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Maybe this is somewhat unfair, but I am reminded of this Chinese propaganda cartoon.
ET, this is interesting. From John’s quote of Bhakdi and Burkhardt, June 19, 15:53, comment #87292, penultimate paragraph:
– “Vaccines that are injected into the muscle – i.e., the interior of the body – will only induce IgG and circulating IgA, not secretory IgA. Such antibodies cannot and will not effectively protect the mucous membranes from infection by SARS-CoV-2.”
ET, can you confirm this? They seem to be criticising the method of administration rather than the vaccines themselves. It could help explain why the vaccines have reduced severity of disease far more than they have reduced transmission. Though if this is the crux of their argument, their criticism of the vaccines themselves rather than the method of administration is not supported by it.
I was re-reading the comments and that paragraph suddenly ‘clicked’ with something I’d read months ago. A remark by a doctor or immunologist on Twitter, I think, saying that they had a lot of left over AstraZeneca vaccine, and that what they should be doing with it was administering it as a spray up the nose – and that he was very tempted to take a nebuliser down to the vaccine refrigerator and administer some to himself.
John, just because I’ve asked a technical question of ET doesn’t mean I’m letting you off the hook. Before you raise any new issues or cite any more contrarian experts, what’s your explanation for the sudden rise in in novel pneumonia and consequent death prior to imposition of lockdowns and deployment of vaccines? And when you’ve answered that, there are quite a few other idiosyncrasies, inconsistencies and apparent contradictions in your remarks that I’d like to go over with you.
https://teachmephysiology.com/immune-system/adaptive-immune-system/antibodies/
As a quick pointer I post the above link. To answer your question fully Clark I’ll have to give it some proper study. I’ve been mulling it in my head for a day or two. However, it is correct to say that only IgA anti-bodies are in the secretions. My understanding is that whilst IgA is broadly effective against a host of viruses and resistant to enzymatic breakdown they are not strain specific, by which I mean you don’t get specific IgA anti-bodies against a particular strain of say influenza virus like H5N1. My understanding is based on student days and anything I have subsequently picked up along the way, so I could be mistaken and unaware of new knowledge relating to that.
My issue with the statement you quoted from that piece is that it relates to virus infecting from the luminal side of the respiratory tract where there is no blood. Once that cell or few cells are infected and start replicating virus, the virus will be released into the blood (and also the luminal side). At that point blood borne anti-bodies have their effect on the course of the disease generally reducing the severity of disease or preventing it from taking hold. In time those infected cells will be dealt with by blood-borne anti-bodies and other immune responses. In terms of the covid vaccines the stated major beneficial effect was to reduce the likelihood of severe disease and thus mortality and it was not promoted to reduce infection or transmission.
Immunology is damned complicated.
– “Immunology is damned complicated.”
Indeed. Which is why it’s always possible to find a handful of experts diverging from the majority position in their field.
And thank goodness for that, for this is one of the ways in which scientific progress occurs. But what it does NOT indicate is that the majority in a field are merely “brainwashed by the MSM” or “saying what they’re paid to by the government” – John, please note.
It is also important to note that the dissenting experts’ proposals often contradict each other, or are incompatible. The proper venue for such disagreements to be debated is the scientific literature, the technical journals and forums, where they will be scrutinised and questioned by people with appropriate experience and background knowledge. These are the people best equipped to devise tests of the various proposals, to see how well they fit the evidence.
The proper venue is NOT Facebook and YouTube (ie. Google) etc., where noise from the ignorant will drown out the signal from the experienced.
– – – – – – – –Of course, if you’re a political actor opposed to, say, lockdowns, because of their economic consequences or even their effects upon your own business, it’s perfectly possible to collect ie. cherry-pick such minority expert opinions from various fields and cobble them together into an argument that looks coherent enough to sway public opinion, and then present that directly to the public, via Facebook, YouTube, and indeed the corporate “MSM” media. But to make it look convincing you’ll have to bang on about how well qualified your chosen experts are, and avoid any discussion of the actual evidence.
To make sense of the resulting furore, those who can see things only in black-and-white / goodies-vs-baddies will either have to follow the mainstream, or resort to conspiracy theory.
So:
- From ONE of the developers of PCR we have “PCR is unsuitable for diagnosis”.
- From ONE of the developers of mRNA vaccines we have “mRNA vaccines are unsuitable for covid”.
- From a HANDFUL of epidemiologists we have – well, various dissent, often incompatible, and most of it discredited when the second wave actually did arrive.
- From a TINY MINORITY of GPs and other medical workers we have, again, various and diverse dissent, about vaccines, or treatments, or prevalence, or whatever.
