Trying to Kill Us

I am referring, of course, to the Food and Drub Administration which just suppressed studies showing the Covid and Shingles vaccines are safe and effective.

RFK, Jr. is a cancer on the American body politic.

Officials at the Food and Drug Administration have blocked publication of several studies supporting the safety of widely used vaccines against Covid-19 and shingles in recent months, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed.

The studies, which cost millions of dollars in public funds, were conducted by scientists at the agency, who worked with data firms to analyze millions of patient records. They found serious side effects to be very rare.

In October, the scientists were directed to withdraw two Covid-19 vaccine studies that had been accepted for publication in medical journals. In February, top F.D.A. officials did not sign off on submitting abstracts about studies of Shingrix, a shingles vaccine, to a major drug safety conference.

The withdrawal of the studies is the latest step by the administration to try to limit access to vaccines. It has sharply cut research funding for vaccine development, released unvetted information casting doubt on vaccines, and blocked other information supporting their safety, most recently a paper on Covid vaccine effectiveness by career scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

These folks need to spend the rest of their lives in prison. 

They’d none of them be missed.

More Fruit of the Poisonous Antivaxx Tree

An increasing number of newborns are dying from intestinal and cranial bleeds because parents are refusing the once-routine vitamin K injection, because ……… anti-vaccine vibes.

They entered the world the way babies should, with piercing cries announcing their arrival. They passed their newborn screening tests. Some made it to their 2-week wellness visits without concern.

Then, without warning, their systems began to shut down. A 7-week-old boy in Maryland developed sudden seizures. An 11-pound girl in Alabama stopped breathing for 20 seconds at a time. A baby boy in Kentucky vomited before becoming lethargic. A brown-haired girl in Texas, not yet 2 weeks old, bled around her belly button.

Desperate to save them, records show, doctors inserted tubes into their airways and hooked them up to IVs. They ordered blood transfusions. They spent half an hour trying to resuscitate one boy until his parents told them they could stop. They shaved another boy’s soft locks to embed a needle directly into his skull to reduce the pressure in his brain.

None of it was enough.

At the morgue, the babies were brought in with their diapers and blankets and with their hospital ID bracelets still wrapped around their tiny ankles. The pathologists’ findings were like those you would typically see in ailing adults, not newborns — the kind of bleeding seen during strokes or brain tissue loss similar to what happens when radiation is administered to treat cancer.

Their autopsies, which took place over the last several years, all came to the same conclusion: The deaths were caused, in whole or in part, by a rare but potentially fatal condition known as vitamin K deficiency bleeding.

In almost every case, the babies’ deaths could have been prevented with a long-standard vitamin K shot. But across the country, families — first in smatterings, now in droves — are declining the single, inexpensive injection given at birth to newborns to help their blood clot.

RFK, Jr. and Andrew Wakefield should spend the rest of their lives behind bars. 

 

Looks Like Someone Is Getting Tired of Florida's 2nd Most Worthless Citizen

And by, "Someone," I mean Republicans in the Florida House, and by, "Florida's 2nd most worthlesss citizen," I mean Governor Ron DeSantis, who just had his initiative to block vaccine requirements in the state shut down.

I think that someone out there believes that goose-stepping in lock-step with the Governor is antithetical to reelection.

The anti-vaccine sugar rush that has infected some portions of the country, largely thanks to the profane appointment of RFK Jr. to head HHS, is incredibly frustrating. That makes it all the more important when the movement receives not just pushback when trying to enact absurd policy based on conspiracy theories, but specifically when that pushback comes from the same party engaging in the absurdity.

Earlier this year, flanked by Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Surgeon General, Joseph Ladapo, announced that the state government was seeking to end all vaccine requirements for school children in the state. And, because Ladapo is a hack, he postured this move in the silliest way possible.

Ladapo said the Florida Department of Health would be working with Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office to end all mandates in state law, at the event at Grace Christian School in Valrico, located just east of Tampa.

“Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery,” Ladapo said of vaccine mandates.

As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know."

He really did say that. 

………

DeSantis, for his part, stated that some vaccine requirements could be removed immediately, while others would require state legislation. But the legislation drawn up to achieve that has hit a major roadblock, and that roadblock is Florida’s House GOP.

Just minutes into a special session on Tuesday, Florida House Speaker Daniel Perez announced that the Republican-led chamber would not take up a proposal from DeSantis to allow children to opt out of certain school vaccination requirements. The move effectively killed the proposal, which had been backed by the Senate. 

