Anti-Covid-19 Vaccines - A Triumph for Science.

Margaret Keenan, 90, becomes first in world to receive Pfizer Covid vaccine outside a clinical trial.

Covid vaccine: UK woman becomes first in world to receive Pfizer jab | World news | The Guardian

Remember the name Margaret Keenan, for she has just made history and will be the answer to trivia quiz questions for years to come. She is the first person outside a clinical trial, to be injected with the first dose of the new SARS-CoV-2 vaccine.

In a slight departure from my usual posts, I publish this one to mark this historic first. It marks a significant milestone in mankind's battle against one of the most deadly and destructive pandemic viruses since the 'Spanish' flu of 1919 and possibly since the black death of the early Middle Ages.

It is also a significant advance in the science of immunology, being the first vaccine produced from the messenger RNA (mRNA) of a virus itself. The section of mRNA is that from the virus' genome that codes for the 'spike' proteins on the virus surface that play a major role in gaining access to the inside of the cell, where it parasitises the cells replicative machinery to make thousands of copies of itself and destroy the cell in doing so.

Evolution News - Another 'Non-Existent' Observed Instance of Evolution in Progress

E. coli are common in the gut – and in scientific experiments.

Credit: Maurizio de Angelis/Science Photo Library/Getty Images

UZH - Natural Selection also Increases the Adaptability of Organism
Not that it will bother them because truth is the least of their concerns, but from today, Creationists who claim there are no observed instances of evolution in progress, are either knowingly lying or repeating lies they have been fooled with, because here we have another instance of as clear and unambiguous an example of it as you could wish for.

Amusingly, Creationists have already tried hard to dismiss it with typically childish responses such as:

Aha! But can you prove it will become a horse? Didn't think so.

Covidiot News - The Orthodox Church's Super-Spreader Events

Funeral of Bishop Ioannis of Lagadas, who died from Covid-19 at age 62.

Credit: Sakis Mitrolidis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Greek Orthodox Church Faces Criticism as Virus Hits Its Ranks - The New York Times

Readers of this blog will be familiar with how Eastern Orthodox priests have been instrumental in spreading the coronavirus amongst their followers in much the same way that Catholic Priests and, especially, American fundamentalist Christian pastors have been.

Only a couple of weeks ago I reported how the death from Covid-19 of 82-year-old Metropolitan Bishop Amfilohije Radovic, one of the leading Orthodox Patriarchs campaigning against the measures to contain the virus on the grounds that piety would protect church-goers, was treated as an opportunity for a super-spreader event.

Evolution News - Arms Races and the Evolution of Vision

An artist’s reconstruction of ‘Anomalocaris’ briggsi swimming within the twilight zone.

Image: Katrina Kenny

Incredible vision in ancient marine creatures drove an evolutionary arms race | Newsroom | University of Adelaide

One of the abilities that gave the Cambrian biota such a big advantage over the earlier sedentary Ediacaran organisms that they probably exterminated them, was the ability to move.

The next major development was the ability to detect movement with vision. This in turn led to an evolutionary arms race that hugely added to the biodiversity in the biota of the early Earth. The evolutionary advantage in being able to detect prey species, and the evolutionary pressure this placed on their prey to see and avoid predators, led to an evolutionary arms race and a period of very rapid diversification, accounting, in part, for the rapid appearance over some 60 million years of the so-called Cambrian Explosion.

Malevolent Designer News - Brilliantly Evil 'Design' of the SARS-CoV-2 Virus

Pathophysiology of SARS-CoV-2 systemic infection. Infection initiates in the upper respiratory tract and progresses to lower regions of the lung in severe cases. Respiratory droplets carrying SARS-CoV-2 infect epithelial and endothelial cells, neurons, microglia, and lung macrophages containing angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE-2). Viral replication and release of damage-associated molecular patterns induce pyroptosis, causing a dysfunctional innate immune response. Release of pro-inflammatory agents can induce a cytokine storm, increasing vasodilation, capillary permeability, and hypoxemia that can often lead to multiple organ failure

Source

How the SARS-CoV-2 Virus Hijacks and Rapidly Causes Damage to Human Lung Cells | School of Medicine

If you've fallen for the intelligent [sic] design hoax, you must be thrilled by the almost daily revelation of the sheer, malevolent genius behind the SARS-CoV-2 virus currently responsible for 65 million cases of Covid-19, 1.5 million deaths and financial ruin and economic collapse world-wide on a scale not even seen in wartime (as of today).

