Monthly Archives: August 2020

“THEY” Do Not Want an Effective and Inexpensive Treatment -No $$$ For Them

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An Effective COVID Treatment the Media Continues to Besmirch

By Steven Hatfill

August 04, 2020

An Effective COVID Treatment the Media Continues to Besmirch
(AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool)

On Friday, July 31, in a column ostensibly dealing with health care “misinformation,” Washington Post media critic Margaret Sullivan opened by lambasting “fringe doctors spouting dangerous falsehoods about hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 wonder cure.”

Actually, it was Sullivan who was spouting dangerous falsehoods about this drug, something the Washington Post and much of the rest of the media have been doing for months. On May 15, the Post offered a stark warning to any Americans who may have taken hope in a possible therapy for COVID-19. In the newspaper’s telling, there was nothing unambiguous about the science — or the politics — of hydroxychloroquine: “Drug promoted by Trump as coronavirus game-changer increasingly linked to deaths,” blared the headline. Written by three Post staff writers, the story asserted that the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine in treating COVID-19 is scant and that the drug is inherently unsafe.

This claim is nonsense

Biased against the use of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 — and the Washington Post is hardly alone — the paper described an April 21, 2020, drug study on U.S. Veterans Affairs patients hospitalized with the illness. It found a high death rate in patients taking the drug hydroxychloroquine. But this was a flawed study with a small sample, the main flaw being that the drug was given to the sickest patients who were already dying because of their age and severe pre-existing conditions. This study was quickly debunked. It had been posted on a non-peer-reviewed medical archive that specifically warns that studies posted on its website should not be reported in the media as established information.

Yet, the Post and countless other news outlets did just the opposite, making repeated claims that hydroxychloroquine was ineffective and caused serious cardiac problems. Nowhere was there any mention of the fact that COVID-19 damages the heart during infection, sometimes causing irregular and sometimes fatal heart rhythms in patients not taking the drug.

To a media unrelentingly hostile to Donald Trump, this meant that the president could be portrayed as recklessly promoting the use of a “dangerous” drug. Ignoring the refutation of the VA study in its May 15 article, the Washington Post cited a Brazil study published on April 24 in which a COVID trial using chloroquine (a related but different drug than hydroxychloroquine) was stopped because 11 patients treated with it died. The reporters never mentioned another problem with that study: The Brazilian doctors were giving their patients lethal cumulative doses of the drug.

On and on it has gone since then, in a circle of self-reinforcing commentary. Following the news that Trump was taking the drug himself, opinion hosts on cable news channels launched continual attacks on both hydroxychloroquine and the president. “This will kill you!” Fox News Channel’s Neil Cavuto exclaimed. “The president of the United States just acknowledge that he is taking hydroxychloroquine, a drug that [was] meant really to treat malaria and lupus.”

Washington Post reporters Ariana Cha and Laurie McGinley were back again on May 22, with a new article shouting out the new supposed news: “Antimalarial drug touted by President Trump is linked to increased risk of death in coronavirus patients, study says.” The media uproar this time was based on a large study just published in the Lancet. There was just one problem. The Lancet paper was fraudulent and it was quickly retracted.

However, the damage from the biased media storm was done and it was long-lasting. Continuing patient enrollment needed for early-use clinical trials of hydroxychloroquine dried up within a week. Patients were afraid to take the drug, doctors became afraid to prescribe it, pharmacies refused to fill prescriptions, and in a rush of incompetent analysis and non-existent senior leadership, the FDA revoked its Emergency Use Authorization for the drug.

So what is the real story on hydroxychloroquine? Here, briefly, is what we know:

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, a search was made for suitable antiviral therapies to use as treatment until a vaccine could be produced. One drug, hydroxychloroquine, was found to be the most effective and safe for use against the virus. Federal funds were used for clinical trials of it, but there was no guidance from Dr. Anthony Fauci or the NIH Treatment Guidelines Panel on what role the drug would play in the national pandemic response. Fauci seemed to be unaware that there actually was a national pandemic plan for respiratory viruses.

