COVID-19 vaccine

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COVID-19 vaccine is a vaccine that aims to confer acquired immunity against coronary disease 2019. There are several different vaccine technologies used to provide limited or total immunity against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID 19).

Quotes

organized chronologically

2020

January 2020

February 2020

  • If everything moves smoothly, it takes 3-6 weeks to get to the point where you can start testing (the vaccine to treat SARS-CoV-2), then you look to see if they can raise an immune response, normally in an animal. You won't start to get human studies until about the beginning of the summer, probably July (2020). But, it's a bit of a moveable feast.

March 2020

Even before we knew it was a coronavirus, I said it certainly sounds like a coronavirus-SARS type thing. As soon as it was identified, I called a meeting of top-level people and said, 'Let's start working on a vaccine right now.' ~ Anthony Fauci
  • We have people around the world working as fast as they can to try to develop an effective vaccine against this dangerous disease. That is great — except these people are working in competition, not in collaboration. They all want to be the first to develop a patentable vaccine that will allow them to get very rich if it proves successful... the coronavirus should be yet another lesson as to why there is a better alternative to patent monopolies for financing biomedical research.

April 2020

‘Subunit’ vaccines, which are composed of a SARS-CoV-2 protein, or a key fragment of one, often need an adjuvant — molecules added to boost the immune response. These might require ingredients that could become scarce during a pandemic.
RNA and DNA platforms may involve a simpler process — which is likely to make them easier to scale up.
In a pandemic, the last thing we want is for vaccines to be exclusively accessed by countries that make them and not be universally available.
[T]he production and purification of whole SARS-CoV-2 virus at high concentrations could require facilities with biosafety level 3 certification. These are scarce, Tapia says, and could be why very few companies say they are trying this approach.
  • Resources for coronavirus will also have to be balanced against the need for other vaccines. Manufacturing facilities around the world can churn out hundreds of millions of doses of influenza vaccine each year, and companies are used to stepping up production at times of high demand.
    But if billions of people need a new kind of vaccine for coronavirus, and firms continue making the normal array of shots against influenza, measles, mumps and rubella, and other diseases, there could be a production shortage, says David Heymann, an infectious-disease specialist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who heads a panel that advises the World Health Organization (WHO) on disease emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • The WHO says it is also working on a plan to ensure the equitable distribution of vaccines. But how that could be enforced in practice isn’t clear. “In a pandemic, the last thing we want is for vaccines to be exclusively accessed by countries that make them and not be universally available,” says Mariana Mazzucato, an economist who heads the University College London Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose.
    Supply constraints, both physical and political, are a “big worry”, agrees Seth Berkley, who heads GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance — a public–private non-profit organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, that aims to increase access to immunizations around the world.
  • If vaccines built from inactivated forms of SARS-CoV-2 prove most effective, it should be easier to estimate what it would take to churn out doses, because this industrial technology has been around since at least the 1950s, says Felipe Tapia, who studies bioprocess engineering at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems in Magdeburg, Germany. That said, the production and purification of whole SARS-CoV-2 virus at high concentrations could require facilities with biosafety level 3 certification. These are scarce, Tapia says, and could be why very few companies say they are trying this approach.
    At least a dozen companies are chasing the idea of injecting into the body formulations of RNA or DNA that would provoke our cells into making one of the proteins used by SARS-CoV-2. “RNA and DNA platforms may involve a simpler process — which is likely to make them easier to scale up,” says Charlie Weller, head of the vaccines programme at Wellcome, a London-based biomedical research funder. But no vaccine with this approach has yet been approved for any disease in humans.
  • Other elements in the manufacturing process might create bottlenecks. ‘Subunit’ vaccines, which are composed of a SARS-CoV-2 protein, or a key fragment of one, often need an adjuvant — molecules added to boost the immune response. These might require ingredients that could become scarce during a pandemic, such as specific lipids, says Jaap Venema, chief science officer of US Pharmacopeia (USP), a non-governmental organization in Rockville, Maryland, that helps to set drug-quality standards.
    Another idea to grow vaccines quickly is using plants. Cigarette giant British American Tobacco (BAT) said in April that it aims to grow vaccines (being developed by its subsidiary Kentucky BioProcessing) in fast-growing tobacco plants. But Venema says such plant-based vaccine products have extra regulatory hurdles to clear, including complying with rules for genetically modified organisms — which could make it very hard to fast-track the process.
  • But even if lots of vaccine is made, there seems to be no way to force countries to share it. During the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic, Australia was among the first to manufacture a vaccine, but did not immediately export it because it wanted vaccines for its citizens first, says Amesh Adalja of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore, Maryland. “Most countries have laws enacted that allow the government to force manufacturers to sell domestically, and I don’t see this changing,” he says.
  • It is possible that by the time a vaccine arrives, much of the world will already have been infected with the new coronavirus. Even in that case, however, many might want shots to boost immunity. And thinking ahead to ensure there’s enough manufacturing capacity for vaccines in any future epidemic is still vital, Yaqub says.
    “The concern for how to manufacture vaccines efficiently, reliably and safely is always going to be there,” he says, “even if we can’t get a coronavirus vaccine or we’ve managed to figure out other ways to deal with coronavirus.”

May 2020

In case anyone is wondering I strongly support the development and widespread adoption of a covid-19 vaccine and will take it as soon as it is widely available... ~Jimmy Wales
  • The coronavirus pandemic is a clear instance in which the whole world shares a common interest in developing and distributing a vaccine. This should mean that we have open research, where all findings are posted on the web as quickly as possible, so that they can build on them. Once a vaccine is developed we should want it spread throughout the world as quickly as possible at the lowest possible cost.
  • Polls show that the American people are extremely worried about contracting the virus. However, the government has a much bigger concern: that if they find a COVID-19 vaccine, China will copy it and distribute it for free. To many, it will not be immediately clear why it would be a problem for a manufacturing superpower, home to 1.4 billion people, to inoculate itself and others. But to the White House, this would be “stealing” a potential American innovation.
  • In the early 1950s, American scientist Jonas Salk pioneered a world-changing vaccine against polio, a deadly disease that tens of thousands of Americans contracted annually. Instead of patenting it and making a fortune, he insisted that his invention belonged to all of humanity. By 1994, polio was eradicated in North America. Yet 70 years later, the logic of capitalism dictates that where... there are enormous profits to be made, and anyone acting outside that system to reproduce a vaccine is not acting responsibly, but “stealing.”
  • Fortunately, it is possible to manufacture a vaccine that does not make use of aborted fetal cells. For instance, Sanofi-Pasteur is using its own recombinant DNA platform to produce its vaccine. They have created a DNA platform which utilizes insect cells, specifically the fall armyworm, as its base. The technology produces an exact genetic match to proteins found on the surface of the virus, which could enable the introduction of a vaccine even faster than one produced traditionally. Debi Vinnedge, commenting on the Sanofi process, stated: “This is great news for millions of people world-wide who are concerned with the use of aborted fetal material in life-saving treatments or vaccines. There is a multitude of moral options that are safer and quite frankly, utilize more modern technology.”
    While the vaccines are still in the development and/or trial stage, life-affirming people should discourage pharmaceutical companies from utilizing fetal cell strains and our government from supporting such development.
  • Although we have been focused specifically on the COVID-19 vaccine, the ethical implications of the use of aborted fetal cells are long-reaching. Each medical benefit or scientific advance gained through the use of fetal tissue desensitizes the beneficiaries, scientists, and doctors to the original evil act that produced these cells. Aborted fetal tissues used in laboratories are minimized and treated merely as “human cells,” and the human beings whose lives were taken to provide those cells become irrelevant. The greatest concern is that desensitization will erroneously validate elective abortions, so much so that they will be perceived in the scientific community as a societal “good.” Absent careful oversight, the unborn could become, like fetal tissue cell lines, merely cells, cultured within the uterus of a woman to be used for scientific exploration.
  • Anglicans for Life believes that every human being is created in the image of God and has value from the moment of conception. Abortion, and anything that fosters or encourages abortion, is morally illicit and must be resisted. Therefore, all people of good conscience, even during this pandemic, have the responsibility to voice opposition to the use of fetal tissue from elective abortions in the creation of a vaccine, in order to promote the development of ethical alternatives and to affirm the value of all human life.
    To that end, AFL encourages you to contact the U. S. Food and Drug Administration and urge them to ensure that vaccines developed to combat the COVID-19 are not “morally compromised” by any connection to cell lines created from the remains of aborted babies.
  • As soon as the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 was posted online in January, three groups began independently working on adenoviral vector vaccines for COVID-19: CanSino Biologics, the University of Oxford, and Johnson & Johnson. All three teams are chock full of vaccine veterans, and their COVID-19 programs have garnered global attention for their scale and speed.
    Many scientists believe that a COVID-19 vaccine will be needed to stop the spread of the coronavirus and end the pandemic, which has claimed more than 270,000 lives so far. Over the past 4 months, more than 100 groups have joined the race to develop COVID-19 vaccines. Their efforts cover a spectrum of technologies, including conventional, inactivated viruses and new, unproven technologies like messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines.
  • Compared with some of the newer, experimental technologies—such as Moderna’s mRNA vaccine, which was the first to enter human trials in the US—adenoviral vectors are touted as a more tried-and-true approach. J&J calls its adenoviral vector platform a “proven” technology. While adenoviral vectors have been tested in far more people than mRNA vaccines, the technology is used in only one commercial vaccine today: a rabies vaccine used to immunize wild animals. So far, no adenoviral vector vaccines have demonstrated they can prevent disease in humans.
  • And while most vaccine scientists agree that adenoviral vector vaccines are great at spurring T-cell immunity, they disagree on how important that will be for preventing COVID-19. Most research has focused on the immune system’s antibody response to the virus. Adenoviral vector vaccines can induce antibody responses, but they’re usually not as strong as those elicited by more traditional vaccines.
  • In case anyone is wondering I strongly support the development and widespread adoption of a covid-19 vaccine and will take it as soon as it is widely available... I don't think I should be in the first wave to take it as that should be people more vulnerable or more likely to be spreaders... I think that's right. [replying to comment: "it should go to health care workers first"]. I'm not an expert. I just know that I'm healthy and safe at home, so it will be more helpful for others to go first. But I'm eager to take it!

June 2020

  • Within days of the first confirmed novel coronavirus case in the United States on 20 January, antivaccine activists were already hinting on Twitter that the virus was a scam—part of a plot to profit from an eventual vaccine... Recent polls have found as few as 50% of people in the United States are committed to receiving a vaccine, with another quarter wavering... In France, 26% said they wouldn’t get a coronavirus vaccine... Even before the pandemic, public health agencies around the world were struggling to counter increasingly sophisticated efforts to turn people against vaccines. With vaccination rates against measles and other infectious diseases falling in some locations, the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2019 listed “vaccine hesitancy” as one of 10 major global health threats.
  • The details of the contracts come just days after the Trump administration faced backlash from consumer groups for refusing to require Gilead to charge a reasonable price for its Covid-19 treatment remdesivir. On Monday, as Common Dreams reported, Gilead announced it will charge U.S. hospitals around $3,120 per privately insured patient for a treatment course of remdesivir, which was developed with the help of at least $70.5 million in taxpayer funding. "Allowing Gilead to set the terms during a pandemic represents a colossal failure of leadership by the Trump administration," Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen's Access to Medicines Program, said in a statement Monday. "The U.S. government has authority and a responsibility to steward the technology it helped develop."
  • Noting that U.S. taxpayers have contributed billions of dollars to help develop a Covid-19 vaccine, the Vermont senator (Bernie Sanders) asked the panel: "Would you agree with me that after that kind of investment we should make sure that every American, every person in this country, can get a vaccine regardless of their income?" National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci, CDC chief Dr. Robert Redfield, FDA commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn, and Assistant Secretary for Health Adm. Brett Giroir, each answered in the affirmative.