The latest finding to impress creationists is the mechanism the virus uses to enter and destroy the cells of the lungs of its victims and the ruthless efficiency with which it does it.

Researchers at Boston University School of Medicine, Massachusetts, USA, in a multi-group collaboration involving scientists from the National Emerging Infectious Disease Laboratories (NEIDL), the Center for Regenerative Medicine (CReM), and the Center for Network Systems Biology (CNSB), have reported the first map of the molecular responses of human lung cells to infection by SARS-CoV-2.

According to a Boston University School of Medicine press release:

Malevolent Designer News - God Doesn't Hate Frogs; He Just Loves Mosquitos and Malaria More

New research finds the global collapse of frogs and other amphibians exacerbated malaria outbreaks in Costa Rica and Panama during the 1990s and 2000s.

Credit: David Mark from Pixabay.

Amphibian die-offs worsened malaria outbreaks in Central America - AGU Newsroom

Readers of this blog may recall that I wrote about the fungus that is devastating amphibian populations around the world several years ago. I then asked the question, "Does God Hate Frogs?"

I also wrote about it in my latest book, The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good., in which I said:

Exterminating Frogs with a Fungus.

Most of the examples I’ve talked about so far have been organisms and viruses that affect humans, but we are far from being the only species that Creationism’s putative intelligent designer seems to have taken an intense dislike to. For example, the world’s frogs and other amphibians are currently being decimated by chytridiomycosis, caused by a couple of related Chytrid fungi, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis and B. salamandrivorans. It has been estimated that over 500 different species have been severely reduced in number by this fungal plague, with over 90 extinctions.

Malevolent Designer News - The Widow's Bite

The Noble False Widow Spider, Steatoda nobilis

Study Finds Noble False Widow Spiders Bite Can Transmit Harmful Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria to Humans - NUI Galway

Readers of my latest book, The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good, will be familiar with very many examples of the malevolence on the part of any designer who could come up with so much pure evil in nature, so they will hardly be surprised at this latest example of its evil genius.

Researchers at NUI Galway, Ireland have discovered that the otherwise harmless bite of the Noble False Widow spider, Steatoda nobilis, now spreading as an invasive species in Britain and Ireland, can inject antibiotic resistant bacteria, causing a serious and intractable infection at the site of the bite.

Malevolent Designer News - How Covid-19 Destroys Your Brain

An electron microscope image (ultrathin section, artificially colored) shows a section of a ciliated cell in the olfactory mucosa. Large numbers of intact SARS-CoV-2 particles (red) are found both inside the cell and on cellular processes. Yellow: kinocilia.

Photo: Michael Laue/RKI & Carsten Dittmayer/Charité

How SARS-CoV-2 reaches the brain: Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin

As though intelligent [sic] design Creationists hadn't got enough to worry about trying to explain why their putative designer designed the coronavirus currently killing people by the hundreds of thousands and making millions more sick, they now have to contend with the virus attacking their brain when they stupidly expose themselves to it in one of their super-spreader events when they gather together to shout down their doubts and sing the praises of this malevolent, misanthropic monster.

A team of scientists at the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany, has now explained how the virus looks for all the world as though it was tailor-made for attacking and destroying the human brain, gaining access to it through the nasal mucosa - if you subscribe to the half-baked intelligent [sic] design notion, that is.

Coronavirus Question for Intelligent [sic] Design Creationists

SARS-CoV-2 virus particles

SARS-CoV-2 mutations do not appear to increase transmissibility | UCL News - UCL – University College London

Findings published, open access, a few days ago in Nature Communications, raises a worrying question for intelligent [sic] design Creationists.

