I don’t know that anyone from the state (Deep or otherwise) was involved in that Pfizer decision at all. I think it’s much more likely that a couple of mid-level managers realized what their data was telling them, realized the likely timelines, and said, “Uh-oh, this means a second term for Orange Man.” I don’t know how high at Pfizer the decision had to go in order to suspend their test results reporting protocol, but I assume it went to the CEO or pretty close. I think it’s actually an interesting example of the sort of decentralized anti-Trump quasi corruption that we also likely saw on Election Day.
And everyone who voted after midnight on Election Day voted for Biden. (That’s just a zinger, I don’t want to derail the thread.)
Your analysis ignores some really important points:
Covid’s risks are not spread equally. Disease risk profiles vary dramatically based on entirely knowable criteria. It’s entirely possible to vaccinate high-risk groups and not vaccinate low-risk groups, and that was in fact (mostly) how the vaccine was rolled out when there was limited supply/access.
The vaccine’s long-term risks are completely unknown. They are literally incalculable. And since this is brand new technology, we really can’t make any analogies.
There may be low-risk treatments for Covid that reduce the transmissibility and/or the impact of Covid. For some reason, the second Trump said “hydroxychloroquine”, everyone in the medical establishment and the media lost their minds about treating this disease.
None of that may matter if the powers that be have decided that nothing will return to normal until we all get the jab, which may have been your underlying point, but color me doubtful that my getting a jab will appease that god, at least not in the long run.
And stick that stuff in my teenagers who already had Covid? Hard pass.
So, I appreciate this author’s general points when it comes to remote cooperation with evil; the impossibility and foolishness of trying to hunt down every possible way in which the things we interact with daily are connected to such and such evil, etc. I agree with this.
However, I believe he misses – or maybe just chooses not to explore – something which I believe would be a substantive distinction when it comes to the medicines he mentions. He says that each of these common medicines has been tested with HEK-293, but that’s all he says about them. He doesn’t get into whether or not the development of these medicines was predicated upon testing using HEK-293, or of aborted fetuses in general.
For example, at the top of his list is Tylenol. Great. I have no reason to doubt that Tylenol has been tested with HEK-293. But a simple examination of dates tells me that Tylenol was being sold in the US decades before HEK-293 was a thing. Similarly, ibuprofen began being marketed and sold throughout the UK in 1969, which pre-dated HEK-293. From what little I know about ibuprofen’s clinical testing origins, my understanding is that it focused on trials in living, breathing rheumatoid arthritis patients.
I can’t speak to each and every case of all the medicines on his list, but my point is that he makes no distinction between HEK-293 testing that was conducted incidentally after a drug had become mainstream, versus HEK-293 testing that was used as the very foundation for a particular field of drug development. I believe this distinction is critical, and is where I find my beef with the state of modern vaccine development.
The current status quo among our medical industry – enabled by ourselves, and by our “health authorities” – is that we have no issue with predicating vaccine development upon the use of the flesh of the unborn. Not just HEK-293, but fetal tissue that is still being harvested for research to this day. We have made ourselves content to allow the work of vaccination development to rest upon the bedrock of a godless view of the womb, and of human life. We are complete atheists in our view of medicine. And yet we have the audacity – as Christians – to herald the COVID vaccine as some sort of savior. Have we forgotten that barely a year ago, there were men among us who were willing to speak plainly of COVID as being God’s discipline? I don’t think we are finished learning all the lessons that God has for us here.
Is also thought one of the reasons for not getting a vaccine for a coronavirus, and why you don’t get one for the common cold, is imperfect use of it leads to faster mutations and super-viruses which are resistant to current vaccines. I.e. it’s not all upside at a micro or macro level, so you want to be careful with who gets vaccinated.
Judging from the section titled “We Should Encourage a Move from HEK-293” I think the author would agree with your negative assessment of research and development that is predicated on use of aborted fetal cell lines. But the author also says this:
If we were to disallow all remote cooperation, we would need to reject all of modern society more than contemplative nuns. Only hermitic subsistence farmers or hunter-gathers making their own clothes and tools could be completely free from very remote cooperation in evil. I’ve noted before that the most logical and moral Christian response is realizing that we can’t avoid all really remote cooperation in evil. In general, we should try to avoid it. However, we should not get scrupulous about it: it is one factor in a decision but should not overwhelm every other factor or lead to excessive worry.
It is beyond the reach of the average Christian to ascertain, for every product he uses, what relationship HEK-293 or any other cell line has to the research and development of that product. Rather than trying to convince other Christians not to use most medicine or many types of products, those with deeper knowledge should work on alternatives and the rest of us can write letters to vaccine developers.
HEK 293 is likely from a spontaneous abortion. To not acknowledge this is to mislead pro-lifers with tender consciences. If we think it’s likely from an elective abortion, we still are obliged to say we’re basing our ethical condemnations, such as they are, on speculations—albeit speculations exceedingly popular today given the political climate among conservatives.
