Mark Boyle is an Irish thinker and writer who made the choice in his thirties to disengage from the industrial civilization of England and move to a small abandoned holding in the west of Ireland.He built and rebuilt the tumbledown structures there doing without fossil energy tools like tractors and saws and electricity, electric lights and running water and by extension no television, radio, telephone,internet or any digital toys. Some years previously he had spent three years trying out a life entirely devoid of using money. He wrote a book on that subject called the Moneyless Man but this move to living a life without all the so called modern conveniences of a technological civilization was an attempt to recreate his life around life’s basic necessities as experienced by the rural Irish of the late 19th early 20th century. He wanted to experience an existence close to and within nature growing and foraging for his food, hauling his own water from a spring and cooking his food over a rocket stove and a wood range using firewood he hauled and split himself by hand in a modest home hewed also by hand. The book has great value in his detailed telling of the tasks of his daily existence living far from the madding crowd by the sweat of his brow. Mark is very literate and well read and his book is sprinkled with quotations from the likes of Also Leopold, Edward Abbey, Wendel Berry and Walt Whitman . He lives or lived with Kirsty, fine spirited and sociable young woman to whom the book is dedicated, a woman who loved to dance, often with her eyes shut. A significant part of the book relates the experiences of a community who lived for almost two hundred years on the Blasket Islands, just off the southwest Irish coast who until 1953 lived a life of basic self sufficiency which Boyle clearly admires and emulates. Their community of 175 people eventually dissolved under the onslaught of industrial scale commercial fishing and the lure of urbanization especially to the young. I waffled on whether to give the book a 4 or 5 star rating. His writing style is 3 or 4 star but the content and story he tells has 5 star value beyond a doubt because this book is a preview of what many of us will be living sometime as early as this century. There is certainly a long term future for living as Mark Boyle does, close to nature not utilizing the energy from a fossil fuel powered civilization which will never be replaced by the chimera of so called renewable energy once the coal pits close and the finite oil and gas reservoirs deplete as they will someday. Mark Boyle feels very strongly about what he does and why he does it and to some readers this may be interpreted as dogmatic and ideological but he shows the how and why of the tasks involved of living with the basics of human existence. Most people who live a safe dopamine besotted technological urban existence of quiet desperation would flee from the hard physical lifestyle of Mark Boyle. Little do they know how fragile and precarious their own lifestyle really is.
The SARS Covid pandemic has certainly spurred interest in previous pandemics and I have read many books and articles on that influenza epidemic but the best and most comprehensive so far is The Great Influenza by John Barry. An easy 5 star book. I almost always go to Goodreads or Amazon reviews just to get a feel for the terrain and the negative reviews did not really surprise me because there are parts of the book that anyone with no scientific background will likely struggle to follow. Disclaimer: Having a medical degree is definitely an advantage and his comprehensive history of the medical profession from Hippocrates through Galen to the present was fascinating to this reviewer.This book is the closest to a magnum opus so far on the 1918-19 pandemic.
At the outset I would like to urge my goodreads friends who have been toiling through lockdowns and social distancing to plan on reading John’s book if they can.
The structure of the book bears mentioning. This is not a Cliff’s notes summary of what went down and if you want a quick concise overview, you best look elsewhere and I will try to provide some suggestions. John Barry mentions that he had to change his outline when he realized that a narration of how and where the pandemic began and spread worldwide would be incomplete without giving a background to the history of medicine and the scientific revolution of the 2 centuries that preceded 1918. Barry also chose to emphasize the personalities and lives of the scientists and politicians throughout the book with an abundance of personal anecdotes as well as detailed descriptions of the lines of research followed from before the pandemic to the final triumph of sequencing the H1N1 influenza virus just a decade or so ago. Again, if you have little interest in science and medicine, just move along because there will be little here for you to savor. There is a whole lot more to the book of course than a medical detective mystery. There is an abundance of personal and structural societal details of how it probably originated as an avian or perhaps animal virus in Haskell County Kansas in the second decade of the Twentieth century The rapidity of spread by this exceedingly transmissible virus to the world was primarily due to the massive troop mobilization going on in the US and their conveyance to the trenches of France in sardine packed train and ship transports. Barry exposes the factors contributing to the stunning death toll in great detail. They include the propaganda and information and behavioral controls at the time on journalists and public opinion. The first casualty of war is of course the truth, and truth about the pandemic was ruthlessly suppressed to “protect morale” of the soldiers and the citizenry. The military demanded cannon fodder to throw into the fray against Germany and the generals wanted those young men there and NOW, no matter the consequences. Leaders at the time believed that “this was just influenza” and no reason to pause their sacred mission to save the world. Of course it was not “just influenza”, a virus endemic to the world even today. It was an entirely new and lethal variant which killed the young and the healthy viciously in as little as 6 to 12 hours. Many doctors thought that this was an entirely new disease or perhaps plague returning because the symptoms so little resembled the normal course and progression of “la Grippe,” that the world was used to. Barry catalogs the absence of effective response to the pandemic in the United States from pooh pooh denials of its severity to an almost total lack of governmental organization to contain the exponential spread until far too late. At the very worst of the outbreak, society was fraying and starting to break down as fear took hold in the country and people began dropping like flies. Bodies were piling up in homes, on porches and in the streets overwhelming hospitals and graveyards. And of course no one knew what was causing this suffering and it became apparent that there was no effective treatment whatever. The pandemic hit in several waves staring in the spring of 1918 , ebbed a bit throughout the summer and really exploded in the fall of 1918 just about the time of the end of the first world war. It continued into 1919 and in years thereafter albeit with much diminished mortality. President Wilson contracted influenza at the Allies conference at the cease fire and reparations in Paris and the normally sharp and decisive Wilson after a slow recovery became forgetful and mentally and psychologically impaired likely due to Influenza, eventually caving to the reparation revenge forced on Germany primarily by the allies under Clemenceau and Lloyd George. This contributed to the rise of Adolph Hitler and the Second would war only 20 years later.