And so on. These are four separate fields, each consisting of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people.
But who rounds up all these snippets, cobbles them into a superficially coherent “anti-mainstream” narrative such that they all seem to support each other, and then publishes the entire edifice directly to the public instead of going through the scientific journals and forums? Oh, a right-wing investment banker, various right-wing newspapers, and others of that ilk. Yeadon, for instance, was popularised by Delingpole of the Telegraph (most famous for his climate change denial), you’d never have heard of him otherwise. Wakefield would be entirely obscure if his case series of eight cherry-picked children hadn’t sparked about 3000 MSM articles around 20 years ago. Had you heard of the PCR developer before covid? I hadn’t.
ET,
The text which I have quoted is a written summary of Dr. Bhakdi’s and Dr. Burkhardt’s presentations at the Doctors for COVID Ethics symposium that was live-streamed by UKColumn on December 10th, 2021.
Here we are 6 months later, and not a single medical professional has publicly challenged their analysis or their conclusions.
Maybe you could allow the possibility that they are entirely correct?
– “Here we are 6 months later, and not a single medical professional has publicly challenged their analysis or their conclusions.”
Yet nearly every medical professional recommends covid vaccination.
Maybe you could allow the possibility that you’re entirely and indeed wilfully missing every point put to you?
Here’s a succinct summary of Bhakdi’s and Burkhardt’s claims, with the audacious title “On COVID vaccines: why they cannot work, and irrefutable evidence of their causative role in deaths after vaccination”
https://doctors4covidethics.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/end-covax.pdf
This is the methodology. Dr Bhakdi performed histopathologic analyses on the organs (heart, lungs, liver, brain, glands, etc.) of 15 people who were vaccinated some time before they died, and concluded:
Histopathologic analysis show [sic] clear evidence of vaccine-induced autoimmune-like pathology in multiple organs. That myriad adverse events deriving from such auto-attack processes must be expected to very frequently occur in all individuals, particularly following booster injections, is self-evident.
Beyond any doubt, injection of gene-based COVID-19 vaccines places lives under threat of illness and death. We note that both mRNA and vector-based vaccines are represented among these cases, as are all four major manufacturers.So there you have it: “myriad adverse events … must be expected to occur very frequently in all individuals, particularly following booster injections”. (Can’t say I noticed any personally, nor did I hear of any amongst the blue-rinse brigade at the bingo in my local club – although I note there were a few pre-vaccination covid deaths.)
A Reuters fact-check of Bhakdi and Burkhardt’s claims, which highlighted serious methodological flaws, can be found here: https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-coronavirus-vaccines-idUSL1N2TN1PP
john, you claim:
“Here we are 6 months later, and not a single medical professional has publicly challenged their analysis or their conclusions.”
Not so fast. That Reuters fack-check cites Professor Neil Mabbott (personal chair in immunopathology at the University of Edinburgh), Professor Kevin McConway (emeritus professor of applied statistics at The Open University), and Dr Rosie Cornish (research fellow in Population Health Sciences at Bristol Medical School, University of Bristol). Among the criticisms, McConway points out that
the 15 cases were not a representative sample of people who have died after being vaccinated. This is due to the autopsies being carried out for specific reasons such as family preferences or the refusal to accept a decision from a previous pathologist or coroner.
So, what we have is that 14 out of 15 people, not typical of those who died after vaccination, had, in the opinion of one pathologist, signs that indicated that the vaccine may have had a role in their death, even though a previous pathologist or coroner did not agree with that conclusion,” he said.It’s also worth knowing that Bhakdi, the pathologist who found this alleged ‘smoking gun’, was pushing his auto-immune theory long before conducting this “study” (USA Today, Fact check: COVID-19 vaccines don’t cause death, won’t decimate world’s population – 30 April 2021), as well as promoting other pseudo-statistical anti-vaxx tropes (Teyit Turkiye: Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi’s multiple coronavirus allegations, 2 January 2021 – in Turkish), and opposing mask mandates (Correctiv Germany: Members of the “Pathology Conference” spread unsubstantiated claims about Covid-19 vaccinations and deaths, 25 September 2021 – in German).
So fifteen bodies were selected for histopathological examination by a maverick pathologist intent on finding evidence to support his idiosyncratic anti-vaccine theory, and yet he asserted his findings as “irrefutable evidence” for “an immediate stop of the use of gene-based COVID-19 vaccines”, because “myriad adverse events deriving from such auto-attack processes must be expected to very frequently occur in all individuals, particularly following booster injections”. I’m not sure what statistical method he’s using to generalise from his selective sample of 15 cases to the entire population of the world, but I’m pretty sure it won’t be found in any credible textbook of quantitative research methods.
