Tuesday, March 28, 2023
Sunday, March 26, 2023
Saturday, March 25, 2023
Irrational humans
I would have thought that a deadly pandemic would have united the human race to a common cause to defeat an enemy killing so many people. However, instead of the pandemic joining us, it divided us even further.
The evidence shows that the vaccine reduces your overall chances of dying by a considerable amount. Nevertheless, I daily see attacks on the vaccine as if it were some sort of plague. People have a right to make poor choices, but the amount of misinformation is vast, which affects people's ability to make decisions.
If COVID had a smallpox death rate then I don't think there would be any argument. Everybody would be lining up for the vaccine, regardless of any potential side effects. However, a death rate of 1% (or less) is still pretty significant if you or a loved one is the one who dies.
This has caused me to reflect on why humans are so irrational. I am seeing what I think is a common factor in how people make decisions. This ties into politics. I have long noticed people are much more intense about the things that they are opposed to. I am calling this the "boogeyman factor." The thinking is that those people over there are going to do something that we don't like so we are going to fight them no matter what. People naturally focus more on adverse outcomes because fear is the most powerful motivator. On the other hand, if you are a happy person who has few worries, which is almost no one, then you might not have much need for politics.
In our current era, we have become very tribal, with no middle ground or nuance. Ask anyone, regardless of party, about politics and they will name at least one evil person that needs to be defeated. It is human nature to need an enemy that we can fight, and in recent years we will vilify just about anyone.
When it comes to the vaccine there are quite a few "boogeymen", whether that be Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, "big pharma", or the government. There are a great many people who are thoroughly convinced that evil forces are trying to hurt us, by one means or another, so they are unwilling even to consider the vaccine because it comes from an evil source.
Once people make up their minds, confirmation bias becomes very strong. They will look only at evidence that supports their position while ignoring evidence to the contrary.
--
Best wishes,
John Coffey
The evidence shows that the vaccine reduces your overall chances of dying by a considerable amount. Nevertheless, I daily see attacks on the vaccine as if it were some sort of plague. People have a right to make poor choices, but the amount of misinformation is vast, which affects people's ability to make decisions.
If COVID had a smallpox death rate then I don't think there would be any argument. Everybody would be lining up for the vaccine, regardless of any potential side effects. However, a death rate of 1% (or less) is still pretty significant if you or a loved one is the one who dies.
This has caused me to reflect on why humans are so irrational. I am seeing what I think is a common factor in how people make decisions. This ties into politics. I have long noticed people are much more intense about the things that they are opposed to. I am calling this the "boogeyman factor." The thinking is that those people over there are going to do something that we don't like so we are going to fight them no matter what. People naturally focus more on adverse outcomes because fear is the most powerful motivator. On the other hand, if you are a happy person who has few worries, which is almost no one, then you might not have much need for politics.
In our current era, we have become very tribal, with no middle ground or nuance. Ask anyone, regardless of party, about politics and they will name at least one evil person that needs to be defeated. It is human nature to need an enemy that we can fight, and in recent years we will vilify just about anyone.
When it comes to the vaccine there are quite a few "boogeymen", whether that be Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, "big pharma", or the government. There are a great many people who are thoroughly convinced that evil forces are trying to hurt us, by one means or another, so they are unwilling even to consider the vaccine because it comes from an evil source.
Once people make up their minds, confirmation bias becomes very strong. They will look only at evidence that supports their position while ignoring evidence to the contrary.
--
Best wishes,
John Coffey
Wednesday, March 22, 2023
Tuesday, March 21, 2023
Perspective
Sometimes it is nice to have perspective. Our Milky Way Galaxy is 105,000 light-years (617 quadrillion miles) across.
This is an artist's rendering based on astronomical data. It is difficult to see everything because interstellar dust gets in the way. We used to think that our solar system was closer to the edge than it actually is. This was revised a few years ago.
I wondered why there are spiral arms. All the stars in the spiral arms should be moving at different speeds depending upon their distance from the center, so you would not expect them to clump together into a structure. The technical explanation as to why this happens is quite complicated, and there are multiple reasons for it. The Milky Way is so big that it has smaller galaxies orbiting around it, and their gravitational influence is part of the reason that the arms form.
In about 2.5 billion years, the Milky Way Galaxy will begin to collide with the bigger Andromeda Galaxy. Eventually, the two galaxies will merge into a larger galaxy.
Sunday, March 19, 2023
Thursday, March 16, 2023
Wednesday, March 15, 2023
Tuesday, March 14, 2023
Wednesday, March 8, 2023
Tuesday, March 7, 2023
COVID Numbers are down
The COVID numbers were somewhat steady for months, but have turned downward. We have gone from about 500 deaths per day, which seemed significant to me, to only about a hundred.
I was at the Columbus, Indiana hospital yesterday when they dropped their mask mandate.