July 2020

A cooperative approach to developing vaccines is important because developing vaccines is an inherently risky undertaking... Only about 7 percent of vaccines in the early stages of development are successful, and only 17 percent of those that reach trials on humans end up being successful, according to figures compiled by GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance.
This devastating pandemic, with all its worldwide chaos and horror, has at the same time created a perfect alignment of technology, science, need, and opportunity. The global impact of Covid-19 could change science forever...Let’s Not Waste It, Jane Metcalfe
  • The United States has bought up virtually all stocks of a drug shown to reduce the recovery time of COVID-19 patients... Remdesivir – an anti-viral drug first developed to tackle Ebola – has been approved for use treating coronavirus in the UK and the US after trials suggested it could cut recovery time by around four days... it will charge $2,340 (£1,900) for a typical treatment course for people in the U.S. and other developed countries... Critics in the U.S. attacked the price because taxpayers have funded much of the drug’s development.
  • It does raise two very important questions: what is a fair price for a drug, and what is fair access to a drug, and those are common issues but are particularly important in a global crisis like this. That’s part of the fair access question ― the trial that gave the result that allowed Remdesivir to sell their drug wasn’t just done in the U.S. There were patients participating through other European countries, in the U.K. as well, and internationally ― Mexico and other places... And I wonder how they would feel knowing now that the drug is going to have restricted availability in their own country and would they have volunteered for that trial if they had known that?
  • This vaccine will be needed by 8 billion people. What happens to poor countries who cannot afford to pay the prices that they'll be charging in the rich countries? Happy to sign, pledge your support http://vaccinecommongood.org
  • Today we envision a vaccine within two years, and for frontline health care workers, probably much sooner. It’s remarkable how fast science can happen when everyone is focused on the same problem. This devastating pandemic, with all its worldwide chaos and horror, has at the same time created a perfect alignment of technology, science, need, and opportunity. The global impact of Covid-19 could change science forever.
  • The race for a COVID-19 vaccine is setting off a different kind of competition in Washington: Who will get it first?... Trump administration officials have signaled they will take a “tiered approach” to giving out the vaccine when it is ready and said that, depending on the results of clinical trials, high-risk individuals, people with pre-existing health conditions, and front-line health care workers will be prioritized. After those groups, it’s anyone’s guess. “Will it be people at highest risk? Will it be people who are key to spreading and transmission? Will it be politically effective lobby groups? Will it be people who can pay the most for it?” said Barry Bloom, a research professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

September 2020

  • The long-term evidence of safety is going to be limited because these vaccines are going to have only 6 months or 5 months of data. So, we’re working super hard on a very active pharmacovigilance system, to make sure that when the vaccines are introduced that we’ll absolutely continue to assess their safety.

October 2020

  • The virus can actually disrupt the immune system. In August, Shiv Pillai, an immunologist on the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts common hospital, examined tissue taken from useless Covid-19 sufferers. He seemed for constructions known as “germinal centres” within the spleen and lymph nodes. These are the place B-cells go to develop antibodies earlier than they’re saved within the immune system’s reminiscence. Pillai failed to find any, suggesting the sufferers have been unable to generate extremely efficient, long-lasting antibodies that might battle the virus for years.
    He believes the identical drawback might come up in individuals with milder Covid-19 too. “If we want antibodies that will persist for a few years and protect us, it’s not clear that’s going to happen,” he mentioned. The excellent news is {that a} vaccine shouldn’t trigger the identical drawback because the virus. “I don’t see why the vaccines won’t work. They may not be fantastic, but I believe that’s what’s going to protect us,” he mentioned.
  • Immunotherapy is considered as an effective method for the prophylaxis and treatment of various infectious diseases and cancers, which involves the artificial triggering of the immune system to elicit the immune response (Masihi, 2001). A vaccine that elicits the production of S protein neutralizing antibodies in the vaccinated subjects is the primary aim of all the programs for COVID-19 vaccines. Studies have revealed that there is a limited to no cross-neutralization between the sera of SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2, indicating that recovery from one infection may not shield against the other (Ou et al., 2020). Furthermore, a database of approximately 5500 full-length genomes of SARS-CoV-2 isolated from various countries is now available at NCBI which facilitates delineating the polymorphisms in S protein and other important proteins of the virus concerning vaccine development. The rationale for writing this review is to gather all the information about the COVID-19 vaccine development programs and give the readers and researchers insight into types of vaccines being worked upon and the current status of the clinical trials of these vaccines for ready reference.
“Senescence is really a key factor in ageing,” says Eric Verdin, president and chief executive of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, California, who is not involved in the fisetin research. No senolytics have currently been approved for clinical treatment, however. “This is one area that has been much less studied,” he says.
Kaeberlein says it’s likely that most companies will pursue anti-ageing drugs as therapies before they test them as prophylactics. “It’s much easier to get a therapy approved in people who are already sick,” he says. He thinks that mTOR inhibitors hold the most promise. “If I had the power to go back to the beginning of this whole COVID pandemic and try one thing, I’d pick mTOR inhibitors — rapamycin specifically,” he says.
  • Scientists have known for decades that ageing immune systems can leave the body prone to infection and weaken their response to vaccines. In June, the US Food and Drug Administration announced that a COVID-19 vaccine would have to protect at least half the vaccinated individuals to be considered effective, but protection in older adults might not even meet that bar. “No vaccine is going to be as effective in the elderly as it is in young people,” says Matt Kaeberlein, a gerontologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. “That’s an almost certainty.”
  • With about 50 COVID-19 vaccine candidates currently being tested in humans, researchers say it’s not yet clear how they will fare in older adults. In its phase I study of 40 people aged 56 and over, Moderna in Cambridge, Massachusetts, reported that its candidate mRNA-1273 elicited similar antibody levels as those elicited in a younger age group1. The Chinese biotech Sinovac in Beijing, which trialled its CoronaVac candidate in a phase I/II study that included 421 adults between 60 and 89 years of age, announced in a press release on 9 September that it seems to work as well in older adults as it does in younger ones. However, a phase I study by international pharma company Pfizer and BioNTech in Mainz, Germany, showed that their vaccine BNT162b2 provokes an immune response that is about half as strong in older adults as it is in younger ones2. The older adults still produced more antibodies in response to the vaccine than people of a similar age who had had COVID-19, but it’s not known how these levels translate into protection from the virus.
  • Carolyn Bramante, an obesity researcher who led the University of Minnesota study, points out that diseases such as diabetes and obesity lead to some of the same immune deficits as occur in older age. She and her colleagues plan to launch a trial of 1,500 people aged 30 and over to determine whether metformin could help stave off SARS-CoV-2 infection or prevent the worst outcomes in people already infected.
    Meanwhile, Jenna Bartley, who studies ageing at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, is assessing whether metformin can boost responses to flu vaccine in a small trial of older adults. The idea, based on her work in mice, is that metformin can improve the energy metabolism of the T cells of the immune system, making them better at detecting new threats. Bartley has finished collecting data, but because her lab was shut down owing to COVID-19, she won’t have the results analysed for a few more weeks.
  • Another class of drug, called senolytics, helps to purge the body of cells that have stopped dividing but won’t die. These senescent cells are typically cleared by the immune system, but as the body ages, they begin to accumulate, ramping up inflammation. In August, Kirkland and a team at the Mayo Clinic launched a 70-person trial to test whether a senolytic called fisetin, which is found in strawberries and sold as a health supplement, can curb progression of COVID-19 in adults aged 60 or older. They also plan to test whether fisetin can prevent COVID-19 infection in nursing-home residents.
    “Senescence is really a key factor in ageing,” says Eric Verdin, president and chief executive of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, California, who is not involved in the fisetin research. No senolytics have currently been approved for clinical treatment, however. “This is one area that has been much less studied,” he says.
  • Kaeberlein says it’s likely that most companies will pursue anti-ageing drugs as therapies before they test them as prophylactics. “It’s much easier to get a therapy approved in people who are already sick,” he says. He thinks that mTOR inhibitors hold the most promise. “If I had the power to go back to the beginning of this whole COVID pandemic and try one thing, I’d pick mTOR inhibitors — rapamycin specifically,” he says. According to his back-of-the-envelope calculations, if rapamycin works in the same way in people as it does in mice, it could reduce COVID-19 mortality by 90%.
When Jesús Ojino Sosa-García looks out over the people being treated for COVID-19 in his hospital’s intensive-care unit, one feature stands out: “Obesity is the most important factor we see,” he says.
Adipose tissue seems to work like a reservoir of the virus. ~ Gianluca Iacobellis
  • When Jesús Ojino Sosa-García looks out over the people being treated for COVID-19 in his hospital’s intensive-care unit, one feature stands out: “Obesity is the most important factor we see,” he says.
    Sosa-García works at Hospital Médica Sur in Mexico City, which has been battling a COVID-19 outbreak for six months. “Every day, we receive patients,” he says. And many of those showing up with severe cases come from Mexico’s growing population of obese individuals — currently 36% of adults. Sosa-García and his colleagues checked the stats early in the pandemic and they were already indicating an imbalance: half of the 32 people admitted to his hospital’s intensive-care unit with severe COVID-19 before 3 May were obese.
    Sosa-García is optimistic that a coronavirus vaccine will arrive soon to dampen the pandemic. But for Mexico and many other countries with a burgeoning population of people with high body mass indices (BMIs), some researchers fear that a vaccine might not be the panacea Sosa-García is hoping for. Obesity correlates with a dulled immune response to COVID-19. And vaccines for a handful of other conditions often don’t work as well in obese people, suggesting that a shot for COVID-19 might not provide as much protection as researchers would like. “We worry about that,” says Donna Ryan, who has studied obesity at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
  • When Xu submitted her study to an academic journal in March, the editors urged her to alert the World Health Organization about her findings. Since then, studies have poured in from countries around the world reaching the same conclusion: those who are obese are more likely to die from COVID-19 than are those of normal weight, even when factors such as diabetes and hypertension are taken into account.
    There are a slew of possible reasons. People with higher BMIs are more difficult to care for. It can be challenging to put a tube down their airway when hooking them up to a ventilator, for example. They can also have reduced lung capacity.
    Then there are the more-hidden, molecular possibilities. Insulin resistance makes it difficult for the body to respond normally to sugar and can precede diabetes. It is more common in those with high BMIs and could exacerbate the metabolic effects of coronavirus infection. And adipose tissue expresses relatively high levels of the ACE2 (angiotensin-converting enzyme 2) receptor that SARS-CoV-2 uses to gain entry into cells. “Adipose tissue seems to work like a reservoir of the virus,” says Gianluca Iacobellis, an endocrinologist at the University of Miami in Florida.
  • Obesity can cause chronic, low-grade inflammation, which is thought to contribute to the increased risk of conditions such as diabetes and heart disease. As a result, people who are obese might have higher levels of a variety of immune-regulating proteins, including cytokines. The immune responses unleashed by cytokines can damage healthy tissue in some cases of severe COVID-19, says Milena Sokolowska, who studies immunology and respiratory diseases at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. And the constant state of immune stimulation can, paradoxically, weaken some immune responses, including those launched by T cells, which can directly kill infected cells. “I would say they are more exhausted at the start in their fight with infection,” says Sokolowska.
    Preliminary evidence suggests that SARS-CoV-2 infections linger for about five days longer in people who are obese than in those who are lean, says endocrinologist Daniel Drucker of the Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, Canada. “That would imply that these people are having trouble clearing the infection,” he says. “They may have trouble mounting normal viral defences.”
  • Obesity is also linked to less-diverse populations of microbes in the gut, nose and lung, with altered compositions and metabolic functions compared with those in lean individuals. Gut microbes can influence the immune responses to pathogens — and to vaccines, says Sokolowska. Last year, for example, researchers reported that the changes to the gut microbiome that come with taking antibiotics alter responses to a flu vaccine.
    All this could spell trouble for a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, when it arrives, particularly in the growing list of countries with obesity problems. According to the latest data from the World Health Organization, about 13% of the world’s adults are obese. Ryan points to studies of vaccines against influenza, hepatitis B and rabies, which have shown reduced responses in those who are obese compared with those who are lean. “With influenza, we’re seeing that vaccination does not work well in those who are obese,” says Xu. “We don’t have the data yet on coronavirus.”

