#coronavirus is a weird disease

[lost-in-frog-land]

catch me coughing up blood like it's the 1800s and I'm dying of consumption

[theintelligentfool]

do y'all remember how back in 2020-2021ish everyone called it corona but at some point the collective english speaking conscious changed our mind and we called it covid instead

[crypticpawart]

Paintings Part 23 | Corona

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This original minimalist painting depicts the microbe of what COVID-19 looks like. Created while I had the 'rona.

[jinxedshapeshifter]

fox news learn how to fucking GOOGLE THINGS CHALLENGE

[ohheyidothat]

Wow isn't it weird that I got shingles last year even though I had been vaccinated against chicken pox as a kid? So weird.

Anyways reminder that as of 2017 the vaccine technology improved *so much* and there is a new shingles vaccine that you can absolutely talk to a medical professional about.

[krispyweiss]

Avett Brother Joe Kwon has COVID-19

Joe Kwon has COVID-19 and lost his senses of taste and smell.

“Awesome,” the Avett Brothers cellist and avowed foodie tweeted.

“It’s a weird novelty at this stage. I think it’s going to sad if it doesn’t come back soon.”

It’s Kwon’s first bout with the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. Scott Avett contracted COVID-19 in July, forcing the Avetts to postpone a handful of shows.

“You know, one of the main reasons I tried to avoid COVID like the plague was because of this very issue,” Kwon said. “I knew I’d be unlucky enough to lose my taste and smell.”

Kwon’s positive test comes less than a week after the Avetts on Aug. 28 wrapped the current leg of their tour. The band is slated to return to the road Sept. 16 at Willie Nelson’s Outlaw Music Festival in Boston.

9/5/22

[deweydecimalchickens]

So I checked the changed NHS Covid advice like a good girl and concluded that I will be ignoring it because I am not too stupid to live. It stinks of political interference over science.

Mmmkay. This is the only example they have under "close contact". If "close contact" for Covid-19 required cohabitation or an overnight stay, we wouldn't have had a pandemic, now, would we? It would've been contained by the limited and largely fixed number of sleeping arrangements.

OMICRON IS HELLA CONTAGIOUS. It's 4 x as contagious as Delta, which was 1.5 x as contagious as Alpha, which was 1.5 x as contagious as the original Wuhan strain. Nearly three years and three more-contagious variants later, why the FUCK is the NHS website implying you're only at risk if you stay overnight in somebody's house?

Look it's not that washing your hands is ever going to be bad advice. We have all enjoyed the relative lack of shitting 'n' puking bugs recently. But THIS BITCH IS AIRBORNE. It's not even just big droplets (that we all got a bit overconfident about because the recommendations came from an old TB study and TB is a pretty weird disease); it's also aerosols. Putting the pointless hygiene theatre in the same list as stuff that actually works just undermines the whole damn list and gives people the wrong idea about how it actually spreads. (If I see one more maskless person diligently cleaning door handles in a windowless space I'm gonna lose it.)

More worrying is the stuff that's missing. Where is "work from home if you can"? Where is "get tested"?

Whoop, there it is. Excuse me, my good bitch, but what seems to be the FUCK? Yes, you should get tested if you have been exposed to a disease, my siblings in Baphomet, how is this even a question?!?!?!

Okay yes there are concerns about the false-negative rate on LFTs, and people wrongly taking a negative LFT during the incubation period as a green light to go and cough on a granny. There are arguments for waiting until day 3-5 to test to reduce the risk of this. But you should still get tested! These are not concerns unique to coronavirus and you can bear them in mind and interpret the results accordingly. But if Schroedinger's Covid becomes Yes Definitely Covid, you do need to know that and react accordingly.

It sure as hell shouldn't be in the "don't" list. It's not going to do any harm or set back your progress. The "don't" list should be reserved for things like "go to unnecessary indoor events for the next ten days". It belongs in a "this is a really good idea but the government won't support you, soz" list along with working from home. What they mean is "you should do this but we're not going to recommend it because then we'd have to address the question of why we withdrew free testing and that would be awkward." Fuck's sake.

