I wonder how NYT will spin this. One of their own dead a day after his booster of a heart attack.
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Biden’s latest plan to give out lots of test kits was actually proposed months ago to help Americans stay safe around the holidays, but of course they didn’t do it and claimed it was impossible. This is despite the UK having been doing this for months now. But now, after it would have mattered most, they’re going to try, but probably still manage to screw it up.
“Pandemic leadership”
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We see on full display the difference between Biden and Trump. I think Biden is doing his personal best. But he is a lifelong politician, not a “git 'er done” sort of person like Trump. And of course Trump was a terrible politician. Thing is:
Biden could still have been successful had he the sense to realize and understand his own shortcomings and compensate by choosing subordinates who could get stuff done. Unfortunately, pretty much right across the board, Biden has chosen liberal idealogues instead. Hence when it comes time to get stuff done, there’s nobody home.
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Covid Persists?
Source: Bloomberg
The coronavirus that causes Covid-19 can spread within days from the airways to the heart, brain and almost every organ system in the body, where it may persist for months, a study found.
In what they describe as the most comprehensive analysis to date of the SARS-CoV-2 virus’s distribution and persistence in the body and brain, scientists at the U.S. National Institutes of Health said they found the pathogen is capable of replicating in human cells well beyond the respiratory tract.
The results, released online Saturday in a manuscript under review for publication in the journal Nature, point to delayed viral clearance as a potential contributor to the persistent symptoms wracking so-called long Covid sufferers. Understanding the mechanisms by which the virus persists, along with the body’s response to any viral reservoir, promises to help improve care for those afflicted, the authors said.
“This is remarkably important work,” said Ziyad Al-Aly, director of the clinical epidemiology center at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System in Missouri, who has led separate studies into the long-term effects of Covid-19. “For a long time now, we have been scratching our heads and asking why long Covid seems to affect so many organ systems. This paper sheds some light, and may help explain why long Covid can occur even in people who had mild or asymptomatic acute disease.”
The findings and the techniques haven’t yet been reviewed by independent scientists, and mostly relate to data gathered from fatal Covid cases, not patients with long Covid or “post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2,” as it’s also called.
The coronavirus’s propensity to infect cells outside the airways and lungs is contested, with numerous studies providing evidence for and against the possibility.
The research undertaken at the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, is based on extensive sampling and analysis of tissues taken during autopsies on 44 patients who died after contracting the coronavirus during the first year of the pandemic in the U.S.
Listen: How the Dead Are Helping the Living (Podcast)Read more: Covid Deaths Are in the Millions But Autopsies Only in Hundreds
The burden of infection outside the respiratory tract and the time taken to clear the virus from infected tissues aren’t well characterized, particularly in the brain, wrote Daniel Chertow, who runs the NIH’s emerging pathogens section, and his colleagues.
The group detected persistent SARS-CoV-2 RNA in multiple parts of the body, including regions throughout the brain, for as long as 230 days following symptom onset. This may represent infection with defective virus particles, which has been described in persistent infection with the measles virus, they said.
“We don’t fully understand long Covid, but these changes could explain ongoing symptoms,” said Raina MacIntyre, professor of global biosecurity at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. MacIntyre wasn’t involved with the research, which she said “provides a warning about being blasé about mass infection in children and adults.”
“We don’t yet know what burden of chronic illness will result in years to come,” she said. “Will we see young-onset cardiac failure in survivors, or early onset dementia? These are unanswered questions which call for a precautionary public health approach to mitigation of the spread of this virus.”
In contrast to other Covid autopsy research, the NIH team’s post-mortem tissue collection was more comprehensive and typically occurred within about a day of the patient’s death.
The researchers also used a variety of tissue preservation techniques to detect and quantify viral levels, as well as grow the virus collected from multiple tissues, including lung, heart, small intestine and adrenal gland from deceased Covid patients during their first week of illness.
“Our results collectively show that while the highest burden of SARS-CoV-2 is in the airways and lung, the virus can disseminate early during infection and infect cells throughout the entire body, including widely throughout the brain,” the authors said.
The study provides pathologic data that support findings of previous research showing, for example, that SARS-CoV-2 directly kills heart muscle cells, and that those who survive an infection suffer cognitive deficits, said MacIntyre at the University of New South Wales.
More here:
As I have been writing from the jump:
This is the virus from hell.
Pandemic leadership, by telling the states to solve it themselves.
I guess sometimes the desire to avoid accountability overrides the natural Democratic political inclination to have the Big Government solve all our problems.