There is obviously parallels to our current Covid pandemic with some of the antics and feckless responses of the last year almost carbon copies of what happened in 1918. This book was published in 2003 and could have been published last week. At the end of the book Barry summarizes the 1918 pandemic as well as later influenza outbreaks up to 2003 with recommendations on how the world should respond with the next pandemic. Some lessons were learned and many more forgotten. The expression that the only thing we can learn from history is that we don’t learn from history merits repetition.
This is a long and heavy book,546 pages. The main text is 465 well written pages with copious notes and bibliography and index along with some pictures, I would have liked many more. The book is exceedingly well edited despite some comments on Goodreads to the contrary. His editor Wendy Wolf did an extraordinary job in my opinion. The value of the book is not as a synopsis of the 1918 worldwide flu outbreak. This is a comprehensive story of the largely sorry history of American medical education which late in the 19th century underwent a rebirth just in time to confront the worst pandemic in terms of actual deaths ever to hit the world. I really think that John Barry either needs to issue a revised updated edition or perhaps a new chronicle of the current Covid pandemic we are all experiencing now.
Alexandria is a 5 star book for a variety of reasons. If you don’t know Paul Kingsnorth, you should. I f you haven’t read Paul Kingsnorth, you should. Very few people know of Paul Kingsnorth. Let me give you a brief bio. Yes I will get around to reviewing ALEXANDRIA but you need to know a little about Paul in order to appreciate his latest effort. Paul is an Oxford educated “ recovered”environmentalist poet and writer, mostly of essays. For the past 5 years he has been writing novels and Alexandria is the last in a trilogy which includes. The Wake , Beast, and now Alexandria. He is more well known in the UK and he resides with his family on his farm on the West coast of Ireland. He is one of the cofounders of “The Dark Mountain Project”, a literary project exploring new ways of art, writing and philosophy. Paul gave up ‘trying to save the world” by environmental activism about a decade ago as a feckless quest and has been trying to point to a new way of thinking and writing about this human experience outside of the rubric we call “civilization.” He thinks our civilization has passed its sell by date. In some of his essays he has called for “Uncivilization.” One quote by Emerson in one of his books says”the end of the human race is that it will eventually die of civilization.” Paul says that before the industrial civilization and the beginnings of the novel, mankind lived by its stories, a way of thinking and living that has been lost by a world of industrial warfare, economic expansion and technological narcissism. Paul wants to bring back storytelling as something far more than an art form, back to the function it enjoyed since not long after man climbed down from the trees.In a sentence, civilization is doomed and we need better stories, not more novels which spring from the brains of urban writers who only know of urban things. Now to Alexandria……..
Alexandria takes place somewhere in SE England about 900 years hence in the same boggy peaty wetland of the previous two novels. The SHTF some time previously with global warming, ocean rise, dieoff and all the rest. We are introduced to our little family unit living a Neolithic lifestyle of hunting and gathering and paying rapt attention to animism and prophesy and dreams and of course story telling. All the while this little survivalist cult is dodging the “Stalkers” who are spying on them and trying to encourage exile to the gated community of Alexandria which is some sort of soul only Utopia established by someone or something called Wayland. Think of Wayland as God and Alexandria as Heaven. But not really, and it’s hard to figure out what it’s all about other than a way to finally clear the earth of the last humans who of course wrecked the planet for the last 900 years. The stalker has some luck peeling off some of the members of this extended social group until there are only 5 left, Father and mother, Sfia(Sophia?) and Nigel and El, their girl child. The narrative unfolds via soliloquys from the group. Eventually they are forced to abandon their settlement and voyage by canoe on a quest to the west following Father who has already left after having a dream prophecy which among other things predicts the fall of Alexandria” when the Swans return.”
It’s more entertaining than it sounds and it has elements of other dystopian fiction like Brave New World and The Road. It is life after the collapse in a matriarchal society.
I was curious about the people and place names like Alexandria and Wayland. Alexandria was founded by Alexander the great and became a center of culture and trade and science with a huge library. It fell to Islam in the 7th century and dwindled over the next millennium plus . Wayland also spelled Weyland as well as a host of other names comes from Icelandic and Germanic mythology. This paragraph from Britannica.com lays out the saga:
Wayland the Smith, Wayland also spelled Weland, in Scandinavian, German, and Anglo-Saxon legend, a smith of outstanding skill. He was, according to some legends, a lord of the elves. His story is told in the Völundarkvida, one of the poems in the 13th-century Icelandic Elder, or Poetic, Edda, and, with variations, in the mid-13th-century Icelandic prose Thidriks saga. He is also mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon poems Waldere and “Deor,” in Beowulf (all from the 6th to the 9th century), and in a note inserted by Alfred the Great into his 9th-century translation of Boëthius.
