Catholic Child Abuse News - A Czech Cardinal Apologist for Paedophiles Defends Pope Benedict XVI

Cardinal Dominik Duka of Prague
"'Only' 10% of abuse accusations against priests are proven to be true."

Czech cardinal accuses Germany's Cardinal Marx of 'betraying' Pope Benedict | National Catholic Reporter

The ambivalent view of the Catholic hierarchy towards child sex abuse by priests was brought into sharp focus a few days ago when Cardinal Dominik Duka of Prague, Czechia, accused Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich of 'harming Pope Benedict XVI's reputation' and calling on Marx to "take responsibility" for the report which revealed that the then Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger of Munich and Freising was complicit in allowing four paedophile priests to continue practising as priests in his archdiocese.

Ratzinger was later promoted to Cardinal and transferred to Rome as head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, i.e., the then Pope John-Paul II's enforcer. It was in that post that he earned a reputation as the Pope's Pitbull and is widely believed to have tried to supress the growing claims that the Catholic Church was complicit in thousands of cases of child sexual abuse to protect the Church and avoid paying compensation to the victims.

Under his tenure, Catholic clerics were forbidden from revealing any information to the authorities which might harm the reputation of the Church on pain of excommunication, even if revealing such information was required by law in the host country. In effect, Ratzinger was telling Catholic clerics and other in holy orders that they owed allegiance only to the Church and ultimately to the Pope in the Vatican, and were therefore above the law of their host country.

The report also revealed that Pope Emeritus Benedict had appeared to try to mislead the enquiry by denying he was present at a meeting in 1980, during which the transfer of a convicted paedophile priest (Priest X in the report) from the diocese of Essen to the archdiocese of Munich was discussed - a denial that was later withdrawn when minutes of the meeting recording his presence were produced, but only after Pope Benedict had first tried to dismiss then as evidence only that something had n written down [sic] and not that he was present or was aware of the discussion.

Pope Benedict then claimed he had misremembered the meeting and still claims to have no recollection of discussing the case.

Cardinal Duka's curious argument appears to be that the then Archbishop Ratzinger had 'no jurisdiction' and that the investigation which revealed his complicity should not have been commissioned by the German. In a published statement, he says:

Munich betrayal for the second time

The publication of the Pope's letter is indeed a glimpse into the soul of the priest, the bishop and the Pope, who retrospectively evaluates his life, but no longer has the strength to comment on all his specifics.

The following is an analysis of the above-mentioned experts, who show us line by line how the so-called goodwill works in the Archdiocese of Munich. It is one of the biggest disappointments I have experienced in our Roman Catholic Church. To defile a person, to injure him unfairly and not even give him the opportunity to appreciate in his favour this so-called goodwill, which must have cost hundreds of thousands of euros, because it does not give the possibility of legal delay? I ask: what is it?

In my article, published in the German magazine Die Tagespost, I point out the following fact: that from all enrolment, every priest who studied ecclesiastical law, even a layman who graduated from the Faculty of Theology and attended an ecclesiastical law course, must understand that the then archbishop [of] Munich, Joseph Ratzinger, had no jurisdiction and no way to deal with the case - Priest X was the priest of the diocese of Essen.

That is why I protest and I really dare to call the Archbishop of Munich, his curia, but also the President of the German Episcopal Conference, to take responsibility for defaming and tarnishing the reputation of Pope Benedict XVI.

Dominik Cardinal Duka, Archbishop of Prague

Translation by Google Translate from the original in Czech.

But the accusation was not that, as Archbishop of Munich and Freising, Joseph Ratzinger had jurisdiction over 'Priest X' when he was predating on children in Essen, but that he was complicit in the removal of Priest X to his own jurisdiction in the archdiocese of Munich, where he was allowed to continue as a priest with access to more potential victims, and that he did nothing to inform the authorities or take steps to protect children in his archdiocese from a known predatory paedophile. The transfer of offending priests into other diocese where their reputation was unknown, was a standard way of covering up their crimes and facilitating their continued access to new, unsuspecting, victims.

And Duka's misleading apologetic does nothing to address the other three cases in which the report found Joseph Ratzinger to be complicit.

Duka himself is no stranger to accusations of being complicit in child abuse cases, so probably has some sympathy with the beleaguered Pope Benedict XVI. According to this report in Agenzia Nova, in 2019 he was suspected:

[…]of having covered up a case of sexual abuse that took place within the Dominican order. This was revealed by the information portal "Seznam.cz". The alleged victim, who remained anonymous, claims to have been abused for many years during his training to become a priest, and to have informed Cardinal Duka about him in time. However, the latter did not act in any way. The priest responsible for these abuses later left the Dominican order due to other allegations from many other alleged victims and died before facing trial. Cardinal Duka admits he remembers the event but justifies his failure to react because the priest at the time would have sworn on the cross that the young victim was lying. Duka says he is ready to cooperate with law enforcement.

In other words, Duka took the word of the priest and assumed his victims were lying, so did nothing to prevent him abusing more victims until the complaints became too many to dismiss them all as lies.

It's obvious from this and his attack on Cardinal Marx, that this odious Cardinal still thinks the most important thing is to protect the Church even at the expense of its victims, and suppress information about sexually predatory priests, and that his first instinct is to believe their victims are liars rather than believe an ordained priest would do such a thing. Clearly, he has learned nothing from the thousands of proven instances of abuse that have swamped Christian churches and bankrupted so many Catholic diocese with claims for compensation, and so is likely to allow it to continue under his watch.

There is no word so far of any action from Pope Francis, either in sanctioning Pope emeritus Benedict XVI for his negligence and attempt to mislead the German enquiry, or against those senior clerics who publicly display this readiness to tolerate paedophile Catholic priests and to dismiss their victims a liars.

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Malevolent Designer News - The Malevolent Designer's Next Move With SARS-CoV-2?

Monoclonal antibody-mediated neutralization of SARS-CoV-2:

The left panel illustrates the morphology of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and displaying the trimeric spike protein on its surface bound with antibodies. The right panel depicts the zoomed view of the trimeric spike protein (top view) in prefusion state bound with monoclonal antibodies. Each monomer of the spike protein shows the receptor binding domain (RBD) in green, orange and magenta, which contains a receptor binding motif in cyan on the top. Mutations emerged in the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variants are shown in red. Here, the C309 (a parent of VIR-7831 or Sotrovimab) antibody is shown in blue, which is one of the antibodies in clinical use that is minimally impacted by the Omicron variant mutations.

