Wuhan Coronavirus / COVID-19 Thread 2: Booster Shot - Resume all Corona sperging here.

[Lemmingwise]

Before I get to the bits of legal news for the day, here's a whitepill for everyone to enjoy -- a clip of a classroom of kids in Israel reacting to the teacher announcing they don't have to mask any more. According to the thread, this was sometime last year, rather than a "just happened" kind of thing, but eh. New to this thread, I think.

White pill? Not really.

 

[Lemmingwise]

Heather McDonalds excellent timing after boosted joke ...
View attachment 2969900

Holy shit

 

[Sincere Sinner]

I spoke to a friend who is a firefighter; Our state had some fires over the weekend and unvaccinated volunteer firefighters were not allowed to help. That alone is a bad case of choosy beggars but here is the sweetest plum; Firefighters from another state were flown in without going through the usual quarantine channels instead.

Him and the other career firies (who have to be jabbed) sat in the city doing fuck all waiting for a call to go down that never came. He suspects they either had no trucks or just didnt want to pay overtime for the weekend.

Fuck Western Australia and everyone running it. What is this retarded shit?

 

[RumblyTumbly]

With this recent Stacey Abrams debacle, it's made me realize something.

I hate politicians and always assume the worst of them. I also believe that most of them are spineless cowards that would protect their own well being and interests above all else.

If this virus was really as scary as they said it was, these fuckers would be isolated for days on end and would use all resources available to protect themselves.

The fact that so many of them have been caught without masks and vacationing to Florida and basically doing whatever they want all the time tells me that this thing isn't really as scary as they made it out to be.

And if I'm wrong, hey, they did a bad job of leading by example.

 

[potato in mah painus]

With this recent Stacey Abrams debacle, it's made me realize something.

I hate politicians and always assume the worst of them. I also believe that most of them are spineless cowards that would protect their own well being and interests above all else.

If this virus was really as scary as they said it was, these fuckers would be isolated for days on end and would use all resources available to protect themselves.

The fact that so many of them have been caught without masks and vacationing to Florida and basically doing whatever they want all the time tells me that this thing isn't really as scary as they made it out to be.

And if I'm wrong, hey, they did a bad job of leading by example.

Three months in, most of our politicians were actively ignoring their own rules and orders and getting caught red handed. A lot of people came to the same conclusion you did as a result. If this was turbo-aids, they would be freaking out and barricading themselves in but not a single one did.

 

[a terminal posture]

The White House suddenly schedules a press briefing by the White House COVID-19 Response Team for today. With the recent spate of state-level rescissions I am cautiously optimistic.

 

[Rumpled Foreskin]

 

[borsabil]

The White House suddenly schedules a press briefing by the White House COVID-19 Response Team for today. With the recent spate of state-level rescissions I am cautiously optimistic.

They're about to pivot hard.

Now natural immunity is a thing. Mandates, masking kids and vaxx passports may be doing more harm than good.

They're going to declare victory against Covid and announce a return to normal. Their polling, the real polls and not the weighted pushed surveys published in the media, must be God awful. We should have expected this with the mid term campaign about to start.

What will happen in the Covidian outposts of Australia, Canada and New Zealand when the Biden administration starts siding with the racist, transphobic, Nazi, trucker supporting vaxx deniers? Poor fucks are being left hanging.

Equally how will the science worshiping bug people, also known as the Democratic Party base, respond to this?

Popcorn at the ready.

 

[Hollywood Hitler]

They're about to pivot hard.

Now natural immunity is a thing. Mandates, masking kids and vaxx passports may be doing more harm than good.

They're going to declare victory against Covid and announce a return to normal. Their polling, the real polls and not the weighted pushed surveys published in the media, must be God awful. We should have expected this with the mid term campaign about to start.

What will happen in the Covidian outposts of Australia, Canada and New Zealand when the Biden administration starts siding with the racist, transphobic, Nazi, trucker supporting vaxx deniers? Poor fucks are being left hanging.

