Our Covid brain trust had a wee discussion of how the dogs are no longer (much) eating the dog food of vaccines as the magic bullet for all problems Covid. Even if the press is hammering away at the story line, we’re seeing more and more defections…including from those inside the media tent.

Bear in mind that until recently, Kim Iverson was of the “let ‘er rip” school of thinking. Now she’s declaring that the vaccines, even boosts, do perilous little to stop Covid. She tears into the public health establishment for being “hyperfocused” on the vaccies , and the degree of neglect and misinformation amounts to crimes agains humanity. Mind you, our GM has been giving a more cool-headed version of this argument for over a year….but to see a version of it in the mainstream media?

Further consider: the media is a hothouse. Iverson would not dare take a line like this and risk career damage and being shunned socially unless at least a substantial minority of her peers felt the same way.

Iverson also tears into the officialdom for the lack of any guidance about what to do if you get sick except go hide and hope you don’t get so debilitated that you need to call 911. Recall that this isn’t just a problem for lowly patients. IM Doc has repeatedly inveighed against the CDC for failing to give advice to clinicians…one of its most important responsibilities in past infectious disease outbreaks. It’s completely punted with Covid. The US should be ashamed that third world countries are doing better by sending diagnosis and treatment kits to citizens, with care packs including thermometers, blood oximeters, test kits, zinc, Vitamin C, Vitamin D, OTC meds for fever, and sometimes the I drug.

But Iverson’s self-described rant hasn’t fully abandoned her previous view that getting Covid might not be terrible. She highlights “natural immunity” (as opposed to “Covid-induced immunity”) as her #2 topic, and it takes a while for her to work around to her point: If you have gotten Covid, how long are you unlikely to get it again and infect others? She frames it as important to know in terms of being able to care for others. But let’s not kid ourselves: the officialdom has been so fixated on vaccines as the one and only approach to Covid that they’ve been unwilling to concede that having gotten infected some protection.¹

And speaking of treatments, IM Doc, who flagged the Iverson video, in recent weeks sent along a discussion of two cases where he was certain the cause of death was remdesivir. His explanation, using one as an example:

This patient although with a high BMI – had not ever had any kind of renal disease in any way but died of acute tubular necrosis – and this is almost always secondary to drug toxic effects. The patient had a CREAT of >7 – (normal being 05.-1.2). Almost assuredly killed by the remdesevir….

Another patient earlier this year shared the same fate.

Did COVID kill them? – No – as there is no evidence that COVID or any other respiratory virus causes this level of renal failure. And this is especially so in the absence of multiple systemic organ failure – when the heart, lungs, liver and brain appear relatively intact – the chance of COVID or any initial infection being the cause of renal failure in isolation is laughably low.

But were they killed by a drug that was being used for COVID? – almost assuredly.

And just try to report that to the FDA – they laugh out loud in your face. And remdesevir is known to nuke kidneys. It happens in up to 1/3 of the patients and was the cardinal reason it was suspended in Ebola. Unfortunately – it does absolutely NOTHING – for the patients – there is no benefit that I have ever been able to see – NOT EVEN ON ONE PATIENT. Almost every country on earth has realized this – and no longer use this agent – except the USA.

However, Iverson makes the mistake of treating mild and asymptomatic cases, particularly among the young, as inconsequential. For starters, an estimated 20% of asymptomatic cases end up with long Covid.

And as GM predicted, Omicron, by not being as well suited to attack the lungs and instead going over ACE2 receptors, which are all over the body, is not much reducing lungs to bloody pulp but instead can and is producing widespread organ damage which takes a while to manifest.²Martha r sent this example from a full year ago:

An Eagle River family spent 10 days in an intensive care unit, including Christmas Day, while their 6-year-old son battled a syndrome that presents in some children who have had COVID-19.

All four members of the Dye family tested positive for COVID-19 in November, parents Jerry “Heath” Dye and Hailey Dye said. The Dye children, 2-year-old Lucas and 6-year-old Cameron, barely had any symptoms while Heath Dye and Hailey Dye said they were exhausted.

“The COVID part wasn’t all that bad for us. It seemed like we had the most common symptoms that you hear about and stuff like that. It was more four weeks after — when we — when Cameron got sick and things changed drastically,” Heath Dye said.

In December, Cameron Dye was running a 104.5-degree fever. A large rash started to spread from his ankles up his entire body. The family took him to urgent care, which treated him for strep throat and scarlet fever. The treatment didn’t relieve his symptoms, and in a few days, he was admitted to the ICU at the Children’s Hospital at Providence Alaska Medical Center.

He had congestive heart failure and fluid in his lungs. The doctors said Cameron Dye had multisystem inflammatory syndrome, a new condition that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says comes with inflammation of the major organs in some children four to eight weeks after a COVID-19 diagnosis.

From Mayo’s listing multisystem inflammatory syndrome, dated last November:

Multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) is a serious condition that appears to be linked to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Most children who become infected with the COVID-19 virus have only a mild illness. But in children who go on to develop MIS-C, some organs and tissues — such as the heart, lungs, blood vessels, kidneys, digestive system, brain, skin or eyes — become severely inflamed. Signs and symptoms depend on which areas of the body are affected….

