Quote from Fm1

None of this matters because we have hippa laws that prohibit anyone from asking you to reveal medical information.

I am sure that will not apply to vaccine passports, if they are implemented. There is no way the CDC rules for cruise ships and airplanes will be implemented if authorized employees cannot demand to see your vaccine passport.

HIPPA laws do not prevent officials, airline employees and others from seeing medical information now, today, on real passports. Passports have vaccine information in them. (Or they used to, anyway -- maybe it is separate document nowadays?) You could not travel to Japan or India without proof of various vaccinations. Airline employees would demand you show these documents before they let you on the plane. Customs officials would demand them when you got off.

Primary school officials demand proof that your child is vaccinated. They are authorized. HIPPA laws do not apply. So I am confident that university officials will also be authorized to demand proof.

Ah ha. Here is an article about the situation at Cornell. Quote:

"Schools and colleges have long required proof of vaccination for diseases such as measles and mumps. . . .

And, though the vaccine is new and, so far, has only emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration, Cornell has decided to mandate it for students. "We have consulted legally about this, and we feel it's defendable and appropriate," [an administrator] says.

Some other institutions are holding off on deciding whether to mandate the vaccine until the FDA grants full approval. . . .

https://www.npr.org/sections/h…-the-idea-is-here-to-stay

I don't recall that Cornell demanded vaccination proofs 1970s, but primary schools sure did, for things like smallpox.

What Cornell demanded was that you could swim 4 lengths of an olympic pool without stopping or touching the bottom. Naked. They still do. I guess it makes sense for a university high above Cayuga's waters, but I don't get why you can't wear a swimsuit. I recall stories of people who dropped out rather than learn to swim. (It was not onerous. I am a terrible swimmer, but I passed with no trouble.)

By the way, the Biden admin. has ruled out any federal role in vaccine passports. They are leaving it up to industry. Cruise ship companies, universities and others are working on various standards, but Uncle Sam will not participate or mandate anything.

https://thehill.com/homenews/a…ment-in-vaccine-passports

White House rules out involvement in 'vaccine passports'

White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Tuesday ruled out the Biden administration playing any role in a "vaccine passport" system as Republican governors in particular balk at the concept.

"The government is not now, nor will we be supporting a system that requires Americans to carry a credential. There will be no federal vaccinations database and no federal mandate requiring everyone to obtain a single vaccination credential," Psaki told reporters at a briefing.

The White House has been clear that it would defer to private companies if they wanted to implement some type of vaccine passport system in which individuals would have to provide proof that they received one of the coronavirus shots. . . .

Study Finds Kids Under 10 Unlikely to Spread Coronavirus at School

https://www.healthline.com/hea…ead-coronavirus-at-school

New research from Israel finds that children up to age 9 have little to do with the spread of the coronavirus.

Experts say this means reopening summer camps and in-person classroom instruction is a good idea, and the findings should reassure educators.

Experts are split on whether young children need to wear masks to stay safe.

Young children not only are at low risk for developing COVID-19 but also don’t play a significant role in the spread of SARS-CoV-2 while attending school, finds a study recently publishedTrusted Source in the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA). However, the same might not apply to teens and adolescents.

According to researchers in Israel, children 10–19 years old had a three-fold higher risk of acquiring the coronavirus after returning to school than when they still were at home.

“It appears that young children 0–9 have shown not only in this study but observationally over the last year of the pandemic that this group has little to do with spread of COVID,” Theodore Strange, MD, interim chair of medicine at Staten Island University Hospital in New York, told Healthline.

Quote from JedRothwell

Also, that would not cover rare but possible breakthrough cases where a vaccinated student is infected by a non-vaccinated one. I just do not see why a university would take any legal risk -- or any moral risk!

Jed just mandates that human rights are worthless. Only fully vaccinated students should be able to get education. So you need every half year a flu vaccine as the flu for students is 10..100x more dangerous that CoV-19. You also need a Hepatitis, Papiloma, AIDS vaccine.

Welcome in the fascists Eugenic world!

It look like such no brain people dominate now the agenda! A doctor can also do prophylaxis with ivermectin that gives you 100% security. May be not for somehow "mad old man" ...

Quote from Wyttenbach

Jed just mandates that human rights are worthless. Only fully vaccinated students should be able to get education. So you need every half year a flu vaccine as the flu for students is 10..100x more dangerous that CoV-19. You also need a Hepatitis, Papiloma, AIDS vaccine.