November 2020

The ultra-low storage conditions are so unprecedented that in order to be successful it has to be a perfectly orchestrated and choreographed dance. ~ Soumi Saha
It’s another good example of how all our rural hospitals are at the end of a supply chain with less leverage to make important purchases. It’s the wild west of the supply chain; that’s not how you fight a pandemic. ~ Tim Size
Pfizer/BioNTech’s vaccine candidate is stable at minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit, which is colder than an Antarctic winter. ~ Theresa Machemer
  • To make their vaccine, Novavax scientists first used a baculovirus to insert the gene for the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein into moth cells, which produced the spikes on their cell membranes. Scientists then harvested the spike proteins and mixed them with a synthetic soaplike particle in which the spikes embed. A compound derived from trees serves as an immune-boosting adjuvant.
    As a 34-year-old graduate student at Texas A&M University in 1983, Smith, with colleagues, had developed a system that could produce proteins in big quantities. The researchers started with an insect-infecting virus called a baculovirus, which had the virtue of a roomy genome that can accommodate large chunks of foreign DNA. The researchers inserted a gene for a human immune protein, interferon, into the virus and then used it to infect cells from the caterpillar form of a pest called the fall armyworm moth. The virus transferred the gene to the moth cells, which duly secreted human interferon.
    Back then, edi-tors of major journals had little interest in the discovery and repeatedly rejected Smith’s paper, which found a home in an obscure new journal, Molecular and Cellular Biology. But today the system is widely used in biotechnology. Now, it is at work producing the Novavax vaccine at a plant owned by a contractor in Morrisville, North Carolina, and soon, it’s expected, at other plants owned or contracted by Novavax in Europe, the United States, and Asia.
  • The government of the United Kingdom soon signed up to buy 60 million doses of Novavax’s vac-cine, and the big drugmaker Takeda licensed it to manufacture at scale with funding from the Japanese government. Other scientists noted strong results in a dozen monkeys injected with various doses of Novavax’s vaccine and then infected with live coronavirus. The virus failed entirely to multiply in the animals’ noses and replicated in the lungs of just one monkey that received the lowest dose; that animal shut down the infection after 4 days.
    “It’s the only vaccine I’ve seen out of all the candidates that are further down the pipeline that actually had no viral replication in the nasal swabs of vaccinated an-imals,” says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University. That’s important, she says, because stopping viral replication in the nose can reduce the spread of infection among people who may be unaware they are sick. But she cautions that monkeys are not people. “We can’t really conclude that this vaccine is going to be better in practice until we have some reliable safety and efficacy data in people.”
  • If the CDC was worried about a shortage of ultra-cold freezers, it hasn’t happened yet. One company, Helmer, reached capacity and now can’t deliver new freezers until March but, for the most part, suppliers are delivering ultra-cold freezers in two to six weeks, said Behlim. Much like for vaccines, though, the distribution of ultra-cold freezers isn’t even across the country. One local Wisconsin hospital looked into acquiring freezers, said Size, but was told delivery would take two to three months. Larger hospitals with the budgets for multiple purchases come first, he said.
    “It’s another good example of how all our rural hospitals are at the end of a supply chain with less leverage to make important purchases,” he said. “It’s the wild west of the supply chain; that’s not how you fight a pandemic.”
  • We just announced that mRNA-1273, our COVID-19 vaccine candidate, has met its primary efficacy endpoint in the first interim analysis of the Phase 3 COVE study.
    • Moderna Inc via, tweet published November 16, 2020
  • Oxfam America’s (Abby) Maxman told IPS the exciting news about vaccines is providing hope of getting out of this global nightmare, but the scientific breakthrough is only part of the equation. Equally important, she said, is making sure every single person on this planet can get it as soon as possible. But at the moment, rich countries, including the US, are already hoarding more than half of the vaccines to be developed by the companies with the leading five vaccine candidates. “With only 4% of the world’s population, the US has already reserved almost 50% of the Pfizer’s total expected supply in 2021. That’s why Oxfam is calling for a people’s vaccine: a global public good, freely and fairly available to all, prioritizing those most in need here at home and around the world”. To protect everyone no matter their wealth or nationality, corporations with the leading candidates for an effective COVID-19 vaccine must commit to openly sharing their vaccine technology to enable billions of doses to be made as soon as possible at the lowest possible price, Maxman declared.

December 2020

The Canadian public are assuming that all of this happened at record speed and every conceivable corner was cut. ~ Kerry Bowman
Developing the vaccines and getting them licensed is like building base camp at the bottom of Everest. And actually getting to the peak - (that) is the delivery part. ~ Kate O’Brien
With this net-work capacity, whether you live in Chicago, Illinois or Murdo, South Dakota, we're able to ensure time definite deliveries of these shipments and we feel very confident in our capabilities in this regard. This is what our network was built to do. ~ Richard Smith
Once it leaves the deep freezers of Pfizer, it has a limited time before it needs to be in somebody's arm. ~ Hani Mahmassani
  • "The Pfizer vaccine requires us to provide the vaccine at the site where it is delivered," provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry said Wednesday. "That will be the case for the first few weeks of this program, which means we need to bring people to the vaccine instead of the vaccine to the people at this point."
  • Mahmassani says the challenge is not just in quickly putting together a global supply chain for billions of vials of vaccines, but what's particularly challenging is that the first vaccine in line for authorization, developed by Pfizer, must be stored and shipped at temperatures of minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit (-70 Celsius), otherwise it will go bad.
    "So that requires speed in moving but it also requires a sort of minimizing the number of hand-offs because it has a limited shelf-life," Mahmassani says. "Once it leaves the deep freezers of Pfizer, it has a limited time before it needs to be in somebody's arm."
    That means transporting the vaccines "essentially, you know, it has to be seamless. You can't miss a beat. Otherwise you're losing very valuable product," Mahmassani adds.
    And when transporting vaccines hundreds or thousands of miles from coast to coast or overseas, there's one mode of transportation in particular that stands out — air travel.
    "There's no replacing the speed of an airplane," says Chris Busch, managing director of Cargo in the Americas for United Airlines.
  • Dr. Kate O'Brien, Director of WHO's Department of Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals, compares the monumental task ahead to climbing the world's tallest mountain.
    "Developing the vaccines and getting them licensed is like building base camp at the bottom of Everest," O'Brien said at a recent WHO Q&A session. "And actually getting to the peak - (that) is the delivery part."
    In other words, O'Brien suggests developing COVID-19 vaccines in record time was relatively easy, but when it comes to transporting and distributing those vaccines, "There is going to be a struggle, frankly, in every country, about how to do this quickly."
  • [T]he major players in transporting and distributing vaccines will be companies like UPS and FedEx, especially once the vaccines are on the ground.
    "We have the capability to serve every zip code in the United States of America. We do it every day," FedEx Express executive Richard Smith told senators Thursday in hearing on the logistics of transporting the coronavirus vaccines.
    "With this net-work capacity, whether you live in Chicago, Illinois or Murdo, South Dakota, we're able to ensure time definite deliveries of these shipments and we feel very confident in our capabilities in this regard," Smith said. "This is what our network was built to do."

1. As the Instruction Dignitas Personae states, in cases where cells from aborted fetuses are employed to create cell lines for use in scientific research, “there exist differing degrees of responsibility” of cooperation in evil. For example,“in organizations where cell lines of illicit origin are being utilized, the responsibility of those who make the decision to use them is not the same as that of those who have no voice in such a decision”.
2. In this sense, when ethically irreproachable Covid-19 vaccines are not available (e.g. in countries where vaccines without ethical problems are not made available to physicians and patients, or where their distribution is more difficult due to special storage and transport conditions, or when various types of vaccines are distributed in the same country but health authorities do not allow citizens to choose the vaccine with which to be inoculated) it is morally acceptable to receive Covid-19 vaccines that have used cell lines from aborted fetuses in their research and production process.
3. The fundamental reason for considering the use of these vaccines morally licit is that the kind of cooperation in evil (passive material cooperation) in the procured abortion from which these cell lines originate is, on the part of those making use of the resulting vaccines, remote. The moral duty to avoid such passive material cooperation is not obligatory if there is a grave danger, such as the otherwise uncontainable spread of a serious pathological agent--in this case, the pandemic spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19. It must therefore be considered that, in such a case, all vaccinations recognized as clinically safe and effective can be used in good conscience with the certain knowledge that the use of such vaccines does not constitute formal cooperation with the abortion from which the cells used in production of the vaccines derive. It should be emphasized, however, that the morally licit use of these types of vaccines, in the particular conditions that make it so, does not in itself constitute a legitimation, even indirect, of the practice of abortion, and necessarily assumes the opposition to this practice by those who make use of these vaccines.
4. In fact, the licit use of such vaccines does not and should not in any way imply that there is a moral endorsement of the use of cell lines proceeding from aborted fetuses. Both pharmaceutical companies and governmental health agencies are therefore encouraged to produce, approve, distribute and offer ethically acceptable vaccines that do not create problems of conscience for either health care providers or the people to be vaccinated.
5. At the same time, practical reason makes evident that vaccination is not, as a rule, a moral obligation and that, therefore, it must be voluntary. In any case, from the ethical point of view, the morality of vaccination depends not only on the duty to protect one's own health, but also on the duty to pursue the common good. In the absence of other means to stop or even prevent the epidemic, the common good may recommend vaccination, especially to protect the weakest and most exposed. Those who, however, for reasons of conscience, refuse vaccines produced with cell lines from aborted fetuses, must do their utmost to avoid, by other prophylactic means and appropriate behavior, becoming vehicles for the transmission of the infectious agent. In particular, they must avoid any risk to the health of those who cannot be vaccinated for medical or other reasons, and who are the most vulnerable.
6. Finally, there is also a moral imperative for the pharmaceutical industry, governments and international organizations to ensure that vaccines, which are effective and safe from a medical point of view, as well as ethically acceptable, are also accessible to the poorest countries in a manner that is not costly for them. The lack of access to vaccines, otherwise, would become another sign of discrimination and injustice that condemns poor countries to continue living in health, economic and social poverty.