Wayland the Smith.Edda Sämund den vises by Fredrik Sander
Wayland was captured by the Swedish king Nídud (Nithad, or Níduth), lamed to prevent his escape, and forced to work in the king’s smithy. In revenge, he killed Nídud’s two young sons and made drinking bowls from their skulls, which he sent to their father. He also raped their sister, Bödvild, when she brought a gold ring to be mended, and then he escaped by magical flight through the air.
Later versions have Bodvild pregnant and happily married to Wayland.
Your guess is as good as mine on why Paul Kingsnorth chose that name but Paul has long been a fan of Celtic and Norse mythology. Wayland was a mythic and godlike figure who got his revenge and wound up with the girl to boot.
If you subscribe to the vision of the Dark Mountain Project, this book should be on your bucket list. The book has a beguiling dreamlike quality which really pulled me along to a not surprising ending.
Brave New World was a hard book to find here in high, wide, and windy Wyoming. Not only did our local Teton County Library not have a copy,no library in Covid besotted Wyoming had a copy to lend so I had to visit ABEbooks and buy my own. There were lots of copies of 1984, the flip side of BNW. So if you have read 1984, you need to read BNW to blend your yin with your yang, to complete your binary view of the world, to view two of the futures that our flesh might be heir to. There are certainly more however in my opinion. For those of you who have not read Brave New World, a brief summary is in order. Huxley wrote the book in 1931 which itself seems improbable and amazing given the technology displayed in the novel. I suppose it is a world some hundred(s) of years in the future after 1931. Dates are given not by AD or CE but AF, which stands for “After Ford”, which I assume is a satirical reference to the industrialist du Jour in 1931, Henry Ford. It is a Utopian world of eugenics with layers of castes with the brightest, the Alphas at the top and the moronic epsilons at the bottom with betas and deltas etc in between. The goal of the society is to match intelligence to tasks so the stupids do all the grunt work while the brains do jobs that need brains. This ensures social stability as all the classes embrace their eugenic servitude, happy in their work. Stability and community of unequals is the goal. Everyone belongs to everyone else and nobody belongs to anybody. That rules out mothers and fathers, husbands and wives and their assorted relatives like children which of course the state raises. The people are all clones of course which simplifies the social stratification. A variety of drugs and bottle baby manufacturing ensure no one visibly ages until their “sell by date.” Everyone is designed to be happy by repeated propaganda starting as children so everyone has the same opinions. In case something goes wrong with this happiness, everyone gets a dose regularly of the miracle drug SOMA which smooths out life’s ups and downs without nasty side effects like hangovers and liver disease. Promiscuity is the rule so “erotic play” is started early and everyone screws like rabbits without having to get involved in disrupting practices like love and marriage. Most of the women are freemasons who have all the equipment of a woman but who are conveniently sterile. A freemason has an XX/XY karyotype and if you are a dairy farmer like me, you are well familiar with freemasons as a heifer calf to avoid at all costs. You can’t milk a freemason………but I digress…… As you can imagine, some of these practices did not go over real big in 1931 and his book got some pretty bad reviews at the time. One character is introduced midway into the book, John, who goes by the name “the savage” is rescued from a Southwest Indian reservation where he had the misfortune of being born to Linda, a woman who got trapped accidentally behind the high voltage fences of the reservation. The natives were locked inside their reservation and allowed to maintain their lifestyle because the area had little in the way of resources to interest the Utopians who were living in far away England. The savage rails against the prevailing order and eventually goes into exile along with a few Alphas who started to get independent ideas of their own. If you are a fan of dystopian literature, this book is certainly one you need to read. There are certainly parallels with our current civilization replete with propaganda, conventional wisdom, mindless entertainment, and drug induced stupors and of course totalitarian mind control states. Go ahead and make your own parallels. Highly recommended.
This lesser known novel by Willa Cather is a 5 star effort equally as good as her well known Prairie Trilogy novels. The novel depicts the life of Claude Wheeler, a member of the wealthy Wheeler Farm during the period of the first world war. Claude is a troubled soul searching for meaning and yearning for a life outside of what appears to be his preordained destiny to grow up , get married and manage the family farm. He marries Enid , a loveless religious girl which doesn’t help his quest for meaning. You know things will be going south when she asks him to sleep on the couch on their wedding night. Meanwhile back in Europe Germany and France and England are locked in trench warfare waiting for America to come to tip the balance. The last third of the novel has Claude Wheeler as Lieutenant Claude Wheeler leading his men against the Bosch in an absolutely vivid depiction of war writing equal to the best male authored novels of the period such as All Quiet on the Western Front. The strength of the novel is the character development of Claude Wheeler and the people in his life in Nebraska and war torn France which also includes heart rending details of the Influenza epidemic of 1918 swirling through the horrific conflict. The novel earned Cather her first and only Pulitzer. The prairie Nebraska sections are vintage Cather but her gritty at times understated depiction of battle conditions writing mind you as a woman presumably without combat experience is amazing.
