Don't be an Alpha-Gal

ProMED tells the sad tale of a repatriated Arkansasan who started a BBQ restaurant and then came down with the tick-bourne meat allergy you may have heard of in a keto horror story somewhere:

Alpha-gal (galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose) is a sugar molecule found in most mammals, but not in humans. Kennedy said because the molecule is foreign to our bodies, when it gets introduced, say, through the saliva of a tick, it can result in serious allergic reactions to red meat and other mammal byproducts like milk or gelatin.

"So when a tick bites you, it injects saliva. Therefore, it's possible that's the route of first sensitization that's required for allergy," Kennedy said. "It is a vector-borne type of allergy that we didn't even know existed until 2007."

But how exactly does the illness manifest from the tick to human? Researchers aren't really sure.

"I wish we knew who would be at most risk, and that's another thing that needs to happen as far as the research goes," [Kennedy] said. "I've lived in Arkansas my whole life, and I can tell you I've had millions of tick bites, right? And I don't have alpha-gal. So why do my patients have it, when they get a tick bite? Is it the tick? Is it the person? What happens there?"

There is apparently some hope of recovery if you leave the range of the lone star tick and see an allergist.

BioNIHTech

It's been so long I've stopped counting. I was planning to comment on #iamahorse, the FDA's tweet-deleting settlement of a lawsuit against them for practicing medicine without a license interfering with the distribution of ivermectin. But then this came up...

The bad cat reports on another lawsuit, in which the NIH is suing BioNIHTech BioNTech for royalties on their COVID vaccine.

the mRNA payload came from NIH to moderna and moderna paid them lavish royalties in the hundreds of millions, possibly billions whose recipients at NIH were never really disclosed (and astonishingly are not required to be). these often go to individuals, not the NIH as a whole. fauci and collins may well be very rich men from this. (and their alleged “nothing to see here disclosures” all oddly seem to predate the commencement of the licensing lucre.)

many searched high and low but bioNtech remained a mystery.

where did they get their mRNA payload for their incredibly profitable product and how did they do it as quickly as moderna who had clearly gotten the cheat codes from the selfsame “scientists” who funded the virus’s creation?

well, now we know: they got it from the same place that moderna did: the NIH.

then they seemingly skipped out on the check. and now they are getting hit with a notice of default.

doopsie.

If it were me, I might gamble that the NIH was raking enough in from Moderna and try to skip out on the check. But it seems they lost the bet that the NIH would pass up Pfizer-level funds to keep this quiet. How much of a secret can it have been that a largely unqualified company also came up with a never-yet-successful mRNA approach to vaccinate against the same disease?

Day 1246: The Erstwhile Preprint

You have to be quick in post-COVID clown world, not taking the week off for the holiday. We at PlagueBlog intended to blog the amazingly anti-vaxx preprint "A Systematic Review of Autopsy Findings in Deaths after COVID-19 Vaccination" on The Lancet's preprint server while it was still up. We expected it to last longer than 24 hours. It seems the world wasn't ready for an estimated 700,000 American vaxx deaths, while the excuses were near at hand. We'll quote them because who knows what they'll be tomorrow:

This preprint has been removed by Preprints with The Lancet because the study's conclusions are not supported by the study methodology. Preprints with The Lancet reserves the right to remove a paper that has been posted if we determine that it has violated our screening criteria.

They cite a FAQ that, of course, does not say they take papers down for methodological reasons (though they do for ethical and other reasons), just that they reject preprints for methodology—which they clearly did not (by posting it in the first place).

Note that this tissue of lies is inserted in place of the paper's abstract. The Wayback Machine is watching, so you can read that much there:

Abstract

Background: The rapid development and widespread deployment of COVID-19 vaccines, combined with a high number of adverse event reports, have led to concerns over possible mechanisms of injury including systemic lipid nanoparticle (LNP) and mRNA distribution, spike protein-associated tissue damage, thrombogenicity, immune system dysfunction, and carcinogenicity. The aim of this systematic review is to investigate possible causal links between COVID-19 vaccine administration and death using autopsies and post-mortem analysis.

Methods: We searched for all published autopsy and necropsy reports relating to COVID-19 vaccination up until May 18th, 2023. We initially identified 678 studies and, after screening for our inclusion criteria, included 44 papers that contained 325 autopsy cases and one necropsy case. Three physicians independently reviewed all deaths and determined whether COVID-19 vaccination was the direct cause or contributed significantly to death.

Findings: The most implicated organ system in COVID-19 vaccine-associated death was the cardiovascular system (53%), followed by the hematological system (17%), the respiratory system (8%), and multiple organ systems (7%). Three or more organ systems were affected in 21 cases. The mean time from vaccination to death was 14.3 days. Most deaths occurred within a week from last vaccine administration. A total of 240 deaths (73.9%) were independently adjudicated as directly due to or significantly contributed to by COVID-19 vaccination.

