90 Miles From Tyranny

Friday, May 20, 2022

Visage à trois #249

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

Three Additional Bonus Videos:

A bombshell study - from the National Institutes of Health and Moderna, no less - should end debate

Unvaccinated people are much more likely to develop broad antibody immunity after Covid infections than people who have received mRNA shots, a new study shows.

The gap remains large whether people had mild, moderate, or severe Covid infections, the study showed - undercutting a crucial argument that vaccine advocates have made to defend the shots.

The research draws on data from Moderna’s 30,000-person clinical trial for its mRNA shots. It may help explain why so many Americans now suffer multiple Covid infections, sometimes within months.

Researchers already knew that many vaccinated people do not gain antibodies to the entire coronavirus after they are infected with Covid.

Unvaccinated people nearly always gain antibodies to the nucleocapsid protein, which covers the virus’s core of RNA, as well as its spike protein, which allows the virus to attack our cells. Vaccinated people often lack those anti-nucleocapsid antibodies and only have spike protein antibodies.

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Vaccine advocates claim the lack of nucleocapsid antibodies may occur because the mRNA shots prime people to fight off the Covid infections more quickly and have lower viral loads. In this view, the narrow immune response is a feature, not a bug - vaccinated people are less seriously infected and so do not need to generate anti-nucleocapsid antibodies.

This study essentially demolishes that theory.

Scientists from the National Institutes of Health and Moderna quietly posted the paper a month ago as a pre-print, but it has received little attention despite its import.

The researchers examined the development of anti-nucleocapsid antibodies in people who had been part of Moderna’s clinical trial and were infected with Covid. As they expected, the scientists found that the vaccinated people were far less likely to develop the anti-nucleocapsid antibodies. Only 40 percent of people who received the shots had antibodies, compared to 93 percent of those who did not.

But they then went a step further. Because the infected people had been in the trial, their viral loads had been precisely measured when they were found to have Covid. So the researchers were able to compare vaccinated and unvaccinated people who had the same amounts of virus in their blood.

Once again, they found that unvaccinated people were far more likely to develop anti-nucleocapsid antibodies than the jabbed. An unvaccinated person with a mild infection had a 71 percent chance of mounting an immune response that included those antibodies. A vaccinated person had about a 15 percent chance.

Only in cases of severe infection and very high viral loads did the difference narrow significantly; in those cases all unvaccinated people and most of the vaccinated had anti-nucleocapsid antibodies.

The chart that should worry the vaccinated: the yellow line shows the odds that an unvaccinated person will develop anti-nucleocapsid antibodies to Sars-Cov-2, stratified by viral load. The blue line shows the same odds for a person who received an mRNA shot.

An unvaccinated person has an almost 60 percent chance of developing antibodies even with an extremely mild infection; a vaccinated person needs almost 100,000 times as much virus in his blood to have the same chance.

The researchers also tried to correlate the development of...

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #416

White Supremacist Shoots Up Korean Hair Salon Injuring Three Korean Women...

White Supremacist Jeremy Smith

Jeremy Smith allegedly told investigators had panic attacks when around Asian people

A man suspected of wounding three Korean women in a Dallas hair salon during a shooting authorities are investigating as a hate crime was arrested Tuesday and is suspected in a recent string of shootings at or near Asian businesses, authorities said.

Jeremy Smith, 37, was booked into the Dallas County jail and is charged with three counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. He allegedly walked into the Hair World Salon on May 11 and opened fire on the seven people inside with a .22 caliber rifle, Dallas Police Chief Eddie Garcia told reporters.

Smith got off 13 shots before fleeing into a minivan, he said.

"We believe the shooting was intentional," said Garcia. "The actions and the investigation has revealed to us that this was motivated by hate."

One victim was shot in the foot, another in the lower back and the third in the right forearm, Garcia said. They are expected to recover.

The FBI said it is investigating the shooting as a hate crime. Surveillance video captured Smith's van with specific details and determined it to be a...

Tolstoy famously wrote that all happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. He might have said the same about unhappy economies — and added that there are all too many signs the US recession now in the works will likely be of the particularly unhappy kind.

Among the reasons to fear a deeper-than-normal recession is that monetary-policy tightening is causing the equity and credit market bubbles to burst. Since the start of the year, not only has the Federal Reserve’s abrupt policy shift wiped out almost 20% of the stock market’s value; it has also wiped out nearly 20% in the bond market’s value and close to 50% in the value of exotic markets like bitcoin.

The combined evaporation of some $12 trillion, or 50% of gross domestic product, in household wealth since the start of the year must be expected to cool consumer demand in time. Households will begin to stress about their reduced 401(k)s, which will make them want to rebuild their savings. According to the Federal Reserve, for every sustained $1 loss in household wealth, consumers tend to reduce their spending by 4 cents.

This means that, although consumer spending has held up well to date, because of their financial-market losses, consumers might soon be expected to reduce spending by as much as 2% of GDP. This is the last thing we need when consumers are already cutting back because of soaring gasoline and food prices and because their wages are being eroded by high inflation.

Another cause for concern is that the Fed’s tightening has led to an abrupt jump in the 30-year mortgage rate from around 3% at the year’s start to 5.5% at present. This has reduced the affordability of housing by 25%. That in turn is already leading to a marked cooling in housing demand.

It is also not helping matters that the shift to a very much tighter monetary policy stance is coinciding with the fading of last year’s massive $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan stimulus. The International Monetary Fund says this will result in an approximate halving in the US government budget deficit from 10% of GDP in 2021 to less than 5% of GDP in 2022. So not only will the economy have to cope with higher interest rates — it will also have to learn to live with very much less government policy support than it had before.

Further clouding the US economic outlook is the much more difficult external environment for US exporters as a result of...