Well just when you thought that it was safe to get back in the water we have news of the rise of mutant corona viruses proliferating seemingly at will. I have covered this likelihood repeatedly and even joked with my brother about the Jackson Hole mutant heading to him in California. In fact mutant variants are popping up all over even in Ohio and Texas. Recall a recent post where I showed an almost vertical exponential spike in Ireland from the B1.1.7 UK variant. The other major variant is the B1.3.5.1 variety originating in the East Cape of S. Africa. However it is the Brazilian variants that are the most concerning and there are at least three labeled P.1, P.2 and P.3. The P.1 is the major one to be worried about. It seems that Manaus , a city of 2 million in NW Brazil had encountered its big pandemic last fall . It was estimated that 75% of its inhabitants had had Covid by late December when all of a sudden a new spike hit and hit hard. Among its unique features was rapid spread and infection of ever younger people. 40% of the victims were under the age of 60. Most alarming was the increase in pathogenicity. Dr Leopolina, a front line Doc, said that this new virus was more transmissible and more pathogenic. He described details such more rapid progression of symptoms. As an example he said while it used to take about 10 days for the lungs to show clinical and radiologic changes, it now only takes seven or eight days and the chest xrays looked far worse than clinical auscultation of the lungs would seem to indicate. It is certainly not coincidental that these new and possibly more pathogenic viruses are emerging from poor and populated areas in the world where the governments response has been weak and ineffective. Keep in mind that our US response and the Russian response has also been ineffective. It does appear that the incoming Biden administration is gearing up for a fight with a mass vaccination program. But will it be effective against these new variants? In Brazil which finally has been vaccinating with the Chinese Sinovac product, authorities are finding that it is only about 50% effective. It was 90% against the original Wuhan Covid virus according to Chinese researchers. Similarly in Israel which has vaccinated the largest percentage of any country , the Health minister Nachman Ash yesterday in the Guardian said that the immunity after the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine was “less effective than we had thought” or that Pfizer had indicated.I saw no mention of which virus was dominant in Israel. 13000 people were coming down with Covid after vaccination “at a greater rate than expected“. This includes at least 69 who were infected after the second jab. Specifically,at 14-17 days post jab there was only a only a 38% improvement in protection as compared to a matched unvaccinated group of 2000,000. This fact alone should be prove positive that we need to question the dubious strategy of trying to vaccinate US citizens with just one dose at the very least even if it means a delay getting the second dose. My opinion is that this was a dangerous and stupid idea emanating out of an administration of dangerous and stupid ideas since last January. A recent long article in Der Spiegel goes into greater detail over the risk of Germany falling victim to these new variants. Here is a telling comment from that article: The virus from Wuhan ravaged the world like a smoldering fire, but the pandemic now more closely resembles a sea of flames raging across the globe.
I have some final comments before closing this post. I said a year ago that this Covid pandemic was likely to be a very big deal but even I may have underestimated how big it was to become. I am willing to speculate that it is going to be a VERY BIG DEAL this year as well because of several factors. The most important is that this Trump Pandemic was ignored for far too long allowing the virus to get a firm toehold just like in Brazil .Incompetence by the government and resistance from US citizens has in many ways sealed our fate. Most of us are sick and tired of living under the cloud of Covid and whether we can at this late date gird our loins and do what needs to be done to abrogate the spread of the Wuhan parent virus and its evil spawns remains to be seen. I have a nagging fear that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines may underwhelm but they are the best we have for now and we need to push forward at warp speed while not neglecting ongoing testing and research. Importantly we need more new and rapid testing far quicker than the plodding PCR nasal swab and we need massively increased genomic testing. In Denmark the government wants every positive PCR test to be sent for genomic sequencing and I read that a similar program is being proposed in Manitoba. That will be a difficult task here because the US has only between 21 to 45 sequencing facilities that I was able to find. If the Pharmaceutical companies are to keep ahead of the curve they will need to be developing upgrades and without current genomic information they will fall behind. It would seem to me that right now we should be developing and administering multivalent vaccines to address these variants and not waiting to be overwhelmed by them after they arrive. We KNOW they will arrive. I also think we need to stop administering the vaccines to the aged and nursing home population. It should be given to the groups encountering and spreading the virus. Forget prioritizing the aged. After front line personnel are taken care of, give it to all ages ASAP especially those people like teachers who sit in rooms with 30 to 40 children. My final demand is that we shut down all international air travel. We should also stop all domestic air travel except in an emergency as well. Close the airports to stop the circulation of the virus. For example in Wyoming Teton County at 21000 people has had as many or more new cases than the other two largest counties with the cities of Casper and Cheyenne. They have 4 to 5 times the population and yet we have the same number of cases! Why? We have the busiest airport in the state. Do you think there might be a causal connection? The reason we have a world pandemic is because of unrestricted excessive cross pollination of millions of infected people crowded into small aluminum tubes without adequate ventilation. Shutting down arrivals from only certain countries hasn’t worked.
In my last Corona virus update I presented optimistic projections about the pandemic from the CDC and why I feared they may be wrong yet again because I feared a worsening of the current pandemic instead of an improvement. I truly hope I am missing something and would be pleased to to be wrong.
In this post I would like to present some information from recent viral research and corona virus case studies along with treatment options beside what Trump’s Warp Speed program is offering.
I was recently doing my morning scan of covid websites and stumbled upon this graph which really caught my eye: notice that flat green line at the very bottom. That represents the death rate in Chiapas state compared to the death rates in all the other states.
This second image happens to be a graph of Mexico’s Covid deaths, state by state. It comes from Mexico’s Public health website which appears excellent but which limits inquiry from unregistered people like me.