Does this mean the Pandemic is over? Not for some people, but the rate of the disease doesn't seem very threatening right now.
This is not what I thought would happen. COVID is very good at both spreading and mutating, and given the number of people who aren't fully vaccinated, I thought that we would be dealing with this for many years.
I used to watch "Physics Girl" on Youtube. Her Long COVID has become so severe that it has become life-threatening. This is from an infection that she had eight months ago.
Sunday, March 5, 2023
Saturday, March 4, 2023
Faraday Cage Physics EXPLAINED using 1843 Ice Pail Experiment and History
This topic interests me because I wonder what we would need to protect ourselves from an EMP attack.
Wednesday, March 1, 2023
Cassowary | The World's Most Dangerous Bird #shorts
https://youtube.com/shorts/UsKKEq1q_vM?feature=share
Experts say that theropod dinosaurs aren't extinct, they evolved into birds. Some theropods like T-Rex likely had feathers, which originally evolved for insulation, and likely were multicolored. Many of these theropod dinosaurs more closely resembled birds than they did giant lizards.
Best wishes,
John Coffey
Experts say that theropod dinosaurs aren't extinct, they evolved into birds. Some theropods like T-Rex likely had feathers, which originally evolved for insulation, and likely were multicolored. Many of these theropod dinosaurs more closely resembled birds than they did giant lizards.
Best wishes,
John Coffey
Sunday, February 26, 2023
Saturday, February 25, 2023
Friday, February 24, 2023
Vaccines prevent COVID-19 spread
A sore spot for me is the claim made by every single conservative talk show host that the vaccines do not stop the spread of COVID-19 and that we were lied to when the government said that they would. This claim is based on testimony by Janine Small to the European Union who said that they did not have time in their initial testing to determine if the vaccines stop the spread of the disease. However, those studies have since been done. I have found studies showing that the vaccines reduce the spread of COVID-19. It also makes sense that if you reduce infection then you also reduce spread. This logic is almost irrefutable, so it would be perfectly proper for the government to make this claim.
Thursday, February 23, 2023
Dianna Cowern Physics Girl
This is popular Youtuber, Physics Girl, Dianna Cowern
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/sOhdQNjmK_U
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/sOhdQNjmK_U
Reportedly, she has been suffering from "Long COVID" since July. She has made this public.
Things got worse and she went to the ER last week.
She is clearly suffering because of this. I have long believed that COVID is something that we should take seriously. It is not an ordinary disease. It is not just the cold or a bad flu.
I looked to see if there is an update on her condition. Nothing yet.
Wednesday, February 22, 2023
ChatGPT Generated Fictional Podcast with A.I Joe Rogan & Jordan Peterson
Once again we get an AI generated script and computer generated voices.
https://youtu.be/sVThCuT8j0A
Is this what the future holds? We might be watching our favorite actors, some long dead, simulated, with a never ending stream of AI created content. You could have Tom Hanks on TV 24/7, and the shows never repeat.
"In the next hour, Tom Hanks, Jimmy Stewart, and Charlie Chaplain take their air car on a grand tour of New Detroit. "
Best wishes,
John Coffey
https://youtu.be/sVThCuT8j0A
Is this what the future holds? We might be watching our favorite actors, some long dead, simulated, with a never ending stream of AI created content. You could have Tom Hanks on TV 24/7, and the shows never repeat.
"In the next hour, Tom Hanks, Jimmy Stewart, and Charlie Chaplain take their air car on a grand tour of New Detroit. "
Best wishes,
John Coffey
Tuesday, February 21, 2023
Saturday, February 18, 2023
Friday, February 17, 2023
Why Honey Badgers Don't Fear God or Lions
Many people have a naive view of wild animals. They are not pets and will try to hurt you if they can. To most animals, you look like food.
Even most herbivores will kill and eat small animals if given the chance.
Thursday, February 16, 2023
Brain injury after vaccination
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZhzWzoPB3M
John Coffey 0 seconds ago:
It is not clear to me that the vaccine causes an excess number of these cases. There is an assumed causality that is not proven.
The U.S. Government statistics show a much lower overall death rate among the vaccinated.
The quoted study concludes with ...
"Neurological manifestations following the SARS-CoV-2 vaccination have been reported, and although they are few in number, healthcare professionals should be alert to their presentation as a high vigilance and rapid response to these events are the need of the hour. Further investigations are required to establish a definitive causal association with the currently recommended vaccines. Until then, the benefit of protection against COVID-19 for both individuals and society is far greater than the hypothesized risk of these adverse events."
John Coffey 0 seconds ago:
It is not clear to me that the vaccine causes an excess number of these cases. There is an assumed causality that is not proven.
The U.S. Government statistics show a much lower overall death rate among the vaccinated.
The quoted study concludes with ...
