By  Megan Redshaw

In an exclusive interview with The Defender, Gianni Cohen said her mother, Cheryl Cohen, developed Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease after getting the Pfizer vaccine, and died within three months of her second dose.

In an exclusive interview with The Defender, Gianni said her mother received the first dose of Pfizer on April 5, and her second dose on April 25.

On May 6, Cheryl experienced her first episode indicating “something was neurologically wrong,” Gianni explained. “She had extreme brain fog and confusion. She couldn’t remember where she was driving, and got really scared.”

On May 31, Cheryl called 911 because she was experiencing a severe headache. She was taken to Nordstrom Medical Center in Homestead, Florida, where she was hospitalized for 10 days.

Gianni said:

“She got taken to this hospital and I don’t know what they considered it, but they kept her for 10 days and released her home. She was in a very very bad state. She said, ‘Hey, I don’t know where I am.’

“My mother had mass confusion and brain fog. She could not do simple things and something wasn’t right. We had to have round-the-clock care with friends and families, thinking this was something that needed to be detoxed from her system.”

Gianni, who at the time did not know Cheryl had been vaccinated, said her mother’s condition grew progressively worse.

“She went from being able to work and do normal everyday activities to being able to do only basic things,” Gianni said. “Before she was vaccinated, she had her own apartment and worked every day as a sales representative. She cooked, cleaned and was in a great place in life.”

Around June 19, Cheryl experienced another severe headache, which became so bad she felt her head was going to explode, so she went to the emergency room and was admitted to the hospital, her daughter explained.

“A few days later, I visited her in the hospital and I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Gianni said. “She couldn’t walk, spoke in broken sentences, wasn’t making much sense, had uncontrollable body movements, was trembling and unable to be still.”

The daily regression was rapid. “It was mind-blowing, confusing and truly heartbreaking. Watching her brain have no control was hard,” Gianni said.

At first doctors couldn’t find anything medically wrong with Cheryl other than a slightly elevated white blood cell count, Gianni said. But then MRI imaging of the brain showed evidence of prion disease, prompting doctors to immediately perform a lumbar puncture — which ruled out acute infection, tuberculosis, syphilis, multiple sclerosis and other diseases.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), prion diseases are a family of rare progressive neurodegenerative disorders that affect humans and animals. Prion diseases are usually rapidly progressive and always fatal.

The CDC’s website states:

“The term ‘prions’ refer to abnormal, pathogenic agents that are transmissible and are able to induce abnormal folding of specific normal cellular proteins called prion proteins that are found most abundantly in the brain. The functions of these normal prion proteins are still not completely understood. The abnormal folding of the prion proteins leads to brain damage and the characteristic signs and symptoms of the disease.”

On July 12, a second lumbar puncture came back positive for CJD — a prion disease. Cheryl’s tau protein value was 38,979 pg/ml, while the spectrum for CJD positive patients is 0 – 1,149.

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/cheryl-cohen-dies-rare-brain-disease-second-dose-pfizer-covid-shot/

By  Aimee Villella McBride Stephanie Locricchio

During the week-long event, beginning Sept. 13, parents and educators across the U.S. will engage in peaceful noncompliance activities to remind government officials that individuals should have the final say when it comes to their health.

Parents and educators across the U.S. will participate in the coordinated week-long event focused on peaceful non-compliance, to remind government officials that individuals should have the final say when it comes to their health.

Participants in Walk-Out Week are urged to keep their children home from school and organize with like-minded parents to show up at local schools and state education departments in peaceful protest.

Parents can also work with other local parents to explore alternative schooling.

CHD’s advocacy team invites everyone to participate in the week-long walk-out and also to sign this pledge.

“Parents around the country are fed up with mask mandates imposed by schools, especially after a summer of normalcy in most states where children have been enjoying summer activities maskless,” said Aimee Villella McBride, CHD advocacy liaison.

“Teachers, educators and staff who prefer choice when it comes to masks, vaccines or weekly testing also are frustrated with their state government overreach and lack of support from their unions for choice,” McBride said.

As the  2021-2022 school year approaches, more states are mandating masks, even school districts that previously left it up to personal choice. There is disparity across the nation, while some states mandate, others — such as Texas, Florida and Arizona — are prohibiting mandates, while other states are leaving up to the discretion of each school.

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/parentrising-sept-13-chd-national-walk-out-week-protest-vaccine-mask-mandates/

Like the record-breaking heat waves and the ceaseless mega-fires, the decline of the Colorado River has been faster than expected.

On a 110-degree day several years ago, surrounded by piles of sand and rock in the desert outside of Las Vegas, I stepped into a yellow cage large enough to fit three standing adults and was lowered 600 feet through a black hole into the ground.

There, at the bottom, amid pooling water and dripping rock, was an enormous machine driving a cone-shaped drill bit into the earth. The machine was carving a cavernous, 3-mile tunnel beneath the bottom of the nation’s largest freshwater reservoir, Lake Mead.

Lake Mead, a reservoir formed by the construction of the Hoover Dam in the 1930s, is one of the most important pieces of infrastructure on the Colorado River, supplying fresh water to Nevada, California, Arizona and Mexico. The reservoir hasn’t been full since 1983. In 2000, it began a steady decline caused by epochal drought.

On my visit in 2015, the lake was just about 40% full. A chalky ring on the surrounding cliffs marked where the waterline once reached, like the residue on an empty bathtub.

The tunnel far below represented Nevada’s latest salvo in a simmering water war: the construction of a $1.4 billion drainage hole to ensure that if the lake ever ran dry, Las Vegas could get the very last drop.

For years, experts in the American West have predicted that, unless the steady overuse of water was brought under control, the Colorado River would no longer be able to support all of the 40 million people who depend on it.