Welcome in the fascists Eugenic world!

It look like such no brain people dominate now the agenda! A doctor can also do prophylaxis with ivermectin that gives you 100% security. May be not for somehow "mad old man" ...

Ivemectin is a live saving treatment that can end the pandemic. Full stop.

Meta-review published: https://journals.lww.com/ameri…_Demonstrating_the.4.aspx

The anti-science death cult will chime in..in 3, 2, 1....

Quote from JedRothwell

What Cornell demanded was that you could swim 4 lengths of an olympic pool without stopping or touching the bottom. Naked. They still do. I guess it makes sense for a university high above Cayuga's waters, but I don't get why you can't wear a swimsuit. I recall stories of people who dropped out rather than learn to swim. (It was not onerous. I am a terrible swimmer, but I passed with no trouble.)

You went through the initiation and passed. That is some messed up stuff.

It's like exercising arbitrary control over others earns points on some dark side metric.

Speaking of control, Joe Rogan shared that he direct (private) messaged someone on Twitter a link to a video by Dr. Pierre Kory talking about ivermectin, in order to enquire about it. Twitter blocked it. First minute of video:

Just another example of the state - intelligence - media - technocracy complex working together to bring you a better world.

Coronavirus promotes the lowest caste to Brahmins..

Asked if he is Brahmin, Rai laughed and said, “Of course not, but in these times, we are all Brahmins.”

https://www.vice.com/en/articl…nter-of-indias-covid-hell

Although the drone videos of multiple cremations are dramatic. 4000 deaths per day is a small fraction of the usual 27,000 for India,.

India's neighbours are faring better.. in this order.. Bangladesh > Sri Lanka> Bangladesh..

definitley the Indian wave has peaked..in Bangladesh..

perhaps ivermectin is saving Bangladesh

like it is saving Zimbabwe..

Kory et al ivermectin analyisis has been just published ... yay..!

Bravo American Journal of Therapeutics..

Will there be just shunning by the WHO... FDA Merck etc or retaliation?

Quote from Shane D.

"Meta-analyses based on 18 randomized controlled treatment trials of ivermectin in COVID-19 have found large, statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance."

https://journals.lww.com/ameri…_Demonstrating_the.4.aspx

"

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https://wolterskluwer.altmetric.com/details/105004227

why the lab leak theory must be pursued

A brief, terrifying history of viruses escaping from labs: 70s Chinese pandemic was a lab mistake

The danger of a manmade pandemic sparked by a laboratory escape is not hypothetical

https://nationalpost.com/news/…andemic-was-a-lab-mistake

The public health danger posed by potentially pandemic-causing viruses escaping from laboratories has become the subject of considerable discussion, spurred by “gain of function” experiments. The ostensible goal of these experiments—in which researchers manipulate already-dangerous pathogens to create or increase communicability among humans—is to develop tools to monitor the natural emergence of pandemic strains. Opponents, however, warn in a variety of recentresearchpapersthat the risk of laboratory escape of these high-consequence pathogens far outweighs any potential advance.

The danger of a manmade pandemic sparked by a laboratory escape is not hypothetical: One occurred in 1977, and it occurred because of concern that a natural pandemic was imminent. Many other laboratory escapes of high-consequence pathogens have occurred, resulting in transmission beyond laboratory personnel. Ironically, these laboratories were working with pathogens to prevent the very outbreaks they ultimately caused. For that reason, the tragic consequences have been called “self-fulfilling prophecies.”

Modern genetic analysis allows pathogens to be precisely identified, and because all circulating pathogens show genetic changes over time, the year that a particular example of a pathogen emerged can generally be determined, given a sufficient database of samples. If a pathogen appears in nature after not circulating for years or decades, it may be assumed to have escaped from a laboratory where it had been stored inert for many years, accumulating no genetic changes—that is, its natural evolution had been frozen.

The swine flu scare of 1976 and the H1N1 human influenza pandemic of 1977. Human H1N1 influenza virus appeared with the 1918 global pandemic and persisted, slowly accumulating small genetic changes, until 1957, when it appeared to go extinct after the H2N2 pandemic virus appeared. In 1976, H1N1 swine influenza virus struck Fort Dix, N.J., causing 13 hospitalizations and one death. The specter of a reprise of the deadly 1918 pandemic triggered an unprecedented effort to immunize all Americans. No swine H1N1 pandemic materialized, however, and complications of immunization truncated the program after 48 million immunizations, which eventually caused 25 deaths.