"Neurological manifestations following the SARS-CoV-2 vaccination have been reported, and although they are few in number, healthcare professionals should be alert to their presentation as a high vigilance and rapid response to these events are the need of the hour. Further investigations are required to establish a definitive causal association with the currently recommended vaccines. Until then, the benefit of protection against COVID-19 for both individuals and society is far greater than the hypothesized risk of these adverse events."
Tuesday, February 14, 2023
Monday, February 13, 2023
Sunday, February 12, 2023
Saturday, February 11, 2023
Friday, February 10, 2023
Yes, masks reduce the risk of spreading COVID, despite a review saying they don't
An updated Cochrane Review published last week is the latest to suggest face masks don't work in the community.
However there are problems with the review's methodology and its underpinning assumptions about transmission.
An RCT comparing occasional versus continuous use of respirators in health care workers showed N95 respirators and surgical masks were equally ineffective when only worn occasionally by hospital workers. They had to wear them all the time at work to be protected.
We also combined only apples and apples in a meta-analysis of two RCTs conducted in exactly the same way and measuring the same interventions and outcomes. We found N95 respirators provide significant protection against respiratory infections when surgical masks did not, even against infections assumed to be "droplet spread".
https://theconversation.com/yes-masks-reduce-the-risk-of-spreading-covid-despite-a-review-saying-they-dont-198992
However there are problems with the review's methodology and its underpinning assumptions about transmission.
An RCT comparing occasional versus continuous use of respirators in health care workers showed N95 respirators and surgical masks were equally ineffective when only worn occasionally by hospital workers. They had to wear them all the time at work to be protected.
We also combined only apples and apples in a meta-analysis of two RCTs conducted in exactly the same way and measuring the same interventions and outcomes. We found N95 respirators provide significant protection against respiratory infections when surgical masks did not, even against infections assumed to be "droplet spread".
https://theconversation.com/yes-masks-reduce-the-risk-of-spreading-covid-despite-a-review-saying-they-dont-198992
Thursday, February 9, 2023
Wednesday, February 8, 2023
Tuesday, February 7, 2023
Monday, February 6, 2023
Animal Secrets Zoos Don’t Want You To Know
https://youtu.be/nvika2cFiq0
I've been saying this for awhile, people need to stop being stupid around animals.
Best wishes,
John Coffey
I've been saying this for awhile, people need to stop being stupid around animals.
Best wishes,
John Coffey
Saturday, February 4, 2023
Dopamine: More Than Pleasure, The Secret is the Anticipation of a Reward - LiveInnovation.org
"The reason for it is because the uncertainty of receiving the reward creates a much greater expectation and therefore dopamine production."
Speaking on a personal level, I seem to get addicted to some things easily.
When I was in college 40 years ago, I noticed something about playing table tennis. After I hit the ball I had a high level of anticipation about what was going to happen next, which was only a couple of seconds away, but unknown until it actually happened. I realized then that this high level of anticipation made the game addicting. Pinball seems to work the same way.
Maybe one reason why there is still a cult following for the 42-year-old video game Donkey Kong, which I still like to play, is that it has a great deal of randomness built into the game. There is no set predictable pattern that you can follow. Parts of the game are predictable, but frequently you have to react within a couple of seconds to an ever-changing circumstance. The game can be an intense experience.
I think that there could be a similar appeal to gambling because the gambler is anticipating an unknown outcome.
On the surface, this would seem unrelated to watching a ton of youtube videos, which has been a problem for me lately. Youtube has a bunch of interesting content, but even before you finish one video, they are recommending other content that you might like. I have a natural tendency to be curious about everything, so I want to see what this other content has to offer. There is anticipation there. It is like they know how to keep me hooked.
TikTok has admitted that they use an algorithm to keep people addicted. The way it works is that they show you a list of videos with the best videos interspersed along the list The idea is to keep you scrolling looking for the best videos. Maybe TikTok is evil.
Social media creates anticipation of positive feedback from other people.
Perhaps if a person is aware of how they are being manipulated on a psychological/neurotransmitter level, then maybe they can change their behavior by not falling for this trap.
I Misunderstood the Greenhouse Effect. Here's How It Works.
I thought that actual Greenhouses prevent convection, which is different than CO2 which absorbs and re-emits infrared photons.
I heard that convection is an important part of how our atmosphere loses heat.
I also had heard that the infrared photon knocks an electron to a higher orbital, and then 3 nanoseconds later the electron falls back down to the lower orbital and re-emits an infrared photon. The net effect is to scatter the photons in a random direction since quantum physics acts somewhat randomly.
Photons are force-carrying particles. They carry electromagnetic force. In order for the temperature to increase, there would have to be a gain of kinetic energy because heat is the motion of molecules. Does the vibration of the molecule convert electromagnetic force to kinetic energy? So I am wondering what percentage of the infrared photons gets converted to kinetic energy, and what percentage gets re-emitted?
