COVID-19 RNA Based Vaccines and the Risk of Prion Disease

Insights and discussion from the cutting edge with reference to journal articles and other research papers.
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Re: COVID-19 RNA Based Vaccines and the Risk of Prion Disease

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circular wrote:
TheBrain wrote:I will post some information that I'd like to share. You might not feel inclined to review any of it, and that's fine. But if others stumble upon this thread, they might be interested in it.
Thanks for posting more about the material you are reviewing on with some links TheBrain. I don't plan to discuss it here in any detail myself because it would take too much time from other things I'm committed to, and general statements on this issue are pretty useless. But I'm scanning it so I have a better idea what people are saying.
Sounds good, circular. I imagine you've got a heavy load as your mother's caregiver.
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Re: COVID-19 RNA Based Vaccines and the Risk of Prion Disease

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Thanks, I was confusing it with the disease people got from eating contaminated cows.
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Re: COVID-19 RNA Based Vaccines and the Risk of Prion Disease

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TheBrain wrote:
buck3Maureen wrote:Isn't GBS a prion disease?...
I just did some poking around. Based on what I've read thus far, it doesn't appear that Guillain-Barré syndrome is a prion disease. Instead, it's described as an autoimmune disease that affects the peripheral nerves....
If I find anything that suggests GBS is a prion disease, I'll share it in this thread.
Hi "Brain" and "Maureen",

Our kids' pediatrician of many years shared with me in the 1980's when his wife developed Guillain-Barré after a "swine flu" vaccine. [The trigger agent in that vaccine was found and has never been used again.]. He obviously loved and worried about her, and shared when she recovered motor skills over a period of months. He always emphasized how rare it was and wanted his kids and ours, including one with a history of heart surgery and asthma, to stay vaccinated.

You're correct that GBS is not a prion disease. Luckily, since the 1980's, it's been better diagnosed early and intensively treated with intravenous immunoglobulin, plasmapheresis and support for possible respiratory impact, although it mostly affects peripheral nerves. Although rare, it also occurs as a consequence of viruses themselves, since it's an immune response. This is from Nature, probably one of the most credible journals in the fields of science.
Guillain–Barré syndrome (GBS) is a rare, but potentially fatal, immune-mediated disease of the peripheral nerves and nerve roots that is usually triggered by infections. The incidence of GBS can therefore increase during outbreaks of infectious diseases, as was seen during the Zika virus epidemics in 2013 in French Polynesia and 2015 in Latin America.
Diagnosis and management of Guillain–Barré syndrome in ten steps

You're great at finding info, Brain, so here's something that you may want to check out--again in Nature from last week, citing academic researchers (not Pharma) from Brazil, Germany, the UK and US looking at effects on astrocytes in the brain from COVID. Note that ALL of these researchers are talking about using this knowledge for treatment--mentioning some used in Guillain-Barre. They're not arguing for the vaccine; just trying to figure out what goes wrong in long-haul COVID. [Bold in quotes is added by me.]
COVID and the brain: researchers zero in on how damage occurs
Infected astrocytes could explain some of the neurological symptoms associated with COVID-19, especially fatigue, depression and ‘brain fog’, which includes confusion and forgetfulness, argues Kriegstein. “Those kinds of symptoms may not be reflective of neuronal damage, but could be reflective of dysfunctions of some sort. That could be consistent with astrocyte vulnerability.”

Evidence has also accumulated that SARS-CoV-2 can affect the brain by reducing blood flow to it — impairing neurons’ function and ultimately killing them.

Pericytes are cells found on small blood vessels called capillaries throughout the body — including in the brain. A February preprint reported that SARS-CoV-2 could infect pericyte-like cells in brain organoids...Attwell suggests that drugs used to treat high blood pressure, which involves blood-vessel restriction, might be useful in some cases of COVID-19. Two clinical trials are currently investigating the effect of the blood-pressure drug losartan to treat the disease....

In a second paper, published online last December, a team including Prüss studied the blood and cerebrospinal fluid of 11 people critically ill with COVID-19, all of whom had neurological symptoms. All produced autoantibodies capable of binding neurons. And there is evidence that giving patients intravenous immunoglobulin, another type of antibody, to suppress the harmful autoantibodies’ action is “quite successful”, says Prüss....

These pathways — astrocytes, pericytes and autoantibodies — are not mutually exclusive, and are probably not the only ones: it is likely that people with COVID-19 experience neurological symptoms for a range of reasons. Prüss says a key question is what proportion of cases is caused by each of the pathways. “That will determine treatment,” he says.
A member of a Board I'm on, who lives in the Midwest and was hospitalized for a week with COVID last fall (no ventilator) is now one of many people in a long-haul clinic and shared that while she is gradually re-gaining the half of her hair that came out during COVID, it's the inability to exert herself for more than 10 minutes without exhaustion, the brain fog, and especially the pain from inflamed nerves that doctors can't guarantee will disappear, that makes her life as a caregiver for her mom with AD and a grandmother of 24 much, much harder.

