Massive Peer-Reviewed Mask Study Shows 'Little To No Difference' In Preventing COVID, Flu Infection

 A massive international research collaboration that analyzed several dozen rigorous studies focusing on "physical interventions" against COVID-19 and influenza found that they provide little to no protection against infection or illness rates.

The study, published in the peer-reviewed Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, is the strongest science to date refuting the basis for mask mandates worldwide.

And of course, the CDC still recommends masking in areas with "high" rates of transmission (fewer than 4% of US counties, as Just the News notes), along with indoor masking in areas with "medium" rates of transmission (27%).

Masks are still required in educational institutions in Democratic strongholds such as New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Washington and California, according to the Daily Mail. Boston Public Schools denied its "temporary masking protocol" in early January was a "mandate," following a public letter against the policy by student Enrique Abud Evereteze.

South Korea is still requiring masks on public transport and in medical facilities after dropping COVID mandates in most indoor settings, including gyms, Monday, Reuters reported. -Just the News

According to the Cochrane study, which included the work of researchers at institutions in the  U.K., Canada, Australia, Italy and Saudi Arabia, a total of 78 studies were analyzed. Most recent additions to the meta-analysis were 11 new randomized controlled trials.

As unlisted study author Carl Heneghan - who directs the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford noted on Twitter: "Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of influenza‐like illness (ILI)/COVID‐19 like illness compared to not wearing masks."

The Danish study had trouble finding a major journal willing to publish its controversial findings that wearing surgical masks had no statistically significant effect on infection rates, even among those who claimed to wear them "exactly as instructed." 

Mainstream media overlooked red flags in the Bangladeshi mask study, which found no effect for surgical masks under age 50 and a difference of only 20 infections between control and treatment groups among 342,000 adults. -JTN

Bottom line, mask wearing "probably makes little to no difference," when it comes to influenza-like or COVID-like illnesses, regardless of type of mask used.

We're sure the cult of Fauci will now start insisting peer-reviewed meta-analyses aren't 'the science.'

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/massive-mask-study-shows-little-no-difference-preventing-covid-flu-infection

US Seizes 300% More Eggs From Americans Eyeing Lower Prices in Mexico

• A lot of people ‘unaware’ of ban on imports of raw eggs
• Egg prices surge after outbreak of avian flu in hen flocks

 

With egg prices surging in the US, some Americans are trying to lower their grocery bills by buying them south of the border. The only problem: It’s illegal to bring them back into the country, and now seizures of eggs at some US-Mexico border crossings have surged more than 300%. 

Since Nov. 1, egg seizures are up 91% at the agency’s El Paso field office, 301% in Laredo, 333% in Tucson and 368% in San Diego compared to the same period a year earlier, according to Customs data through Jan. 17. In most cases, the seizures involve no more than a few 30-egg flats that travelers say they purchased for themselves to take advantage of lower prices in Mexican stores, said Roger Maier, a spokesman for US Customs and Border Protection.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-01/high-egg-prices-spur-300-jump-in-seizures-at-us-mexico-border?srnd=markets-vp

Hologic's fiscal Q1 tops views, company raises guidance for the year

 Hologic Inc. (HOLX) stock rose nearly 3% in the extended session Wednesday after the medical technology company reported quarterly earnings and sales that topped Wall Street views and raised its outlook for fiscal 2023. Hologic earned $187.4 million, or 75 cents a share, compared with $499.2 million, or $1.95 a share, in the year-ago period. Adjusted for one-time items, Hologic earned $1.07 a share. Revenue fell 27% to $1.07 billion, mostly thanks to lower sales of COVID-19 assays and supply-chain "challenges" with semiconductor chips used in the company's breast-health business, it said. Analysts polled by FactSet expected Hologic to report adjusted earnings of 91 cents a share on revenue of $1 billion in the quarter. "We had a strong start to our fiscal year with double-digit organic revenue growth ex. COVID-19 in our diagnostics and surgical businesses, as well as encouraging signs of recovery in our breast health business," Chief Executive Steve MacMillan said in a statement. Hologic upped its fiscal 2023 revenue guidance to between $3.85 billion and $4 billion, compared with a previous guidance of revenue between $3.7 billion and $3.9 billion. It raised adjusted EPS guidance to between $3.55 and $3.85, from an earlier outlook of adjusted EPS between $3.30 and $3.60. That highlights "the confidence we have in our businesses despite an uncertain macro environment," MacMillan said. Shares of Hologic ended the regular trading day up 1.7%.