Friday, February 3, 2023
COVID vaccines slash risk of spreading Omicron — and so does previous infection
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgrMzvasrm8&t=1100s
"Decreases in transmission of the delta variant were greater after two BNT162b2 vaccinations"
"The team found that among individuals with COVID-19, those who received at least one vaccine shot were 24% less likely to infect close contacts"
"This study confirms that COVID-19 vaccination reduces the risk of delta variant infection and also accelerates viral clearance in the context of the delta variant. However, this study unfortunately also highlights that the vaccine effect on reducing transmission is minimal in the context of delta variant circulation. These findings have immediate public health implications. Higher vaccination coverage rates need to be achieved because indirect protection from vaccinated to unvaccinated people remains suboptimal."
"Pfizer vax did reduce transmission of early variants"
"Researchers in the United Kingdom reported in a February observational study that Pfizer's vaccine helped cut transmission of the alpha and delta variants."
"Fact check: Vaccines protect against contracting, spreading COVID-19"
"Scientific studies show that the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine reduces transmission"
"However, when booster vaccine doses reduce the risk of infection (as shown in the study by Spitzer et al2), then these boosters will also prevent transmission. As with all infectious diseases, the pathogen is required to cause the disease, and SARS-CoV-2 infection is the sine qua non for COVID-19. Prevention of infection results in prevention of potential onward transmission from all individuals who are spared the infection."
"New research suggests COVID-19 vaccines can slow the spread of disease, even with Omicron"
"Early data suggest infections in fully vaccinated persons are more commonly observed with the Delta variant than with other SARS-CoV-2 variants. However, data show fully vaccinated persons are less likely than unvaccinated persons to acquire SARS-CoV-2, and infections with the Delta variant in fully vaccinated persons are associated with less severe clinical outcomes. Infections with the Delta variant in vaccinated persons potentially have reduced transmissibility than infections in unvaccinated persons, although additional studies are needed."
"Instead, it's the principle that the UKHSA identified above: if you don't get infected in the first place thanks to a vaccine, you can't spread it. Once you're infected, you still can"
Thursday, February 2, 2023
Wednesday, February 1, 2023
Significant Events
Until recently, the most significant thing to happen in my lifetime was 9-11. It had a profound effect on this country and its foreign policy, and it also had a profound effect on me because I went to work for a defense contractor. It also temporarily brought Americans together to fight a common enemy.
In terms of the number of people affected, 9-11 is small potatoes compared to the COVID-19 pandemic. There have been 675 million cases worldwide, with 6.76 million deaths. In the United States, there have been 104 million cases with 1.1 million deaths. Roughly 1 out of every 300 Americans has been killed by COVID-19. However, when it comes to fighting the disease, this common enemy did not bring us together but made us more divided.
Perhaps the most important thing in the world right now is that we don't get into a nuclear war with Russia or China or any other potential adversary. Since this is not likely to happen, I'm not too worried about it.
So the second most important thing in the world is how we handle the COVID-19 pandemic both personally and in terms of public policy. The actions we take could save or cost lives.
Most people today see the pandemic in the rearview mirror. The public seems very lax. People stopped wearing masks. President Biden has declared May 11th the end of the COVID emergency. However, I think that it could be naive to think that COVID is over. We currently have around 500 deaths per day. New mutations keep popping up and some of these might not be so bad, but there is always the potential for a new deadly strain to arise. The XBB 1.5 variant is so infectious there is a possibility that everyone will get it, and it has killed 1,600 New Yorkers since December 1st.
I suspect that we will be fighting COVID for the rest of our lives.
Almost nobody has time to read scientific literature. This is one reason we pay politicians to make policy so that we don't have to sort through all the details ourselves. And most people are fine with that. However, only 68% of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated, with around 21% having never been vaccinated.
I am personally angry with the anti-vax crowd because they seem to only think about themselves. There are some very small risks associated with the vaccines, so many people assume that if they are young and healthy that they are better off not getting vaccinated. These assumptions may not be correct, since many young healthy people also have died from COVID-19. However, the reason for my consternation is that the anti-vax crowd seems to not care at all about people like my elderly mother whose health issues would make her extremely vulnerable to COVID. If a person chooses not to be vaccinated, then they are choosing to likely spread COVID to someone else, because the R factor of the Omicron variant is 3.4. In the past, anything with an R factor of 1 or higher was considered serious.
I like to say that the anti-vax crowd cherry-picks their data, but that is being generous. For the most part, they don't look at data. They see statements on social media, Youtube, and fringe conspiracy-theory websites made by very questionable people, and they believe in some of the most absurd positions as if they were gospel. I have spent 2 years fighting vaccine misinformation on the Internet, but I give up because apparently, you can't reason with irrational people.
I see claims every day that I know have been debunked by at least one scientific study. The most recent one is that the mRNA vaccines don't stop the spread of the disease. There are studies that say otherwise.