The second image as I stated is the death rate per 100,000 before and after July 2020 after Chiapas sent out Ivermectin kits to their population . I was not able to ascertain whether this was to be a prophylactic or a treatment trial but the effect is jaw dropping, over a 90% decrease in deaths. Correlation doesn’t always imply causation but what else could explain such a decline? I was able to find out the dose regimen which I present: It was a 5 day course of Ivermectin(a antihelminthic) given at 12 mg/day if you are less than 80 kg and 18 mg/day if over 80 kg(176 lbs). It appears Hydroxychloroquine was also given(?) as 400 mg BID for one day and then 200 mg BID for the next 4 days. That dosing regimen is also being trialed somewhere in Mexico currently I believe but I have no access to the results at the moment. The CDC has debunked these drugs early on but their recommendation was based upon a poorly structured trial with high does in animals and in hospitalized patients with late stage Covid. This regimen is also being used in India at the moment but I have not investigated how that is working out yet. Unfortunately there is variability in how the tests were performed and until large double blind studies in a variety of patients are performed, the jury will remain out. The best anecdotal reports I have seen is when Ivermectin with or without zinc and with or without doxycycline and hydrochloroquine is given very early in the infection, it seemed patient outcomes were improved. What about antiviral drugs, like the “miracle” drug remdesivir?
Early on Remdesivir was purchased by the US government as a potentially landmark antiviral drug . It was administered to trump as you may recall. We purchased the world supply of 500,000 doses at a cost of $ 2300/ea and the delivered cost to the patient was to be $3200 to $4100 for a 5 day course. This from NPR last year. Remember that? The US government had already underwritten over $70 million given to Giliad in development costs and allowed Giliad to secure a patent to prevent open source use. As you may know, Remdesivir was a colossal and expensive DUD. The trials were either poorly structured or worse. It seems every month or two there is a new miracle antiviral being touted. The latest is Molnupiravir from a Georgia company which allegedly kills the coronavirus at 99% when trialed with ferrets and now is in human trials according to an Atlanta TV station. I personally hope for such an effective immediate treatment for Coronavirus as the most effective way to stop the Covid epidemic in its tracks but I’m not holding my breath.I do hope the ferrets are still doing OK. I should mention a study involving mouthwashes containing cetylpyridinium chloride having strong antiviral properties in an inviro study. It was assumed it would be effective against covid-19 in their conclusions. It is present in a variety of mouthwashes, toothpastes and nasal sprays such as those made by Colgate, Crest and Sensodine among others. This seems to me to be a no brainer if you regularly use mouthwashes. Keep taking your Vit D.
I bring these treatment options up because of my skepticism about long term vaccine efficacy which has not been established because establishing such efficacy will require long term rigorous phase three clinical trials which were not done by Trump’s Warp Speed program. Here are some of my concerns and I will try to use solid research already done to justify my concerns.
There is a long established phenomenon of “Antibody escape” which occurs when the virus “escapes” the antibody . There was some good work done recently at the U of Washington at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in which they used convalescent plasma rich in antibodies which targeted particular regions of the Sars Coronavirus spike proteins. They tested all possible mutations in the spike proteins which could offer escape pathways to escape mutants. The surprise to me was that these escape pathways differed from person to person. Here is a statement from the paper:
The findings suggest that peoples’ responses to a vaccine that targets the spike protein are unlikely to be uniform, say the researchers. I guess that means vaccine efficacy may also be unlikely to be uniform.
I should note that this finding while worrisome is just released and not yet peer reviewed but there have been some SARS virus studies similarly done challenging viruses over a period of 5 months in which later versions of the virus became resistant to convalescent serum challenges. I Do not recall which immune proteins were being tested and there are quite a few. There is a case study out of Brazil again just released on 5 Jan describing a patient infected by the SARS corona virus who recovered only to be reinfected 5 months later by a variant and she became much more deathly sick. It is studies and reports like this with corona virus immune responses that make this observer concerned about long term efficacy of vaccines or reinfection after their initial episode. It is common knowledge that immunity from a corona cold virus doesn’t prevent getting another cold in the same cold/URI season.
Finally to close out this post I would like to state my preference for a particular vaccine. I base my decision on several factors. The vaccine is finishing up phase three trials and is the J&J vaccine produced and developed in Belgium and at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. It uses a tried and proven technology well researched and tested against the Ebola virus. Their proprietary technology is called ADVAC and instead of using a grafted RNA spike protein subunit like Pfizer and Moderna, it uses a common noninfective adenovirus in which no RNA is used. Instead it is DNA and it resides within the nucleus of the inactivated virus. After the corona virus invades the cell a process is initiated in which mRNA is elaborated to make the spike proteins that are released and which stimulate an immune response with a variety of immune cells. Among them are Helper and killer T cells, and Beta cells. I assume a variety of neutralizing antibodies are also elaborated. The results using participants’ worldwide look promising so far and if I was betting on a horse race, J&J’s Ad26.Cov2.S vaccine would be my bet. It is a stable rugged vaccine and can be stored in any refrigerator. Best of all it is a one shot. Unlike Pfizer the J&J trials have included testing to include the elderly with and without a variety of comorbidities. Recall that Pfizer and Moderna stopped their trials at age 55 and now most vaccination programs are targeting the elderly as next in line after front line doctors and nurses. In other words they are vaccinating this group absent any phase three trials ever being done!!! And now there are reports out of Norway and elsewhere tying more than a dozen deaths of elderly over the age of 80 dying after receiving their second Pfizer poke. These reports need immediate investigation and not by Pfizer, to establish the level of risk/benefit of mRNA vaccines to the elderly. Good thing for Pfizer stockholders that their lawyers negotiated indemnity against lawsuits. I have also been hearing anecdotal reports that the second Pfizer shot has more unpleasant side effects. My prediction is that if Ad26.Cov2.S is as effective as its competitors and is priced properly it will out compete the fragile and less rigorously tested vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. I should also mention again that the Oxford Zeneca uses similar technology with a Chimp adenovirus. Stay well out there and use a real N95 or N99 mask like my SPERIAN valve mask. These variants from the UK and S Africa and Brazil are out to rumble and mean business!
