#Katherine J. Wu
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Last week, in his State of the Union address, President Joe Biden told the American public that “we have broken COVID’s grip on us.” Highlighting the declines in the rates of COVID deaths, the millions of lives saved, and the importance of remembering the more than 1 million lost, Biden reminded the nation of what was to come: “Soon we’ll end the public-health emergency.”
When the U.S.’s state of emergency was declared nearly three years ago, as hospitals were overrun and morgues overflowed, the focus was on severe, short-term disease. Perhaps in that sense, the emergency is close to being over, Deeks told me. But long COVID, though slower to command attention, has since become its own emergency, never formally declared; for the millions of Americans who have been affected by the condition, their relationship with the virus does not yet seem to be in a better place.
Even with many more health-care providers clued into long COVID’s ills, the waiting lists for rehabilitation and treatment remain untenable, Hannah Davis told me. “I consider myself someone who gets exceptional care compared to other people,” she said. “And still, I hear from my doctor every nine or 10 months.” Calling a wrap on COVID’s “emergency” phase could worsen that already skewed supply-demand ratio. Changes to the nation’s funding tactics could strip resources—among them, access to telehealth; Medicaid coverage; and affordable antivirals, tests, and vaccines—from vulnerable populations, including people of color, that aren’t getting their needs met even as things stand, McCorkell told me. And as clinicians internalize the message that the coronavirus has largely been addressed, attention to its chronic impacts may dwindle. At least one of the country's long-COVID clinics has, in recent months, announced plans to close, and Davis worries that more could follow soon.
Scientists researching long COVID are also expecting new challenges. Reduced access to testing will complicate efforts to figure out how many people are developing the condition, and who’s most at risk. Should researchers turn their scientific focus away from studying causes and cures for long COVID when the emergency declaration lifts, Davids and others worry that there will be ripple effects on the scientific community’s interest in other, neglected chronic illnesses, such as ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome), a diagnosis that many long-haulers have also received.
The end of the U.S.’s official crisis mode on COVID could stymie research in other ways as well. At Johns Hopkins University, the infectious-disease epidemiologists Priya Duggal, Shruti Mehta, and Bryan Lau have been running a large study to better understand the conditions and circumstances that lead to long COVID, and how symptoms evolve over time. In the past two years, they have gathered online survey data from thousands of people who both have and haven’t been infected, and who have and haven’t seen their symptoms rapidly resolve. But as of late, they’ve been struggling to recruit enough people who caught the virus and didn’t feel their symptoms linger. “I think that the people who are suffering from long COVID will always do their best to participate,” Duggal told me. That may not be the case for individuals whose experiences with the virus were brief. A lot of them “are completely over it,” Duggal said. “Their life has moved on.”
Kate Porter, a Massachusetts-based marketing director, told me that she worries about her family’s future, should long COVID fade from the national discourse. She and her teenage daughter both caught the virus in the spring of 2020, and went on to develop chronic symptoms; their experience with the disease isn’t yet over. “Just because the emergency declaration is expiring, that doesn’t mean that suddenly people are magically going to get better and this issue is going to go away,” Porter told me. After months of relative improvement, her daughter is now fighting prolonged bouts of fatigue that are affecting her school life—and Porter isn’t sure how receptive people will be to her explanations, should their illnesses persist for years to come. “Two years from now, how am I going to explain, ‘Well, this is from COVID, five years ago’?” she said.
A condition that was once mired in skepticism, scorn, and gaslighting, long COVID now has recognition—but empathy for long-haulers could yet experience a backslide. Nisreen Alwan, a public-health researcher at the University of Southampton, in the U.K., and her colleagues have found that many long-haulers still worry about disclosing their condition, fearing that it could jeopardize their employment, social interactions, and more. Long COVID could soon be slated to become just one of many neglected chronic diseases, poorly understood and rarely discussed.
— Long COVID is the emergency that won’t end
#katherine j. wu#long covid is the emergency that won't end#current events#science#medicine#biology#human biology#disability#chronic illness#ableism#covid 19#pandemic#long covid
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Ship Noises Mute the Songs of Humpback Whales
Drowned out by the din of passing ships, humpback whales attempting to breed off the coast of Japan are cutting their conversations short.
— By Katherine J. Wu
A Humpback Whale breaching near Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary in Massachusetts Bay. These whales may be imperiled by the sounds of passing ships, which silence their songs during mating season. Photo Credit: Whit Welles, Wikimedia Commons
With Its Enigmatic Chorus of Clicks, Groans, and Whistles, the haunting opus of the humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) is one of the ocean’s most striking sounds. Every winter, humpbacks may swim thousands of miles to their seasonal breeding grounds, where males competing for mates fill the waters with soft serenades. But off the coasts of Japan, these seas are falling silent—and it seems humans are to blame.
Today, in the journal PLOS ONE, researchers report that the noises emanating from human-operated cargo ships disrupt the mating songs of humpback whales. Drowned out by the underwater din, some whales are even going completely mum in the vicinity of these vessels—which could have serious consequences for their reproductive success.
Beneath the surface of the sea, light falters fast. But because sound travels faster in water than air, keen audiophiles like the humpback whale use sound to navigate the dimly lit underwater world. These gentle giants engage in casual chatter year-round, but breeding season tends to feature prominent displays of song from males. Whale compositions are exquisitely complex, with at least 34 distinct sound types in the repertoire. Males will carefully remix their melodies as the years go by, and even pass tunes from population to population like vocal culture.
Despite all this, scientists still aren’t entirely sure why male humpbacks sing. Though musicality surges during periods of mating, song could serve a multitude of purposes, from gruff territorial warnings to come-hither calls. Whatever the whales’ rationale, it’s clear that song is crucial: Once they’ve warmed up, humpbacks can sing for hours on end, their ghostly echoes reverberating up to 100 miles through the surrounding sea.
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But when humans enter the mix, being pitch perfect can be a double-edged sword. Unnatural noises from technological advancements like seismic airguns and military sonar have permanently disabled—and even killed—whales and their seafaring relatives.
Even the low-frequency hum of ships appears to perturb whales in conversation. The drones emitted by these ships can actually overlap with the frequencies of whale song, making it more difficult for humpbacks to pick out important bits of intel from the surrounding cacophony—the underwater equivalent of struggling to hear a friend in a busy restaurant.
Several researchers have observed whales changing their behavior in the presence of ships. However, compared to unmistakable consequences from airguns and sonar, it’s been challenging to reach a consensus on the extent of the effects of these more muted sources of noise, explains study author Tomonari Akamatsu, a biologist at the Japan Fisheries Research and Education Agency. In shipping hubs that see a lot of traffic, for instance, it’s difficult to disentangle which among the many possible disturbances are most problematic.
But the small outpost of Chichijima in Japan’s Ogasawara Islands presented a rare opportunity for Akamatsu and his colleagues. Separated from the southeastern coast of Japan by over 600 miles, the 2,000 or so residents of Chichijima receive just one daily ship: the Hahajima Maru, a small passenger-cargo vessel that ferries in a regular supply of goods and people from afar.
For the most part, the waters in this remote part of the world are quiet. But each winter, the seas swell with the symphony of hundreds of humpback whales eager to mingle with their mates—giving the researchers the chance to observe the effects of a single ship on the behavior of a wild population. The pristine nature of this locale stripped away other variables that could muddy the waters—other vessels, for instance, or inconsistent traffic.
“This study presents a really special and unique situation,” says Rosalind Rolland, a whale expert and veterinarian at the Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life at the New England Aquarium who did not participate in the research. “It’s very difficult to find anywhere in the ocean where there is just a single source of ocean noise. Most times there is noise from all directions.”
By placing two recorders in the waters near Chichijima, the researchers captured a series of whale vocalizations between the months of February and May 2017. Each day, they recorded one or two male humpbacks, amassing tracks of 53 soloists in total—half in the presence of the ship, and half without. The team also used the recordings to pinpoint the whales’ positions relative to the machinery as they sang, tracking their movements through time.
When the team mapped out the whales’ responses, the results were sobering. If the vessel was present, it produced, at its loudest, about 150 decibels of noise, comparable to the volume of a shotgun—and humpbacks seemed to shirk from its path, vacating the areas closest to the shipping lane. The whales that remained within 1200 meters of the ship produced fewer sounds overall. Some even cut their serenades off entirely—and most who did still hadn’t resumed their songs half an hour after the ship had passed through.