Creationist dogma states that there are no such thing as random, purposeless mutations because all changes to a genome are made by their putative sentient designer for a purpose. The question then is why do the mutations in the SARS-CoV-2 virus not appear to do anything in terms of the virus' ability to infect people or to replicate more quickly or successfully? All of them appear to be neutral and apparently random and purposeless - exactly what Creationist dogma states never happens.

This was the conclusion of a team of researchers, led by Professor Francois Balloux, of University College of London (UCL) Genetics Institute, from their analysis of the genome of viruses recovered from more than 46,000 patients who had been infected with the virus during 2020. The team includes scientists from the Université de la Réunion and the University of Oxford.

Covidiot News - SCOTUS Backs Unrestricted Church Super-Spreader Events

Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Fundamentalist Catholic and Trump stooge on SCOTUS.

Splitting 5 to 4, Supreme Court Backs Religious Challenge to Cuomo’s Virus Shutdown Order - The New York Times

In an astonishing but predictable ruling, and one which reverses similar rulings concerning coronavirus restrictions on church services in Nevada and California, the US Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional for New York's Mayor Cuomo to impose restrictions on places of worship in New York in an attempt to bring the raging coronavirus pandemic under control.

President-Reject Trump's Dangerous Legacy

U.S. voters are fearful, angry but hopeful about country post-election | Pew Research Center

President-reject Trump's legacy is to leave almost two-thirds of Americans feeling fearful about the future of the country, as the coronavirus pandemic grips the country like no other, and the narcissistic fool is too proud to admit defeat and allow the handover to President-elect Biden to proceed as smoothly as it should if continuity is to be maintained and Biden is to get to grips with the major problems as quickly as he needs to.

This is the finding of a Pew Research survey published a few days ago.

But the survey also showed how a majority of people now feel more hopeful following Biden's election than felt hopeful during Trump's disastrous stint in office but not in charge, rising to 56% from 42% under Trump.

So we now have the paradox of a majority of Americans still feeling fearful, but more hopeful about the future of the nation.

Covidiot News - Why President-Reject Trump is Encouraging National Suicide

Daily new coronavirus cases, USA (27 Nov 2020)
(A new spike is predicted by experts following widespread travel and flouting of the guidelines during the Thanksgiving holiday)

Source: Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center - New Cases

An Extraordinarily Dangerous Moment for Rural America | Psychology Today

An extraordinarily powerful article in Psychology Today explains why people in rural America are being led like lambs to the slaughter by a failing President Trump as his powers decline in the last few weeks of his disastrous presidency.

Professor Floyd "Ski" Chilton, of the University of Arizona, hails from the rural American south and identifies with this 'tribe'. He explains the phenomenon as an expression of the dual thinking process - the slow, deliberate, analytical thought process versus a fast, effortless, unconscious, associative processes:

The early works of Sloman, Stanovich, Evans, and Kahneman proposed a dual process theory of thought. A psychological distinction is made between slow, deliberate “thinking” versus fast, effortless, unconscious, associative processes and emphasizes the dominance of the latter evolutionarily driven, unconscious system in most people and especially in people who feel threatened.

Why Trumpanzees Go along with President-Reject Trump's Delusions

August Landmesser 1936. The lone dissenter from the Nazi cult.

Source: Wikipedia

Compelled to Conform: When Tribal Ties Trump Truth | Psychology Today

An article in Psychology Today, by Noam Shpancer Ph.D., explains very well the current strange phenomenon of dedicated Trumpanzees insisting, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary and the singular lack of evidence for it, that President-reject Trump actually won the 2020 presidential election.

The answer is that cult-think, i.e. the need to belong and conform to the pressure from a group, rather than have the courage to stand up and tell the truth, is the stronger motive for these weak and intellectually dishonest individuals. Conformity has greater value to them than the truth does. They will be admired more for conforming and not spreading doubt and dissent than they will be for defending the truth.