Some commentators who I would normally respect think that the government has been lying to us this whole time. They are calling for the prosecution of government officials for their "COVID lies".
What the data currently shows is that there is much lower overall mortality for people who have been vaccinated. There is a small health risk with the vaccines, but COVID-19 is no ordinary disease. It attacks every organ in the body. The health complications from COVID are far more dangerous than the vaccines.
Best wishes,
John Coffey
John Coffey
Tuesday, January 31, 2023
Monday, January 30, 2023
Our galaxy will be colonized by robots not humans | David Kipping and Lex Fridman
It might be impossible or too difficult to send biological beings to other stars. But we could send intelligent machines.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RI_iji4N7-k
There is an assumption that is often taken as a given that it won't be too hard to develop intelligent machines. Eventually, we will get there, but there are huge technical hurdles to overcome, along with the end of Moore's law. We are approaching the limit of how small we can make circuits with silicon. Different computer technologies are being developed, but they are a ways off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RI_iji4N7-k
There is an assumption that is often taken as a given that it won't be too hard to develop intelligent machines. Eventually, we will get there, but there are huge technical hurdles to overcome, along with the end of Moore's law. We are approaching the limit of how small we can make circuits with silicon. Different computer technologies are being developed, but they are a ways off.
Sunday, January 29, 2023
Friday, January 27, 2023
Thursday, January 26, 2023
Bill Maher goes NUCLEAR on COVID Tyranny
https://youtube.com/shorts/0MXPmTdfIkI?feature=share
I agree about mandates. I disagree about vaccine hesitancy in the midst of a deadly worldwide pandemic.
If this were smallpox, with a death rate 30 times higher, how many people would be opposed to the vaccine? But when it is your family member who dies from COVID-19, the death is no less significant.
Best wishes,
John Coffey
I agree about mandates. I disagree about vaccine hesitancy in the midst of a deadly worldwide pandemic.
If this were smallpox, with a death rate 30 times higher, how many people would be opposed to the vaccine? But when it is your family member who dies from COVID-19, the death is no less significant.
Best wishes,
John Coffey
Wednesday, January 25, 2023
Monday, January 23, 2023
Vaccines Will Not Produce Worse Variants | Science | AAAS
'And past antibodies, there's the whole T-cell system - those T cells are looking to recognize human cells that have been attacked by the virus, whereupon they move in to kill them off before they can break open like a piñata and release a big pile of new viral particles. They are primed for this task by having pieces of viral proteins presented to them by other immune cells, and these T cells become specifically sensitized to the appearance of these in the future - these pieces get taken to the surface of infected cells by the MHC glycoproteins where the T cells can detect them. So you can see that in all of these cases, the key is protein surface recognition, which tells you how viruses can work their way around to evading such attacks. They have to change their surface proteins in such a way that they can still function, but that defeats that antibody/T-cell binding that the immune system has settled in on.
That's not so easy, because (for one thing) there are an enormous number of different antibodies involved (and an enormous number of T-cell recognition proteins). There are any number of ways to bind to a given protein target, and the adaptive immune system's whole function is to be ready for all kinds of targets and to hit them in all kinds of ways. And there's that constraint mentioned above: the virus still has to be able to function! Losing the entire Spike protein or mutating it completely beyond recognition would definitely evade vaccine-induced immunity, but it would also definitely produce a coronavirus that couldn't infect human cells in the way it's completely evolved to do. Coming up with a completely new infection route is (mutationally) extremely costly and complex, and not something that can be done "on the fly". Various coronaviruses use different human cell surface proteins to do their attack, but these have gradually developed and diverged over evolutionary time (hundreds of thousands, or millions of years) through untold numbers of tiny steps.
But it can be done, in principle. And as with everything in evolution, if it gets done at all, it'll get done by similarly untold numbers of individual mutants, and mutants on top of those mutants, until something appears that can both avoid being inactivated by the immune response and still infect cells and reproduce. There is no guarantee that such a virus can exist, and there is no guarantee that it can't. Evaluating the number of possibilies is frankly beyond computation - we didn't, for example, see the details of the Delta variant coming, and if you'd given someone that exact sequence last year, there's no guarantee that they would have been able to predict how much more infectious it would be.
The more chances you give the coronavirus to reproduce, the more mutations it will explore. Its proofreading system for reproduction is pretty good but not perfect, and that's where the mutations come from. It's a numbers game all the way. The virus is not thinking about how to evade vaccine-induced immunity; it's throwing stuff randomly against every available wall in every available direction, and whatever sticks gets a chance to go on throwing some more. Remember, an unvaccinated person is still mounting an antibody defense against the virus - they're just having to do it from scratch, rather than having a pre-primed leg up like someone who's been vaccinated. The longer these infections go on inside human bodies, the more bets the virus gets to put down on the table. The good news is that so far, there is not much evidence that the virus is doing much evasion inside a given person during the course of normal infection.
