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Pfizer course has 23% efficacy vs. Omicron: S. African study
Immunity is still likely strong enough to curb severe disease
Published: December 12, 2021 18:09
Bloomberg
A two-shot course of Pfizer Inc.’s vaccine has just 22.5% efficacy against symptomatic infection with the omicron variant, but can thwart severe disease, according to laboratory experiments in South Africa.
Researchers at the Africa Health Research Institute in Durban issued additional data on a small study released earlier this week.
The research considered blood plasma samples from 12 participants. Scientists found omicron resulted in about a 41-fold reduction in levels of neutralising antibodies produced by people who had received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech SE shot, compared with the strain detected in China almost two years ago.
This is “essentially compromising the ability of the vaccine to protect against infection,” said the team of scientists led by laboratory head Alex Sigal in a preprint released on Friday.
There continues to be sufficient protection against severe disease, they said. The team this week was the first to show that the variant, found by scientists in South Africa and Botswana and announced on November 25, could largely, but not totally, escape the antibodies produced by Pfizer’s vaccine.
Still, they said a booster shot could increase immunity. That’s been backed up by studies carried out by Pfizer itself.
Preliminary U.K. data released on Friday showed that boosters from AstraZeneca Plc and Pfizer/BioNTech SE improve protection against the omicron variant to as much as 75% in the early days after the shot.
With Ivermectin in Hand, Wife Dies While Husband
Begs Hospital to Administer
By Beth Brelje December 12, 2021
David DeLuca of Sicklerville, New Jersey will never know if the Ivermectin prescribed by an out-of-state doctor for his wife would have saved her life. Colleen DeLuca, 62, died of COVID-19 on Oct. 10, at Jefferson Washington Township Hospital in Sewell, New Jersey, before he could get a court order to administer the drug.
Ivermectin has helped in some cases, but across the United States, many hospitals don’t include it in their COVID protocol for treatment and refuse to use it, even as a last effort on a dying patient.
This is how much control Big Pharma has over state governments and hospitals. They don't care if people die, as long as Ivermectin doesn't interfere with their astonishing profit margins.
Buffalo, New York attorney Ralph Lorigo has spent the last 11 months handling cases where the family wants to try Ivermectin and must get a court order to force hospitals to allow the drug to be administered. DeLuca had Lorigo draw up papers for court, but because Lorigo doesn’t practice in New Jersey, he instructed DeLuca to find a New Jersey attorney to file the papers and handle the case. However, DeLuca couldn’t find an attorney willing to take on the case.
“They kept telling me the magistrates of New Jersey will never let this go through. Now I’ve got to go through the next 25 years without her,” grief stricken David DeLuca, 62, told The Epoch Times. “My 3-year-old granddaughter kisses her photo at night.”
A Beautiful Life
David fondly recalls the day in 10th grade American History class when the pretty, new girl took a seat near his. Colleen’s family was in the military and she had just moved back from Germany. She was quiet but loved to listen to him talk. By senior year, they were an item and went to senior prom together. And when he got a scholarship to Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, he couldn’t imagine life without her. He arranged for housing and a justice of the peace, and in 1977, the two 18-year-old high school sweethearts shocked their families and eloped.
“Everybody said it wasn’t going to work,” David said. “But ultimately my parents came to love her as a daughter.” They went home for Thanksgiving and were loaded down with hand-me-down household items, proving their family was getting used to the union.
He worked two jobs; she helped him type school papers and cooked dinner for David and three college buddies who would become lifelong friends. By the time he graduated, they had three children under the age of four. Altogether, they had six children. The last two were home schooled all the way through graduation. And now there are 10 grandchildren. Colleen loved giggling with her grandchildren and was big on offering hugs.
Devout Catholics, they intentionally moved near a church offering Mass in Latin and were deeply involved with their faith. Colleen joined an order of the Carmelite nuns for married women.
When COVID-19 appeared, they worried. Colleen beat cancer twice and had asthma and other health concerns. David had health issues too.
“We knew we were high-risk patients,” David said.
Colleen sewed 500 face masks and gave them all away. They took all the precautions they could take. She stayed home most of the time, They wore masks and disinfected.
But when vaccines became available, they couldn’t take them because of direct ties to aborted fetal cells.
Suffering
In mid-September, Colleen started showing asthma symptoms. They called her pulmonologist and she prescribed the usual asthma medicines, including her nebulizer.
“We weren’t thinking COVID at that time,” David said. It was not unusual for Colleen to have an asthma attack. She had complex breathing issues and used a nasal pap and an oxygen concentrator when she slept. Soon, she was coughing and they started to monitor her oxygen saturation levels.
David did what he could to care for her but on Sept. 21, he suddenly felt like he hit a brick wall.