Equally how will the science worshiping bug people, also known as the Democratic Party base, respond to this?

Popcorn at the ready.

Even if they end all of this nonsense, this war isn't over. There needs to be reprocutions for what these people have done for the past two years. We need to send a message that something like this will never happen again, and I think we should leave executions on the table for punishment.

 

[a terminal posture]

They're about to pivot hard.

Speaking of:

NEW: Gov. JB Pritzker will announce Wednesday plans to begin lifting Illinois’ indoor mask mandate, according to source. The elimination of masking requirements is expected to occur by March 1.

Notably: Pritzker will continue to fight to keep masking requirements in schools.

It will be more like this. They can't fold instantly which is tantamount to admitting they were wrong, so rescinding the mandates will be a long, agonizing political theater (and lol @ reinstating school masking, from what I've seen here the toothpaste ain't going back in the tube in many districts.)

 

[George Lucas]

Nobody’s gonna watch your twenty-fucking-minute long video. What’s your point?

 

[Diana Moon Glampers]

They're about to pivot hard.

Now natural immunity is a thing. Mandates, masking kids and vaxx passports may be doing more harm than good.

They're going to declare victory against Covid and announce a return to normal. Their polling, the real polls and not the weighted pushed surveys published in the media, must be God awful. We should have expected this with the mid term campaign about to start.

What will happen in the Covidian outposts of Australia, Canada and New Zealand when the Biden administration starts siding with the racist, transphobic, Nazi, trucker supporting vaxx deniers? Poor fucks are being left hanging.

Equally how will the science worshiping bug people, also known as the Democratic Party base, respond to this?

Popcorn at the ready.

Nope. Got a half-hour infomercial about how boosters are keeping people alive and out of the hospital, and how you should get boosted and kids should get boosted and we should all wear masks.

This was what they had to declare a sudden, unscheduled briefing for.

What the fuck is going on, exactly?

 

[teriyakiburns]

The UK is scrapping all Covid rules from the end of February. All of them are going.

Fucking ay. Amazing what happens when a venal, lying grifter gets caught out.

 

[NoReturn]

Check out what just popped up on Pocket (gonna xpost to A&N)

What the Omicron wave is revealing about human immunity​

No one anticipated how quickly Omicron would sweep the globe. Although the surge from the variant is starting to decline in many countries, worldwide case numbers are still on the rise. The last full week of January saw about 23 million confirmed new cases; previous peaks topped out at about 5 million per week. Beleaguered public-health officials are still scrambling to curtail the virus’s spread so that people with COVID-19 don’t overwhelm the hospitals.Omicron also presented immunologists with a new and urgent puzzle. Initial data suggest that existing vaccines, designed around the original SARS-CoV-2, do not provide much protection from becoming infected with the variant, even if they do seem to reduce the risk of hospitalization or death. The protection provided by two doses of a messenger RNA vaccine drops to less than 40% just a few months after the second dose1,2. But a third, ‘booster’ dose seems to help. One report found about 60–70% protection from infection at two weeks after a third shot1, and protection from severe illness seems strong2.“This is very exciting,” says Mark Slifka, an immunologist at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. It’s also a little surprising. Why would a third encounter with a vaccine targeted to the original virus’s spike protein — which it uses to enter cells — work against this variant, which has more than 30 mutations in the spike?The human immune system’s ability to remember past infections is one of its hallmarks, but a durable response is not guaranteed. Some infections and immunizations elicit lifelong protection, but for others, the response is modest and requires regular reminders in the form of booster shots or new, reformulated vaccines. COVID-19 has forced on the world a chance to explore the intricacies of this complex and crucial biological phenomenon. “It’s an amazing natural experiment,” says Donna Farber, an immunologist at Columbia University in New York City. “It’s just this unbelievable opportunity to look at human immune responses in real time.”With around ten billion shots of a dozen COVID-19 vaccines already in people’s arms, and five worrying variants pulsing around the globe, scientists are scrambling to answer key questions. How long will vaccination protect people for? What will that protection look like? And, of course, how will a vaccine developed against the original SARS-CoV-2 fare against other variants, such as Omicron?“We are just at the beginning of a wave of discovery,” says John Wherry, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia. What emerges will be crucial not only for fighting COVID-19, but for understanding some of the most fundamental features of immune memory.