Following a careful regimen developed by doctors in France, some knowledgeable practicing U.S. physicians began prescribing hydroxychloroquine to patients still in the early phase of COVID infection. Its effects seemed dramatic. Patients still became sick, but for the most part they avoided hospitalization. In contrast — and in error — the NIH-funded studies somehow became focused on giving hydroxychloroquine to late-presenting hospitalized patients. This was in spite of the fact that unlike the drug’s early use in ambulatory patients, there was no real data to support the drug’s use in more severe hospitalized patients.

By April, it was clear that roughly seven days from the time of the first onset of symptoms, a COVID-19 infection could sometimes progress into a more radical late phase of severe disease with inflammation of the blood vessels in the body and immune system over-reactions. Many patients developed blood clots in their lungs and needed mechanical ventilation. Some needed kidney dialysis. In light of this pathological carnage, no antiviral drug could be expected to show much of an effect during this severe second stage of COVID.

On April 6, 2020, an international team of medical experts published an extensive study of hydroxychloroquine in more than 130,000 patients with connective tissue disorders. They reaffirmed that hydroxychloroquine was a safe drug with no serious side effects. The drug could safely be given to pregnant women and breast-feeding mothers. Consequently, countries such as China, Turkey, South Korea, India, Morocco, Algeria, and others began to use hydroxychloroquine widely and early in their national pandemic response. Doctors overseas were safely prescribing the drug based on clinical signs and symptoms because widespread testing was not available.

However, the NIH promoted a much different strategy for the United States. The “Fauci Strategy” was to keep early infected patients quarantined at home without treatment until they developed a shortness of breath and had to be admitted to a hospital. Then they would they be given hydroxychloroquine. The Food and Drug Administration cluelessly agreed to this doctrine and it stated in its hydroxychloroquine Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) that “hospitalized patients were likely to have a greater prospect of benefit (compared to ambulatory patients with mild illness).”

In reality just the opposite was true. This was a tragic mistake by Fauci and FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn and it was a mistake that would cost the lives of thousands of Americans in the days to come.

At the same time, accumulating data showed remarkable results if hydroxychloroquine were given to patients early, during a seven-day window from the time of first symptom onset. If given during this window, most infections did not progress into the severe, lethal second stage of the disease. Patients still got sick, but they avoided hospitalization or the later transfer to an intensive care unit. In mid-April a high-level memo was sent to the FDA alerting them to the fact that the best use for hydroxychloroquine was for its early use in still ambulatory COVID patients. These patients were quarantined at home but were not short of breath and did not yet require supplemental oxygen and hospitalization.

Failing to understand that COVID-19 could be a two-stage disease process, the FDA ignored the memo and, as previously mentioned, it withdrew its EUA for hydroxychloroquine based on flawed studies and clinical trials that were applicable only to late-stage COVID patients.

By now, however, some countries had already implemented early, aggressive, outpatient community treatment with hydroxychloroquine and within weeks were able to minimize their COVID deaths and bring their national pandemic under some degree of control.

In countries such as Great Britain and the United States, where the “Fauci-Hahn Strategy” was followed, there was a much higher death rate and an ever-increasing number of cases. COVID patients in the U.S. would continue to be quarantined at home and left untreated until they developed shortness of breath. Then they would be admitted to the hospital and given hydroxychloroquine outside the narrow window for the drug’s maximum effectiveness.

In further contrast, countries that started out with the “Fauci-Hahn Doctrine” and then later shifted their policy towards aggressive outpatient hydroxychloroquine use, after a brief lag period also saw a stunning rapid reduction in COVID mortality and hospital admissions.

Finally, several nations that had started using an aggressive early-use outpatient policy for hydroxychloroquine, including France and Switzerland, stopped this practice when the WHO temporarily withdrew its support for the drug. Five days after the publication of the fake Lancet study and the resulting media onslaught, Swiss politicians banned hydroxychloroquine use in the country from May  27 until June 11, when it was quickly reinstated.