Humpback Whales rely on sound to communicate in the dark ocean waters. During their winter breeding season, males will sing for hours on end—but their serenades may be stifled by the sounds of passing ships. Photo Credit: Christopher Michel, Flickr
Akamatsu had initially assumed that in the presence of the ship, the humpbacks would raise their voices or change the frequency at which they sang—both strategies that might enable whales to discern calls above the clang and clamor. But, he says, perhaps this reticent response is an adaptive, energy-saving strategy.
“It’s actually very clever,” Akamatsu explains. “They know it’s temporary, so they just wait for it to pass.”
Vocal adjustments, after all, are exhausting. Even 500 to 1200 meters away from the ship, the whales were still contending with a noise level of about 100 decibels—roughly equivalent to a motorcycle or a raucous rock band. Perhaps, instead of attempting to outperform the uproar, humpbacks were simply waiting out the storm.
Every whale who stopped his song did eventually rebound from the chorus interruptus—and such resilience may spell tentatively good news for the residents of Chichijima, who remain tied to the Hahajima Maru’s regular visits. “This ship is a lifeline for an isolated island,” Akamatsu explains. “Humans need that ship to survive.”
But Michelle Fournet, a wildlife scientist in the Bioacoustics Research Program at Cornell University, points out that it’s also possible the humpbacks’ silence may not be indicative of flexibility at all. Muted by the regularity of passing ships, whales may be running out of sustainable strategies to cope, and instead accepting defeat. While bellowing above the fray may be exhausting, it at least offers whales a fighting chance of still being heard. Complete silence, on the other hand, brings the probability of communication down to zero. If humpbacks want any shot at coupling up, they can only wait so long for ambient noise to die down.
“Humpbacks have to contend with a lot of variability,” says Fournet, who was not involved in the research. “And they’re capable of adapting to natural sounds. But they may not always be able to apply those same strategies to [human-made] noise.”
While no long-term repercussions have yet been found, it will be imperative to measure the ship’s effects on humpback reproduction, Fournet adds. Even though most populations of humpbacks are no longer considered endangered, pods around the world remain vulnerable to human interference. And despite decades of study, researchers are still puzzling through the intricacies of whale song. It’s unclear how disastrous even the tiniest tweaks to a tune could be for humpbacks trying to find each other in the dark.
And, of course, the calm of Chichijima is the exception, not the rule: Most ships don’t sail solo. Acoustic pollution from human-made vessels will likely be on the upswing for years to come, warns Paul Wensveen, a biologist who studies marine acoustics at the University of Iceland. Even technological Band-Aids like insulators, which muffle the sound from ships’ propellers, are quickly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of noise radiating from the world’s busiest ports.
If humankind’s presence in the ocean continues to grow, there may soon be little stopping the whales’ brief intermission in song from turning into an irreversible coda.
“Some of the whales’ strategies have been successful so far,” says Fournet. “But as the ocean gets louder, and more vessels come in, we can only expect to see more changes.”
#Youtube#Nature#NOVA#Humpback 🐋 Whales 🐳#Katherine J. Wu#Stellwagen Bank | National Marine Sanctuary | Massachusetts Bay
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During pregnancy, fetal cells migrate out of the womb and into a mother’s heart, liver, lung, kidney, brain, and more. They could shape moms’ health for a lifetime, Katherine J. Wu reports.
The presence of these cells, known as microchimerism, is thought to affect every person who has carried an embryo, even if briefly, and anyone who has ever inhabited a womb. The cross-generational transfers are bidirectional—as fetal cells cross the placenta into maternal tissues, a small number of maternal cells migrate into fetal tissues, where they can persist into adulthood.
Genetic swaps, then, might occur several times throughout a life. Some researchers believe that people may be miniature mosaics of many of their relatives, via chains of pregnancy: their older siblings, perhaps, or their maternal grandmother, or any aunts and uncles their grandmother might have conceived before their mother was born. “It’s like you carry your entire family inside of you,” Francisco Úbeda de Torres, an evolutionary biologist at the Royal Holloway University of London, told Wu.
Some scientists have argued that cells so sparse and inconsistent couldn’t possibly have meaningful effects. Even among microchimerism researchers, hypotheses about what these cells do—if anything at all—remain “highly controversial,” Sing Sing Way, an immunologist and a pediatrician at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, told Wu. But many experts contend that microchimeric cells aren’t just passive passengers. They are genetically distinct entities. And they might hold sway over many aspects of health: our susceptibility to infectious or autoimmune disease, the success of pregnancies, maybe even behavior.
If these cells turn out to be as important as some scientists believe they are, they might be one of the most underappreciated architects of human life, Wu writes.
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By now everybody has heard the horror stories about learning loss suffered during the pandemic.
Shutting down schools for months or more, it turns out, wasn’t such a hot idea. Who could have guessed? Politicians are scrambling to escape blame, parents are getting madder by the minute, and editorialists are doing their chin-stroking think pieces about how unfortunate this all is–as if they weren’t at least as blameworthy for the crisis as anyone.
Yet the pediatric education crisis is only the most obvious of the many horrible consequences of the COVID fascist policies. Doctors on the front lines of pediatric medicine are being taught a real-time lesson in reality: immune systems work by fighting off bugs, developing defenses through exposure to bacteria and viruses. Because of this fact, the 2+ years of making children into “bubble boys” protected from every disease has made many children defenseless against the everyday bugs that plague everybody.
Katherine Wu at The Atlantic tells the tale:
At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, as lines of ambulances roared down the streets and freezer vans packed into parking lots, the pediatric emergency department at Our Lady of the Lake Children’s Hospital, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was quiet.
It was an eerie juxtaposition, says Chris Woodward, a pediatric-emergency-medicine specialist at the hospital, given what was happening just a few doors down. While adult emergency departments were being inundated, his team was so low on work that he worried positions might be cut. A small proportion of kids were getting very sick with COVID-19—some still are—but most weren’t. And due to school closures and scrupulous hygiene, they weren’t really catching other infections—flu, RSV, and the like—that might have sent them to the hospital in pre-pandemic years. Woodward and his colleagues couldn’t help but wonder if the brunt of the crisis had skipped them by. “It was, like, the least patients I saw in my career,” he told me.
That is no longer the case.
Across the country, children have for weeks been slammed with a massive, early wave of viral infections—driven largely by RSV, but also flu, rhinovirus, enterovirus, and SARS-CoV-2. Many emergency departments and intensive-care units are now at or past capacity, and resorting to extreme measures.
At Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, in Maryland, staff has pitched a tent outside the emergency department to accommodate overflow; Connecticut Children’s Hospital mulled calling in the National Guard. It’s already the largest surge of infectious illnesses that some pediatricians have seen in their decades-long careers, and many worry that the worst is yet to come. “It is a crisis,” Sapna Kudchadkar, a pediatric-intensive-care specialist and anesthesiologist at Johns Hopkins, told me. “It’s bananas; it’s been full to the gills since September,” says Melissa J. Sacco, a pediatric-intensive-care specialist at UVA Health. “Every night I turn away a patient, or tell the emergency department they have to have a PICU-level kid there for the foreseeable future.”
Of all the viruses out there to worry about, COVID-19 should have been near the bottom of the list of concern when it comes to children. Rather than using intelligence and reason, policymakers and some parents who got freaked out by the COVIDiots shoved every child they could into a germ free bubble to protect them from a disease that wasn’t terribly dangerous for them.
Many doctors knew that this was insanely stupid, but few had the courage to speak up. And those who did were vilified mercilessly. Some had their license to practice medicine threatened–including Minnesota’s current candidate for governor Scott Jensen.
For a while it seemed a miracle happened: kids weren’t quite so snot-nosed as usual. See! Protection works!
The long-term result? Kids are more vulnerable to diseases to which they should have developed immunity by now. And they are getting worse cases, more frequently, and winding up in understaffed pediatric ICU units. Pediatric ICU units that had often cut staff and beds because demand during the pandemic was abnormally low.