I get the impression this is going to be another tail-chasing exercise.
“Maybe you could allow the possibility that they are entirely correct?”
What exactly is it they are entirely correct about? They are stating that blood borne anti-bodies induced by the vaccines will not affect the step where a virus that has evaded the secretory IgA anti-bodies in the musous enters a cell. So far as it goes that is correct. They affirm that as this is the case “Thus, the currently observed “breakthrough infections” among vaccinated individuals merely confirm the fundamental design flaws of the vaccines.” They then make the leap that because of this the vaccines are useless and because they may cause adverse reactions they ought to be prohibited.
There is no attempt to account for what happens after the cell has been infected, begins to replicate virus, and release new copies of the virus into the blood. At that point in the disease pathogenesis, blood-borne anti-bodies to a virus will bind to the virus, allowing other immune mechanisms to render that particular virus (as in that individual viral particle/entity) inactive and preventing it from infecting another cell in the body. Also, the original infected cell will also be subject to blood-borne anti-bodies marking it out for attention from immune mechanisms such as phagocytosis. Thus circulating anti-bodies can and do have an effect on the evolution of a viral disease and can modify the course/severity of the disease. As far as covid vaccines are concerned, that was what their proposed benefit is: to modify the course of the infection such that severe disease was reduced. They didn’t say initially that it prevented infection or transmission.
Let’s say that I have developed innate immunity from a flu virus like H5N1 from previous infection. In my immunological anti-body database will be how to make anti H5N1 anti-bodies which will be circulating in my blood in small numbers. Again, let’s say I inhale some H5N1 virus and a few get past the secretory IgA and latch onto and infect a few cells. My anti-bodies won’t have prevented that step but as soon as H5N1 copies of virus get released into my blood some of my previously learned anti H5N1 anti-bodies will bind with them and trigger a cascade mechanism which ramps up production of that anti H5N1 anti-body and modify the course of the disease such that I probably will never know I had it in the first place. If I hadn’t had that prior learned innate immunity, my immune system would have had to recognise that an infection was happening, learn how to manufacture anti H5N1 anti-bodies, make them and eliminate the infection. That would have taken time during which initially the virus would have had party time infecting numerous cells, replicating more virus and I’d probably have been symptomatic.
As I said in a previous post, as far as I am aware, secretory IgA is not strain-specific to viruses – though I admit I could be wrong about that and I’ll post a link to a paper below that seems to suggest “recent studies found it (secretory IgA) also played an important role in the specific immunity and immunoregulation.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6970489/
I am not aware that any vaccine yet purports to induce pathogen-specific sceretory IgA anti-bodies but there is definitely a lot of research in that area.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5719502/
In summary John, whilst they are technically correct to say that blood anti-bodies cannot prevent the initial step of an airborne virus attaching to and infecting a cell they don’t address how circulating blood anti-bodies can have an effect on the evolution of a disease thereafter. To me, that is arbitrarily limiting the discussion. I don’t think as yet anyone has produced to market a vaccine that induces pathogen-specific secretory IgA anti-bodies, so we are kind of stuck with the current technology we have available to us. Most vaccines are given via injection and most viral pathogens enter the body via mucous membranes, so the same could be said of most successful vaccines.
On a different note John, you said above:
“The CDC’s influenza data for the 2019-20 flu season in the US for the 50 – 64 cohort estimates 8,125,732 symptomatic cases, resulting in 5,727 deaths, which represents a mortality rate of 0.07%”
I cannot find the CDC page you got that information from, can you post a link? I am surprised that there are so few estimated deaths from flu with a population of 330 million.
Strictly speaking the Case Fatality Rate should include all diagnosed patients not just those symptomatic. However, the crude mortality rate from those figures is 0.0017%, 5727 divided by total population (330 million). The infection mortality rate you quote for under 70s is an estimate (deaths/cases) as we probably won’t ever get a true case number. You haven’t given the same estimate for flu in USA (ie.under 70s).
https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid discusses the different metrics used and their pros and cons.
