Check out this report from James Corbett. It is time to take charge of your health and your future, as well as that of y9our loved ones;
Author Archives: marcia
Nashville DEW
Nashville “Bombing” – Directed Energy Weapon Caught on Camera BEFORE Explosion!
Security camera video from Nashville, TN shows what appears to be a Directed Energy Weapon coming down out of the sky and burning the AT&T Data Center location just seconds BEFORE a massive explosion erupted. We have the video!
Before we go farther, you need to understand that the AT&T data center in Nashville, TN, which is where this explosion took place, is an absolutely CRITICAL piece of United States communications infrastructure. It is a primary hub for VoIP traffic (Voice Over Internet Protocol) and is a primary data collection center used by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) to intercept telephone calls and keep stored copies of those phone calls.
The map below shows how few such centers exist, and the critical location of the Nashville Center relative to the rest of the system:
The damage done to this AT&T facility knocked out 911 Emergency call centers in most of Tennesee, parts of kentuck and even parts of Alabama. It also knocked out AT&T cellular services in much of Tennessee, knocked out airport Control Tower radio communications with aircraft, and completely cut off most Internet services in much of Tennessee. Big impact on communications.
DIRECTED ENERGY WEAPON ATTACK
The video below aired on local television in Nashville and the news reporter whose voice can be heard, describes what he is seeing as “something coming up off the ground into the sky . . .” as giant flames from an explosion rise up into the air. Here, pay VERY close attention to the first five seconds:
But a closer look at what the reporter describes as “goes up into the sky” reveals that what is seen is a directed energy weapon fired FROM the sky, and whose beam is obstructed by the low level cloud cover as the beam moves with the satellite.
What makes it clear this is an energy beam is that it TRAVELS to the right IN COMPLETE UNIFORMITY at significantly high speed . . . thus proving it is NOT something “coming up from the ground” but rather a beam moving at high speed because a space satellite in orbit, WHICH FIRED THE BEAM, is moving at such a high speed relative to the ground!
Very shortly after the beam is visible, gigantic flames from a ground explosion rise up from the ground below.
If this was something shooting up from the ground, them it would have a smoke/debris trail which would LINGER, being gently pushed by winds. But that’s NOT what we see. We see the “smoke trail” moving at high speed, and very uniformly toward the right . . . which is NOT a characteristic of a smoke/debris trail.
NO BLAST CRATER
There is NO BLAST CRATER on the ground where the Recreational Vehicle (RV) allegedly exploded.
In countless images from countless other truck bombings, a large blast crater is always clearly visible in the aftermath. Not in Nashville! NO BLAST CRATER exists on the public street where this RV exploded.
Here’s a few images, see any crater?
MORE . . .
Debris on the ground outside the AT&T data center shows al long, stainless steel, ELEVATOR PISTON from an underground hydraulic elevator inside the AT&T data center, laying outside on the sidewalk.
In the images below show images of the debris in the top photo, and how the street looked BEFORE the explosion, in the bottom photo.
In the top photo, the steel elevator piston is contained within the red outlined area and the street elevator shaft it came out of is shown in the green outlined area. Here, look: 
The condo complex where I reside has this exact type of elevator piston.
The piston was installed before the condo complex roof was put on. It is a long piston that allows an elevator in our building to service the ground level and the three residential levels above it (about 40 feet long. The piston has to be installed from the roof because it is NOT a telescoping piston; it is one, long, piece of steel, lowered into place by crane during construction.
At the bottom end of the piston is a flexible connection segment, as is clearly visible in the photo from Nashville.
If the explosion that took place was solely from an RV on the street, there is no physical way possible for the underground elevator piston to have been hurled upward toward the explosion from underground. The explosion HAD to take place inside the AT&T data center in order to hurl that elevator piston upwards out of the ground and on to the street!
Video showing a blast on the street are actually showing the blast which began inside the AT&T data center, finally breaking through the foundation of the building and erupting onto the street, enveloping the RV.
The investigation by law enforcement is ongoing. But there are serious questions arising about this incident, and there is already empirical physical evidence proving something much bigger took place in this situation than we’re being told.
It seems clear the AT&T data center was the target of this attack. It seems whoever attacked the data center WANTED to disrupt communications in the US. They also WANTED to do something to the NSA telephone recording and data collection abilities.
But police report that the RV had a loudspeaker and a recorded message telling people to evacuate. I know of no bomber who ever did that.
One possibility is maybe a “deep state” perpetrator needed to do this, but was warned not to cause innocent casualties????? Who ELSE has access to directed energy weapons and would also NEED to destroy evidence in a data collection facility?
Another possibility is that a foreign nation attacked us. Again. With the same weaponry repeatedly seen used to start wildfires in California, Oregon and Washington State.
GEORGIA RUNOFF ELECTION – Jan. 5
I’m going to reveal something now that will make a lot of people angry. Inside Nashville AT&T Data Center, Room 641A is the specific data collection point operated by AT&T for the National Security Agency (NSA). It is part of the Warrantless interception perpetrated by government under the PATRIOT ACT.
What part of the United States does this particular room cover? Georgia.
By damaging this data center, it will make it almost impossible to monitor the upcoming Runoff Election for US Senate within the State of Georgia scheduled for January 5.