Overall having advice this shitty and not being honest about why is an ongoing threat to public health. It just furthers the idea "they don't know what they're doing" and "they keep changing their minds", which makes people less likely to listen when the next wave or disease tears through. Yes Omicron is half as lethal as Delta but it's four times more contagious and I don't always maths good but that equals twice as many deaths. It's not over.

[pinkopalina]

the most harrowing thing to me about my experience with covid-19 was that I first heard about it from a meme on Tumblr in October of 2019. we didnt know it would be called covid-19 yet, we just knew "coronavirus" was going around, and the meme I saw was the simpsons Barney getting tossed out of the bar meme, and Moe had tossed out Barney with some disease we were worried about before (I can't even remember, after all the COVID lol) and Barney walked in and it just said the word coronavirus. it made me kind of stop and think oh god whats about to happen

and then it felt really weird in December, when things picked up and everyone really started knowing about it

and then by March, we were all stay at home

I wish I could find that post because I don't think I reblogged it, I think it scared me and i kind of scrolled past it but I did think it was funny but it was weird to me that somebody could kind of see the problems that were going to happen beforehand

whatever the first panel had said had implied something like a regulatory disease that was going to change things and just as soon as we had taken care of that, coronavirus was going to fuck everything up and then it did. it's still odd to think about

[americanmysticom]

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. details how the NSA was in charge of Operation Warspeed's COVID-19 mRNA vaccines,

the history of the United States bioweapons program, and why Anthony Fauci is the highest-paid government official in history:

KanekoaTheGreat@KanekoaTheGreat

https://twitter.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/1657175672660566016

https://kanekoa.substack.com/

"The weird thing about the pandemic was this constant involvement by the CIA, the intelligence agencies, and the military. When Operation Warp Speed made its presentation to the FDA committee called VRBPAC.

When Warp Speed turned over the organizational charts that were classified at the time, it shocked everybody because it wasn't HHS, CDC, NIH, FDA, or a public health agency. It was the NSA, a spy agency that was at the top and led Operation Warp Speed. The vaccines were developed not by Moderna and Pfizer. They were developed by NIH, their own the patents are owned 50% by NIH. Nor were they manufactured by Pfizer, or by Moderna.

They were manufactured by military contractors, and basically, Pfizer and Moderna were paid to put their stamps on those vaccines as if they came from the pharmaceutical industry. This was a military project from the beginning. One of the things I uncovered in my book is  20 different simulations on coronavirus and pandemics. That started in 2001.

The first one was right before the anthrax attacks and the CIA sponsored them all. The last one was Event 201 which was in October 2019. And one of the participants was Avril Haines, the former Deputy Director of the CIA, who has been managing coverups her whole life. She did the Guantanamo Bay and others. She is now the Director of National Intelligence which makes her the highest ranking officer at the NSA which managed the pandemic.

So you have a spy who is convening these pandemic simulations and in each of these simulations going back 20 years, they're not simulating a public health response. They're not doing things like how do we stockpile Vitamin D. How do we get people outdoors losing weight doing exercise? How do we develop an information grid for all the 15 million front line doctors all over the world so that we can get their information that works and what doesn't work.

We had an incredible opportunity to manage a pandemic in a way that was intelligent and sensitive and devastating to the disease, but we didn't do any of those things. It was all about how do you use a pandemic to clam down censorship. How you use it to force lockdowns.

By the way, with lockdowns, every pandemic preparedness document that had been adopted by any major public health agencies, whether it was CDC, WHO, European Health Agency, National Health Services of Britain. All of them said you don't do lockdowns, you quarantine the sick, you protect the vulnerable. And you let everybody else go back to work because a lockdown actually amplifies the impacts of the disease. If you isolate people, it makes them more vulnerable, it breaks down their immune system."