[T]he finish line is in sight. So we’ve just got to keep on running. American people, we need you to keep on running. We’re going to get there. ~ Jerome Adams
It shows how fast vaccine development can proceed when there is a true global emergency and sufficient resources. It has shown that the development process can be accelerated substantially without compromising on safety. ~ Dan Barouch
With large sums given to vaccine firms by public funders and private philanthropists, “they could do preclinical and phase I, II and III trials, as well as manufacturing, in parallel instead of sequentially”, says Rino Rappuoli.
  • When scientists began seeking a vaccine for the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in early 2020, they were careful not to promise quick success. The fastest any vaccine had previously been developed, from viral sampling to approval, was four years, for mumps in the 1960s. To hope for one even by the summer of 2021 seemed highly optimistic.
    But by the start of December, the developers of several vaccines had announced excellent results in large trials, with more showing promise. And on 2 December, a vaccine made by drug giant Pfizer with German biotech firm BioNTech, became the first fully-tested immunization to be approved for emergency use.
    That speed of advance “challenges our whole paradigm of what is possible in vaccine development”, says Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida in Gainesville. It’s tempting to hope that other vaccines might now be made on a comparable timescale. These are sorely needed: diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and pneumonia together kill millions of people a year, and researchers anticipate further lethal pandemics, too.
    The COVID-19 experience will almost certainly change the future of vaccine science, says Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. “It shows how fast vaccine development can proceed when there is a true global emergency and sufficient resources,” he says. New ways of making vaccines, such as by using messenger RNA (mRNA), have been validated by the COVID-19 response, he adds. “It has shown that the development process can be accelerated substantially without compromising on safety.”
  • “A lot went into the mRNA platform that we have today,” says immunologist Akiko Iwasaki at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, who has worked on nucleic-acid vaccines — those based on lengths of DNA or RNA — for more than two decades. The basic research on DNA vaccines began at least 25 years ago, and RNA vaccines have benefited from 10–15 years of strong research, she says, some aimed at developing cancer vaccines. The approach has matured just at the right time; five years ago, the RNA technology would not have been ready.
    For instance, researchers at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in Bethesda, Maryland, knew from their research on MERS and SARS that it was best to tune the RNA sequence to stabilize the resulting spike protein in the form it adopts before it docks with a host cell. “If you can trap it in its original pre-fusion state, it becomes a much better vaccine antigen,” says Barney Graham, deputy director of NIAID’s vaccine research centre. That work gave the NIAID team, which worked with Moderna, a head start once SARS-CoV-2 was sequenced in January. “The fact that people had been paying close attention to coronaviruses really allowed this whole process to accelerate,” says Dean.
  • With large sums given to vaccine firms by public funders and private philanthropists, “they could do preclinical and phase I, II and III trials, as well as manufacturing, in parallel instead of sequentially”, says Rino Rappuoli, chief scientist at GlaxoSmithKline’s vaccines division in Siena, Italy. This meant that companies could gamble on starting large-scale testing and manufacturing of candidates that might not work out. “It was totally de-risking the entire development process,” says Kampmann.
    The vaccine science would not have produced such fast results without this funding, she says. “It didn’t happen with Ebola, which was devastating communities in Africa [in 2014–16]” — and Ebola vaccines accordingly took longer to develop. The money only materialized this time because all countries, including wealthy ones, faced economic devastation: suggesting that the development of future vaccines, including for existing diseases such as malaria, will not be as speedy. “Unless you put in the money, there’s no way to accelerate,” says Rappuoli.
    Virologist Peter Hotez at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, suggests that large pharmaceutical companies might have been motivated not just by the desire to stop the pandemic, but also by the opportunity for governments to fund their research and development. With public investment of around US$10 billion, the US Operation Warp Speed vaccine programme “represents the largest government stimulus package the pharma companies have ever seen”, says Hotez.
    The impetus didn’t all come from the urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic itself. Previous infectious and lethal viruses have motivated the creation of national and global infrastructures that can promote faster vaccine development. The Ebola and Zika outbreaks saw the beginning of better global coordination in how to respond to an infectious-disease crisis, Graham says. “If SARS in 2002 had spread like this, we wouldn’t have had the vaccine technology or the coordinated systems, and we’d have had a much more difficult time,” he says.
  • The COVID-19 pandemic should see some permanent changes in vaccine development. For a start, it might establish the use of mRNA vaccines — which hadn’t previously been approved for general use in people — as a speedy approach for other diseases. “This technology is revolutionizing vaccinology,” says Kampmann. Candidate mRNA vaccines can be chemically synthesized in a few days, in contrast to the more complicated biotechnology involved in producing proteins in cells. “The technology lends itself to the nimble plug-and-play approach that will be required to respond to [future] pandemics,” Kampmann says.
    What’s more, “RNA simplifies the manufacturing a lot,” says Rappuoli. “You can use the same facility to make RNA for different diseases. That decreases the investment required.” Companies should also be ramping up their manufacturing capacities because they still have to make vaccines for measles, polio and other diseases even as they produce COVID-19 immunizations. That could help to meet demand in future.
  • The large clinical trials for COVID-19 vaccines, and others in development, should provide data that are more widely useful for understanding immune responses, says Hotez. “Given all the different technologies, and detailed information collected on clinical volunteer demographics, antibody and cellular responses, we might learn as much or more from human vaccine responses this year than in previous decades. Human vaccinology could make a quantum leap.”
    Still, other vaccines can probably only be developed at a comparable speed when infection levels are high — making it possible to run massive trials relatively quickly — and with huge amounts of funding. And other viruses might be harder to target than SARS-CoV-2 turned out to be.
    That’s why we need to know more about all families of viruses, say researchers. There are at least 24 other virus families that can infect humans, says Graham. Rather than waiting to sink resources into fighting the next virus that pops up, money would be better spent now setting up systems to monitor all these viruses and to generate data on prototype infections in each of these families, he says.
  • The entire WORLD is being badly hurt by the China Virus, but if you listen to the Fake News Lamestream Media, and Big Tech, you would think that we are the only one. No, but we are the Country that developed vaccines, and years ahead of schedule!
  • Anaphylactic reactions can occur with any vaccine, but are usually extremely rare—about one per 1 million doses. As of 19 December, the United States had seen six cases of anaphylaxis among 272,001 people who received the COVID-19 vaccine, according to a recent presentation by Thomas Clark of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); the United Kingdom has recorded two. Because the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines use a new platform, the reactions call for careful scrutiny, says Elizabeth Phillips, a drug hypersensitivity researcher at Vanderbilt University Medical Center who attended an NIAID meeting on 16 December. “This is new.”
    News reports about the allergic reactions have already created anxiety. “Patients with severe allergies in the US are getting nervous about the possibility that they may not be able to get vaccinated, at least with those two vaccines,” Togias wrote in an invitation to meeting participants. “Allergies in general are so common in the population that this could create a resistance against the vaccines in the population,” adds Janos Szebeni, an immunologist at Semmelweis University in Budapest, Hungary, who has long studied hypersensitivity reactions to PEG and who also attended the 16 December gathering.
  • Jonas Salk’s vaccine helped wipe polio from most of the world, something that many people hope will happen with the coronavirus vaccine. However, Salk warns eradicating polio from the United States was a long and difficult journey, and he doesn’t expect eliminating COVID-19 will be any easier.
    “It’s going to be a long road, just even getting enough vaccines out to people around the world ... this virus does not respect borders,” said Salk, a doctor and a part-time professor of infectious diseases at the University of Pittsburgh, where his father developed the polio vaccine. “It travels by airplane everywhere in the world and unless this virus can be contained everywhere, it’s going to continue to spread and be a problem.”

2021

January 2021

  • The first vaccines for prevention of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in the United States were authorized for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) (1) and recommended by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) in December 2020. However, demand for COVID-19 vaccines is expected to exceed supply during the first months of the national COVID-19 vaccination program. ACIP advises CDC on population groups and circumstances for vaccine use.† On December 1, ACIP recommended that 1) health care personnel and 2) residents of long-term care facilities be offered COVID-19 vaccination first, in Phase 1a of the vaccination program (2). On December 20, 2020, ACIP recommended that in Phase 1b, vaccine should be offered to persons aged ≥75 years and frontline essential workers (non-health care workers), and that in Phase 1c, persons aged 65-74 years, persons aged 16-64 years with high-risk medical conditions, and essential workers not recommended for vaccination in Phase 1b should be offered vaccine. These recommendations for phased allocation provide guidance for federal, state, and local jurisdictions while vaccine supply is limited. In its deliberations, ACIP considered scientific evidence regarding COVID-19 epidemiology, ethical principles, and vaccination program implementation considerations. ACIP's recommendations for COVID-19 vaccine allocation are interim and might be updated based on changes in conditions of FDA Emergency Use Authorization, FDA authorization for new COVID-19 vaccines, changes in vaccine supply, or changes in COVID-19 epidemiology.
  • The coronavirus vaccines do have side effects — but that doesn't mean they're harmful. It actually means they're working. We know from Pfizer's clinical trials that short-term side effects occurred with-in 24 to 48 hours, especially after the second dose. Sixteen percent of people ages 18 to 55 and 11 per-cent of people over 55 reported fevers after the second dose. Even more people reported having fatigue, headaches and joint pain. (The Covid-19 vaccine hasn't yet been approved for children under 16.)
  • I've also heard of concerns that the vaccine may cause cancer in the long term, particularly from anti-vaxxers worried about what other ingredients in the vaccines can do. First, unlike non-mRNA-based vaccines, Covid-19 vaccines don't contain other components. Second, mRNA-based vaccines can't make changes to the human genome and therefore are extremely unlikely to induce new genetic mutations in the cells of the kind that lead to cancer.
  • The study showed that between the fifth day and the 12th day after receiving the first vaccine dose, there were no differences between the vaccinated group and the non-vaccinated group: the rate of positive tests for the SARS-CoV-2 in the two groups was similar. In other words: no difference in infection rates was observed between those who were vaccinated and those who were not vaccinated.
  • Earlier WHO chief Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said "vaccine nationalism" could lead to a "protracted recovery".
    Speaking at the Davos Agenda - a virtual version of the global summit - he said vaccine hoarding would "keep the pandemic burning and... slow global economic recovery", in addition to being a "catastrophic moral failure" that could further widen global inequality.
  • With the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in December found that protection doesn't start until 12 days after the first shot and that it reaches 52% effectiveness a few weeks later. A week after the second vaccination, the effectiveness rate hits 95%. In its application for authorization, Moderna reported a protection rate of 51% two weeks after the first immunization and 94% two weeks after the second dose.
    "That's not 100%," says Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and a member of the Food and Drug Administration's vaccine advisory board. "That means one out of every 20 people who get this vaccine could still get moderate to severe infection."
  • Before approving the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, the FDA asked the vaccine manufacturers only whether their products protect people from COVID-19 symptoms. They didn't ask if the vaccines stop people who've been vaccinated from nevertheless spreading the virus to others. The emergency authorizations by the FDA that have allowed distribution of the two new vaccines cite only their ability to keep you — the person vaccinated — from becoming severely sick with COVID-19.
    In the words of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "Experts need to understand more about the protection that COVID-19 vaccines provide before deciding to change recommendations on steps everyone should take to slow the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19."
  • Here's how that might work: Let's say you've been vaccinated and you encounter SARS-CoV-2. You're much less likely to develop symptoms — that's clear. But your immune system may not fight off the virus completely — it might allow some viruses to survive and reproduce and get expelled from your nose or mouth in a breath, cough or sneeze. Remember: No one can be sure yet if this actually happens or if it happens often enough that you'd be emitting enough active virus to sicken someone else.
  • Even though the pre-authorization studies of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were as streamlined as possible, they still required quite a lot of work. Each of the 75,000 volunteers had to come into a clinic; get a test for the coronavirus; get either a vaccine or a placebo shot (without knowing which they'd received); return for a second shot; and come back to the clinic for testing anytime in the interim if they showed any symptoms of having caught the virus.
    Adding in even more coronavirus tests along the way to see if the vaccinated volunteers had picked up or were transmitting the virus would have delayed the initial results considerably, Corey says. And in the midst of the pandemic, speed was of the essence.