https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20230201959/hologics-fiscal-q1-tops-views-company-raises-guidance-for-the-year

Billionaire Zelensky-Backer & Ex-Minister Among Ukrainian Officials Targeted In More Anti-Corruption Raids

 In yet another case of curious timing, given it comes a day after the US Treasury issued a (dubious) statement saying US authorities have found no evidence of misuse of the billions in US aid funds flowing into Ukraine, Wednesday has witnessed more anti-corruption raids on a number of prominent government-linked figures. 

Among the homes raided by Ukraine’s security agency, the SBU, included that of the former interior minister Arsen Avakov, as well as one of the the country's richest men with ties to Zelensky, Ihor Kolomoisky.

In Kolomoisky's case, state security services released photos of the Ukrainian billionaire's home being searched. The probe is reportedly related to massive embezzlement and fraud cases centering on Ukraine's two largest oil firms. 

"In a statement that made no mention of the tycoon, the economic security bureau said it had exposed large-scale embezzlement schemes and tax evasion worth 40bn hyrivnia ($1bn; £880m) by the former management of Ukraine's two biggest oil firms, Ukranafta and Ukrtatnafta," BBC reports.

Kolomoisky had already long been under US sanctions over "significant corruption" allegations during his time as governor of the wider Dnipropetrovsk region in 2014.

His money has reportedly been instrumental in bolstering anti-Russian defense militias in the Donbass. He's also well-known as a powerful backer of President Volodymyr Zelensky, as various reports now point out:

Mr Kolomoisky is also a wealthy businessman involved in Ukrainian media, oil and banking. His TV channel gave Mr Zelensky his break with the comedy series Servant of the People, before he backed the former actor's bid for the presidency.

It's clear that Zelensky is now feeling pressure from Europe and Washington to 'get tough' on corruption, given in some cases popular support in the West for the tens of billions in foreign and defense aid being funneled to his government's coffers is beginning to wane.

It appears the proverbial 'house is being cleaned'... much too belatedly, when it comes to entire central government offices, following last week's mass resignations of at least ten high level officials and multiple more regional officials related to widespread corruption:

Referring to the latest anti-corruption swoop as "spring landings", Mr Arakhamia listed further investigations, including the dismissal of the entire leadership of the customs service. MP Oleksiy Honcharenko said the acting head and two deputies had been fired.

The main tax office in Kyiv was also raided.

US authorities have long pressed Kiev authorities to seize Kolomoisky's assets and take expansive legal action against the oligarch...

As for the investigation of former Interior Minister Avakov, it relates to government purchases of six French-made helicopters in 2018. An inquiry into the deal urgently began after last month's crash of one of the helicopters in a residential area which killed over a dozen people, including top ministry officials, significantly among them Interior Minister Denys Monastyrskyi.

Avakov while confirming his home was raided on Wednesday firmly rejected any wrongdoing: "The investigation took interest in the contracts on the purchase of Super Puma (Airbus Helicopters H225) helicopters by the Interior Ministry," he said in a statement.

"The investigators behaved properly although the reasonability for such an investigative action looks a bit stupid six years after the conclusion of the contract," he complained, according to Interfax.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/billionaire-zelensky-backer-ex-minister-among-ukrainian-officials-targeted-more-anti

Pfizer CEO Made 'Misleading' Statements On Vaccinating Children Against COVID-19: UK Watchdog

 by Lily Zhou via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla has made “misleading” and unsubstantiated statements on the merit of giving COVID-19 vaccines to young children, according to a case report published by a UK pharmaceutical watchdog on Jan. 27.

During an interview with the BBC published on Dec. 2, 2021, Bourla was asked whether he believed it was likely that 5- to 11-year-olds in the UK and Europe would be vaccinated against COVID-19 and whether it was a good idea.