Catholic Abuse News - Letting The Predatory Priests Off

Roger Sinclair, who was removed by the Diocese of Greensburg in Pennsylvania in 2002 for allegedly abusing a teenage boy decades earlier. Now serving a prison sentence in Oregan for abusing a developmentally disabled man in 2017.

Credit: Deschutes County District Attorney's Office / via AP

Almost 1,700 priests and clergy accused of sex abuse are unsupervised

An investigation by reporters from Associated Press has discovered that almost 1700 American Catholic priests and clergy who had been named as credibly accused of sexual abuses are working unsupervised in the community, often with children.

According to this report by Claudia Lauer and Meghan Hoyer of Associated Press:

Nearly 1,700 priests and other clergy members that the Roman Catholic Church considers credibly accused of child sexual abuse are living under the radar with little to no oversight from religious authorities or law enforcement, decades after the first wave of the church abuse scandal roiled U.S. dioceses, an Associated Press investigation has found. These priests, deacons, monks and lay people now teach middle-school math. They counsel survivors of sexual assault. They work as nurses and volunteer at nonprofits aimed at helping at-risk kids. They live next to playgrounds and daycare centers. They foster and care for children. And in their time since leaving the church, dozens have committed crimes, including sexual assault and possessing child pornography, the AP’s analysis found.

Evolution News - How a Medicinal Plant Evolved to Hide from Humans

Fritillaria delavayi in populations with high harvest pressure.

Photo credit: Yang Niu

Research news - Plant evolves to become less visible to humans - University of Exeter

Researchers from Exeter University and the Chinese Academy of Science Kunming Institute of Botany, have discovered that a plant, Fritillaria delavayi, used in Chinese medicine, has evolved to become harder to find and harvest.

They have shown how this example of cryptic camouflage is more prevalent in areas more heavily harvested than in areas where it is less likely to be picked.

The plant has leaves that naturally vary from grey through brown to green and only flowers when at least five years old, after which it produces a single flower each year. The bulbs are used in Chinese medicine and are harvested in the wild. Their price has escalated in recent years, increasing the selection pressure on them from human collectors.

Covidiot News - The Orthodox Patriarch, Prayer and Covid-19

Mourners kissed the glass cover on Patriarch Irinej's coffin, despite the risk of Covid-19.

Serbia: Thousands mourn Patriarch Irinej amid Covid concerns - BBC News

Mourners at the funeral of Patriarch Irinej, the head of the Serbian Orthodox church, today, mostly wore face-masks and observed sensible social distancing - apart that is from the priests who conducted the service. They declined to wear face-masks, despite the fact that Patriarch Irinej died of Covid-19, probably contracted when he conducted the service at the funeral of the Orthodox Church's most senior cleric in Montenegro, 82-year-old Metropolitan Bishop Amfilohije Radovic, who also died of Covid-19 earlier this month.

In line with tradition, many mourners kissed the glass covering over the dead patriarch's face, placed there to prevent them kissing his face and hands. Some even drank from the same communion spoon, believing their prayers and piety would keep them safe!

Patriarch Irinej, aged 90, was a conservative and was politically highly influential. He tested positive for Covid-19 three weeks ago, a few days after kissing the face and hands of the dead Metropolitan Amfilohije Radovic, at his funeral at the end of October. Those attending the funeral of Radovic had agreed to ignore the dangers from the coronavirus and abide by the tradition of walking up to the open coffin and kissing the hands and forehead of the dead priest.

Initially, Irinej's office issued a statement which said "His Holiness is hospitalised in a Covid-19 hospital in Belgrade. [He remains] without symptoms and is in excellent health." On 14^th November his condition was described as "stable and under control during hospitalization". On 19^th November the Serbian Orthodox Church officially refuted press reports of his death, despite press claims of 'reliable sources', but announced he was dead on 20^th.

Coronavirus daily new cases, Serbia

Source: Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center

Metropolitan Amfilohije was a notable coronavirus sceptic who foreswore wearing face-masks and recommended pilgrimages instead, describing them as "God's Vaccine". In addition to Patriarch Irinej, several other attendees at Amfilohije funeral were also reported to have contracted the virus and Amfilohije's successor was said to be suffering from "mild pneumonia".