Image Credit: Piyush Prakash, Anshumali Mittal, Vikash Verma, Arun Khatri (CC BY 4.0)

Mutations in SARS-CoV-2 spike protein receptor-binding domains may result in escape variants resistant to therapeutics and vaccines | PLOS Pathogens

Creationist mode:

In what may well prove to be a fruitless effort, Anshumali Mittal at the University of Pittsburgh, USA and colleagues have been trying to anticipate how Creationism's beloved pestilential mendacity is likely to modify its SARS-CoV-2 design to make it better at killing people and making others sick, despite the fact that many of them will now have a good degree of immunity, having either been vaccinated against it or acquired it naturally by surviving an earlier attack.

They have been doing so by working out what changes to the spike protein are most likely to enable the virus to evade the antibodies that our immune systems might throw at it in the future

Of course, as any worshiper of the evil genius behind the virus will tell you, it will never give up trying and will always manage to outwit medical science. It's almost exactly like it uses a random process that throws up an almost infinite range of mutations and combinations of mutations, and then something in the environment favours the ones which give most descendants, so even if they are the billion to one chance, the probability that they will arise and become predominant is virtually certain. Rather like repeatedly shuffling the pack and dealing four cards, then repeating until you get four of a kind. It might take days, but if you deal often enough, eventually you will get four of a kind.

Information released ahead of publication in PLOS Pathogens, the PLOS news release explains:

Pandemic News - Why We Need To Help Poor Countries Get Vaccinated and Have Access to Effective Treatment

Nadia Sam-Agudu, MD, lead author of the study.

2022 News - Multi-Country African Research Reports High Rates of COVID-19-Related Deaths Among Hospitalized Children and Adolescents | University of Maryland School of Medicine

An open access paper published recently in JAMA Pediatrics shows that African children and adolescents hospitalized with COVID-19 experience much higher mortality rates than Europeans or North Americans of the same age.

The study, led by Associate Professor Nadia Sam-Agudu, MD, of Maryland University School of Medicine (MUSOM), entitled, Assessment of Clinical Outcomes Among Children and Adolescents Hospitalized with COVID-19 in six Sub-Saharan African Countries, was conducted by a collaboration under AFREhealth (the African Forum for Research and Education in Health), a consortium of cross-disciplinary health personnel across Africa.

According to information supplied by the University of Maryland School of Medicine:

Covidiot News - If You Are Young and/or Poor, Get Vaccinated Now!

Excess years of life lost to COVID-19 and other causes of death by sex, neighbourhood deprivation, and region in England and Wales during 2020: A registry-based study

Communities in the North West of England experienced more than three times the excess years of life lost in the South West.

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic hit hardest in deprived areas of England and Wales, with excess years of life lost more than three times as high in the North West than the South West of England. The research, publishing yesterday in the open access journal PLOS Medicine, also finds 11 times as many excess deaths in 15-44 year olds in the most deprived areas compared to the most affluent ones, and suggests that measuring years of life lost can be more informative for assessing inequalities resulting from the pandemic than looking at excess deaths alone.

According to information made available by PLOS ahead of publication:

Comparing the number of deaths during the pandemic with statistics from previous years can shed light on its impact, but looking at excess deaths alone underestimates years of life lost and does not account for the differences in ages at which people die in different social groups. Evangelos Kontopantelis at the University of Manchester and colleagues looked at mortality registers and estimated expected years of life lost during 2020, by sex, geographical region, and deprivation quintile, using data from Jan 2015 to December 2020.

The impact of the pandemic, when quantified using years of life lost, was higher than previously thought, on the most deprived areas of England and Wales, widening pre-existing health inequalities.

Evangelos Kontopantelis, lead author
Division of Informatics, Imaging and Data Sciences
University of Manchester, Manchester, England, UK
And NIHR School for Primary Care Research
University of Oxford, Oxford, England, UK

The team finds striking socioeconomic and geographical health inequalities, with 1,645 years of life lost per 100,000 of the population in the most deprived areas and 916 years per 100,000 people in the most affluent. London and the North West had the highest years of life lost with South Central and the South West lowest. These inequalities were also seen when examining excess deaths, especially in younger age groups: there were 11 times as many excess deaths in deprived compared to affluent areas in 15-44 year olds, three times as many in 45-64 year olds, almost twice as many in 65-74 year olds, 1.4 times more in 75-84 year olds and no significant difference in people over 85.

Looking at years of life lost is an effective way of determining unmet needs and the authors suggest this could be used for prioritising vaccine delivery and providing targeted financial and social support as part of immediate and longer-term recovery plans. Public health measures and wider socioeconomic interventions are needed to support communities that have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic.

In the abstract to their open access paper, the authors say:

Abstract

Background
Deaths in the first year of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in England and Wales were unevenly distributed socioeconomically and geographically. However, the full scale of inequalities may have been underestimated to date, as most measures of excess mortality do not adequately account for varying age profiles of deaths between social groups. We measured years of life lost (YLL) attributable to the pandemic, directly or indirectly, comparing mortality across geographic and socioeconomic groups.

Methods and findings
We used national mortality registers in England and Wales, from 27 December 2014 until 25 December 2020, covering 3,265,937 deaths. YLLs (main outcome) were calculated using 2019 single year sex-specific life tables for England and Wales. Interrupted time-series analyses, with panel time-series models, were used to estimate expected YLL by sex, geographical region, and deprivation quintile between 7 March 2020 and 25 December 2020 by cause: direct deaths (COVID-19 and other respiratory diseases), cardiovascular disease and diabetes, cancer, and other indirect deaths (all other causes). Excess YLL during the pandemic period were calculated by subtracting observed from expected values. Additional analyses focused on excess deaths for region and deprivation strata, by age-group. Between 7 March 2020 and 25 December 2020, there were an estimated 763,550 (95% CI: 696,826 to 830,273) excess YLL in England and Wales, equivalent to a 15% (95% CI: 14 to 16) increase in YLL compared to the equivalent time period in 2019. There was a strong deprivation gradient in all-cause excess YLL, with rates per 100,000 population ranging from 916 (95% CI: 820 to 1,012) for the least deprived quintile to 1,645 (95% CI: 1,472 to 1,819) for the most deprived. The differences in excess YLL between deprivation quintiles were greatest in younger age groups; for all-cause deaths, a mean of 9.1 years per death (95% CI: 8.2 to 10.0) were lost in the least deprived quintile, compared to 10.8 (95% CI: 10.0 to 11.6) in the most deprived; for COVID-19 and other respiratory deaths, a mean of 8.9 years per death (95% CI: 8.7 to 9.1) were lost in the least deprived quintile, compared to 11.2 (95% CI: 11.0 to 11.5) in the most deprived. For all-cause mortality, estimated deaths in the most deprived compared to the most affluent areas were much higher in younger age groups, but similar for those aged 85 or over. There was marked variability in both all-cause and direct excess YLL by region, with the highest rates in the North West. Limitations include the quasi-experimental nature of the research design and the requirement for accurate and timely recording.