It’s helpful to understand the position that Dr Sucharit Bhakdi was starting from, before evaluating the “findings” of his histopathological studies. Interestingly, he co-authored the 2020 book Coronavirus: False Alarm – Facts and Figures, which can be found online:
Coronavirus: False Alarm – Facts and Figures, by Dr Karina Reiss & Dr Sucharit Bhakdi (2020, Chelsea Green Publishing) – pdf at archive.org
A quick skim shows that it ticks the majority of Covid Denialist boxes: e.g. covid cases and deaths were vastly overcounted; the PCR test is unreliable; covid is no more dangerous than the flu; lockdowns are pointless; masks don’t offer protection; there’s no such thing as asymptomatic transmission; there was no “Covid wave” at all; the increased death rate was actually due to disrupted medical care (postponement of routine treatments, elective surgeries and check-ups), as well as domestic violence and suicides; the higher death rates in Italy and the UK were largely due to their inefficient health systems; artificial ventilation killed people … and so on, in a tiresome stream of dubious claims and debunked conclusions. The book could be used for a fun game of ‘Spot the Fallacy’.
Despite the subtitle “facts and figures”, the latter half of the book is a libertarian call for resistance against authoritarian governments and controlled organisations.
It was published well before Dr Bhakdi started pushing his idea that millions of people have been killed by the mRNA vaccines, and then finding what he claimed was “irrefutable evidence” (contradicted by the other pathologists) to support it. Politics -> conclusion -> evidence. The poor chap’s got his thinking the wrong way round.
Dawg, 14:46, #87349:
– “Can’t say I noticed any personally, nor did I hear of any amongst the blue-rinse brigade at the bingo in my local club”
One, in my case. Commenter Fred, whom I spent some time with in 2013, said that an elderly friend of his got blood clots in his brain after the AstraZeneca vaccine and never recovered – though that’s not an mRNA vaccine. Compared with two people I knew personally who died of covid, and around 27 known to people I know.
John, how many potentially vaccine-induced deaths have you personally encountered?
Clark : You fail to consider that Fred lies all the time. It is unwise to quote anecdotal evidence when it comes from a mischief-making known liar, who constantly posted in bad faith.
John : Far from just making ad hominems, posts directed your way have been very much on point. If you’re anything like the other Covid denialists, we’ll hear very little from you again, and nothing whatsoever about the rebuffs to the evidence you thought you had.
Which is a shame, because it would be nice to think that denialists, while wrong, were actually acting in good faith. When they just run off and/or ignore evidence they don’t like and cannot refute, it doesn’t speak highly of their honesty.
Bear in mind, there are ‘experts’ in any number of fields who can be wheeled in to supposedly discredit established scientific understanding.
There are ‘young earth’/creationists claiming to be creditable and supposedly showing how evolutionary biologists have got it all wrong, or they were fooled, or they ignore the ‘real’ evidence, or they refuse to accept Creation out of their own arrogance.
Then there are climate denialists, brought in to throw doubt around on the established fact of man-made climate change.
There were champions of the tobacco industry, who for years held up legislation while continually calling for “more research!” and claiming links between smoking and disease was yet to be established.
These biostitutes are paid very well. Monied interests love them, for quite understable reasons. Conspiracy minded people love them too, it’s just what they want to hear.
A Radio-4 podcast called “Death by conspiracy” recently was quite good.
So John – what is your motivation for bringing all this to our attention? I can guess at some, but would rather hear it from you. Thanks.
—–and yet the evidence of egregious harm caused by these experimental gene therapies is right out there in front us all in the VAERS system, and in Pfizer’s own 6 month trial data, which shows that their vaccine does more harm than good.
—–and yet the evidence of egregious harm caused by these experimental gene therapies is right out there in front us all in the VAERS system, and in Pfizer’s own 6 month trial data, which shows that their vaccine does more harm than good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_Adverse_Event_Reporting_System
As it is based on submissions by the public, VAERS is susceptible to unverified reports, misattribution, underreporting, and inconsistent data quality.[3] Raw, unverified data from VAERS has often been used by the anti-vaccine community to justify misinformation regarding the safety of vaccines; it is generally not possible to find out from VAERS data if a vaccine caused an adverse event, or how common the event might be.[4]
Also John,
If you think that most educated people are trying to kill you in some mass conspiracy (where only a tiny few speak out) – there’s not much I can say or do.
As far as I’m concerned the current vaccines aren’t perfect but they are much better than nothing. Meanwhile this virus is pretty good at staying one step ahead of us and Omicron variants may be especially immune evasive. You stick with your choice and I’ll stick with mine.
—not to mention the almost unthinkable manipulations and fraud that were involved in the approval of the Covid genic drugs, the ‘Ventavia’ scandal, the declarations by a Pfizer whistle-blower – and what is being discovered in the FDA documentation on the approval of the Pfizer vaccine, that Pfizer wanted to secret for 75 years, but is now being forced to reveal, albeit with crucial information deleted from public view
Sqonk,
Here is Class 1 scientific evidence that Pfizer’s 6 month trial results shows their experimental gene therapy does more harm than good.