The interview was published after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorised the use of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for young children, but the UK’s medicines regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), didn’t approve the product for the same age group until Dec. 22, 2021.

While acknowledging that it was up to the UK authorities to decide whether or not to approve and deploy the vaccines, Bourla replied, “I believe it’s a very good idea.”

He cited disruptions in education and the potential of developing so-called long-COVID, saying, “so there is no doubt in my mind about the benefits completely are in favour of doing it.”

Syringes in front of displayed Biontech and Pfizer logos on Nov. 10, 2020. (Dado Ruvic/Illustration/Reuters)

Following complaints from UsForThem—a children’s welfare campaign group founded in response to the COVID-19 lockdowns—a panel from the Prescription Medicines Code of Practice Authority (PMCPA) ruled that Bourla’s statements breached a number of rules in the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) code of practice.

After Pfizer appealed against the ruling, an appeal board upheld five counts of breaches of three ABPI codes that require information and claims to be accurate, balanced, capable of substantiation, not raising unfounded hopes of successful treatment, and not be misleading with respect to the safety of the product.

The PMCPA described Bourla’s statements as being of a “strong unqualified nature.” It also said they inferred there was “no need to be concerned about potential side-effects of vaccination in healthy children aged 5-11” and that the implication was “misleading and incapable of substantiation.”

The PMCPA said it has received an undertaking from Pfizer to prevent similar breaches in the future.

Code breakers are charged for administrative costs, but the self-regulatory body does not have the power to impose fines or other legal sanctions.

Bourla was initially found to have also breached the code for promoting the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in the 5–11 age group when it was not authorised by the MHRA, but the appeal board overturned the ruling, agreeing with Pfizer that its CEO was asked a specific question and it was not unreasonable to talk about the issue in principle. The board also noted that two other COVID-19 vaccines were also under investigation for the age group.

The appeal board also overturned previous rulings that said Pfizer had failed to maintain high standards and brought discredit upon the industry.

Most Serious Rulings

Pfizer didn’t respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment. In a previous statement to The Telegraph in November 2022, when the newspaper obtained the unpublished ruling, a spokesman for Pfizer said the company was “committed to the highest levels of integrity in any interaction with the public.”

“We are pleased the UK’s PMCPA Appeal Board found Pfizer to have maintained high standards and upheld confidence in our industry, the two most serious rulings in this complaint from a UK campaign group,” the statement reads.

“In the UK, we have always endeavoured to follow the principles and letter of our industry Code of Practice throughout. We will review the case report in detail when we receive it, to inform future activity,” it added.

Speaking to The Epoch Times on Tuesday, Ben Kingsley, head of legal affairs at UsForThem, said he was “thrilled” the regulator ultimately agreed with them that the Pfizer CEO’s statements were misleading and unsubstantiated after the pharmaceutical giant opposed their claims “with all of the resources at its disposal” throughout the process.

Commenting on Pfizer’s previous statement on the ruling, Kingsley said the group “found it quite surprising” that Pfizer would consider the rulings about maintaining high standards and upholding confidence in the industry the “most serious” of all.

“I think to the average member of the public, we’d regard misleading us about the safety of their product to be plenty more serious than bringing the repute of the pharmaceutical industry down,” he said.

“So I think it tells you something about the mindset and the priorities of pharma executives that they regard the abuse of the industry as being a more serious matter than misleading the public.”

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/pfizer-ceo-made-misleading-statements-vaccinating-children-against-covid-19-uk-watchdog

Expanding the Brain. Literally.

  

BY DEREK LOWE

I have to begin by saying that this story gives me the shivers at the end of it. Read on and see if it does the same for you,

First, a bit of background. Most of our functional genes can be traced back to, well, other genes. A common route is some sort of genetic duplication event, where various copies then start to diverge on their own. That’s how generally how we end up with closely related subtypes of enzymes and receptors, and you can trace these things back evolutionarily to get an idea of when the original split might have occurred. Serotonin receptor subtypes, for example, go back to around the time that vertebrates diverged from invertebrates, and they have been useful in more than just nerve function. Muscarinic receptor subtypes are also a vertebrate thing, with increases during the known “tetraploidization” events in evolutionary history, but zebrafish for some reason doubled their muscarinic count one more time than the rest of us backboned creatures (at the 3R event when the teleost fish appeared) and have ten such receptors rather than five. And so on.