Human H1N1 virus reappeared in 1977, in the Soviet Union and China. Virologists, using serologic and early genetic tests, soon began to suggest the cause of the reappearance was a laboratory escape of a 1949-50 virus, and as genomic techniques advanced, it became clear that this was true. By 2010, researchers published it as fact: “The most famous case of a released laboratory strain is the re-emergent H1N1 influenza-A virus which was first observed in China in May of 1977 and in Russia shortly thereafter.” The virus may have escaped from a lab attempting to prepare an attenuated H1N1 vaccine in response to the U.S. swine flu pandemic alert.

The 1977 pandemic spread rapidly worldwide but was limited to those under 20 years of age: Older persons were immune from exposures before 1957. Its attack rate was high (20 to 70 percent) in schools and military camps, but mercifully it caused mild disease, and fatalities were few. It continued to circulate until 2009, when the pH1N1 virus replaced it. There has been virtually no public awareness of the 1977 H1N1 pandemic and its laboratory origins, despite the clear analogy to current concern about a potential H5N1 or H7N9 avian influenza pandemic and “gain of function” experiments. The consequences of escape of a highly lethal avian virus with enhanced transmissibility would almost certainly be much graver than the 1977 escape of a “seasonal,” possibly attenuated strain to a population with substantial existing immunity.

Smallpox releases in Great Britain. Eradication of natural smallpox transmission made the prospect of reintroduction of the virus intolerable. This risk was clearly demonstrated in the United Kingdom. From 1963-78 the U.K. saw only four cases of smallpox (with no deaths) occurred that were imported by travelers from areas where smallpox was endemic. During this same period at least 80 cases and three deaths resulted from three separate escapes from two different accredited smallpox laboratories.

The first recognized laboratory escape, in March 1972, occurred with the infection of a laboratory assistant at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She had observed the harvesting of live smallpox virus from eggs used as a growing medium; the process was performed on an uncontained lab table, as was then routine. She was hospitalized, but before she was placed in isolation, she infected two visitors to a patient in an adjacent bed, both of whom died. They in turn infected a nurse, who survived, as did the laboratory assistant.

In August of 1978, a medical photographer at Birmingham Medical School developed smallpox and died. She infected her mother, who survived. Her workplace was immediately above the smallpox laboratory at Birmingham Medical School. Faulty ventilation and shortcomings in technique were ultimately implicated.

Investigators then re-examined a 1966 smallpox outbreak, which was strikingly similar. The initial 1966 infection was also a medical photographer who worked at the same Birmingham Medical School facility. The earlier outbreak was caused by a low-virulence strain of smallpox (variola minor), and it caused at least 72 subsequent cases. There were no deaths. Laboratory logs revealed variola minor had been manipulated in the smallpox laboratory at a time appropriate to cause the infection in the photographer working a floor above.

Venezuelan equine encephalitis in 1995. Venezuelan equine encephalitis is a viral disease transmitted by mosquitoes. It intermittently erupts in regional or continental-scale outbreaks that involve equines (horses, donkeys, and mules) in the Western Hemisphere. There are often concurrent zoonotic epidemics among humans. VEE in humans causes a severe febrile illness; it can occasionally be fatal or may leave permanent neurological disability (epilepsy, paralysis, or mental retardation) in 4 to 14 percent of clinical cases, particularly those involving children.

There were significant outbreaks of VEE every few years from the 1930s to the 1970s. Modern analysis revealed most outbreaks were genetic matches to the original 1938 VEE isolation used in inactivated veterinary vaccines. It was clear that many batches of the veterinary VEE vaccines had not been completely inactivated, so residual infective virus remained.

From 1938 to 1972, the VEE vaccine caused most of the very outbreaks that it was called upon to prevent, a clear self-fulfilling prophecy.

In 1995 a major VEE animal and human outbreak struck Venezuela and Colombia. There were at least 10,000 human VEE cases with 11 deaths in Venezuela and an estimated 75,000 human cases in Colombia, with 3,000 neurological complications and 300 deaths. VEE virus was isolated from 10 stillborn or miscarried human fetuses.

