Author: HP McLovincraft

Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.

A Cancer Vaccine Is In Development By COVID-19 Vaccine Maker, Using The Same Tech

Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, the husband and wife team who founded German pharma firm BioNTech, were studying a potential vaccine for tumors using a novel technology known as messenger RNA (mRNA) when they learned about a new type of coronavirus spreading in China in January 2020.

The couple decided to investigate the possibility of making a vaccine for that mysterious and highly contagious virus using mRNA. Within weeks, BioNTech scientists developed an experimental vaccine in partnership with American pharma giant Pfizer. And 10 months later, the vaccine cleared clinical trials and regulatory hurdles and began going into tens of millions of people’s arms around the world.

For Şahin and Türeci, it’s time to pick up the cancer research where it’s left.

“We have several different cancer vaccines based on mRNA,” Türeci told The Associated Press in an interview on Friday. Though it’s too early to predict when such a vaccine will be available, the prospect is promising. “It’s very difficult to predict in innovative development. But we expect that within only a couple of years,” Türeci added.

The biotech community has been studying mRNA for two decades. The medical platform works by carrying instructions for making antigen proteins found on the surface of a virus into body cells. The antigen will then be copied and produced in more cells to prime the immune system against that specific virus.

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‘More Masks Than Jellyfish’: Covid Mask Pollution Is Destroying Ocean Ecosystems, Wildlife

While Covid face mask mandates have proved lucrative for governments, the pharmaceutical and PPE industries, and health officials, they have taken a devastating toll on the world’s oceans and wildlife according to ecological and environmental experts.

An extensive study from marine preservation group OceansAsia found that “the number of masks entering the environment on a monthly basis as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic is staggering.”

“From a global production projection of 52 billion masks for 2020, we estimate that 1.56 billion masks will enter our oceans in 2020, amounting to between 4,680 and 6,240 metric tonnes of plastic pollution,” OceansAsia reported. “These masks will take as long as 450 years to break down and all the while serve as a source of micro plastic and negatively impact marine wildlife and ecosystems.”

“Every single visit we find more masks,” OceansAsia’ Teale Phelps Bondaroff said, noting that since many masks are shredded and covered in algae, they may be consumed by fish and ocean creatures that mistakes the masks as food.

The global face masks market value was roughly $790 million in 2019, but exploded to over $166 billion by the end of 2020.

In a Facebook post from early in the mask and lockdown cycle, Operation Clean Sea nonprofit founder Laurent Lombard warned, “Knowing that over 2 billion disposable masks have been ordered, soon there are likely to be more masks than jellyfish in the waters of the Mediterranean…!”

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BLM Activist Refuses To Resign From School Board After Calling Asians ‘House N*****s’ Who ‘Use White Supremacist Thinking’

A pro-Black Lives Matter vice president of the San Francisco school board is refusing to resign after being criticized for a deluge of racist tweets against Asian Americans in 2016 where she said they used “white supremacist thinking” and compared them to “a house n****r.”

School Board VP Alison Collins said in 2016 that “In fact many Asian American Ts, Ss, and Ps actively promote these myths. They use white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead’.”

“Talk to many @thelowell parents and you will hear praise of Tiger Moms and disparagement of Black/Brown ‘culture,’” Collins continued in the tweet thread, going on to say, “I even see it in my FB timeline with former HS peers. Their TLs are full of White and Asian ppl. No recognition”.

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