But there are a few genes that don’t fit this pattern, the so-called “de novo” sequences. As the name implies, these seem to have evolved from previously noncoding DNA, which on the face of it seems extremely unlikely. This is a very good overview of the subject, and it breaks down the how-can-that-ever-happen intuition into three parts. The first is sparsity: we tend to believe that only a very small number of possible sequences would produce some sort of usable biological effect. The second is the idea that nongenic sequences are a random sample of possible sequences with no particular biases in them. And the last is the belief that surely not very many such nongenic sequences have had a chance to show effects on the evolutionary time scale, anyway. But although intuitively appealing, none of these necessarily have to be the case, or at least not to the extent that we imagine.

For one thing, it’s become clear that there’s a lot of noncoding DNA in the genome, and that a lot of it gets transcribed, at some level, into RNA. So the last of those three suppositions isn’t quite right; a lot of sequences get a chance to do something. There are several of these de novo genes whose sequences overlap in some way with commonly expressed genes, too, so they have had a lot of chances. And as for the first two suppositions, it appears that structural motifs like alpha helices, beta-sheets, and lipophilic transmembrane domains are not that hard to generate, even from random sequence libraries. The reason these motifs are used so much in natural protein biology may well that they are just plain abundant. And the barriers to cellular function are lower than we tend to think they are: the undoubted functional importance of things like microRNAs show that you don’t need large amounts of well-formed tertiary structure (and indeed, some of the de novo genes seem to function by acting as “sponges” for particular miRNA species).

So at this point the evidence for such genes is very strong indeed: there aren’t that many of them, but they are real. There are quite a few of them that have emerged in humans versus other vertebrates (and in humans versus our evolutionary close ape relatives), but this might be because we have studied human sequences so intensely.  Another trend that shows up is for many of these genes to be involved in carcinogenesis or tumor maintenance. But a new paper (with commentary here at Science) suggests a more direct connection with the emerged-in-humans observation, and here’s where things get unnerving.

These authors have been looking for years now at de novo genes in a “transcription first” manner: they’re looking at long noncoding RNAs in other species (especially rhesus macaques) and seeing if these have similarities to the known de novo human genes. This would suggest that some of these lncRNAs became somehow “translatable” along the way. lncRNA species tend to be more concentrated in the nucleus than the cytoplasm, and this new paper identifies some structural elements (such as the U1 binding motif in the sequences) that are associated with more localization in the nucleus. Mutations in these features may be what allow these RNA species to escape the nucleus and move out to where the ribosomes are, and thus get translated into proteins. These localization effects are supported by recent work in other groups as well.

A search for human de novo genes that had both lncRNA homologues in monkeys and had such mutations that could lead to nuclear exit turned up 29 genes that are shared between humans and chimpanzees, and 45 that are exclusively human. A closer look at nine of these that are known to be active in central nervous system tissue showed that their expression affects the size of cortical organoids grown from stem cells in culture (their overexpression makes these cultured neuron clumps grow somewhat larger, and their absence makes them smaller). The authors then inserted these gene sequences into mice, which animals showed “significant cortical expansion” as they matured. The Science commentary linked to above features a statement from one of the paper’s authors that a paper is coming that shows that these animal do indeed perform better in tests of cognitive function and memory. They are smarter mice, with larger brains. And now the hair may be rising up on the back of your neck, as it did on mine.

At the same time, it’s important to realize that there are a number of genes involved in the expansion of our brains relative to other species. Similar experiments have been done with some of the non-de-novo ones, such as ARHGAP11B, NOTCH2NL, TBC1D3, and more (all three of those seem to have arisen by good ol’ gene duplication). But this latest work is a particularly direct example of a clear break between humans and other species, and suggests that these de novo genes managed to fit well into an existing network of brain-development signaling and to potentiate it even more. It has been a longstanding question, how human brains managed to expand so dramatically, but it appears that we’re on the way to answering that one. The “why” part of the question is answered the same way every other question in evolution is answered: because it worked. A larger cerebral cortex seems to have conferred survival advantages, and here we all are with our large brains, having overrun the earth.