Making memories last ​

The immune system kicks into action soon after a pathogen enters the body. But it can take several days for the specialized cells that target viruses and bacteria to join the battle. These B cells and T cells work to eradicate the infection; after the fight is over, they remember the intruder.
B cells “are the first responders”, says Ali Ellebedy, an immunologist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri. During a first exposure to a pathogen, B cells that get activated divide rapidly and differentiate into plasma cells that churn out proteins called antibodies. Antibodies can flag suspicious intruders for destruction, and some might bind to a part of a pathogen that prevents it from infecting cells altogether. These are the ‘neutralizing’ antibodies. “They’re the only thing that can truly give you sterilizing immunity,” says Shane Crotty, an immunologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in California. That’s why researchers typically use the presence of these antibodies as a proxy for immune protection.
By September 2020, a handful of studies3,4 reported that neutralizing-antibody levels were dropping in people who had recovered from COVID-19. Some experts expressed alarm that immunity to SARS-CoV-2 might therefore be fleeting.
Immunologists, however, weren’t surprised. Antibodies are supposed to wane after an infection. The short-lived B cells that churn out antibodies right away die off quickly. “This is something we’ve known forever,” says Rafi Ahmed, an immunologist and director of the Emory Vaccine Center at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
What matters is whether the body makes long-lived B cells that can target the pathogen if it reappears. These cells typically develop inside structures called germinal centres, which arise in the lymph nodes during an infection and serve as a sort of B-cell training camp. There, the cells multiply and acquire mutations. Only those that produce the best antibodies, the ones that latch most securely on to the surface of the virus, survive. It’s “almost a winnowing process”, Ellebedy says.
Within a month or so, some of the cells that produce these super-binders become memory B cells that circulate in the blood (see ‘B-cell memory’). They don’t produce antibodies, but if they encounter the virus or its proteins, they can rapidly divide and become plasma cells that do. The rest become long-lived plasma cells that reside mainly in the bone marrow and secrete a small-but-steady stream of high-quality antibodies. “Those cells basically live with us for the rest of our lives,” Ellebedy says.

A drop in antibody levels after infection is normal. What immunologists really want to know is where — or whether — the decline will stop. In April 2020, Ahmed and his team began studying people who had recovered from COVID-19. The scientists found that those people’s antibody levels dropped quickly for the first two or three months after infection. But then, after about four months, the researchers saw the curve start to flatten. They have published results on the first eight months5, but now have data up to 450 days, and Ahmed is encouraged by what they see. So far, “looking at the shape of the curve, it looks pretty damn good”, he says. “It is really quite stable.”
The immune response after vaccination more or less mimics what happens after infection, with one major difference. In a SARS-CoV-2 infection, the immune system sees the whole virus. The most effective vaccines, however, are using just one viral protein to elicit a response: spike. And whether antibody levels will also plateau after vaccination isn’t yet clear. Wherry and his colleagues analysed immune responses in 61 people for 6 months after their first shot, finding that antibody levels peaked about a week after the second shot and then fell quickly for a couple of months. After that, they declined more slowly6.
With that decline came a drop in protection. The shots, which became widely available in some countries as early as December 2020, showed impressive effectiveness initially. But by July 2021, reports began to surface of breakthrough infections. Data from Israel, which had launched an aggressive vaccination campaign using the Pfizer–BioNTech mRNA vaccine, suggested that this vaccine’s protection against infection dropped from 95% to just 39% over the course of 5 months (see go.nature.com/3hjdxtn; in Hebrew and English).
Those numbers make it sound as though the vaccine is faltering. And researchers have seen that, over time, it does lose its ability to keep infection at bay. But vaccines have retained their ability to prevent serious illness. Protection from infection might be waning, but protection against hospitalization seems to be holding up. “You’re probably going to have protective immunity for years,” Crotty says.