In my last Corona virus update I presented optimistic projections about the pandemic from the CDC and why I feared they may be wrong yet again because I feared a worsening of the current pandemic instead of an improvement. I truly hope I am missing something and would be pleased to to be wrong.
In this post I would like to present some information from recent viral research and corona virus case studies along with treatment options beside what Trump’s Warp Speed program is offering.
I was recently doing my morning scan of covid websites and stumbled upon this graph which really caught my eye: notice that flat green line at the very bottom. That represents the death rate in Chiapas state compared to the death rates in all the other states.
This second image happens to be a graph of Mexico’s Covid deaths, state by state. It comes from Mexico’s Public health website which appears excellent but which limits inquiry from unregistered people like me.
The second image as I stated is the death rate per 100,000 before and after July 2020 after Chiapas sent out Ivermectin kits to their population . I was not able to ascertain whether this was to be a prophylactic or a treatment trial but the effect is jaw dropping, over a 90% decrease in deaths. Correlation doesn’t always imply causation but what else could explain such a decline? I was able to find out the dose regimen which I present: It was a 5 day course of Ivermectin(a antihelminthic) given at 12 mg/day if you are less than 80 kg and 18 mg/day if over 80 kg(176 lbs). It appears Hydroxychloroquine was also given(?) as 400 mg BID for one day and then 200 mg BID for the next 4 days. That dosing regimen is also being trialed somewhere in Mexico currently I believe but I have no access to the results at the moment. The CDC has debunked these drugs early on but their recommendation was based upon a poorly structured trial with high does in animals and in hospitalized patients with late stage Covid. This regimen is also being used in India at the moment but I have not investigated how that is working out yet. Unfortunately there is variability in how the tests were performed and until large double blind studies in a variety of patients are performed, the jury will remain out. The best anecdotal reports I have seen is when Ivermectin with or without zinc and with or without doxycycline and hydrochloroquine is given very early in the infection, it seemed patient outcomes were improved. What about antiviral drugs, like the “miracle” drug remdesivir?
Early on Remdesivir was purchased by the US government as a potentially landmark antiviral drug . It was administered to trump as you may recall. We purchased the world supply of 500,000 doses at a cost of $ 2300/ea and the delivered cost to the patient was to be $3200 to $4100 for a 5 day course. This from NPR last year. Remember that? The US government had already underwritten over $70 million given to Giliad in development costs and allowed Giliad to secure a patent to prevent open source use. As you may know, Remdesivir was a colossal and expensive DUD. The trials were either poorly structured or worse. It seems every month or two there is a new miracle antiviral being touted. The latest is Molnupiravir from a Georgia company which allegedly kills the coronavirus at 99% when trialed with ferrets and now is in human trials according to an Atlanta TV station. I personally hope for such an effective immediate treatment for Coronavirus as the most effective way to stop the Covid epidemic in its tracks but I’m not holding my breath.I do hope the ferrets are still doing OK. I should mention a study involving mouthwashes containing cetylpyridinium chloride having strong antiviral properties in an inviro study. It was assumed it would be effective against covid-19 in their conclusions. It is present in a variety of mouthwashes, toothpastes and nasal sprays such as those made by Colgate, Crest and Sensodine among others. This seems to me to be a no brainer if you regularly use mouthwashes. Keep taking your Vit D.
I bring these treatment options up because of my skepticism about long term vaccine efficacy which has not been established because establishing such efficacy will require long term rigorous phase three clinical trials which were not done by Trump’s Warp Speed program. Here are some of my concerns and I will try to use solid research already done to justify my concerns.
There is a long established phenomenon of “Antibody escape” which occurs when the virus “escapes” the antibody . There was some good work done recently at the U of Washington at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in which they used convalescent plasma rich in antibodies which targeted particular regions of the Sars Coronavirus spike proteins. They tested all possible mutations in the spike proteins which could offer escape pathways to escape mutants. The surprise to me was that these escape pathways differed from person to person. Here is a statement from the paper:
The findings suggest that peoples’ responses to a vaccine that targets the spike protein are unlikely to be uniform, say the researchers. I guess that means vaccine efficacy may also be unlikely to be uniform.
I should note that this finding while worrisome is just released and not yet peer reviewed but there have been some SARS virus studies similarly done challenging viruses over a period of 5 months in which later versions of the virus became resistant to convalescent serum challenges. I Do not recall which immune proteins were being tested and there are quite a few. There is a case study out of Brazil again just released on 5 Jan describing a patient infected by the SARS corona virus who recovered only to be reinfected 5 months later by a variant and she became much more deathly sick. It is studies and reports like this with corona virus immune responses that make this observer concerned about long term efficacy of vaccines or reinfection after their initial episode. It is common knowledge that immunity from a corona cold virus doesn’t prevent getting another cold in the same cold/URI season.
