In people who had been infected with SARs-CoV-2 and were then vaccinated, the outcome was completely different: All the vaccines provided a major immunological boost against re-infection, and the differences between the mRNA shots and the other ones "began to blur," says John Moore, a virologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York who was not involved in the study.

Of the five vaccines tested, four produced nearly identical immune reactions. This group included Pfizer's mRNA shot as well a shot made by AstraZeneca, the Sputnik V shot made by the Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology in Russia, and one from Cansino, a Chinese company. A fifth vaccine, CoronaVac, made by Sinovac Biotech in China, was the worst performer, though still protective to some degree. //

The study's point that vaccinating after a case of COVID provides protection against future infections is supported by a newly-published Israeli study. Researchers found that unvaccinated individuals who had recovered from COVID and were then given the Pfizer vaccine had significantly lowered reinfection risks after getting a Pfizer vaccine.

Summing up the two findings, Moore says "The Israeli paper tells you that vaccinating convalescent people has real-world benefits and the Rockefeller paper tells you the vaccine you use [either mRNA or non-mRNA] is inconsequential — you get the benefits from each."

Now, fair notice: I’m heading pretty deep into the weeds here, so here’s the TL;DR:

In paragraphs 2 through 7, under the heading FACTUAL BACKGROUND, Durham details important points about the indictment that show Sussman working with Rodney Joffe and his firm Neustar, who passed information to researchers under a DARPA contract at Georgia Tech and coordinated an effort to build up a falsified case for investigating Trump’s connections to Russia. This also involved the Clinton campaign, and the Clinton campaign’s general counsel — a familiar name, Marc Elias. This data was, to put it gently, massaged in order to make an incriminating case against Trump that fed into the Clinton campaign’s other efforts, like the “dossier,” and thus into the fraudulent FISA warrants and more intelligence operations against the Trump campaign.

You can see why this caused a lot of agitation on the Democrats’ side: Durham is laying out a case that Perkins Coie, through Sussman and with the active participation of Mark Elias, purposefully manufactured evidence against Trump that factored into the four-year investigation into “Russian collusion”.

I’ve talked to several lawyer friends, and frankly, this appears to indicate many violations of law — too many to list. But plenty that would send mere politically unconnected mortals to Leavenworth for the rest of their lives.

Now, into the weeds.

For those hesitant in getting jabbed with the relatively new technology represented by mRNA vaccines, it might be reassuring to know that the old-fashioned way still works. In fact, laboratory studies found that two doses of the Sanofi-GSK vaccine stimulated the production of more neutralizing antibodies than mRNA vaccines already on the market, according to the companies.

Matthew Dowd @matthewjdowd
If you are blaming Biden today for what Putin is doing in Ukraine please take down the American flag from your home or social media account and replace it with the Russian flag. It will help us all know where you clearly stand.
8:54 AM · Feb 22, 2022 //

Garrett M. Graff @vermontgmg
One thing worth keeping in my mind today: There’s a straight line from Russia’s attack on the US election in 2016 to 1/6 to today’s new invasion of Ukraine. The chaos that Russia unleashed with the election of Trump weakened us to the point Putin feels confident invading Europe.
7:05 AM · Feb 24, 2022 //

John Harwood @JohnJHarwood
another way of stating Garrett's point:

the Russian thug now attacking Ukraine helped Donald Trump become president because he thought that would some day make this kind of attack easier to pull off

he was right in the short term

longer term, TBD //

Europe was never going to be enough to deter Russian movement into Ukraine. It was always going to come down to whether or not the U.S. would be tough enough to deter it a bit longer. Afghanistan showed that we are not, and so Putin began speeding up his plans.

That’s not to say that Russia is doing this because of anything happening in Washington. It’s simply to say that the last barrier to doing it was the U.S. and Biden completely tore down that barrier himself.

So, no, Russia didn’t get Trump elected, much less as part of a plan to take over Ukraine. And, no, Trump isn’t responsible for what’s happening now. Weak leadership in the U.S. at this very moment gave Putin all the confidence he needed.

“That’s a pincer movement. Religions themselves have failed and the secular world. It is the overwhelming dynamo of society. I’ve said for years, secular societies influenced religions much more than religions have influenced secular society in the last hundred years,” Prager noted during the interview.

