COVID-19 Research, Drug trials and Pathophysiology

They state that it was incorrect to say that the CEO confirmed the case but that is not the same as saying the latest patient has contracted transverse myelitis, just the CEO himself did not confirm it.

Could the confusion be that the same person in July has been confused with the latest person (MS is similar to transverse myelitis)? But if it is confirmed that in the relatively low sample of people, two contracted this disease, that is concerning.

 

Ok, I getcha.
You think they are just playing with words?

 

From the same report “
This afternoon, Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt said the illness, although neurological in nature, was "undiagnosed in terms of its specific form" and the source was unknown.

"At about 7:30 this morning, I received a call from the Australian head of AstraZeneca," he said.

"The advice that I have, as of that time, is that the patient who had an adverse event is recovering and recovering quickly [and] is likely to be discharged from hospital within the next 24 hours."

 

Don't know. I had high hopes for this vaccine given that it was a novel engineered way of production that I hoped would have no serious side effects - perhaps the virus signature (can't remember the scientific word) maybe similar to nerve cells causing the antibodies to attack nerve cells?

 

I still have high hopes for it. Would any drug or vaccine production be totally free of hiccups or glitches?

 

Let's hope it's the case. Transverse myelitis while it has multiple causes (I went over them in my thread about The State of Vaccines), is indeed a known post-vaccine reaction (and a bad one, given that it is more resilient than Guillain-Barre) that has happened after other vaccines were given, so just statistically speaking, it is likely that if it happened after the vaccination, it is indeed related. Not proven, of course; it could be a coincidence and it could have been caused by many of the other causes.

But fingers crossed that it isn't transverse myelitis and whatever it is, is not related to the vaccine.

 

Totally free of hiccups or glitches, no, but it depends on the seriousness of the hiccups and glitches. Fever, pain, fatigue, malaise for a day or two? Sure, why not? But if you get one case of transverse myelitis, a very serious reaction, in 20,000 participants, it becomes a problem if you give the vaccine to billions of people. See, if you give a vaccine with 1 in 20,000 bad reaction to one billion people, that means 50,000 cases of that bad reaction. In the US alone if the entire population accepted the vaccine, 16,500 cases. It is disqualifying.

If this is confirmed as transverse myelitis and it is confirmed that this vaccine has caused it, I don't see it earning regulatory approval. Or else it would earn very limited emergency approval for special populations where the benefits would outweigh the risks. Let's say, you have an elderly patient with 5 underlying medical conditions, he/she would be better off taking the vaccine to avoid a disease that for that person would have a 1 chance in 5 of killing him/her (at least), versus a 1 in 20,000 chance of causing a bad reaction. But for the population at large, which includes youngsters that aren't at a significant risk? I think not. Especially, in the presence of better alternatives, if one of the other vaccine candidates doesn't cause similar reactions by the end of phase 3.

When you say, any drug or vaccine, do realize that the scrutiny for vaccines is stricter because they are given by the billions and to healthy populations. It's different than a drug intended for a small sub-set of the population (the people already suffering from the disease that the drug treats) and those are not healthy, they are already experiencing the risks of the disease, so the benefits of the drug may outweigh the risks. But for a vaccine, if you give it to hundreds of millions of youngsters who are healthy and not at a big risk of dying from this virus, and it causes a lot of cases of transverse myelitis, that's not good.

 

Forgive some state pride but I rather hope that the University of Queensland vaccine proves itself too. Even the idea behind a “molecular clamp is in itself very new

https://www.csl.com/news/2020/20200605-uq-cepi-and-csl-partner-for-covid-19-vaccine-candidate

https://www.pharmalicensing.com/detail.php?uid=66499

Hmmmmm “of human and veterinary importance”. Who wants to put money on research into a vaccine for the Hendra Virus coming post Covid?
Seems South Australia’s Flinders Uni is also developing a vaccine
https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/could-australia-have-the-answer-to-a-covid-vaccine

https://www.health.gov.au/news/depu...s-conference-about-covid-19-on-19-august-2020


https://www.csl.com/news/2020/20200...ly-uq-and-ou-vaccine-candidates-for-australia

And yeah the Aus government has also committed to buying vaccines for the pacific islands. Don’t get me wrong I am cynic enough to believe that this argues will come with the price tag of standing by us when and if we need them but I would rather be nice and engender a debt than try and bully

 

Remember the Hendra virus outbreak in ? 2005. Horse racing was put on hold and the greyhound racing pools in the TAB were much larger than usual.

