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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2022-003
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
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Other issues:
Russian ultimatum:
> When asked recently whether he could point to any evidence that the Russians were deterred by recent sanctions, a senior aide to Mr. Biden paused a moment and then said, “No, none.” <
Various items:
The Wannabe-Sultan is cooking the books:
Let 'er rip!
Matthew Cortland, JD @mattbc – 2:12 UTC · Jan 8, 2022
Today, @CDCDirector said:
"The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least 4 comorbidities. So really these are people who were unwell to begin with and yes, really encouraging news in the context of Omicron."
This is eugenicist.
(vid)
Compare and contrast:
Tech:
Use as open thread …
Outlaw US Empire’s efforts to rehabilitate Nazi War Criminal Stepan Bandera are funded by all tax -paying citizens–even Holocaust survivors:
“The Ukrainian language channel of US state-run broadcaster RFERL is making a concerted effort to rehabilitate the life and legacy of WWII-era Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, widely held by historians to have been a war criminal.
“A video posted by the broadcaster, registered as a ‘foreign agent’ in Russia, earlier this month argued that Ukrainians are deeply divided about whether the wartime leader was a hero or a villain – while leaning heavily in favour of the hero narrative. RFE/RL is part of the US Agency for Global Media, a government controlled organisation, with an annual budget of over $800 billion, which is charter bound to promote the ‘foreign policy objectives of the United States.'”
I’m not certain of the budget amount Diesen provides, but it’s likely far more than the amount of money provided by Russia to all its English language media platforms–and they certainly don’t go about resurrecting and promoting lies about WW2. Diesen makes the following observation:
“The US does not in itself have an ideological proclivity towards neo-Nazism, at least in the mainstream, but its policies come down to a question of power politics.”
I would point out to him it’s not “the mainstream” we ought to be concerned with; rather, it’s the elite, and there’s lots of evidence to support that group–particularly those from 1930-1970–to be American Fascists as described by Henry Wallace the famous NY Times op/ed he wrote in 1944, which I’ve cited numerous times. As some know and as I’ve written about on occasion, in the closing years of WW2 as areas of Europe were liberated by Anglo troops on the Western Front, members of the Resistance–who were generally Leftists of various types, including communists–were not allowed via force by the Anglos to take over administration in liberated areas, which were instead turned over to those who collaborated or were actual members of the Axis. (In Asia, the collaborators were always put back in charge, even to the very positions the resistance had ousted them from.) Indeed, there was an actual war that was waged in Greece by the Anglos to keep the Left from gaining the power it won by defeating the Nazis. Yugoslavia is another, similar, story. As Kolko details in his Politics of War, the Cold War began in occupied Italy in 1943 with deliberate disruption of relations between Soviet and Anglo forces that were subtle at first but escalated as time went by leading to the efforts by Alan Dulles to try and arrange a sperate peace with German forces than cutout Soviet involvement–involvement that was agreed to by higher levels of command. The point here being that Fascism/Nazism was active within FDR’s wartime administration and the US Military, as well as in the civilian world.
The “revisionism” we’ve witnessed regarding events before and during WW2 began shortly after Putin became Russia’s President and has escalated since egged on by longstanding British Russophobia. That has prompted Putin to open Russia’s archives to reveal the evidence that proves the “revisionists” to be liars and propagandists of the worst sort that have tarnished legitimate revisionist historians. (All history is revisionist as I’ve argued here on several occasions.) But what points to the Outlaw US Empire as being a fascist operation is its Imperial Policy and its utter negation of FDR’s post-war promises and vision–especially the negation of the UN Charter and thus gutting of the US Constitution.
The problem with Diesen’s conclusion is the Outlaw US Empire has allied itself with Fascists and actively recruited, paid and made into an auxiliary force what I call its Terrorist Foreign Legion–since 1945, not just recently in Syria or Ukraine:
“States tend to act in accordance with their fundamental interests, and then clothe these policies in the language of values and virtue. Much like US recognised the value of jihadist allies in Syria and Yemen, so have the fascists been a reliable ally against Russia. US support for extreme nationalists and fascists is sold as ‘democracy promotion’, and the suppression of the political opposition and media is sold as ‘fighting the Russian hybrid war’. The bold new video from RFERL shows that Washington has no qualms about continuing the long tradition of rebranding fascists as freedom fighters.”
