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Tuesday 27 April 2021

Holiday Injection … Done! Getting “Pfizered” for Greece

 


Some parts of the world are trying to get back to some sort of Covid normal, while others are in crisis.  Where we live 40% have been vaccinated and likely 50% have already had the virus.

Monty, aged 17 with ASD, is a big fan of swimming in the sea and where we live that means crossing borders.  Crossing borders is much easier if you have had a Covid-19 vaccine and it looks like for children the best option is the one from Pfizer-BioNTech.  BioNTech is the clever company set up by a Turkish husband and wife team in Germany. They licensed their vaccine to Pfizer for distribution outside of China, in China they have a deal with Fosun Pharma.

Last week Monty had the opportunity, at very short notice, to go and get the Pfizer inoculation. I collected him from school and took him to a clinic in the city centre, that he has never been to and which undoubtedly would have a long line of people queuing outside it.

Monty knows all about injections and syringes, courtesy of his dental marathon a couple of years ago. He even knows about antibodies from Biology classes. The most rational explanation I came up with while driving, for why he was going to see the “doctor” was that it was for his “holiday injection”.  Monty’s school assistant had some more scientific explanations, but the problem is then you are left wondering why you still need to wear a mask at school, after you have been “Pfizered”.


“Do you like swimming in the sea, on holiday?” …   “Yes” was reply.


“This year, because of Covid, you need to get a holiday injection in your arm.  It doesn’t hurt and we’ve all had ours.”


“After 2 holiday injections, you’re ready for summer holidays.”


Bad news became good news.  Holidays … nice!

 

Children traveling without a covid Vaccine

In many cases children can travel without a covid vaccine, but you may need a PCR test before the trip out and the trip back.  You might well develop covid whilst you are abroad and then you are stuck.

A classmate of Monty was traveling with his vaccinated parents and the border policeman was not sure whether to let him through, since he had no PCR test, or vaccine certificate.

The Pfizer vaccine does look the best choice for a healthy 17-year-old.  For them, safety is more important than efficacy, because they are at almost zero risk from the current variants of the virus.  This may very well change in the coming years.

  

Covid risk for those with autism

Whether you are at elevated risk from Covid depends on what kind of autism you have.  I think my son is at even lower risk than his peers; he very rarely gets sick and another reason is his steroid inhaler for asthma; this actually reduces the chance of mild covid becoming severe covid.  Steroids are now widely used in hospital treatment, but really should be started before you even think about going to hospital.

People with MS (multiple sclerosis) taking disease modifying therapy may be another group who are protected from severe Covid.  These therapies block the cytokine storm that takes you from mild covid to severe covid.  The studies are somewhat contradictory, so you can believe whichever you want.   

The expensive drug Remdesivir, was approved as a therapy even though it has no effect on mortality, which makes you seriously wonder about its benefit.  Not surprisingly, the cheap oral steroid drug, Dexamethasone, substantially reduces mortality.

What happened to hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and Didier Raoult, the French Professor who promoted it?  He still thinks he is right, even though great efforts were made to prove him wrong, including using data later shown to have been faked.

A recently published study looking at 28,759 adults with mild COVID 19 in Iran actually supports Raoult:


https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1567576921002721

Early administration of HCQ reduced the odds of hospitalization by 38%.

Early administration of HCQ reduced the odds of death by 73%.

Serious HCQ adverse drug reactions were not reported in any of the age groups with or without comorbidities.

 

Does hydroxychloroquine have an anti-viral benefit in Covid-19?  Only you can decide.  The scare stories about dangerous side effects were evidently grossly overstated, which makes you wonder what else was made up by the naysayers.

I think this shows that you can find data to support whichever side you favour.  This seems to happen quite often, when a medical issue becomes politicized.

My own Covid therapy was hydroxychloroquine as the antiviral, to which I would have added prednisone if necessary.  As a local doctor told me, you do not want to go to hospital with Covid.

Back to autism.