There are a number of very obvious experiments suggested by this work that we are going to have to be very cautious with. What happens if you splice a suite of these human-brain-only genes into mice, instead of just one at a time? What happens if you increase expression of one or more of them, with a different promoter or through adding more than one copy? We are going to be having some very interesting debates about quantifying animal intelligence. And we will want to practice very good laboratory hygiene as well, because I think we can all agree that it is not in our best interest to allow the earth’s mice and rats to become any more intelligent and wily than they are already. I wish that I were joking about that, but I’m not.

Nor am I joking when I think about the human implications. As the world knows, we have already seen irresponsible attempts to do germline editing and produce altered human babies. When will someone try adding in more of the cortical-expansion genes, to see what happens? I’ll leave it there.

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/expanding-brain-literally

Aging and Retroviruses

  

BY DEREK LOWE

There are a lot of weird things about the human genome, and one of them is the amount of it that seems to be detritus from old viruses. I mentioned this as part of this post in 2021 - the idea is that ancient retroviruses have (over millions of years) taken the occasional opportunity to insert viral DNA sequences into the human germline, which is interesting in itself because we don’t know of any current retroviruses that do that in humans. We are still carrying this stuff around, and by that I mean carrying between five and ten per cent of our entire genomes. A lot of it has deteriorated with time, accumulating mutations of various kinds, but some of these things can still be translated into RNA, and some of those can still be transcribed into proteins. And since we know that both proteins and RNA species can have numerous activities in the cell, and we also know that functional genes can emerge from previously nonfunctional RNA sequences. . .well, it makes these things worth keeping an eye on.

It’s already known that these endogenous retrovirus sequences have influenced the evolution of the human immune system and can be involved in some forms of cancer as well. in this new paper, that list grows to include aging in general. That builds on recent work showing that another form of viral debris, LINE1 sequences (which were mentioned in the 2021 blog post linked above), seem to be involved in cellular senescence. There were reports about ten years ago that these genetic elements became more actives in senescent cells, and that’s starting to look prescient. The new culprit described here is HERV-K, which is probably the most recently integrated retrovirus in humans, and (surely not by coincidence) one of the most transcriptionally active as well.

The paper shows that HERVK envelope proteins (and their associated mRNAs) are detectable at greater and greater levels as cells age, and that this relationship holds in rodents and primates (by cell, tissue, and serum assays), and even in tissue and serum from aged human donors. They even say that they are able to detect entire retrovirus-like-particles (RVLPs) in the cytoplasm of aged cells. The claim is that increased expression of these things actually helps drive cellular senescence, and this is demonstrated in two directions. Deliberately increasing the expression of these proteins does seem to lead to senescence in cell culture (as compared to controls), and exposing cells to extracellular levels of them does as well. This effect could be reversed by treatment with an anti-HERVK-envelope-protein antibody.

These retroviral proteins set off a constant immune response, which ties in with the general observation that nonstop inflammation is a characteristic of aging in many tissues. The paper extends the connection in vivo by looking at a similar mouse retrovirus (MMRV). It’s found to be expressed at greater levels in degenerating joint tissues, and this phenotype could be alleviated by siRNA knockdown. Taken together, the proposal is that retroviral proteins (HERVK envelope in particular, and likely others?) are being reactivated as cells age, that this is directly responsible for some parts of the aging phenotype, and that this presents an opportunity for therapeutic intervention.

A lot of this story has not been filled out yet, but this very much looks like it’s worth investigating. It would be particularly interesting to see what happens when you target these proteins in aged rodents or primates, perhaps through antibody treatment or through genetic modifications as a proof-of-concept. You’d also want to try treating them before they show signs of aging to see how that progresses. My own guess - and that’s all it is - is that this is all still secondary to aging itself (i.e., I don’t think we get old just because of retroviruses). But it’s certainly possible that the underlying aging phenotype is being exacerbated, perhaps greatly, by this route, and that we could alleviate things by targeting it. Let’s find out!

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/aging-and-retroviruses