‘Israel has been at the top of the game since the coronavirus pandemic began. The country has taken every possible step and has been applauded for being able to keep Covid under control.
‘Three evangelical pastors, along with several Jewish congregations, have filed a joint lawsuit with the Australian Federal Government, seeking an injunction against the New South Wales and Victorian Government’s current COVID-19 lockdown measures.
The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday in the Federal Court, argues the state governments have selectively discriminated against religious groups in denying citizens the ability to congregate in Houses of Worship by arbitrarily deeming them “non-essential,” while allowing the public to gather elsewhere, such as in supermarkets and liquor stores.
The lawsuit will argue that Houses of Worship provide significant spiritual, psychological, and emotional support for communities, especially those who are suffering financially and psychologically from the impacts of the state government’s lockdown policies.
Furthermore, it will be argued that the governments’ indiscriminate selection of “essential” and “non-essential” venues under the Public Health Order is not supported by robust scientific or medical evidence.
According to the complaint, neither the NSW nor Victorian Governments have the constitutional or common law power to deny citizens their religious freedom which includes their ability to fulfill particular religious obligations and practices in their designated House of Worship.
Internationally renowned COVID-19 expert, Jayanta Bhattacharya, Professor of Medicine at Stanford University in California has also provided an independent expert report in support of the action brought forward by the plaintiffs.
Lawyer Tony Nikolic said his clients were forced to appeal to the courts after the matter had been repeatedly ignored by the NSW state government, in particular.
“My clients have attempted to engage with the NSW and Victorian Premiers and their Ministers as well as various NSW, Victorian, and Federal Parliamentarians to have their grievances addressed in a diplomatic and respectful manner.
“Unfortunately, in the context of NSW, the NSW Government has been unwilling to engage with my clients in any meaningful dialogue. As a result, our only last venue for relief is the courts.”
Pastor Robert Ayoub, one of the plaintiffs in the case, said they have exhausted other options to no avail.
“Now we have. a legal option, where we take the matter to the courts and have it heard by a court,” Pastor Ayoub said in a recent interview. “We believe this is a respectful way to do things, and importantly, a legal way to do things.
“We’re not here to be vindictive, or dishonouring towards the government, we’re just seeking to be able to practice our religion freely, and we’re appealing to our government to allow. us to love our God and also love our neighbour, to love our community.”
The plaintiffs in the case have also backed The Moses Statement, an open letter to Prime Minister Scott Morrison and the State Premiers, urging a reopening of churches across the nation.
The following is from an email sent out by Qantas. This is health apartheid!
‘We’re all dreaming about the day we can fly away to see family, friends or enjoy a long overdue holiday. Getting vaccinated is an important step that every Australian can take to bring us that little bit closer to life as we knew it.~
If you’re a Qantas Frequent Flyer who has been fully vaccinated for COVID-19, we want to say thank you for protecting yourself and the community, with your choice of reward, and the chance to win a fantastic major prize.*’
‘Host Christine Dolan speaks with Angelia Desselle on the life-altering health problems she experiences after taking the Pfizer ‘vaccine’. Desselle also details the absolute lack of help from the government, or drug companies.’
I had Covid. I had an antibody test to prove it. Am I protected (and do I need to get the vaccine)?
Let me start with the usual disclaimer: THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE. I AM NOT A PHYSICIAN.
But the answer is now increasingly clear: natural immunity from Covid following infection and recovery is HIGHLY protective against future Covid infections. Rates of reinfection are very low.
Perhaps natural immunity eventually wanes, but we don’t know when. In fact, a little-noticed paper from June suggests it may actually strengthen for at least a year – and provide plenty of protection from Delta and other variants.
I am not going into the problems with vaccine-generated protection today or with our political unwillingness to recognize natural immunity. (Remember, GOOD NEWS – we could all use it).
Let’s just look instead at why natural immunity works so well.
You immune response comes in two forms: “humoral” and “cellular.”
When you are infected with Sars-Cov-2, your body’s “B-cells” – part of the immune system – quickly pour out “antibodies.” These antibodies attack the viral particles circulating in your blood and other fluids, hoping to keep the virus from entering your cells and replicating itself.