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Quarantine refers to the time people stay away from others if they are exposed to a disease but not yet testing positive or showing symptoms.
CDC changed those recommendations, too. “For people who are unvaccinated or are more than six months out from their second mRNA dose (or more than two months after the J&J vaccine) and not yet boosted, CDC now recommends quarantine for five days followed by strict mask use for an additional five days,” it said.
“Alternatively, if a five-day quarantine is not feasible, it is imperative that an exposed person wear a well-fitting mask at all times when around others for 10 days after exposure,” the CDC added.
So, basically what some have been saying should be the policy since the beginning - if you’re exposed, wear a mask for a few days while you go on about your business.
Is anyone offering up apologies for the character assassinations that followed anyone making such assertions? Or to all the kids who have been forced to miss weeks of school because another kid in their class tested positive?
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Not to make too much out of a 13 person study in S.Africa, but it looks like surviving O enhances your immunity against Delta (while the opposite is not so much the case).
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OTOH ivermectin and hydroxycloroquin have been taken by billions of people with very few side effects. But, of course, they do not generate huge profits for big Pharma.
Unfortunately, both Pfizer’s and Merck’s drugs come with some serious drawbacks, the biggest being that they can cause life-threatening reactions with widely used medications like statins - taken by people with high blood pressure - blood thinners, and even some antidepressants.
What’s more, the FDA doesn’t recommend Paxlovid for people who have severe liver and kidney disease.
The Merck drug hasn’t even been approved because the experts are worried about potential side effects. Because of this, the FDA has restricted its use to adults, and only in scenarios in which other authorized treatments, including monoclonal antibodies produced by Regeneron and others, are inaccessible or are not “clinically appropriate.”
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I just dont get it. “It might not work” is somehow a magnitudes-bigger concern than “it might (literally) kill you”. One leaves you with a still-untreated illness, the other can leave you dead. And the most insane part is how those defending these mucked-up priorities do so by merely telling you to use some common sense.
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But but but…
I’m a (scientist) (doctor) (politician) so I know best.
So many actions defy logic when inspected, especially in retrospect.
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73% down to 22%. That’s quite an “adjustment”. But no one cares, because the desired hype was achieved before Christmas, and that’s all that really matters.
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Isnt this what Trump said from the beginning, that this had to be primarily handled on a state/local level? And it was widely attacked, including by Biden, as a lack of leadership?
This clip pretty much says exactly that…
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It certainly is.
It most assuredly was.
But too many Americans today have short, and very selective, memories.
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you know all that panic about the O? Well it ain’t no never mind.
Omicron is not as pervasive among new COVID-19 cases as originally estimated, officials say.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its breakdown of COVID-19 variants on Tuesday, significantly diminishing the number of omicron infections in the United States. Omicron cases account for 58.6% of all COVID-19 diagnoses as of Saturday, a significant decrease from the previously reported 73.2% Dec. 18 estimate, according to new data.
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I heard a reporter this morning talking about Biden’s New Years Resolutions.
#1. Fire management staff
#2. Speaking to the people without teleprompter
#3. Love America 
Of coarse these are just a little something to begin to make a difference in Biden’s agenda. (all in jest)
Probably never going to happen. Biden should resign, he’s incompetent. Tearing down all the good stuff Trump accomplished.
He needed to watch television and see what happened a few days ago. Someone else is running the White House. Let’s go Brandon!
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Now we hear…Biden will be talking to Putin tomorrow….
You’re 3 posts and 15 hours late… 
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Gotcha🤫. it is still amazing that after all the panic headlines all of a sudden the numbers get cut back by 30 or 40%. And, of course, the case numbers do not mean much. It’s the hospitalizations that matter and they are dropping.
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good article on the US covid policy response generally.
Millions upon millions of young people have been forced to take vaccinations that they didn’t need, with unknowable future consequences, and millions upon millions of metabolically broken, high risk people have been denied access to cheap, effective, early treatment.
Everyone has been denied the empowering information on modifiable risk factors for severe disease — namely metabolic disease and nutritional deficiencies.
The purpose of this part was to illustrate how far from gold standard the public health response the Bio-Security Police State has strayed.
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T cell immune responses, either from vaccine or prior infection, appear to work well against O.
These results demonstrate that despite Omicron’s extensive mutations and reduced susceptibility to neutralizing antibodies, the majority of T cell response, induced by vaccination or natural infection, cross-recognises the variant. Well-preserved T cell immunity to Omicron is likely to contribute to protection from severe COVID-19
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