I do not think that Republicans have suddenly ended their opposition to the basic concept of public health, it's just a political calculus about how Trump, Kennedy, et al have become so toxic even among the Republican base.

Good News

US Judge Brian Murphy has struck down the decision by HHS to remove vaccines from their recommendations.

This is cause for hope, at least until the Supreme Court overrules with a tersely worded shadow docket ruling. 

In a severe blow to the Trump administration’s health agenda, a federal judge in Massachusetts on Monday blocked the government from implementing a series of decisions on vaccines made over the last year by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The ruling also reversed, at least for the time being, all decisions made by the panelists that Mr. Kennedy appointed to the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, which makes recommendations on which vaccines Americans should take. The court decision will prevent the committee from meeting later this week, as it was scheduled to do.

The judge’s ruling brought an abrupt halt to the major changes that Mr. Kennedy, who has long been skeptical of vaccines, had set in motion, upending national vaccine policy and making sweeping revisions to the recommendations for what shots are given and when. Those included cutting down the number of diseases covered by routine immunization, and restricting access to Covid vaccines, two pillars of Mr. Kennedy’s vaccine agenda.

In his decision, Judge Brian Murphy, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, noted that the vaccine committee has historically made decisions through careful review of scientific evidence, “a method scientific in nature and codified into law through procedural requirements." But, he added “unfortunately, the government has disregarded those methods and thereby undermined the integrity of its actions.”

………

Judge Murphy made the ruling in a lawsuit brought by six medical organizations, that contended Mr. Kennedy and his appointees had made “arbitrary and capricious” changes to the childhood vaccine schedule, bypassing the careful, evidence-based practice that in the past has underpinned the recommendations.

"Arbitrary and capricious," pretty much defines RFJ, Jr,s whole life.

25% Lower All-Cause Mortality

Get your vaccines.

A new study covering 30 million Frenchmen shows that not only is there no increase in mortality from MRNA Covid vaccines, but mortality is significantly lower.

At a glance

• Among 28 million French adults aged 18–59, those who received an mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine were less likely to die in the subsequent four years than those who remained unvaccinated, corresponding to a 25% lower risk of death from all causes.
• Although vaccinated adults were 74% less likely to die from severe COVID-19, the reduced mortality risk persisted after COVID-19 deaths were excluded from the analysis.
• The study found no increase in the risk of deaths from cancer, heart disease, accidental injury or any other major category: in every case, vaccinated individuals had equal or lower rates of death.

For years, a lingering question has shadowed COVID-19 vaccination campaigns: are mRNA vaccines safe in the long run?

While many studies have established that COVID-19 vaccines prevent severe illness and death in the weeks and months after injection, sceptics have continued to ask whether any hidden harms might surface later on.

Now, one of the largest long-term vaccine safety studies ever undertaken – including data from more than 28 million adults aged 18 to 59 – offers the clearest answer yet.

Get your damn vaccine.  Covid f%$#s you up.  MRNA, adjuvant, it does not matter. 

H/t Dr. Eric Ding

Well Imagine That

From Reason magazine, we have a report that shows that mRNA COVID vaccines do not have increased mortality, in fact, morbidity, including long COVID, has decreased.

When JFK, Jr. has lost Reason, he's lost everyone.

A few years before he took over the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called COVID-19 shots the "deadliest vaccine ever made." More recently, various anti-vaccination activists have been claiming that the mRNA vaccines are causing a turbo-cancer epidemic.

A huge new French study in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network deflates those claims and confirms the safety and efficacy of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. The researchers followed 22.7 million vaccinated individuals and 5.9 million unvaccinated individuals for nearly four years. They found not only that vaccinated people have a 74 percent lower risk of death from severe COVID-19, but also that those individuals have a lower risk of death, period. Specifically, people who received the shots have a 25 percent lower risk of all-cause mortality.

Because COVID-19, is associated with increased cancer rates, blood clots, heart attacks, etc.

As for the turbo-cancer claims, the researchers report that the incidence of tumors among vaccinated adults is 769 per million. For the unvaccinated, the rate is versus 853 per million. In other words, vaccinated adults were about 15 percent less likely to be diagnosed with cancer than those were unvaccinated.