Conclusions
In this study, we observed strong socioeconomic and geographical health inequalities in YLL, during the first calendar year of the COVID-19 pandemic. These were in line with long-standing existing inequalities in England and Wales, with the most deprived areas reporting the largest numbers in potential YLL.

Author summary

Why was this study done?

• The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic generated large numbers of excess deaths (additional deaths over those predicted from trends in previous years). These excess deaths were also unevenly distributed across different geographic areas and socioeconomic groups, exacerbating prepandemic inequalities.
• Up to a quarter of the excess deaths during the pandemic were attributable to coronary heart disease, dementia, and other noninfectious causes, and not directly to COVID-19 infection.
• Most measures of excess deaths do not fully account for differences in the ages at which people die in different social groups. If the pandemic killed disproportionally more young people in more deprived areas, then inequalities resulting from the pandemic will have been underestimated. Measuring years of life lost (YLL) rather than excess deaths would address this problem.

What did the researchers do and find?

• In England and Wales, there were an estimated 763,550 (95% CI: 696,826 to 830,273) excess YLL during the first 42 weeks of the pandemic, of which 15% were not directly attributed to COVID-19 or another respiratory cause.
• For all-cause mortality, estimated deaths in the most deprived compared to the most affluent areas were as follows: 11 times as many for 15- to 44-year-olds, 3 times as many for 45- to 64-year-olds, 40% higher in 75- to 84-year-olds, and not significantly higher for those aged 85 or over.
• This pattern of disproportionately higher mortality in younger age groups exacerbated prepandemic inequalities between the most and least deprived areas, and varied widely across regions, with the North West particularly affected.

What do these findings mean?

• Inequalities between socioeconomic and geographic groups resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic are more pronounced than previously reported.
• Future plans to manage pandemics, including decisions about vaccination rollout, should include an understanding of regional and socioeconomic variation in YLL and how this has exacerbated long-standing health inequalities.
• Immediate and longer-term recovery planning for communities and their health and social services should reflect historical disparities as well as the impact of the pandemic on YLL.
• Limitations of this study include the observational nature of the data and the need for accurate and timely recording of the deaths and their causes.

Kontopantelis E, Mamas MA, Webb RT, Castro A, Rutter MK, Gale CP, et al. (2022)
Excess years of life lost to COVID-19 and other causes of death by sex, neighbourhood deprivation, and region in England and Wales during 2020: A registry-based study.
PLoS Medicine 19(2): e1003904. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1003904

Copyright: © 2022 The authors. Published by PLOS
Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

So, apart from what this says about social inequalities and deprivation in Britain, the message is perfectly clear. Pending the political solution to these inequalities, poor people and young people and especially poor young people should get vaccinated and/or boosted as soon as possible because for them the likely outcome is significantly worse than for people from less deprived backgrounds and the more prosperous areas of the UK.

Don't be a Covidiot!

Get Vaccinated or Get Boosted, Now!

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YEC Failure News - Science Again Refutes YECism Without Even Trying

Enormous volumes of floodwater from the Missoula megafloods once poured over Dry Falls, which stretches 3.5 miles wide and drops 400 feet to a plunge pool now fed by groundwater.

Photo: Tamara Pico

Towering cliffs carved by the Missoula megafloods are found throughout the Channeled Scablands in eastern Washington.

Photo by Tamara Pico

Tilting of Earth’s crust governed the flow of ancient megafloods

Geologists led by Tamara Pico, assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences at University of California, Santa Cruz, have explained how the formation known as the Channeled Scablands, Washington, were formed in a series of cataclysmic floods called the Missoula megafloods. Although these were massive, nevertheless they were local to what is now Eastern Washington.

YECs often point excitedly at the effects of this water erosion as evidence of a global flood, just as they claim the Grand Canyon is, being too parochial to distinguish between a part of the USA and the entire planet. But the scientists have shown how this carving of long, deep channels and towering cliffs was caused by the changing weight of the ice sheets as they retreated at the end of the last Ice Age, causing the entire landscape to tilt and so changing the course of the megafloods.

As the UC Santa Cruz news release explains:

Malevolent Designer News - How Ebola is Designed to Hit Back Weeks, Months or Years After You Think You're Over It

Ebola can hide in your brain fluid and reactivate long after you think you're over it

Image credit: Maciej Frolow via Getty Images

Ebola Lurking in Brain Fluid Kills Monkeys Weeks After Recovery | The Scientist Magazine®

News this week that should awe and amaze devotees of the malevolent creator Creationists like to imagine creates everything and designs any modifications needed to its parasites to keep them making people suffer and die because a mythical couple ate one of its apples.

It is the news that the Ebola virus has been designed to hide in the fluid that surrounds, protects and nourishes our brain, from where it can launch a fresh attack many weeks after you think you've recovered from an earlier attack. Clearly, the divine malevolence is not going to give up easily in its determination to make as many people sick and die as possible, especially those living in West Africa. That'll teach them to think their immune systems, together with modern medical science, can beat it at its nasty little game.

Research published in Science Translational Medicine a few days ago explained how it performs this masterstroke. The study was carried out by a team at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), led by Xiankun (Kevin) Zeng, Ph.D.

According to the USAMRIID new release:

Evolution News - A Little More is Added to the Human Evolution Story

UB 10749 vertebral body. (a) Superior view; (b) posterior view; (c) inferior view; (d) anterior view.

Prehistoric Migrations: New study presents ancient human vertebra discovered in Jordan Valley | Bar-Ilan University

A little more clarity was added to the story of archaic hominin migration out of Africa and into Eurasia with the publication few days ago in Scientific Reports, of the findings of a team of archaeologists led by researchers from Bar-Ilan University, and including specialists from Ono Academic College, The University of Tulsa, and the Israel Antiquities Authority.

It was the discovery that a 1.5 million-year-old fossilised vertebrae found at 'Ubeidiya, in the Jordan Valley near Kibbutz Beit Zera, in 1966, was that of large-bodied species of Homo aged about 6-12 years old as determined by the characteristic pattern of ossification. In adulthood, this individual would have been considerably bigger than the hominins found in Georgia and is more similar to archaic hominins found in East Africa, so supports the idea of successive waves of different species of hominin migrating out of Africa via the Levantine corridor.

From the Bar-Ilan University press release:

Trumpanzee QAnon Fruitloop News - Update on Covidiot Cirsten Weldon's COVID-19 Death

Cirsten Weldon, Pro-Trump, Antivaxx QAnon conspiracist.
Died of COVID-19, 04 Jan, 2022.