Genomic analysis identified the 1995 virus as identical to a 1963 isolate, with no indication it had been circulating for 28 years. It was another case of frozen evolution, but unlike the vaccine-related VEE outbreaks, the 1963 virus had never been used in a vaccine. Suspicion fell on an inadvertent release from a virology lab, either by an unrecognized infection of a lab worker or visitor, or escape of an infected laboratory animal or mosquito. The major scientific group working on VEE published a paper in 2001 stating the 1995 outbreak most likely was a laboratory escape, with considerable circumstantial evidence: The outbreak strain was isolated from an incompletely inactivated antigen preparation used on the open bench in the VEE laboratory located at the outbreak epicenter. But clear proof was lacking, and the group subsequently said it was reconsidering this conclusion.

SARS outbreaks after the epidemic. The 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome outbreak spread to 29 countries, causing more than 8,000 infections and at least 774 deaths. Because 21 percent of cases involved hospital workers, it had the potential to shut down health care services wherever it struck. It is particularly dangerous to handle in the laboratory because there is no vaccine, and it can be transmitted via aerosols.

Moreover, about 5 percent of SARS patients are “super-spreaders” who infect eight or more secondary cases. For instance, one patient spread SARS directly to 33 others (reflecting an infection rate of 45 percent) during a hospitalization, ultimately leading to the infection of 77 people, including three secondary super-spreaders. A super-spreader could turn even a single laboratory infection into a potential pandemic.

SARS has not re-emerged naturally, but there have been six escapes from virology labs: one each in Singapore and Taiwan, and four separate escapes at the same laboratory in Beijing.

The first was in Singapore in August 2003, in a virology graduate student at the National University of Singapore. He had not worked directly with SARS, but it was present in the laboratory where he worked. He recovered and produced no secondary cases. The World Health Organization formed an expert committee to revise SARS biosafety guidelines.

The second escape was in Taiwan in December 2003, when a SARS research scientist fell ill on a return flight after attending a medical meeting in Singapore. His 74 contacts in Singapore were quarantined, but again, fortunately, none developed SARS. Investigation revealed the scientist had handled leaking biohazard waste without gloves, a mask, or a gown. Ironically, the WHO expert committee called for augmented biosafety in SARS laboratories the day after this case was reported.

In April 2004, China reported a case of SARS in a nurse who had cared for a researcher at the Chinese National Institute of Virology. While ill, the researcher had traveled twice by train from Beijing to Anhui province, where she was nursed by her mother, a physician, who fell ill and died. The nurse in turn infected five third-generation cases, causing no deaths.

Subsequent investigation uncovered three unrelated laboratory infections in different researchers at the NIV. At least of two primary patients had never worked with live SARS virus. Many shortcomings in biosecurity were found at the NIV, and the specific cause of the outbreak was traced to an inadequately inactivated preparation of SARS virus that was used in general (that is, not biosecure) laboratory areas, including one where the primary cases worked. It had not been tested to confirm its safety after inactivation, as it should have been.

Foot-and-mouth disease in the U.K. in 2007. Foot-and-mouth disease infects cloven-hoofed animals such as pigs, sheep, and cattle. It has been eradicated in North America and most of Europe. It is highly transmissible, capable of spreading through direct contact on the boots of farm workers and by natural aerosol that can spread up to 250 kilometers. Outbreaks in FMD-free areas cause economic disaster because meat exports cease and animals are massively culled. A 2001 U.K. outbreak resulted in 10 million animals killed and $16 billion in economic losses.

In 2007, FMD appeared again in Britain, 4 kilometers from a biosafety level 4 laboratory—a designation indicating the highest level of lab security—located at Pirbright. The strain had caused a 1967 outbreak in the United Kingdom but was not then circulating in animals anywhere. It was, however, used in vaccine manufacture at the Pirbright facility. Investigations concluded that construction vehicles had carriedmud contaminated with FMD from a defective wastewater line at Pirbright to the first farm. That outbreak identified 278 infected animals and required 1,578 animals to be culled. It disrupted U.K. agricultural production and exports and cost an estimated 200 million pounds.

Federal law bans FMD virus from the continental United States, and it is held only at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Plum Island facility off Long Island, N.Y. Currently, however, its replacement, the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility, is under construction in Manhattan, Kan., under the aegis of the Department of Homeland Security. Moving FMD research to the agricultural heartland of the United States was opposed by many groups, including the Government Accountability Office, but Homeland Security decided on the Kansas location. In upgrading facilities to counter the threat of agro-bioterrorism, the department is increasing the risk to U.S. agriculture of unintentional release.