The researchers sought to control for various confounders, such as a healthy-vaccinee effect, where healthier individuals are more likely to opt for vaccination, or a frailty-related bias, where those in poorer health may avoid it. They also note that vaccinated individuals in their study were generally older and tended to have more co-morbidities, such as obesity and chronic illnesses, which would usually be associated with an increased risk of dying. (The different results, they note, might be partially explained by the fact that vaccinated individuals tend to be more socioeconomically advantaged.)

Get your f%$#ing shots (I did, though I got the the adjuvent based Novavax), and wear your f%$#ing masks.

In the Contest for Worst Trump Administration Official, We Have a Winner

In news that should surprise no one, it's RFK Jr. who is now trying to take down the Hepatitis B vaccine.

Normally, I would say that separating the excrement from the chaff in the Trump administration would be a difficult task.

RFK, Jr. makes it easy.

An influential vaccine committee will revisit recommendations around the hepatitis B shot on Thursday and may change the current practice of vaccinating newborns, an intervention that for decades has contributed to falling rates of the disease.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly questioned whether babies should continue to receive the vaccine on their first day of life.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory committee has recommended the hepatitis B vaccine for all infants since 1991. (The panel later recommended catch-up vaccinations for children who were not immunized as babies; it first recommended the vaccine in 1982 for people who were at high risk.) The goal was to guard against an infection that can leave lasting liver damage.

Yet another case where this lunatic is trying to dismantle one of the great public health successes of the past half century. 

This man is a menace. 

So the Senate Republicans Have Limits

It appears that in the midst of a rapidly spreading measles outbreak, The Trump administration has pulled Dave Weldon to be head of the Center for Disease Control because they lack the votes, which means that at least 4 Republicans are not willing to support this moron.

The White House abruptly abandoned the nomination of Dave Weldon, the former Florida congressman who questioned vaccine safety, to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday amid concerns he could not be confirmed by the Senate.

The move leaves the Trump administration in search of a leader for the agency — which formulates vaccine policy recommendations — as a growing measles outbreak highlights criticism of the administration’s public health response.

The Senate health committee announced Weldon’s nomination had been pulled shortly before he was scheduled to testify at a hearing Thursday morning.

The withdrawal of Weldon’s nomination marks a rare setback for a Trump administration pick. The Senate has confirmed every controversial choice brought to a full vote on the floor to date.

Weldon, a 71-year-old doctor who left Congress in 2009, drew scrutiny for his longtime promotion of the false claim that vaccines can cause autism.

Yeah, but they still voted for JFK, Jr.

Great

RFK, Jr. has just been sworn in as head of HHS.

Expect to see him revoke authorizations for multiple vaccines, as well as revoking authorization for mifepristone.

It is highly likely that in the next 12 to 18 months, we will be in the worst public health crisis since 1918.

Lovely News

In the journal Nature Medicine, a paper is showing that,"SARS-CoV-2-specific plasma cells are not durably established in the bone marrow long-lived compartment after mRNA vaccination.

Translated into English, it means that immunity to the disease falls off of a cliff after 3 months.

Abstract

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) mRNA vaccines are effective at protecting from severe disease, but the protective antibodies wane rapidly even though SARS-CoV-2-specific plasma cells can be found in the bone marrow (BM). Here, to explore this paradox, we enrolled 19 healthy adults at 2.5–33 months after receipt of a SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine and measured influenza-, tetanus- or SARS-CoV-2-specific antibody-secreting cells (ASCs) in long-lived plasma cell (LLPC) and non-LLPC subsets within the BM. Only influenza- and tetanus-specific ASCs were readily detected in the LLPCs, whereas SARS-CoV-2 specificities were mostly absent. The ratios of non-LLPC:LLPC for influenza, tetanus and SARS-CoV-2 were 0.61, 0.44 and 29.07, respectively. In five patients with known PCR-proven history of recent infection and vaccination, SARS-CoV-2-specific ASCs were mostly absent from the LLPCs. We show similar results with measurement for secreted antibodies from BM ASC culture supernatant. While serum IgG titers specific for influenza and tetanus correlated with IgG LLPCs, serum IgG levels for SARS-CoV-2, which waned within 3–6 months after vaccination, were associated with IgG non-LLPCs. In all, our studies suggest that rapid waning of SARS-CoV-2-specific serum antibodies could be accounted for by the absence of BM LLPCs after these mRNA vaccines.

