I don’t care who the candidates are. I am a single issue voter: immigration. Save the country from demographic transformation and everything else can be dealt with. Let the country become Brazil 2.0 and no amount of sensible policies can bring the former glory back.

In the America where whites govern themselves there would be little room for Umpalumpas from Turaqistan. And what little that there will be, can be dealt on the level of state government.

This must have been triggered by some recent code change:

On all of my browsers, both Firefox- and Chrome-based, reloading/coming back to a previously read comments section marked them all as unread. The header is correct (i.g., “110 Comments • 66 New”) but *all* messages turn up with a blue background.

Thus, one of the great features of your comments section design seems to be broken.

After all unz.com cookies deleted, the behavior remains. Upon careful inspection, it seems that the change [in the way cookies are set?] happened late on October 17, 2020.

Of course, deleting cookies clears all blue out but upon repeated reloading, the post after about that time stay blue no matter what. E.g., to take Steve’s blog:

Or, to put in another way, the solution used to resuspend adenovirus in (same as placebo) has about as many additives to it as those crappy pickled cucumbers made commercially for super-long storage.

If I could pick and choose, I’d first get an adenovirus shot (ChAd5 or Ad26) and then get boosted by purified protein. I’ll take mRNA if there is no other choice but would prefer to wait couple years to make sure it does not result in some weird long-term immune imbalance like allergies or auto-immune reactions..

LOL, Fred. Don’t be silly. You must have heard of barter. You probably also heard of cryptocurrencies. Think!

Sigh, this comment section is sad. It almost feels like a brain disease.

1. Baric’s paper reports on chimera with of mouse-adapted SARS. As such, this rendered a layer of safety, since all of virology research before suggests that viruses well adapted to different species tend to not be particularly infectious and/or dangerous for the original species they came from.

2. Roughly half of all known coronaviruses have furin site in their S protein. Although closest SARS-1/SARS-2 relatives, sarbecoviruses, don’t, it shows that such mutations/adaptations happen all the time.

3. There are exactly zero signs of the actual SARS-2 genome manipulation. None. The codons of S protein are not human-adapted, and literally all vaccines and most of the research done on SARS-2 do bother to codon-optimize for better expression in human cells.

4. Vero E6 cells is ubiquitous monkey cells line found in literally every virology lab and available from ATCC to cheaply purchase by anyone affiliated with research organization.

5. SARS-2 S protein is not uniquely optimized for infecting humans. Thorough experiments (as opposed to bullshitting with models and molecular dynamics on computers) definitely show that it is not.

6. Consider the priors: We’ve seen several zoonotic spillovers in the past two decades causing significant epidemics. In contrast, lab escapes (which do happen, of course) causing an epidemic have never happened before.

Wade is right: There is no way to distinguish natural evolution and evolution from passaging of bat virus on human cells to promote human adaptation. So both zoonotic and lab leak origins remain plausible. But it is completely retarded to think that zoonotic origin has been disproved or even that it is far less likely than a lab leak. Even if it was a lab leak, the only way to prove it is if the Chinese cooperate, which they never would if they are responsible.

Please read more than Wikipedia and National Post (! – really?). There is practically no way the 1997 flu was an accidental release from the lab. It almost certainly was shoddy a vaccine trial in China. The virus was significantly attenuated and it was detected simultaneously in several regions.

Once again, the system of preferential treatment for blacks that they are trying to build has strong parallels to Soviet Russia and its massive push to advance peasants and proletarians at the expense of “bourgeois science”. Lysenko was only one of the many products of this system.

Oh god, how ridiculous. Media bloviation aside, the evidence for lab leak is incredibly scarce and in its entirety consists of:

1. First noticed significant outbreak in proximity to WIV.
2. Natural reservoir of the ancestor virus not being identified in a little over a year. (Compare with SARS: It took 11 months for the very first report of finding it in palm civets and four years to nail down a natural reservoir in horseshoe bats.)

Everything else–the impossibility of furin site, the unusual codon usage, the unique adaptation to humans over all other animals, the documented work in WIV on chimeric SARS viruses with the aim to make them more infectious to humans (that work was done in NC, USA and involved a mouse-adapted virus)–is completely and easily verifyably false.

Oh yes, there are also vague “intelligence reports” that claim various things, none of them backed by any actual facts, all surfacing when it became politically convenient. Do you people never learn? Every swamp-supported hoax in the past few years had been backed by exactly the same kind of intelligence report…

Sure, a serious investigation is in order simply because lab-made adaptation to humans remains plausible. But in the face of several zoonozes occurring right in from of our eyes in the past couple decades, and with literally no evidence supporting lab leak, acting like lab leak is very likely is utterly idiotic.

Re: “Gain of function”

Does everyone here realize that GoF has no precise definition? That it is in fact much fuzzier than most other definitions? Think of GoF as “racism” – it can mean anything one wants it to mean! Practically any mutagenesis screen can be called a gain of function (even if it is in fact a loss of function). As such, e.g., just about any genetic research on tuberculosis can be claimed to constitute a GoF research.

A narrow meaning could be accepted for the purpose of this debate: “Any research that explicitly aims to generate organisms more pathogenic to humans”.

Under this definition, it’s not very likely that the Chinese contributed to Covid. Why? Well, how about “because they are not stupid”?