Utah Man Told COVID-19 Led To Diabetes Diagnosis

https://ksltv.com/461130/utah-…o-diabetes-diagnosis/amp/

the metabolic disease.

Fair became sick with the virus in January. Two weeks later, he was hospitalized and told he had almost slipped into a diabetic coma.

“I had to go to the hospital,” he said. “I barely got myself down the stairs to call the ambulance.”

He was told there were medical studies happening to figure out why the virus triggered diabetes in some people, but his doctor explained it “like a door was open.”

“I may have had the condition, but it may have been dormant,” said Fair.

The scientific journal showed a global registry had been created to see if COVID-19 causes diabetes.

It was created by Kings College London and Monash University in Australia.

“It’s rare, but it can happen,” said Fair. “There are quite a few studies done online about it.”

Fair hoped to spread awareness by sharing his story.

“I am quite literally a living example of what COVID can do,” he said.

KSL-TV reached out to doctors studying this latest development of the impact of COVID-19 and have not yet heard back.

There Are New Safety Concerns About Russia's COVID Vaccine, Which Is Already Being Distributed Worldwide

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/a…id-vaccine-safety-worries

The global drive to speed COVID-19 vaccination has taken a serious blow since Brazilian health officials on Monday recommended against importing Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine to curb a severe coronavirus epidemic. In an extraordinary dispute that blew up on Thursday, the vaccine’s Russian backers threatened legal action for defamation and the Brazilian officials released recordings and documents supporting their position.

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to rage across the world, the angry exchanges have raised questions about the safety of the shots and doubts about its maker’s willingness to answer them. That poses a big headache for dozens of countries that have already accepted donations of the vaccine from Russia in hopes of accelerating their vaccination programs.

Officials with Anvisa, Brazil’s health regulatory agency, said Monday that documentation provided by the Gamaleya Research Institute in Moscow didn’t provide enough information about the safety and efficacy of the Sputnik V vaccine — including information on any serious side effects. The documents also indicated that the inactivated cold viruses the vaccine relies on to deliver an immune response against the coronavirus, which are supposed to be unable to reproduce, were in fact able to do so.

This finding shocked vaccine experts. If confirmed, it suggests manufacturing was botched and that the Sputnik V vaccine is unlikely to win approval from other leading regulators around the world.

“If this is true, Sputnik is nixed,” John Moore, a virologist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, told BuzzFeed News.

Russian authorities reacted angrily to Anvisa’s ruling. “The decision by Brazil’s National Health Surveillance Agency (Anvisa) to delay the approval of Sputnik V is, unfortunately, of a political nature and has nothing to do with the regulator’s access to information or science,” said a statement posted on the website set up to promote the vaccine.

By Thursday, things had escalated into a bitter public dispute. To counter Russian claims that it was spreading “fake news” about Sputnik V, Anvisa took the highly unusual step of releasing a recording of parts of a teleconference with Gamaleya officials. The vaccine’s official Twitter account had previously gone on the offensive, controversially claiming other vaccines have a poorer safety record, sparring with a leading virologist who commented on Anvisa’s concerns, and stating that the vaccine’s makers would launch a defamation action against the Brazilian agency for “knowingly spreading false and inaccurate information.”

In a presentation posted on the Brazilian government’s YouTube channel on Thursday, Anvisa officials showed portions of the Russian documents they reviewed that mentioned the presence of viruses that were able to reproduce. The video also showed part of a three-hour April 23 teleconference in which Anvisa officials said they asked for more information but did not receive satisfactory answers.

For the process of vaccine approval to degenerate into a public spat with threats of legal action is highly unusual. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this,” Monica de Bolle, an economist from Brazil working at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC, told BuzzFeed News.

“If they want to sue us, then sue us,” Antonio Barra Torres, head of Anvisa, told reporters on Thursday. “We’ll answer through the correct channels.”

Sputnik V has been controversial from the start. It was approved for use in Russia last August before clinical trials were completed. That gamble seemed to have paid off in February, however, when a paper published in the Lancet, a medical journal, indicated the vaccine was 91.6% effective in preventing people from getting sick with COVID-19.

The Sputnik V vaccine consists of two doses of common cold viruses called adenoviruses; the first dose is a virus called Ad26 and the second Ad5. In the vaccine, they are modified so they make the “spike” protein from the coronavirus, priming the immune system to attack it. The vaccine’s adenoviruses are also supposed to lack two key genes that they need to reproduce.