The consequences of suddenly stopping hydroxychloroquine can be seen by examining a graph of the Case Fatality Ratio Index (nrCFR) for Switzerland. This is derived by dividing the number of daily new COVID fatalities by the new cases resolved over a period with a seven-day moving average. Looking at the evolution curve of the CFR it can be seen that during the weeks preceding the ban on hydroxychloroquine, the nrCFR index fluctuated between 3% and 5%.

Following a lag of 13 days after stopping outpatient hydroxychloroquine use, the country’s COVID-19 deaths increased four-fold and the nrCFR index stayed elevated at the highest level it had been since early in the COVID pandemic, oscillating at over 10%-15%. Early outpatient hydroxychloroquine was restarted June 11 but the four-fold “wave of excess lethality” lasted until June 22, after which the nrCFR rapidly returned to its background value.

Here in our country, Fauci continued to ignore the ever accumulating and remarkable early-use data on hydroxychloroquine and he became focused on a new antiviral compound named remdesivir. This was an experimental drug that had to be given intravenously every day for five days. It was never suitable for major widespread outpatient or at-home use as part of a national pandemic plan. We now know now that remdesivir has no effect on overall COVID patient mortality and it costs thousands of dollars per patient.

Hydroxychloroquine, by contrast, costs 60 cents a tablet, it can be taken at home, it fits in with the national pandemic plan for respiratory viruses, and a course of therapy simply requires swallowing three tablets in the first 24 hours followed by one tablet every 12 hours for five days.

There are now 53 studies that show positive results of hydroxychloroquine in COVID infections. There are 14 global studies that show neutral or negative results — and 10 of them were of patients in very late stages of COVID-19, where no antiviral drug can be expected to have much effect. Of the remaining four studies, two come from the same University of Minnesota author. The other two are from the faulty Brazil paper, which should be retracted, and the fake Lancet paper, which was.

Millions of people are taking or have taken hydroxychloroquine in nations that have managed to get their national pandemic under some degree of control. Two recent, large, early-use clinical trials have been conducted by the Henry Ford Health System and at Mount Sinai showing a 51% and 47% lower mortality, respectively, in hospitalized patients given hydroxychloroquine. A recent study from Spain published on July 29, two days before Margaret Sullivan’s strafing of “fringe doctors,” shows a 66% reduction in COVID mortality in patients taking hydroxychloroquine. No serious side effects were reported in these studies and no epidemic of heartbeat abnormalities.

This is ground-shaking news. Why is it not being widely reported? Why is the American media trying to run the U.S. pandemic response with its own misinformation?

Steven Hatfill is a veteran virologist who helped establish the Rapid Hemorrhagic Fever Response Teams for the National Medical Disaster Unit in Kenya, Africa. He is an adjunct assistant professor in two departments at the George Washington University Medical Center where he teaches mass casualty medicine. He is principle author of the prophetic book “Three Seconds Until Midnight — Preparing for the Next Pandemic,” published by Amazon in 2019.

from:    https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/08/04/an_effective_covid_treatment_the_media_continues_to_besmirch_143875.html

Now Big Brother Has A Very Big Family

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Google’s secret home security superpower: Your smart speaker with its always-on mics

Google speakers are listening to more than just voice commands. Using them for home security could supercharge Google’s $450 million ADT deal.

Janko Roettgers

August 3, 2020

Last week, Reddit user Brazedowl received a curious notification on his phone: Google was telling him that a smoke detector in his home had gone off. Brazedowl, a teacher from North Carolina who goes by Drew in real life, knew about the smoke alarm — he was at home himself and had just fried some sausages in his kitchen. But up until that moment, he had no idea that his smart speaker was able to detect such events. “Google just made my dumb smoke detectors smart,” he wrote on Reddit. “Pretty rad.”

A Google spokesperson told Protocol that the feature was accidentally enabled for some users through a recent software update and has since been rolled back. But in light of Monday’s news that Google invested $450 million — acquiring a 6.6% stake — in home security provider ADT, it may be a sign of things to come for Google, as it hints at the company’s secret home security superpower: millions of smart speakers already in people’s homes.