Some types of autism are associated with comorbidities elsewhere in your body.  These can include problems with your lungs, as in the case of Down syndrome. If you have Prader Willi syndrome, you will present with autism and obesity.  The obesity is the covid risk.

Intellectual disability is put forward as a Covid risk, which makes sense.  People with ID/MR are likely to live in group homes or institutions, where they may be exposed to the virus and they may not follow all the protective measures.  People taking psychiatric drugs are likely to be overweight, which is a bigger risk factor than age.  People with ID/MR are likely to get worse healthcare than typical people, even when there is no health crisis.  The study below seems very credible'. 

After old age, intellectual disability is greatest risk factor for death from COVID-19, study finds

The results showed that those with intellectual disabilities were 2.5 times more likely to contract COVID-19, were about 2.7 times more likely to be admitted to the hospital and 5.9 times more likely to die from the infection than the general population.


Nowadays most people diagnosed with autism do not have any intellectual disability, so it makes sense that in some countries they have made people with intellectual disability, rather than just autism, as a priority group for vaccination.  

On a practical level, an overstretched hospital is not going to be a good place for an adult with intellectual disability, with or without autism.  They should indeed be prioritized for vaccination

When it comes to autism parents there seem to be three groups: -

1.     Desperate to get the vaccine

2.     Desperate to avoid the vaccine

3.     Desperate to go on holiday

 

 

 

 

11 comments:

  1. Hi Peter

    Started using California Gold Calcium Folinate & have seen some improvement.

    As always with these things the concern is about side effects.

    I understand that huge doses were given in the trials up to 50mg. Is Hypercalcemia something to be concerned about? Or would that be with even bigger doses? Obviously, the upper limit must be very high if they confidently gave 50mg to 4- & 5-year-olds?

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    1. Ross, there are two schools of thought, Dr Ramaeker's thinks you should first test for folate receptor antibodies and only if they are present you then start taking calcium folinate.

      In the US, autism doctors are doing the test and sometimes prescribing calcium folinate, regardless of the result. Some people with the antibodies do not improve with calcium folinate and some people without the antibodies do show a positive response to calcium folinate.

      Dr Ramaekers cautions about what would happen in the brain with normal levels of folate, if you then give large doses of calcium folinate. This does not seem to bother the US doctors.

      Folate is water soluble and so your body should be able to get rid of excess amounts.

      Nobody seems to have come to any harm in the trials.

      Hypercalcemia from the calcium salt may occur if you take calcium folinate intravenously at a huge dose and rapidly. The suggested maximum dose is 160 mg/minute in adults. So you do not have to worry about high levels of calcium from your drops, which are absorbed slowly.

      In some people large does of calcium folinate cause aggression and this does not fade away after a few weeks. This seems to be the main risk.

      Dr Ramaekers says that 75% of people with autism do have the folate receptor antibodies and so 75% of people would be suitable for this therapy.

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  2. Thanks Peter, though it appears the main FRAT testing clinic iliadneuro.com is no longer trading or at least the domain name is on GoDaddy for sale. I hope demand will lead to another clinic picking the test up & not just the US.

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  3. Hi Peter, do you think people with autoimmune or mitochondrial type of autism are at increased risk of adverse reactions to covid vaccines?

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    1. Dr Kelley from Johns Hopkins has written that people with mitochondrial disease can take precautions before vaccinations (Montelukast, Ibuprofen etc ) to avoid what we might describe as “over-stressing” mitochondria. As you get older, the brain gradually becomes less and less power hungry and so this should become less of an issue. The biggest risk is below 6 years old and for the moment nobody is vaccinating this age group against Covid.

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  4. It still baffles me why governments around the world all insist on vaccinating young people who have effectively zero risk of dying of COVID-19 and no proven long-term risk from infection which in and of itself renders one immune to future infections. None of these vaccines have been tested for long-term safety and there are so many different ways that various vaccines can cause far more long-term damage to individuals and society than having no vaccination campaign at all since none of the vaccines have yet to be proven safe and this is all under the generous assumption nothing nefarious is going on with any of these companies.