Finally to close out this post I would like to state my preference for a particular vaccine. I base my decision on several factors. The vaccine is finishing up phase three trials and is the J&J vaccine produced and developed in Belgium and at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. It uses a tried and proven technology well researched and tested against the Ebola virus. Their proprietary technology is called ADVAC and instead of using a grafted RNA spike protein subunit like Pfizer and Moderna, it uses a common noninfective adenovirus in which no RNA is used. Instead it is DNA and it resides within the nucleus of the inactivated virus. After the corona virus invades the adenovirus cell a process is initiated in which mRNA is elaborated to make the spike proteins that are released and which stimulate an immune response with a variety of immune cells. Among them are Helper and killer T cells, and Beta cells. I assume a variety of neutralizing antibodies are also elaborated. The results using participants’ worldwide look promising so far and if I was betting on a horse race, J&J’s Ad26.Cov2.S vaccine would be my bet. It is a stable rugged vaccine and can be stored in any refrigerator. Best of all it is a one shot. Unlike Pfizer the J&J trials have included testing to include the elderly with and without a variety of comorbidities. Recall that Pfizer and Moderna stopped their trials at age 55 and now most vaccination programs are targeting the elderly as next in line after front line doctors and nurses. In other words they are vaccinating this group absent any phase three trials ever being done!!! And now there are reports out of Norway and elsewhere tying more than a dozen deaths of elderly over the age of 80 dying after receiving their Pfizer poke. These reports need immediate investigation and not by Pfizer to establish the level of risk/benefit of mRNA vaccines to the elderly. Good thing for Pfizer stockholders that their lawyers negotiated indemnity against lawsuits. I have also been hearing anecdotal reports that the second Pfizer shot has more unpleasant side effects. My prediction is that if Ad26.Cov2.S is as effective as its competitors and is priced properly it will out compete the fragile and less rigorously tested vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. I should also mention again that the Oxford Zeneca uses similar technology with a Chimp adenovirus. Stay well out there and use a real N95 or N99 mask like my SPERIAN valve mask. These variants from the UK and S Africa and Brazil are out to rumble and mean business!
Hello folks. I just did an update less than a week ago and I do updates based upon anything new I might happen to unearth in regional, national and world news on Covid. I have recently returned to trying to watch this pandemic more closely since just after Thanksgiving when I noticed increases in cases worldwide. I follow Covid related information on the CDC and WHO websites. I also have access to some research abstracts from a variety of sources without pay walls and on a variety of other websites that most of you may be familiar with such as woroldometer , The Covid Tracking project at the ATLANTIC, and particularly our excellent Wyoming Covid site: Tetonwy covid response overview. My wife opens that website every morning and she pointed out the recent jump in daily cases from about 12/day at Christmas to now over 60/day. That marks a 5X increase in about the last 2 or 3 weeks. I also happened to notice that Ireland in about the same time period experienced a 30X(!!!) jump in cases along with continued increases in the UK. This merits a graph:
Yowza! Our recent Wyoming spike bears a morphological similarity to this Ireland disaster spike but instead of 30X it is just 5X:
I am sorry I can’t insert this graph but click it to view if you wish. Here is a headline on CNBC today that caught my eye along with a comment from Larry Kudlow, one of the resident economic geniuses in the Trump administration:
“Up to 30% of Americans may be infected with coronavirus by year-end,” Dr. Scott Gottlieb says.
White House National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow said Tuesday that the U.S. has “contained” the threat of a domestic coronavirus outbreak”, breaking with the warnings of officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We have contained this, I won’t say airtight but pretty close to airtight,” Kudlow told CNBC’s Kelly Evans on Tuesday afternoon.
SO with this I decided to look at what data Larry Kudlow and Scott Gottlieb were referring to at the CDC and I found this graph of current and projected cases.
The first thing I noticed was that it sure didn’t look like Ireland or Teton County and I wondered why. ….Text from the CDC website:
This week, CDC received forecasts of new reported COVID-19 cases over the next 4 weeks from 32 modeling groups that were included in the ensemble forecasts.
This week’s national ensemble predicts that 900,000 to 1,800,000 new cases will likely be reported in the week ending January 30, 2021.
The state- and territory-level ensemble forecasts predict that over the next 4 weeks, the number of new reported cases per week will likely decrease in 8 jurisdictions, which are indicated in the forecast plots below. Trends in numbers of future reported cases are uncertain or predicted to remain stable in the other states and territories. There are 32 models displayed here!
I wondered how they came to this prediction based upon what seemed to be happening not just in Teton County and Ireland but in England, Europe, and hot spots in the US like CA and AZ. If you click on countries in Worldometer to check their cases graph, you will notice that even formerly well contained countries like Switzerland, Denmark and Sweden have exponential curves. Everything in these jurisdictions seemed to be going exponential;. By the way I need to insert a famous quotation from Albert Einstein which has been patently obvious for this whole pandemic:”The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”
Gottlieb in that CNBC article said that about a third of the US has either had the vaccine, an asymptomatic infection or a symptomatic infection and with the hopeful increase in vaccine production we may be peaking based upon the cdc models.
So here is how I think the models break down (this from several sources and one recent blog:
10 million Americans have had asymptomatic covid
23 million have tested positive for Covid
5 million or more are immunized and more each day
And get this: 70 million have already had Covid with symptoms but decided not to get tested and ride it out.(????)
