BlackMask Breaking News

Nick Note: This video was from over a year ago. At that time Abbott offed the test kits commercially for $5.00. After they destroyed millions of kits creating an artificial shortage the price soared.  The kits if you can find them for 3 week delivery  cost $25.00 in quantities of 100 plus ripp off shipping rates

The New York Times– For weeks in June and July, workers at a Maine factory making one of America’s most popular rapid tests for Covid-19 were given a task that shocked them: take apart millions of the products they had worked so hard to create and stuff them into garbage bags. Soon afterward, Andy Wilkinson, a site manager for Abbott Laboratories, the manufacturer, stood before rows of employees to announce layoffs. The company canceled contracts with suppliers and shuttered the only other plant making the test, in Illinois, dismissing a work force of 2,000. “The numbers are going down,” he told the workers of the demand for testing, saying it wasn’t their fault. “This is all about money.”

© Abbott,  BinaxNOW, a rapid test made by Abbott, can provantigen ide results in 15 minutes.

As virus cases in the U.S. plummeted this spring, so did Abbott’s Covid-testing sales. But now, amid a new surge in infections, steps the company took to eliminate stock and wind down manufacturing are proving untimely — hobbling efforts to expand screening as the highly contagious Delta variant rages across the country. Nick Bit: In July when i realized that the Delta Mutation was out of control and our vaccines were diminishing in effectiveness i panicked. That is when besides sending out our CoronaVit supplement to subscribers  I frantically tried to get test kits. They had to have FDA approval our I could not import them because they had no approval and frankly all the made in India and China crap I tested was should we say deficient. I settled on the BinaX Now test  kits after Sarah was tested at the airport with this kit. I bought, paid for and ordered 1000 kits… And it was hell to get them to you. I still have another 1000 kits on back order and less then 200 in inventory . We put together a bonus package with test kits and CoronaVit supplements or  ULPA nano filters and  masks. We are loosing money on every order. But its not about the money… I trade for that. Click link below to see offers. SEE DISCOUNT OFFERS ON BINAX NOW CORONA TEST KITS

Demand for the 15-minute antigen test, BinaxNOW, is soaring again as people return to schools and offices. Yet Abbott has reportedly told thousands of newly interested companies that it cannot equip their testing programs in the near future. CVS, Rite Aid and Walgreens locations have been selling out of the at-home version, and Amazon shows shipping delays of up to three weeks. Abbott is scrambling to hire back hundreds of workers. America was notoriously slow in rolling out testing in the early days of the pandemic, and the story of the Abbott tests is a microcosm of the larger challenges of ensuring that the private sector can deliver the tools needed to fight public health crises, both before they happen and during the twists and turns of an actual event. “Businesses crave certainty, and pandemics don’t lend certainty to demand,” said Stephen S. Tang, chief executive of OraSure Technologies, which in the midst of the testing slump in June received emergency F.D.A. authorization for its own rapid test, InteliSwab, long in development. But the company is not yet supplying retail stores. Abbott’s decisions have ramifications even beyond the United States. Employees in Maine, many of them immigrants from African countries, were upset at having to discard what might have been donated. Other countries probably could have used the materials, according to Dr. Sergio Carmona, chief medical officer of FIND, a nonprofit that promotes access to diagnostics. “This makes me feel sick,” he said of the destruction, noting that more than a dozen African nations have no domestic funds to buy Covid tests. In an interview, Robert B. Ford, Abbott’s chief executive, argued that the discarded materials — finished test cards — should not be viewed as tests. Kits for sale also include swabs, liquid buffer and instructions. Nick Bit: This ASSHOLE can eat shit and die!. Who the fuck does he think he is? In a pandemic he starved the market to fuck us on price. They will not supply me direct and i am paying first cost as much as $25 a kit plus rip off shipping rates.. FUCK HIM IN HIS ASS. Ill be damed if i can’t out fox a corporate prick greedy scum bag. I hate them all. I will get us all the test kits we neeed. Testing right now is our best option. Even after the 3rd booster shot you must not let your guard down… In February when they roll out the booster shot tailored to the 3 deadly variants they can we feel safe again. In the mean time fight fight fight and survive………… CLICK HERE TO SEE DISCOUNT OFFERS ON BINAXNOW TEST KITS