One of the great lies of public policy is that there needn’t be any trade-offs. Everything can be a win-win. Yet usually that is not the case. In the real world you balance risks vs rewards, costs vs benefits, and find messy solutions for even messier problems. People get sick, have accidents, deal with tragedies. You do what you can, but life inevitably happens. You can mitigate risks, but not eliminate them. And often you have to balance competing risks.
Yet with COVID, policy makers took the exact opposite approach, treating the virus as the ultimate evil and everything else was worth sacrificing to reduce COVID infections. This was always insane.
From the beginning of the pandemic it was obvious who was at most risk–very old and very sick people–and we should have focused our energies on protecting the people at most risk. Everybody else needed to get on with our lives.
We did the opposite. Politicians put COVID patients into nursing homes, killing off thousands of people prematurely. And at the same time they demanded children be isolated–shut up in homes planted in front of a computer to get their now revealed-to-be-worthless “education.” Not only was COVID not particularly dangerous to these kids, but lack of exposure to the unavoidable illnesses of childhood has left the kids more vulnerable to severe illness and death from common viruses.
Early on in the pandemic I got involved in the anti-lockdown movement, and I was struck by how taboo it became to refer to the immune system as a defense against illness. It was not uncommon to be accused of the most vile motives for suggesting that natural immunity can be a good and necessary thing. Vaccines depend upon stimulating the immune system, not some magic hocus pocus.
Our masters in politics and the media decided to bet on the magic, and everybody else is paying the price.
As I wrote yesterday, some are now calling for a COVID amnesty–a mass forgiveness for all the harm done by the COVID policy madness. My answer is no, not because making mistakes is unforgivable. All of us make mistakes and we all deserve more than a bit of grace when we do.
My answer is “hell no” because the COVID fascists at the top knew that what they were doing was wrong–how could they not after it became obvious?–and did it anyway. For money. For power. To transform society to their liking. That is unforgivable.
If the powers-that-be want amnesty then we need a “truth and reconciliation commission,” as they did in South Africa after Apartheid fell. Lay it all out on the table. The good. The bad. The ugly. The people who did this need to be exposed and to beg forgiveness.
Short of that, my solution is to politically destroy every COVID fascist politician and grind their careers into the dust.
What really is unforgivable about all this is that progressive adults were willing to inflict this horror on children for their own false sense of security.
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STORY AT-A-GLANCE
So far, children have been largely unfazed by COVID-19 because their interferon pathway works really well. Interferon is an immune molecule that protects cells against invading pathogens
The COVID jab inhibits the type-1 interferon pathway, so mass injecting young children may actually erase the natural herd immunity against COVID-19 that would develop if all children remained unjabbed
Aggressive cancers have exploded among adults who got the shots, even though it’s only been a little over two years since their rollout
Analysis of U.S. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) data suggests the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is redesignating cancer deaths as COVID deaths to eliminate the cancer signal, and has been doing so since April 2021
We’ve also seen massive increases in excess mortality from abnormal clotting issues and heart problems since the COVID shots rolled out. If side effects such as cancer, heart disease and stroke are killing working age adults in unprecedented numbers already, what will the excess mortality be, say, 10 years from now if children and teens keep getting mRNA boosters every year?
What will the future hold for people whose exposure to COVID-19 occurs during the first years of life? That question was recently asked by Katherine J. Wu, a staff writer at The Atlantic.1
COVID Jab Prevents Natural Herd Immunity
Wu praises the COVID jab as being part of why we can be hopeful for future generations that have to live with this new virus, but is that really realistic? Right now, everything points to the COVID shot being a disaster, and no one actually knows what the long-term effect will be on children who get it.
Wu highlights the fact that children's immune systems have the advantage of "marshaling hordes of interferon — an immune molecule that armors cells against viruses." This is thought to be a primary reason why COVID-19 isn't nearly as lethal in young children as in older adults.
The problem that Wu completely misses is that the COVID jab inhibits the type-1 interferon pathway,2 so mass injecting young children may actually erase the natural herd immunity against COVID-19 that would develop if all children remained unjabbed. The shots will NOT, as Wu suggests, help us achieve herd immunity at all.
Cancer Rates in Young People Will Likely Rise
Mass injecting children with a drug that impairs their immune system may also (rather predictably) result in exploding cancer rates. Already, aggressive cancers have exploded among adults who got the shots,3 even though it's only been a little over two years since their rollout.
For example, data from the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED)4 — historically one of the most well-kept and most heavily relied-upon medical databases in the world — showed that, compared to the previous five-year averages, cancer among Department of Defense (DOD) personnel in 2021 skyrocketed.
Overall, cancers tripled among servicemen and their family members after the rollout of the COVID shots. Breast cancer went up 487%. Exploding cancer rates are also seen elsewhere. Indeed, the explosion of cases is so bad that cancer is now one of the top three leading causes of premature death among young working-age adults — a trend that in turn has driven down U.S. life expectancy by three years.
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Cancer Relapses and Metastasis Rates Are Exploding
November 26, 2022, The Daily Sceptic published a letter5,6 to the editor of The BMJ, written by Dr. Angus Dalgleish, professor of oncology at St. George's University of London, warning that COVID boosters may be causing aggressive metastatic cancers:
In a December 19, 2022, article7 in Conservative Woman, Dalgleish continued discussing the phenomenon of rapidly spreading cancers in patients who were in stable remission for years before receiving their COVID boosters. He noted that after his letter to The BMJ was published, several oncologists contacted him to say they're seeing the same thing in their own practices.
Swedish pathologist, researcher and senior physician at Lund's University, Dr. Ute Krueger, has also observed an explosion in rapidly advancing cancers in the wake of the COVID shots, with the largest increase occurring among 30- to 50-year-olds.9,10 According to Krueger, tumor sizes are also dramatically larger, multiple tumors in multiple organs are becoming more common, and cancer recurrence and metastasis are both increasing.
Cancer Deaths Are Being Intentionally Hidden
Disturbingly, as detailed in "How Cancer Deaths From the COVID Jabs Are Being Hidden," analysis of U.S. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) data suggests the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is filtering out and redesignating cancer deaths as COVID deaths to eliminate the cancer signal, and has been doing so since April 2021.
The signal is being hidden by swapping the underlying cause of death with main cause of death. As many as 20% of the weekly so-called COVID deaths are actually cancer deaths.
An Unconscionable Experiment on Humanity
Absolutely no one knows what the long-term ramifications of giving these injections to infants and young children will be. It's a public health experiment unlike anything we've ever seen before. So far, we've not seen cancer rates among children skyrocket, but the uptake among young children has also been low.
If side effects such as cancer, heart disease and stroke are killing working age adults in unprecedented numbers already, what will the excess mortality be, say, 10 years from now if children and teens keep getting mRNA boosters every year?
Since their immune systems are also more robust, children may be protected from cancer for a time even if they do get the jab. The question is how long? The U.S. childhood vaccination schedule now includes the initial series plus an annual COVID booster. How many boosters will it take before a child's immune system breaks and cancer starts to proliferate?
Excess Mortality Skyrocketing
We've also seen massive increases in excess mortality from abnormal clotting issues and heart problems since the COVID shots rolled out. If side effects such as cancer, heart disease and stroke are killing working age adults in unprecedented numbers already, what will the excess mortality be, say, 10 years from now if children and teens keep getting mRNA boosters every year?
I shudder to even think about it. Making matters even worse, drug makers are working overtime to deliver other mRNA-based "vaccines" as well, including one against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has already fast-tracked it. This, despite the fact that previous attempts to create an RSV vaccine failed because they caused antibody dependent enhancement (ADE).
No Benefit, Massive Cost
Now that we're more than two years into the COVID injection campaign, the cost-benefit analysis is clearer than ever. The benefit is so small as to be inconsequential, while the costs are enormous. Here's a quick summary breakdown, based on available evidence:
•Benefit — Short-term (four to six months) protection from severe COVID illness and death.
•Cost — Negative effectiveness after a few months (meaning the risk of infection, hospitalization and death from COVID is higher than before the injection). It also doesn't prevent infection or spread of the virus, so vaccine-induced herd immunity can never be achieved.