Full Video; Russell & RFK Jr | FAUCI, CIA Secrets & Running For President - #128 https://rumble.com/v2nermq-russell-and-rfk-jr-fauci-cia-secrets-and-running-for-president-128-stay-fre.html

View on CloudDrive; how the NSA was in charge https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=kZ6Ay6VZkA6Rfi5Vj3m5AuBX1iwsF0jGriQ7

https://www.secretdonttell.com/shop/

[saentorine]

Viral Amorality

It’s always so odd to me how compelled people are to assign some kind of moral weight and intention to the coronavirus. Like it’s consciously out to get us, or could only possibly exist through creation by someone who is consciously out to get us, and it’s objectively “bad” or “evil.” It’s just a little microbe* doing what microbes have been doing for like three billion years before we grew brains big enough to think about it: surviving. That’s the core function of every species. It found a superior way to survive, and so it’s continuing to do that. In this case, its survival and adaptation comes at cost to our species’ health and wellbeing-- just like we threaten so many other creatures with our existence-- and as it adapts, it’s also our right as another living entity sharing the same space to adapt in our own ways against it. But nothing about what the virus does is objectively ~evil or even planned. It’s just doing what all life* does.

[officialbabayaga]

i had to have a conference call with the head scientist and lab director of my job (because?? my weird job responsibilities that i’ve gotten in the R&D department since we’ve started our covid testing had suddenly turned me into a Very Important employee who’s now talking directly to our CEO so that’s weird) at SIX PM tonight. then immediately took a shot and am planning on remaining crossfaded for the next 24 hours so woo hoo Big Kid Hours over HERE

[eternal-bauhinian]

*rolls eyes* Blocked. Are you serious about blaming Jews and Muslims for the coronavirus outbreak? I'm sick and tired of your unoriginal bullschist. You have been bothering me for months about this Danny Woo thing, and frankly, I don't give a schist anymore.

For your information, the coronavirus is most likely caused by idiot mainlanders… southerners… *shakes head because I have southerner genes and I am ashamed of my brethren to the north* who don't discriminate in what they consume, including 'delicacies' from wild animals that may or may not carry viruses like these (first Guangdong, now Hubei… what the hell do I do with you guys… but I'd rather increase my distance from the CCP HQ so I'm not moving north… no offense, Beijing). True to the stereotype that southerners - especially Cantonese, for the record - will eat anything and everything, and the consequences of being such dumbasses.

Maybe I should ask my friends north of the Sham Chun River to consume your sorry arse just so I don't have to listen to your b!tching anymore. But then that would likely cause another virus outbreak, and since my city is already devastated by the effects of this stupid virus, sadly, I ought to let you go. This time.

[newsfeast]

Κέρκυρα : 55χρονος αρνητής μάσκας γρονθοκόπησε αστυνομικό

Κέρκυρα : 55χρονος αρνητής μάσκας γρονθοκόπησε αστυνομικό

Με γροθιές στο πρόσωπο του αστυνομικού και λεκτική βία φέρεται ότι απάντησε 55χρονος Κερκυραίος, όταν το έγινε προτροπή να φορέσει τη μάσκα του. Το γεγονός συνέβη το πρωί στον κεντρικό πεζόδρομο της πόλης της Κέρκυρας, στην Ευγενίου Βουλγάρεως, όταν δύο αστυνομικοί πλησίασαν τον 55χρονο προκειμένου να του συστήσουν να φορέσει την προβλεπόμενη και υποχρεωτική σε ανοιχτούς χώρους μάσκα προστασίας…

[labratchat]

You know these alien looking animals you see on the beach sometimes? Well they're called horseshoe crabs, and their blood is critical for ensuring the safety of many vaccines, including a vaccine for COVID-19. #horseshoecrab #whatisthat #weirdcreatures #weird #awesome #amazing #vaccines #safety #blood #alien #beach #animaltesting #animalresearch #covid19 #coronavirus #disease #covid #labratchat #thankananimal https://www.instagram.com/p/CD9MiEDhEj-/?igshid=80jbvbs5og62

[themedicalstate]

The Second COVID-19 Shot Is a Rude Reawakening for Immune Cells

Side effects are just a sign that protection is kicking in as it should.

Side effects are a natural part of the vaccination process, as Sarah Zhang has written. Not everyone will experience them. But the two COVID-19 vaccines cleared for emergency use in the United States, made by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, already have reputations for raising the hackles of the immune system: In both companies’ clinical trials, at least a third of the volunteers ended up with symptoms such as headaches and fatigue.