Cirsten Weldon, a prominent Trumpanzee and QAnon conspiracist and antivaxxer, who earned her living tell gullible fools that only idiots get vaccinated, died of COVID-19 on January 4, 2022, in Camarillo, California.

Her fellow conspiracy theorists have now dreamed up an even more preposterous conspiracy theory: that she is still alive and in 'protective custody' having faked her own death. I wonder if, like Elvis, she'll turn up working in a chip shop near you, in the not too distant future.

Is there no lower limit to the credulity of these idiots? Certainly QAnon hasn't found it yet. They even think Trump was a competent POTUS!

To begin with, as I reported at the time:

Hypocrisy News - Another Sex Scandal Rocks the French Catholic Church

Archbishop Michel Aupetit (former) Archbishop of Paris
Relationship with a woman was 'ambiguous'

© Ludovic Marin / AFP

Pope accepts Paris archbishop's resignation over "ambiguous" relationship

Probably the last thing the French Catholic Church wanted right now was another sex scandal involving a senior cleric, but that's just what they've got in the form of Archbishop Michel Aupetit, (former) Archbishop of Paris, who has resigned following the revelation that he had a sexual relationship with a women, despite his vow of celibacy and his requirement that all those under him in his archdiocese take the same vow.

The story of the consensual relationship was exposed by Le Point magazine. Aupetit denied that he had had a sexual relationship with the woman but told Le Point that the relationship was 'ambiguous' - a neat euphemism for clandestine sexual relations with a woman outside marriage and contrary to his oath as an ordained Catholic priest.

This came on top of the recent report which revealed that 3,000 French Catholic priests had sexually abused more than 200,000 children over the past 70 years and that there had been a widespread, systematic cover up. When abuse by lay members of Catholic schools and other institutions was taken into account, the number of abused children, almost all of which were young boys, rose to some 330,000.

Christian Bigotry News - A New 'Journal' to Try to Make Religion Look Less Hateful

New journal will spotlight queer and trans religious studies scholarship | News

In an effort to alter the general perception that religions, especially Christianity and Islam, are fundamentally hostile to anyone who doesn't fit their strict definitions of sexuality and conform to their strict rules on permitted sexual relationships, a couple of Christian theology professors have founded a new 'Journal' which will concentrate on publishing articles and papers exploring 'the full range of rich and complex connections between religion, gender, and sexuality'.

The journal, to be called QTR: A Journal of Queer and Transgender Studies in Religion, has been founded by Melissa M. Wilcox, a religious studies professor from University of California, Riverside (UCR) and Joseph Marchal, a religious studies professor at Ball State University in Indiana.

According to the UCR news release:

It's a Miracle! Not a Single Red Face as Lourdes Reopens After Closing for the Coronavirus Pandemic!

[left caption]

[Right caption/credit]

The shrine to Bernadette Soubirous, Lourdes, France

Lourdes resurrected: grotto reopens to pilgrims after two year Covid closure

Without the slightest sign of irony, the Catholic Church in France has re-opened the Lourdes faith-healing scam in the Hautes-Pyrénées region, which had been closed because of the Coronavirus pandemic. Lourdes, it may be remembered, sells quack cures for all manner of afflictions and illnesses, but is powerless to prevent people catching COVID-19, apparently.

The grotto was officially reopened on February 11, on the anniversary of the date in 1858 on which a young peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous, or Sobirós, in the local language, Occitan, then spoken in the Languedoc region of France, whom many townspeople, including her own father, thought was mentally disturbed, claimed to have seen a vison of the Virgin Mary.

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Beloved Sadist Designed Ovarian Cancer to Kill More Women

Killer T cells (red) and helper T cells (green) guarding tumour cells (light blue).

Image: Anniina Färkkilä

The secret hideouts of ovarian cancer revealed – Findings boost the development of precision therapies | University of Helsinki

Creationist mode:

In Finland in an average year, 550 women will be diagnosed with ovarian cancer and 320 of them will die from it. Now researchers at Helsinki University Hospital have discovered why ovarian cancers are proving to be unresponsive to the latest immunotherapies which are giving good results in the treatment of other cancer - ovarian cancers have been designed to be good at hiding from our immune systems.

They do it by tricking the immune system into actively protecting them! Brilliant, eh?

And this was the immune system the same intelligent [sic] designer supposedly gave us to protect us from its nastier little creations, such as viruses, bacteria, fungi and cancers that it designed to make us suffer and die from. Or so Creationists who argue that noting in nature happens by chance or by a mindless, undirected process such as evolution by natural selection, but is the deliberate creation of an intelligent [sic] designer, have to believe.

Creationist mode:

So much for the childish superstitions and fairy tales that abound in fundamentalist religions.

The news release from Helsinki University explains the science:

Human Evolution - Modern Humans Were In Europe 54,000 Years Ago

Grotte Mandarin, Vallée du Rhône, France

© Ludovic Slimak

Neronian Points

© Laure Metz and Ludovic Slimak

Evidence of Europe’s first Homo sapiens found in French cave

Scientists led by Dr Ludovic Slimak of the Université de Toulouse Jean Jaurès, and including Professor Chris Stringer, Research Leader in Human Evolution at the Natural History Museum in London, have discovered evidence of the earliest modern humans (Homo sapiens) in western Europe from a cave, known as Grotte Mandrin, in France’s Rhône Valley.

The date of this find, at 54,000 years pushes the first recorded presence of H. sapiens in Europe back by a bout 10,000 years. The evidence is in the form of a deciduous upper molar from a modern human child.

Apart from the early date for this fossil, other dental remains show a pattern of alternating

Missing Link News - A Triple Whammy for Half-Baked Creationists. How Sweet!

Mystery of sweetpotato origin uncovered, as missing link plant found by Oxford research | University of Oxford

Here is one of those scientific discoveries that should have every Creationist covering their eyes and ears and looking the other way, or simply invoking some wackadoodle conspiracy theory in order to dismiss it. What they won't do, is incorporate the new knowledge and adjust their opinion accordingly.

Their problem is because the discovery shatters three of their most cherished dogmas:

1. 'Macro-evolution' (i.e. a new taxon arising) is impossible.
2. No new information can arise by mutation.
3. There are no transitional forms.

The discovery is one of the parent species of the sweetpotato, Ipomoea batatas, an important food crop whose ancestry was unknown.

The problem was that the sweetpotato is a hexaploid plant, having six copies of each chromosome, instead of the usual two, in other words, its entire genome has been trebled. Polyploidy is common in plants and is a common way new species arise because a polyploid individual cannot normally interbreed with either of its parents. The problem was that there were no suitable candidate species for the parents of the sweetpotato - until now.