Once the deal closes, ADT’s more than 20,000 installers will also sell Google-made smart displays, security cameras and other hardware, and ADT will more closely integrate Google technology into its own home security offerings. “The goal is to give customers fewer false alarms, more ways to receive alarm events, and better detection of potential incidents inside and around the home,” Google Nest VP and GM Rishi Chandra said in a blog post.

Brazedowl wasn’t the only Google smart speaker user receiving a possible preview of this kind of incident detection in recent days. Other Reddit users reported getting security alerts after breaking glassware, as well as some false alarms triggered by sounds like popped bubble wrap and high-frequency noises that could be confused with a smoke alarm.

When Reddit user Brazedowl fried some sausages last week, accidentally setting off a smoke alarm, his Google Home smart speaker sent alerts to his phone.Screenshot: RedditGoogle announced support for the detection of “critical sounds” for paying subscribers of its Nest Aware home security subscription service in May. “Your Nest speakers and displays will notify you if a critical sound is detected, like a smoke alarm or glass breaking, by sending an alert to the Home app,” the company wrote in a blog post. “From there, you can hear an audio clip or listen live within the Home app to confirm the alarm.”

“A recent software update enabled these alerts on some of our speakers that didn’t have a subscription, but we’ve since rolled that back,” a Google spokesperson told Protocol last week. The spokesperson declined to comment on whether Google had any plans to bring the feature to users without subscriptions in the future. Google did announce Monday that ADT customers would get access to Nest Aware over time.

On the one hand, there is some potential for a privacy backlash. Google has long told users that its speakers only actively monitor ambient audio for utterances of the “Hey Google” wake phrase. Any use of far-field microphones for other purposes, especially for users who didn’t sign up for advanced monitoring, could result in some consumers rejecting the device category altogether.

On the other hand, the feature does demonstrate how powerful Google’s smart speakers can be in the context of home security. Google sold around 30 million smart speakers and displays in 2019 alone, market research company Strategy Analytics estimated earlier this year. All of these devices feature powerful far-field microphones capable of detecting not only voice commands but also environmental noises.

Some of this functionality is less obvious than the detection of blaring smoke alarms. Google’s smart displays sense it if someone walks up to them by emitting and monitoring ultrasonic sounds. Right now, this is being used to change the size of fonts on the display, but the same technology could conceivably also be used to detect possible intruders and other movements inside a home.

Google isn’t the first company to rely on smart speakers for monitoring; rival Amazon also uses smart speakers to detect fire alarms and other sounds as part of its Ring Alarm security system.

But in a way, it is a very Google-ish approach to home security: The search giant has long made its own cameras and smoke detectors, with mixed success, and largely failed to make a mark when it introduced its very own home security system in 2017.

With its ADT partnership, Google now signals that it is happy to rely on others for the more mundane aspects of home security, including the huge workforce needed to install and troubleshoot window sensors and the like. Instead, Google is bringing to the table what it does best: advanced technology, including millions of cheap speakers with far-field microphones, ready and able to become smart home security sensors.

from:    https://www.protocol.com/google-smart-speaker-alarm-adt

Mr. Fed, Where are You Going?

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David Stockman: The Biggest Threat To Your Prosperity And What You Can Do

Authored by David Stockman via Doug Casey’s International Man,

If you want to understand America’s dangerously deepening travails, you have to start at the Federal Reserve’s Eccles Building…

After a 30-year rolling coup d’etat, its occupants have imposed a regime of destructive falsification on America’s financial, economic, political, and social life.

It has become the heart of mushrooming darkness taking prosperity, liberty, and democracy down for the count.

How do we get 50 million unemployed… the stock market at record highs… companies trashing their balance sheets to buy back stock and do vastly overpriced M&A deals… doctors and politicians savaging the economy and the livelihoods of millions… and Washington going incontinent on the fiscal front?

The answer is simple:

the rapidly-spreading dysfunction is rooted in the giant financial fraud embedded in the Federal Reserve’s $7 trillion balance sheet.

The latter is blissfully taken for granted by the politicians and C-suites of corporate America and desperately insisted upon by the unhinged gamblers of Wall Street.