The shots destroy immune function, making people more prone to all types of infections and chronic diseases, which in turn puts pressure on the health care system, raises disability rates and excess mortality, and lowers life expectancy. On top of all that, there's evidence suggesting the shots have adverse effects on fertility, which could potentially result in a population collapse.
Evidence mRNA Jabs Cause Fertility Problems
By December 2021, at which time the COVID jabs had only been out for one year, reports of surges in menstrual changes and stillbirths were already proliferating. And, while health officials were, and still are, adamant that the COVID shot is safe for pregnant women, the data tell a very different story.
The study11 most widely used to support the U.S. recommendation for pregnant women to get injected was sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and published in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in April 2021. According to this study, the miscarriage rate among COVID jab recipients was 13.9%.
However, there was a MAJOR mistake made in this study, which was highlighted in a rapid communication12 from the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge (IPAK). The authors are Aleisha Brock, Ph.D. of New Zealand, and Simon Thornley, Ph.D., a senior lecturer in the section of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Auckland.
They explained that the NEJM study "presents falsely reassuring statistics related to the risk of spontaneous abortion in early pregnancy, since the majority of women in the calculation were exposed to the mRNA product after the outcome period was defined (20 weeks' gestation)."13
When the risk of spontaneous abortion (miscarriage) was recalculated based on the cohort that was injected prior to 20 weeks' gestation, the incidence of miscarriage was seven to eight times higher than the original study indicated, with a cumulative incidence of miscarriage ranging from 81.9% to 91.2%!
What's more, 12.6% women who received the jab in the third trimester reported Grade 3 adverse events, which are severe or medically significant but not immediately life-threatening.
Another 8% also reported a fever of 38 degrees C (100.4 degrees F), which can lead to miscarriage or premature labor.14 Another problem with the NEJM study is that follow-up only continued for 28 days after birth, meaning the long-term effects of prenatal exposure to babies is still unknown.
A Pfizer-BioNTech rat study also showed the injection more than doubled the incidence of preimplantation loss. Birth defects, specifically mouth/jaw malformations, gastroschisis (a birth defect of the abdominal wall) and abnormalities in the right-sided aortic arch and cervical vertebrae, were also observed.15
Transhumanist Cabal Intend to Change Humanity
It's become quite clear that the technocratic, transhumanist cabal that it trying to seize worldwide control is aggressively trying to genetically alter humanity. But to what end? Considering all the negative effects we're seeing in adults, just two years in, what will happen to the infants and children who have been jabbed over the next decade or two? Especially if they start getting mRNA boosters every year?
Transhumanism is "sold" as the way of the future — a future in which everyone is in perfect health and can live as long as they want. We already see how the COVID shots are advertised as a simple "software update" for your immune system. The idea is that, eventually, any health issue will be solved this way.
The problem with this utopia is manifold, however. First of all, considering how disastrous this first mRNA injection is, it seems clear the reengineering of an already perfect biological system isn't as easy as they make it out to be, and I for one doubt they'll ever perfect it.
Secondly, while they say this transhumanist utopia is for everyone, it's absolutely not. Do you really believe they want 8 billion people to be in perfect health and live for hundreds of years?
Perfect health means perfect reproductive capacity, so the number of offspring would be staggering. Clearly, they don't want this, seeing how these same individuals are already complaining that the world is overpopulated. So, perfect health for everyone is a pipedream.
Extreme life extension for the masses also isn't in the cards. Already, they want people to die as close to retirement age as possible, to minimize payouts. Do you really think they'd be willing to pay billions of people to spend 100 years in retirement?
Even if the retirement age was pushed way back to, say, 150, and the average life span is 175, who's going to employ all these people? Remember, robots and artificial intelligence are already slated to take over most jobs, making most humans obsolete. There's simply no incentive to extend the health span and life span of billions of people.
No, the transhumanist utopia is intended to be reserved for a select few, and this is something to keep in mind as they continue these genetic experiments on humanity. They're not for our benefit.
What Are They Turning Us Into?
In closing, here's a snippet from a November 22, 2022, Truth Talk article, in which blogger Katrina Wicks ponders the reasons behind the transhumanist push:16
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America's Infectious-Disease Barometer Is Off [ Avian influenza ]
America’s Infectious-Disease Barometer Is Off [News Summary]
Somehow, the U.S. is both over- and under-reacting to bird flu and other
pressing infectious threats. By Katherine J. Wu. Cows graze on a…
American dairy cows have been contracting avian flu, and inactive traces of
the virus have been found in milk supplies across the country.
The U.S. is grappling with a recently discovered outbreak…
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“Joe Biden’s Big New Hampshire Blunder,” by Jonathan Martin in Politico.
“The Simple Truths of Nate Bargatze on SNL,” by Esther Zuckerman in The Atlantic.
“Biden takes on AI – and the tech industry,” by Mohar Chatterjee in Politico.
“Co-workers knew he was struggling. They didn’t expect he’d buy an AR-15.,” by Robert Klemko in The Washington Post.
“Netanyahu blames security agencies for intelligence failure, then pulls back,” by Federica Di Sario in Politico.
“Fidelity has marked down the value of Twitter/X by 65%,” by Dan Primack in Axios.
“Gaza receives largest aid shipment so far as deaths top 8,000.,” by Associated Press in Politico.
“Israel’s ground assault of Gaza is happening. Here’s what we know,” by Ellen Ioanes in Vox.
“Residents of Maine gather to pray and reflect, days after mass shooting left 18 people dead,” by Associated Press in Politico.
“Trump’s Old Legal Arguments Are Coming Back to Haunt Him,” by Aaron Tang in Slate.
“Iranian foreign minister deflects question about threatening U.S.,” by David Cohen in Politico.
“Iowa poll: Nikki Haley surges as Ron DeSantis frozen in place,” by Justin Green in Axios.
“"‘I really don't see what he is doing’: Jayapal baffled by Phillips' White House bid," by Kelly Garity in Politico.
“Wisconsin might get an official state cocktail: the brandy old-fashioned,” by María Paúl and Emily Heil in The Washington Post.
“Biden tells Netanyahu that Israel must protect Palestinian civilians in Gaza,” by Barak Ravid in Axios.
“One of the Hardest Things About Being a Professor Is Only Getting Harder,” by Kelly Ritter in Slate.
“The Other Group of Viruses That Could Cause the Next Pandemic,” by Katherine J. Wu in The Atlantic.
“Biden risks Jimmy Carter redux as global crises spiral,” by Josh Kraushaar in Axios.
“Once Again, the History of Witch Trials Has Inspired the World’s Most Annoying Merch,” by Eleanor Janega in Slate.
“The world will see this as Biden’s war,” by Jonathan Guyer in Vox.
Axios.
“After setback, antiabortion forces struggle before key Ohio vote,” by Annie Gowen in The Washington Post.
“The Old-Fashioned Charm of The Golden Bachelor,” by Isabel Fattal in The Atlantic.
“Johnson "not afraid" of vacating rule that drove McCarthy out as speaker,” by Shauneen Miranda in Axios.
““Lord of the Flies”: The House’s chaotic next era, explained,” by Ben Jacobs in Vox.
“Anderson Cooper’s Co-Author Discusses Their New Bestseller About the Astors,” by June Thomas in Slate.
“Biden’s re-election horror shows,” by Jim VandeHel in Axios.
“Cookbooks Are Finally Telling the Truth About the Worst Part of Cooking,” by Marian Bull in Slate.
“House Speaker Mike Johnson’s Louisiana hometown guided by faith and family,” by Molly Hennessy-Flake in The Washington Post.
“‘I Am a Practicing Catholic and I Am a Proud Jew’,” by David I. Kertzer in The Atlantic.
“Prisons are banning thousands of books,” by Shauneen Miranda in Axios.
#new hampshire#joe biden#saturday night live#snl#artificial intelligence#ar-15#maine#netanyahu#twitter#gaza#gaza strip#hamas#israel#mass shooting#donald trump#iran#iowa#nikki haley#ron desantis#pramila jayapal#dean phillips#wisconsin#pandemic#prison#abortion#ohio#kevin mccarthy#mike johnson#catholic#jewish
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📆 10 Sep , 2021 📰 We’re Asking the Impossible of Vaccines ✍️ Katherine J. Wu 🗞 Atlantic
Complete protection against infection has long been hailed as the holy grail of vaccination. It might simply be unachievable.