The normal way a polyploid species arises is because of a failure in the normal process which reduces the genome by half in each the gametes, which results in a gamete having the entire genome. If two of these gametes (pollen and ovule) happen to form a zygote, a tetraploid individual can be the result. The mystery was how a hexaploid species arose in the case of the sweetpotato. The assumption was that a tetraploid gamete from a tetraploid plant in which the reduction stage had failed must have fused with a diploid gamete from a diploid plant in which the reduction had also failed.

The problem was that there were no known tetraploid members of the Ipomoea genus so there was no known intermediate stage between diploidy and hexaploidy.

The University of Oxford news item explains:

Malevolent Designer News - God Still Hates Frogs!

Californian red-legged frog, Rana draytonii

Photo: Conservación de Fauna del Noroeste

The Frogs of Baja California | The UCSB Current

Creationist mode:

Long-term readers of this blog my recall how I wrote about a fungal infection, chytridiomycosis, that is devastating populations of frogs and other amphibians throughout the world. I concluded that, if as Creationists claim, these organisms are intelligently designed by a god, to do exactly what they do, the only conclusion was that this putative god must hate frogs and is trying to exterminate them, without going to the extremes it went to when it decided to exterminate another of its mistakes - humans - when in a fit of pique and a loss of self-control, it drowned everything else too.

I also wrote about the disease in my popular, illustrated book, The Malevolent Designer: How Nature's God is not Good.

In that earlier blog from October 2013, I described how scientists had discovered just how clever the designer of the fungus had been. It had taken a common, normally harmless soil fungus of the widespread chytrid family, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) and modified it to not only infect the skin of amphibians but to paralyse their immune systems too, making it easier to kill its victims by thickening their skin so they are no longer able to breathe through it, and then use their dead bodies to make more fungi, to kill more amphibians. Sheer, genius, eh?

Now, nine years later, scientists working for the University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA (UC Santa Barbara), Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, Tijuana, Mexico and Conservación de Fauna del Noroeste, A.C., Ensenada, Baja California, have discovered that, not only is the devastation continuing in both Southern California and Baja California but that there is something going on in Baja California that is enabling Bd to hit the frogs there much harder than it is hitting them in Southern California, despite the fact that the species are the same and the environment is very similar.

From the UCSB news release:

Covidiot News - Two More Very Good Reason to Be Vaccinated

As though any more evidence were needed, two papers out recently show just why it is important to get vaccinated, and, if necessary, boosted against the virus.

SARS-CoV-2COVID-19 infections increase risk of heart conditions up to a year later – Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis

The first comes from Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri, USA where, by analysing federal health data, researchers have found that people who have had COVID-19 are at increased risk of developing cardiovascular complications within the first month to a year after infection.

According to the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis:

Malevolent Designer News - How a Fungus and a Bacterium Work Together to Make Us Sick

The fungus Rhizopus germinates and forms hyphae as part of the infection process.

How do pathogens learn to be pathogens: partnerships between microbes leading to human disease | University of Exeter

Creationist mode:

Here is a discovery that should thrill devotees of the putative divine malevolence that intelligently [sic] designs the pathogens that make us sick. It is published in an open access paper in the journal Current Biology, by a team of researchers from the Universities of Birmingham, Exeter and Sheffield, led by Dr. Herbert Itabangi of Birmingham University School of Biosciences' Institute of Microbiology and Infection. It is the mechanism which enables a soil fungus to become pathogenic by allying itself with a bacterium in a symbiotic relationship.

The soil fungus is Rhizopus which, when it plays host to the bacterium, Ralstonia, can avoid being consumed by a predatory amoeba, Dictyostelium. Using the same trick, Rhizopus is able to avoid being consumed and destroyed by the cells of our immune system and so become pathogenic on humans and cause mucormycosis, and in particular the condition known as "black fungus", a complication of COVID-19.

As the Exeter University news release explains:

How Science Works (And Why Religion Doesn't)

The Andromeda Galaxy (Messier 31). The small Messier 32 galaxy is seen above and slightly to the left (directly south) of the centre of M31, and Messier 110 is below and to the left. Above and to the left of M32 is the star HD 3914. This is an RGB image + some h alpha data. Captured in the Israeli desert (the Negev). Equipment: Celestron Cpc1100 Millburn wedge Starizona hyperstar Zwo asi294mc for imaging + asi178mc for guiding Finderscope for guiding Acquisition: 60 subs of 32 seconds for RGB 20 subs of 64 seconds for hydrogen alpha (This is an f/2 config) Captured with sharpcap and guided with phd2 Processing: Stacked in pixinsight Processed and enhanced in photoshop including noise reduction, sharpening etc.

By ;David (Deddy) Dayag - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Too many disk galaxies than theory allows — University of Bonn

Science's greatest strength, and the thing that seems to baffle Creationists most, is the way it constantly reassesses and revises its theories and never holds any opinion as sacred and unchallengeable. Religions, by contrast, have fundamental tenets, almost literally cast in tablets of stone, which, if they are ever seriously questioned, leads to internal conflict, schisms and often open violent hostilities. To question the fundamental beliefs of a religion is tantamount to leaving that religion.

Here, for example, we have scientists examining a fundamental theory in cosmology and concluding, quite amicably and dispassionately, that the generally accepted Standard Model of Cosmology is fundamentally flawed. What will happen now is that others will try to replicate these findings, a debate will ensue and, if necessary former ideas that were held to be true will be abandoned and revised, and, in all probability if they are proved to be correct, the scientists who made the discovery will be rewarded with prizes and plaudits and top jobs in prestigious institutes.

I don't pretend to be an expert in this subject, but what the cosmologists from the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Germany, St Andrews University, Scotland, UK and Charles University in the Czech Republic believe they have shown is that there is a significant discrepancy between the number of disk galaxies that can be observed and what the 'Standard Model' predicts, therefore the Standard Model is wrong and needs revising. And they are proposing a new one which would require a far-reaching revision of other areas of physics. And all because the accepted Standard Model of Cosmology does not appear to model the reality it was designed to explain.

The Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn news release accompnying the team's open access publication in The Astrophysical Journal, explains:

Malevolent Designer News - Is Creationism's Favourite Sadist Trying a New Tack?

New highly virulent and damaging HIV variant discovered in the Netherlands | University of Oxford

Creationist mode:

It's beginning to look like, in choosing quantity over quality, the divine sadist might have boobed with the Omicron variant of its SARS-CoV-2 virus as it seems to be a relatively mild disease compared to its earlier versions. It is very much more contagious, but the resulting infection is resulting in far fewer serious illnesses and deaths. It's still a nasty, dangerous little parasite that people need to be vaccinated against, but it iss beginning to look like a virus our health services can cope with.