Over the past two decades, Western states took incremental steps to save water, signed agreements to share what was left and then, like Las Vegas, did what they could to protect themselves. But they believed the tipping point was still a long way off.

Like the record-breaking heat waves and the ceaseless mega-fires, the decline of the Colorado River has been faster than expected.

This year, even though rainfall and snowpack high up in the Rocky Mountains were at near-normal levels, the parched soils and plants stricken by intense heat absorbed much of the water, and inflows to Lake Powell were around one-fourth of their usual amount.

The Colorado’s flow has already declined by nearly 20%, on average, from its flow throughout the 1900s, and if the current rate of warming continues, the loss could well be 50% by the end of this century.

Earlier this month, federal officials declared an emergency water shortage on the Colorado River for the first time. The shortage declaration forces reductions in water deliveries to specific states, beginning with the abrupt cutoff of nearly one-fifth of Arizona’s supply from the river, and modest cuts for Nevada and Mexico, with more negotiations and cuts to follow.

[…]

The Colorado River’s enormous significance extends well beyond the American West. In addition to providing water for the people of seven states, 29 federally recognized tribes and northern Mexico, its water is used to grow everything from the carrots stacked on supermarket shelves in New Jersey to the beef in a hamburger served at a Massachusetts diner.

The power generated by its two biggest dams — the Hoover and Glen Canyon — is marketed across an electricity grid that reaches from Arizona to Wyoming.

The formal declaration of the water crisis arrived days after the Census Bureau released numbers showing that, even as the drought worsened over recent decades, hundreds of thousands more people have moved to the regions that depend on the Colorado.

Phoenix expanded more over the past 10 years than any other large American city, while smaller urban areas across Arizona, Nevada, Utah and California each ranked among the fastest-growing places in the country. The river’s water supports roughly 15 million more people today than it did when Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992.

These statistics suggest that the climate crisis and explosive development in the West are on a collision course. And it raises the question: What happens next?

Since about 70% of water delivered from the Colorado River goes to growing crops, not to people in cities, the next step will likely be to demand large-scale reductions for farmers and ranchers across millions of acres of land, forcing wrenching choices about which crops to grow and for whom — an omen that many of America’s food-generating regions might ultimately have to shift someplace else as the climate warms.

California, so far shielded from major cuts, has already agreed to reductions that will take effect if the drought worsens. But it may be asked to do more. Its enormous share of the river, which it uses to irrigate crops across the Imperial Valley and for Los Angeles and other cities, will be in the crosshairs when negotiations over a diminished Colorado begin again.

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/colorado-river-drying-up-emergency-water-shortage/

In the largest real-world observational study comparing natural immunity gained through previous SARS-CoV-2 infection to vaccine-induced immunity afforded by the Pfizer vaccine, people who recovered from COVID were much less likely than never-infected, vaccinated people to get Delta, develop symptoms or be hospitalized.

Natural immunity appears to confer longer lasting and stronger protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization from the Delta variant compared to Pfizer-BioNTech’s two-dose vaccine-induced immunity, according to a new Israeli preprint study.

The new data could play a key role in determining whether people who have previously had COVID need to receive both doses of Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, Science reported.

In the largest real-world observational study comparing natural immunity gained through previous SARS-CoV-2 infection to vaccine-induced immunity afforded by the Pfizer mRNA vaccine, people who recovered from COVID were much less likely than never-infected, vaccinated people to get Delta, develop symptoms or be hospitalized.

The study, published Aug. 25 on medRxiv, was conducted in one of the most highly vaccinated countries in the world using data from Maccabi Healthcare Services, which enrolls about 2.5 million Israelis, or about 26% of the population.

Researchers examined medical records of 673,676 Israelis 16 years and older — charting their infections, symptoms and hospitalizations between June 1 and Aug. 14, when the Delta variant predominated in Israel.

The study, led by Tal Patalon and Sivan Gazit, with Maccabi’s research and innovation arm, KSM, found in two analyses that people who had never been infected with SARS-CoV-2 but were vaccinated in January and February were six to 13 times more likely to experience breakthrough infection with the Delta variant compared to unvaccinated people who were previously infected with SARS-CoV-2.

Researchers noted increased risk was significant for asymptomatic disease as well.

“This analysis demonstrated that natural immunity affords longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization due to the Delta variant,” the researchers said.

“It’s a textbook example of how natural immunity is really better than vaccination,” Charlotte Thålin, a physician and immunology researcher at Danderyd Hospital and the Karolinska Institute, told Science. “To my knowledge, it’s the first time [this] has really been shown in the context of COVID-19.”

In one analysis that assessed more than 32,000 people in the health system, the risk of developing symptomatic COVID was 27 times higher among the vaccinated and the risk of hospitalization eight times higher, Science reported.

“The differences are huge,” said Thålin, although she cautioned the numbers for infections and other events analyzed for the comparisons were small.

Scripps’s Eric Topol pointed out several limitations with the study, such as the inherent weakness of a retrospective analysis compared with a prospective study that regularly tests all participants as it tracks new infections, symptomatic infections, hospitalizations and deaths going forward in time.

Michel Nussenzweig, an immunologist at Rockefeller University who researches the immune response to SARS-CoV-2, said the Israeli study confirms laboratory findings from a series of papers in Nature and Immunity by his group, and a study by colleague Dr. Paul Bieniasz –– whose team published a preprint earlier this month showing polyclonal antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 should be resilient to future SARS-CoV-2 variants and may confer protection against future sarbecovirus pandemics.

Nussenzweig said his group published data showing people who recover from a SARS-CoV-2 infection continue to develop increasing numbers and types of coronavirus-targeting antibodies for up to 12 months.

By contrast, Nussenzweig said, twice-vaccinated people stop seeing increases “in the potency or breadth of the overall memory antibody compartment” a few months after their second dose.