International
Coronavirus: what happens when a person is simultaneously infected with two variants?
The real concern is if two variants infect the same cell and swap genetic material.

Scientists in Brazil recently reported that two people were simultaneously infected with two different variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. This co-infection seemed to have no effect on the severity of patients’ illness, and both recovered without needing to be hospitalised.
Although this is one of the few such cases recorded with SARS-CoV-2 – and the study is yet to be published in a scientific journal – scientists have observed infections with multiple strains with other respiratory viruses, such as influenza. This has raised questions about how these viruses may interact in an infected person, and what it could mean for generating new variants.
Viruses are masters of evolution, constantly mutating and creating new variants with every cycle of replication. Selective pressures in the host, such as our immune response, also drive these adaptations. Most of these mutations won’t have a significant effect on the virus. But ones that give an advantage to the virus – for example, by increasing its ability to replicate or evade the immune system – are cause for concern and need to be closely monitored.
The occurrence of these mutations is down to the error-prone replication machinery that viruses use. RNA viruses, such as influenza and hepatitis C, generate a relatively large number of errors each time they replicate. This creates a “quasi-species” of the virus population, rather like a swarm of viruses, each with related but non-identical sequences. Interactions with the host cells and immune system determine the relative frequencies of the individual variants, and these coexisting variants may affect how the disease progresses or how well treatments work.
Compared with other RNA viruses, coronaviruses have lower mutation rates. This is because they are equipped with a proofreading mechanism that can correct some of the errors that occur during replication. Still, there is evidence of viral genetic diversity in patients infected with SARS-CoV-2.
The detection of multiple variants in a person could be the result of co-infection by the different variants, or the generation of mutations within the patient after the initial infection. One way to discriminate these two scenarios is by comparing the sequences of the variants circulating in the population with those in the patient. In the Brazilian study mentioned above, the variants identified corresponded to different lineages that had been previously detected in the population, implying co-infection by the two variants.
Mixing it all up
This co-infection has opened concerns of SARS-CoV-2 acquiring new mutations even more rapidly. This is because coronaviruses can also undergo large changes in their genetic sequence by a process called recombination. When two viruses infect the same cell, they can swap large parts of their genomes with each other and create completely new sequences.
This is a known phenomenon in RNA viruses. New variants of influenza are generated by a similar mechanism called “reassortment”. The genome of influenza virus, unlike coronavirus, comprises eight segments or strands of RNA. When two viruses infect the same cell, these segments mix and match to produce viruses with a new combination of genes. Interestingly, pigs can be infected with different strains of influenza viruses, and have been referred to as “mixing vessels” that shuffle them into new strains. The 2009 H1N1 pandemic virus emerged from a reassortment of a human, avian, and two swine influenza viruses.

With coronaviruses, which only contain one RNA strand in each virus particle, recombination can only occur between RNA strands derived from one or more viruses in the same cell. Evidence of recombination has been found both in the laboratory and in a patient infected with SARS-CoV-2, suggesting that this could drive the generation of new variants. In fact, the ability of SARS-CoV-2 to infect human cells is proposed to have developed via recombination of the spike protein between closely related animal coronaviruses.
It is important to note that this requires the two viruses to infect the same cell. Even if a person is infected with several variants, if they replicate in different parts of the body, they will not interact with each other. Indeed, this was seen in patients, where different quasi-species of coronaviruses were found in the upper and lower respiratory tracts, suggesting that viruses in these sites were not directly mixing with each other.
The evidence so far does not suggest that infection with more than one variant leads to more severe disease. And although possible, very few cases of co-infection have been reported. More than 90% of the infections in the UK currently are by B117 – the so-called Kent variant. With such a high prevalence of one variant in the population, co-infections are not likely to occur. Still, monitoring this landscape allows scientists to track the emergence of these new variants of concern and understand and respond to any changes in their transmission or vaccine efficacy.
Maitreyi Shivkumar does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
vaccine genome genetic rna pandemic coronavirus covid-19 transmission brazil ukGovernment
Who Can You Trust?
Who Can You Trust?
Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,
“I’m sick and tired of hearing Democrats whining about Joe Biden’s…

