☕️ Coffee & Covid ☙ Monday, September 13, 2021 ☙ Going Bananas 🦠

Today’s roundup includes more terrific news about Florida’s Covid performance, gorilla reservoirs and breakthroughs, docs eschewing treatment for unvaxx people ...

Happy Monday, C&Cers! Today’s roundup includes more terrific news about Florida’s Covid performance, gorilla reservoirs and breakthroughs, docs eschewing treatment for unvaxx people, Fauci blathering about vaccine passports and school mandates, hijinks with NIH’s ivermectin review committee, France bans unvaxx travel from the US, a major UK committee questions the evidence for vaccine passports, studies suggest a mechanism for spike protein damage to the heart, and great news — Covid is no longer the greatest threat to world health.

🗞 *THE C&C ARMY POST* 🗞

🔥 C&C Callers — I think we are starting to get some traction. At a fund-raising event last night, Senator Keith Perry said that the bills we drafted have now been submitted to the state’s legislative review staff. That’s huge progress. And he also said, “we can’t wait until March. We need a special session.” Yes.

The legislature is back in Tallahassee one week from today. When they get back on the 20th, they start what is called their “work session,” where they meet in committees and things like that, to get ready for January when they begin the “legislative session.”

It’s normally the January session where the bills get passed into law. By the time they work their way through various committees and floor votes and things like that, it could be March before a particular bill is actually passed into law. So that’s why Senator Perry said we can’t wait until March. Even though they are back next week, it’s just to work in committee, and so we still need a “special legislative session.” As soon as they get there. So here’s our new script:

“People are being coerced into quitting, being fired, and having their retirement stripped away. Hospitals are losing nurses faster than ever. You have to do something! We want you to say publicly that you support an immediate special session to pass vaccine choice and mask choice, to begin next week when the legislators get back to Tallahassee.”

🔥 Be sure to bookmark www.coffeeandcovid.com just in case anything ever happens to my Facebook page. And please support C&C if you can. I’m working on a solution for smaller donations; currently Substack gives me limited options, so stand by if you’re in that category.

🗞*COVID NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞

🦍 The animal reservoirs are filling up again. The Atlanta zoo announced this weekend that 13 western lowland gorillas have now tested positive for Covid, including a 60-year old fellow named Ozzie. I guess he’s in a high-risk group or something. Anyway, articles about the breakout are unintentionally hilarious.

First, the zoo says the gorillas probably caught Covid from one of the zoo workers. But check out how they describe the guy:

Zoo officials say they believe an asymptomatic employee who cares for the gorillas passed on the virus. The employee had been fully vaccinated and was wearing protective equipment such as a mask and gloves.

Hahahaha! You can’t make this stuff up! Who’s going to protect the unvaccinated gorillas from the vaccinated zoo workers? Joe Biden? Where are you, Joe?

And, what about the mask? AND gloves? I just can’t even. These people really have no idea how they come across, do they? The newspaper was trying to explain how careful the zoo is, they always go into the monkey cages with their masks and gloves on and stuff. But they totally missed the gorilla-sized point that THE MASK AND GLOVES DIDN’T PROTECT THE APES. It has to be a kind of mental illness, right? Or like snow blindness or something?

Anyway, guess what the zoo did about the sick apes? “The zoo says it is treating the gorillas at risk of developing complications from SARS-CoV-2 with monoclonal antibodies.”

Double haha! The monkeys can get the monoclonal treatment, but you can’t! The hospital doesn’t stock it. YOU get the vent, human. Unless you live in a state like Florida or Texas where you can go to an outpatient treatment center set up by the governor.

Finally, I wonder if the other monkeys — the ones that weren’t sick — were giving the sick ones a hard time, saying, “you shouldn’t be taking those monoclonal antibodies! That’s just a human dewormer!” Or something.

🥼 Meanwhile, over in the human kingdom, things aren’t going so well as they are in the monkey kingdom. According to news reports last week, Dr. Linda Marraccini, a family practice physician in South Miami, says she and her staff are terrified of unvaccinated people and from now on aren’t going to get anywhere near them. “I understand that people are free to choose, but to me, it’s a problem when it affects other people,” Marraccini said.