February 2021

The core human rights principle is equity and nondiscrimination. There's a huge moral crisis in equity globally because in high income countries like Israel or the United States or the EU countries, we’re likely to get to herd immunity by the end of this year. But for many low-income countries, most people won’t be vaccinated for many years. Do we really want to give priority to people who already have so many privileges? ~ Lawrence Gostin
  • Many inactivated vaccines against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) are being tested at various clinical stages. Most of these vaccines are formulated with aluminium hydroxide, and one, VLA-2001, has two adjuvants, CpG oligodeoxynucleotides and aluminium hydroxide. Because of the ease of production and scale-up and relatively low cost, inactivated vaccines can capture a sizeable portion of the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine landscape. Inactivated vaccines are well established and can provide advantages in a variety of distinct populations, including those with degrees of immune senescence. Given that the risk of more severe COVID-19 increases with age, the clinical evaluation of the responses of older adults to vaccines is essential.
  • Correlates of immune protection have not been established for SARS-CoV-2 vaccines to date, posing a foundational constraint to any vaccine development, although many vaccines have been granted emergency use approvals around the globe. Comparisons of various vaccine platforms have been hampered because, until recently, there were no standard pooled convalescent sera from infected individuals to use as a reference standard. Interpretation of immune responses is limited in that no consensus standard methods for measuring neutralising antibody titres are in place, thereby confounding comparisons between age groups and comparisons with different vaccine strategies.
    Immune senescence is complex and there are no validated methods to identify early stages or measures of severity. A correlation between anti-receptor-binding domain IgG and neutralising antibodies has been reported for adults aged 18–59 years, but this relationship might not hold true for older individuals with various stages of immune senescence.
  • 100 million people will soon have recovered from SARS-CoV-2 infection. Most recovered individuals have had antibody and T-cell responses against multiple SARS-CoV-2 proteins, but vaccination of these individuals might be necessary to prevent reinfection. Compared with other vaccines targeting only the spike protein, inactivated vaccines could provide an added benefit to these individuals by boosting their T-cell responses against many of the SARS-CoV-2 proteins.
  • Even if the vaccines are less powerful against the variant, they still appear to protect people from the worst outcomes, like hospitalization or death. But the loss in efficacy against the B.1.351 variant in clinical trials suggested to some experts that the immunity the shots confer may not last as long against that form of the coronavirus. Or that the vaccines won’t be as powerful of a drag on transmission, the way scientists hope the shots will be for other versions of the virus.
    More urgently, experts said, the disparate results serve as a warning flag that the world needs to step up its current vaccination cam-paigns and expedite efforts to envision what Covid-19 vaccines 2.0 might look like.
    “It’s a huge relief to know that the vaccines still seem to protect against hospitalization and deaths,” said Emma Hodcroft, a molecular epidemiologist at the University of Bern. “The No. 1 thing at the moment is to try and reduce in any way the cost that this virus charges us as it spreads through societies. But it’s def-initely true the loss in efficacy, it raises some worrying questions.”
  • “The core human rights principle is equity and nondiscrimination,” said Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown University professor and director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law.
    “There's a huge moral crisis in equity globally because in high income countries like Israel or the United States or the EU countries, we’re likely to get to herd immunity by the end of this year," he said. "But for many low-income countries, most people won’t be vaccinated for many years. Do we really want to give priority to people who already have so many privileges?”

March 2021

We should oppose authorizing or funding research rooted in the taking of innocent human life. That does not mean, though, that people must shun medical treatments that can save lives because they were discovered through means of which we would not necessarily approve. ~ Russell Moore
When ethically irreproachable COVID-19 vaccines are not available it is morally acceptable to receive COVID-19 vaccines that have used cell lines from aborted fetuses in their research and production process. ~ Vatican Office
No community is an island, and the landscape of immunity that surrounds a community really matters. ~ Shweta Bansal
Geographic clustering is going to make the path to herd immunity a lot less of a straight line, and essentially means we’ll be playing a game of whack-a-mole with COVID outbreaks. ~ Christie Aschwanden
  • As COVID-19 vaccines become available, supply is expected to initially fall short of demand. In response, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) has issued guidance on which groups should be prioritized to receive vaccines. For the first phase of vaccine allocation, the ACIP recommended healthcare personnel and long-term care facility residents as recipients. This recommendation was based on risks endemic to these populations, as well as ethical principles related to benefits and harms, mitigating health inequalities, and promoting justice. Commercial truck drivers have played a vital and underappreciated role during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the indispensable role that commercial drivers play in distributing vaccines, they have not been recommended for vaccine allocation in the next phase (1b) by the ACIP. However, the rationale and ethical principles cited for the first vaccine phase suggest that these workers should be recommended for inclusion. By doing so, the acquisition and transmission of COVID-19 may be mitigated, which would benefit both these workers and the US public. Further, persistent vulnerabilities render commercial truck drivers susceptible to severe COVID-19 infection; therefore, vaccination during the next phase is imperative to curb the exacerbation of extant health inequities. Finally, because present-day COVID-19 vulnerabilities in these workers have been shaped by unjust policies over the past several decades, and because COVID-19 public health policies have excluded and potentially exacerbated the impacts of the pandemic for these workers, allocating vaccines to commercial truck drivers is a necessary step toward promoting justice.
  • The new Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine may offer the best prospect for protecting as many Americans as possible, as quickly as possible, but some U.S. faith leaders say they have moral concerns about its development.
    Unlike the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was produced in part through the use of cell lines derived from an aborted human fetus. In a statement released this week, leaders of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said that this feature of the vaccine raises questions about its permissibility.
    "If one has the ability to choose a vaccine, Pfizer or Moderna's vaccines should be chosen over Johnson & Johnson's," say Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann of Kansas City, Kan., and Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Ind. Naumann chairs the USCCB's Committee on Pro-Life Activities, and Rhoades chairs the USCCB's Committee on Doctrine.
  • "We should oppose authorizing or funding research rooted in the taking of innocent human life," says Russell Moore, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.
    "That does not mean, though," Moore tells NPR, "that people must shun medical treatments that can save lives because they were discovered through means of which we would not necessarily approve."
  • "When ethically irreproachable COVID-19 vaccines are not available," the Vatican office said, "it is morally acceptable to receive COVID-19 vaccines that have used cell lines from aborted fetuses in their research and production process."
    The Johnson & Johnson vaccine was developed with the use of PER.C6, a fetal cell line that originated in an 18-week-old fetus aborted in 1985. According to a June 2020 article in Science, human fetal cells can be used as "miniature 'factories' to generate vast quantities of adenoviruses ... that are used as vehicles to ferry genes from the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19."
    The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines also make use of human fetal cells, but only during testing of the vaccines' efficacy, a fact that makes them acceptable, according to a lengthy statement from the U.S. bishops issued in December.
    "While neither vaccine is completely free from any connection to morally compromised cell lines," the bishops said, "in this case the connection is very remote from the initial evil of the abortion."
  • I would recommend it, and I would recommend it to a lot of people that don't want to get it and a lot of those people voted for me, frankly. But again, we have our freedoms and we have to live by that and I agree with that also. But it is a great vaccine. It is a safe vaccine and it is something that works.
  • “Herd immunity is only relevant if we have a transmission-blocking vaccine. If we don’t, then the only way to get herd immunity in the population is to give everyone the vaccine,” says Shweta Bansal, a mathematical biologist at Georgetown University in Washington DC. Vaccine effectiveness for halting transmission needs to be “pretty darn high” for herd immunity to matter, she says, and at the moment, the data aren’t conclusive. “The Moderna and Pfizer data look quite encouraging,” she says, but exactly how well these and other vaccines stop people from transmitting the virus will have big implications.
    A vaccine’s ability to block transmission doesn’t need to be 100% to make a difference. Even 70% effectiveness would be “amazing”, says Samuel Scarpino, a network scientist who studies infectious diseases at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. But there could still be a substantial amount of virus spread that would make it a lot harder to break transmission chains.
  • In most countries, vaccine distribution is stratified by age, with priority given to older people, who are at the highest risk of dying from COVID-19. When and whether there will be a vaccine approved for children, however, remains to be seen. Pfizer–BioNTech and Moderna have now enrolled teens in clinical trials of their vaccines, and the Oxford–AstraZeneca and Sinovac Biotech vaccines are being tested in children as young as three. But results are still months away. If it’s not possible to vaccinate children, many more adults would need to be immunized to achieve herd immunity, Bansal says. (Those aged 16 and older can receive the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine, but other vaccines are approved only for ages 18 and up.) In the United States, for example, 24% of people are under 18 years old (according to 2010 census data). If most under-18s can’t receive the vaccine, 100% of over-18s will have to be vaccinated to reach 76% immunity in the population.
    Another important thing to consider, Bansal says, is the geographical structure of herd immunity. “No community is an island, and the landscape of immunity that surrounds a community really matters,” she says. COVID-19 has occurred in clusters across the United States as a result of people’s behaviour or local policies. Previous vaccination efforts suggest that uptake will tend to cluster geographically, too, Bansal adds. Localized resistance to the measles vaccination, for example, has resulted in small pockets of disease resurgence. “Geographic clustering is going to make the path to herd immunity a lot less of a straight line, and essentially means we’ll be playing a game of whack-a-mole with COVID outbreaks.” Even for a country with high vaccination rates, such as Israel, if surrounding countries haven’t done the same and populations are able to mix, the potential for new outbreaks remains.

April 2021

  • America is rapidly approaching the point where demand, not supply, is the limiting factor of our vaccine rollout. Our job now is hearing out the worries of vaccine-hesitant friends and trying to assuage their concerns. My fellow Catholics are one group in need of assurance.
    Although the Vatican has stated clearly that the vaccines approved in the United States are “morally licit” to receive, some Catholics are reluctant because these vaccines have been developed or tested using lab-replicated cells cultured from aborted fetuses.
    Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, sent a letter to his diocese that read, “I urge you to reject any vaccine that uses the remains of aborted children in research, testing, development, or production.” On social media, the vaccine selfies I see are interspersed with friends sharing Bishop Strickland’s and other prelates’ exhortations and grieving over their friends’ willingness to compromise with what they see as evil. Vaccine-hesitant Catholics are reluctant to accept protection from viral contagion at the risk of moral taint.
    I’ve gotten both my shots and I strongly believe other Catholics should get vaccinated, too. But I don’t think those qualms are entirely misguided, and they’re not limited to vaccinations. When we reap the benefit of what we see as a past injustice, we are implicated in the original wrongdoing. We have to decide if our actions compound the original abuse and what kinds of reparations we must make.