So, is the realisation that it isn't causing as much death and destruction behind its recently detected super-duper new more dangerous version of HIV? HIV, as Creationists fundamentalist evangelicals were never slow to claim, was their beloved pestilential deity's attempt to punish homosexuals for the sexuality it gave them and was, in its heyday, a very serious virus that killed millions of homosexuals and heterosexuals alike, apart from lesbians who rarely, if ever, become infected during homosexual sex, and left countless children orphaned. Then medical science came up with treatments like antiretroviral drugs, which allow victims to live a relatively normal life and, better still, not pass it on to sexual partners.

Now though, according to scientists from the University of Oxford, UK, there is a much more dangerous and virulent variant, which has been detected in Holland, so it looks like any intelligence responsible for the design of these parasites has given the arms race spiral another twist, as though to resurrect one of its earlier attempts at mass killing.

According to the Oxford University news release:

Malevolent Designer News - How the Omicron Variant Evades Our Antibody Defences

A computational study shows that dozens of mutations help the virus’ spike protein evade antibodies that target SARS-CoV-2.

Credits:Image: CDC; Christine Daniloff, MIT

How Omicron escapes from antibodies | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Creationist mode:

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have discovered how the omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, currently causing the largest wave of new and repeat infections yet in the current pandemic, manages to evade the antibodies we produce in response to either vaccinations or earlier infections.

It can do this because of the large number of mutations in the spike proteins that the antibodies would normally bind to, making it difficult for the antibodies to bind to and neutralize the virus particles to prevent them entering the cells.

The article by Anne Trafton of the MIT News Office explains what was discovered and how:

A new study from MIT suggests that the dozens of mutations in the spike protein of the Omicron variant help it to evade all four of the classes of antibodies that can target the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19.

It is important to get a more comprehensive picture of the many mutations seen in Omicron, especially in the context of the spike protein, given that the spike protein is vital for the virus’s function, and all the major vaccines are based on that protein. There is a need for tools or approaches that can rapidly determine the impact of mutations in new virus variants of concern, especially for SARS-CoV-2.

Professor Ram Sasisekharan, Senior author
Alfred H. Caspary professor of Biological Engineering and Health Sciences and Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA, USA

This includes antibodies generated by vaccinated or previously infected people, as well as most of the monoclonal antibody treatments that have been developed, says Ram Sasisekharan, the Alfred H. Caspary Professor of Biological Engineering and Health Sciences and Technology (HST) at MIT

Using a computational approach that allowed them to determine how mutated amino acids of the viral spike protein influence nearby amino acids, the researchers were able to get a multidimensional view of how the virus evades antibodies. According to Sasisekharan, the traditional approach of only examining changes in the virus’ genetic sequence reduces the complexity of the spike protein’s three-dimensional surface and doesn’t describe the multidimensional complexity of the protein surfaces that antibodies are attempting to bind to.

[&heelip;]

What’s good about vaccines is they don’t just generate B cells, which produce the monoclonal [antibody] response, but also T cells, which provide additional forms of protection.

With the network approach, you’re looking at that amino acid residue in the context of its neighborhood and environment. When we started to move away from the one-dimensional sequence space toward multidimensional network space, it became evident that critical information about the interaction of an amino acid in its three-dimensional environment in the protein structure is lost when you look at just the one-dimensional sequence space.

Professor Ram Sasisekharan

Even though Omicron is able to evade most antibodies to some degree, vaccines still offer protection, Sasisekharan says.

Antibody escape

After the Omicron variant emerged last November, Sasisekharan and his colleagues began to analyze its trimeric spike protein using a network-based computational modeling method they had originally developed several years ago to study the hemagglutinin spike protein on flu viruses. Their technique allows them to determine how mutations in the genetic sequence are related in the three-dimensional space through a network of inter-amino-acid interactions that critically impact the structure and function of the viral protein.

The researchers’ approach, known as amino acid interaction network analysis, evaluates how one mutated amino acid can influence nearby amino acids depending on how “networked” they are — a measure of how much a given amino acid interacts with its neighbors. This yields richer information than simply examining individual changes in the one-dimensional amino acid sequence space, Sasisekharan says.

[…]

Sasisekharan’s lab has previously used this technique to determine how mutations in the hemagglutinin protein of an avian flu virus could help it to infect people. In that study, he and his laboratory identified mutations that could change the structure of hemagglutinin so that it could bind to receptors in the human respiratory tract.

When Omicron emerged, with about three dozen mutations on the spike protein, the researchers decided to rapidly use their method to study the variant’s ability to evade human antibodies. They focused their analysis on the receptor binding domain (RBD), which is the part of the spike protein targeted by antibodies. The RBD is also the part of the viral protein that attaches to human ACE2 receptors and allows the virus to enter cells.

Using their network modeling approach, the researchers studied how each of the mutations on the RBD changes the protein’s shape and affect its interactions with four classes of human antibodies that target SARS-CoV-2. Class 1 and 2 antibodies target the RBD site that binds to the ACE2 receptor, while class 3 and 4 antibodies bind to other parts of the RBD.

The researchers compared the Omicron variant to the original SARS-CoV-2 virus, as well as the Beta and Delta variants. The Beta and Delta variants have mutations that help them evade class 1 and 2 antibodies, but not class 3 and 4. Omicron, on the other hand, has mutations that affect the binding of all four classes of antibodies.

With Omicron you can see a significant number of sites being perturbed compared to Beta and Delta. From the original strain to the Beta strain, and then the Delta strain, there is a general trend towards a greater ability to escape.

Our hope is that as we understand the viral evolution, we’re able to hone in on regions where we think that any perturbation would cause instability to the virus, so that they would be the Achilles heels, and more effective sites to target.

Professor Ram Sasisekharan

Those perturbations allow the virus to evade not only antibodies generated by vaccination or previous SARS-CoV-2 infection, but also many of the monoclonal antibody treatments that pharmaceutical companies have developed.

As patients began to appear with Omicron infections, researchers and pharmaceutical companies sought to guide treatment by predicting which antibodies were most likely to retain their efficacy against the new variant.

Based on their one-dimensional sequence and single point mutation analyses, pharmaceutical companies believed that their monoclonal antibodies were likely to bind Omicron and not lose any potency. However, when experimental data became available, the Omicron variant was found to substantially escape from monoclonal antibodies known as ADG20, AZD8895, and AZD1061, as predicted by the network analyses in this study, while the activity of monoclonal antibody S309 was also reduced by threefold.

Additionally, the study revealed that some of the mutations in the Omicron variant make it more likely that the RBD will exist in a configuration that makes it easier to grab onto the ACE2 receptor, which may contribute to its enhanced transmissibility.