This is the same basic technology behind the vaccines made by Johnson & Johnson, which uses a single dose of a modified Ad26 virus, and AstraZeneca, which uses two doses of a different adenovirus that normally infects chimpanzees.

Buoyed by the results of the clinical trial, the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), set up by the Kremlin to invest in homegrown companies, has offered the vaccine to dozens of countries across the world in a major diplomatic push, especially in the developing world. The Sputnik V Twitter account boasts that the vaccine has been authorized in more than 60 countries.

But many of those countries lack strong expertise for judging the safety and efficacy of new drugs and vaccines, and they tend to follow the leads of the World Health Organization, the FDA, or the European Medicines Agency. None of these organizations have yet given a green light to use Sputnik V.

The EMA announced a “rolling review” of Sputnik V on April 3. But on Monday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that insufficient information had yet been provided for the European Union to authorize the vaccine. Nevertheless, two EU members, Hungary and Slovakia, have started using Sputnik V. But Slovakia rejected a batch of the vaccine earlier this month after its “characteristics and properties” were found to be different from the shots described in the Lancet paper.

No date has been set yet for the WHO’s review of the vaccine. “On Sputnik, we are still waiting, we are still in the back-and-forth stage,” WHO spokesperson Margaret Harris told a briefing in Geneva on Tuesday, Reuters reported.

So the review by Anvisa was Sputnik V’s first big regulatory test. In Thursday’s YouTube video, Gustavo Mendes, Anvisa’s general manager for medicines and biological products, showed documents supplied by the Gamaleya Research Institute. These noted that the vaccine could contain up to 1,000 viruses able to reproduce per dose and that tested samples contained fewer than 100. “Those numbers should be zero,” he says.

Even before this week’s dispute, Russia’s donations of the vaccine to developing nations before the world's leading regulatory authorities approved it had alarmed some experts. One concern is that many of these countries lack good systems to look for adverse events such as the rare but very serious blood clots triggered by the similar vaccines made by AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson.

“This creates a lot of concern for us in the global vaccine community,” Peter Hotez of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, who has been heavily involved in developing vaccines for countries without strong healthcare infrastructure, told BuzzFeed News.

Even if the cold viruses used in the Sputnik V vaccine are able to reproduce, it is unlikely to cause serious illness unless the recipients are badly immunocompromised, like some patients with HIV or organ transplants. But failure to completely inactivate the viruses would be a red flag against the manufacturing of the Sputnik V vaccine.

“It’s a big nyet-nyet,” Moore said.

Despite the pushback from Russia, Anvisa’s experts are respected internationally for being thorough. And for Brazil’s regulator to raise concerns as the nation wrestles with a COVID-19 outbreak that is currently killing around 2,500 Brazilians a day, driven by a highly contagious coronavirus variant, is significant. The official death toll in Brazil passed 400,000 this week.

“There is not, in this institution, any person that has any interest or joy in denying the import of any vaccine,” Torres says in the YouTube video.

Possible viral replication isn’t the only concern about Sputnik V. In October, four senior AIDS researchers noted in a letter to the Lancet that a decade ago they had abandoned a clinical trial of an HIV vaccine using an inactivated Ad5 virus for safety reasons: In men who had previously been infected with Ad5, the vaccine actually increased susceptibility to infection with HIV.

“On the basis of these findings, we are concerned that use of an Ad5 vector for immunisation against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) could similarly increase the risk of HIV-1 acquisition among men who receive the vaccine,” the scientists wrote.

One of those researchers, Carl Dieffenbach, director of the division of AIDS at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, told BuzzFeed News that he would avoid using an Ad5-based vaccine in countries like those in Africa and Latin America where HIV infection is a serious concern.

“I think it’s unnecessary,” Dieffenbach said. “Ad26 is a perfectly fine vector in itself. It doesn’t do this.”

In addition to Sputnik V, Ad5 is used as the vector for a COVID vaccine made by the Chinese company CanSino, which has been authorized for use in countries including Pakistan, Mexico, and Chile.

Despite the emerging concerns about the safety of Sputnik V, the vaccine is still in demand in many countries battling COVID-19. The RDIF announced that it will start shipping the vaccine to India, which is now in the grip of a devastating coronavirus outbreak, on May 1. Turkey announced on Friday that it had authorized the vaccine for emergency use.

The RDIF did not immediately respond to requests for further comment on the safety concerns or the threats of legal action against Anvisa.