Even if you believe that a regular infusion of money is needed to catalyze the wheels of capitalist growth (we don’t), there is absolutely no economic logic that says the central bank’s balance sheet should grow by orders of magnitude faster than GDP over an extended period of time.

If the robustly growing GDP of 1987 needed $5 of central bank money per $100 of GDP, there is no reason why that ratio should have differed in 2008 or 2020.

But it did and does.

In June 1987, the nominal GDP was $4.8 trillion, and by all current estimates, it clocked in at $19.4 trillion in June 2020. That’s a 4.1X expansion over 33 years.

In contrast, the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet stood at about $240 billion on the eve of Greenspan’s arrival at the Eccles Building in August 1987 and clocked in at $7.2 trillion at the end of Q2 2020. That’s a 30X gain.

Since the early 2000s and the dotcom crash, it has only gotten far worse. The chart below of the Fed’s balance sheet and GDP is indexed to 100 as of January 2003. It tells you all you need to know.

During the past 17 years, the Fed’s balance sheet (purple line) has risen to 983% of its starting value, even as GDP (red line) has risen to only 192%.

What was fostered in the vast area between the two lines above was excess liquidity, debt, speculation, and malinvestment. This was accompanied by a complete breakdown of financial discipline in all sectors of American society.

These long-term growth factors are not even in the same zip code or planet—and the massive excess of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet versus GDP did not happen like a tree falling silently in an empty forest.

On the contrary, it turned the financial and economic world upside down. That’s because the effect was to systematically suppress the cost of debt and speculation and drastically inflate the value of financial assets. As a result, everyone got false price signals and changed their behavior accordingly:

  • Wall Street investors became leveraged speculators;
  • Corporate business builders become financial engineers;
  • Middle-class households became debt slaves living hand-to-mouth on borrowed money; and
  • Washington’s politicians became free lunch spendthrifts piling on public debt like there was no tomorrow.

The Fed is now a rogue institution that comprises a clear and present danger to the future of prosperity and liberty in America.

The tragedy is that the clueless speculators on Wall Street, and the politicians of Washington who are riding the most egregiously inflated financial bubble ever, don’t even get the joke.

So what happens next?

We’d say nothing very pleasant.

*  *  *

The truth is, we’re on the cusp of a economic crisis that could eclipse anything we’ve seen before. And most people won’t be prepared for what’s coming. That’s exactly why bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just released a free report with all the details on how to survive an economic collapse. Click here to download the PDF now.

from:    https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/david-stockman-biggest-threat-your-prosperity-and-what-you-can-do?utm_campaign=&utm_content=ZeroHedge%3A+The+Durden+Dispatch&utm_medium=email&utm_source=zh_newsletter

Take 6 Minutes to Watch… Then Think It Over.

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Forrest Maready is producing a movie that might be of interest in these unsettling times.

Right now we all need to be questioning what is going on and to look for and look at the bigger picture.  We as individuals can only be safe and saved and healthy if we all work together to uncover the lies and bring to the light the dark agendas that are threatening our sanity, our economy, our neighborhoods, our ways of life, and our own ways of thinking.

Will This Ever End?

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The Masses are Dragging us into Hell – So What can we do?

2020-08-08 G. Edward Griffin 0

This look into the future by Max Egan will disturb you to the core. It shows how gruesome life may become in the near future because of a pandemic that does not exist. Everything of value in our lives will be negatively impacted – especially the end of personal freedom and the arrival of a new money system designed to integrate with a social-score system, such as now used in Communist China. Unfortunately, Max does not show us a way out but he makes us realize that, if the masses continue to fall for the pandemic ploy, the rest of us will be swept along with them. The great value of this video, therefore, is to sharpen our vision for a winning strategy. If the masses will drag us into slavery with them, our plan becomes clear. We must apply all of our present efforts and financial resources to those projects and activities that offer the best chance of reaching the masses with the truth. If we fail to do that, nothing else matters. Thank you, Max, for making that point clear. 2020 Aug 3 – Source: #maxigan

from:    https://redpilluniversity.org/2020/08/08/the-masses-are-dragging-us-into-hell-so-what-can-we-do/

Testing Positive? Try Again…

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Ohio Governor Mike DeWine Tests Negative For COVID-19 Hours After Testing Positive: Live Updates

by Tyler Durden

Thu, 08/06/2020

Update (1920ET): Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has tested negative for COVID-19, just hours after testing positive before he was set to meet with President Trump in Cleveland.