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,
“I’m sick and tired of hearing Democrats whining about Joe Biden’s age. The man knows how to govern. Just shut up and vote to save Democracy.”
- Rob Reiner, Hollywood savant
Perhaps you’re aware that the World Health Organization (WHO) is cooking up a plan to impose its will over all the sovereign nations on this planet in the event of future pandemics.
That means, for instance, that the WHO would issue orders to the USA about lockdowns, vaccines, and vaccine passports and we US citizens supposedly would be compelled to follow them.
Why the “Joe Biden” regime would go along with this globalist fuckery is one of the abiding mysteries of our time - except that they go along with everything else that the cabal of Geneva cooks up, such as attacks on farmers, and on oil production, and on relations between men and women, and on personal privacy, and on economic liberty throughout Western Civ, as if they’re working overtime to kill it off. And all of us with it.
I think they are working overtime at that because the sore-beset citizens of Western Civ are onto their game, and getting restless about it. So, the Geneva cabal is in a race against time before the center pole of their circus tent collapses and the nations of the world are compelled to follow the zeitgeist in the direction of de-centralizing, foiling all their grand plans.
The “Joe Biden” regime is pretending to ignore the reality that this WHO deal is actually a treaty that would require ratification by a two-thirds vote in the senate, an unlikely outcome. In any case, handing over authority to the WHO — in effect, to its chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus — to push around American citizens like a giant herd of cattle would be patently unlawful.
That center pole of the circus tent is the wobbling global economy. It’s barely holding up the canvas over the three rings of the circus. In the center ring, the death-defying spectacle of the Biden Family crime case is playing out before a huge audience (us). This week, a gun went off at the FBI and smoke is curling out of the barrel. FBI Director Christopher Wray was forced to verify that he’s been sitting on an incriminating document for three years from a “trusted” confidential human source, i.e., an informant, stating that the Biden Family received a $5-million bribe from a foreign entity when “JB” was vice-president.
That’s only one bribe of many others, of course, as documented in the Hunter Biden laptop, and it must be obvious it represents treasonous behavior that will demand resignation or impeachment. As this spools out in the weeks and months ahead, do you think Americans will be in the mood to accept further insults such as “Joe Biden” surrendering our national sovereignty to the WHO?
Anyway, you must ask yourself: why on earth should I trust the WHO about anything? Did they not participate in laying a trip on the world with Covid-19? How did those lockdowns work out? Do you think they destroyed enough businesses and ruined enough households? How’s the vaccination program doing? Effective? Safe? Yeah, maybe not so much. Maybe killing a lot of people, wrecking immune systems, sterilizing reproductive organs, causing gross disabilities, shattering lives.
Of course, in over three years neither the WHO nor the US medical authorities showed the slightest interest in helping to figure out how the Covid-19 virus was made in a lab, and exactly how it got loose in the world. Lately, Dr. Ghebreyesus has warned the world about much worse future pandemics supposedly coming down at us. Oh? Really? What does he know that we don’t? That possibly new efforts to concoct chimeric diseases are ongoing in labs around the world? (You know that dozens of such labs were discovered in Ukraine as the war got underway there in 2022.) What’s Dr. Ghebreyesus doing to stop that?
If US orgs and citizens are involved in this “research,” why doesn’t the WHO alert our government leaders so they can stop it? (Would they? I’m not so sure.) And, who is behind it this time? The Eco-Health Alliance again, like with Covid-19? By the way, that outfit got another whopping grant last fall from the NIH to “study” bat viruses — right after the NIH terminated a previous grant on account of The Eco-Health Alliance failing to turn over notebooks and other records.
No, you cannot trust the WHO about anything. The “trust horizon” (a concept introduced by the great Nicole Foss, late of The Automatic Earth dot com) is shrinking. You can no longer trust any distant authorities. You also cannot trust the US federal government (especially the executive branch behind “Joe Biden”). And notice: the trust horizon is shrinking just as the world is de-centralizing. This, you see, is the main contradiction behind all the Globalists’ twisted ambitions to control everything, including you. They are working against the current tide of human history which is pushing everything toward down-scaling, re-localization, and re-assertion of the sovereign individual person.
That trend will become increasingly evident as things organized at the giant scale start to implode — giant retail chains, medical behemoths, hedge funds, big banks, you name it. The world no longer has the mojo for globalism. There’s reason to wonder these days whether the USA has the mojo to remain a unified national polity of states. Our federal government is not only financially bankrupt beyond any coherent reckoning, it is also morally bankrupt, and it has decided to make war against its own people. None of this is satisfactory and none of this is working. It’s time to figure out who and what you can trust and act accordingly.
International
Removing antimicrobial resistance from the WHO’s ‘pandemic treaty’ will leave humanity extremely vulnerable to future pandemics
Drug-resistant microbes are a serious threat for future pandemics, but the new draft of the WHO’s international pandemic agreement may not include provisions…