As any Intelligent [sic] Design advocate will argue, a combination of just the right mutations arising together is so vastly improbable that it must have been intelligently designed. So the Omicron variant must be the intended outcome of intervention by their divine malevolence for the purpose of giving the spiralling arms race between it and medical science, another twist.

Creationist mode:

Of course, as with so many Creationists arguments this ignores reality and relies on ignorant incredulity.

The fact is that, in a process that can produce trillions of new viruses from the few hundreds or thousands in the initial viral load, the one-in-a-billion chance of any particular combination of mutations arising happens a thousand times on average. In a population with millions of unvaccinated people, the probability is very high that a novel variant which is better able to spread and infect people, including those with immunity to the earlier variants, will arise frequently. Omicron is just the latest in a sequence of such variants, and there will be others so long as there is a large pool of unvaccinated people for them to evolve in.

The MIT team's findings are published, open access, in Cell Reports Medicine:

Highlights

• Network analyses offer distinct insights into RBD–neutralizing Ab interactions
• Omicron mutations broadly and deeply perturb networks across RBD epitope classes
• Networks capture indirect effects of Omicron mutations on Ab escape potential
• Omicron mutations provide plausible structural rationale for enhanced transmission

Summary
The Omicron variant features enhanced transmissibility and antibody escape. Here, we describe the Omicron receptor binding domain (RBD) mutational landscape using amino acid interaction (AAI) networks, which are well-suited for interrogating constellations of mutations that function in an epistatic manner. Using AAI, we map Omicron mutations directly and indirectly driving increased escape breadth and depth in class 1-4 antibody epitopes. Further, we present epitope networks for authorized therapeutic antibodies and assess perturbations to each antibody’s epitope. Since our initial modeling following the identification of Omicron, these predictions have been realized by experimental findings of Omicron neutralization escape from therapeutic antibodies ADG20, AZD8895, and AZD1061. Importantly, the AAI predicted escape resulting from indirect epitope perturbations was not captured by previous sequence or point mutation analyses. Finally, for several Omicron RBD mutations we find evidence for a plausible role in enhanced transmissibility via disruption of RBD-down conformational stability at the RBD_down-RBD_down interface.

Miller, N.L., Clark, T., Raman, R., Sasisekharan, R.
Insights on the mutational landscape of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant receptor binding domain
Cell Reports Medicine (2022), doi: 10.1016/j.xcrm.2022.100527.

Copyright: © 2022 The authors. Published by Elsevier Inc.
Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

If you are a Creationist, then, you have two choices:

• You can ascribe this clearly malevolent piece of redesign to your beloved intelligent [sic] designer and continue to argue that the sheer number of ‘right’ mutations needed to get the desired result proves intelligent intervention. This will tell the world your beloved designer is a malevolent deity who is actively working to make people sick and die and has gone into competition with medical science to make sure it's design keeps on doing that, while ignoring the 'fact' that it also designed the immune system that medical science is using against its design and is now stupidly treating its design, which was intended to protect us against its parasites, as a problem to be overcome.
• You can go against the dogmas of your cult and do what people who understand science do - ascribe it to an evolutionary process in which no intelligence or intent was involved - which lets your favourite deity off the hook, explains the appearance of design and explains the uncaring nature of the process and its random victims.

Which will you plump for?

---

Thank you for sharing!

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False Prophets For Trump - Talibangelical Hank Kunneman Believes God Has Given Him a Veto Over Biden's Presidency

False Prophet, Hank Kunneman
Lord of Hosts Church in Omaha, Nebraska, USA

'Prophet' Hank Kunneman Says Biden Has No Right to Appoint a New SCOTUS Justice Because He's 'Illegitimate' | Right Wing Watch

Just over a year on from the inauguration of President Joe Biden, that Hank Kunneman claimed God told him he wouldn't allow to happen, Biden having won an election with the largest popular vote in US history, that Kunneman claimed God told him he wouldn't allow him to win, false prophet, Hank Kunneman still can't accept that he's outed himself as a false prophet and a liar.

If you don't believe Hank Kunneman lied to his cult, you must believe God lied to Hank Kunneman, because manifestly, none of his prophesies ever came true despite the fact that Kunneman claimed God revealed them personally to him - the very definition of a false prophet.

Faced with the evidence of his false prophesies, Kunneman now has two choices: he can admit he lied and bore false witness to his cult or he can double down on his lies and pretend he was right all along and that God really did prevent Biden's victory (only no-one noticed) and just rely on his credulous cult not accepting the evidence either.

The Old Dead Gods of Wiltshire are Still Hiding Their Secrets

Stonehenge at dawn

Photograph: Chris Gorman/Getty Images

How science is uncovering the secrets of Stonehenge | Heritage | The Guardian

Rosa's Laws of Theodynamics.

First Law of Theodynamics

Gods can be created out of nothing and will disappear without trace.
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Third Law of Theodynamics

Gods disappear completely when the number of believers in them reaches zero.
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The vast complex of Late Bronze/Early Iron Age monuments, burial chambers and earthworks on Salisbury Plain, in central southern England about which I've written before, continue to remind us how, when a religion and its god(s) disappear into the mists of time and no-one remembers them, unlike a science could be, they cannot be reconstructed from real-world sources, because they were never founded on real-world sources in the first place. They arose entirely in the imaginations of people who lacked the scientific method to discover the truth about the world about them.

But to their believers, as we can see by the evidence of the resources they devoted to them, they would have been no less important and no less 'proven' than are the modern gods of present days religions. The evidence for them would have been 'all around them'. It would have been in the 'design' of trees, sunsets and flowers and in the way they always answered prayers like ensuring the sun rose in the morning and the crops continued to grow in the fields, and when they failed this was proof of the failure of their followers to pray hard enough or to believe with enough faith or not having performed the required ritual correctly, or because the god(s) said no, for reasons which could only be guessed at.

Religious Child Abuse News - Pentecostals Cover Up Down Under

Brian Houston, charged with concealing evidence of child abuse
"Stepping aside as global senior pastor"

Facing trial, Brian Houston steps aside as global senior pastor of Hillsong

I doubt anyone will be the least surprised that another Christian sect is embroiled in a child sex abuse scandal.

This time it is the Australian Pentecostal mega-rich Hillsong megachurch and global Christian music publishing empire. Its founder, Brian Houston, has agreed to step aside as global senior pastor until the end of the year, while he faces criminal charges in Australia alleging that he concealed the predatory paedophilia of his father, Frank Houston, who died in 2004.

Christian Hate News - Pastor Greg Locke Says Children With Autism are Possessed by Demons.