Much of the loss of religion in our society, Prager observed, is based on Americans forgetting the influence of their faith.

“People forgot what their religion is about, you know. They went on automatic pilot. They didn’t teach their kids what America means. And so America doesn’t mean much to most kids. And the same with the religions, Judaism and Christianity. They didn’t teach their kids why the religion is so relevant to society,”

Prager notes, “I’m not blaming them.” Instead, he highlights, “I’m just describing a reality. That’s what happened. They didn’t convey the meaning, and so the kids just dropped it.” //

You know who opposed Soviet communism? Pope John Paul II from Poland, and Muslims in Afghanistan, and the Jews in the Soviet Union. These were the nemeses of the Soviet Union. You either worship the God of the Judeo-Christian world or the god of Marx. That’s what it really amounts to,” Prager shared. //

“I can tell you what has worked for me,” Prager answered. “For almost half a century explaining to people rationally why God and the Bible are necessary. That’s why I’ve embarked on this massive project of a five-volume commentary on the first five books of the Bible called the Rational Bible.” //

“My vehicle to God is purely through reason. I admit I don’t have a mystical bone in my body. I envy people who do, but I don’t. My vehicle to God and religion is purely through reason. But I have found that that is the most persuasive way to touch people, at least to the times in which we live,” Prager explained.

this case might resurface in the future, as the Supreme Court appears to be set to refine how the Voting Rights Act can be used. In the past few years, the Supreme Court has transformed the Voting Rights Act from an un-Constitutional means of mass punishment and imposing collective guilt to something that is merely offensive to the Constitutional right of states to set “time, place, and manner” of elections and a tool for the left to interject chaos and ad hoc rules in defiance of state law. There is a very good chance that five justices will drag Chief Justice John Roberts to outlaw the use of race in setting voting district boundaries.

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By refusing to acknowledge the harms of lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccination, the CDC has brought everlasting shame to itself. There is clear evidence these types of interventions carry measurable risk.

A better approach would have been to honestly discuss the risks and benefits with the public, much like I discuss surgical risks and benefits with my patients. This is the very tenet of informed consent, and better communication always results in a better relationship. //

The consequences of lying about Covid-19 will spill into other areas of health care. Millions of Americans have lost trust in our hospitals and institutions and are now resorting to “under the table” health care. In health care, loss of trust equals lack of access. The CDC must return to the basics of evidence-based medicine to overcome its crisis of legitimacy.

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An otherwise ordinary building in Costa do Valado, Portugal, on national road N335, near the city of Aveiro, was transformed half a century ago in the grand Portuguese tradition of azulejos - the art of using hand painted, glazed ceramic tiles to depict scenes.
 
In this case the tiles - made by the Aleluia ceramic company in Aveiro (still in operation) - show a pristine image of Pan Am's Jet Clipper America, along with a bit of advertising: "More jets to more places" in Portuguese. The billboard, for lack of a more appropriate term, must date from the days when Pan Am's Boeing 707's represented the epitome of air travel, before the advent of the jumbo jets which came to dominate international air routes at the beginning of the 1970's. The beautiful colors still stand out with vibrancy and impact, and the careful depiction of Pan American's Clipper has lost nothing of its visual attraction despite the loss of some of the tiles at the bottom of the work.

Ava DuVernay@avaImagine being able to do this. 👀0:02 / 0:59

From Philip Crowther8:11 PM · Feb 21, 2022 //

Six languages!

The antiparasitic drug ivermectin failed to treat COVID-19 in yet another randomized clinical trial, but the drug remains popular amid the pandemic thanks to Republican politics. That's the takeaway from two separate studies published Friday in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Together, the studies raise yet more concerns for the use of ivermectin against the pandemic virus—as well as the reasons behind its use, which appear politically motivated.

"Political affiliation should not be a factor in clinical treatment decisions," the Harvard researchers behind one of the studies concluded. "Our findings raise concerns for public trust in a non-partisan health care system."

Changing the blood type of donated organs could shorten transplant wait times. //

In a plastic-domed case at the Toronto General Hospital Research Institute, researchers gave a pair of lungs a new identity. When the lungs first arrived in the lab, they were from someone with type A blood, meaning that there were certain tiny markers, called antigens, attached to the lung tissue and blood cells. But when the lungs left the lab, those antigens were almost entirely gone. In just one hour, the researchers had effectively transformed the lungs into type O. //

There are four major blood type groups: A, B, O, and AB. Think of type O as the base model. It has no antigens that attach to it. The A and B blood types each have extra antigens that attach to that core, and AB blood has both types of antigens.