The cells will save us​

Immune memory depends on more than just antibodies. Even when antibody levels drop, memory B cells can recognize a return invader, divide, and quickly start churning out antibodies to fight it. And the memory B-cell response improves over time, at least in the short term. Six months after vaccination, the individuals in Wherry’s study6 had elevated numbers of memory B cells that responded not only to the original SARS-CoV-2, but also to three other variants of concern.
And then there are T cells, the third pillar of immune memory. On coming into contact with an antigen, these multiply into a pool of effector cells that act to wipe out the infection. Killer T cells quickly divide to assassinate infected cells, and various types of helper T cell secrete chemical signals that stimulate other parts of the immune system, including B cells. After the threat has passed, some of these cells persist as memory T cells (see ‘T-cell memory’).

Some people might carry memory T cells from past coronavirus infections — such as those that cause common colds — that can recognize SARS-CoV-2. These cells could help to fight the infection, or even stop it completely. One study7 found that health-care workers who were exposed to SARS-CoV-2 but never tested positive had subtle signs of a response to infection. The researchers hypothesize that cross-reactive T cells shut the infection down before it could take hold. “These people did have an infection in a sort of loosest sense of the word,” says Mala Maini, an immunologist at University College London who led the study. But “there’s probably not much virus around because it’s being shut down very quickly”.
This idea is still controversial, and the phenomenon might be rare. Memory cells typically can’t block infection in the way that neutralizing antibodies can, but they don’t necessarily need to. With COVID-19, infection happens quickly, but it takes a little while to cause serious illness. That gives memory T cells some time to do their jobs. When re-exposed to a virus or booster, these cells will kick into overdrive, “proliferating like crazy”, Crotty says. “In a 24-hour period, you can get a tenfold increase in the number of your memory T cells.” That’s probably not fast enough to have much of an effect on getting sick, he adds. But it could be fast enough to prevent hospitalization.
And it’s much harder for the virus to find a way around the T-cell response. That’s because T cells in one individual recognize different parts of the virus than do T cells in another individual. So a virus could mutate to escape one person’s T-cell response, but not another’s. “Escape is meaningless at the population level,” Crotty says. Also, T cells can see parts of the virus (or the spike protein) that antibodies can’t, including pieces that are less likely to mutate.
Several studies have found that people who had been vaccinated or had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 had about the same T-cell response to Omicron as they did to the Delta variant, despite the large number of mutations8,9. Observations of Omicron’s spread also suggest that this is so. A T-cell response is possibly also helping to drive the phenomenon known as ‘decoupling’. In areas with higher immunity because of past infections or vaccination, the number of cases of Omicron has risen quickly, but the number of hospitalizations and deaths has increased much more slowly.

Evolution of immunity​

A perfect vaccine would induce an immune response that is not only durable, but also broad enough to protect against the virus as it mutates and evolves. With Omicron raging, it seems the vaccines have lost some ground. But the immune system still has a number of tricks to deal with viruses that keep changing.
One of those tricks happens inside the germinal centres. There, the B-cell training not only improves how well antibodies bind to their original target; it can also boost the number of binding sites they recognize, increasing the odds that they can identify a variant.
“Indirectly, the whole success of vaccination depends on how robust the germinal centre is,” Ellebedy says. Dogma suggests that without the germinal centre, “we don’t have memory”.
But that might not be entirely true. The immune system has “a grab bag of other pathways” that are more nuanced and less well studied, says Stephanie Eisenbarth, director of the Center for Human Immunobiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois. Research by Eisenbarth and her colleagues shows that even mice that lack the ability to make germinal centres can generate long-lived plasma cells10. How these cells arise isn’t entirely clear, but just like the plasma cells that come through the germinal centre, these seem to bind tightly to their targets.
Emerging data suggest that Omicron is, nevertheless, able to largely circumvent the antibodies generated by past infection or vaccination. Pfizer reported a 25-fold drop in the neutralization of Omicron (compared with the original SARS-CoV-2) in people who had received two vaccine doses. Why a third-dose booster might bring back protection isn’t entirely clear.
It’s possible that a third shot simply boosts all antibody levels equally, including the small proportion that can recognize pieces of Omicron’s spike protein that haven’t changed. “We know already from some of the data released by the companies that antibodies get boosted very, very efficiently,” says Wherry. But it’s looking likely that a third shot actually increases the breadth of the response.

