Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

Saint Dabo of the Upstate approves.

 

Interesting insight into how the coronavirus works, with implications for possible treatments for those with the worst cases.

Interferons are immune proteins that normally interfere with a virus’ life cycle — hence the name, interferon. In addition to their antiviral properties, they summon natural killer cells, “the best soldiers, as it were, of the innate immune system,” Anthony S. Fauci, director of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview.

That system is both the body’s whooping air-raid siren and its emergency responders rushing to the scene. The virus’s ability to hamstring this system may be one of the keys to its success.

Now, several trials are underway in the United States and elsewhere to see whether giving interferon to coronavirus patients early on might prevent severe disease, or hasten recovery, if administered later.

Driving the trials are a spate of recent studies showing that interferons are weakest in the worst coronavirus cases. Scientists in France came to this conclusion after examining cells in the blood of 50 covid-19 patients who had spent 10 days in the hospital, as they wrote in a study published Aug. 7 in the journal Science.

“We found that the more severe the patients were, the less interferon type-1 they were producing,” said Benjamin Terrier, a professor of internal medicine at the National Reference Center for Rare Systemic Autoimmune Diseases in Paris’s Cochin Hospital, referring to a subset of the proteins normally deployed against viruses.
This spring, Benjamin tenOever, a microbiology professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, and his colleagues came to similar conclusions after studying the virus in samples taken from humans, ferrets and infected cells grown in a lab. Interferons, as they reported in the journal Cell, were lacking in all of those.

“The virus is very actively repressing both the production of and the sequencing of interferons,” meaning the process by which the body makes these proteins, tenOever said.

This weakening happens not only in patients’ lungs but in their blood, according to new research by Bali Pulendran, an immune system expert at Stanford University School of Medicine, and his colleagues.​

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2020/08/31/interferons-coronavirus-immune-boost/

 

And a side note: Even if you don’t normally get your flu shot, this year you better get your flu shot.

 

Two Million Dead. Put forward as a rational strategy.

 

Of course, this happened.

 

Figures. Walgreens is the first one to have all the necessary details and use my full name on the lab report... but it's a rapid (antigen) test and not a molecular/nucleic acid/PCR test, on which Hong Kong insists. Need the test I took yesterday to come through or it's another two days in sunny Dallas for me.

 

This is like a twilight zone episode.

 

My insurer REQUIRES I fill scrips at CVS. Criminal operation, the fuckers

 

A few years ago I saw a mention that CVS is a horrible corporate entity, but I don't remember why.

Anyone know the story? I'd rather go to Walgreens anyway, and CVS seems overpriced and understocked.

 

Couldn't think of any other way to spend that money.

 

I dunno; I really appreciated how they had taken quite progressive social stances, and of course was the first retailer to ban cigarettes.
I had a high opinion of them but this changes things.