For an organ transplant to work, the donor and recipient have to have compatible blood types. If someone with type O or B blood receives a donation from someone with type A blood, for example, those A antigens will trigger the recipient’s immune system to attack the transplanted organ, which is perceived as a foreign invader. This process, called rejection, can be deadly.

But because type O blood has no antigens, people with O are considered “universal donors.” Their blood and tissue won’t set off an immune response for recipients of any blood type. //

This study is just a proof of concept, meant to show that such a feat is possible, cost-effective, and takes effect quickly enough to work in a real-life transplant scenario. But they didn’t try transplanting the tissue, and they focused their work on only the A antigen. (The team is currently looking for the right enzymes to perform that same search-and-snip function on B antigens.) One question is whether the body will immediately reject the modified lung. Another is whether those A antigens will regrow and trigger that dangerous immune response when they do.

As much as I love the idea of honoring my favorite presidents, it’s time that we acknowledge what today really is: the observation day of George Washington’s birthday. Ok, so his actual birthday is Feb. 22, but we celebrate it on that catch-all day known as Presidents’ Day — or Washington’s Birthday. //

You can read plenty of books, essays, and encyclopedia entries about George Washington’s life and accomplishments. He truly was a man of greatness.

But today I want to focus on a not-so-true story about our first president. //

Today, on the eve of George Washington’s 290th birthday, I’d like to introduce you to a history of America’s founding that you’ve probably never heard. We’ll go ahead and put it out there that 1861’s Osanaetoki Bankokubanashi (童絵解万国噺) probably has absolutely no basis in fact, but this Japanese history of the founding of the U.S. is a heck of a lot of fun.

For starters, the book portrays George Washington fighting with a bow and arrow alongside the “Goddess of America.” //

Lest you look at this book and think that the Japanese really screwed up our history, Billy Moncure writes at War History Online that Osanaetoki Bankokubanashi wasn’t meant to be entirely serious.

“Nozaki Bunzō, also known by his pen name of Kanagaki Robun, was known for amusing historical fiction,” Moncure notes. “His pen name roughly translates as ‘Scribbler of Foolish Words.’”

“Although the text was supposed to give the reader a general idea of American history and significant figures, much of it is intended to be symbolic of America’s struggle rather than a true history,” he continues.

So if you take time out today to remember our first and greatest president, or maybe tomorrow on Washington’s actual birthday, don’t forget the time that a Japanese author gave the Father of Our Country the most badass treatment imaginable.

Last week saw the corrupt media spinning explosive revelations from Special Counsel John Durham’s office as a big ol’ nothingburger. Yet, as I explained on Friday, none of the narratives pushed by the Durham deniers countered the evidence in court filings showing that “enemies of Donald Trump surveilled the internet traffic at Trump Tower, at his New York City apartment building, and later at the executive office of the president of the United States, then fed disinformation about that traffic to intelligence agencies hoping to frame Trump as a Russia-connected stooge.”

Although The New York Times, CNN, and other legacy media outlets failed to refute the significance of the details revealed in Durham’s latest filing, their concerted efforts highlighted their previous lack of coverage of the investigation and the many stunning revelations that have come from Durham’s team to date.

One of the most significant aspects of the ongoing investigation ignored or downplayed by the supposed standard-bearers of journalism concerns the extensive role the Hillary Clinton campaign played in the Russia collusion hoax.

Let us remember something truly great about old, honest Abe. //

This toast was given in honor of Abraham Lincoln at a president’s day celebration last week.

While attending the recent opening of “Holbein: Capturing Character,” the new exhibition dedicated to the German Renaissance master Hans Holbein the Younger (c. 1497-1543) that just opened at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, I observed a visitor asking the security guards, “Where are the pictures of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell?”

This was a fair question since Holbein, although born in Augsburg and for many years a citizen of Basel, is most famous for the portraits he executed in London, where he eventually became King’s Painter to Henry VIII (1491-1547). If you imagine Tudor England in your mind’s eye, chances are the way you envision its people stems directly from the work of this artist.