COVID-19 vaccines were never going to give us sterilizing immunity; it’s possible they never will. But the reason isn’t just their design, or the wily nature of the virus, or heavy and frequent exposures, though those factors all play a role. It’s that sterilizing immunity itself might be a biological myth.
The classic tale of sterilizing immunity unfolds something like this: A pathogen attempts to infiltrate a body; antibodies, lurking in the vicinity thanks to vaccination or a previous infection, instantly zap it out of existence, so speedily that the microbe can’t even reproduce. No symptoms manifest, and most of the body’s immune cells never get involved, a bit like an intruder smacking up against an electric fence around a building, leaving the security guards inside none the wiser.
This is a very neat story. And it is “almost impossible to prove,” Mark Slifka, an immunologist and vaccine expert at Oregon Health & Science University, told me.
With measles, for instance, scientists initially lacked the tests needed to show them otherwise, Diane Griffin, an immunologist at Johns Hopkins University, told me. When virtually no one fell ill after an inoculation campaign, researchers figured that infections had evaporated as well. Now, however, techniques are far more powerful, giving researchers the ability to zero in on even tiny blips of infection. Post-vaccination measles infections, though still uncommon, are much more “regularly observed” than they were once believed to be, Griffin said.
As detection tools improve, each data point further erodes the mythos of sterilization. With enough scrutiny, the experts I spoke with told me that similar illusions can probably be shattered against supposedly “sterilizing” shots that guard against other pathogens, including poxviruses such as smallpox, bacteria that cause meningitis, and the parasites that cause malaria. “I think it’s literally chasing rainbows,” Slifka said. “The closer you get, the sooner you realize it’s not there.”
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Covering the COVID-19 origin debate
For about 24 hours in March, it looked as though the fierce, long-running debate over the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic might be close to resolution. First with the story was reporter Katherine J. Wu of The Atlantic, in a March 16 piece entitled “The Strongest Evidence Yet That An Animal Started the Pandemic.”
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Die größte COVID-Frage: Was wird in 10 Jahren passieren?
Uncut schreibt: »Bereits in zwei Jahren sehen wir katastrophale Auswirkungen – was wird in 10 Jahren passieren, wenn die Menschen weiterhin wie Schafe folgen? GESCHICHTE AUF EINEN BLICK Wie sieht die Zukunft für Menschen aus, die in den ersten Lebensjahren COVID-19 ausgesetzt sind? Diese Frage wurde kürzlich von Katherine J. Wu, einer Mitarbeiterin von The Atlantic, gestellt. […] http://dlvr.it/SlHFZ5 «
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Despite an influx of resources into long-COVID research in recent months, data on the condition’s current reach remain a mess—and scientists still can’t fully quantify its risks.
Recent evidence from two long-term surveys have hinted that the pool of long-haulers might be shrinking, even as new infection rates remain sky-high: Earlier this month, the United Kingdom’s Office for National Statistics released data showing that 2 million people self-reported lingering symptoms at the very start of 2023, down from 2.3 million in August 2022. The U.S. CDC’s Household Pulse Survey, another study based on self-reporting, also recorded a small drop in long-COVID prevalence in the same time frame, from about 7.5 percent of all American adults to roughly 6. Against the massive number of infections that have continued to slam both countries in the pandemic’s third year and beyond, these surveys might seem to imply that long-haulers are leaving the pool faster than newcomers are arriving.
Experts cautioned, however, that there are plenty of reasons to treat these patterns carefully—and to not assume that the trends will be sustained. It’s certainly better that these data aren’t showing a sustained, dramatic uptick in long-COVID cases. But that doesn’t mean the situation is improving. Throughout the pandemic, the size of the long-COVID pool has contracted or expanded for only two reasons: a change in the rate at which people enter, or at which they exit. Both figures are likely to be in constant flux, as surges of infections come and go, masking habits change, and vaccine and antiviral uptake fluctuates. Davis pointed out that the slight downward tick in both studies captured just a half-year stretch, so the downward slope could be one small portion of an undulating wave. A few hours spent at the beach while the tide is going out wouldn’t be enough to prove that the ocean is drying up.
Recent counts of new long-COVID cases might also be undercounts, as testing slows and people encounter more challenges getting diagnosed. That said, it’s still possible that, on a case-by-case basis, the likelihood of any individual developing long COVID after a SARS-CoV-2 infection may have fallen since the pandemic’s start, says Deepti Gurdasani, a clinical epidemiologist at Queen Mary University of London and the University of New South Wales. Population immunity—especially acquired via vaccination—has, over the past three years, better steeled people’s bodies against the virus, and strong evidence supports the notion that vaccines can moderately reduce the risk of developing long COVID. Treatments and behavioral interventions that have become more commonplace may have chipped away at incidence as well. Antivirals can now help to corral the virus early in infection; ventilation, distancing, and masks—when they’re used—can trim the amount of virus that infiltrates the body. And if overall exposure to the virus can influence the likelihood of developing long COVID, that could help explain why so many debilitating cases arose at the very start of the pandemic, when interventions were few and far between, says Steven Deeks, a physician researcher at UC San Francisco.
There’s not much comfort to derive from those individual-level stats, though, when considering what’s happening on broader scales. Even if immunity makes the average infected person less likely to fall into the long-COVID pool, so many people have been catching the virus that the inbound rate still feels like a flood. “The level of infection in many countries has gone up substantially since 2021,” Gurdasani told me. The majority of long-COVID cases arise after mild infections, the sort for which our immune defenses fade most rapidly. Now that masking and physical distancing have fallen by the wayside, people may be getting exposed to higher viral doses than they were a year or two ago. In absolute terms, then, the number of people entering the long-COVID pool may not really be decreasing. Even if the pool were getting slightly smaller, its size would still be staggering, an ocean of patients with titanic needs. “Anecdotally, we still have an enormous waitlist to get into our clinic,” Putrino told me.
Deeks told me that he’s seen another possible reason for optimism: People with newer cases of long COVID might be experiencing less debilitating or faster-improving disease, based on what he’s seen. “The worst cases we’ve seen come from the first wave in 2020,” he said. But Putrino isn’t so sure. “If you put an Omicron long-COVID patient in front of me, versus one from the first wave, I wouldn’t be able to tell you who was who,” he said. The two cases would also be difficult to compare, because they’re separated by so much time. Long COVID’s symptoms can wax, wane, and qualitatively change; a couple of years into the future, some long-haulers who’ve just developed the condition may be in a spot that’s similar to where many veterans with the condition are now.
Experts’ understanding of how often people depart the long-COVID pool is also meager. Some long-haulers have undoubtedly seen improvement—but without clear lines distinguishing short COVID from medium and long COVID, entry and exit into these various groups is easy to over- or underestimate. What few data exist on the likelihood of recovery or remission is inconsistent, and not always rosy: Investigators of RECOVER, a large national study of long COVID, have calculated that about two-thirds of the long-haulers in their cohort do not return to baseline health. Putrino, who has worked with hundreds of long-haulers since the pandemic began, estimates that although most of his patients experience at least some benefit from a few months of rehabilitation, only about one-fifth to one-quarter of them eventually reach the point of feeling about as well as they did before catching the virus, while the majority hit a middling plateau. A small minority of the people he has treated, he told me, never seem to improve at all.
Letícia Soares, a long-hauler in Brazil who caught the virus near the start of the pandemic, falls into that final category. Once a disease ecologist who studied parasite transmission in birds, she is now mostly housebound, working when she is able as a researcher for the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Her days revolve around medications and behavioral modifications she uses for her fatigue, sleeplessness, and chronic pain. Soares no longer has the capacity to cook or frequently venture outside. And she has resigned herself to this status quo until the treatment landscape changes drastically. It is not the life she pictured for herself, Soares told me. “Sometimes I think the person I used to be died in April of 2020.”
