Summary: Study reveals how psychedelic drug-induced changes in subjective awareness are rooted in specific neurotransmitter systems.
Source: McGill University
Psychedelics are now a rapidly growing area of neuroscience and clinical research, one that may produce much-needed new therapies for disorders such as depression and schizophrenia. Yet there is still a lot to know about how these drug agents alter states of consciousness.
In the world’s largest study on psychedelics and the brain, a team of researchers from The Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital) and Department of Biomedical Engineering of McGill University, the Broad Institute at Harvard/MIT, SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University, and Mila—Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute have shown how drug-induced changes in subjective awareness are anatomically rooted in specific neurotransmitter receptor systems.
The researchers gathered 6,850 testimonials from people who took a range of 27 different psychedelic drugs. In a first-of-its-kind approach, they designed a machine learning strategy to extract commonly used words from the testimonials and link them with the neurotransmitter receptors that likely induced them.
The interdisciplinary team could then associate the subjective experiences with brain regions where the receptor combinations are most commonly found—these turned out to be the lowest and some of the deepest layers of the brain’s information processing layers.
Using thousands of gene transcription probes, the team created a 3D map of the brain receptors and the subjective experiences linked to them, across the whole brain. While psychedelic experience is known to vary widely from person to person, the large testimonial dataset allowed the team to characterize coherent states of conscious experiences with receptors and brain regions across individuals. This supports the theory that new hallucinogenic drug compounds can be designed to reliably create desired mental states.
Graph showing relation between type of drug, descriptive words and neurotransmitter. Credit: Danilo Bzdok
For example, a promising effect of some psychedelics for psychiatric intervention is ego-dissolution—the feeling of being detached with the self. The study found that this feeling was most associated with the receptor serotonin 5-HT2A.
However, other serotonin receptors (5-HT2C, 5-HT1A, 5-HT2B), adrenergic receptors Alpha-2A and Beta-2, as well as the D2 receptor were also linked with the feeling of ego-dissolution. A drug targeting these receptors may be able to reliably create this feeling in patients whom clinicians believe might benefit from it.
“Hallucinogenic drugs may very well turn out to be the next big thing to improve clinical care of major mental health conditions,” says Professor Danilo Bzdok, the study’s lead author
“Our study provides a first step, a proof of principle that we may be able to build machine learning systems in the future that can accurately predict which neurotransmitter receptor combinations need to be stimulated to induce a specific state of conscious experience in a given person.”
Cloth masks do little to prevent the spread of COVID-19 or other airborne diseases, a new study finds.
Researchers from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom found that 90 percent of particles could get through cloth masks, making them effectively useless during the pandemic.
Cloth masks have been popular in the U.S., as they are easily reusable after washing and at some points were the most accessible due to shortages and high prices for surgical or N95 masks.
Now, though, experts have discovered that these masks were doing little if anything to actually stop the spread of the virus, and likely contributed to spread as people who believed they were acting safely were not doing so.
Researchers found that cloth masks only block an estimated 10 percent of all particles from getting through. Because cloth masks are made of tightly woven yarn (top) unlike surgical and other kind of masks that are made to filter particles (bottom) they are not as protective against Covid
Researchers do not recommend surgical masks either because they are not well-fitting and often leave gaps that allow should-be filtered particles to escape
Researchers, who published their findings Tuesday in Physics of Fluids, built an airflow simulation using 3d imaging to gauge how well different masks were used during the pandemic filtered particles.
They note that unlike N95 or surgical masks, cloth masks are not built using material made to filter out particles.
Cloth masks are made out of tightly-woven fabrics. While not visible to the eye, small gaps in the fabric are enough to allow for a vast majority of particles to get through.
‘Masks are air filters, and woven fabrics, such as cotton, make for good jeans, shirts, and other apparel, but they are lousy air filters,’ Richard Sear, co-author of the study and physicist at Surrey University, said in a statement.
KN95 masks are built to filter out particles and have a standard filtration of 95 percent.
‘The filtering layer of an N95 mask is made from much smaller, 5-micrometer fibers with gaps that are 10 times smaller, making it much better for filtering nasty particles from the air, such as those containing virus,’ Sear said.
KF-94 masks are considered to be very effective as well, with the ability to filter out 94 percent of particles.
Filtration efficiency is not the only two benefits of those masks, though. Fit is very important as well.
A mark should fit tightly around a person’s face, almost hugging their nose, cheeks, and chin.
This is to avoid leaving gaps above or below the mouth and the nose where air can escape.
Even if a person does have a mask that can filter up to 95 percent of particles if the mask isn’t well-fitting then the particles could just escape out of the side anyways.