 

Do I? And I remember Lyssavirus. We were ruddy lucky that those two never became airborne or had the transmission rates of Covid. The mortality rate for both are horrific!

https://www.business.qld.gov.au/ind...welfare/pests-diseases-disorders/hendra-virus

http://conditions.health.qld.gov.au/HealthCondition/condition/14/217/10/australian-bat-lyssavirus

 

It’s compelling. I just found these posts as I have only been able to keep up with replies to quotes recently and haven’t been reading all threads. My questions would be why assume cytokines are irrelevant just because they are lower in C19 than other conditions? That’s mentioned in the article. Also the relationship of cytokines and bradykinins is unknown to me at this point. I did read this
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3696050/

and it looks like we understand some of the mechanisms here. Some of my link looks counterintuitive on the surface but when feedback loops and negative feedback loops are part of the equation it often appears that way at first glance. I’ll try and look into this more but I still haven’t found the podcast on B cell formation I (kind of, with caveat) promised you.

If things like the MATH+ protocol work that target cytokine storm then cytokines are a factor, the same treatment controls bradykinins, or there is some close interactions between cytokines and bradykinins.

To lighten things up, an hour I could have spent last night reading I spent catching this guy. As I was eating supper it started flying around my kitchen. Wouldn’t go out any open doors except a bathroom where I finally tired it enough it crash landed in the tub. I always have leather gloves handy so I just picked it up and took it outside. I wanted to photograph it better but it was so scared and made such a pitiful cry I took a quick picture and let it go.

So if I disappear from the forum in a couple weeks the rona got me. I didn’t wear a mask and only social distanced part of the time. But I didn’t eat it so I probably have a 50/50 shot at survival.

 

AstraZeneca is being criticized for being less than transparent. Apparently in a meeting with major shareholders only, they did disclose the transverse myelitis but not to the press. And now, believe it or not, I heard rumors of a second case of transverse myelitis associated with the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. This is not good, and if confirmed, I think it will be the end for them. I have no way to post a link. The rumor was passed on to my via a phone call with someone abroad.

 

It's interesting because I met extensively one of the three co-discovers of bradykinin, Professor Wilson Teixeira Beraldo, back in the eighties. He discovered characteristics of kallikrein, too.

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Bradykinin also promotes inflammation so I suppose the methylprednisolone proposed by the MATH+ protocol would have some effect, but in my understanding, treating a bradykinin storm is done with different drugs, not necessarily steroids.

See this comment about the original article:

"To that point, a very good feature of this work is that it immediately suggests several interventions with FDA-approved drugs. Not all of these are actionable (for example, androgenic steroids decrease bradykinin production, but do a hell of a lot of other things besides!) But icatibant (brand name Firazyr) is an antagonist of bradykinin B2 receptors, and ecallantide (brand name Kalbitor) is an inhibitor of kallikrein, a key enzyme in bradykinin production. Both of those would seem to be directly targeting the proposed mechanisms. Hymecromone is a small molecule that’s known to inhibit the synthesis of hyaluronic acid. And thymosin beta-4 is a protein that could tie into the connection between bradykinin activity and coagulopathies; a version of this protein has been in human trials as Timbetasin. As mentioned above, vitamin D supplementation might also be beneficial – its receptor has connections with vascular permeability and with the renin/angiotensin system, and its deficiency has already been noted as a rsk factor in the current pandemic."

Here is the original article:

https://elifesciences.org/articles/59177

It's been generating a lot of buzz. By now there are many comments on this, in the international scientific community.

About the low level of cytokines, there is this, though:

"Dr. Kishimoto said, “SARS-CoV-2 infection causes critical illness and severe dysfunction in respiratory organs and induces a cytokine storm,” even in the setting of lower but still elevated serum IL-6 levels."

So my take is, maybe it's both. Maybe both cytokines and bradykinin are involved in the physiopathology of this complex disease.

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LOL, we'll have a new coronavirus, jumping species from bat to farmer!

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Dr. Paul Marik has updated the MATH+ protocol again. Added to the prophylaxis phase, interferon alpha nasal spray.

https://www.evms.edu/media/evms_pub...cine/EVMS_Critical_Care_COVID-19_Protocol.pdf

By the way, now Dr. Marik has done something he should have done before: he has published a paper justifying his protocol.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14787210.2020.1808462?scroll=top&needAccess=true

It's a pity that only the abstract is not behind a paywall. I can get it from my hospital's library but I'd have expected Dr. Marik to publish this with a non-paywall publication.