Even long-haulers who have noticed an improvement in their symptoms are wary of overconfidence. Some absolutely do experience what could be called recovery—but for others, the term has gotten loaded, almost a jinx. “If the question is, ‘Are you doing the things you were doing in 2019?’ the answer is largely no,” says JD Davids, a chronic-illness advocate based in New York. For some, he told me, “getting better” has been more defined by a resetting of expectations than a return to good health. Relapses are also not uncommon, especially after repeat encounters with the virus. Lisa McCorkell, a long-hauler and a co-founder of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, has felt her symptoms partly abate since she first fell ill in the spring of 2020. But, she told me, she suspects that her condition is more likely to deteriorate than further improve—partly because of “how easy it is to get reinfected now.”
— Long COVID is the emergency that won’t end
#katherine j. wu#long covid is the emergency that won't end#current events#science#medicine#biology#human biology#disability#chronic illness#ableism#covid 19#pandemic#long covid
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Ultra-Processed Foods Make Us Eat More, and It’s Not About Their Nutritional Makeup
Two Groups of Study Participants were Offered Nutritionally Identical Diets. Those Eating Ultra-Processed Foods Consumed More Calories and Gained Weight.
— By Katherine J. Wu | Published: Thursday May 16, 2019 | NOVA—PBS | Wednesday 22 November 2023
Sweetened breakfast cereals count as ultra-processed foods, which often include additives and ingredients that enhance a product's flavor, texture, or shelf life. Image Credit: Ponce Photography, Pixabay
At the start of his latest clinical trial in 2018, National Institutes of Health researcher Kevin Hall was sure he wouldn’t see a difference.
His study, intended to monitor caloric intake and weight gain, offered its participants one of two nearly identical menus. Both contained the same number of calories, and comparable amounts of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. Even the diets’ fiber, sugar, and sodium contents were matched. Nutrient-wise, they were about as similar as two meal plans could get.
But as the days ticked by, Hall quickly began to see how wrong his initial hunch had been. Despite the superficial similarities, one group was eating much more of the food they were offered. And by the end of two weeks, the members of that same group had gained an average of two pounds, while their counterparts had lost two pounds.
The only explanation was the one factor Hall had thought would have no effect at all: While one menu was made up mostly of whole, unprocessed foods, the other—the one tied to weight gain—was composed almost entirely of ultra-processed foods.
Compared to unprocessed foods like fresh fruits and nuts, ultra-processed foods like cookies and chips tend to have more calories, sugar, fat, and salt, all of which have been linked to putting on weight. But the findings from Hall’s team, published today in the journal Cell Metabolism, are the first to show there’s something inherent to ultra-processed foods, independent of nutritional makeup, that seems to encourage overeating.
“This is really important work,” says Dana Small, a psychologist and neuroscientist studying food choice at Yale University who was not involved in the study. “This study produces a definitive answer to a question we did not have a definitive answer to.”
Though it’s not yet clear why ultra-processed foods have this effect, the results underscore the importance of an issue that goes beyond effective dieting. With their cheapness, convenience, and long shelf life, ultra-processed foods now make up more than half the calories Americans eat. These numbers tick even further upwards for underrepresented minorities, as well as in lower income populations.
“This is not about willpower—we’re living in a manipulated food environment,” says Ashley Gearhardt, a psychologist studying food addiction at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the study. “Ultra-processed foods are unique in ways that we are only just starting to understand.”
The unprocessed and ultra-processed breakfasts (respectively) offered to study participants on Day 4. Left: A spinach, onion, and tomato omelet made with fresh eggs and olive oil, sweet potato hash, and skim milk. Right: Scrambled eggs prepared from liquid, pork sausage, honey buns, and orange juice infused with fiber. Image Credit: Courtesy of Kevin Hall, National Institutes of Health, Hall et al. 2019
Technically, any food that’s been mechanically or chemically altered from its original state can be considered “processed.” That label applies to milk, tofu, frozen spinach, and countless other foods that appear in our diets, and doesn’t automatically designate a product as unhealthy.
Ultra-processed foods, on the other hand, take things one step further by including ingredients that provide cheap, “industrial” sources of dietary energy and nutrients—like added sugars, fats, and chemical preservatives—that enhance an item’s flavor, texture, or shelf life. Some offenders in the ultra-processed arena are familiar, like candy and chicken nuggets; others, like sweetened yogurts, reduced-fat salad dressing (or reduced-fat anything, for that matter), and packaged soup, may be a little more surprising.
For years, scientists have been linking ultra-processed foods to a variety of poor health outcomes, including cancer, obesity, and even an increased risk of death. Most of these studies, however, have been limited to questionnaires and diet records that rely on people to accurately report what they’ve eaten, and can’t establish direct cause and effect.
So Hall and his team decided to do what no other group had done before: Round up 20 people, house them at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, and prepare, serve, and track every single morsel of food they ate for a month. Each person was randomly assigned to either an ultra-processed or unprocessed menu for the first two weeks, then switched. Both diets consisted of three meals and a glut of snacks, providing almost 4,000 calories each day, and participants were told to eat as much or as little as they wanted.
The unprocessed and ultra-processed lunches (respectively) offered to study participants on Day 6. Left: Salmon, green beans with olive oil, baked sweet potato, and plain Greek yogurt with frozen strawberries. Right: Burgers with American cheese, fries, ketchup, and diet lemonade infused with fiber. Image Credit: Courtesy of Kevin Hall, National Institutes of Health, Hall et al. 2019
In terms of their nutritional composition, the two diets were equivalent on almost every front, down to the average number of calories per gram of food. But while ultra-processed foods had no part in the unprocessed menu, they contributed more than 80 percent of the calories in the ultra-processed diet.
It took some serious finagling to get the menus to match, while keeping the ratio of carbohydrate to fat to protein within a healthy range, Hall says. The team also had to take great pains to keep the study’s results mum as they unfolded, even outfitting participants in loose-fitting clothing to mask any weight gain or loss.
But the work paid off. In the end, the only real difference between the groups was the proportion of ultra-processed foods in their diets.
“I can’t think of another study that has been this well controlled for so long,” Gearhardt says. “That allows us to make much more confident interpretations of what these foods are really doing.” If Hall and his team saw clear differences in outcome, there would be a pretty clear culprit.
But even Hall was surprised to discover how quickly changes in eating behavior unfolded. When put on the ultra-processed diet, participants started eating an average of 500 extra calories a day, resulting in several people gaining weight and body fat over the two-week stint. The difference had nothing to do with the amount of food they’d been offered, or even how good it tasted (when asked, participants reported the two menus were equally appetizing and satisfying). But the inclusion of ultra-processed food had triggered a subtle, and likely subconscious, shift in behavior.
The study was brief, and there’s no telling if these results will hold true on a longer time scale, says Vasanti Malik, a nutrition researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health who was not involved in the study. To that point, the difference in the number of calories consumed on each diet actually decreased slightly as time went on. But that doesn’t make the upshot any less concerning: Something in this ultra-processed diet was making people eat more, and it didn’t take long to see the effects.
What exactly that something was, though, is still an open question. Finding the answer will require a lot more research, but Hall has a few theories.
Although both diets were similar in energy density, or the number of calories per gram, these calculations also counted drinks, including juices and lemonade that acted as vehicles for fiber supplements in the ultra-processed diet. But beverages may not make people feel full in the same way that solid food does—and when the researchers took liquids out of the equation, the solid foods on the ultra-processed menu packed in more calories per bite. This might have made it easy for people on this diet to scarf down a lot of calories, Hall says.
People also ate much faster when put on the ultra-processed diet, consuming 17 more calories per minute compared to the unprocessed diet. It takes a while for our brains to register the feeling of fullness, and this lag gives our mouths plenty of time to overeat—an easy thing to do with ultra-processed foods, which are often softer and easier to chew and swallow, Hall says.
The researchers are currently gearing up for a repeat study that may put these theories to the test. One critical change will involve revamping the ultra-processed diet to include more stews and gumbos. Hopefully, Hall says, this swap will both dilute the energy density of the solid food portion of the meal and encourage people to eat more slowly.
Plain yogurt is technically a "processed" food, but still healthful. The addition of flavors and sweeteners, however, transforms plain yogurt into an ultra-processed product. Image Credit: Alexialex, iStock
There’s plenty to grapple with, but one needn’t see directly into the belly of the beast to know to avoid its bite. The study’s results are a resounding confirmation of years of nutritional counsel—and if anything, the problem is only getting worse.