For now, Marraccini says she will offer telemedicine as an option, or they can go to a different doctor, but they better not get anywhere near her offices. She’s not treating them in person. So.

According to reports, Dr. Marraccini says everyone she’s spoken with approves of her decision to abandon a group of patients. Here’s her website link in case you think she might benefit from hearing any other points of view. [Dr. Linda Marraccini](https://www.drmarraccini.com/dr-linda-marraccini.html)

🏥 Last week, The Washington Post published an op-ed headlined, “*Doctors should be allowed to give priority to vaccinated patients when resources are scarce*.” Here’s the very first sentence:

This conflicts radically with accepted medical ethics, I recognize.

That’s where the op-ed should probably have stopped, no? A “radical” conflict with “accepted medical ethics” is just another way of saying, it’s UN-ETHICAL. But never mind! The writer quotes an ER doctor, Dan Hanfling, for the justification: “At the end of the day, if you have willingly chosen not to do something that benefits the public good in the setting of a national crisis, then there are certain consequences.”

Consequences! That’s the same justification the communist Chinese use for their odious social-credit scoring system, too. No health care for you, science denier!

Best and brightest. Good thing they are in charge at a time like this.

🪳 Fauci was back on the podcast circuit over the weekend, trying to stay relevant and somehow top Joe Biden’s massive Covid vaccine power grab from last Thursday. Now Fauci says that he supports vaccine mandates for air travel and public schools.

“I would support that if you want to get on a plane and travel with other people, that you should be vaccinated,” Fauci said in a podcast promo video.

But why, Tony? Why? What if you have natural antibodies? What about then? What’s the “science,” exactly? And, what about citizens’ constitutional rights to interstate travel, Tony? What about that?

And he’s coming for the kids. “I don’t know what school you went to, but the school that I went to, you had to be vaccinated for measles, mumps, rubella, polio or otherwise you couldn’t go to school. So it is not something new to mandate vaccine for school children,” Fauci said.

The school that I went to has a religious exemption to vaccination that only requires you to let the state know you opt out. That’s the “school I went to.”

I’m going to go out on a limb here. I’m predicting the scariest Halloween costume this year is going to be the rubber Fauci mask and the giant hypodermic needle. I better order mine now, before they run out. I’m going to jump out of the bushes yelling, “I’m coming for YOU, kids! Booooo!” Hehe. I can’t wait.

🪳 Speaking of Fauci, attorneys who’ve been trying to get FOIA information from the NIH about its Ivermectin non-recommendation say they’re finally getting somewhere. They’ve been asking the NIH for the names of the scientists on the committee that approved the “non-recommendation” against the Nobel-prize-winning drug. They wanted to know who these people are.

The NIH responded to the public information requests by redacting the names of the nine members of the committee, and fighting the requests in federal court. The committee had concluded there was “insufficient evidence … to recommend either for or against the use of ivermectin for the treatment of Covid-19.” So, eat cake, citizens. I guess the names were redacted because science works best in the dark.

But the enterprising lawyers sent separate requests to other agencies and found a document at the CDC referring to the committee and identifying the nine members. So. Whoops! Nice job, lawyers.

And guess what? It turns out that the nine members have HUGE undisclosed conflicts of interest. Three of them work for Merck, which is currently developing a Covid drug that would compete with Ivermectin. One of them got a $155 MILLION DOLLAR grant to “study” Ivermectin after the vote. Had the committee recommended Ivermectin, no study would have been needed.

I know, you’re totally shocked. Shock and appalled. How could this happen.

✈️ On Thursday, France bumped the United States and Israel from the country’s “green” list down to “orange,” effectively prohibiting nonessential travel to France for unvaccinated visitors. Now, in Israel — and probably soon here as well — most cases of Covid are developing in vaxx people. But, Science! Shut up!

I almost left this story out. Who cares? Who wants to go to France anyways? The country is jammed with French people protesting for nine straight weeks over its vaccine passport laws. Saturday, The Washington Time published an article headlined, “France chaos: Protests descend into violence as hundreds of thousands march against Macron.”

Sounds like a fun place to go, right?

Here’s another fun fact. The article reports that “Joe Biden is understood to have been influenced by the French vaccination effort, as he unveiled plans this week to take a tougher line on vaccine mandates.” So … Biden was influenced by a policy that’s created nine weeks of nationwide violent protests? Makes sense.

By the way, you can’t find that article in Google. You have to use DuckDuckGo. Just saying. Probably just one of those weird search engine anomalies or something.

🛂 Meanwhile, in the UK, things are trending the other direction. Britain’s Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee just issued a formal report questioning the scientific basis for vaccine passports. PACA Committee Chair William Wragg said, “We have often heard throughout the pandemic that the Government will follow the science, but when afforded the opportunity to provide it on Covid passports, it has failed to do so. All we have is a flimsy claim that there is a public health case, but without any foundation for the claim to stand on.” The Committee observed that recent evidence suggests “that vaccinated people carry as much of the virus as the unvaccinated into any setting.”

How about that. Now, who’s going to protect the unvaccinated Brits from the vaccinated? Asking for a friend.

🔬 A largely-overlooked preprint study published in BioRxIV in late July describes a mechanism by which the researchers suggested that Covid-19 spike proteins can potentially cause “micro-damage” to cardiac tissue. The researchers concluded, “our findings suggest that circulating [spike] protein prompts vascular PC dysfunction, potentially contributing to establishing microvascular injury in organs distant from the site of infection. This mechanism may have clinical and therapeutic implications.”

You don’t say.

All the currently-available vaccines produce circulating spike proteins, now known to escape the injection site.

🔬 Since that statement will probably be disputed by some ambitious apoplectic commenter, in a May study published in Oxford’s Clinical Infection Diseases journal, the researchers concluded, “circulating SARS-CoV-2 [spike] proteins are present in the plasma of participants vaccinated with the mRNA-1273 vaccine.” So there.

🔥 Great news! Covid-19 is — apparently — no longer the greatest threat to public health! Last week, the New York Times published an article headlined, “*Medical Journals Call Climate Change the ‘Greatest Threat to Global Public Health’*.”

Climate change is the greatest threat! Not Covid! But, I should mention that the “medical journals” referred to in the headline were really just an opinion piece published in a bunch of journals. Not a study or anything. An editorial. An editorial expressing some doctors’ opinion that “a 1.5-degree-Celsius rise in global temperatures [is] the greatest threat to global public health.”

Well then. It’s settled. Covid is over. Now we need to focus on a 1.5 degree increase in global temperature. Which, even if true, has happened lots of times in Earth’s history. But the authors want to freeze the Earth’s climate just where it is now: “Indeed, no temperature rise is ‘safe.’” None, zip, zero.

How worried should we be? Covid-worried? More? Less?

📊 *COVID IN FLORIDA AND ALACHUA COUNTY* 📊

Biden’s vaccine mandate is working! Or something.

With the exception of the least important metric, every single weekly statistic that we track here at C&C is down, significantly, from the prior week.

U.S. hospitalizations fell from 2,601 to 2,224.

Florida Covid-19 bed utilizations fell from 14,577 to 11,701.

Florida’s reported cases fell from 129,240 to 100,012.

Florida’s positivity rate fell from 15.2% to 13.5%.

Florida deaths — a trailing indicator — finally began to fall, dropping by 20%, from 433 to 353. DeSantis’ critics were hardest hit. It was the lone statistic they were clinging to.

Florida’s cases per 100K fell from 588 to 455.

Alachua County’s cases fell from 1,458 to 1,277.

Florida’s R-naught, as reported on the Harvard/Yale covidestim site, fell from 0.73 to 0.54. The last time the R-naught was this low was in early January 2020. The next lowest point since then was 0.84 in September of 2020. We’re at the lowest point since the start of the pandemic, by a LOT.

In fact, the R-naught figure is so low that it almost seems weird. An error? But the graph looks organic, meaning that the curves appear natural. It makes me think about the 1918 pandemic, in which there were three large waves, and then the novel H1N1 virus settled into the endemic background noise of seasonal respiratory illnesses. Could this be it? If we can avoid ADE and vaccine-enhanced virulence, this absurdly low value is what we might see if we were approaching natural herd immunity. So.

Have a terrific Monday, and I’ll see you back here tomorrow for more coffee and covid commentary.

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