Rarely, some adults develop signs and symptoms similar to MIS-C. This new and serious syndrome, called multisystem inflammatory syndrome in adults (MIS-A), occurs in adults who were previously infected with the COVID-19 virus and many didn’t even know it. MIS-A seems to occur weeks after COVID-19 infection, though some people have a current infection.

With Omicron being more severe in children and hitting other organs proportionally harder than the lungs than other variants, it looks very likely that we’ll see higher levels of multisystem inflammatory syndrome and other long-term ailments than we did in the past.

Returning to the official narrative, GM opined that it still can be spun to serve our putative leaders:

Vaccination has been used to shift the frame of thinking about COVID and that shifting continues.

First, it was a way to shut down any discussion of eliminating the virus. We were going to solve this with vaccines alone, and remember that what was actually peddled was that vaccines stop transmission and that once we vaccinate enough people, transmission will stop. That was known to be false by all that were actually paying attention, but the trick was played very cleverly – people are mortally afraid of being called anti-vaxxers, because that threatens their social class status, so the majority of voices calling for actual infection control went quiet once we had vaccines.

Saying that the vaccines suck and that they have been oversold was enough for you to be labelled anti-vaxxer. I myself have experienced it on numerous occasions.

That has continued ever since but the frame has been gradually shifting — as the vaccines have been eroding it has been still socially unacceptable to say they suck and we cannot rely on them, but meanwhile we moved from saying they stop transmission to saying they are there to prevent you from getting sick, not getting infected, and now to saying that yeah, you can still get sick, but that’s OK, as long as you don’t die. But as that progression has unfolded, most people were successfully accustomed to the view that getting infected and sick is something normal, and the idea that we can actually stop transmission with public health measures was almost completely forgotten.

Also, notice how nobody realizes how quick that has happened — when has previously a vaccine gone from offering insufficient but still pretty good protection to offering very little? Except for flu, but everyone knows flu vaccines sucks, and even if they don’t, they’re only good for a few months. This one, however, was advertised as one-and-done, and even when eventually it had to be acknowledged it will be an annual vaccine (false too, it’s a 3-shots-a-year vaccine right now), that it might suck really bad some years because you can’t reliably predict antigenic drift, as with flu, is never ever mentioned.

But that wasn’t enough, people had to be made happy about getting infected and resistance to corporate pandemic policies had to be completely crushed.

Artificially creating the vaxxer/anti-vaxxer opposition helped to do that with up to a third of the population — for those that whether for political reason or due to previously held anti-vaxxer beliefs didn’t want the vaccine, if they weren’t exactly happy about getting COVID annually before, it now became a personal matter of sticking it to their enemies and oppressors.

But you still have much of the rest of society. Part of it was taken care of once the mainstream media started the campaign that hybrid immunity is the best immunity.

But the vaccine mandates and green passes came into play in order to shift the frame even further. It’s a ridiculously inefficient epidemiologically measure, but it has a repressive character to it.

So what happens? People rail against these things as they see it as impinging on their freedom and as useless because everyone around them is getting it regardless of vaccination status. And that moves them towards being happy to get infected, because they have never been told what that means in the long term.

That effect was also used to sneak in new monstrous policies such as the 5-day isolation — lots of people are genuinely happy about that because apparently few are capable of running the consequences through their heads a few moves ahead and realizing that this does not mean they will be “free” from restriction but that they will be forced to go to work even when they can’t get out of bed and power over their bodily autonomy has been taken away from them and put into the hands of their bosses.

And finally it was used to neuter opposition from the supposedly non-mainstream voices, who turned out to be ignorant about the situation both scientifically and socioeconomically, but who are now openly advocating for letting it rip and ending of vaccine mandates, as if the two things are somehow linked. Because the frame of discourse was moved to present those as the only two possible alternatives.

So now we have this perverse situation in which infection control is seen by many as corporate-driven oppression, when the reality is that corporate interests sabotaged infection control from the start.

But with the potential to further fray official credibility, any Omicron retreat be followed by a new wave:

Denmark and France both experiencing resurgence of Omicron, presumably BA.2. This will extend epidemic in Europe and soon N America.

— Brian Hjelle, virologist (@hjelle_brian) January 21, 2022

So brace yourselves for a wild ride.

_____

¹ The reality is Omicron is so different from previous variants that as we have seen, it greatly diminishes the efficacy of vaccines even among the boosted. And we are now flying blind with how much protection having gotten a previous variant (and then charitably assuming one has a good guess as to which variant it was) vs. Omicron.

¹ As GM previously said:

The problem for all of us is that COVID is really three diseases at once:

1. The acute URT infection
2. The hyperinflammatory reaction in the alveoli that causes ARDS
3. The systemic infection that damages hearts, kidneys, beta cells in the pancreas, endothelial cells, the brain (though perhaps not directly), etc.

People mostly die immediately from #2.

They also die from #3, and will be dying of it in very large numbers in the future, but that does not enter the official statistics and thus can be ignored politically.

With Omicron we get worse #1 (high ACE2 in the bronchi and above them in the URT), less severe #2, and we have no direct data on #3, but logic says it is worse, for the same reasons #1 is worse.

But because #2 happens to be the immediate killer that grabs attention, the rest can be ignored with a sufficient amount of propaganda.

And that is what happened.