So one key way to cut down on the odds of a nasty mutant popping up is to just keep the virus from reproducing so much. Cut down on the number of people it infects. When it does infect people, cut down on the amount of time it spends reproducing inside the body. These countermeasures are exactly what a mass vaccination program does. Fewer people get infected in the first place, and when they do get infected, their disease course tends in the great majority of cases to be shorter and milder. A nasty variant is almost certainly going to come up by accident, so let's not have so many accidents going on constantly around the clock, around the world.
...
a true vaccine-evading mutant is going to need a set of several mutations (off the existing variants) all at the same time. The vaccine-induced immune response looks like it's knocking down a lot of these intermediate-step mutations before they can keep on throwing off subsequent mutations on top of the first ones. These pathways are choked off before they can even get explored, and this "evolutionary smothering" is something that you don't see so dramatically when you're doing those in vitro experiments with specifically targeted small molecules mentioned at the top of this post. A broad antibody and T-cell response is a different thing altogether.
There is, then, every reason at both the population and individual level to expect that vaccination will strongly decrease the chances of a more dangerous coronavirus strain taking hold. If we'd had them earlier and were able to deploy them quickly and widely enough, we never would have seen the Delta variant in the first place. If we keep deploying them now, we will keep worse variants from even being able to form. Anyone who tells you that vaccines will make things worse is at best deeply misinformed and at worst lying to you for profit.'
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/vaccines-will-not-produce-worse-variants
That's not so easy, because (for one thing) there are an enormous number of different antibodies involved (and an enormous number of T-cell recognition proteins). There are any number of ways to bind to a given protein target, and the adaptive immune system's whole function is to be ready for all kinds of targets and to hit them in all kinds of ways. And there's that constraint mentioned above: the virus still has to be able to function! Losing the entire Spike protein or mutating it completely beyond recognition would definitely evade vaccine-induced immunity, but it would also definitely produce a coronavirus that couldn't infect human cells in the way it's completely evolved to do. Coming up with a completely new infection route is (mutationally) extremely costly and complex, and not something that can be done "on the fly". Various coronaviruses use different human cell surface proteins to do their attack, but these have gradually developed and diverged over evolutionary time (hundreds of thousands, or millions of years) through untold numbers of tiny steps.
But it can be done, in principle. And as with everything in evolution, if it gets done at all, it'll get done by similarly untold numbers of individual mutants, and mutants on top of those mutants, until something appears that can both avoid being inactivated by the immune response and still infect cells and reproduce. There is no guarantee that such a virus can exist, and there is no guarantee that it can't. Evaluating the number of possibilies is frankly beyond computation - we didn't, for example, see the details of the Delta variant coming, and if you'd given someone that exact sequence last year, there's no guarantee that they would have been able to predict how much more infectious it would be.
The more chances you give the coronavirus to reproduce, the more mutations it will explore. Its proofreading system for reproduction is pretty good but not perfect, and that's where the mutations come from. It's a numbers game all the way. The virus is not thinking about how to evade vaccine-induced immunity; it's throwing stuff randomly against every available wall in every available direction, and whatever sticks gets a chance to go on throwing some more. Remember, an unvaccinated person is still mounting an antibody defense against the virus - they're just having to do it from scratch, rather than having a pre-primed leg up like someone who's been vaccinated. The longer these infections go on inside human bodies, the more bets the virus gets to put down on the table. The good news is that so far, there is not much evidence that the virus is doing much evasion inside a given person during the course of normal infection.
So one key way to cut down on the odds of a nasty mutant popping up is to just keep the virus from reproducing so much. Cut down on the number of people it infects. When it does infect people, cut down on the amount of time it spends reproducing inside the body. These countermeasures are exactly what a mass vaccination program does. Fewer people get infected in the first place, and when they do get infected, their disease course tends in the great majority of cases to be shorter and milder. A nasty variant is almost certainly going to come up by accident, so let's not have so many accidents going on constantly around the clock, around the world.
...
a true vaccine-evading mutant is going to need a set of several mutations (off the existing variants) all at the same time. The vaccine-induced immune response looks like it's knocking down a lot of these intermediate-step mutations before they can keep on throwing off subsequent mutations on top of the first ones. These pathways are choked off before they can even get explored, and this "evolutionary smothering" is something that you don't see so dramatically when you're doing those in vitro experiments with specifically targeted small molecules mentioned at the top of this post. A broad antibody and T-cell response is a different thing altogether.
There is, then, every reason at both the population and individual level to expect that vaccination will strongly decrease the chances of a more dangerous coronavirus strain taking hold. If we'd had them earlier and were able to deploy them quickly and widely enough, we never would have seen the Delta variant in the first place. If we keep deploying them now, we will keep worse variants from even being able to form. Anyone who tells you that vaccines will make things worse is at best deeply misinformed and at worst lying to you for profit.'