No, the Outlaw US Empire’s Death Squads have been on the prowl since 1945 (even before in Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Philippines, Haiti, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, El Salvador, Santo Domingo, and United States) when they were sent into Eastern Europe and used in Korea and Southeast Asia to keep the winners there out of government. Then it was Central America that saw them followed by South America–recall that those terror formations never ceased operating in Asia and were officially if off the record reinforced. Africa didn’t escape either, although it’s avoided the worst. Of course, I’d be remiss if not to mention the domestic Death Squads formed by the various gangs and mafias that exist–some with CIA support–within the Outlaw US Empire; those first Death Squads were those populated by White slaves to track down Black slaves, not to omit Pilgrim Death Squads and their ilk–Scalping was an Anglo Terror action brought from the Homeland, not native American.
The Anglo 1% has never shrank from terrorizing anyone, including their own people if there was profit to be made. And it continues today–right now as I type. IMO, Xi, Putin and other national leaders understand that rather grizzly and hard to deal with truth. Pushing back against the BigLies is one thing, and essential; neutering its militarism however is a must, but must be done in a delicate manner to avoid a catastrophic nuclear war. In all honesty, I don’t expect to see any progress at the negotiations, only stonewalling. And even if Biden were to say yes to a few items, I’d predict they’ll never be followed through, meaning the Hardball will need to escalate.
Posted by: karlof1 | Jan 9 2022 22:26 utc | 59
Not the flu !!! (JR where are u?)
This paper is pre Omicron. However, if Omicron does not severely infect the lungs like Delta and other previous versions of the thing, SarsCov2 could now be more flu like, or cold like, insofar as “viremia leading to body-wide dissemination, including across the blood-brain barrier, and viral replication … occur[ring] early in COVID-19, even in asymptomatic or mild cases” would be curtailed? But It still sounds like we want to keep the little suckers out of our blood stream at all costs, even Omicron.
When I read of China’s extreme public health measures to avoid this 21st century disease, and the prompt response of another country in particular which involved and still involves mass vaccination ( a country known for being in the know by whatever backdoor means), I knew I wanted to avoid this infection too.
It has been an interesting two years, but then we live in interesting times.
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SARS-CoV-2 infection and persistence throughout the human body and brain
Dec 20, 2021 preprint
Abstract
COVID-19 is known to cause multi-organ dysfunction in acute infection, with prolonged symptoms experienced by some patients, termed Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 (PASC). However, the burden of infection outside the respiratory tract and time to viral clearance is not well characterized, particularly in the brain. We performed complete autopsies on 44 patients with COVID-19 to map and quantify SARS-CoV-2 distribution, replication, and cell-type specificity across the human body, including brain, from acute infection through over seven months following symptom onset. We show that SARS-CoV-2 is widely distributed, even among patients who died with asymptomatic to mild COVID-19, and that virus replication is present in multiple extrapulmonary tissues early in infection. Further, we detected SARS-CoV-2 RNA in multiple anatomic sites, including regions throughout the brain, for up to 230 days following symptom onset. Despite extensive distribution of SARS-CoV-2 in the body, we observed a paucity of inflammation or direct viral cytopathology outside of the lungs. Our data prove that SARS-CoV-2 causes systemic infection and can persist in the body for months.
Discussion
Here we provide the most comprehensive analysis to date of SARS-CoV-2 cellular
tropism, quantification, and persistence across the body and brain, in a diverse autopsy cohort collected throughout the first year of the pandemic in the United States… [the study took place from April 2020 through March 2021, so pre Omicron]
We show SARS-CoV-2 disseminates across the human body and brain early in infection at high levels, and provide evidence of virus replication at multiple extrapulmonary sites during the first week following symptom onset. We detected sgRNA in at least one tissue in over half of cases (14/27) beyond Day 14, suggesting that prolonged viral replication may occur in extra-pulmonary tissues as late as Day 99.