Israeli officials authorized a fourth dose of a COVID-19 vaccine in January in hopes of boosting people’s immunological memory.Credit: Amir Levy/Getty
In one study11, researchers assessed blood from people who had received vaccines from Moderna, Pfizer–BioNTech or Johnson & Johnson to assess how well their antibodies neutralized a virus containing spike protein from SARS-CoV-2 variants. Blood from individuals who received one or two doses had little ability to neutralize Omicron. But blood from people who had received a booster dose of an mRNA vaccine fought the variant effectively. Their neutralization capacity against Omicron was only four- to sixfold lower than against the original strain.
People who have received two doses of vaccine have memory B cells that can bind to Omicron12. It’s possible that a third shot prompts these memory cells to become antibody-producing cells. “One of the major jobs of memory B cells is to be a library of guesses by the immune system about what a variant may look like,” Crotty says.
Wherry offers another possibility. The booster might be triggering the formation of germinal centres, setting off another cascade of mutation among B cells. “That’s one of the things that we’re going to be watching carefully,” he says.
Slifka posits that the first dose of the vaccine generates antibodies that bind well to the features of the spike protein that are readily accessible. When subsequent doses arrive, existing antibodies quickly coat those accessible features, leaving less-accessible targets available for B cells to latch on to.
The good news about boosters, however, comes with a caveat. It’s not clear how long booster protection will last. Data from the United Kingdom suggest it could wane quickly13. Three doses of the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine provided 70% protection initially. But by 10 weeks, protection against infection had dropped to 45%. And reports emerging from Israel suggest that a fourth-dose booster doesn’t seem to elevate protection effectively. This suggests that the best next move might be to develop Omicron-specific booster shots.
Pfizer and Moderna are already working on mRNA versions of such jabs. In January, Pfizer chief executive Albert Bourla said that an Omicron-specific vaccine should be ready to launch by March. By then, however, many will already have been infected with the variant and gained some immunity that way. Pfizer is also working on a shot that would include both the original spike and one from Omicron. The ultimate goal, of course, is to develop a jab that would provide long-lasting immunity without multiple boosters.