May 2021

  • Schaffner said he believes vaccination rates would improve among those who object for political reasons if the governor, state and local elected officials would discuss the importance of vaccination. Business leaders, chambers of commerce and religious leaders also should promote vaccination, Schaffner said.
    Schaffner said there's "a real political veneer" to the portion of the population that has refused vaccination. Without strong endorsements from local political and business leaders, it might be difficult to convince people to get vaccinated.
    "It’s everybody’s individual responsibility to make this decision. The question is, what is the most responsible thing you can do?" Schaffner said. "The most responsible thing for you to do is get vaccinated to protect yourself and your family and your whole community."
  • Currently, the UK variant (B.117) is the dominant strain in the United States. Because that variant has crowded out other variants that vaccines are less effective against, we haven't seen the same spike in deaths as in some other countries, Mokdad said.
    But that could change if the South African or Brazilian variants catch on here, because the vaccines work less well against them and can reinfect people who have had other types of COVID-19.
    Katonah doesn't buy this thesis. "I'm not concerned about variants like I was a few months ago," he said. "Every single variant has been looked at with a vaccine and has been found to be effective...If the variants do start to become problematic, the vaccines can be adjusted. On the fly, they can change the genetic code that's in an mRNA vaccine."
  • David Hardy, MD, a scientific and medical consultant who is an adjunct clinical professor of medicine at the Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, said it's not clear how effective the current vaccines are against the South African and Brazilian variants.
    "Because the vaccines used in the US, Pfizer and Moderna, were not tested in that part of the world, we don't have good on-the-ground human clinical testing of whether those vaccines protect against the variants or not. We have in vitro data, in which they took the plasma of people who were vaccinated with Pfizer and Moderna and have tested the plasma against those variants in vitro. Those plasma antibodies seem to neutralize the variants, although not as well as they neutralize the original SARS-CoV-2 virus or the UK variant."

July 2021

Young people really are hundreds of times less vulnerable than seniors, and Republicans are, on average, a lot more realistic than Democrats about a person’s chances of developing severe disease once they’ve been infected by the coronavirus. (At the same time, they’re much less realistic about COVID-19’s harms in aggregate.) In other words, efforts to scare more young people or Republicans into getting vaccinated could end up encouraging them to be less informed about the facts, at least narrowly construed, instead of more so. ~ Daniel Engber
[W]e're not going to be able to land the plane without turbulence. How much turbulence will track with how many people are vaccinated in a given community. ~ Jessica Malaty Rivera
There have been widespread protests in France since mid-July, as the government of President Emmanuel Macron imposed the vaccination mandate on health workers and introduced a “health pass” requirement to access public venues with more than 50 people in attendance. The pass requirement will extend to cafes, restaurants and shops starting August 1.
  • an investigational vaccine .. the clot shot .. needle rape .. Why are we injecting something into the human body that is the toxin? It is the toxin, it causes the disease, this isn't a vaccine.
    • Dr. Ryan Cole during July 2021 conference in Dallas, Texas reported 8 September 2021 by NewsWeek (Cole was appointed to the Peace Valley Charter School district health board in August 2021]
  • Rather than diverging politics, people’s willingness to get vaccinated might best be understood as a function of how they perceive risk. Although there are more noble reasons to be immunized than self-protection, surveys show that they’re not the ones most often cited. Kaiser finds that among those who have gone in for their shots, more than half say the “main reason” was to reduce their personal risk of illness. Meanwhile, among the unvaccinated, one-half assert that COVID-19 case rates are now so low that further vaccinations are unnecessary.
  • Young people really are hundreds of times less vulnerable than seniors, and Republicans are, on average, a lot more realistic than Democrats about a person’s chances of developing severe disease once they’ve been infected by the coronavirus. (At the same time, they’re much less realistic about COVID-19’s harms in aggregate.) In other words, efforts to scare more young people or Republicans into getting vaccinated could end up encouraging them to be less informed about the facts, at least narrowly construed, instead of more so.
  • The timing of the guidance was off, says Jessica Malaty Rivera, an infectious disease epidemiologist who has worked with the COVID Tracking Project.
    "When the Biden administration and the CDC [said] if you're vaccinated, you can take your mask off, I screamed," she says. "Because for so long, we've been talking about getting to a place where transmission is low and vaccination is high. Transmission was lower [at the time]. Vaccination was not high. So it seemed truly premature."
    The tone of the messaging also signaled to vaccinated people that they could throw caution to the wind, Rivera says. "It gave people, in their minds, immunity passports," she says. "It said to them, 'I'm vaccinated — I can go to Miami. I'm vaccinated — I can go to this party in a basement.' "
    The messaging around lifting mask use should have been more gradual, Rivera says: "You can change some of your behavior, but don't just have a rager as if the pandemic wasn't happening. Calibrating, instead of eliminating [all caution], was where we needed to go."
  • The take-home message of this latest model is that the pandemic isn't over yet and "we're not going to be able to land the plane without turbulence," says William Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. "How much turbulence will track with how many people are vaccinated in a given community."
    "I also strongly suspect that delta is highly prone to superspreading — if I am right, it might go off like a bomb in some undervaccinated communities," Hanage adds.
  • They wouldn't be pushing their fake vaccines so hard if they weren't horrifically bad for you. Don't even hesitate to walk away from your job or cut ties with family members rather than submit to it. It may sound like hyperbole, but it's genuinely possible that the continued existence of the human race literally depends on those who refuse to submit to the wickedness.
  • There have been widespread protests in France since mid-July, as the government of President Emmanuel Macron imposed the vaccination mandate on health workers and introduced a “health pass” requirement to access public venues with more than 50 people in attendance. The pass requirement will extend to cafes, restaurants and shops starting August 1.
  • One of the most pressing problems has been the shortage of big, sterile plastic bags used to grow vaccine cells inside large vessels called bioreactors.
    They are a little like the bags used in the home-brewing process, says Matthew Downham, sustainable manufacturing lead for the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) - a global body aiming to fast-track vaccine production and one of the lead organisations launching the marketplace.
    The giant plastic bags, which can hold up to 2,000 litres, are needed in the process of making all the four types of vaccine currently in manufacture.
  • In order to achieve universal coverage of Covid-19 vaccines in the coming months, what we really need is for the US Government to sit down with China, Russia, the European Union, and the United Kingdom to allocate the ongoing global monthly vaccine production in a fair and inclusive manner, rather than having a few rich countries hoard a disproportionate share of the vaccines (and then dispose of many vaccines when they hit their expiration date.)
  • Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccinologist and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor Col-lege of Medicine, said the Biden administration's acknowledgement of the "terrible impact" of the anti-vaccine movement was important, but he said the government could do more.
    "Anti-science is arguably one of the leading killers of the American people, and yet we don't ... treat it as such. We don't give it the same stature as global terrorism and nuclear proliferation and cyber attacks," he said.
  • Stand your ground if you're unvaccinated. It's already clear that in addition to all of the adverse effects, the vaccines make you more susceptible to serious harm from Covid, not less susceptible.

August 2021

An unvaccinated individual in the UK who contracts COVID has a 1 in 597 chance of dying. A fully-vaccinated individual has a 1 in 117 chance of dying, which is 5.1 times greater. The vaccines are clearly not effective, as they actually increase one’s risk of dying of Covid. And that doesn’t even account for the mounting evidence of serious adverse effects. ~ Theodore Beale
The Pfizer COVID-19 mRNA vaccine was found to be associated with a threefold increased risk of myocarditis, according to a real-world case-control study from Israel. ~ Molly Walker
  • With increasing zeal, corporations are seeking to mandate vaccines among their employees, while universities, bureaucracies, and other government institutions around the world are following their lead. Meanwhile, "liberal" pundits have been increasingly advocating for forced vaccination of the population if nicer approaches fail.
  • Scientists have known since December 2020 that the vaccines not only do not protect against the transmission of Covid-19 or reduce the severity of it, but actually make the vaccine recipients subject to more serious cases of the disease.
  • The coronavirus appears to be becoming less dangerous to the unvaccinated and more dangerous to the vaccinated.
  • Vaccinated people appear to be getting the coronavirus at a surprisingly high rate. But exactly how often isn’t clear, nor is it certain how likely they are to spread the virus to others. And now, there’s growing concern that vaccinated people may be more vulnerable to serious illness than previously thought.
  • Available data from short-term follow-up suggest that most individuals have had resolution of symptoms. However, some individuals required intensive care support. Information is not yet available about potential long-term health outcomes.
  • I was one of those people wiping down my deliveries w/alcohol & rubber gloves at first. I was onboard. Then they lied about masks, encouraged riots, cast doubt on "Trump's vaccine" then withheld it until after the election, lied about the lab leak, and started threatening people.
  • An unvaccinated individual in the UK who contracts COVID has a 1 in 597 chance of dying. A fully-vaccinated individual has a 1 in 117 chance of dying, which is 5.1 times greater. The vaccines are clearly not effective, as they actually increase one’s risk of dying of Covid. And that doesn’t even account for the mounting evidence of serious adverse effects.
  • Let us start with the pharmaceutical industry. It has an obvious economic interest in the vaccination campaign. It makes enormous profits from widespread vaccination.
  • A radio presenter died due to complications from the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine, a coroner has found. Lisa Shaw, who worked for BBC Radio Newcastle, died at the age of 44 in May after developing headaches a week after getting her first dose of the vaccine. Newcastle coroner Karen Dilks heard Ms Shaw suffered blood clots in the brain which ultimately led to her death.
  • Whether imposed by government or the private sector, vaccine passports must be resisted.