Let’s get a look at Dr. Shi’s lab notes then think through the lab leak theory. Right now they’re unavailable for some strange reason. Does that strike you as odd?

Not at all. On two very familiar levels it is easy to see why the Chinese find it unacceptable:

1. They know how propaganda works: “Give them a finger, they will attempt to bite a whole hand”. In this, the Chinese are (for very good reasons) very apprehensive about the whole investigation being turned into a never-ending series of political gotchas based on relatively minor biosafety violations that may be discovered (something that every BSL-4 lab in the world is always fretting about).

2. They are reluctant to voluntarily open up 100% of what they view as their crowning scientific achievements – something that’s guaranteed to be a result of the kind of intrusive investigation demanded by the US Congress critters.

Bottom line is, regardless of whether they are guilty or not, they view it as a lose-lose proposition.

Look up “plaque assay” or “limiting dilution assay”. Filtered samples free of any living matter reproducibly produce cultures of dead cells that can be isolated and sequenced to find viral genomes that do not have anything comparable in humans.

Or, in brief, don’t be stupid. It’s one thing to assign different weights to some pertinent facts but it’s completely different thing to be so bloody ignorant as to flatly deny indisputable facts.

Have a look at the actual paper. It’s a stupid design made to have no statistical power (four treatment groups of N~50 each). VitC consistently shows improvement though, and zinc dose was tiny, only 50 mg zinc gluconate per day; it is argued that for antiviral activity it needs to be taken as ~ 200 mg elemental Zn/day. Zn and weak but not negligible antiviral activity goes back to hundreds of papers showing effects (on flu mainly IIRC).

And it does no look to be the case of publication bias either.

Bottom line is: 200 mg Zn per day taken for a week only is not going to harm you. It may help. I’d take if I knew I had Covid.

In the light of all this, the only reasonable thing to do is try to ensure that you are never treated by a doctor who is not a white male. It’s a sound Bayesian approach.

This actually seems… rather accurate, by and large.

Not really. How do you fight a determined golden eagle to win 61% of fights? Absolutely no way. They kill wolves and deers.

Not to mention the absolutely ridiculous winning 83% of fights against unarmed humans. Statistically that’s just stupid beyond any belief.

I have to disagree with the consensus here. Chances are very good that Vonnegut would be terrified by the Woke religion and be right up there with folks like David Mamet in rejecting it.

Liberals made this sort of savage behavior possible but they will never admit to it. The most likely reaction will be to double down on the systemic racism BS.

Google’s search by image can’t find it if you just give it that original image, but if you crop out only the statue it finds it immediately … Bing image search doesn’t find it in either way

Two of our biggest tech giants can’t get picture search right. In comparison, the Russian Yandex search engine finds it right away, together with several similar images of other men in the same setting.

We are sliding into mediocrity and losing competitive edge on everything that matters.

The answer: We have several decades-long knowledge of what anti-adenovirus immune response looks like. It’s very safe, as safe as any other commonly accepted vaccine. In contrast, we have almost no idea about long-term effects of immunity to mRNA itself. RNA is highly immunogenic and even though the modern formulations reduce it a lot, there is simply no way yet to be sure that it won’t have long-term consequences in the form of, e.g., increased rate of autoimmune disorders. Chances are high that mRNA at doses given is safe – but not 99% high.

My solution: J&J vaccine and 0.2 mg/kg of ivermectin once a month. Every indication (and we have decades of experience with it and N in the hundreds of millions) is that at this dose it is very safe. Indeed, I have had exactly zero side effects from taking it.

Not true. From your link now:

“Correcting a statistic I gave at the press conference,” Vallance said on Twitter. “About 60% of hospitalisations from COVID are not from double vaccinated people, rather 60% of hospitalisations from COVID are currently from unvaccinated people.”

It’s still bad that 40% of hospitalized have had the vaccine but it is almost certain that majority of those were hospitalized “with Covid”, not “for Covid”.

Deigin’s molecular/genetic arguments pro the lab leak hypothesis are simply incompetent. And he is wrong on Ivermectin: The preponderance of evidence is that it is clearly very useful. Don’t know about prophylactic effect but it’s almost certain taking Ivermectin immediately after onset of symptoms very significantly alleviates the severity of the disease (2-4X effect).

Heck, the evidence is very strong that even HCQ is better than nothing: Clear 30-40% effect on duration (but, again, like most antivirals, it has to be taken early to have any effect).

just because ivermectin is one of the greatest drugs of the late 20th century, that doesn’t mean it does or doesn’t work against covid

True. Except that there is a substantial evidence that it does: https://ivmmeta.com/
Is it a miracle cure? Almost certainly not. Does it make sense to still take it ASAP upon diagnosis, given the available evidence and the stellar safety record of ivermectin? Almost certainly yes – particularly because the standard advice is to literally do nothing and hope to not get hospitalized.

I got a tube for the horses. The compound itself surely comes from the same drum, be it a human or horse formulation. Cost me $3.27 and will be enough to treat myself and/or my wife, should we get infected. The math to calculate human dose should be accessible to anyone with three digits IQ (overdosing on ivermectin is not a good idea; it’s not going to kill you but will be very unpleasant).