Dose No. 2 is more likely to pack a punch—in large part because the effects of the second shot build iteratively on the first. 

But much like any other learning process, in this one repetition is key. When hit with the second injection, the immune system recognizes the onslaught, and starts to take it even more seriously. The body’s encore act, uncomfortable though it might be, is evidence that the immune system is solidifying its defenses against the virus.

“By the second vaccine, it’s already amped up and ready to go,” Jasmine Marcelin, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, said. Fortunately, side effects resolve quickly, whereas COVID-19 can bring on debilitating, months-long symptoms and has killed more than 2 million people.

When the immune system detects a virus, it will dispatch cells and molecules to memorize its features so it can be fought off more swiftly in the future. Vaccines impart these same lessons without involving the disease-causing pathogen itself—the immunological equivalent of training wheels or water wings.

The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines accomplish that pedagogy via a genetic molecule called mRNA that’s naturally found in human cells. Once delivered into the upper arm, the mRNA instructs the body’s own cells to produce a coronavirus protein called spike—a molecule that elicits powerful, infection-fighting antibody responses in people battling COVID-19.

To ensure safe passage of mRNA into cells, the vaccine makers swathed the molecules in greasy bubbles called lipid nanoparticles. These strange, fatty spheres don’t resemble anything naturally present in the body, and they trip the sensors of a cavalry of fast-acting immune cells, called innate immune cells, that patrol the body for foreign matter. Once they spot the nanoparticles, these cells dispatch molecular alarms called cytokines that recruit other immune cells to the site of injection. Marshaling these reinforcements is important, but the influx of cells and molecules makes the upper arm swollen and sore. The congregating cells spew out more cytokines still, flooding the rest of the body with signals that can seed system-wide symptoms such as fever and fatigue.

“It’s the body’s knee-jerk reaction to an infection,” or something that looks like it, Mark Slifka, a vaccine expert and an immunologist at Oregon Health and Science University said. “Let’s spray the area down with antiviral cytokines, which also happen to be inflammatory.”

The mRNA itself might also tickle a reaction out of the immune system, simply because of how unusual it looks. “All of a sudden, you have a lot of new RNA that the cell didn’t make,” says Donna Farber, an immunologist at Columbia University, who got her second shot of Moderna’s vaccine last month, with very few side effects.

The provocative nature of mRNA might help explain why Moderna’s shot, which contains three times as much of the genetic material as Pfizer’s, was linked to more side effects in clinical trials.

The innate immune system acts fast. But its actions aren't very long-lived or discerning: These cells just clobber anything that looks a little weird. Within a day or two of the injection, they start to lose steam. Cytokine production sputters; side effects start to fade. Around this time, innate immune cells start to pass the baton to another division of the immune system, called adaptive immunity, which includes sniperlike molecules and cells, such as antibodies and T cells, that will launch an attack on specific pathogens if they try to infect the body again.

T cells and B cells, the cells that make antibodies, need several days to study the spike’s features before they can respond. But by the time the second injection rolls around, adaptive cells are raring to go, and far faster to react. Some of these cells have even been lingering at the site of injection, out of suspicion that their target would return. Stimulated anew, these sentinel cells will blast out their own cytokines, layering on an extra wave of inflammation. In some people, these complex reactions can manifest in fevers, aches, and prolonged exhaustion.

But the ruckus raised after the second injection might be a double whammy: The expected innate cells might be further egged on and amplified by a less sluggish surge of adaptive cells, concentrated near where the needle goes in.

“With the second dose, now everything is responding within that same short time period,” said Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington.

Pepper described her first shot of Pfizer’s vaccine as “a piece of cake.” The second injection saddled her with flu-like symptoms, tougher to take. But the side effects also signify that both branches of the immune system are being engaged as they should—cementing the memory of the coronavirus’s spike protein in some of the body’s most powerful cells.