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/vaccines-will-not-produce-worse-variants
Sunday, January 22, 2023
Friday, January 20, 2023
STAR TREK: THE ENTERPRISE PROJECT
Because why the hell not?
I wonder if you could make a shell of a full-sized ship that is helium filled and could be flown like a hot air balloon? Or a drone? Imagine seeing the Star Trek Enterprise in the sky.
Monday, January 16, 2023
Saturday, January 14, 2023
Friday, January 13, 2023
CDC identifies possible 'safety concern' for certain people receiving COVID vaccines | Fox News
"Rapid-response investigation of the signal in the VSD raised a question of whether people 65 and older who have received the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, Bivalent were more likely to have an ischemic stroke in the 21 days following vaccination compared with days 22-44 following vaccination."
"Neither Pfizer and BioNTech nor the CDC or the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have observed similar findings across numerous other monitoring systems in the U.S. and globally and there is no evidence to conclude that ischemic stroke is associated with the use of the companies' COVID-19 vaccines," the spokesperson continued.
"Compared to published incidence rates of ischemic stroke in this older population, the companies to date have observed a lower number of reported ischemic strokes following the vaccination with the Omicron BA.4/BA.5-adapted bivalent vaccine. The CDC continues to recommend vaccination with the Pfizer-BioNTech Omicron BA.4/BA.5-adapted bivalent COVID-19 vaccine for all authorized ages and indications."
In a statement to Fox News Digital, a spokesperson for Pfizer said, "Pfizer and BioNTech have been made aware of limited reports of ischemic stroke that have been observed in the CDC Vaccine Safety DataLink (VSD) database in people 65 and older following vaccination with the Omicron BA.4/BA.5-adapted bivalent COVID-19 Vaccine by Pfizer and BioNTech."
The agency also said that the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) managed by CDC and FDA has not seen an increase in reporting of ischemic strokes following the updated (bivalent) vaccine.
"Neither Pfizer and BioNTech nor the CDC or the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have observed similar findings across numerous other monitoring systems in the U.S. and globally and there is no evidence to conclude that ischemic stroke is associated with the use of the companies' COVID-19 vaccines," the spokesperson continued.
"Compared to published incidence rates of ischemic stroke in this older population, the companies to date have observed a lower number of reported ischemic strokes following the vaccination with the Omicron BA.4/BA.5-adapted bivalent vaccine. The CDC continues to recommend vaccination with the Pfizer-BioNTech Omicron BA.4/BA.5-adapted bivalent COVID-19 vaccine for all authorized ages and indications."
Thursday, January 12, 2023
Wednesday, January 11, 2023
COVID vaccine related deaths
Andy Saffle
Well then someone needs to explain why the COVID Vaccinated men Are dropping like flies From Sudden Heart failure and that COVID Vaccinated men, for some odd reason have the highest Rates if Myocarditis ever seen...
Andy Saffle "Well then someone needs to explain why the COVID Vaccinated men Are dropping like flies From Sudden Heart failure".
This is a total lie.
With 200 million vaccinated people in the United States, a certain number of them are going to have adverse events regardless of whether they are vaccinated or not. The data showed a much lower death rate for vaccinated people, including non-COVID deaths.
John Coffey well that didn't age well did it.. I'm seeing 3 to 5 different #diedsuddenly stories daily. Mostly young athletes, men and women, died of some type of cardiac event... That MMA women prodigy who was 18 and literally just dropped dead.. her family released a photo of what the Morgue pulled out of her blood during embalming . I'm on top of this brother. I know of 200 others that have had similar clots pulled out during embalming... They only thing they have in common is the Covid Vaccine.. WHICH IS CAUSING MYOCARDITIS AND CLOTTING, and the manufacturers are admitting this.. they are also admitting this this MRNA tech.was never tested before release an authorization.. I'll gladly show some of the pictures of the clotting if you would like
John Coffey not even an hour difference and this one pops up( I know he isn't an athlete)
John Coffey here's another that popped this morning.. this guy definitely qualifies as an athlete
John Coffey
Anecdotal evidence is not scientific. People have been dying of heart attacks long before vaccines. The articles you quote don't mention the vaccine. Confirmation Bias causes people to believe Anecdotal evidence as proof because it confirms their preconceived notions.
We arrive at the truth through peer-reviewed studies that take into account how vaccines affect large groups of people.
The data shows that mRNA-vaccinated people have a lower death rate even from non-COVID illnesses. Whatever risk there may be is very low compared to the risk of COVID-19, which according to a study that I already quoted shows that the risk of myocarditis/pericarditis is 1000 to 2000 times higher with the disease than it is with the vaccine.
Although the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine was associated with rare blood clots, which caused it to be banned in some areas, there is no evidence that the mRNA vaccine causes blood clots.