 

Good Lord. The Warp Speed money should have come with strings attached. Like public hanging for anyone caught lying about a product or sacrificing safety for profit. What will this do to the already shaky public perception of vaccines?

 

Exactly. It's a disaster. Not only one of the most promising vaccines and the one that was once the front runner, is likely going belly up (although, not yet; maybe it's a coincidence after all, but I find it highly unlikely), but also, public confidence will be undermined. Although, it shouldn't. This trial being paused is actually reassuring in terms of people NOT cutting corners with safety, but the corporate part about trying to protect their stock value is what sounds quite despicable.

 

@CenterField, I’m just getting to thinking about bradykinins and age as an underlying condition. Sure enough, aging decreases the sensitivity of bradykinin receptors and baseline bradykinin levels are higher in the aged. When this virus messes up regulation by stopping degradation and increasing production of bradykinins while simultaneously re-sensitizing receptors it’s no wonder bad things happen inflammatory-wise. I’m looking forward to more research. Very interesting.

The more things like this we learn, I’m more and more convinced baseline inflammation needs more study. Earlier I was thinking about minorities and their higher rates in the US. I found information that African American children with US born parents are 36% more likely to have low grade inflammation than white kids. It’s 76% higher for Hispanic kids than whites. If parents of minorities are not US born it’s even worse for Hispanics.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6177208/

It seems every time I look up a risk factor or comorbidity, I find an increased baseline inflammation correlation. Does anyone have data on childhood cases by race? It would be interesting to see if minority child rates match up with inflammation rates.

 

Agree. I wasn’t accusing this company of everything I listed.

 

Yes, inflammation is terrible in chronic diseases. Remember that obesity also increases inflammation so it's not surprising that obesity is currently being called the worst underlying condition to have if you catch Covid-19. I do not know from the top of my head childhood chronic inflammation levels by race, but yes, generally people of color are worse off.

 

Yes obese people have high levels of inflammation. Partly due to inherent effects excess adipose tissue has on the body and immune system. But a lot of inflammation and obesity are symptoms of other poor choices. Chronic borderline dehydration, eating processed foods especially carbohydrates, lack of exercise, stress, negative attitudes, overexposure to non-natural light especially fluorescent lighting, smoking, alcohol consumption, insufficient exposure to allergens/contagions at a young age, and on and on. All causes of inflammation and nearly all causes of obesity as well.

I’d make a thread on it all, I’ve thought about it. But when I’ve brought up personal responsibility factors in C19 and general immune function (even in relation to how general health and immune system health affect response to vaccination) in the past it just generates anger. Calls for personal responsibility generally do around here.

I posted a link on variation of childhood inflammation by race. What I need is actual data of SARS-CoC-2 infections and severity of c19 in children by race. I’ve not found any data like that.

What I wouldn’t give to see baseline inflammation data on asymptomatic, symptomatic and severe C19 patients. Your information on bradykinins is more evidence to me we are bringing this on ourselves to a large extent by lifestyle choices.

 

Here you go:

"Overall, Hispanic or Latino (Hispanic) and non-Hispanic black (black) children had higher cumulative rates of COVID-19–associated hospitalizations (16.4 and 10.5 per 100,000, respectively) than did non-Hispanic white (white) children (2.1)."

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6932e3.htm

 

Thanks! Matches up with the baseline inflammation data almost perfectly from the study I linked. Hopefully someone besides me notices and cares. (There are likely other contributions to the disparity in race as well).

Also from my earlier linked study on race and inflammation in children, in Hispanics, children from parents not born in the US had even higher rates of inflammation. That makes me think the “Old Friend” effect on baseline inflammation is possibly a factor.

 

This is neat, very sci-fi, the use of AI to help with the diagnosis by looking at a chest X-ray:

https://www.mdedge.com/chestphysici...nt=AI can pinpoint COVID-19 from chest x-rays

 

Oxford has resumed testing

 

Haven't they already vaccinated all the people they were going to?

 

interesting, coming from India that really pushes plant based diets

"Can Keto diet 'protect' you from Coronavirus?"

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com...you-from-coronavirus/articleshow/74577613.cms

"The study, which was published in the journal, Science Immunology, pointed out that the cells, once powered by Keto work by enhancing mucus production in the body and hence beat out the flu and related symptoms. In fact, the study also mentions that prolonged practice of Keto diet may even help make the body immune to several types of viruses, including coronavirus."