The study does not do a comparison between mRNA and other vaccines, so it is unclear whether this is an artifact of the Covid virus or of the mRNA vaccines, but I'm due for a booster, and I am getting Novavax, and I recommend that you do to.

Remember though, I am an engineer, not a doctor, dammit*, so my advice is simply based on my very flawed gut, and nothing else.

Any shot is better than no shot.

^*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

Get the F%$#ing Vaccine

No, I am not referring to the Covid vaccine, I am referring to the HPV vaccine. 

A historic new study out of Scotland shows the real-world impact of vaccines against the human papillomavirus: The country has detected no cases of cervical cancer in women born between 1988-1996 who were fully vaccinated against HPV between the ages of 12 and 13.

Many previous studies have shown that HPV vaccines are extremely effective in preventing cervical cancer. But the study, published on Monday in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, is the first to monitor a national cohort of women over such a long time period and find no occurrence of cervical cancer.

(Emphasis mine)

………

The authors of the Scotland study monitored the records of all women born between 1988 and 1996 who were eligible for cancer screening, about 450,000 women. Of that group, 40,000 were vaccinated between the ages of 12 and 13, and 124,000 received the vaccines at or after 14 years of age. The remaining women, nearly 300,000, were not vaccinated.

No cases of cervical cancer were found among the women who were vaccinated before they turned 14, even if they had only received one or two doses of the vaccine rather than the full, three-dose protocol. Also noteworthy is that women who received the three-dose protocol between the ages of 14 and 22 also benefited significantly. While some cases of cervical cancer were recorded in this group, the incidence (3.2 cases per 100,000 women) was two and a half times lower than among unvaccinated women (8.4 cases per 100,000 women).

………

The types of vaccine administered to the cohorts monitored in the study changed as newer ones became available, covering more types of HPV. Until 2012, the vaccine in use was the bivalent Cervarix, targeting HPV 16 and 18. Then the quadrivalent Gardasil was administered until 2023, when the nonavalent Gardasil 9 was introduced.

This is why it’s still possible that cervical cancers may still arise even in vaccinated women, caused by the HPV strains not targeted by the earlier vaccines. “There are obviously other HPV types that cause cancer,” Palmer said, noting that the current results don’t mean cases of cervical cancers, caused by less high-risk strains of HPV, won’t emerge in the analyzed cohort in the future.

It should be noted that boys as well as girls should get the vaccine for two reasons, first, it mitigates the spread of HPV, and second, HPV associated penile cancer is rather common.

It is never too late to get the shot, but the sweet spot is 9-14 years old.

Yeah, Just Like the Flu

The current Covid-19 surge is severe enough that the FDA is reported to be accelerating the release of updated vaccines.

The US Food and Drug Administration is poised to sign off as soon as this week on updated Covid-19 vaccines targeting more recently circulating strains of the virus, according to two sources familiar with the matter, as the country experiences its largest summer wave in two years.

The agency is expected to greenlight updated mRNA vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech that target a strain of the virus called KP.2, said the sources, who declined to be named because the timing information isn’t public. It was unclear whether the agency simultaneously would authorize Novavax’s updated shot, which targets the JN.1 strain.

The move would be several weeks ahead of last year’s version of the vaccine, which got FDA signoff on September 11.

“Now is the time to get a dose with this surge,” Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told CNN.

Meanwhile, the public health establishment at places like the CDC, they are downplaying Bird Flu, MPox, and still denying airborne transmission.

We are f%$#ed.

Osama, Take Me Now

37% of dog owners in the United States are vaccine hesitant because they are concerned about doggy autism.

I understand the concern.  A lot of dogs are completely non-verbal and engage in stimming behavior like chasing their own tails and pursuing tennis balls.  (Not)

The anti-vaccine rhetoric that dogged COVID-19 responses has now gone to the dogs, literally.

A little more than half of surveyed dog owners—53 percent—questioned the safety, efficacy, and/or necessity of vaccinating their beloved four-legged family members. The study, published recently in the journal Vaccine, involved a nationally representative group of 2,200 American adults, of which 42 percent (924) made up the analyzed subgroup of dog owners. Overall, the findings add to concern that the anti-vaccine sentiments that flared amid the pandemic have fanned out broadly, undermining even routine childhood vaccinations.