There. That’s your 1/3 that Scott Gottlieb is talking about. If his educated guesses are right you can make a plausible argument that the graph may be right. But I don’t buy it.
Here is my take on this. Even if these numbers are correct this projection does not seem to take into account the variants of the Corona virus now starting to sweep the world: The UK and the S. African variants seem to be far more communicable (40-70%) than the Wuhan virus. Increase in percentage is VERY IMPORTANT , as it is percentage increases or decreases that form the basis of exponential functions. I have read reassuring comments from a variety of political and media sources that it may be no more lethal even if it is more communicable. Comments like this are absolutely nuts because just a 50% increase in communicability changes the shape of an exponential curve drastically in a short period of time. Another question I have asked but rarely answered is what does an increase in communicability really mean? I have read that it may mean that the virus binds more tightly to the ACE Receptors primarily in the Respiratory tract. It probably also means that a smaller inoculum may be needed to induce disease in that case and just those two factors are enough to kickstart new and larger outbreaks. If the variants bind more tightly in the lung will they bind more tightly in the heart or gut as well? Will that alter the percentage of people becoming “Long Haulers?” These are just some of the speculative questions that occur to me. Will the vaccines work as well on these new variants? Pfizer seems confident their vaccine will handle these few mutations so far elaborated by genomic testing. Well it turns out that there are not just single mutations on these viruses. The UK has had 23 and the S. African at least 21.(Sorry…lost that source).
Somebody else must have noticed these tidbits I am throwing out and questions I am raising and I am certain they have, but questions like these tend to undermine trust in the Trump Warpspeed Rollout. The Trumpian response to the epidemic has been botched from the very first press conference almost a year ago and trust is not a word that can be associated with his administration. “Mistakes have been made,” as the politicians love to say and of course I hope that a new administration might reduce the frequency of mistakes but there is a lot of complexity and unknowns around this pandemic and what we believe today may be rejected tomorrow. Think System theory also. The mistakes made have stemmed from structural failures of the entire system and not just individual mistakes.
One of the long standing questions in epidemiology is why bacteria and viruses behave the way they do. Basically they are smart little buggers. Their goal like most of us is more reproduction. The more individuals they can infect, the more successful they become. If they become more lethal that becomes self defeating. If the host dies, they die. The host’s immune system fight back with antibodies to stay alive and kill the invaders which often prompts a retaliatory response from the microorganisms. And so it goes.But I digress………
I will take up and elaborate in future posts issues such as immune responses, new vaccine and treatment options , changes we need to make to our Public Health System as well as big picture questions I have covered for years about how this little detour in the trajectory of the civilization affects our future. Stay tuned.
If you are romantic or a romanticist of enjoy a tumultuous romantic love triangle or quadrangle in this case, you will love this book. If you are a man who wonders about the structure within a woman’s mind, you may be mystified, bewildered and confused. But this book was written with a mystified, bewildered girl as the central character, written by a 19th century Brit and if there were a world populated by many such women there would be many more men willing to give up the heterosexual life forever!.
Bathesheba Everdene is her name and fickle is her game. On a foolish and cruel whim she sends an anonymous valentine to the local confirmed bachelor farmer, William Boltwood with only 2 words: Marry Me. Up until then Farmer Boltwood wouldn’t know a woman from a ewe and this card turns his life upside down as he turns into a lovesick maniac when he finds out who wrote the note, his next door neighbor, the aforementioned vixen Bathsheba, also a sheep farmer. Bathsheba is a hottie teenager with great managerial skills and diligence to succeed on her new inherited farm which of course only a man could handle but she proves to the serfs in the little Southwest England burg of Weatherbury that a sheep farm and haying 1000 acres is woman’s work. We are introduced to a salt of the earth shepherd Gabriel Oak, who falls for her hook, line and shepherd’s crook. He woos her and has his hopes dashed but he stays on as hired help carrying his secret flame burning in his breast.
Boltwood, our love sick puppy, begs Bathsheba to marry him and she is almost persuaded to do so if for no other reason than to shut him up when a red coated blue blooded soldier/lothario by the name of Frank Troy sweeps her off her feet with ridiculous flattery and amazing swordsmanship and the knot is quickly tied. But it turns out he has been bonking a blonde maid, Fanny Robin, who he loves better. So much better that she gets a swelled abdomen leading to complications. So Bathsheba’s marriage turns to sheep manure as he blows
her money on gambling and booze. I’ll stop now. Hardy now has to decide if true love will ever come to Bathsheba or anyone else. The strong points are Hardy’s floral descriptions of Wessex(SW England) with its farms and fens and moors and horrific weather. If you love nature, you know Hardy by now. The characterizations are at times clear and brilliant and at times not so brilliant. Bathsheba Everdene at times is presented as a self assured independent level headed woman in full command of her life and at times a whako teenager with poor impulse control and terrible judgment. I’d say the first half of the book is a solid 4 star read but Tom Hardy really ramps up the last half with crises and conflict enough to satisfy anyone who loves hopeless romantic entanglements. Five star for me. Disclosure: I am a sheep farmer which may have influenced my rating. Addendum: The title comes from a line in Thomas Grays poem “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” which is a 5 star poem. The term refers to a life far from the bustle of civilization, preferably in a calm, private and rural setting.
Rendezvous Mountain Farm 