{"id":57199,"date":"2022-02-07T17:03:39","date_gmt":"2022-02-07T22:03:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/?p=57199"},"modified":"2022-02-08T11:38:27","modified_gmt":"2022-02-08T16:38:27","slug":"looking-into-ways-of-protecting-against-covid-in-addition-to-the-three-vaccine-booster-shots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/?p=57199","title":{"rendered":"Looking into ways of protecting against covid — in addition to the three vaccine\/booster shots"},"content":{"rendered":"

How not to catch covid: Stay thin, get plenty of vitamin D (click here<\/strong><\/span><\/a>), mask up and stay away from indoor crowds. And don’t think because you’re triple vaxed, you can’t get it. You can.<\/p>\n

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And listen to\u00a0Richard Feynman, Nobel-winner who said knowledge requires questioning assertions: “Learn from science that you must doubt the experts.<\/em>“<\/p>\n

For covid, you plenty of reasons to doubt the experts, and our government.<\/p>\n

For all this you need to read “Needle Points,\u2019\u00a0<\/em>Tablet\u2019s exploration into the sources and nature of vaccine hesitancy. This is not the hesitancy that comes from nutty conspiracy theories. It comes from the way our government functions and how it responds to the huge amount of lobbying dollars pharma throws at it.<\/p>\n

This is a long four part piece. You should read it all.\u00a0 This is not conspiracy stuff with b.s. “experts. This is real science, mixed in with some serious history.<\/p>\n

Start here.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

I can’t summarize the article in one short blog. I can say it’s made a profound impression on me. One major impact: I threw out all the Celebrex pills my doctor had so diligently prescribed for my injured shoulder. It also made me even more afraid of going anywhere near covid, since, despite the excellent vaccines and the excellent booster vaccines (that I and millions of others have), we know we can still get covid. Further, we know nothing about the long-term effects of the disease.<\/p>\n

Here are a few paragraphs I copied from the article:<\/p>\n

+ Angell argued that government agencies were highly compromised. She demonstrated how conflicts of interest permeated the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which gave “expedited” reviews and approvals for drugs with major side effects like heart attacks and stroke (such as Vioxx and Celebrex), and some with no serious benefit.<\/p>\n

+ Angell also revealed that “many members of the FDA advisory committees were paid consultants for drug companies. Although they were supposed to excuse themselves from decisions when they have a financial connection with the company that makes the drug in question, that rule is regularly waived.” She documented multiple instances of committee members discussing decisions on safety violations committed by the very companies that paid them, from which they did not recuse themselves.<\/p>\n

+ It is noteworthy that this was the moment U.S. government officials and the media chose to assert, soon on a daily basis, that the country was now in “a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” even though it was now clear that the vaccinated could get infected and transmit the virus. Every day, famous Americans including entertainers, athletes, and politicians who had been doubly vaccinated were having “breakthrough” infections. The message that “this is only an epidemic of the unvaccinated . is falling flat,” noted Harvard epidemiologist Michael Mina.<\/p>\n

+ By this point, the hesitant were no longer the only ones who had doubts. There were many anecdotal reports of great worry about breakthrough cases among the vaccinated (including among those who put much faith in vaccines because their immune systems were compromised by age or illness). Headlines about waning vaccines expressed despair that this pandemic might never end.<\/p>\n

+ Instead of addressing how this disappointment might affect people, U.S. public health talking heads and Twitter-certified human nature experts turned now to behavioral psychology, a very American form of psychology, to deal with the crisis — treating their fellow citizens like children or lab rats to be given rewards when “good” and punishments when “bad.” Some seemed to relish telling people that if they didn’t just do what the experts told them to do, they’d lose their jobs, their place in school, or some other basic need, like mobility.<\/p>\n

+ A study of 160 countries in 2020 showed that the risk of death from COVID is 10 times higher<\/strong> in countries like the United States where the majority of the population (67.9%) is overweight. CDC data shows that a whopping 78% of all hospitalized cases in the United States, and therefore those most at risk of death, were overweight or suffered from obesity. By lowering immunity, obesity increases the chance of severe illness, and also decreases vaccine efficacy, as has been shown with the flu vaccine.<\/p>\n

+ The problem with the PCR test is it is good at detecting viral RNA, but can’t distinguish whether the materials are intact particles, which are infectious, or merely degraded fragments, which are not.<\/p>\n