In late May, the latest version of the draft Pandemic Instrument, also referred to as the “pandemic treaty,” was shared with Member States at the World Health Assembly. The text was made available online via Health Policy Watch and it quickly became apparent that all mentions of addressing antimicrobial resistance in the Pandemic Instrument were at risk of removal.
Work on the Pandemic Instrument began in December 2021 after the World Health Assembly agreed to a global process to draft and negotiate an international instrument — under the Constitution of the World Health Organization (WHO) — to protect nations and communities from future pandemic emergencies.
Read more: Drug-resistant superbugs: A global threat intensified by the fight against coronavirus
Since the beginning of negotiations on the Pandemic Instrument, there have been calls from civil society and leading experts, including the Global Leaders Group on Antimicrobial Resistance, to include the so-called “silent” pandemic of antimicrobial resistance in the instrument.
Just three years after the onset of a global pandemic, it is understandable why Member States negotiating the Pandemic Instrument have focused on preventing pandemics that resemble COVID-19. But not all pandemics in the past have been caused by viruses and not all pandemics in the future will be caused by viruses. Devastating past pandemics of bacterial diseases have included plague and cholera. The next pandemic could be caused by bacteria or other microbes.
Antimicrobial resistance

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is the process by which infections caused by microbes become resistant to the medicines developed to treat them. Microbes include bacteria, fungi, viruses and parasites. Bacterial infections alone cause one in eight deaths globally.
AMR is fueling the rise of drug-resistant infections, including drug-resistant tuberculosis, drug-resistant pneumonia and drug-resistant Staph infections such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). These infections are killing and debilitating millions of people annually, and AMR is now a leading cause of death worldwide.
Without knowing what the next pandemic will be, the “pandemic treaty” must plan, prepare and develop effective tools to respond to a wider range of pandemic threats, not solely viruses.
Even if the world faces another viral pandemic, secondary bacterial infections will be a serious issue. During the COVID-19 pandemic for instance, large percentages of those hospitalized with COVID-19 required treatment for secondary bacterial infections.
New research from Northwestern University suggests that many of the deaths among hospitalized COVID-19 patients were associated with pneumonia — a secondary bacterial infection that must be treated with antibiotics.