“I went to bed immediately,” David said. The next morning he got tested and learned that he had COVID, and the doctor told him certainly Colleen had it too. The general practitioner prescribed a host of medicines, including hydroxychloroquine.
On September 23, Colleen’s oxygen level dropped to 88 percent.
“I said, I have to take you to the hospital. She said, if you take me to the hospital, I’m going to die there. I said, if I don’t take you, you are going to die here.” She wanted to sleep at home through the night, but he checked her level again and it had already dropped to 86 percent.
Too weak from COVID to take her himself, David called an ambulance.
The ambulance crew had Colleen sitting up on a gurney with an oxygen mask on her mouth, so he couldn’t kiss her goodbye. Her eyes looked scared. Tracing the sign of the cross on her forehead with his thumb, David blessed her. They waved goodbye and that was the last time he saw her awake.
The hospital had her on a CPAP machine with full oxygen and at home, David was also suffering from COVID. On Sept. 28 he got a call from a doctor at the hospital. They were going to put Colleen on a ventilator and she wanted to talk to David. Her voice was weak, and competing with the oxygen machine.
“I’m going on the ventilator. Bury me in my ceremonial scapular. I love you and the kids.”
David started calling friends asking them to pray for Coleen and one friend told him about Ivermectin.
He asked his general practitioner for it and, although David feels his doctor was doing his best, the doctor said the data did not show it would help and did not prescribe it. David got a prescription for himself and Colleen through a telehealth meeting with a doctor from Oklahoma.
David took his Ivermectin and in days, he started to feel better, although today he still has an occasional cough. He asked the hospital to give Colleen Ivermectin.
“They said no, it’s not part of our protocol. It doesn’t work,” David said. “I told the doctors, you need to dispense this medicine. They said no.”
Now he was trying to find an attorney, trying to convince the hospital to use the Ivermectin he already had, and he was trying to get permission to go into his wife’s room. He says they would not let him visit her because she was contagious, but since he already had COVID, he felt he should have been able to get in.
Eventually, he was able to see her through a window, but he wanted to hold her hand and let her hear his voice.
Jefferson Washington Township Hospital said it does not comment on individual patients and, when asked about its Ivermectin policy, had no comment.
David went to church early on Oct. 10. He got two calls from the hospital just before Mass started. The first call let him know Colleen was in renal failure. He said he would go to the hospital right after church.
“You don’t understand. Your wife is dying,” David recalls the second call. He went directly to the hospital and this time they let him into the room with a gown and mask.
“I could see she was going to die. I called my kids and grandkids from all over the United States.” It was a video call.
Colleen had been weaned off sedation.
“She was awake and she was suffering,” David said.
David was an Air Force pilot for 28 years and flew combat missions during which he was responsible for hundreds of lives. He was trained to make life and death decisions in seconds. But he never thought he would be in this situation. He allowed them to remove her from the ventilator.
“I said, Lene, I can’t do this to you, and she squeezed my hand. We pulled the vent and she died within 30 seconds. I couldn’t hug her because of all the stuff around her. I blessed her.”
His sorrow turns to anger when he thinks about the experience. He feels the hospital expected her to die as soon as she went on the ventilator.
“In my opinion, they gave up on her on day one. Their protocols killed her,” David said. “The legal system won’t do its job. People need to know (Ivermectin) is out there. I want her story to be told because I want other people to be protected and not go through what my kids went through, losing their mother.”
“I trusted the system to help, and they didn’t care.”
The hospital protected her from a possible cure. Go figure! Who are they working for? As if I didn't know.
Since the woman was clearly dying, there was no sensible reason to deny her the Ivermectin; the worst it could do is kill her. It seems that hospitals and governments are protecting dying people from the possibility of getting better. Why? Because that would reveal that Ivermectin can work, and it would also reveal that Big Pharma does not want patients to get better if it means their profits decrease.
Pfizer documents reveal 160,000 adverse vaccine reactions
12 Dec, 2021 21:17
Documents released by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reveal that drugmaker Pfizer recorded nearly 160,000 adverse reactions to its Covid-19 vaccine in the initial months of its rollout.
The documents were obtained by a group of doctors, professors, and journalists calling themselves Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, who filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the FDA for their release.
The first tranche of documents reveal that as of February 2021, when Pfizer’s shot was being rolled out worldwide on an emergency basis, the drugmaker had compiled more than 42,000 case reports detailing nearly 160,000 adverse reactions to the jab.
These reactions ranged from the mild to the severe, and 1,223 were fatal. The majority of these case reports involved people aged between 31 and 50 in the United States.