Interpretation: The consistency seen among cases in this review with known COVID-19 vaccine adverse events, their mechanisms, and related excess death, coupled with autopsy confirmation and physician-led death adjudication, suggests there is a high likelihood of a causal link between COVID-19 vaccines and death in most cases. Further urgent investigation is required for the purpose of clarifying our findings.

Funding: None.

Declaration of Interest: Drs Alexander, Amerling, Hodkinson, Makis, McCullough, Risch, Trozzi are affiliated with and receive salary support and or hold equity positions in The Wellness Company, Boca Raton, FL which had no role in funding, analysis, or publication.

The Wayback Machine is not so good at capturing weirdly-linked PDFs, so if you're looking for the paper, the precient folks at The Daily Skeptic have it here, along with their own reporting.

Here is the preprint's extrapolation of 700,000 deaths, not from the autopsies and causes they listed, but from a rather mild VAERS underreporting factor:

Pantazatos estimated that VAERS deaths are underreported by a factor of 20. If we apply this underreporting factor to the May 5th, 2023, VAERS death report count of 35,324, the number of deaths in the United States alone becomes 706,480. If this extrapolated number of deaths were to be confirmed, the COVID-19 vaccines would represent the largest medical failure in human history.

Day 1224: Patients Zero

An independent news substack reports on three patients zero, doing gain-of-function research on SARSes at the Wuhan Institute of Virology:

Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. All were members of the Wuhan lab suspected to have leaked the pandemic virus.

As such, not only do we know there were WIV scientists who had developed COVID-19-like illnesses in November 2019, but also that they were working with the closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2, and inserting gain-of-function features unique to it.

When a source was asked how certain they were that these were the identities of the three WIV scientists who developed symptoms consistent with COVID-19 in the fall of 2019, we were told, “100%”[.]

“Ben Hu is essentially the next Shi Zhengli,” said Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and coauthor with Matt Ridley of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid19. Shi is known as “the bat woman of China,” and led the gain-of-function research at the WIV. “He was her star pupil. He had been making chimeric SARS-like viruses and testing these in humanized mice. If I had to guess who would be doing this risky virus research and most at risk of getting accidentally infected, it would be him.”

So not wet-market pangolin shoppers after all.

Day 1213: The New Anti-Vaxxers

The failure of the COVID vaccines has led to generalized grassroots anti-vaxxing. But lately the sorts of professionals who used to preface their doubts about the mRNA vaccines with apparently sincere statements that "I am not an anti-vaxxer but..." have been coming out as anti-vaxxers.

I don't know whether it's the recent revelations about massive production issues with AstraZeneca, the latest autism numbers, or previous enormities like the CDC adding an emergency use vaccine to the childhood schedule that's pushed these people out the Overton window into anti-vaxxing, but once they arrive they usually mention autism (rather than, say, SIDS).

Recently vocal anti-vaxxers include Steve Kirsch, Dr. Peter McCullough, and Aaron Siri.

Day 1193: Letters to Walensky

The bad cat has joined the epistolary madness, writing his own, properly capitalized missive to lame-duck CDC head Rochelle Walensky.

This series of unfounded claims and distortionary definitions seems both a poor and a deeply dangerous practice for Public Health.

If we are to have any hope of restoring faith in this field, we must ask and answer the pointed questions of “How did this happen?” and “At whose behest?”

Someone made these choices for some reason. Who and why would seem to be the bare minimum of post mortem here.

It is oft opined that a bad map is worse than no map at all and in this, I must wholeheartedly agree. The public health agencies in America have become the most calamitous of cartographers.

Jessica Rose also reports on Dr. Lapado's missive exchange with the dens of vipers writers of "word salad" at the FDA and CDC (which we linked in passing last time).

Day 1189: The State of Non-Emergency

About a year and a half after all semblance of an emergency ended (with the just the flu Omicron wave), the federal government has finally put a stake into the state of emergency that would not die. Federal largess for free COVID tests and vaccines has officially dried up. Like welfare bonuses, the Medicaid extension ended a bit earlier, but what happens when to those who no longer qualify for Medicaid varies by state.

Holdout states like Massachusetts are quickly dropping any remaining mask, testing, and vaccination mandates as well as ending local states of emergency. The major healthcare networks have been sending out emails about what they're dropping, as though they had a choice and could continue enforcing masking or other measures without the state to back them up. Regardless, none of them seem to have the appetite for it any longer.

It's difficult to say which intervention was the least effective, but the one people on the ground are still the most attached to seems to be masking. The government, on the other hand, continues to push dangerous and ineffective vaccines.

P.S. ...except in Florida.