Treating these bacterial infections requires effective antibiotics, and with AMR increasing, effective antibiotics are becoming a scarce resource. Essentially, safeguarding the remaining effective antibiotics we have is critical to responding to any pandemic.
That’s why the potential removal of measures that would help mitigate AMR and better safeguard antimicrobial effectiveness is so concerning. Sections of the text which may be removed include measures to prevent infections (caused by bacteria, viruses and other microbes), such as:
- better access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene;
- higher standards of infection prevention and control;
- integrated surveillance of infectious disease threats from human, animals and the environment; and
- strengthening antimicrobial stewardship efforts to optimize how antimicrobial drugs are used and prevent the development of AMR.
The exclusion of these measures would hinder efforts to protect people from future pandemics, and appears to be part of a broader shift to water-down the language in the Pandemic Instrument, making it easier for countries to opt-out of taking recommended actions to prevent future pandemics.
Making the ‘pandemic treaty’ more robust
Measures to address AMR could be easily included and addressed in the “pandemic treaty.”
In September 2022, I was part of a group of civil society and research organizations that specialize in mitigating AMR who were invited the WHO’s Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) to provide an analysis on how AMR should be addressed, within the then-draft text.
They outlined that including bacterial pathogens in the definition of “pandemics” was critical. They also identified specific provisions that should be tweaked to track and address both viral and bacterial threats. These included AMR and recommended harmonizing national AMR stewardship rules.
In March 2023, I joined other leading academic researchers and experts from various fields in publishing a special edition of the Journal of Medicine, Law and Ethics, outlining why the Pandemic Instrument must address AMR.
The researchers of this special issue argued that the Pandemic Instrument was overly focused on viral threats and ignored AMR and bacterial threats, including the need to manage antibiotics as a common-pool resource and revitalize research and development of novel antimicrobial drugs.
Next steps
While earlier drafts of the Pandemic Instrument drew on guidance from AMR policy researchers and civil society organizations, after the first round of closed-door negotiations by Member States, all of these insertions, are now at risk for removal.
The Pandemic Instrument is the best option to mitigate AMR and safeguard lifesaving antimicrobials to treat secondary infections in pandemics. AMR exceeds the capacity of any single country or sector to solve. Global political action is needed to ensure the international community works together to collectively mitigate AMR and support the conservation, development and equitable distribution of safe and effective antimicrobials.
By missing this opportunity to address AMR and safeguard antimicrobials in the Pandemic Instrument, we severely undermine the broader goals of the instrument: to protect nations and communities from future pandemic emergencies.
It is important going forward that Member States recognize the core infrastructural role that antimicrobials play in pandemic response and strengthen, rather than weaken, measures meant to safeguard antimicrobials.
Antimicrobials are an essential resource for responding to pandemic emergencies that must be protected. If governments are serious about pandemic preparedness, they must support bold measures to conserve the effectiveness of antimicrobials within the Pandemic Instrument.
Susan Rogers Van Katwyk is a member of the WHO Collaborating Centre on Global Governance of Antimicrobial Resistance at York University. She receives funding from the Wellcome Trust and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
treatment pandemic coronavirus covid-19 deaths canada world health organizationSpread & Containment
Repeated COVID-19 Vaccination Weakens Immune System: Study
Repeated COVID-19 Vaccination Weakens Immune System: Study
Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Repeated COVID-19…

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Repeated COVID-19 vaccination weakens the immune system, potentially making people susceptible to life-threatening conditions such as cancer, according to a new study.
Multiple doses of the Pfizer or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines lead to higher levels of antibodies called IgG4, which can provide a protective effect. But a growing body of evidence indicates that the “abnormally high levels” of the immunoglobulin subclass actually make the immune system more susceptible to the COVID-19 spike protein in the vaccines, researchers said in the paper.
They pointed to experiments performed on mice that found multiple boosters on top of the initial COVID-19 vaccination “significantly decreased” protection against both the Delta and Omicron virus variants and testing that found a spike in IgG4 levels after repeat Pfizer vaccination, suggesting immune exhaustion.
Studies have detected higher levels of IgG4 in people who died with COVID-19 when compared to those who recovered and linked the levels with another known determinant of COVID-19-related mortality, the researchers also noted.
A review of the literature also showed that vaccines against HIV, malaria, and pertussis also induce the production of IgG4.
“In sum, COVID-19 epidemiological studies cited in our work plus the failure of HIV, Malaria, and Pertussis vaccines constitute irrefutable evidence demonstrating that an increase in IgG4 levels impairs immune responses,” Alberto Rubio Casillas, a researcher with the biology laboratory at the University of Guadalajara in Mexico and one of the authors of the new paper, told The Epoch Times via email.
The paper was published by the journal Vaccines in May.
Pfizer and Moderna officials didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Both companies utilize messenger RNA (mRNA) technology in their vaccines.
Dr. Robert Malone, who helped invent the technology, said the paper illustrates why he’s been warning about the negative effects of repeated vaccination.
“I warned that more jabs can result in what’s called high zone tolerance, of which the switch to IgG4 is one of the mechanisms. And now we have data that clearly demonstrate that’s occurring in the case of this as well as some other vaccines,” Malone, who wasn’t involved with the study, told The Epoch Times.
“So it’s basically validating that this rush to administer and re-administer without having solid data to back those decisions was highly counterproductive and appears to have resulted in a cohort of people that are actually more susceptible to the disease.”
Possible Problems
The weakened immune systems brought about by repeated vaccination could lead to serious problems, including cancer, the researchers said.
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Who Can You Trust?