As for VAERS, there is another viewpoint that it UNDERSTATES by between 40 and 100 times the harm done by these experimental therapies.
Just give up trying to convince me by posting nonsense. I know you don’t understand it is nonsense but that’s not my problem. But I admit that’s a glossy PDF you linked to and that will suck you in. How about this link?
As it says at your linked website:…
The information contained or presented on this website is presented solely for educational purposes only on matters of interest for the personal use of the reader, who accepts full responsibility for its use. The information is provided with the understanding that the authors and publishers are not herein engaged in rendering medical, pharmaceutical, nutritional, mental health, legal, or any other professional advice or services. As such, it should not be used as a substitute for consultation and advice from a licensed professional in the specific field of interest who will provide recommendations based on your particular situation and factual background.
Do not make any decisions based on the information contained or presented on this website without consulting an appropriate professional.
Nice to know you ignore the website’s advice and actually do base your decisions on it.
John:
– “Here is Class 1 scientific evidence that Pfizer’s 6 month trial results shows their experimental gene therapy does more harm than good.”
My problem with this is that I don’t see it in the hospitalisation and death from all causes numbers.
In fact, I see very much the opposite in those numbers. When covid arrived, before vaccination, hospitalisation and death from all causes shot up like a rocket. Not just in the UK but in country after country. After vaccination, when new variants arrived, those numbers increased, but a fraction as much as they did before. And there wasn’t any general increase which followed the number of people vaccinated.
So, John, I have another question for you. Which should I trust? The numbers, with which the vast majority of expert and medical opinion is clearly consistent? Or a handful of contrarian “experts” with some cherry-picked paragraphs, all rounded up and published together by partisan organisations?
Yes I know there’s massive corruption in the pharmaceutical industries; I’ve read an entire, extensively referenced 400 page book about precisely how they get away with it. But the numbers are what they are, and they’re consistent with my personal experience.
And:
– “As for VAERS, there is another viewpoint that it UNDERSTATES by between 40 and 100 times the harm done by…”
Actually, that claim far pre-dates the pandemic; general anti-vaxxers had been using it for many years, decades I think, before covid raised its ugly head.
“Viewpoints” – I’m sick to death of viewpoints; nature doesn’t care what anyone thinks. We’ve had over thirty years of inaction on global warming and fossil fuel depletion due to the promotion of “viewpoints”, as the polar ice melted away and reserve after reserve of fuel went into terminal decline. Now we’re seriously in the shit, our entire civilisation is likely to collapse causing unimaginable suffering, and all because of “viewpoints”.
How tiresomely predictable. Instead of taking on _any_ of the arguments about John’s own hand-picked points (his “smoking guns”), it’s down to some feeble, “Ah yes, but what about…”
Why bother with the “what about…?” if you don’t follow up on the answers to them, John?
Since you wouldn’t be drawn on your motivations for bringing all this junk science here, let me put forward a couple of my own speculations. You think you’re much more clever than the “sheeple” that meekly accept whatever they’re told. You think you’ve uncovered some almighty plot by “them”, but – gosh, darn it – “they” just couldn’t stop a few brave truth-tellers from blowing away the official story. And, ehem, yes – perhaps these “truth-tellers” do happen to be racists, lunatics, industry stooges and extreme right-wing operators, but hey, nobody’s perfect.
You possibly also want to justify your own recklessness in nearly killing your own wife – according to the testimony you’ve provided. But if you have other motivations, don’t be coy – let us know!
You’re in predictable company though, John. Every last one of you denialists (Covid, climate change, flat-Earthers etc.) has behaved in exactly the same way. Not a single one has ever stuck to a point of argument to its conclusion. None, ever, and nor will you.
John, June 22, 02:47, #87390:
– “…the ‘Ventavia’ scandal, the declarations by a Pfizer whistle-blower…”
If anyone is interested in this, an account, including the Ventavia (not Pfizer) whistle-blower’s testimony, can be found here:
https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635
It’s about Ventavia, a company contracted by Pfizer rather than Pfizer itself, and reveals poor practice rather than fraud, but it’s an important issue nonetheless. But at first glance it far from supports the claims that the Canadian Covid Care Alliance have made based upon it. Some commentary about its significance at the following link:
John, I’m still waiting to hear from you how allegedly incorrect attribution of cause of death can cause the death from all causes graph to leap off the scale. Unless you can answer this you have precisely zilch. It’s been six days now…
The following article has a graph you should look at. Now which curve does the death rate follow, eh? Vaccination? I think not…