As food production becomes increasingly industrialized, ultra-processed foods have taken over the diets of modern Americans. Even when put on diets at two extremes of a spectrum, study participants experienced a bigger change in their hormone levels when shifting to the unprocessed menu, suggesting that their baseline was more aligned with an ultra-processed diet.
That’s not terribly surprising, given that these products tend to be rich in fat and sugars, which set off the brain’s pleasure system, Gearhardt says. Over time, our bodies get used to the reward, and crave it in even higher quantities. This vicious cycle of addiction makes ultra-processed foods a tough habit to break.
But weaning ourselves off ultra-processed foods entirely isn’t a practical goal. The fact remains that ultra-processed foods require less time, money, and effort to purchase and consume—and they’re effectively marketed as such. In the study, the ingredients that went into the unprocessed meal plan cost nearly 50 percent more than those for the ultra-processed menu. Tacking on the hours, skills, equipment, and energy invested in the storage and preparation of perishable whole foods, it’s no wonder ultra-processed foods have become a mealtime fixture over the past 30 years, Hall says.
Whole foods, while healthful, carry a bigger price tag than ultra-processed foods—even before taking into account the added expenses of storing, preparing, and serving them. Image Credit: Vera Petrunina, iStock
What’s more, because cost is such a big incentive, the burden of ultra-processed foods is disproportionately shouldered by people who make less money—those with the fewest means to avoid them. This trend threatens to exacerbate existing health disparities between socioeconomic brackets.
There’s no quick fix to this problem. But the path forward is with studies like these, Small says. By pinpointing the mystery factor in ultra-processed foods—whatever it is that’s causing us to eat more and gain weight—researchers may be able to partner with the food industry to cook up cheap, convenient foods that can still confer some health benefits.
In the end, “just giving people nutrition advice won’t be enough,” Gearhardt says. “We need to advocate for policy initiatives and support people’s needs. This is a social justice issue. And we’re living it right now.”
#Body and Brain 🧠#Ultra Processed Foods#Nutritional Makeup#Katherine J. Wu#NOVA | PBS#More Calories#Weight Gaining
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The Strongest Evidence Yet That an Animal Started the Pandemic
‘A new analysis of genetic samples from China appears to link the pandemic’s origin to raccoon dogs….’
— Katherine J. Wu via The Atlantic
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How curiosity about cats inspired practical science stories
New Post has been published on https://petn.ws/hJdY
How curiosity about cats inspired practical science stories
Calvin and Hobbes, who live with Atlantic science reporter Katherine J. Wu Courtesy of Katherine J. Wu By Philip Kiefer In the last several weeks, Katherine J. Wu, a science writer at the Atlantic, has written a lot about cats. Her run started in late August with a profile of vet dentists and the fact […]
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Story at a glance:
So far, children have been largely unfazed by COVID-19 because their interferon pathway works really well. Interferon is an immune molecule that protects cells against invading pathogens.
The COVID-19 jab inhibits the type-1 interferon pathway, so mass injecting young children may actually erase the natural herd immunity against COVID-19 that would develop if all children remained unjabbed.
Aggressive cancers have exploded among adults who got the shots, even though it’s only been a little over two years since their rollout.
Analysis of U.S. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report data suggests the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is redesignating cancer deaths as COVID-19 deaths to eliminate the cancer signal, and has been doing so since April 2021.
We’ve also seen massive increases in excess mortality from abnormal clotting issues and heart problems since the COVID-19 shots rolled out. If side effects such as cancer, heart disease and stroke are killing working-age adults in unprecedented numbers already, what will the excess mortality be, say, 10 years from now if children and teens keep getting mRNA boosters every year?
What will the future hold for people whose exposure to COVID-19 occurs during the first years of life? That question was recently asked by Katherine J. Wu, a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Wu writes:
“To be a newborn in the year 2023 — and, almost certainly, every year that follows — means emerging into a world where the coronavirus is ubiquitous … Beyond a shadow of a doubt, this virus will be one of the very first serious pathogens that today’s infants — and all future infants — meet.
“Eventually, the expectation is that the illness will reach a stable nadir, at which point it may truly be ‘another common cold,’ says Rustom Antia, an infectious-disease modeler at Emory.
“The full outcome of this living experiment, though, won’t be clear for decades — well after the billions of people who encountered the coronavirus for the first time in adulthood are long gone.
“The experiences that today’s youngest children have with the virus are only just beginning to shape what it will mean to have COVID throughout a lifetime, when we all coexist with it from birth to death as a matter of course.”
COVID jab prevents natural herd immunity
Wu praises the COVID-19 jab as being part of why we can be hopeful for future generations that have to live with this new virus, but is that really realistic?
Right now, everything points to the COVID-19 shot being a disaster, and no one actually knows what the long-term effect will be on children who get it.
Wu highlights the fact that children’s immune systems have the advantage of “marshaling hordes of interferon — an immune molecule that armors cells against viruses.” This is thought to be a primary reason why COVID-19 isn’t nearly as lethal in young children as in older adults.
The problem that Wu completely misses is that the COVID-19 jab inhibits the type-1 interferon pathway, so mass injecting young children may actually erase the natural herd immunity against COVID-19 that would develop if all children remained unjabbed. The shots will NOT, as Wu suggests, help us achieve herd immunity at all.
Cancer rates in young people will likely rise
Mass injecting children with a drug that impairs their immune system may also (rather predictably) result in exploding cancer rates. Already, aggressive cancers have exploded among adults who got the shots, even though it’s only been a little over two years since their rollout.
For example, data from the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database — historically one of the most well-kept and most heavily relied-upon medical databases in the world — showed that, compared to the previous five-year averages, cancer among U.S. Department of Defense personnel in 2021 skyrocketed.
Overall, cancers tripled among servicemen and their family members after the rollout of the COVID-19 shots. Breast cancer went up 487%. Exploding cancer rates are also seen elsewhere.
Indeed, the explosion of cases is so bad that cancer is now one of the top three leading causes of premature death among young working-age adults — a trend that in turn has driven down U.S. life expectancy by three years.
Cancer relapses and metastasis rates are exploding
On Nov. 26, 2022, The Daily Sceptic published a letter to the editor of The BMJ, written by Dr. Angus Dalgleish, professor of oncology at St. George’s University of London, warning that COVID-19 boosters may be causing aggressive metastatic cancers:
“COVID no longer needs a vaccine programme given the average age of death of COVID in the U.K. is 82 and from all other causes is 81 and falling.
“The link with clots, myocarditis, heart attacks and strokes is now well accepted, as is the link with myelitis and neuropathy …
“However, there is now another reason to halt all vaccine programmes. As a practicing oncologist I am seeing people with stable disease rapidly progress after being forced to have a booster, usually so they can travel. Even within my own personal contacts I am seeing B cell-based disease after the boosters.
“They describe being distinctly unwell a few days to weeks after the booster — one developing leukemia, two work colleagues Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and an old friend who has felt like he has had Long COVID-19 since receiving his booster and who, after getting severe bone pain, has been diagnosed as having multiple metastases from a rare B cell disorder.
“I am experienced enough to know that these are not coincidental anecdotes … The reports of innate immune suppression after mRNA for several weeks would fit, as all these patients to date have melanoma or B cell-based cancers, which are very susceptible to immune control — and that is before the reports of suppressor gene suppression by mRNA in laboratory experiments. This must be aired and debated immediately.”
In a Dec. 19, 2022, article in Conservative Woman, Dalgleish continued discussing the phenomenon of rapidly spreading cancers in patients who were in stable remission for years before receiving their COVID-19 boosters.
He noted that after his letter to The BMJ was published, several oncologists contacted him to say they’re seeing the same thing in their own practices.
“Seeing the recurrence of these cancers after all this time naturally makes me wonder if there is a common cause?” he wrote. “I had previously noted that relapse in stable cancer is often associated with severe long-term stress, such as bankruptcy, divorce, etc.”
He continued:
“However, I found that none of my patients had any such extra stress during this time, but they had all had booster vaccines and, indeed, a couple of them noted that they had a very bad reaction to the booster which they did not have to the first two injections.