His wife, Fran DeWine, also tested negative along with several staff members – after they all underwent a more accurate testing method in Columbus, vs. the rapid-result test which showed DeWine to be positive earlier in the day, according to AP.

DeWine, an early advocate among Republicans of wearing masks and other pandemic precautions, said he took a test arranged by the White House in Cleveland as part of standard protocol before he was to meet Trump at an airport. He had planned to join the president on a visit to the Whirlpool Corp. plant in northwest Ohio.

Instead, he received the news he was positive, called his wife, Fran DeWine, and returned to central Ohio where he took the other test that showed him to be negative.

“A big surprise to me and certainly a big surprise to our family,” DeWine said at a late afternoon news conference broadcast from his porch on his farm in Cedarville in southwestern Ohio, where he planned to quarantine for 14 days. –AP

The 73-year-old DeWine said he didn’t know how he could have contracted the virus, as he’s been spending most of his time on his farm.

from:    https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/germany-suffers-biggest-jump-covid-19-case-may-poland-imposes-new-restrictions-live?utm_campaign=&utm_content=ZeroHedge%3A+The+Durden+Dispatch&utm_medium=email&utm_source=zh_newsletter

If It works – Why Sell Your Stock?

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Moderna’s CEO, CMO Both Sell Shares As Final Coronavirus Vaccine Trials Begin – What Do They Know That We Don’t?

August 7, 2020

The executive leadership over at Moderna is abandoning ship in terms of what the future holds for its Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine.

by Ethan Huff

Both Stéphane Bancel, its CEO, and Tal Zaks, its CMO (chief medical officer) have cashed out their company shares as the company’s plandemic jab is right on the verge of entering late-stage trials.

Moderna’s Ceo, Cmo Both Sell Shares As Final Coronavirus Vaccine Trials Begin – What Do They Know That We Don’t?

According to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, Zaks recently offloaded nearly all of his shares, while Bancel has tossed many of his over the past several months.

Zaks, however, still holds tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of options in the company.

If Moderna’s vaccine for the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) was on a solid track, both of these guys probably would have kept their shares, and possibly purchased even more of them.

The fact that they cashed out, however, bodes ominous, especially for other shareholders still holding the bag.

Zaks also works on the scientific side of the company, it is important to note, suggesting that he knows something that the rest of the world does not.

Is Moderna’s vaccine on the verge of being exposed as a total failure, we wonder?

It was already obvious before this that Moderna’s jab was just a pump-and-dump scheme anyway. And now it would seem that the scam is on the verge of unraveling.

“In general, when stakeholders believe in their product, they increase their shares in order to increase confidence in the market,” reports The Jerusalem Post.

“The move by Moderna officials to do the opposite raised concerns about the company, especially considering that Zaks, who sold almost all of his shares, is on the scientific side of the company, according to Globes.”

Don’t be fooled: Moderna has probably got nothing

While Moderna would never publicly admit to it, chances are that its Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine is a total dud.

And yet the company has continued to increase share sales ever since the results of “successful” early trials were reported back in early July.

Though these results appear to be questionable at best, Moderna has continued to sell shares to eager investors that are being hoodwinked into believing that the company’s Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) jab holds promise.

Meanwhile, Bancel, his children’s trust, as well as other companies that Bancel owns all offloaded about $21 million worth of shares between January 1 and June 26.

Reuters reportedly spoke with seven different executive compensation experts about these mysterious share liquidations, which they explained highlight how companies will hype up development milestones for their products, even if said products never actually make it to market.

In other words, Moderna’s Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine may never be released, despite the company receiving gobs of American taxpayer cash to develop one.