This is humoral immunity. Your B-cells make antibodies in many different shapes. Some are better at sticking to the virus. Scientists call these “neutralizing” antibodies because they neutralize the “antigen,” the foreign body attacking you, keeping it from entering your cells.
Amazingly, your B-cells quickly figure out which antibodies neutralize most effectively and make more of them, while cutting back on those that don’t work.
At the same time, another part of the immune system – killer or CD8 T-cells – attacks cells that the virus has already infected. You destroy your own cells to prevent the virus from using them to make more copies of itself. This is cellular immunity.
For a few days after you are infected, your immune system is in a race with the virus. If you win the race, defeat the virus, and recover – as the vast majority of people infected with Sars-Cov-2 do – within a week or two you should have no measurable levels of virus in your body.
With no invader provoking a response, your B-cells will stop making antibodies against the virus. Over time, the antibodies you have made will slowly degrade – a change scientists can measure.
Antibody levels are measured as “titers” – how much the part of the blood that contains antibodies must be diluted before it stops neutralizing the coronavirus (or any antigen).
The details of how scientists measure titers are complicated. But the takeaway is simple – higher titers mean more antibodies in the initial sample. Higher titers are better, unless they are so high they indicate an overactive immune response. Over time, titers will decline.
But your immune system has not forgotten the virus. Both B-cells and T-cells are now trained to respond to it, should it reappear. (Confusingly, the immune system includes two types of T-cells, CD4 and CD8, and many subtypes of both B- and T-cells.)
This “adaptive” response explains why people remain immune to some viruses for their entire lives after being infected once – or inoculated with an effective vaccine.
Scientists have different ways to measure your immune response.
They can measure how tightly your antibodies bind to an antigen (the virus), how many different parts of the antigen they attack, how quickly your B- and T-cells will ramp up to make new antibodies or attack infected cells, and even whether those antibodies can recognize new variants of the original antigen.
In June, Rockefeller University researchers published a paper in Nature examining how antibodies changed up to a year after coronavirus infection and recovery.
The authors found that even “in the absence of vaccination, antibody reactivity to the receptor binding domain (RBD) of SARS-Cov-2, neutralizing activity, and the number of RBD-specific memory B-cells remain relatively stable between 6 to 12 months after infection.” (They also found that vaccination of previously infected and recovered people could boost those responses further.)
However, in a second paper published in late July, the authors found that vaccines did NOT produce a similarly powerful response in the B-cells of people who had not previously been infected. (But we’re not going to talk about that today. Good news, remember?)
In July, another group of researchers published similar findings in Cell:
Again, the authors offered reassuring findings:
Here, we evaluate 254 COVID-19 patients longitudinally up to 8 months and find durable broad-based immune responses. SARS-CoV-2 spike binding and neutralizing antibodies [have] an extended half-life of >200 days suggesting the generation of longer-lived plasma cells… Taken together, these results suggest that broad and effective immunity may persist long-term in recovered COVID-19 patients.
T-cell immunity was also durable, the authors found, and the killer T-cells could recognize not just the coronavirus’s spike protein but other parts of the virus.
(Again, the paper offered reasons to believe vaccine immunity was inferior, but we won’t talk about that, not today.)
A paper from Israel released Sunday reported that antibody titers in people who had recovered from infection fell only 5 percent a month (titers in the vaccinated fell 40 percent a month, though from a higher baseline).
Even better, between four and nine months after infection, the percentage of people with low titers remained roughly flat, at 10 percent.
All these papers should increase our confidence that natural immunity is durable and powerful. But what about real-world data?
Fortunately, we now have several studies examining large groups of previously infected people. In perhaps the most striking, the Cleveland Clinic reported in June a reinfection rate of zero among 1,359 people with natural immunity:
Not one of the 1359 previously infected subjects who remained unvaccinated had a SARS-CoV-2 infection over the duration of the study.