Glenn Beck has trafficked in a ton of conspiracy theories. I don't consider him nor The Blaze to be a reliable source of information. You are being lied to by people who want to exploit you.
The most damning study I found said that the vaccine is associated with 2 deaths per million doses. Although that sounds high, that is low enough to be random noise when you consider that people die all the time from many causes. Meanwhile, in the United States, 1.1% of cases died from the disease with 1.1 million deaths. My cousin on her deathbed expressed regret about not getting the vaccine.
You can go through life believing in BS and that is your right. I just don't think that it is in your best interest. People who believe in these false theories put themselves and others at greater risk.
Tuesday, January 10, 2023
Brain Shrinkage and COVID-19: How the Virus Affects Your Brain
one 2022 study used two magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans in 785 participants. Researchers found brain changes in the 401 cases who tested positive for COVID-19 between each scan. Changes included:
reduced gray matter (the outer layer of the brain)
tissue damage in areas of the brain connected to smell
decreased brain size
reduced gray matter (the outer layer of the brain)
tissue damage in areas of the brain connected to smell
decreased brain size
The study also found that the same participants who showed brain shrinkage were at a greater risk of experiencing cognitive decline. There was more tissue damage in the areas of the brain that control smell.
Fact Check-No evidence vaccination efforts are causing new COVID-19 variants | Reuters
There is no evidence that COVID-19 vaccinations have caused the original coronavirus to mutate. As explained here by the World Health Organization (WHO), when a virus is spreading widely in a population and infecting many people, it is more likely to mutate. "The more opportunities a virus has to spread, the more it replicates – and the more opportunities it has to undergo changes," the WHO says.
Monday, January 9, 2023
Sunday, January 8, 2023
Thursday, January 5, 2023
Wednesday, January 4, 2023
COVID vaccine study raises questions about boosters | Sandusky Register Vaccines save lives, but multiple boosters for COVID may not help, study suggests
SANDUSKY — It turns out that COVID-19, and the efforts to fight it, still have some mysteries for scientists to puzzle over.
A new Cleveland Clinic study of vaccinations of thousands of its employees had a surprising finding: Employees with a high number of vaccine doses, including boosters, were more likely to contract COVID-19.
"The study found that the longer it has been since last exposure to the virus by infection or vaccination, the higher the risk of acquiring COVID-19. It also found that the higher the number of vaccine doses an individual previously received, the higher the risk of contracting COVID-19," according to a statement from the Cleveland Clinic summarizing the study.
The clinic said officials don't know what to make of the fact that the more-immunized employees also caught COVID-19 more often.
"It is unclear, at this time, why this was observed and how it should be interpreted, and more research is needed to either confirm or refute this finding. It's important to note that this paper has not yet been peer-reviewed," the statement said.
The study does not contradict massive evidence showing that the COVID-19 vaccination campaign saved many lives in the U.S. and abroad.
Vaccines remain "very effective" against severe disease and death, the study cites. And even critics of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's fast decision to approve the newest COVID-19 booster agree that COVID vaccinations saved many lives.
A new Cleveland Clinic study of vaccinations of thousands of its employees had a surprising finding: Employees with a high number of vaccine doses, including boosters, were more likely to contract COVID-19.
"The study found that the longer it has been since last exposure to the virus by infection or vaccination, the higher the risk of acquiring COVID-19. It also found that the higher the number of vaccine doses an individual previously received, the higher the risk of contracting COVID-19," according to a statement from the Cleveland Clinic summarizing the study.
The clinic said officials don't know what to make of the fact that the more-immunized employees also caught COVID-19 more often.
"It is unclear, at this time, why this was observed and how it should be interpreted, and more research is needed to either confirm or refute this finding. It's important to note that this paper has not yet been peer-reviewed," the statement said.
The study does not contradict massive evidence showing that the COVID-19 vaccination campaign saved many lives in the U.S. and abroad.
Vaccines remain "very effective" against severe disease and death, the study cites. And even critics of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's fast decision to approve the newest COVID-19 booster agree that COVID vaccinations saved many lives.
Could it be that multiple vaccinations cause people to be less careful?
There is other evidence that the bivalent vaccine is very effective at preventing disease...
When compared with unvaccinated persons, VE of a bivalent booster dose received ≥7 days before illness onset (median = 29 days) against COVID-19–associated hospitalization was 84%. Compared with persons who received ≥2 monovalent-only mRNA vaccine doses, relative VE of a bivalent booster dose was 73%. These early findings show that a bivalent booster dose provided strong protection against COVID-19–associated hospitalization in older adults and additional protection among persons with previous monovalent-only mRNA vaccination. All eligible persons, especially adults aged ≥65 years, should receive a bivalent booster dose to maximize protection against COVID-19 hospitalization this winter season. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm715152e2.htm?s_cid=mm715152e2_w
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