The magic ingredient​

SARS-CoV-2 could provide other opportunities for learning how to improve vaccination. In 2019, Slifka and his colleague Ian Amanna published a review14 looking at different types of vaccine and hunting for patterns that might help to predict why some induce durable immunity and others don’t.
Of the vaccine types they looked at, the longest-lasting protection tended to come from live-virus vaccines. These consist of pathogens that have been altered so that they can’t cause disease. Because they mimic the actual infection so well, they tend to elicit a durable response. But those that contained whole inactivated virus or pieces of viral protein elicited good memory, too. What seems to matter, Slifka says, is the amount of time the antigen sticks around. “You don’t have to be chronically infected,” he says, “but it has to maintain stimulation of the immune system for a certain amount of time.”
Slifka and Amanna didn’t include mRNA vaccines in the paper — the technology wasn’t in common use — but these do seem to fit the trend. For mRNA vaccines, the antigen gets produced by cells in the body (from an mRNA template). It sticks around for just a few weeks. And the evidence so far suggests that immunity might also be transient. But RNA vaccines that have the ability to replicate in the body might bring about longer-lasting immunity.
SARS-CoV-2 has given scientists a plethora of vaccines to observe and compare against the backdrop of an active pandemic, including those using whole, inactivated virus; protein; or mRNA, or those based on an adenovirus, such as Oxford–AstraZeneca’s or Johnson & Johnson’s offerings. There have been surprises. The response after a shot of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, for example, elicits a weaker immune response than the mRNA vaccines initially, “and then it actually starts to get better over time”, says Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “Something interesting is happening there.”
Scientists are also eager to understand what happens when people mix and match vaccines. A UK study known as Com-CoV has been investigating this phenomenon since early in the pandemic. Its most recent data15 show that people who received a first dose of either Oxford–AstraZeneca or Pfizer–BioNTech followed by Moderna had a higher antibody response than those who received a second dose of the same vaccine.
“You can think about it like cross training,” Wherry says. Mixing and matching different kinds of vaccine might create a more flexible, diverse immune memory.
Adding more targets might also trigger better protection. The most effective current vaccines target the spike protein, but T cells can see the whole virus, says Bali Pulendran, an immunologist at Stanford University in California. He thinks of immunological memory as an enormous chandelier suspended by three thin wires: one represents the antibody response, one is memory B cells and the third is memory T cells. Each is important and should be considered in vaccine design. If one or two of the strands were severed, “would we be confident standing under it?” Pulendran asks.
A shot with broad, durable neutralizing activity against SARS-CoV-2 was always going to be a tall order. Much of that comes down to the nature of the virus itself. “If you look at respiratory infections, these historically have been very hard to prevent,” Ahmed says. That applies to influenza, respiratory syncytial virus and “we definitely see it with the common cold”. With a systemic infection, such as measles, it takes time for the virus to spread through the body and cause illness. With respiratory infections, it’s happening right at the point of entry. For such pathogens, protecting against serious illness might be the best anyone can hope for.
Many are still optimistic, however. “Everyone and their mother is studying SARS-CoV-2 right now,” says Scott Hensley, an immunologist at the Perelman School of Medicine. That surge of interest has led to remarkable advances in immunologists’ ability to dissect the immune response. The insights might finally help them to unlock the recipe for a vaccine that offers long-lasting, broad protection.
“What’s the magic sauce?” Pulendran asks. “Therein lies a deep, deep mystery, a fundamental challenge, which if it is solved will have a transformative effect on vaccinology.”

 

[Homegrown Homophobia]

My county in California as of the 16th is finally getting rid of indoor masks as long as you're *wink* wink* "vaccinated". As if any restaurant or store is going to check customers.

DNC internal polling must really be that awful and of course worries about spillover from the Canadian trucker protests if even the fagged out Bay Area is starting to give up on the pandemic.

 

[UVB-76]

@NoReturn (quote bug)

For mRNA vaccines, the antigen gets produced by cells in the body (from an mRNA template). It sticks around for just a few weeks. And the evidence so far suggests that immunity might also be transient. But RNA vaccines that have the ability to replicate in the body might bring about longer-lasting immunity.

Oh my god can labcoats just stop fucking with nature for a few decades?

 

[teriyakiburns]

@NoReturn (quote bug)

Oh my god can labcoats just stop fucking with nature for a few decades?

Self-replicating RNA is literally a virus.

 

[Super-Chevy454]

My county in California as of the 16th is finally getting rid of indoor masks as long as you're *wink* wink* "vaccinated". As if any restaurant or store is going to check customers.

DNC internal polling must really be that awful and of course worries about spillover from the Canadian trucker protests if even the fagged out Bay Area is starting to give up on the pandemic.

Too bad then LA doesn't seem to follow.