September 2021

In every age group [in Israel] from 20-79, the percentage of the confirmed Covid cases are “fully vaccinated” exceeds the percentage of the population that is “fully vaccinated”. This means the fake vaccines are literally worse than nothing. ~ Theodore Beale
More on Israel cases. Not really consistent with the story line pushed by legacy media in USA. Not a pandemic of the unvaccinated in Israel. ~ Robert W. Malone
Joe Biden's new vaccine mandates for federal employees don't apply to members of Congress or those who work for Congress or the federal court system. ~ Darragh Roche
Vaccinated people are at risk of the new variants. In transmission, it’s been proven now in several countries that vaccinated people should be put in quarantine and isolated from society. Unvaccinated people are not dangerous; vaccinated people are dangerous to others. That’s been proven in Israel now, where I’m in contact with many physicians. They’re having big problems in Israel now: severe cases in hospitals are among vaccinated people. And in the UK also, you had a larger vaccination programme and there are problems [there] also. But also, the “variants” are not very dangerous. All the “variants” since last year are less and less virulent. That’s always the story in infectious diseases. ~ Christian Perronne
Haven’t official vaccine trials shown that covid vaccines are safe, though? The answer is no. In fact, several serious adverse events were already observed during covid vaccine trials, but were discarded as “unrelated”. In addition, the Pfizer vaccine trial excluded five times more people from the vaccine group than from the control group. In the Pfizer vaccine trial for adolescents, as 12-year-old girl suffered permanent paralysis, but Pfizer reported her case merely as “abdominal pain”. ~ Swiss Policy Research
  • In Singapore, a 16-year-old boy was ruled to be eligible for a $225,000 settlement this week after suffering a myocarditis cardiac arrest event that doctors ruled was likely in response to receiving his first dose of the Pfizer BionTech vaccine, with the Ministry of Health stating, “The myocarditis was likely a serious adverse event arising from the COVID-19 vaccine he received, which might have been aggravated by his strenuous lifting of weights and his high consumption of caffeine through energy drinks and supplements.”
  • The Corona vaccines don’t work very well. Ubiquitous statistics showing that the vaccinated enjoy substantial protection against serious illness and death seem wrong. In some cases they are probably manipulated. They are certainly confounded by the different testing regimes to which the vaccinated and the unvaccinated are subjected. Once you forget the specifics of efficacy and look at the broader picture, it is easy to see where we are. The vaccines have not reduced Corona mortality compared to the same time last year in any jurisdiction that I know of. Countries with high vaccination rates are now seeing the same number of deaths, or more, as they had at the beginning of September 2020. Time is a flat circle.
  • In every age group [in Israel] from 20-79, the percentage of the confirmed Covid cases are “fully vaccinated” exceeds the percentage of the population that is “fully vaccinated”. This means the fake vaccines are literally worse than nothing. And remember, the Antibody Dependent Enhancement that is created by the “vaccines” don’t merely enhance Covid-19, they will enhance all similar viruses, including the common cold virus. This isn’t just logic applied to scientific data anymore. This isn’t just theory. This is now the published medical reality from a sample size of 18,678 confirmed Covid cases. The fake vaccines will not protect you, and contrary to the government and media propaganda, they will render you more susceptible to infection, hospitalization, and possibly, death, than simply doing nothing.
  • The evidence does not show the vaccine works, and there is reason to believe it has harmful effects.
  • In August, the Medical Director of Herzog Hospital in Jerusalem, the city’s third largest hospital, which describes itself as “Israel’s foremost center for geriatric, respiratory, mental health and psychotrauma care, treatment and research,” told Channel 13 TV to the contrary that 95 percent of the hospital’s severely symptomatic COVID-19 patients were vaccine recipients. The Director also told the outlet that 85 to 90 percent of all hospitalizations were vaccinated individuals.
  • In the history of infectious disease medicine, it has never happened that a state or politicians recommend systematic vaccinations for billions of people on the planet for a disease whose rate of mortality now is 0.05%. That’s a very low rate of mortality! And they’re making everybody afraid that there’s a new so-called “Delta variant” coming from India, but in fact all these variants are less and less virulent, and we now know that [with] this so-called “vaccine”, in the population that is inoculated at large, it is in these people that the variants emerge.
  • Vaccinated people are at risk of the new variants. In transmission, it’s been proven now in several countries that vaccinated people should be put in quarantine and isolated from society. Unvaccinated people are not dangerous; vaccinated people are dangerous to others. That’s been proven in Israel now, where I’m in contact with many physicians. They’re having big problems in Israel now: severe cases in hospitals are among vaccinated people. And in the UK also, you had a larger vaccination programme and there are problems [there] also. But also, the “variants” are not very dangerous. All the “variants” since last year are less and less virulent. That’s always the story in infectious diseases. In my hospital, in March-April 2020, the whole building was full of people with Covid-19: fifty patients. And the so-called "second”, “third”, “fourth waves” were just very small waves, because the hospitals are not full any more. But in the media, they said that all the hospitals were full of patients. That’s not true. Of course, the epidemic was going on, but the “variants” were less and less virulent.
  • The official numbers of deaths from “vaccinations” are around 15,000 [across Europe]. It was 14,000 but it’s been increasing, and we now officially have 15,000 deaths [registered in] the Pharmacovigilance Network [Eudravigilance]. And indeed, it is under-reported. People are saying 10%; in France, sometimes even 5%. So you should multiply this number by [up to] a hundred, yes.
  • Changes to periods and unexpected vaginal bleeding are not listed, but primary care clinicians and those working in reproductive health are increasingly approached by people who have experienced these events shortly after vaccination.
  • It’s not up for debate anymore. The expensive mRNA fake vaccine approach has completely failed, with Antibody Dependent Enhancement and Vaccine Enhanced Infection “breakthroughs” now outnumbering the number of unvaccinated people being infected everywhere from Israel to Ireland. Meanwhile, in India, the disease has been all but eradicated by a US-size state that has relied upon a cheap, well-known, Nobel Prize-winning medication [ivermectin].
  • In other words, it is claimed that vaccines are remarkably effective, and that the vaccinated must also be protected from the unvaccinated. How can both claims be true at the same time? They can’t. The idea that vaccinated people are being frequently harmed by the unvaccinated is a complete fabrication.
  • On October 3, in about a week and a half, life will change for close to one million Israelis, 900,000 to be exact, who, according to the Health ministry, are eligible to receive the third dose of the Corona vaccine, but have not yet rolled up their sleeves at their local dispensary. So, on October 3, the government is revoking the Green Tag privileges of anyone who received their second dose more than six months ago and has not yet received the third. It’s like that second shot never happened.
  • Haven’t official vaccine trials shown that covid vaccines are safe, though? The answer is no. In fact, several serious adverse events were already observed during covid vaccine trials, but were discarded as “unrelated”. In addition, the Pfizer vaccine trial excluded five times more people from the vaccine group than from the control group. In the Pfizer vaccine trial for adolescents, as 12-year-old girl suffered permanent paralysis, but Pfizer reported her case merely as “abdominal pain”.
  • The great stagflation of the ‘70s set up the neoliberal era that began with Reagan. We do not know what economic future awaits us after this covid induced inflation, but we can be assured that whatever comes next will be much different than the framework hammered out in the ‘80s. Saying economic is incorrect as economics was originally called political economy. Governments mandating vaccines to purge transportation, warehouse and medical employees in the middle of a supply chain crisis and pandemic points to this being a political restructuring that few are ready for.
  • The state has no right to require anyone to accept a medical procedure against their will. Therefore, medical procedure mandates are wrong. Whether vaccines or cliterectomy. Wrong. Not ethical. Not acceptable. This is my position.
  • If they have the right to force you to accept vaccine, they have the right to force you to be castrated. Same fundamental issue. Do you have the right to control what medical procedures are done to you, or do you not. It is that simple.

October 2021

I find myself wondering if deaths from direct adverse reactions to the vaxx are somehow counted as “unvaccinated” given that one is no longer deemed “vaccinated” until two weeks after the vaxx has been administered. ~ Theodore Beale
Dr. Kilian added that since the rollout of COVID jabs, she has seen a striking uptick in patients who have been admitted with heart issues and do not fit risk categories. She stated that as more and more people have received the jab, she has seen a host of strange events in her patients. She spoke of “people coming with newly diagnosed high blood-pressure, diabetics that was controlled that are no longer controlled – their sugars are either through the roof or they’re down in the ground … The only factor … constant that changed in their life was the injection of an experimental biologic.” ~ Kennedy Hall
For these folks, facts mean nothing; membership and identity, everything. Groupishness, in-/out-group differentiation ... is much stronger on the right. ~ William Bernstein
The Gates Foundation said the primary barriers to vaccine access it has identified include financing, limited tech transfer, constraints on raw materials, and “nationalist policies that have kept doses concentrated in a few high-income countries.”
  • Today, being pro- or anti-vaccine has become essential to many people’s social identity during the pandemic. William Bernstein, a neurologist and author of The Delusions of Crowds, pointed me to the “moral foundations” theory, which attempts to understand what motivates the decision-making of people on the right and left ends of the political spectrum.
    That theory holds that, within the American right, the concepts of loyalty and betrayal are more influential to their worldview than on the American left. Staying true to your group is a powerful pull for conservatives.
    “For these folks, facts mean nothing; membership and identity, everything,” Bernstein said over email. “Groupishness, in-/out-group differentiation ... is much stronger on the right.”
  • I find myself wondering if deaths from direct adverse reactions to the vaxx are somehow counted as “unvaccinated” given that one is no longer deemed “vaccinated” until two weeks after the vaxx has been administered.
  • Covid cannot be blamed for the sudden rise in deaths among 15-19 year-olds in summer 2021, as the ONS data shows that over the period there were only nine deaths with Covid in that age group. So what has suddenly increased the mortality rate since June in 15-19 year-olds, but not in younger children? It coincided with the rollout of vaccines, which are known to cause rare but serious side-effects in young people, especially myocarditis (heart inflammation). Is this real-world evidence that over the summer the vaccines killed nine times as many 15-19 year-olds as Covid did – 81 versus nine? If not, what are the other possible explanations and how likely are they?
  • Allegations that Pfizer are conducting experiments on six-month-old orphans to test their Covid-19 vaccine have been made by whistleblowers in Poland leading to a group of lawyers, medical professionals and activists demanding members of the Polish parliament and Senate organise an urgent conference on Saturday 2nd October.
  • Dr. Kilian added that since the rollout of COVID jabs, she has seen a striking uptick in patients who have been admitted with heart issues and do not fit risk categories. She stated that as more and more people have received the jab, she has seen a host of strange events in her patients. She spoke of “people coming with newly diagnosed high blood-pressure, diabetics that was controlled that are no longer controlled – their sugars are either through the roof or they’re down in the ground … The only factor … constant that changed in their life was the injection of an experimental biologic.”
  • We already know that the vaccinated are dying in droves; the all-cause death statistics clearly indicate that. But at present, there is still some wiggle room for the media to pretend otherwise, although it’s only a matter of months before that disappears.
  • Ultimately, donations have not made up for COVAX’s shortfall. By early October, COVAX had shipped only 330 million of its 2 billion planned doses, 40% of which were donated. “I do not believe donations is the way we should be dealing with a health crisis like this,” Berkley told the Bureau. “What we need is to get those deals locked in and to make sure that manufacturers will deliver on time.”
    “You can’t charity your way out of a pandemic,” Elder of MSF said. “This is why rebalancing between corporate interests and the public’s interest is so important.”
    With frustrations mounting, some advocates have accused COVAX of taking a “business as usual” approach to an unprecedented global emergency.
    “The foundational flaw for me is the fact that they did not put around the table the low- and middle-income countries,” said Joanne Liu, the former international president of MSF. She believes that there was a sense that as a product of the western-led global health system, COVAX could not find the time to or was not interested in listening to the needs of poorer countries, and was instead telling them to be grateful for what they were being given. “That country club mindset needs to change.”
  • The Gates Foundation said the primary barriers to vaccine access it has identified include financing, limited tech transfer, constraints on raw materials, and “nationalist policies that have kept doses concentrated in a few high-income countries.” It added that COVAX is breaking new ground in facilitating access to COVID-19 vaccines for all.
    “Their whole premise is about public-private cooperation,” said Katerini Storeng, an associate professor at the University of Oslo who has researched Gavi and Gates’ approach to improving global health. “And if you’re trying to cooperate with people, you don’t enter into a revolution, do you?”
  • COVAX has shipped doses to 144 countries — but some have received less than half of what they were originally allocated.
    COVAX is clear on who’s to blame for the shortfall: vaccine manufacturers. “There’s no transparency on where we are in the queue,” Berkley told the Bureau. While some manufacturing delays were certainly legitimate, “the question is, are they equally affecting all of their customers? Or are they saying, ‘Gee, we’re going to have more political pressure from high-income countries, and therefore we’re going to allow [COVAX] to slip down the pipeline.’”
    Kate O’Brien, director of the WHO Department of Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals, agrees: “It would be probably fair to say that it’s the manufacturers who allocated vaccines globally.”
  • A soldier who quit the Pontifical Swiss Guard as a conscientious objector to forced vaccination has penned a searing exposé uncovering the Vatican's double standards in coercing guardsmen to receive the abortion-tainted jab.
  • There are reports that in Jacksonville, Florida, air traffic controllers walked off the job to protest against vaccine mandates. But that might not be all. Southwest announced a vaccine mandate for all personnel last week, and there are reports that pilots are joining the resistance as well.
  • In an attempt to clear up misinformation coming from the medical establishment, Malone said fully vaccinated individuals can spread COVID. “The idea that if you have a workplace where everybody’s vaccinated, you’re not going to have virus spread is totally false. A total lie,” Malone said. The vaccinated are actually the “super-spreaders” that everyone was told about in the beginning of the pandemic, Malone argued.
  • A legal challenge backed by dozens of scientists and other employees at Los Alamos National Laboratory to block a vaccine mandate was denied by a New Mexico judge Friday, putting the workers at risk of termination if they don’t adhere to the vaccination deadline by the afternoon deadline. More than 100 scientists, nuclear engineers, research technicians, designers, project managers and other employees joined the attempt to block the mandate. Several of the employees are specialists with high security clearance, performing functions from national defense to infrastructure improvements and research on COVID-19.
  • The so-called emergency pandemic has been utilized as a false pretext to impose the vaccination and Green pass in many nations of the world in a simultaneous and coordinated way. They support them in this wicked plan and go so far as to condemn those who do not accept being subjected to inoculation with an experimental gene serum, with unknown side effects, that does not impart any immunity from the virus, to say nothing of the moral implications related to the presence of genetic material derived from aborted fetuses, which for a Catholic is a more than sufficient reason to refuse the vaccine.
  • Police, firefighters, doctors, nurses, paramedics, airport security and prison guards across the country are facing termination this week if they don’t comply with their employers’ vaccine requirements. Many have already lost their jobs or have been disciplined. Other say they will defy the vaccine mandates on principle. As a result, essential workers may soon be in short supply in many parts of America.
  • On August 24, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin issued a memo to senior Pentagon leadership announcing that he was implementing a mandatory COVID-19 vaccination policy for all military service members. The day before, the FDA had issued full authorization to Pfizer for their Comirnaty COVID-19 vaccine product (the nomenclature of which is meant to be a mashup of the words “COVID”, “mRNA”, and “community”) . At first glance it would seem that the mandatory vaccination policy, while scientifically unsound and strategically foolish, was at least a policy being implemented according to both the letter of the directive and in accordance with the law. But a further examination of the facts and the manner in which this order is being implemented makes clear that the military’s implementation of this order is illegal and highly unethical.
  • “More than 10 months since the first vaccines were approved, the fact that millions of health care workers still haven’t been vaccinated is an indictment on the countries and companies that control the global supply of vaccines,” Tedros said. He added that high- and upper-middle-income countries have now administered almost half as many booster shots as the total number of shots low income countries have administered. And he urged the countries headed to the G20 summit later this month in Rome to tackle vaccine inequity.
    WHO officials estimate that Western countries have hundreds of millions of doses sitting unused, swathes of which face upcoming expiration dates. They’re urging countries to find ways to transfer their vaccines and switch delivery contracts to move their excess supplies to other countries.
  • Annette Kennedy, the president of the International Council of Nurses, argued that governments had forsaken their duty to protect health care workers and warned that pandemic would have long tail ef-fects, with many nurses considering leaving the workforce. She also noted that the high-income countries that were hoarding vaccines and had started booster campaigns “aggressively” recruit nurses from other countries “who cannot afford to lose their nurses or their health care workers.”
    “I wish it was a better day today, I wish it was a day that we would celebrate that all health care workers had been vaccinated or that we had come to the end of Covid-19,” Kennedy said. “But it is not that day. It is a day when we are hearing about 115,000 health care workers who have died, many needlessly, many we could have saved.”