(The political pressure for vaccination is such that the Cleveland Clinic then issued a press release basically pretending the study didn’t say what it did. But we won’t talk about that today, good news, etc.)
And this week, Israeli researchers looking at a much larger group of people also found very, very low reinfection rates. Only 19 out of 16,215 people with natural immunity had a second infection from June 1 to August 14 (far fewer than the number of vaccinated people who were infected in a matched group).
These findings are particularly important because the Delta variant accounted for nearly all coronavirus infections in Israel by this summer. In other words, natural immunity remained protective against Delta.
So there’s your good news. Both the theoretical bench work and the real-world data suggest that natural immunity is long-lasting and protective even against Sars-Cov-2 variants that can evade vaccines.
Here in New South Wales Australia we continue to be in lockdown because the politicians say they are listening to the HEALTH EXPERTS! Well, I wish they would listen to ‘A Stanford University Medical School epidemiologist and public health expert reiterated in a recent interview his conviction that Covid lockdowns have been horrendous for public health and affirmed that they have killed more people than they have saved.
“I say the lockdowns were the single biggest mistake in public health history. I still believe that. I don’t see how anyone can look at lockdown and say there was successful policy,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said.
“We have had lockdowns in country after country after country,” he continued. “I don’t think by any measure you can call them a success.”
From the beginning of the pandemic, Bhattacharya has advocated for a public health action plan of “focused protection,” a policy wherein creative measures are enacted by public servants to shield the most vulnerable from infection and the rest of society is allowed to carry on with regular life.
As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, Bhattacharya and numerous other medical professionals formally outlined this idea in the Great Barrington Declaration. In part, it reads:
The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.
Regarding this approach, Bhattacharya said, “The idea was to give people resources to protect themselves as they saw fit, that they could make trade-offs in their lives based on what they valued.” He added, “You have to think differently about what the goal is. If the goal is focused protection, then adopt a different set of policies than if the goal is testing, tracing, identifying, and quarantine.”
Bhattacharya said that many in the medical and public health community have come to think erroneously about herd immunity, which was once identified as the goal for resolving the Covid pandemic.
“Herd immunity is not a synonym for zero Covid. It does not mean the disease has gone away. What it means is that the disease has become endemic,” he said.
“What I do know is that if a government induces fear in a population, if a government formally locks down, that it will take much longer to get to that point where the disease is at a level where we can manage it without having to turn over all of society,” Bhattacharya asserted. “If people are scared to interact with everybody else, it will take longer, even if you don’t have a policy.”
Bhattacharya called the harms caused by lockdowns “extremely multi-dimensional” and traumatic, especially to the poor, children, and those on the margins of society. “It’s not possible to reduce to a single number,” he said. “A child who skips a year of school, the consequences will last a lifetime.”
According to Bhattacharya, dramatic increases of poverty, food insecurity, outright starvation, depression, anxiety, suicide, and death are some of the black fruits of the mitigation measures implemented in lockdowns. Asked directly if “lockdowns have killed more people than they have saved,” he responded, “Yes, I think that is actually true.”
The idea that there are alternatives to lockdowns has not been given minimal space for discussion in the public forum, particularly among the mainstream media, politicians, and public health and medical professionals. Conversely, Bhattacharya asserted that science is, in fact, a “free-wheeling discussion,” one that should be informed by data, not politics. To be against lockdown, Bhattacharya said, was considered “saying something dangerous” and “at the core of this sort of de-platforming effort” by Big Tech companies. Standing against this trend is “something we should resist with all our strength.”
“We have come to think about lockdown as if it were the only possible thing to do,” Bhattacharya said, “But that’s not true. You have to make decisions based on the margins of what is alternatively possible. That requires imagination and requires care about thinking of different people in different parts of society, and the risks they face combined with the values they have and the scientific parameters about disease spread and all of these other things.”
Bhattacharya noted that we have had “enormous Covid deaths despite the lockdowns.” While lockdown proponents may argue that this is because the lockdowns were not strong enough, Bhattacharya insists that reality is a constraint on their model and that in the real world “society could not meet their high standard of what a lockdown ought to look like.”