Pastor Greg Locke, Global Vision Bible Church, Tennessee.
"Autistic children are possessed by evil demons"

Greg Locke Says Autistic Children Are Demonized: ‘Ain’t No Such Diagnosis in the Bible’

Preacher of hate, Talibangelical Pastor Greg Locke of the Global Vision Bible Church in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, USA has turned his hate from face masks, social distancing, anti-COVID vaccines and people who didn't vote for Donald Trump, to autistic children.

Failing to find any mention of autism in the Bible, he has concluded that autistic children must be possessed by evil demons. There is no mention of cancer, diabetes, sickle-cell syndrome, cerebral palsy, Alzheimer’s dementia, viruses or bacteria in the Bible either, but Locke seems blissfully unaware that when he tells us the Bible disagrees with science, he is telling us the Bible is wrong. This is something we have known for hundreds of years of course, ever since the scientific method gave us the tool to discover the truth and we discovered the truth was very different to what the Bible said.

Covidiot News - Antivaxxer Claims Are Becoming Indistinguishable from The Claims of Lunatics

Dr Sherri Tenpenny
Osteopath and self-proclaimed 'expert' on the anti-COVID vaccines

Anti-Vaccine 'Expert' Sherri Tenpenny Says COVID-19 Vaccines Will Turn People Into 'Transhumanist Cyborgs' | Right Wing Watch

Is fanatical Trumpanzee covidiocy a form of insanity?

I pose this question because Dr Sherri Tenpenny, an osteopath and self-proclaimed expert on the anti-COVID vaccines, who has had no formal training in immunology or epidemiology, puts me in mind of a distressing incident I and my crew mate had to deal with as ambulance Paramedics many years ago. It involved the lawful detention of a female doctor and pathologist under Section 2 of the Mental Health Act (MHA).

The unfortunate lady was being held under Section 136 of the MHA in a local police station as a place of safety, having been apprehended running around the town stark naked and shouting hysterically for people to take cover from an invisible, odourless gas that was pervading the streets and turning them into automatons.

Covidiot News - New York Unvaccinated 26 Times More Likely to Die of COVID-19 Than Vaccinated

At the peak of the Omicron wave, New York City saw 26 times more deaths among the unvaccinated than vaccinated people. A pop-up COVID-19 testing site is shown in a neighbourhood among those that have seen some of the highest number of city deaths on February 23 in the Queens borough of New York City.

Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Unvaccinated New Yorkers 26 Times More Likely to Die of COVID at Omicron Peak | Newsweek

Antivaxx covidiots, scraping around for something to support their selfish stupidity will often point to the fact that vaccinated people are still catching the omicron variant of COVID-19 as evidence that the vaccines don't work. At least only the lunatic fringe conspiracists are still coming up with the more insane claims such as that the vaccine is designed to turn you gay, or make you magnetic so you can be controlled by Bill Gates, or that it is designed to kill you as part of some nefarious eugenic population control.

But what are the merits of this claim of non-effectiveness, as though governments worldwide are spending vast sums of money to give their people something that doesn't work, as well as being in on a vast global conspiracy involving tens or hundreds of millions of people?

The facts are, as explained in this Newsweek report, not on the side of the antivaxxers, not because they are wrong to claim that vaccinated people can still catch COVID-19, but because they are wrong to claim this means the vaccines are not effective.

In fact, the evidence is that, as the vaccine manufacturers always claimed, that, while not 100% effective and while not giving permanent protection as immunity was likely to decline over time, so top-up boosters will be needed, the vaccines give you a very significantly increased probability of avoiding serious illness and death. And this is borne out by the facts, both in the USA and in the UK.

COVID-19 News - It Doesn't Matter Which Booster You Have, So Long as You Have One!

Transmission electron micrograph of SARS-CoV-2 virus particles (gold) within endosomes of a heavily infected nasal epithelial cell.

Credit: NIAID

Mix-and-Match Trial Finds Additional Dose of COVID-19 Vaccine Safe, Immunogenic | NIH: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

My first two anti-COVID vaccines were the Astra-Zeneca vaccines but, for reasons of availability, my booster was the Pfizer vaccine. None of the vaccines caused anything more than the slightest discomfort at the injection site which lasted about 2 days. However, a friend of mine declined an offered booster because it wasn’t the same as the initial vaccine and thought there might be a smaller boost as well as doubling the risk of an adverse reaction.

So, which of us was right?

The preliminary results of a clinical trial by the US National Institute of Health, show that there is certainly no disadvantage in a mix and match approach and there may even be a benefit. The trial results are reported in The New England Journal of Medicine.

As the NIH News release explains:

Malevolent Designer News - How the Omicron Variant of SARS-CoV-2 Was Created

The Omicron variant was first detected in Botswana in October 2021 and has quickly spread throughout the world. A large international team of researchers, including Maciej Boni, associate professor of biology, Penn State, was the first to describe the genomic profile of Omicron and explore the origins of the variant.

Credit: Justice Hubane, Unsplash.

Omicron genetics and early transmission patterns are characterized in new study | Penn State University

Creationist mode:

A team of scientists led by Maciej Boni, associate professor of biology, Penn State University, USA have discovered how, where and approximately when the omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was created.

Of course, being proper scientists they say this was an evolutionary process, but, as any devotee of Creationism's divine sadist will tell you, evolution doesn't happen so all these changes must have been intentionally designed by their beloved malevolence.

We have seen SARS-CoV-2 generate three major variants — Alpha, Delta and Omicron — in about 16 months, which is very surprising because other viruses do not make such repeated big evolutionary leaps. The latest variant — Omicron — is extraordinary because of the even bigger jump it made in the evolution of its spike protein.

Associate Professor Maciej Boni
Penn State University.

The discovery is that omicron (B.1.1.529) is a descendant of the alpha (B.1.1.7) variant, that replaced the original virus at about the beginning of October, 2020 and caused the second major wave of infections. Alpha was of the B.1.1 lineage but was much more transmissible. It was itself replaced by the delta (B.1.617.2) variant which caused the third wave starting in about June, 2021.

Despite expectations that a subsequent variant of concern (VOC) would evolve from delta, the team found that omicron is not closely related to delta, but is a highly modified version of alpha.

The team's findings are published in Nature, sadly behind a paywall. However the abstract can be read here and a PDF is available to download from here.

What this means is that although Omicron belongs to the same lineage as the Alpha variant, it has changed to such a great extent that it is largely unrecognizable as a cousin or nephew of the Alpha variant. When the Omicron genome was first sequenced, it became clear that this virus had the potential to be phenotypically very different from previous SARS-CoV-2 variants that we were familiar with.

This finding led to our conclusion that adaptive evolution played a significant role in the early emergence and establishment of Omicron. This finding suggests that Omicron is likely the result of an evolutionary process that created a highly transmissible virus that partially evades our antibody responses.

Maciej Boni

The Penn State news release explains: