☕️ Coffee & Covid ☙ Wednesday, May 25, 2022 ☙ PROTOTYPES 🦠

UK hospitals to drop mask mandates; CDC wants to testing vaccinated people; Pfizer says its drug is a prototype; Wuhan and monkeypox; HIV and monkeypox; reinfections; and lots more...

Good morning and Happy Wednesday, C&C! Today’s roundup includes: UK hospitals to drop mask mandates; CDC suggests testing vaccinated people for domestic US travel; Pfizer argues in court its safe and effective drug is just a prototype; the Economist made an adventurer’s map; Wuhan lab experimented on monkeypox last year, right after they finished their covid experiments; a link between HIV and enhanced monkeypox; a 2015 study links suppressed IFN function to monkeypox, guess what mRNA does?; Bloomberg blurts that some people are catching covid again faster; Gates funds lots of lefty groups; another sudden and unexpected stroke; and Governor DeSantis continues focusing on rural areas in Florida.

🗞*COVID NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞

😷 The UK Daily Skeptic ran a story yesterday headlined, “Mask Requirement for Healthcare Workers to Be Dropped From Monday.” The story reports that the UK’s National Health Service will lift the mask mandate starting next week.

💉 One step forward, two steps back. ZeroHedge ran a story yesterday headlined, “CDC Now Recommends COVID Testing For All Domestic Air Travel, Including The Vaccinated.”

Haha, suckers! You actually believed that taking the jab would get you out of testing.

The story reports that the CDC quietly changed the guidance on its website yesterday, now recommending that people traveling within the US — not just internationally — get tested as close to departure as possible, and now, regardless of vaccine status. The prior guidance only suggested testing for disgusting unvaccinated people.

A little over a week ago on May 19th, a CDC agent told AFAR Magazine that “People who are up to date with their covid-19 vaccines may feel well and not have symptoms but still can be infected and spread the virus to others.” It only took a year for the CDC to admit that.

Anyway, the testing reccomendation not a mandate, not yet. I suspect such a mandate would be an unconstitutional restraint of freedom of movement.

💉 The Epoch Times ran a story earlier this week headlined, “Pfizer Moves to Dismiss Lawsuit From COVID-19 Vaccine Trial, Citing ‘Prototype’ Agreement.”

The gist is that whistleblower Brook Jackson sued Pfizer last year alleging that the vaccine maker violated federal laws governing procurement of new drugs and clinical trial regulations. But Pfizer just filed a motion to dismiss Brook’s lawsuit, arguing that those laws and regulations don’t apply to its vaccine contract with the U.S. Department of Defense, because its agreement was executed under a special provision for “prototype drugs,” allowing contractors to skirt many of the rules and laws that typically apply to normal drug development contracts.

In the “Background” section of its Motion to Dismiss, here’s exactly what Pfizer argued:

Because of pandemic-related exigencies, the agreement was not a standard federal procurement contract, but rather a ‘prototype’ agreement executed pursuant to 10 U.S.C. § 2371b[.] … The [contract’s Statement of Work] describes a ‘large scale vaccine manufacturing demonstration’ that imposes no requirements relating to Good Clinical Practices (‘GCP’) or related FDA regulations.

So there you have it. It wasn’t a “rushed experimental drug.” According to PFIZER, it was an “exigency-driven prototype manufacturing demonstration not subject to good clinical practices and related FDA regulations.” It’s totally different from an experiment. This was a “demonstration.”

It took me a while to stop laughing. I’m old enough to remember when calling the jabs “experimental drugs” could get you thrown in Facebook jail. Now PFIZER is shirking liability for its shoddy trials by calling its own drug a “prototype” and a “demonstration.” That would’ve made for a good marketing slogan, right? “Our drug isn’t experimental, it’s a prototype!”

The bottom line is a prototype isn’t something you give to consumers. It’s a mock up, a test. This argument is a joke. It might work, but it’s a joke, a joke they played on all of us.

Pfizer said a lot of other dumb stuff in its motion. For those of you with legal interests, here’s a downloadable copy of the Motion to Dismiss. Even non-lawyers can understand the introductory section. https://tinyurl.com/3ue6rpz3.

🙈 The Economist ran a story yesterday headlined, “Where is monkeypox spreading fastest?” The story provided a helpful heat map showing where monkeypox is spreading most. It’s also a helpful guide for the sexually adventurous. Spain looks to be the networking hot spot just now.

🙈 Trending Politics ran a story yesterday headlined, “Wuhan Laboratory Found to Have Conducted Novel Monkeypox Research One Year Before Global Outbreak.”

What awful disease WEREN’T this crazy Chinese scientists working on in that Wuhan lab?

The article reported that a February 2022 study published in Virologica Sinica, the official journal of the Chinese Society of Microbiology, explained the process for artificially enhancing a monkeypox virus. The kicker is that the study’s authors include, you guessed it, scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which continues happily tinkering with dangerous viruses to this day.

It gets better. The study’s lead author and publisher is Editor-in-Chief Zheng-Li Shi, now the DIRECTOR of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, who you may recall was widely known in 2020 as the “Bat Lady” who researched how to increase transmissibility of coronaviruses at the lab. Looks like she got a promotion for all that excellent work.

Investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson recently suggested that the new monkeypox virus may also have gained increased transmissibility functions, somehow. Attkisson wrote, “This isn’t like previous encounters with the [monkeypox] virus. The widespread nature of the outbreak and evidence of frequent human-to-human transmission has researchers questioning whether the virus has changed to become more transmissible.”

Yes, but HOW could it have changed to become more transmissible? One day we’ll have to look into what’s really going on inside that Chinese lab. If only we had a huge federal health agency that could … oh never mind.

🔬 A new study just published in Applied Mathematics and Computation titled, “Modelling HIV/AIDS and monkeypox co-infection.” The researchers studied whether there was any link between HIV and monkeypox infections. Guess what they found:

[I]nfection by HIV greatly enhances monkeypox infections, as in the absence of HIV/ AIDS most people will naturally recover as noted but that is not the case for the dually infected.

So.

🔬 A 2015 study published in the Journal of Virology was titled, “Evasion of the Innate Immune Type I Interferon System by Monkeypox Virus.” The researchers concluded in that study that “On the other hand, MPXV (monkeypox) is not pathogenic in most strains of inbred mice, unless IFN signaling is abrogated.”

In August 2021, a different pre-print study titled “The BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 reprograms both adaptive and innate immune responses,” concluded that mRNA “vaccination decreased IFN-γ production[.]”

Abrogated IFN = decreased IFN. A weird coincidence.

Just saying.

🔥 Bloomberg ran a story last week headlined, “Omicron Is Turning Out to Be a Weak Vaccine.” The article is just a lot of fear porn about how “nobody” has immunity, especially gross unvaccinated people, and ANYBODY can catch a covid reinfection. It’s these variants, you see. It just keeps changing.

The article features no data, no numbers, no reference to any particular city, state, country or even continents. It doesn’t consider or even mention whether subsequent infections might be milder. It’s just a vague “zero covid” threat advisory.

But there was ONE sentence that jumped out at me. I wonder if this one sentence is the reason they wrote the article. It said, “public health experts also point out that in rare cases people are getting reinfected within weeks.”

Wait, what? Reinfected WITHIN WEEKS? Why, it’s almost like those people’s immune systems aren’t working right or something. Is this a narrative tweak to hide multiple rapid reinfections under a big bushel of “everybody gets reinfected?”

Anyway, just to SEE, I searched Twitter for “reinfected.” I had to stop after a few seconds because jab-happy people are so terrifying.

Tessa Fisher @spacermase

So, since it's looking like we're all going to get reinfected with COVID every 4 months or so, are there any, uh, plans, to deal with that? Better vaccines? A returns to stricter lockdowns during waves? Widespread improvement of ventiliation systems? Anything?

🔥 A variety of sources broke a story this week showing — and you’ll never believe it — Bill Gates is the source of hundreds of millions of dollars funding leftwing activist groups, from well-known ones like BLM, Media Matters, and NARAL, to a whole raft of other shady behind-the-scenes groups. It turns out that Gates’ “philanthropic foundation” has spent vastly more on leftist activism than it has spent on health, education, or welfare.

The story began with an Elon Musk tweet. Twenty-six lefty groups had signed an open letter calling for companies to boycott Twitter if Musk’s purchase goes through. So Musk tweeted about it, asking his followers to help figure out who funds them, singling out one of the signers in particular, a 501(c) called “Accountable Tech.”

Musk was curious because the Washington Free Beacon had just investigated “Accountable Tech” and only found an empty office. The Free Beacon explained the company is just a “registered trade [name] for the North Fund, a shape-shifting nonprofit group that uses aliases to push an array of left-wing causes from a shell office in Washington, D.C.”

The Beacon was able to figure out that Accountable Tech/North Fund gets its money from two other non-profits, the “Sixteen Thirty Fund” and the “New Venture Fund,” which themselves use more than 50 patriotic-sounding fictitious names, like “Fix Our Senate” and “Floridians for a Fair Shake.” Breitbart then figured out that the New Venture Fund gets its cash from … the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. So Accountable Tech was actually funded by Gates through a bunch of cut-outs to disguise where the money came from.

So far, 11 of the 26 signers of the anti-Elon letter are Gates funded entities.

The article has LOTS of other details. If you like this kind of thing, read more in the Brietbart story headlined, “EXCLUSIVE: Bill Gates Poured Millions into Dark Money Fund Attacking Elon Musk.” Link: https://tinyurl.com/2p8npd7a.

I hope Microsoft Windows justifies creating this monster. I never liked Windows anyway. I’m a Mac user. Don’t judge me.

💉 28-year old Queens special ed teacher Areti Boukas had a stroke while teaching class earlier this month. Mount Sinai posted a heartwarming video about her journey to recovery last week. Apparently her stroke was caused by a blood clot in her brain that Sinai hospital was fortunately able to clear, and it looks like the young teacher is doing well.

Mount Sinai Health System @MountSinaiNYC

Areti Boukas, a 28-year-old teacher, realized she was having stroke symptoms when teaching a math lesson. Areti shares her story and the swift, lifesaving care she received at @MtSinaiQueens Cerebrovascular Stroke Center: mshs.co/3N7Rn2m @MountSinaiNeuro @MajidiShahram

mshs.coSecond Chapter at Life for Young Stroke Patient at Mount SinaiAreti Boukas, a 28-year old teacher in Queens, was teaching a math lesson when she noticed her students were looking at her funny. That’s when she realized s...

🦸‍♂️ Governor DeSantis held a press conference earlier this week, again touting “Infrastructure Improvements,” which means investments in rural cities and counties. Unlike yesterday’s story about the home buying help, which I felt somewhat ambivalent about, I like this effort. DeSantis has been at this for several weeks now. Using the budget surplus to build up Florida’s smaller towns and rural counties could have enormous long-term benefits to the state.

Normally, the political gravity of the large metro areas would suck in all the extra money. It’s politically courageous for DeSantis to use the money to help rural communities.

Have a wonderful Wednesday and I’ll see you back here tomorrow for more.

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