More than 25,000 nervous system disorders were reported, along with 17,000 musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders and 14,000 gastrointestinal disorders. A range of different autoimmune conditions were reported, along with some peculiar maladies, including 270 “spontaneous abortions,” and incidences of herpes, epilepsy, heart failure and strokes, among thousands of others.
These side effects were previously known, and have all been logged on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database, which as of Sunday has tracked 3,300 deaths following vaccination with Pfizer’s vaccine, a figure broadly in keeping with the company’s own data.
Critics say that some of these deaths cannot be conclusively linked to vaccination, while others argue that the true number of deaths and adverse effects is underreported.
Critically, Pfizer’s documents were used by the FDA to declare the company’s jab safe, which it did for Americans aged 16 and older in August. It has since been approved for children as young as five, and booster doses for people aged 16 and up were approved last week.
The FDA says it may take until 2096 to release all 451,000 pages it used to approve Pfizer’s vaccine.
In the face of the more transmissible and apparently more vaccine-resistant Omicron strain of the coronavirus, the US government has continued to tout vaccination as key to defeating Covid-19. So too has Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, who said on Wednesday that a fourth shot of his company’s vaccine may be needed to keep immunity levels up.
And soon it will be a requirement every 5 months. Bourla will become the richest man in the world.
With one South African study showing Pfizer’s vaccine up to 40 times less effective against Omicron than previous variants, the company says it could have an Omicron-specific vaccine on the market by March 2022.
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Russian expert rubbishes Pfizer call for Covid jabs every 3 months
14 Dec, 2021 18:33
One of the team that developed Russia’s pioneering Sputnik V vaccine has hit out at US pharma giant Pfizer’s warning that Covid-19 jabs may be required every three months to protect against the virus.
“We don’t recommend that, and I don’t see the necessity,” Denis Logunov, a deputy director at the Gamaleya Institute, told RIA Novosti on Tuesday. “What Pfizer is publishing now looks like an advertisement for an unsold product, not proven research. For now, intermediate results are coming out, and it would be hasty to use them to justify the decision to vaccinate people en masse every three months.”
Studies published in October showed the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine’s effectiveness at preventing infection dropped from 88% to 47% after six months. However, the same analysis also showed that the jab was still 90% effective at preventing hospitalization after the same interval of time.
Since then, booster shots of Pfizer’s vaccine have become widely available in the US and the UK. The firm recently released data showing that three doses appeared to provide good protection against Covid-19, even with the Omicron variant spreading, which scientists fear could be more contagious than previous strains and circumvent immunity.
Last week, however, the company’s CEO, Albert Bourla, told CNBC a fourth jab may eventually be required. He said he had previously thought a fourth would be required only after 12 months, but that Omicron may now necessitate earlier distribution. He emphasized that, as the Northern Hemisphere heads into winter, when immunity is naturally lower, “a third dose will give very good protection, I believe.”
Some experts have pointed out that Pfizer and other drug companies have a financial interest in selling more shots, arguing that the data shows vaccines remain effective at preventing serious cases of Covid-19 even after six months.
A comparative study of vaccines conducted between January and June showed that, after six months, Sputnik V vaccine was the most effective at preventing Covid-19 mortality, and second only to Moderna at preventing infection. However, despite being given the green light in more than 70 countries, it has not yet been approved by the World Health Organization, with Moscow citing bureaucratic hurdles.
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Man spent millions in Covid relief payments on luxury cars & private jets
15 Dec, 2021 06:20
A Texas man has been arrested for allegedly scamming the US government out of $3.3 million in Covid-19 pandemic relief payments, which he spent on real estate, luxury vehicles, and private jets.
Scott Jackson Davis, 46, was granted $3.3 million in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans after he claimed he needed the money to pay for the “significant payroll” of three businesses. An investigation revealed, however, that the companies “had few if any employees and little to no payroll.”
Authorities also discovered that Davis had previously pleaded guilty to felony wire fraud – a detail he left out of his loan application.
Davis was arrested on Tuesday on charges of wire fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering after he “spent a large portion of the PPP loan funds on private jet travel, real estate, and luxury vehicles,” according to the US Department of Justice.
“If convicted, he faces a maximum total penalty of 30 years in prison for each count of bank fraud, 20 years in prison for each count of wire fraud, and 10 years in prison for each count of money laundering,” the DOJ declared.
Davis is not the first Texan to face charges for stealing money through the US pandemic relief program.
Lee Price III, 29, was charged with wire and bank fraud among other crimes last year after he obtained $1.6 million through fraudulent relief applications. Price spent the money on real estate, a Lamborghini sports car, jewelry, and strippers before he was caught and sentenced to over nine years in prison.
I wonder what Lee Price II thinks of his namesake today?
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