That concern was supported by the new study, which found that the dog owners who espoused "canine vaccine hesitancy," or CVH, were more likely to embrace misinformation and falsehoods linked to human vaccines. And those anti-vaccine beliefs were potent. Responses from the CVH dog owners suggested that 56 percent opposed mandatory vaccination against rabies, a 100 percent fatal condition.

In a particularly striking finding, the study found that 37 percent of all dog owners believed vaccines could cause their pets to develop cognitive problems, such as "canine/feline autism."

To be clear, vaccines do not cause autism. This falsehood has been thoroughly and repeatedly debunked for years; the plethora of data on vaccine safety shows absolutely no link between vaccination and autism. Further, "canine autism" (aka "canine dysfunctional behavior" on the Internet) is not a real condition. A veterinarian who was not involved with the new study confirmed to Ars that it is not an established diagnosis, though dogs can suffer behavioral and cognitive disorders unrelated to human autism.

Nevertheless, anti-vaccine bunkum has clearly metastasized to our furry companions. The lead author of the study, Matthew Motta, told Ars over email that he and his co-authors expected some vaccine hesitancy among pet owners but still found the results "pretty surprising."

Not surprising at all, to quote H.L. Mencken, "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people."

The Stupid

It appears that we have hit another milestone in antivaxx insanity, with measels and chickenpox exploding in the United States due to reduced vaccinations.

We are killing ourselves and our children:

A rapidly growing measles outbreak in Columbus, Ohio — largely involving unvaccinated children — is fueling concerns among health officials that more parent resistance to routine childhood immunizations will intensify a resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases.

Most of the 81 children infected so far are old enough to get the shots, but their parents chose not to do so, officials said, resulting in the country’s largest outbreak of the highly infectious pathogen this year.

“That is what is causing this outbreak to spread like wildfire,” said Mysheika Roberts, director of the Columbus health department.

………

More than a third of parents with children under 18 — and 28 percent of all adults — now say parents should be able to decide not to vaccinate their children for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) to attend public schools, even if remaining unvaccinated may create health risks for others, according to new polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health-care research nonprofit.

………

Adam Moore, a father of three in the Detroit suburbs, said none of his children — 9, 12 and 17 and enrolled in private school — have received routine childhood immunizations, let alone vaccines for the coronavirus or flu. He values personal liberty and says the government has no right telling people what to do with their bodies.

“I find it a hard argument when the government says we’re all for individual liberty on abortion rights and all this other stuff, but when it comes to vaccinations, there’s no such thing as ‘my body, my choice,’” said Moore, 43, an account manager for a marketing company.

I will explain this with small words:  When someone gets an abortion it does not effect anyone but the woman, but when someone refuses to get vaccinations, it creates epidemics which involve the whole community.

Moore, who describes himself as Republican-leaning, said he does not view childhood diseases such as measles and polio, which have resurfaced in recent years, as threats. But if the deadly Ebola virus were circulating, he said, he would want his children to get vaccinated.

Measles kills people, polio cripples them for life, but only Ebola is a scary problem because ……… I guess if you are "Republican-leaning" because it comes from Black people in Africa?

………

A few weeks ago, [Chief Medical Officer for Alasks, Dr. Anne] Zink, an emergency room doctor, saw her first case of chickenpox when a young woman walked into the Mat-Su Regional Medical Center in Palmer covered in large, painful lesions. The woman said she and her family did not believe in vaccinations and told Zink she thought chickenpox no longer existed.

Seriously?  Have you seen the ads for the Shingles Vaccine that appear on most major sports broadcasts?  They all say that it comes from the Chicken Pox virus.

Have you ever talked to someone who has had Shingles?  I've had Shingles.  It is some of the most excruciating pain that I have ever experienced.

If I could find a way to monetize stupidity in the United States, I'd be richer than Elon Musk Bernard Arnault.

Hell, I'd be able to buy and sell him 10 times over.

Now Fire Them

At the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor has refused to stay the enforcement of the vaccine mandate by New York City.

Now fire them.  The NYPD, and the whole City of New York, will benefit by their removal.

Being an anti-vaxx assholes is an indicator of a whole bunch of other problems with these individuals.

They never should have been given a gun and a badge:

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Monday declined to block New York City from enforcing its mandate that all municipal workers be vaccinated against COVID-19, rebuffing a police detective who challenged the public health policy.

The liberal justice denied Detective Anthony Marciano's request for a stay of the vaccination requirement while an appeal over his claims continue in a lower court. A federal judge threw out Marciano's case in March.

Sotomayor is the justice designated by the court to act on some matters arising from New York and certain other states.

………

Marciano remains on active duty while he appeals the denial of his vaccine exemption request. The city's health department ordered the mandate in October 2021. In February of this year, 1,430 municipal workers were fired for failing to comply.

Marciano filed his lawsuit last December in a state court. After the case was moved to Manhattan federal court, U.S. Judge Jed Rakoff dismissed the case in March.

………

The Manhattan-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied Marciano's stay request on Aug. 2.

Now fire his flabby cop ass.

Quote of the Day

Our legal system is unlikely to bother even with public figures obviously helping themselves to public funds, unless they're black city politicians.

—Duncan Black

To quote Madeline Kahn, "Oh, it's twue. It's twue. It's twue, it's twue!"

Damn

It appears that the blood clotting issues are dire enough that the FDA is limiting the use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. 

It's not a big deal for me or Charlie, but for Sharon and Nat, it is, because they have allergies to corn, (maize) which are in, or cannot be certified not to be in, the MRNA vaccines.

They will have to jump through some more hoops:

The Food and Drug Administration imposed new restrictions Thursday on the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine, saying the risk of a rare and life-threatening blood clot syndrome outweighed the benefits of the vaccine for people who are 18 or older and can get another shot, unless they would otherwise remain unvaccinated.

The FDA said only people who are unable to receive other vaccines because they are not accessible or clinically appropriate, or because individuals refused to get a different vaccine, should receive the Johnson & Johnson shot.

The Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been associated with a rare but potentially deadly blood clotting and bleeding syndrome called thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, or TTS. The condition usually occurs within one to two weeks of vaccination, and a commonly used treatment to address clotting, heparin, can cause additional harm.

“This is not a new safety signal — it is based on updated information showing that it is a persistent safety signal,” Peter Marks, the FDA’s top vaccine official, said in an interview. He said other, safer vaccines that can be used to inoculate people against the coronavirus.

It looks like it's going to be hard to find a site giving the shot.

Good News Everyone!

It appears that the effectiveness of the Johnson and Johnson Covid vaccine is the same as the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines.

Given that I got the J&J vaccine, because it was the only one that showed that it had no corn (maize) products in it, and my wife and kids have corn allergies.

This is also good news because the J&J vaccine has a one shot regime and can be stored at refrigerator temperatures, greatly simplifying vaccine distribution and administration:

Roughly 17 million Americans received the Johnson & Johnson Covid vaccine, only to be told later that it was the least protective of the options available in the United States. But new data suggest that the vaccine is now preventing infections, hospitalizations and deaths at least as well as the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines.

The reasons aren’t clear, and not all experts are convinced that the vaccine has vindicated itself. But the accumulating data nonetheless offer considerable reassurance to recipients of the vaccine and, if confirmed, have broad implications for its deployment in parts of the world.

………

The Johnson & Johnson vaccine was billed as an attractive option for communities with limited access to health care, including some within the United States, because of its ease of delivery and mild side effects. But it has had a bumpy journey.

The shot seemed to produce a weaker initial immune response, and more people who got the single-dose vaccine had breakthrough infections, compared with those who got two doses of Pfizer or Moderna, the mRNA vaccines.

In April, federal health officials in the United States and in South Africa paused the J.&J. vaccine’s distribution as they examined reports of a rare blood-clotting disorder in women. Though both countries resumed the rollouts soon after, the vaccine’s reputation never fully recovered.

But the notion that the vaccine is inferior has grown outdated, some experts said: More recent data suggest that it has more than held its own against its competitors.

………

Until last June, the cumulative data from the C.D.C. showed that immunization with the Moderna vaccine resulted in the lowest rates of breakthrough infections; those who got Johnson & Johnson saw the highest rates, with Pfizer-BioNTech somewhere in the middle.

During the summer months, the gaps — particularly between J.&J. and Pfizer — began to narrow. By now, all the vaccines seem to be performing about equally well against coronavirus infections; in fact, Johnson & Johnson appears to be holding up slightly better.

As of Jan. 22, the latest data available, unvaccinated people were 3.2 times as likely to become infected as those who received the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine; they were 2.8 times as likely to become infected as those who received two doses of the Moderna vaccine and 2.4 times as likely as those with two doses of Pfizer-BioNTech. Overall, then, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine appeared to be somewhat more protective against infection than the two alternatives.