“I think we’ve expressed our position in tweets and other statements,” Gleb Bryanski, the RDIF’s director for special projects, told BuzzFeed News

Covid vs cancer, who wins? The patient!!!

Complete remission of follicular lymphoma after SARS-CoV-2 infection: from the “flare phenomenon” to the “abscopal effect”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7913037/

In a 61-year-old patient affected from follicular lymphoma, end-of-treatment [18F]FDG-PET/CT (panel B) revealed bilateral pneumonia suggestive for COVID-19, subsequently confirmed by a nasal swab. Simultaneously, images showed the shrinkage of a para-aortic lymph nodal lesion compared to baseline (arrows), consistent with a partial response to R-bendamustine (panels B–F vs A–E). Re-staging [18F]FDG-PET/CT, obtained after SARS-CoV-2 recovery, showed an increase in size and in [18F]FDG avidity of the para-aortic lesion, suggestive for progressive disease (panels C-G-I). During COVID-19 infection and after, he did not experience any symptoms [1]. Surprisingly, malignancy was excluded by CT-guided biopsy performed twice, and this finding was confirmed by a second follow-up scan showing a complete metabolic response (panels D–H).

Complete remission after a concurrent infection has been reported in diffuse large B-cell lymphoma [2] and Hodgkin lymphoma [3].

The SARS-CoV-2 infection has proved to trigger an immune response. In this patient, the virus may have firstly induced a local “flare phenomenon” (panels C-G-I)—as typically observed in patients receiving immunotherapy—finally resulting in an “abscopal effect” (panels D–H). This report suggests a close interplay among COVID-19 infection, inflammation, and tumour biology.

Quote from Mark U

You went through the initiation and passed. That is some messed up stuff.

It's like exercising arbitrary control over others earns points on some dark side metric.

[Initiation meaning swim test.]

It does not seem any different from any other physical education requirement. You also have to participate in sports or at least running. It seems to me that any able-bodied, well rounded college grad should have some phys. ed. They also make you take some courses in English and two semesters of science (physics, chemistry, biology at various levels: easy, middle and difficult). Would that be "messed up"? Making 18-year-olds do things they may not be good at, out of their comfort zone?

If you do not want a phys. ed. requirement, go to some other university. Cornell is rigorous. Hard to get into, and even harder to get out of.

It makes sense for Cornell to have a swim test because it is next to one of the biggest lakes in North America. A person can drown even in shallow water, as my father used to say. He was in the merchant marine in the 1930s, when many sailors could not swim. There are other lakes and ponds on in that area, including Beebe lake where a rhinoceros drowned in 1925. Sort of.

The swim test started in 1905. See: https://pe.cornell.edu/require…history-cornell-swim-test

Interesting and good do know. FYI it's not the swim part that I thought was messed up. It was the swimming naked part. Reminded me of hazing, frankly.

Quote from Fm1

Covid vs cancer, who wins? The patient!!!

This reminds me of the casual observation that people who get measles and chickenpox in childhood are conferred a greater amount of protection later in life against certain cancers. This little cancer treatment experiment took that basic idea to another level :

https://www.mayoclinic.org/dis…ncer-fighter/vid-20097437

Quote from Mark U

Interesting and good do know. FYI it's not the swim part that I thought was messed up. It was the swimming naked part. Reminded me of hazing, frankly.

Ha! That's funny. It never occured to me it was hazing. Ten minutes during a 4-year stay? 3 laps in a pool?

I think it would be childish to complain about the naked part. That sort of thing was common in high school and college the 1970s. I am not a nudist but I spent my formative years in Japan when they still had public baths, so it didn't bother me.

I don't know if they still insist on no bathing suit at Cornell. People nowadays are such snowflakes, there would probably be a fuss.

Yeah, in public and high school we had common showers, where we all stood naked around a central column with multiple shower heads. Nakedness with peers in a common shower room was expedient and practical, although at the cost of modesty. But having to swim naked to be evaluated by a superior is without rational basis. What, do they think the swimmers would have floatation devices hidden in their swimming trunks? What dark mind thinks up that shite? Arbitrary control by authorities over relatively small things reeks of psychological control and conditioning in the worst way, because it is a harbinger of more egregious violations over personal sovereignty and dignity to come. People's fear of Covid is giving people tolerance of these violations, just as your (possible) fear of not being admitted to Cornell had you tolerating and downplaying someone's sick idea of control.

You don't know what kids watch/share on their mobiles in the school yard...