Although ostensibly favouring inter-religious dialogue, Patriarch Irinej was a Serbian nationalist and advocate of 'Greater Serbia' who described the independence of Kosovo as a 'sin' and referred to Republika Srpska as a Serbian state - repeating the Serbian territorial claim to it that had precipitated the Serbia/Bosnia war following the breakup of former Yugoslavia. Republika Srpska is an ethnically Serbian-dominated autonomous part of the Federation of Bosnia and Hertzegovinia, which emerged as a compromise from the war.

During that conflict, a Serbian Nationalist and Greek Orthodox Volunteer militia occupied the town of Srebrenica and murdered 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in what a war-crimes trial later established was an act of genocide. The Serbian and Greek Orthodox churches had strongly supported the Serbians in the war against the mainly Moslem Bosniaks.
Having initially downplayed the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic, Serbia's Orthodox leaders are now appealing for people to take it seriously. Patriarch Irinej and Metropolitan Amfilohije are just two of a large and growing number of religious clerics who have told their followers that prayer and pious deeds will save them, or even that the virus only infects the ungodly, only to have themselves then died of Covid-19.

---

Tweet Link

Covidiot News - More Lying Christian Pastors Against Covid-19 Vaccines

Pastor Rodney Howard-Brown of The River church, Tampa, Florida and Revival Ministries International. Lying for money and to keep his death-cult paying for his quackery while endangering their health and welfare.

Lying Pastor: A COVID Vaccine Will Alter Your DNA and “Remove the God Factor” | Hemant Mehta | Friendly Atheist | Patheos

As I remarked in my previous post, there is something weird about fundamentalist Christians who seem to want to help their malevolent designer's special creation, the SARS-CoV-2 virus, kill people or at least make them sick.

This one, Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne, of The River church in Tampa, Florida, and Florida-based Revival Ministries International, who, along with his good friend, Pastor Jonathan Shuttlesworth, has been doing his best to ensure as many people as possible get Covid-19, is now lying in a desperate attempt to fool people into not having the vaccine medical science has developed to combat it.

Covidiot News - The Catholic Bishop And The Great Vaccine Lie

Bishop Joseph Brennan, Bishop of Fresno. Fooling the faithfooled.

Bishop tells Catholics not to jump on 'vaccine bandwagon’ - Los Angeles Times

There is something really weird about fundamentalist Christians. They seem to want people to catch the coronavirus!

And it's not just the American mega-church pastors more worried about their falling income than the welfare of their 'flock', who have campaigned against social distancing and wearing facemasks, often with blatant lies and criminal irresponsibility, encouraging and organising the super-spreader events that church services have become.

These same frauds are also now campaigning now against the vaccines that medical science is on the verge of bringing into mass production to protect us from the virus and bring life back to normal - even making it safe to go into a crowded church to stuff more money into the mega-rich pastor's bank account, safe in the knowledge that you're not going to take something away that could kill your friends and relatives.

This mysterious campaigning on the side of a lethal virus is almost like they know they should be siding with the malevolence they believe designed and perfected the SARS-C0V-2 virus. So, Bishop Joseph Brennan's deliberate attempt to trick his followers into thinking they should refuse any vaccine and instead take their chances with a lethal virus is understandable, even if morally reprehensible. He worships the malevolent god whom he believes sent the plague to make people sick and kill millions, and probably thinks its a blasphemy to try to counter its attempted genocide.

His lie is of course, that the vaccine is made from the bodies of aborted foetuses, playing on the superstition that the Catholic Church inculcates its members with that an aborted foetus and even the zygote resulting from in vitro fertilisation are full human beings and thus the sacred special creations of God. Brennan singled out the Pfizer vaccine now going into full production, claiming the cells of aborted foetuses were used in its production.

They are not. Not a single stage in the vaccine's production uses them, according to Pfizer spokeswoman, Jerica Pitt. Bishop Brenan has yet to correct this misinformation and to apologise to Catholics for dangerously and wilfully misleading them.