November 2021

  • “The U.S. made a deal that was extraordinarily beneficial to Moderna and also beneficial to the United States," said Lawrence Gostin, a global health law professor at Georgetown University who has advised the World Health Organization and other international organizations on the Covid-19 response. "But it negotiated a horrific deal for the world that in fact impeded the world’s ability to respond and end the pandemic.”
    Indeed, federal officials were so focused at the time on stockpiling vaccines to combat the pandemic at home that there was relatively little thought given to the global reverberations, according to a dozen current and former officials and others with knowledge of the process who spoke with POLITICO for this article.
    “We were 100 percent focused on U.S.” acknowledged one of the people, an official on the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed.
  • “Nine out of 10 Moderna doses have gone to rich countries,” said Robbie Silverman, the senior manager of private-sector advocacy at global justice organization Oxfam America. “Even among a set of bad actors in terms of vaccinating the world, Moderna stands out.”
  • They screwed those of us who got this vaccine,” said Rosenda Ruiz, 52, a public relations manager in Mexico City who received Sputnik V. “There are lots of Mexicans who want to travel, but we can’t. I am thinking of getting whatever other vaccine I can get.”
  • Saying the surge was "worrying," Wenseleers said he believed low vaccine uptake and high vaccine hesitancy were largely to blame.
    "It’s not due to lack of vaccines," he said, noting that the joint procurement of vaccines at the European Union level meant all 27 member states "were able to buy equivalent quantities of vaccines."
    "Despite having access to vaccines, those countries did not manage to convince their population to get vaccinated," he said.
  • Danny Altmann, a professor of immunology at Imperial College London, said that as the first winter with the delta variant approaches, he was "not sure if people in Eastern Europe appreciate how punishing the pandemic continues to be in the time of delta."
    "It’s unremitting," he said. With some Eastern European countries "at the extreme end of vaccine hesitancy," he added, "there’s no possibility of dealing with this pandemic under these conditions."
  • Despite the repeated warnings of health leaders, our failure to put vaccines into the arms of people in the developing world is now coming back to haunt us. We were forewarned – and yet here we are.
    In the absence of mass vaccination, Covid is not only spreading uninhibited among unprotected people but is mutating, with new variants emerging out of the poorest countries and now threatening to unleash themselves on even fully vaccinated people in the richest countries of the world.
  • Many of the world's richest countries have spent the past year hoarding coronavirus vaccines, buying up enough doses to vaccinate their populations several times over and consistently failing to deliver on their promises to share doses with the developing world. The World Health Organization said the approach was "self-defeating" and "immoral."
  • Dr. Richard Lessells, an infectious diseases specialist at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, said the reaction of the rich world to the news that South African scientists discovered a new variant was an example of its own selfishness.
    "What I found disgusting and really distressing ... was not just the travel ban being implemented by the UK and Europe but that that was the only reaction, or the strongest reaction.
    "There was no word of support that they're going to offer to African countries to help us control the pandemic and particularly no mention of addressing this vaccine inequity that we have been warning about all year and [of which] we are now seeing the consequences play out," he told CNN.

?

“Interim Clinical Considerations for Use of COVID-19 Vaccines Currently Approved or Authorized in the United States”, CDC.gov

  • Any of the COVID-19 vaccines can be used for booster vaccination, regardless of the vaccine product used for primary vaccination. When a heterologous or “mix and match” booster dose is administered, the eligible population and dosing intervals are those of the vaccine used for primary vaccination.
  • A person is considered fully vaccinated against COVID-19 ≥2 weeks after receipt of the second dose in a 2-dose series (Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna) or ≥2 weeks after receipt of the single dose of the Janssen vaccine. CDC has developed interim public health recommendations for fully vaccinated people . Administration of an or a booster dose is not required to be considered fully vaccinated for public health purposes. People who have a contraindication to vaccination or who otherwise do not complete a primary vaccination series are not considered fully vaccinated.
  • In exceptional situations in which the mRNA vaccine product given for the first dose of the primary series cannot be determined or is not available, any available mRNA COVID-19 vaccine may be administered at a minimum interval of 28 days between doses to complete the mRNA COVID-19 vaccination series. In situations where the same mRNA vaccine product is temporarily unavailable, it is preferable to delay the second dose to receive the same product than to receive a mixed primary series using a different product. If two doses of different mRNA COVID-19 vaccine products are administered in these situations (or administered inadvertently), the primary series is considered complete and no subsequent doses of either product are recommended to complete the primary series. Such persons are considered fully vaccinated against COVID-19 ≥2 weeks after receipt of the second dose of an mRNA vaccine and may be offered an additional dose or booster dose.
  • Currently, there are no data on the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines in people who received monoclonal antibodies or convalescent plasma as part of COVID-19 treatment. Based on the estimated half-life of such therapies and evidence suggesting that reinfection is uncommon within the 90 days after initial infection, vaccination should be deferred for at least 90 days after receiving monoclonal antibodies or convalescent plasma for treatment. This is a precautionary measure until additional information becomes available, to avoid potential interference of the antibody therapy with vaccine-induced immune responses. This recommendation applies to people who receive passive antibody therapy before receiving any vaccine dose and between doses. Receipt of passive antibody therapy in the past 90 days is not a contraindication to receipt of COVID-19 vaccine. COVID-19 vaccine doses received within 90 days after receipt of passive antibody therapy do not need to be repeated.
  • Unvaccinated people in the community or in outpatient settings who have had a known COVID-19 exposure should not seek vaccination until their quarantine period has ended to avoid potentially exposing healthcare personnel and others during the vaccination visit. This also avoids causing diagnostic confusion between possible adverse effects of vaccination and symptoms of a new COVID-19 diagnosis. This recommendation also applies to people with a known COVID-19 exposure before receipt of the primary series, an additional dose, or booster dose.
  • People with immunocompromising conditions or people who take immunosuppressive medications or therapies are at increased risk for severe COVID-19. The currently FDA-approved or FDA-authorized COVID-19 vaccines are not live vaccines and therefore can be safely administered to immunocompromised people. However, reduced vaccine effectiveness has been observed in immunocompromised participants compared to participants who are not immunocompromised in a limited number of studies. Small studiespdf icon have demonstrated that an additional mRNA COVID-19 vaccine dose in some immunocompromised people who received an mRNA COVID-19 primary vaccine series may enhance antibody response, increasing the proportion of people who respond.
  • People who are immunocompromised (including people who receive an additional mRNA COVID-19 vaccine dose after an initial 2-dose mRNA COVID-19 primary vaccine series) should be counseled about the potential for a reduced immune response to COVID-19 vaccines and the need to continue to follow current prevention measures (including wearing a mask, staying 6 feet apart from others they don’t live with, and avoiding crowds and poorly ventilated indoor spaces) to protect themselves against COVID-19 until advised otherwise by their healthcare professional. Close contacts of immunocompromised people should also be strongly encouraged to be vaccinated against COVID-19 to protect these people.
  • Myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) or pericarditis (inflammation of the lining around the heart) have occurred rarely in some people following receipt of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines (Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna). The mechanisms that cause myocarditis or pericarditis following vaccination with an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine are not well understood. Cases of myocarditis or pericarditis have occurred predominantly in males aged 12-29 years within a few days after receiving the second dose of vaccine. Most patients have been hospitalized for short periods, with the majority achieving resolution of acute symptoms. Follow-up is ongoing to identify and understand potential long-term outcomes among cases.
  • People with autoimmune conditions were enrolled in COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials. Safety and efficacy of vaccines in this population were similar to the general population. People with autoimmune conditions may receive any currently FDA-approved or FDA-authorized COVID-19 vaccine. If people with these conditions are immunocompromised because of medications such as high-dose corticosteroids or biologic agents, they should follow the considerations for immunocompromised people.
  • Infrequently, people who have received dermal fillers might experience swelling at or near the site of filler injection (usually face or lips) following administration of a dose of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine (no similar occurrences were observed in the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials). The swelling appears to be temporary and resolves with medical treatment, including corticosteroid therapy. Any currently FDA-approved or FDA-authorized COVID-19 vaccine can be administered to people who have received injectable dermal fillers who have no contraindications or precautions for vaccination. However, these people should be advised to contact their healthcare professional for evaluation if they experience swelling at or near a dermal filler site following vaccination.
  • In view of reports of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) and pericarditis (inflammation of the lining outside the heart) after receipt of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, the fact sheets for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccineexternal icon and the Moderna COVID-19 vaccineexternal icon include information about myocarditis and pericarditis. For each mRNA vaccine, the Fact Sheet for Recipients and Caregiversexternal icon notes that myocarditis or pericarditis have occurred in some people who have received the vaccine. In most of these people, symptoms began within a few days following receipt of the second dose of the vaccine. The chance of myocarditis or pericarditis occurring after receipt of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine is very low and can occur in patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection at higher rates than in those who received mRNA vaccines. People should seek medical attention right away if they have any of the following symptoms after receiving the vaccine:

See also

External links

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