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/new-york-ditch-indoor-mask-mandate-while-la-county-refuses-do-so

New York To Ditch Indoor Mask Mandate While LA County Warns Its Could Remain For 'Weeks Or Months'​

BY TYLER DURDEN
WEDNESDAY, FEB 09, 2022 - 11:50 AM
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is planning to lift the Empire State's mask mandate this week - what the NYT described as a "watershed moment" in New York's struggle against COVID - a decision that follows a similar move by NJ Gov. Phil Murphy made earlier this week.
According to an NYT preview of Hochul's decision (which she confirmed in an announcement released just before noon, in New York) the governor "was not swayed" by similar moves made by neighboring Democrat-controlled states (*cough* New Jersey *cough*) and is basing her decision "purely on the latest data and consultations with public health experts" - including her talks with Dr. Anthony Fauci.
On Tuesday, the governor became more comfortable with the latest metrics, which indicated that bed capacity at hospitals in the state was at about 4%, down from a peak of 23% on Jan. 2. As for masks in schools, Hochul says she will wait until March before she stops to reassess.
While NY is keeping its mask mandate in schools - for now, at least - Massachusetts has just decided that its school mask mandate will end on Feb. 28.
The decision will have a "far reaching" impact on public settings in the state, including businesses from retail shops to restaurants and malls - and workplaces as well.
Once Hochul's decision has been made, these places would no longer be required to enforce "mask-wearing" or ask for "proof of vaccination" unless they choose to do so on their own.
Unfortunately for students and their parents, Hochul's move wouldn't impact requirements that students and teachers wear masks at school. That decision is set to expire on Feb. 21, and it's unclear whether the governor wll move to extend it, or not.

"I am optimistic that we’re trending in that direction, but I still need the time," said Ms. Hochul, who met virtually with a group of school officials on Tuesday afternoon.

While plenty of New Yorkers will be relieved, in other states and counties, they haven't been as lucky. While California prepares to lift its indoor mask mandate next week, the state's most populous county - LA County - has established itself as a notable hold out, thanks to the decision-making skills of its "SJW" Director of the Department of Public Health, Barbara Ferrer.

And now the CDC show misinformation on masks not science.

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/cdc-spreads-misinformation-masking-not-science

CDC Spreads Misinformation On Masking, Not Science​

BY TYLER DURDEN
WEDNESDAY, FEB 09, 2022 - 12:14 PM
Authored by Amelia Janaskie via The American Institute for Economic Research,
Twisting the truth is our current Federal Government’s modus operandi. Look no further than White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki’s latest political gymnastics when she claimed, “We’ve not been pro-lockdown – most of the lockdowns actually happened under the previous President.”
While technically true (most actual lockdowns happened in America under Trump), the reality is that Biden praised pro-lockdown governors like Andrew Cuomo of NY, deified lockdown advocate Anthony Fauci as “America’s scientist,” and insisted throughout his 2020 campaign that lockdowns were necessary.
While our government officials may struggle with cognitive dissonance, Americans are taking notice as their trust in the federal government continues to plummet.

The Biden Administration aside, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) approach to the pandemic has been concerning, especially regarding its ability to offer reliable information to the public. The latest example of this trend occurs in a misleading infographic, which if taken at face value, conveys that wearing a cloth mask provides 56 percent more protection than no mask at all.



The CDC cites the results from its new study on masking, which states that “wearing a cloth mask (aOR = 0.44; 95 percent CI = 0.17–1.17) was associated with lower adjusted odds of a positive test compared with never wearing a face covering but was not statistically significant.” If one looks closely at the infographic, the hash symbol at the bottom indicates the results for cloth masks are “not statistically significant.”

Even though the CDC is technically honest in reporting this fact on the infographic, the situation still raises the question: if it admits in fine print that its infographic isn’t backed by reliable evidence, then why are they publishing it in the first place? Moreover, if the evidence suggests that wearing cloth masks has no statistically significant relationship with reducing the probability of testing positive, then why does the CDC continue to say we should use them?