She's just one person; knowing her struggles moves me to hope others I know don't have to deal with 9 months of pain, exhaustion and missing the life they loved.
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Re: COVID-19 RNA Based Vaccines and the Risk of Prion Disease

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NF52 wrote: You're correct that GBS is not a prion disease. Luckily, since the 1980's, it's been better diagnosed early and intensively treated with intravenous immunoglobulin, plasmapheresis and support for possible respiratory impact, although it mostly affects peripheral nerves. Although rare, it also occurs as a consequence of viruses themselves, since it's an immune response. This is from Nature, probably one of the most credible journals in the fields of science.
Guillain–Barré syndrome (GBS) is a rare, but potentially fatal, immune-mediated disease of the peripheral nerves and nerve roots that is usually triggered by infections. The incidence of GBS can therefore increase during outbreaks of infectious diseases, as was seen during the Zika virus epidemics in 2013 in French Polynesia and 2015 in Latin America.
Diagnosis and management of Guillain–Barré syndrome in ten steps

You're great at finding info, Brain, so here's something that you may want to check out--again in Nature from last week, citing academic researchers (not Pharma) from Brazil, Germany, the UK and US looking at effects on astrocytes in the brain from COVID. Note that ALL of these researchers are talking about using this knowledge for treatment--mentioning some used in Guillain-Barre. They're not arguing for the vaccine; just trying to figure out what goes wrong in long-haul COVID. [Bold in quotes is added by me.]
COVID and the brain: researchers zero in on how damage occurs
NF52, thank you for sharing the story of your kids' pediatrician's wife. It had to be a scary experience for her, and I'm glad she recovered from Guillain–Barré syndrome. I understand that many do, but not all.

Thanks as well for sharing the intriguing research in Nature. I didn't re-quote it here because my response would become very long, but it's fantastic that these researchers are finding promising treatments for neurological issues due to COVID-19.
NF52 wrote:A member of a Board I'm on, who lives in the Midwest and was hospitalized for a week with COVID last fall (no ventilator) is now one of many people in a long-haul clinic and shared that while she is gradually re-gaining the half of her hair that came out during COVID, it's the inability to exert herself for more than 10 minutes without exhaustion, the brain fog, and especially the pain from inflamed nerves that doctors can't guarantee will disappear, that makes her life as a caregiver for her mom with AD and a grandmother of 24 much, much harder.

She's just one person; knowing her struggles moves me to hope others I know don't have to deal with 9 months of pain, exhaustion and missing the life they loved.
I'm sorry to hear about your fellow board member's struggles with long-haul COVID. I can't imagine dealing with her symptoms while being a caregiver for her mother and grandmother. I hope she fully recovers soon.
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Re: COVID-19 RNA Based Vaccines and the Risk of Prion Disease

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TheBrain wrote:I understand, Nords. I, too, like to do my due diligence and confirm or deny claims.

I can't speak directly to Dr. Merritt's claim because she didn't give details. But just to get a sense of the Twitter censorship going on, I did a search at DuckDuckGo.com with the search term: twitter censorship of covid vaccines

Wow. I just scrolled through results. They go more broadly into "Big Tech" as well. This one is of particular interest:
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Re: COVID-19 RNA Based Vaccines and the Risk of Prion Disease

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Dod wrote:Taking pharmaceuticals to protect others - where does that end?
We have been taking pharmaceuticals to protect others for many decades. This is a standard aspect of many vaccination programs. It is part of what it means to be a society, and necessary in dealing with highly contagious diseases. We have seen before what happens when intake of the measles vaccine or the pertussis vaccine drops. We get outbreaks. And there are always highly vulnerable people who cannot be vaccinated. We need to deprive pathogens of potential hosts to infect.
There are plenty of steps that everyone can take to drastically improve their chances.
...and the most effective of these is to get vaccinated. This virus is not going away any time soon, since humanity failed to contain it and failed to distribute vaccines everywhere fast enough. One failure of your 'plenty of steps' sometime in the coming years and your wall is breached. But getting vaccinated requires very little effort per protection time. Even if we end up needing to get revaccinated annually (like with flu), or every few years (like with tetanus), or just whenever a new strain shows up.
Asymptomatic spread - for example both Fauci and a WHO rep clearly stated last year that it is not a factor in driving a pandemic. If they changed their minds then even more reason not to listen to them unquestioningly. Common sense says the same
This isn't about any particular individual changing their mind, it is about the pathogens themselves changing. If you look at How much is asymptomatic spread driving Covid-19? Here's what the evidence says. and read in detail, you can see that the different views being expressed depend on what assumptions are made about how contagious the virus is. This varies among strains of the virus.
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Re: COVID-19 RNA Based Vaccines and the Risk of Prion Disease

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TheBrain wrote:https://www.openvaers.com/covid-data

From this page:
VAERS is the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System put in place in 1990. It is a voluntary reporting system that has been estimated to account for only 1% (see the Lazarus Report) of vaccine injuries. OpenVAERS is built from the HHS data available for download at vaers.hhs.gov.