“I then noted that some of these patients were not having a normal pattern of relapse but rather an explosive relapse, with metastases occurring at the same time in several sites … Scientifically, I was reading reports that the booster was leading to a big excess of antibodies at the expense of the T-cell response and that this T-cell suppression could last for three weeks, if not more.
“To me, this could be causal as the immune system is being asked to make an excessive response through the humoral inflammatory part of the immune response against a virus (the alpha-delta variant) which is no longer in existence in the community.
“This exertion leads to immune exhaustion, which is why these patients are reporting up to a 50% greater increase in Omicron, or other variations, than the non-vaccinated.”
Swedish pathologist, researcher and senior physician at Lund’s University, Dr. Ute Krueger, has also observed an explosion in rapidly advancing cancers in the wake of the COVID-19 shots, with the largest increase occurring among 30- to 50-year-olds.
According to Krueger, tumor sizes are also dramatically larger, multiple tumors in multiple organs are becoming more common, and cancer recurrence and metastasis are both increasing.
Cancer deaths are being intentionally hidden
Disturbingly, as detailed in “How Cancer Deaths From the COVID Jabs Are Being Hidden,” analysis of U.S. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report data suggests the CDC is filtering out and redesignating cancer deaths as COVID-19 deaths to eliminate the cancer signal, and has been doing so since April 2021.
The signal is being hidden by swapping the underlying cause of death with main cause of death. As many as 20% of the weekly so-called COVID-19 deaths are actually cancer deaths.
An unconscionable experiment on humanity
Absolutely no one knows what the long-term ramifications of giving these injections to infants and young children will be. It’s a public health experiment unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. So far, we’ve not seen cancer rates among children skyrocket, but the uptake among young children has also been low.
Since their immune systems are also more robust, children may be protected from cancer for a time even if they do get the jab. The question is how long?
The U.S. childhood vaccination schedule now includes the initial series plus an annual COVID-19 booster. How many boosters will it take before a child’s immune system breaks and cancer starts to proliferate?
Excess mortality skyrocketing
We’ve also seen massive increases in excess mortality from abnormal clotting issues and heart problems since the COVID-19 shots rolled out.
If side effects such as cancer, heart disease and stroke are killing working-age adults in unprecedented numbers already, what will the excess mortality be, say, 10 years from now if children and teens keep getting mRNA boosters every year?
I shudder to even think about it. Making matters even worse, drug makers are working overtime to deliver other mRNA-based “vaccines” as well, including one against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has already fast-tracked it. This, despite the fact that previous attempts to create an RSV vaccine failed because they caused antibody-dependent enhancement.
No benefit, massive cost
Now that we’re more than two years into the COVID-19 injection campaign, the cost-benefit analysis is clearer than ever. The benefit is so small as to be inconsequential, while the costs are enormous. Here’s a quick summary breakdown, based on available evidence:
Benefit — Short-term (four to six months) protection from severe COVID-19 illness and death.
Cost — Negative effectiveness after a few months (meaning the risk of infection, hospitalization and death from COVID-19 is higher than before the injection). It also doesn’t prevent infection or spread of the virus, so vaccine-induced herd immunity can never be achieved.
The shots destroy immune function, making people more prone to all types of infections and chronic diseases, which in turn puts pressure on the healthcare system, raises disability rates and excess mortality and lowers life expectancy.
On top of all that, there’s evidence suggesting the shots have adverse effects on fertility, which could potentially result in a population collapse.
Evidence mRNA jabs cause fertility problems
By December 2021, at which time the COVID-19 jabs had only been out for one year, reports of surges in menstrual changes and stillbirths were already proliferating. And, while health officials were, and still are, adamant that the COVID-19 shot is safe for pregnant women, the data tell a very different story.
The study most widely used to support the U.S. recommendation for pregnant women to get injected was sponsored by the CDC and published in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in April 2021. According to this study, the miscarriage rate among COVID-19 jab recipients was 13.9%.
However, there was a MAJOR mistake made in this study, which was highlighted in a rapid communication from the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge. The authors are Aleisha Brock, Ph.D., of New Zealand and Simon Thornley, Ph.D., a senior lecturer in the section of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Auckland.
Brock and Thornley explained that the NEJM study “presents falsely reassuring statistics related to the risk of spontaneous abortion in early pregnancy, since the majority of women in the calculation were exposed to the mRNA product after the outcome period was defined (20 weeks’ gestation).”
When the risk of spontaneous abortion (miscarriage) was recalculated based on the cohort that was injected prior to 20 weeks’ gestation, the incidence of miscarriage was seven to eight times higher than the original study indicated, with a cumulative incidence of miscarriage ranging from 81.9% to 91.2%!
What’s more, 12.6% women who received the jab in the third trimester reported grade 3 adverse events, which are severe or medically significant but not immediately life-threatening.
Another 8% also reported a fever of 38 degrees C (100.4 degrees F), which can lead to miscarriage or premature labor.
Another problem with the NEJM study is that follow-up only continued for 28 days after birth, meaning the long-term effects of prenatal exposure to babies is still unknown.
A Pfizer-BioNTech rat study also showed the injection more than doubled the incidence of preimplantation loss. Birth defects, specifically mouth/jaw malformations, gastroschisis (a birth defect of the abdominal wall) and abnormalities in the right-sided aortic arch and cervical vertebrae, were also observed.
Transhumanist cabal intend to change humanity
It’s become quite clear that the technocratic, transhumanist cabal that it trying to seize worldwide control is aggressively trying to genetically alter humanity. But to what end?
Considering all the negative effects we’re seeing in adults, just two years in, what will happen to the infants and children who have been jabbed over the next decade or two? Especially if they start getting mRNA boosters every year?
Transhumanism is a “sold” as the way of the future — a future in which everyone is in perfect health and can live as long as they want. We already see how the COVID-19 shots are advertised as a simple “software update” for your immune system. The idea is that, eventually, any health issue will be solved this way.
The problem with this utopia is manifold, however. First of all, considering how disastrous this first mRNA injection is, it seems clear the reengineering of an already perfect biological system isn’t as easy as they make it out to be, and I for one doubt they’ll ever perfect it.
Secondly, while they say this transhumanist utopia is for everyone, it’s absolutely not. Do you really believe they want 8 billion people to be in perfect health and live for hundreds of years?
Perfect health means perfect reproductive capacity, so the number of offspring would be staggering. Clearly, they don’t want this, seeing how these same individuals are already complaining that the world is overpopulated. So, perfect health for everyone is a pipedream.
Extreme life extension for the masses also isn’t in the cards. Already, they want people to die as close to retirement age as possible, to minimize payouts. Do you really think they’d be willing to pay billions of people to spend 100 years in retirement?
Even if the retirement age was pushed way back to, say, 150, and the average life span is 175, who’s going to employ all these people?
Remember, robots and artificial intelligence are already slated to take over most jobs, making most humans obsolete. There’s simply no incentive to extend the health span and life span of billions of people.
No, the transhumanist utopia is intended to be reserved for a select few, and this is something to keep in mind as they continue these genetic experiments on humanity. They’re not for our benefit.
What are they turning us into?
In closing, here’s a snippet from a Nov. 22, 2022, Truth Talk article, in which blogger Katrina Wicks ponders the reasons behind the transhumanist push:
“They make no secret of it, it’s not some wild conspiracy theory and is in fact being implemented in front of us and around us. Changing humans from what we are, into something else. Augmented humans seem to be on the horizon, as well as disrupted, corrupted and spliced humans too …
“’The Island of Dr. Moreau’ … by H.G. Wells … highlights an obsession with making animals more human through ‘medical intervention’ … I wonder if they are trying to do the opposite … to make humans more animal like? …
“A certain international organization seems to have a nominated mascot who is the mouthpiece of how they want us to be bio-mechanical beings essentially, being constantly monitored, tested, observed and upgraded. Weird huh? Yet they gleefully put these plans forward and explain how and when. Just not really covering the why, or at least the real reasons for it.
“But you can make up your own mind on what their purpose really is … what is out there for everyone to see is that they do want control.
“Of your daily activities, thoughts, fears, aspirations … and generally of your future. So that is where you do get to take an active role, unless you already consider your life forfeit and have already accepted their new regime and landscape. But if you do not … and you have chosen to live, then now is the time.”
Originally published by Mercola.
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