At the same time, its executives are getting filthy rich off of the mere idea of a future vaccine being released.

“This may be their one shot at making a boatload of money if the vaccine doesn’t work out,” says Jesse Fried, a Harvard Law School professor who wrote an entire book about executive compensation.

According to Fried, Moderna’s chiefs have a strong incentive to “keep the stock price up.”

Investors, however, may not fully understand this, despite considering themselves “savvy.”

Many are right this moment buying up what appear to be overpriced shares in Moderna, which may never end up releasing this “promising” vaccine at all.

“The trial is one of the first late-stage studies supported by the Trump administration’s effort to speed development of measures against the novel coronavirus, adding to hope that an effective vaccine will help end the pandemic,” the Post further reports about Moderna’s progress.

from:    https://humansarefree.com/2020/08/modernas-ceo-cmo-both-sell-shares-as-final-coronavirus-vaccine-trials-begin-what-do-they-know-that-we-dont.html

High Winds in High Places

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Mount Washington hit by strongest August wind gust on record – New Hampshire, U.S.

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Categories: Earth changes, Hurricanes, Newsflash

Mount Washington hit by strongest August wind gust on record - New Hampshire, U.S.

The Mount Washington Observatory in New Hampshire recorded a wind gust of 237 km/h (147 mph) at the summit on Tuesday evening, August 4, 2020, as post-tropical cyclone Isaias swept through the New England region. This is the strongest wind gust ever recorded at the mountain in the month of August, breaking the previous one set in 1954.

Mount Washington is the highest peak in the Northeastern United States at 1 916 m (6 288 feet). On average, the mountain sees gusts of about 39 km/h (24 mph) during the month of August.

Strong winds from Isaias knocked power to more than 140 000 customers in New Hampshire on Tuesday. Many wires and trees were downed, blocking scores of roads. During the height of the storm, the observatory registered 237 km/h (147 mph), which officially became the strongest gust for the month of August.

The previous record for the strongest wind gust for the month of August was during Hurricane “Carol” in 1954 at 228 km/h (142 mph).

The highest all-time wind gust on Mount Washington was 372 km/h (231 mph) set in April 1934. This was the highest wind speed ever recorded on Earth until 1996 when Tropical Cyclone “Olivia” set a new record at 407 km/h (253 mph) in Barrow Island, Australia.

Featured image credit: Google

from:    https://watchers.news/2020/08/06/mount-washington-hit-by-strongest-august-wind-gust-on-record-new-hampshire-u-s/

Radiation, DNA, & Chloroquine

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Treatment of radiation disorders

Abstract
The present invention provides methods and compositions for the treatment of DNA damage related disorders. One embodiment is a method for the inhibition of side effects associated with chemotherapeutic and radiotherapeutic agents using chloroquine compounds. Another embodiment is a method for treatment and/or prevention of lethal or sub-lethal radiation toxicities associated with terrorist acts or war.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20050014785A1/en

Old Vaccines for New Viruses

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Vaccination with bacillus Calmette-Guérin leads to a small pustule that can develop into a scar.

Kwangmoozaa/iStock

Can a century-old TB vaccine steel the immune system against the new coronavirus?

By Jop de Vrieze

Researchers in four countries will soon start a clinical trial of an unorthodox approach to the new coronavirus. They will test whether a century-old vaccine against tuberculosis (TB), a bacterial disease, can rev up the human immune system in a broad way, allowing it to better fight the virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 and, perhaps, prevent infection with it altogether. The studies will be done in physicians and nurses, who are at higher risk of becoming infected with the respiratory disease than the general population, and in the elderly, who are at higher risk of serious illness if they become infected.

A team in the Netherlands will kick off the first of the trials this week. They will recruit 1000 health care workers in eight Dutch hospitals who will either receive the vaccine, called bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG), or a placebo.

BCG contains a live, weakened strain of Mycobacterium bovis, a cousin of M. tuberculosis, the microbe that causes TB. (The vaccine is named after French microbiologists Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin, who developed it in the early 20th century.) The vaccine is given to children in their first year of life in most countries of the world, and is safe and cheap—but far from perfect: It prevents about 60% of TB cases in children on average, with large differences between countries.