This is why Sear also does not recommend the use of surgical masks.
‘Surgical masks fit badly, so a lot of air goes unfiltered past the edges of the mask by the cheeks and nose,’ he said.
While this is only one study, based on a computer model, the implications are major when looking back on two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Many Americans wore cloth masks, almost exclusively, throughout the pandemic believing they were doing their part to stop the spread of the virus.
Wearing a mask also may have made people feel more comfortable about going out in public, believing the face coverings would protect everyone around them from the virus.
It could be the case that the cloth masks were providing little to no protection at all, and people believing they were taking proper virus mitigation measures were not doing so.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends KN95 masks as the gold standard to stop the spread, but still recommends cloth masks as a valid face covering on its website.
Are you tired of debating with your liberal friends and family on the safety of the COVID-19 vaccine?
Informed Choice Australia made a list of ‘peer-reviewed’ medical papers submitted to various medical journals, showing extensive evidence of adverse events in the COVID-19 vaccines.
The list only includes the studies made up to January 20 concerning the adverse reaction from COVID-19 vaccines, such as myocarditis, thrombosis, thrombocytopenia, vasculitis, cardiac, Bell’s Palsy, immune-mediated disease, and many more.
Myocarditis after immunization with COVID-19 mRNA vaccines in members of the US military. This article reports that in “23 male patients, including 22 previously healthy military members, myocarditis was identified within 4 days after receipt of the vaccine”: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/2781601
Occurrence of acute infarct-like myocarditis after COVID-19 vaccination: just an accidental coincidence or rather a vaccination-associated autoimmune myocarditis?: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34333695/
It is one of the great mysteries of the pandemic: Why have mainstream journalists, public health officials, and America’s elected leaders ignored “natural immunity” to Covid from prior infections?
The incessant agenda to get everyone ‘vaccinated’ — despite the now undeniable body of evidence the mRNA shots do nothing to stop the spread of the virus — has defied basic scientific reasoning. Even if the mRNA shots appear to lower mortality rates for those who are at risk, prior infections provide equal or even superior protection due to their spurring of antibodies. After all, this is what the mRNA shots are meant to accomplish in the first place.
Research in the past has established that natural immunity is a real thing and actually works. A famous, widely cited Israeli study that showed “natural immunity confers longer-lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization” was recently replicated in an independent study. Nonetheless, there has been a stubborn refusal by the part of the media to acknowledge natural immunity exists, and the overwhelming majority of Democrat voters do not believe that it works against Covid.
Enter a new study on natural immunity published in the European Journal of Immunology. The cutting-edge research shows that not only is natural immunity effective, it is superior to vaccinated immunity because it is much longer-lasting.
“Most subjects develop antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 following infection,” the study states. “In order to estimate the duration of immunity induced by SARS-CoV-2 it is important to understand for how long antibodies persist after infection in humans… We found that NAb [natural antibodies] against the WT virus [B-lineage variants] persisted in 89% and S-IgG in 97% of subjects for at least 13 months after infection.”
Eat your heart out, Big Pharma. Nature’s immunization system beats your leaky, ineffective products any day of the week. Let’s dig a little deeper and examine the results:
The study’s results show the overwhelming majority of subjects received natural immunity from prior infection, regardless of whether the case was ‘severe’ or ‘mild.’ The researchers also sought to assess if natural immunity to certain variants of concern can be expected to protect against future variants.
“Previous infection with SARS-CoV-2 has shown to induce effective immunity and protection against reinfections in most individuals,” the study says. “In animal studies, a protective antibody titer against SARS-CoV-2 infection has been suggested to be low. Higher IgG antibody levels against SARS-CoV-2 among healthcare workers within three months after vaccination were found to be associated with lower infectivity. However, a protective threshold for humans is still under debate and subject to the standardization of serological methods. The accumulating research data on the persistence of antibodies after natural infection, and NAbs in particular, will provide important insight into estimating for how long antibodies induced by Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccination can be expected to persist and provide protection against emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants.”
It is important to note that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention refuses to accept the presence of antibodies as a demonstration of natural immunity to Covid-19. The CDC insists on every eligible person getting vaccinated, regardless of prior infection.
Antibody testing is not currently recommended to assess for immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following COVID-19 vaccination, to assess the need for vaccination in an unvaccinated person, or to determine the need to quarantine after a close contact with someone who has COVID-19. Some antibody tests will not detect the antibodies generated by COVID-19 vaccines. Because these vaccines induce antibodies to specific viral protein targets, post-vaccination antibody test results will be negative in persons without history of previous infection, if the test used does not detect antibodies induced by the vaccine.