As with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, the vaccines currently leading the race, such as the Oxford vaccine, are made from small sections of SARS-CoV-2 messenger RNA (mRNA); the section that carries the instructions for making the 'spike' proteins coating the surface of the virus which it uses to gain entry into the cells of the respiratory system and other organs. This is inserted into the genome of a harmless virus so that, when injected into a muscle, the harmless virus delivers its package of SARS-CoV-2 mRNA into the muscle cells whose internal mechanisms then begin to make the viral 'spike' protein.

The protein on its own is harmless but the body recognises it as foreign and makes antibodies against it. In effect, the vaccine tricks your immune system into thinking you have Covid-19. Now, when the actual SARS-CoV-2 virus enters your body, these antibodies attach to its 'spike' proteins and prevent them working, so the virus can't enter your cells and destroy them, nor can it reproduce to create a viral load for you to spread to other people.

This use of an 'mRNA vaccine' is a major technological breakthrough for medical science and opens up the possibility of quickly making new vaccines to combat other similar viruses as well as the resistant mutations that will inevitably evolve in the future, making us able to respond quickly and effectively against the parasite's latest move in the evolutionary arms race. Maybe it's this stunning victory of human medical science against the malevolent entity that fundamentalists believe creates these nasty little parasites and wages this arms race against us that so worries these people.

If we have eradicated its smallpox virus and are on the verge of eradicating its poliomyelitis virus, what of its special creations will we be attacking next, and how will that affect their market in the magical 'cures' for sickness they now hawk? Minimising the threat from SARS-CoV-2 is the final straw for frauds who require a frightened, superstitious people to prey on.

Their hated 'enemy', science, is winning and needs to be stopped!

---

Tweet Link

Malevolent Designer News - A Little More Malevolence

TB researcher Faramarz Valafar and his team have discovered what causes the TB bacterium to become resistant to antibiotics, which will help advance therapeutics and vaccine targets.

Source

Solving a Mystery: How the TB Bacterium Develops Rapid Resistance to Antibiotics | NewsCenter | SDSU

The TB bacterium, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, is one of the malevolent designer's little triumphs (if you've been taken in by the intelligent [sic] design hoax).

Once a major killer in cities where crowded conditions made transmission easy for it, medical science had seemed on the point of eliminating it with antibiotics and vaccinations. However, it has now made a strong come-back due to developing antibiotic resistance and is now endemic in many third world and developing countries with some 10 million new cases and 1.8 million deaths a year in 2018.

Exactly how it did this so quickly for an organism that is slow-growing and which reproduces relatively slowly was something of a mystery to medical science because a slow generation time is not conducive to rapid evolution and yet antibiotic resistance can arise within weeks or months in an individual patient undergoing treatment.

Intelligent [sic] design advocates, of course, have what they think is a better explanation - it was redesigned by their putative designer as another escalation in its arms race against human medical science in its determination to make us sick and die in an especially nasty way.

However, scientists at San Diego State University think they have discovered that this was due to evolution after all, not to the intervention of a magician, malevolent or otherwise.

Covidiot News - Wearing a Face Mask Does NOT Impair Breathing

Wearing a mask while exercising may feel uncomfortable, but research shows doing so does not impair lung function.

Photo credit: Getty Images

Exercised Over Nothing: Masks Don’t Impair Lung Function During Physical Activity

More evidence, if any were needed, that, contrary to the lies of President-reject-supporting evangelical Christians, wearing a face-mask does not impair airflow or exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide, even during physical activity.

This is the conclusion from a meta-analysis of all known scientific literature that "examined the effects of various face masks and respiratory loading devices on physiological and perceptual responses to physical activity" by an American and Canadian team led by Susan Hopkins of the University College of San Diego, USA. The single exception was someone with severe cardiopulmonary disease for whom a minor change in resistance to breathing or a slight change in blood gasses could precipitate dyspnoea. However, these people are also at high risk from Covid-19 - an important factor when deciding whether to wear a face-mask or not.

The results of this analysis were published two days ago in the Annals of the American Thoracic Society.