While others have questioned if extrapulmonary viral presence is due to either residual blood within the tissue, or cross-contamination from the lungs during tissue procurement, our data rule out both theories…
Others have previously reported SARS-CoV-2 RNA within the heart, lymph node, small intestine, and adrenal gland. We demonstrate conclusively that SARS-CoV-2 is capable of infecting and replicating within these tissues. Current literature has also reported absent or controversial expression of ACE2 and/or TMPRSS2 in several extrapulmonary tissues, such as the colon, lymphoid tissues, and ocular tissues, calling into question if these tissues can become infected by SARS-CoV-2 . However, we observed high levels of SARS-CoV-2 RNA and evidence of replication within these organs, as well as SARS-CoV-2 RNA via ISH in colonic mucosal epithelium and mononuclear leukocytes within the spleen, thoracic cavity lymph nodes, and GI lymphoid aggregates. We believe these ISH positive cells represent either infection or phagocytized virus in resident macrophages. Further, we isolated virus from a mediastinal lymph node and ocular tissue from two early cases.
Our use of a single-copy sequencing approach for the SARS-CoV-2 spike allowed us to demonstrate homogeneous virus populations in many tissues, while also revealing informative virus variants in others. Low intra-individual diversity of SARS-CoV-2 sequences has been observed frequently in previous studies, and likely relates to the intrinsic mutation rate of the virus as well as lack of early immune pressure to drive virus evolution in new infections. It is important to note that our HT-SGS approach has both a high accuracy and a high sensitivity for minor variants within each sample, making findings of low virus diversity highly reliable .
The virus genetic compartmentalization that we observed between pulmonary and extrapulmonary sites in several individuals supports independent replication of the virus at these sites, rather than spillover from one site to another. Importantly, lack of compartmentalization between these sites in other individuals does not rule out independent virus replication, as independently replicating populations may share identical sequences if overall diversity is very low. It was also interesting to note several cases where brain-derived virus spike sequences showed non-synonymous differences relative to sequences from other tissues. These differences may indicate differential selective pressure on spike by antiviral antibodies in brain versus other sites, though further studies will be needed to confirm this speculation.
Our results collectively show while that the highest burden of SARS-CoV-2 is in the airways and lung, the virus can disseminate early during infection and infect cells throughout the entire body, including widely throughout the brain. While others have posited this viral dissemination occurs through cell trafficking due to a reported failure to culture virus from blood, our data support an early viremic phase, which seeds the virus throughout the body following pulmonary infection.
Recent work by Jacobs et al…, supports this mechanism of viral dissemination. Although our cohort is primarily made up of severe cases of COVID-19, two
early cases had mild respiratory symptoms (P28; fatal pulmonary embolism occurred at home) or no symptoms (P36; diagnosed upon hospitalization for ultimately fatal complications of a comorbidity), yet still had SARS-CoV-2 RNA widely detected across the body, including brain, with detection of sgRNA in multiple compartments.
Our findings, therefore, suggest viremia leading to body-wide dissemination, including across the blood-brain barrier, and viral replication can occur early in COVID-19, even in asymptomatic or mild cases. Further, P36 was
a juvenile with no evidence of multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, suggesting infected children without severe COVID-19 can also experience systemic infection with SARS-CoV-2.
Finally, a major contribution of our work is a greater understanding of the duration and locations at which SARS-CoV-2 can persist. While the respiratory tract was the most common location in which SARS-CoV-2 RNA tends to linger, ≥50% of late cases also had persistence in the myocardium, thoracic cavity lymph nodes, tongue, peripheral nerves, ocular tissue, and in all sampled areas of the brain, except the dura mater. Interestingly, despite having much lower levels of SARS-CoV-2 in early cases compared to respiratory tissues, we found similar levels between pulmonary and the extrapulmonary tissue categories in late cases. This less efficient
viral clearance in extrapulmonary tissues is perhaps related to a less robust innate and adaptive immune response outside the respiratory tract…
These data coupled with ISH suggest that SARS-CoV-2 can replicate within tissue
for over 3 months after infection in some individuals, with RNA failing to clear from multiple compartments for up to D230. This persistence of viral RNA and sgRNA may represent infection with defective virus, which has been described in persistent infection with measles virus.
The mechanisms contributing to PASC are still being investigated; however, ongoing
systemic and local inflammatory responses have been proposed to play a role . Our data provide evidence for delayed viral clearance, but do not support significant inflammation outside of the respiratory tract even among patients who died months after symptom onset. Understanding the mechanisms by which SARS-CoV-2 persists and the cellular and subcellular host responses to
viral persistence promises to improve the understanding and clinical management of PASC.
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1139035/v1
Posted by: suzan | Jan 10 2022 2:08 utc | 84
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