Vinay Prasad, Professor of Epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco, echoes this sentiment, scrutinizing the rigor of the study itself. According to Prasad, there are multiple issues with how the researchers conducted the survey, including significant response and selection bias. In a Cato working paper, Prasad, along with other researchers, highlights the main concern with broadcasting flawed research:

Although weak evidence should not preclude precautionary actions in the face of unprecedented events such as the Covid-19 pandemic, ethical principles require that the strength of the evidence and best estimates of amount of benefit [should] be truthfully communicated to the public.

Unfortunately, this behavior is typical for the CDC, which has debased itself to the level of partisan media outlets that spin the results of medical studies. Admitting that cloth masks don’t reduce the odds of testing positive would disrupt its existing narrative and result in political uproar against the CDC from the public and other highly influential groups, such as the Biden Administration and teachers unions.

Relenting on its stance will further erode the CDC’s recommendation for universal masking in schools, enraging teachers unions, who we know influenced its school mask guidance.

Despite the growing evidence against masks, the CDC is intent on maintaining its position on school masking.

Power Grabs and Misinformation​

According to its official mission, the CDC “serves as the national focus for developing and applying disease prevention and control, environmental health, and health promotion and health education activities designed to improve the health of the people of the United States.” Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, there have been many cases in which the CDC stepped outside its mission.

We must not forget the eviction moratorium. On September 4th, 2020, the CDC, citing the need to control Covid, stopped landlords from evicting tenants. The data backing this argument was shoddy, and the moratorium was later deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

In addition to controlling landlords, the CDC also ignores research that opposes its position on the robustness of natural immunity. According to famed Johns Hopkins researcher Marty Makary, the results of the latest data on reinfection rates demonstrated that “natural immunity was 2.8 times as effective in preventing hospitalization and 3.3 to 4.7 times as effective in preventing Covid infection compared with vaccination.”

Yet, the CDC spun the truth when reporting on this study. They claimed “vaccination remains the safest strategy for averting future SARS-CoV-2 infections, hospitalizations, long-term sequelae, and death,” based on a comparison between hybrid immunity (combination of prior infection and vaccination) with natural immunity. They did not clarify what the study’s results actually show: that vaccination does not significantly reduce the risk of hospitalization for those with natural immunity.

But why would they? These findings directly dispute the position held by the CDC and the Biden administration. The current CDC Director Rochelle Walensky will not budge on her position either. In October of 2020, she signed the John Snow Memorandum, which still states “there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection.”

The Game Is Up​

The American people can sense the lies. Their trust in the CDC is falling. Its lack of transparency damages public health in the long run, hindering its ability to provide effective messaging during future health emergencies.

If they want the trust of the American people, they have to work harder to regain it. Unfortunately, the CDC is beholden to special interest groups, which leads it to renege on its mission of providing accurate public health recommendations. The CDC faces incentives that prompt it to follow the concentrated interests of special interest groups at the cost of providing reliable information to the public.

The CDC’s actions have completely bewildered the American people. If it continues down this road, it will only erode what little credibility it has left.

 

[NyQuilninja]

3 years deep still haven't gotten the shot.

 

[Fliddaroonie]

With this recent Stacey Abrams debacle, it's made me realize something.

I hate politicians and always assume the worst of them. I also believe that most of them are spineless cowards that would protect their own well being and interests above all else.

If this virus was really as scary as they said it was, these fuckers would be isolated for days on end and would use all resources available to protect themselves.

The fact that so many of them have been caught without masks and vacationing to Florida and basically doing whatever they want all the time tells me that this thing isn't really as scary as they made it out to be.

And if I'm wrong, hey, they did a bad job of leading by example.

The head of the UK government, the PM was snapped Christmas 2020 sans mask celebrating without a mask with colleagues.

This shit is not as scary as they want you to believe and it never has been. Not once, not ever. If it was why were they carrying on as normal while the rest of us were locked on pie homes? And just cos the leaders of your country weren't caught doesn't mean they weren't at it cos I guaranfeckingtee they were.