There is no credible scientific reasoning provided — only a vague appeal that it is hard to test for the specific antibodies provided by the “vaccines.” Needless to say, this is not a valid argument.
Additionally, the CDC itself claims that there have been 146.6 million prior infections in the United States (as of October 2). Based on its calculation and the current reported 52 million “cases,” this would put prior infections and natural immunity at around 200 million people.
The Mayo Clinic once considered 200 million Americans with vaccinated or natural immunity to be sufficient to claim “herd immunity.” Obviously, the “experts” (who have been wrong in countless ways) continue to move the goalposts to further the total-vaccination/zero-Covid agenda at all costs.
The European Journal of Immunology nonetheless demonstrates that natural immunity from prior infection is both durable and longer-lasting than vaccinated immunity, although elderly patients may benefit less from this form of immunity.
“Previous studies have indicated that the presence of antibodiesto SARS-CoV-2 was associated with a significantly reduced risk of SARS-CoV-2 reinfection among healthcare workers for upto 7 months after infection,” the study points out. “We observed that S-IgG antibodies [one of three types tested in the study] and NAbs [natural antibodies] persist at least a year after infection in most individuals. This strongly suggests that protection against reinfection is long-lived, although antibody-mediated immunity may not persist equally well among elderly subjects.”
“The results of our study support previous findings indicating that protection against infection mediated by NAbs may be impaired against the VOCs [variants of concern], especially after a mild disease,” the study’s authors continue. “While in the absence of NAbs reinfection is possible, cellular immunity is not similarly affected by mutations in the RBD site [receptor-binding domain on the virus] and is likely to provide long-term protection against severe disease.”
It should be noted that these aren’t some rogue scientists who happened to get a journal article smuggled through peer-review: The nine authors include members of the Department of Health Security and Department of Public Health and Welfare in Helsinki, Finland.
But the final nail in the coffin for the media’s natural immunity deniers is a recent study that was conducted on children.
A study published just days ago in nature immunology shows that children have an even more robust natural immunity response than adults.
“SARS-CoV-2 infection is generally mild or asymptomatic in children but a biological basis for this outcome is unclear,” the study’s authors state in the abstract. “Here we compare antibody and cellular immunity in children (aged 3–11 years) and adults. Antibody responses against spike protein were high in children and seroconversion boosted responses against seasonal Beta-coronaviruses through cross-recognition of the S2 domain. Neutralization of viral variants was comparable between children and adults.”
However, the children had a much stronger T cell response than adults, meaning a heightened ability for their bodies to recognize the virus. Furthermore, their natural immune response lasted longer.
“Spike-specific T cell responses were more than twice as high in children and were also detected in many seronegative children, indicating pre-existing cross-reactive responses to seasonal coronaviruses,” the study states. “Importantly, children retained antibody and cellular responses 6 months after infection, whereas relative waning occurred in adults. Spike-specific responses were also broadly stable beyond 12 months.”
“Therefore, children generate robust, cross-reactive and sustained immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 with focused specificity for the spike protein,” the study notes. “These findings provide insight into the relative clinical protection that occurs in most children and might help to guide the design of pediatric vaccination regimens.”
The children also demonstrated strong humoral immunity (B-cell immunity), while most but not all adults demonstrated this type of adaptive immunity.
“We next assessed the longevity of immune responses within a subgroup of 35 children and 81 adults who had seroconverted at least 6 months before the analysis,” the study says. “All children retained humoral immunity while 7% (6/81) of previously seropositive adults failed to show antibody responses. Children also maintained higher antibody titers against spike and RBD, which were 1.8-fold higher than adults.”
Nonetheless, America is one of the few nations in the Western world that continues to treat children as if they are at equal risk to the virus as the at-risk elderly. There are 29 states in the United States that have seen zero Covid-related mortality in children, and the survival rate for healthy children is literally 99.99995%. Even so, America is one of only seven Western countries that insists on masking children in schools, ignoring the dubious efficacy of masks and that there is a mental health crisis being exacerbated by the pandemic response.
America’s “public health” officials thus continue to ignore the Science on vaccines (they do not stop the spread, therefore they are not a “public health” but a personal issue), natural immunity (which is superior to ‘vaccinated immunity’), and the overwhelming evidence of immune resiliency to the virus among children.
One of these days, the people will catch on to the facts of the Covid pandemic. Until then, it is up to us citizens to spread the word.
This article was originally published on The Wildfire Newsletter – a free and paid subscription service provided by independent journalist Kyle Becker. Never miss an issue!
“As far as I'm concerned, it's a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity.” -Hunter Thompson
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