That’s a big part of why vaccine boosts are so important, Slifka said. Although the first shot stimulates both innate and adaptive immunity, the second injection reminds B and T cells that the threat of the coronavirus cannot be taken lightly, and ensures that the sharpest and strongest immune players will be used for any subsequent response.

“They’re asking, ‘Why is this happening 21 or 28 days later? I thought we took care of this four weeks ago,’” Slifka said.

Marcelin, the Nebraska infectious-disease physician, also experienced rougher symptoms after her second shot of Pfizer’s vaccine. By the time she went to bed that evening, she was gripped with miserable muscle aches and chills. It took a couple more days before “I felt like myself,” Marcelin recalled.

The side effects didn’t faze her, though. She’s now about three weeks out from her second dose—past the point when the vaccine’s full protective effects are expected to kick in. “I would do it again,” she says. “It was definitely worth it.”

People shouldn’t be perturbed by a lack of vaccine side effects either. As our bodies churn through new information, “some people’s immune systems are louder than others’,” Marcelin said. But the quiet ones are still hard at work.

This is a million times better than getting COVID.

By Katherine J. Wu (The Atlantic). Image: Getty/Atlantic.

[luxurybrownbarbie]

Thank you so much for the COVID Vaccine answer,so many people have said it’s dangerous bc they just came up with it. But literally people wanted a vaccine to come out and now they’re scared of it and I know it’s scary but idk your answer really helped me out💕 my mother disagrees with me getting the vaccine but all I can do is pray,I have asthma and I just feel like the longer I wait to get it the more anxious I feel. Have you gotten it yet and are your long term symptoms improving? Praying for you💖💖

I have exercise induced asthma. Covid was terrifying. I’m literally begging for the vaccine, and the UK rollout is absolutely terrible.

It’s funny because people do distrust things which happen too fast. There was an article I read in 2019 which explained that a lot of things we have load instantly. Our infrastructure has instantaneous loading pages. So websites, apps, everything online actually loads faster than you think. But humans distrust that, so they often have artificial loading times and wait pages so we think it’s quality. Humans are very weird.

I had an issue with how fast it came out as well. But I read pages from immunologists and from my friends who have studied microbiology and immunology.

The struggle with vaccines/healthcare is funding. No one ever has enough funding. So when a global pandemic hit, governments and private donors knew what would happen/was happening to the economy, and knew we needed to get back to normal as soon as possible, so they put all of the money towards vaccine development.

Covid is not new. The virus we’re dealing with itself is novel, but the family of viruses are not. The strain were struggling with is SARS-COV-2, which means “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-Coronavirus-2”. So this strain is called a novel virus, because we haven’t seen it in humans before, but we have seen SARS before. This is technically the seventh coronavirus we’ve seen in humans before. It’s also a part of zoonosis, which is when certain animals have viruses which cause separate issues for humans. The thing we struggle with is the novel strain’s high transmission, high infectivity rate.

The Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) are also coronaviruses. They’re all part of the same virus family. So scientists know the family, (this SARS-Cov-2 is the seventh known coronavirus scientists have seen) they know the building blocks of the viruses, so they know how to create a vaccine using those building blocks.

Having prior knowledge and having plenty of funding meant immunologists needed less time and didn’t have to go begging governments to care about the virus, which meant they could work 20x faster.

The fact that the vaccine is coming so quickly is something we should question, but not the immunologists. We should be questioning our governments as to why we have so many brilliant microbiologists and immunologists, who can create life changing vaccines in roughly eight months, and we still can’t get vaccines and cures for diseases. This is highlighting the fact that the people who fund a major portion of vaccine research only care when viruses get to the point of causing a global pandemic, and therefore disrupt the economy in a significant way.

I feel like we all direct our attentions to the wrong places. I was questioning people with decades of knowledge and experience, instead of questioning people who have literally no experience with immunology and zoonosis directing us all.

I trust this vaccine. I did my research. I read the papers. I’ve experienced Covid firsthand.

The problem isn’t the speed of the vaccine. It’s a greater issue into how governments don’t care about healthcare until it affects the economy.

I hope this helps. 💛 And I hope you get your vaccine soon.