An inexpensive anti-depressant curbed the number of COVID-19 patients ending up in hospital by 30 per cent, making it a potential breakthrough treatment for a virus that continues to spread widely, a Canadian-led clinical trial is reporting. The researchers looked at the rate of hospitalization among patients with test-confirmed infection. Most of the eight studied drugs, including much-debated candidates such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, showed no detectable benefit.  But the study found that 77 of the 739 subjects who were randomly selected to receive fluvoxamine ended up spending more than six hours in an emergency department or being admitted to hospital, compared to 108 of the 733 who were administered a placebo. The trial’s independent data-safety monitoring board, which keeps an eye on results that are blinded to the actual researchers, ordered the trial stopped after seeing the positive numbers, said Mills. It confirms smaller, earlier studies that had shown promise for the drug — used to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder — and its anti-inflammatory properties. “This is among the most important findings since the COVID pandemic began,” said Mills, a part-time professor at McMaster. “There is no other treatment for early COVID that has been shown to prevent serious disease progression.” “You have a Canadian-led study that has the potential to change guidance around the world for a very cheap treatment,” he said. “This is a massive finding of benefit to public health.” Costing about $4 per 10-day course, fluvoxamine could be especially important in poorer countries with low vaccination rates and that lack the ability to acquire more expensive therapies, he said. The researchers — including co-principal investigator Dr. Gilmar Reis of Brazil’s Pontificia Universidade Catòlica de Minas Gerais — plan to post a paper outlining their results on a pre-print site and submit it to a journal for publication within days, but so far it has yet to be peer-reviewed. They did, however, present their findings to a meeting of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the U.S. last week and to World Health Organization experts. And the team includes world-renowned clinical trial experts from McMaster, including Dr. Gordon Guyatt, credited with coining the term “evidence-based medicine.” Scientists not associated with the trial voiced cautious optimism about the results, while suggesting more research would be helpful before giving the green light for the medicine’s widespread use against COVID.“This is really the first large trial that shows a benefit for fluvoxamine — or any oral medication,” said Dr. David Boulware, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Minnesota and national co-chair of the NIH’s own trial investigating potential COVID treatments. “It’s inexpensive, it’s generic and it’s going to be used. So in that sense it’s a world-wide drug.” Boulware, who was co-author of one of the earlier, small studies of fluvoxamine and COVID, said some of the monocolonal antibody treatments given emergency approval by regulators have greater effectiveness, but their high cost and mode of administration limit how widely they are used. Dr. Gerald Evans, head of the infectious disease department at Queen’s University’s medical school, said he’d like to see even larger trials conducted in other parts of the world to confirm the findings. But Evans noted the trial did back up those earlier studies and was headed by respected researchers. He called the findings “impressive.” “Everything that I’ve seen does suggest it’s an honest, true signal,” he said. “This is the first drug that has shown a consistent benefit for COVID 19, which separates it from others being studied.” Fluvoxamine is part of the widely used selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) family of anti-depressants, but was found previously to also have anti-inflammatory properties. COVID-19 patients get most severely ill when their immune systems go haywire in response to the infection, causing what’s called a cytokine storm. Fluvoxamine does not attack the SARS-CoV-2 virus itself, but addresses that immune response. The idea of using it was first tested by Drs. Eric Lenze and Angela Reiersen at Washington University in St. Louis. They published a paper last November involving a total of about 150 subjects randomly assigned to either fluvoxamine or a placebo, suggesting the drug curbed the rate of patients suffering serious clinical deterioration. An observational “cohort” study published in February, where patients themselves chose whether to take fluvoxamine, found that those who did were much less likely be hospitalized or have symptoms after 14 days. The Together trial, being carried out in Brazil’s Minas Gerais region, is an adaptive platform trial, where different drugs are added or removed depending on ongoing results. Fluvoxamine was added to the trial just this January in light of the results of the smaller studies, said Mills. Nick Note: we are all looking for the silver bullet. I have a prescription and hope to fill it this weekend.