Vaccines generally raise immune responses specific to a targeted pathogen, such as antibodies that bind and neutralize one type of virus but not others. But BCG may also increase the ability of the immune system to fight off pathogens other than the TB bacterium, according to clinical and observational studies published over several decades by Danish researchers Peter Aaby and Christine Stabell Benn, who live and work in Guinea-Bissau. They concluded the vaccine prevents about 30% of infections with any known pathogen, including viruses, in the first year after it’s given. The studies published in this field have been criticized for their methodology, however; a 2014 review ordered by the World Health Organization concluded that BCG appeared to lower overall mortality in children, but rated confidence in the findings as “very low.” A 2016 review was a bit more positive about BCG’s potential benefits but said randomized trials were needed.

Since then, the clinical evidence has strengthened and several groups have made important steps investigating how BCG may generally boost the immune system. Mihai Netea, an infectious disease specialist at Radboud University Medical Center, discovered that the vaccine may defy textbook knowledge of how immunity works.

When a pathogen enters the body, white blood cells of the “innate” arm of the immune system attack it first; they may handle up to 99% of infections. If these cells fail, they call in the “adaptive” immune system, and T cells and antibody-producing B cells start to divide to join the fight. Key to this is that certain T cells or antibodies are specific to the pathogen; their presence is amplified the most. Once the pathogen is eliminated, a small portion of these pathogen-specific cells transform into memory cells that speed up T cell and B cell production the next time the same pathogen attacks. Vaccines are based on this mechanism of immunity.

The innate immune system, composed of white blood cells such as macrophages, natural killer cells, and neutrophils, was supposed to have no such memory. But Netea’s team discovered that BCG, which can remain alive in the human skin for up to several months, triggers not only Mycobacterium-specific memory B and T cells, but also stimulates the innate blood cells for a prolonged period. “Trained immunity,” Netea and colleagues call it. In a randomized placebo-controlled study published in 2018, the team showed that BCG vaccination protects against experimental infection with a weakened form of the yellow fever virus, which is used as a vaccine.

Together with Evangelos Giamarellos from the University of Athens, Netea has set up a study in Greece to see whether BCG can increase resistance to infections overall in elderly people. He is planning to start a similar study in the Netherlands soon. The trial was designed before the new coronavirus emerged, but the pandemic may reveal BCG’s broad effects more clearly, Netea says.

For the health care worker study, Neeta teamed up with epidemiologist and microbiologist Marc Bonten of UMC Utrecht. “There is a lot of enthusiasm to participate,” among the workers, Bonten says. The team decided not to use actual infection with coronavirus as the study outcome, but “unplanned absenteeism.” “We don’t have a large budget and it won’t be feasible to visit the sick professionals at home,” Bonten says. Looking at absenteeism has the advantage that any beneficial effects of the BCG vaccine on influenza and other infections may be captured as well, he says.

Although the study is randomized, participants will likely know if they got the vaccine instead of a placebo. BCG often causes a pustule at the injection site that may persist for months, usually resulting in a scar. But the researchers will be blinded to which arm of the study—vaccine or placebo—a person is in.

A research group at the University of Melbourne is setting up a BCG study among health care workers using the exact same protocol. Another research group at the University of Exeter will do a similar study in the elderly. And a team at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology last week announced that—inspired by Netea’s work—it will embark on a similar trial in elderly people and health workers with VPM1002, a genetically modified version of BCG that has not yet been approved for use against TB.

Eleanor Fish, an immunologist at the of the University of Toronto, says the vaccine probably won’t eliminate infections with the new coronavirus completely, but is likely to dampen its impact on individuals. Fish says she’d take the vaccine herself if she could get a hold of it, and even wonders whether it’s ethical to withhold its potential benefits from trial subjects in the placebo arm.

But Netea says the randomized design is critical: “Otherwise we would never know if this is good for people.” The team may have answers within a few months.

from:    https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/can-century-old-tb-vaccine-steel-immune-system-against-new-coronavirus