This was one of the worst scientific/medical presentations I’ve ever seen. I nearly shut it off at the beginning when he started calling the vaccines the “fake vaccines”, the “clot shots”, “needle rape”. I can’t take scientists seriously when they are pandering, using emotionally manipulative language, and acting like they know better than everyone else. He then presents a lot of pretty pictures and a few random studies thrown in to try and bolster his argument. Outside of experts in the field, those pictures and studies are just for show. I doubt that many people in his audience could legitimately evaluate and interpret the data he was showing. The end of his presentation was much better. He toned down a lot of rhetoric (although he kept on throwing in one liners and cheap shots for needless effect) and presented a lot of potential issues which I think are valid. Unfortunately those issues were almost drowned out by his showboating. There are many legitimate concerns and questions that people have about the safety and efficacy of the vaccines. I would not want Dr. Cole to be the one answering those questions for me any more than someone like Dr. Fauci.
You might be surprised to find I agree with some of what you’ve said. I posted without comment because I was interested in what the response would be given other discussions. Thanks for saying what you think.
Couple questions brother.
Why do you think the man used the language that he did? To simply emote, pander, pontificate, and showboat? Stated another way, if the man is as educated and experienced as he claims to be, why is he so animated?
What are the “lot of potential issues” you think are valid?
If Dr. Cole and Dr. Fauci aren’t answering questions for you, who is?
I don’t know him nor am I familiar with any of Dr. Cole’s work in general. My impression of him, from this video clip, is that he knows how to read a room and give his audience what they want. From the audience’s reactions and his willingness to showboat it seemed like the atmosphere was not one of very serious scientific/medical inquiry and sharing of knowledge but more so one of trying to “dunk on the libs”, if you understand that colloquialism. It was clear that he is very passionate about the subject matter he was presenting about and judging from his presentation I believe what he said about his qualifications and expertise. He could have presented the material in a very succinct, understandable, and objective way but I don’t believe that the format of whatever conference he was presenting at was necessarily calling for that style.
As for the potential issues, I’m mainly thinking about his summary slide. There are questions about the Sars-CoV2 spike protein, its side effects, and distribution in the body which are important to examine. If the vaccine or spike protein is circulating in the body and interacting with other tissues (lungs, heart, brain, testes, ovaries), then what is the incidence of these effects and what are the long-term effects on these organs. Other important questions are: How does the vaccine interact with our immune systems and what might the long-term side effects be there? What is the effect of this vaccine on women and the female reproductive system? Does this vaccine have any carcinogenic effects? How long does immunity from the vaccine last as compared to natural immunity which you get from an actual infection? I could go on but these are some of the more important questions that I can think of.
For myself, as a trained research scientist, I prioritize primary literature sources. I take what is being said by authorities with a grain of salt and investigate to see if what they’re saying is actually borne out by the reports and data.
Forgive me if this a tangent too far, but would anyone like to explain why there has been no resistance or pushback against the use of monoclonal antibodies to treat Covid? This is an experimental treatment developed in a very short timeframe, it is being used under EUA, and HEK293T was involved in its development. I’m sure there are adverse events associated with it, starting with all the ways that an IV infusion can go wrong, never mind what can happen when you introduce a foreign protein into the body. According to FAERS there have been serious cases including death. Is anyone looking at those event reports?
The reason nobody is bothering to be bothered by them, I suspect, is because they aren’t being trumpeted as a solution by the liberal media. Which just goes to show, that the resistance to the vaccines among conservatives is largely political.
Just for the sake of clarity, monoclonal antibody is a term referring to (at present) over 500 drugs, both investigational and also approved for use in therapy (approximately 125 of these). Some were approved for therapeutic use as far back as 1994 (abciximab, used in certain coronary heart disease therapies).
Many of these drugs are used in the treatment of cancer. One used frequently in blood cancers is rituximab, approved in 1997 for the treatment of B-Cell lymphoma. I am currently being treated for a rare sub-type of this cancer (chronic lymphocytic leukemia with Richter’s transformation) which generates an aggressive form of B-cell lymphoma. Rituximab is the first drug in a cocktail of them that is infused into me via IV in hospital.Thanks to the prayers of many of you, I experience no side effects whatsoever when this drug is administered.
Rituximab attaches to a protein on the surface of the cancer cell, assisting the patient’s immune system to recognize and attack the cancerous B-cell.
At present five of the over 500 monoclonal antibodies are approved for emergency use against COVID-19 (Bamlanivimab, Casirivimab, Etesevimab, Imdevimab, Sotrovimab).
Apologies for not being more specific. The Covid monoclonal antibody treatment that I had in mind was the casirivimab and imdevimab combination that seems to get the most attention here in the US. Sotrovimab is likewise a recent development available under EUA. Bamlanivimab and etesevimab were stopped when they were found to no longer be effective due to prevalence of gamma and beta variants. And I’ll note that the manufacturers refer to these as ‘investigational’; I used ‘experimental’ because, obviously, I’m trying to draw a parallel with the most common objections to Covid vaccines.
They’re also a little niche (sick with high risk of admission but not sick enough yet to be admitted). We have outpatients report to the ER, call on arrival, and go into a negative pressure room for the infusion.
I think there are medical questions that loom large as well. The emphasis on a vaccine that is, for the young and healthy, seemingly unnecessary, feels strange. True, politics and medicine are now on this issue inextricably intertwined. But I think there were significant medical questions that predated some of the more recent politics of vaccine mandates.