ERUSALEM, Aug 20 (Reuters) – In Israel’s COVID-19 wards, doctors are learning which vaccinated patients are most vulnerable to severe illness, amid growing concerns about instances in which the shots provide less protection against the worst forms of the disease. Around half of the country’s 600 patients presently hospitalized with severe illness have received two doses of the Pfizer Inc (PFE.N) shot, a rare occurrence out of 5.4 million fully vaccinated people. The majority of these patients received two vaccine doses at least five months ago, are over the age of 60 and also have chronic illnesses known to exacerbate a coronavirus infection. They range from diabetes to heart disease and lung ailments, as well as cancers and inflammatory diseases that are treated with immune-system suppressing drugs, according to Reuters interviews with 11 doctors, health specialists and officials. Such “breakthrough” cases have become central to a global debate over whether highly vaccinated countries should give booster doses of COVID-19 vaccines, and to which people. Israel began offering booster doses to people age 60 and up in July, and has since expanded that eligibility. The United States, citing data out of Israel and other findings, said on Wednesday it would make booster doses available to all Americans beginning in September. Other countries, including France and Germany, have so far limited their booster plans to the elderly and people with weak immune systems. “The vaccinated patients are older, unhealthy, often they were bedridden before infection, immobile and already requiring nursing care,” said Noa Eliakim-Raz, head of the coronavirus ward at Rabin Medical Centre in Petach Tikva. In contrast, “the unvaccinated COVID patients we see are young, healthy, working people and their condition deteriorates rapidly,” she said. “Suddenly they’re being put on oxygen or on a respirator.” Israel’s Health Ministry raised new alarm this week with a report showing the effectiveness against severe disease of the Pfizer vaccine, developed with Germany’s BioNTech, appeared to have dropped from more than 90% to 55% in people age 65 and up who received their second jab in January. Disease experts say it is not clear how representative the figures are, but agree it is concerning given evidence that overall vaccine protection against infection is waning. They cannot say whether that is due to the amount of time that has passed since inoculation, the ability of the highly contagious Delta variant to evade protection, the age and underlying health of the people vaccinated, or a combination of all of these factors. Health officials in the UK and United States, two other nations with high vaccination rates and a spike in Delta infections, have reported similar trends. In the UK, about 35% of the people hospitalized with a Delta case in recent weeks had received two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine. Nearly three-quarters of U.S. breakthrough infections that led to hospitalization or death were among people age 65 or older, according to federal data. U.S. officials said their booster plan is based on concern that over time, the vaccines will provide less protection against severe disease, including among younger adults. “We are watching other countries carefully and (are) concerned that we too will see what Israel is seeing, which is worsening infections over time” among vaccinated people, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said at a press conference on Wednesday. The World Health Organization has repeatedly urged wealthy nations to refrain from providing boosters while much of the world has yet to access their first COVID vaccine doses. The Delta variant, first identified in India, has become the dominant version of the SARS-CoV-2 virus globally, accelerating a pandemic that has killed more than 4.4 million people. In Israel, daily new cases have increased from the single digits in June to around 8,000 since the arrival of Delta. Approximately half of the cases – the majority of them mild to moderate – are in vaccinated people. Those vaccinated first in Israel were at high-risk, including people age 60 and up. The immune response of some may have weakened by the time Delta hit Israel. But for others with underlying health conditions, the vaccine may have not kicked in at all. “For some of them the vaccine did not trigger an immune response, they had no antibodies, because of the illness itself or because they are treated with medication that suppresses the immune system,” said Dror Mevorach, who heads the coronavirus ward at Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem. He cited examples such as chronic lymphocytic leukemia and lymphoma. Among 3 million vaccinated Israelis covered by Clalit, the country’s largest healthcare provider, 600 have suffered severe breakthrough cases since June. Around 75% of them were above the age of 70 and were at least 5 months after their second dose, according to Ran Balicer, Clalit’s chief innovation officer. Nearly all of them have chronic illnesses. “We are hardly seeing young vaccinated people in severe condition,” said Balicer. In the UK, doctors described similar characteristics among vaccinated patients who fall severely ill. “In those people who come in, because of their age, because of their co-morbidities, they might be people that you would expect that the vaccine is not quite so efficacious as other age groups,” said Tom Wingfield, a clinical lecturer at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. A new surge in U.S. coronavirus cases and deaths has been fueled by Delta, particularly in states where vaccination rates remain low. Among vaccinated patients who become infected, there is evidence of older people being hit harder.

SpaceX adding capabilities to Starlink internet satellite

TOKYO, Aug 20 (Reuters) – Japan plans to dramatically ramp up daily COVID-19 tests, borrowing from anti-contagion measures used in the recent Tokyo Olympics, as it battles its worst wave of infections, driven by the Delta variant. New infections exceeded 25,000 on Thursday for the first time, a tally by national broadcaster NHK showed, with the surge mainly among those in their 40s and 50s, most of whom are unvaccinated..