The OpenVAERS Project allows browsing and searching of the reports without the need to compose an advanced search (more advanced searches can be done at medalerts.orgor vaers.hhs.gov).
Don't forget that an event reported in VAERS is simply an event that happened some time after someone was vaccinated. There is no need to show that the vaccine was even relevant to the event for it to be reported. It's the old correlation vs causation question.
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Re: COVID-19 RNA Based Vaccines and the Risk of Prion Disease

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Quantifier wrote:
TheBrain wrote:https://www.openvaers.com/covid-data

From this page:
VAERS is the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System put in place in 1990. It is a voluntary reporting system that has been estimated to account for only 1% (see the Lazarus Report) of vaccine injuries. OpenVAERS is built from the HHS data available for download at vaers.hhs.gov.

The OpenVAERS Project allows browsing and searching of the reports without the need to compose an advanced search (more advanced searches can be done at medalerts.orgor vaers.hhs.gov).
Don't forget that an event reported in VAERS is simply an event that happened some time after someone was vaccinated. There is no need to show that the vaccine was even relevant to the event for it to be reported. It's the old correlation vs causation question.
Yes, that's true. The reports need to be thoroughly investigated by the powers that be (the CDC, if I recall correctly). But doctors are the ones who predominantly enter adverse events into this database, not patients (unfortunately, many doctors aren't even aware of VAERS existence, much less patients). I've read that the interface isn't easy to use.
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Re: COVID-19 RNA Based Vaccines and the Risk of Prion Disease

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circular wrote:Are the potential problems people think we might face from mRNA vaccines thought to be addressable in any way, similar (in a manner of speaking) to the way we offset ApoE4?
I just listened to an hourlong podcast by Peter McCullough, MD, that I believe addresses circular's question—but extends to all of the COVID-19 vaccines. First, here's his bio:
Dr. Peter McCullough is an internist, cardiologist, epidemiologist, and Clinical Professor of Medicine at Texas A & M College of Medicine, Dallas, TX. Dr. McCullough is an internationally recognized authority on the evaluation and practical application of medical evidence concerning contemporary issues in medicine. He has lectured on a broad range of health topics around the world and brings his experience into clinical focus for his patients on a daily basis.

Dr. McCullough is known for his iconic views on the state of medical truth in America and around the globe pierces through the thin veil of mainstream media stories that skirt the major issues and provide no tractable basis for durable insight. His show 'The McCullough Report' is heard on the America Out Loud Network.
Here's the podcast episode I'm referring to:

Ill-Conceived COVID-19 Mass Vaccination Program Could Be Catastrophic

The podcast's title doesn't jive with addressing circular's question, but stick with me. The podcast starts with Dr. McCullough discussing three papers that came out over less than a month ago (probably all preprints). They address the catastrophe he's concerned about, which arises from the world embarking on a mass vaccination campaign during a pandemic—which has never been done before. Here's an excerpt from his show notes:
There have been concerns from many that mass vaccination would backfire. These were confirmed in a paper by Acevedo from Santiago Chile, who reported on the Lambda variant outbreak in Peru, which looks like it clearly occurred due to indiscriminate vaccination using the whole killed SARS-CoV-2 Sinovac (Coronovac) vaccine.

While causing a small outbreak, the Lambda variant is notable for having seven mutations in the spike protein, two of which are in the receptor-binding domain and allow complete escape from vaccine immunity.

These papers, in aggregate, suggest that mass vaccination into a pandemic is “fooling with mother nature” in a manner that could be catastrophic if the indiscrimination program continues to be forced on the population.
[Emphasis mine]

Then, Dr. McCullough interviews three people. The first two are of esteemed doctors who are proponents of early treatment of the virus to prevent hospitalization and death. Dr. McCullough said in this podcast (and elsewhere) that if early treatment had been part of our protocol in the United States (and other Western countries), 85% of deaths could have been prevented. To this day, people who are sick are told to stay home and do nothing; if they start having trouble breathing, then go to the hospital.

Per Dr. McCullough, anyone who gets this virus, whether vaccinated or not, should take advantage of early treatment. (Exclusions can include healthy young people and children, who are at almost zero risk of serious disease and death.) If you're interested, listen to those two interviews to find out about such treatments. If your doctor is uncomfortable prescribing the meds for you, there are telemedicine services you can use. Two options are:

https://myfreedoctor.com
https://americasfrontlinedoctors.org/treatments/

The key is to initiate treatment ASAP. No one wants to enter the cytokine storm phase of the disease. (Some people might consider prophylactic treatment, depending on their health status.)

The last interview is of the lead counsel in the Supreme Court of India. He provides "an update on legal proceedings concerning what appears to be a fraudulent and off-the-rails COVID-19 vaccination program in India."
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Re: COVID-19 RNA Based Vaccines and the Risk of Prion Disease

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