    For one, if a vaccine only prevents symptoms and not infection itself, it is said to be a "leaky" vaccine. This is incredibly dangerous because a hot virus kills or else maims its host to the degree that the host (human) is no longer walking around society and spreading the virus. However, if you get a vaccine that reduces the symptoms of a hot virus but not the shedding of the virus itself, then you have potentially millions of typhoid Mary's walking around the planet except they are spreading hot mutated SARS-2 virii rather than typhus. Furthermore, because the host is able to survive without fully destroying the infection, the virus is allowed to mutate indefinitely in a symptom resilient host which allows the creation of even hotter viruses which have the grave potential to kill the vaccinated as well as the unvaccinated. In fact, the vaccinated are even more at danger because vaccines give you specific immunity to the synthetic spike protein created indirectly in your cells via the vaccines, rather than non-specific immunity which you get from a natural viral infection to SARS-2.

    On top of that Pfizer has already announced that those using their vaccine may need a third booster for their vaccine this winter. Personally, I don't think the mRNA vaccines are any riskier than the others, but the biggest risks are that pretty much all of the vaccines seem very leaky at this point and that the spike protein itself being delivered all throughout the body (dosage matters a lot here) that can damage a lot of healthy cells to the point that you don't notice the damage until later on in life just as alcoholics do not notice the damage done to their bodies and brain in their 20's, but start to have serious health problems once they are in their late 30's when you have less healthy stem cells around to replace all the dead or dying stem cells which were harmed from decades of alcohol abuse.

    I guess we will see in the coming years whether mass vaccinations with rushed vaccines are foolish or not, but our family will never be getting vaccines since we have already been exposed to SARS-2 already and it was far less challenging than many other infections I have had in the past (suspected swine flu being the worst). If that means we don't travel by air, well then I guess that is a luxury we will have to live without as a family.

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    1. I agree Tyler. I am certainly not an expert, but trying to vaccinate 90%+ of the population (or whatever) with a brand new vaccine seems mad to me. Vaccinating the groups most at risk - sure, that's an easy choice, covid19 is clearly a big risk for them, but at some % of the population it seems to me that they risk disobeying the "first do no harm" idea. Here in Scotland recently a young man with muscular dystrophy died after receiving his vaccination, and it seems to me that people with muscular issues might be guessed to be at risk of this kind of thing. (Beyond my knowledge there really, but ...)
      I don't know what % _should_ be vaccinated, 10%? 33%? 50%? etc, but the 80/90%+ that authorities seem to be aiming for seems way too high to me.

      Aspie2

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  5. Hi Peter

    Do you see anything positive for Autism research coming out of the whole COVID crisis? Any place for mRNA in neuroscience for example, or advances in genetics maybe?

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    1. As Tatjana has mentioned, the mRNA vaccine developers see this technology as potentially being applicable to treat auto immune diseases, these range from MS to arthritis to some autism.

      A Tolerizing mRNA Vaccine against Autoimmunity?
      https://www.cell.com/molecular-therapy-family/molecular-therapy/fulltext/S1525-0016(21)00070-8

      You would hope that the desire to repurpose existing drugs for Covid-19 might make the idea of repurposing existing drugs for autism more attractive.

      There is a vast amount of autism research, but very little use is made of it. This is the biggest issue.

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  6. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/research/research-conducted-at-nimh/research-areas/clinics-and-labs/mib/neuroimmune-activation-in-autism-imaging-translocator-protein-using-positron-emission-tomography-pet?fbclid=IwAR0U94IfR8dBwBiZB1Ac8uMPYFzBxFyD9x61YiYL3nU0SzI8Z-FzAENHbnA

    Seems the battle is near won, if this is what the NIH is up to. Peter, your son could be eligible very soon? And some others here might like to participate.

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