………

Dr. Corey said the results jibe with his experience in H.I.V. research with the adenovirus that forms the backbone of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. “It has much longer durability than almost any other platform that we’ve ever worked with,” he said.

So it confers immunity for a longer period of time.

………

The infection rate is now lower among people who got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine but did not get a booster. Still, the death rate is slightly higher, compared with that among those who got the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, Dr. Dean noted.

But the differences are not huge, and disappeared among those who got booster shots. The C.D.C.’s statistics on deaths only run through Jan. 1, and the Johnson & Johnson vaccine’s edge may only become apparent in data from February or March, said Dan Barouch, a virologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston who collaborated with Johnson & Johnson in the development of the vaccine.

In any case, get the f%$#ing vaccine, and when you can, get boosted.

The Canadian Truckers

I've been thinking on this for a while, and I have a few thoughts about this:

• The protests are massively inconvenient, and this is generally a good thing, because polite protests that do not inconvenience their targets are simply ignored.
• It is clear that objections to Canadian vaccine mandates are a very small minority, even among truckers.
• The protests have been organized by white supremacists with the goal of recruiting new members and gaining political power, and their opposition to vaccine mandates is a means to an end.  Much like the fluoridation conflicts in the 1950s, the vaccine mandates are more a tool used to attain political power than it is an actual deeply held grievance.
• There is a trans-national and well organized neo-Nazi/White Supremacist community, and they have been trying various techniques, and this one has achieved the most success to this point.
  
• That these protests have achieved a level of success because the police have been tacitly and actively supporting the protesters.
• There has also been a lot of incompetence on the part of the authorities.
• The fact that counter protesters are blasting a gay cowboy song at the protesters is very amusing.
• I am not sure how to handle the protests, but it is clear that the authorities have been less aggressive and less proactive than they were in targeting (for example) the Occupy Wall Street protests. 

I'd like to offer something deeper, but I don't have anything deeper to add.

 

Good Point

Dennis Laich and Lawrence Wilkerson make a good point, that that the unwillingness of senior military command to aggressively move against vaccine refusers in the military is a dereliction of duty.

The soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen who are refusing vaccines are not just engaging in conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline military, which is a crime under the UCMJ, they are endangering their fellow service members:

The United States military presents itself as an institution ready to fight and win America’s wars because it is the best led, best trained and best equipped in history. Polls of the most trusted institutions in America and a host of “thank you for your service” pronouncements indicate that Americans buy into this, though recent polls indicate a slight downturn. A few facts might call this still-high confidence into question.

America has won only one war since World War II — the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War. We tied in Korea, lost in Vietnam, lost in Iraq and lost in Afghanistan, while being embarrassed in Syria, Libya, Beirut and Mogadishu. Moreover, the Defense Department, which received more than $760 billion of taxpayer money this year, is the only government department unable to pass a financial audit. And it is unable to fix several internal problems that are decades-long such as sexual assault and active duty and veteran suicides. But while these are serious problems, they are not as threatening as the emerging and very public issue of mass insubordination and dereliction of duty related to COVID-19 vaccination.

Despite a clear, lawful order to get vaccinated, tens of thousands of active duty (9,500 Marines, 5,360 sailors, 8,000 airmen and guardians, and 9,700 soldiers) and reserve and National Guard service members have refused to be vaccinated, thereby disobeying a lawful order and being insubordinate. Insubordination in the military is the act of disobeying a lawful order of one’s superior and is punishable under Article 91 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

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When senior uniformed officials in the Pentagon decline to take immediate appropriate action to restore discipline in the military in response to mass insubordination, they are derelict in their duty to the institution, the nation and service members who obey the order. Dereliction of duty refers to the failure through negligence or obstinacy to perform one’s legal or moral duty to a reasonable expectation. Their dereliction is at odds with the military’s long-held claim to being a disciplined force and impairs readiness, thereby jeopardizing national security. It also violates a basic military principle of “taking care of the troops” by exposing vaccinated troops to the unvaccinated.

Indeed.  Biden is commander-in-chief of the military, and he could make this happen tomorrow, and he should.

In addition to preserving discipline, it would also have the effect of purging many of the christo-fascist bigots from the military, so it is a win-win.