+ It found that people who had a previous COVID infection and beat it with natural immunity in January or February 2021 were 27 times less likely to get a symptomatic reinfection than those who got immunity from the vaccine. A Washington University study showed that even a mild infection gives long-lasting immunity.<\/p>\n

+ …Israeli data showed the potency of the vaccines was fading after five months, contrary to what Pfizer claimed. Thus, the data showed that the earlier one was vaccinated, the less protection one had against delta. That finding was crucial, because it meant that the new wave in Israel was not simply caused because a new variant came along. The vaccines were losing potency over time.<\/p>\n

+ “I think the problem we have is people-whether it’s the CDC or the people that are doing the briefings-their big concern is, they just want to get vaccinations up. And they don’t want to punch any holes in the story about vaccines. But we can handle the truth. And that’s what we should be getting.”<\/p>\n

+ This is especially important because we don’t yet-we can’t yet-have any good randomized control trial data to rule out long-term effects. Vaccine supporters, including government officials, will say: “There’s not been a serious side effect in history that hasn’t occurred . within six weeks of getting the dose.” But, as Doshi and others argue, there are examples of long-term problems that come to light after two months (for example, Doshi points out that it took nine months to detect that 1,300 people who received GlaxoSmithKline’s Pandemrix influenza vaccine after the 2009 `swine flu’ outbreak developed narcolepsy thought to be caused by the vaccine)<\/p>\n

My big news.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

I played tennis today. Icing, rest, hot showers and Celebrex (?) worked on my shoulder. Not perfect, but enough to hit a few balls. I need to change my tennis game — looser strings, slice backhand, no serving, and more top-spin forehand — one that doesn’t use brute shoulder strength. The joy of tennis is the exercise of chasing balls. You don’t have to play like Federer or Nadal to come off the court feeling healthier. Far better than listening to a rambling podcast on a stationary bicycle.<\/p>\n

I own one of these<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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It was actually legal tender before they ditched their dollar and went to the American dollar. At its end this note was worth about 40 cents.<\/p>\n

Zimbabwe is a great story of what happens when a popular freedom fighter (Robert Mugabe) is elected head of government and, over time, runs your country into the ground. A little on Mugabe:\u00a0 Under Mugabe’s Marxist rule, Zimbabwe went from a food exporter (it was the bread basket of Africa) to food importer with much of the population starving. In the 1980’s the AIDS epidemic hit and the incompetent government was unfit to deal with the crisis. The white population was harassed, then terrorized into fleeing the country, and the Ndebele tribe suffered genocidal ethnic cleansing. As the years of corruption turned into decades, the Zimbabwean currency collapsed, and the currency was suspended. In 2015 a 100 trillion dollar Zimbabwean note was worth 40 U.S. cents.<\/p>\n

The world is filling with autocrats doing “I have the answer to everything” — from Turkey to Syria, from Russia to Burma. I’m so happy we dodged that bullet here. Meantime, remember the old adage: Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Amazon is selling these notes for $249. Click here.\u00a0<\/strong><\/a> You can show it to your friends, frame it in your bathroom or use it to illustrate your story about autocrats.<\/p>\n

As you know I’m out of Facebook<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

It once was the best advertising vehicle on the Internet. But then it got itself into hot water with the regulators and Apple tightened some privacy screws on it. To deflect all that, it came up with a big push to the the metaverse. Kara Swisher writes about that in the Sunday New York Times, under the headline, “Meta Is Off to A Very, Very Rough Start.”\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

While the Apple challenge and the metaverse spending are certainly troubling, what we might be seeing is the market\u2019s tiring of co-founder Zuckerberg at the helm, even as more exciting and energetic rivals come into play. Even Microsoft seems more relevant and vibrant, including its recent and very deft plan to snap up Activision, a move Meta wouldn\u2019t dare make due to regulatory scrutiny.<\/p>\n

So Facebook is forced to be creative on its own, not always its strongest suit given how it is known for ham-handedly shoplifting ideas from others.<\/p>\n

Indeed, Zuckerberg did not sound much like Caesar Augustus \u2014 the techie\u2019s favored Roman emperor \u2014 in his earnings call with investors: \u201cAlthough our direction is clear, it seems that our path ahead is not quite perfectly defined.\u201d You\u2019d imagine $10 billion would buy a better map.<\/p>\n

Meantime, Google and Amazon are eating Facebook’s advertising lunch.<\/p>\n

Facebook in the last five days:<\/p>\n

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