The speed and severity of Japan’s Delta-driven infections are overtaking the strategy of targeted cluster tracing it has favoured over the mass testing used by many nations.

The cabinet office said Japan intends to employ its full daily capacity of about 320,000 polymerase-chain reaction (PCR) tests, or about triple the use now. “At least in a big city like Tokyo, the cluster methodology won’t work anymore,” said Kazuaki Shindai, a doctor and public health researcher at Kyoto University.

“If individuals can get more PCR testing, it may be helpful to find out their condition and isolate themselves and then prevent them going about.”

The government wants to use the full capacity of public and private testing “as much as possible,” said Makoto Shimoaraiso, a cabinet official guiding the pandemic response. Free PCR screenings are being offered to passengers on some airline flights, and local governments plan to use high-speed antigen tests in shopping areas, he added. Nick Bit: One of my daughters just flew in from London. Mandatory testing 190 Pounds… Landed France 150 Euros mandatory testing…… Using the same 15 minute Antigen teste we supply for less then $15 a test….. Who is fucking who! Although Japan widened a state of emergency this week over Tokyo and much of the country, the effect on public behaviour is diminishing in its fourth emergency of the pandemic. Top national health adviser Shigeru Omi urged the government to step up testing and add hospital beds, suggesting that the law may have to be amended for tougher lockdowns. Japan’s COVID-19 testing, or the lack of it, has been a controversial topic throughout the pandemic, standing at just 150 tests per 1,000 people now, versus 230 in South Korea and 1,520 in the United States, website Our World in Data shows. But massive, regular testing, with close to 600,000 tests, was a key feature of infection control at the recently completed Tokyo Olympics  It was a “double standard” that mass testing figured at the Games but not more widely for Japan, said Kenji Shibuya, the former director of the Institute for Population Health at King’s College London. It is never too late to increase testing in the virus battle, however, he said, adding, “This should also be combined with the efforts to isolate and monitor the infected people.”  Nick Note: Mask up, Vitamin up, Isolate, Get your 3rd booster shot as soon as you can and test yourself at least once a week and test everyone that is entering your airspace….

• The Taliban’s return to power could once again turn Afghanistan into a haven for terror groups operating in the region, former U.S. national security advisor John Bolton said on Thursday.
• He said the U.S. had gone into Afghanistan in 2001 to oust the Taliban and the “sanctuary they had provided to Al Qaeda.”
• The U.S. should have maintained its military presence in Afghanistan as long as the threat from terror groups existed, said Bolton who was national security advisor to Donald Trump from April 2018 to September 2019.

The Taliban’s return to power could once again turn Afghanistan into a haven for terror groups operating in the region, former U.S. national security advisor John Bolton told CNBC. As the U.S. withdrew its military presence ahead of an Aug. 31 deadline, the Taliban made lightning advances to seize control of more territory — despite being outnumbered by the Afghan military. President Joe Biden issued an order in April to completely withdraw about 3,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan by Sept. 11.  Bolton said the U.S. had gone into Afghanistan in 2001 to oust the Taliban and the “sanctuary they had provided to Al Qaeda.”  “We stayed there for an equally valid strategic reason,” said Bolton, who is widely considered a foreign policy hawk. “Which is to keep Taliban, Al Qaeda and other threatening terrorist groups from regaining a capability, to have a privileged sanctuary from which they could plan and direct attacks against the U.S. and our friends and allies.” The U.S. should have maintained its military presence in Afghanistan as long as the threat from terror groups remained, said Bolton, who was national security advisor to Donald Trump from April 2018 to September 2019. But critics point to the growing cost of America’s longest war, both in terms of the number of lives lost and the amount of money spent. In two decades of fighting, more than 6,000 Americans were killed, over 100,000 Afghans died and the United States spent more than $2 trillion on operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Biden this week defended his decision to pull out U.S. troops amid mounting criticism of his administration’s handling of the situation, as parts of Kabul descended into chaos following the government’s collapse.

“What Taliban-controlled Afghanistan provides is potential for a regime that enables terrorist groups — unlike other regimes which try and hunt them down and eliminate them,” Bolton said.

“They can now go to Afghanistan under Taliban and expect a more hospitable reception. I think that endangers us all,” he added.