Whoever did this may have wanted to prevent anyone from repeating the capture of phony voting tabulation which was caught during the November 3 Presidential election. As most rational people already realize, that November 3 election was stolen by Democrats to illegitimately claim the Presidency for Joe Biden. Now they seem to want to steal the US Senate too.
So either the “Deep State” is trying to hide their upcoming theft of the Georgia US Senate runoff election, or perhaps they’re on the run, trying to destroy evidence? The other possibility is that a foreign power is attacking US infrastructure to hamper communications before they . . . . what . . . . attack?
Either way, this Nashville incident has trouble written all over it, either from a Deep State, false flag or from a foreign power trying to weaken the nation and hamper communications.
from: https://halturnerradioshow.com/index.php/en/news-page/news-nation/nashville-bombing-directed-energy-weapon-caught-on-camera-before-explosion
Food Shortages Coming – Be Alert
Check out the map from. https://iceagefarmer.com/map/
You can see the crop losses throughout the world and the Solar Minimum is coming.
Then listen to the report: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oe3y-OdNSsw&feature=emb_logo
Human Activity Is Changing Space? Really?
There’s a Human-Made Barrier in Space, Surrounding The Entire Earth
In 2017, NASA space probes detected a massive, human-made ‘barrier’ surrounding Earth.
And tests have confirmed that it’s actually having an effect on space weather far beyond our planet’s atmosphere.
That means we’re not just changing Earth so severely, scientists are calling for a whole new geological epoch to be named after us – our activities have been changing space too.
But the good news is that unlike our influence on the planet itself, that humungous bubble we created out in space is actually working in our favour.
Back in 2012, NASA launched two space probes to work in tandem with each other as they whizzed through Earth’s Van Allen Belts at speeds of around 3,200 km/h (2,000 mph).
Our planet is surrounded by two such radiation belts (and a temporary third one) – the inner belt stretches from around 640 to 9,600 km (400 to 6,000 miles) above Earth’s surface, while the outer belt occupies an altitude of roughly 13,500 to 58,000 km (8,400 to 36,000 miles).
In 2017, the Van Allen Probes detected something strange as they monitored the activity of charged particles caught within Earth’s magnetic field – these dangerous solar discharges were being kept at bay by some kind of low frequency barrier.
When researchers investigated, they found that this barrier had been actively pushing the Van Allen Belts away from Earth over the past few decades, and now the lower limits of the radiation streams are actually further away from us than they were in the 1960s.
So what’s changed?
A certain type of transmission, called very low frequency (VLF) radio communications, have become far more common now than in the 60s, and the team at NASA confirmed that they can influence how and where certain particles in space move about.
In other words, thanks to VLF, we now have anthropogenic (or human-made) space weather.
“A number of experiments and observations have figured out that, under the right conditions, radio communications signals in the VLF frequency range can in fact affect the properties of the high-energy radiation environment around the Earth,” said one of the team, Phil Erickson from the MIT Haystack Observatory in Massachusetts, back in 2017.
Most of us won’t have much to do with VLF signals in our everyday life, but they’re a mainstay in many engineering, scientific, and military operations.
With frequencies between 3 and 30 kilohertz, they’re far too weak to carry audio transmissions, but they’re perfect for broadcasting coded messages across long-distances or deep underwater.
One of the most common uses of VLF signals is to communicate with deep-sea submarines, but because their large wavelengths can diffract around large obstacles such as mountain ranges, they’re also used to achieve transmissions across tricky terrain.
It was never the intention for VLF signals to go anywhere other than on Earth, but it turns out they’ve been leaking into the space surrounding our planet, and have lingered long enough to form a giant protective bubble.
When the Van Allen Probes compared the location of the VLF bubble to the bounds of Earth’s radiation belts, they found what initially looked like an interesting coincidence – “The outward extent of the VLF bubble corresponds almost exactly to the inner edge of the Van Allen radiation belts,” said NASA.
But once they realised that VLF signals can actually influence the movement of the charged particles within these radiation belts, they realised that our unintentional human-made barrier has been progressively pushing them back.
One of the team, Dan Baker, from the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, referred to this as the “impenetrable barrier”.
While our protective VLF bubble is probably the best influence we humans have made on the space surrounding our planet, it’s certainly not the only one – we’ve been making our mark on space since the 19th century, and particularly over the past 50 years, when nuclear explosions were all the rage.
“These explosions created artificial radiation belts near Earth that resulted in major damages to several satellites,” the NASA team explained.
“Other anthropogenic impacts on the space environment include chemical release experiments, high-frequency wave heating of the ionosphere and the interaction of VLF waves with the radiation belts.”
Astronomer Carl Sagan once wanted to find unequivocal indications of life on Earth from up in space – turns out, there are a bunch of them if you know where to look.
The research was published by Science Space Reviews.
A version of this story was first published in May 2017.
from: https://www.sciencealert.com/there-is-a-human-made-barrier-surrounding-earth-and-we-can-detect-it
Digital Passport Anyone?
Yes, Bill Gates Said That. Here’s the Proof.
Gates and his minions insist the billionaire never said we’d need digital vaccine passports. But in a June 2020 TED Talk, Gates said exactly that. Someone edited out the statement, but CHD tracked down the original.
Some chiseler altered Bill Gates’ June 2020 TED Talk to edit out his revealing prediction that we will all soon need digital vaccine passports (slide 1). But after considerable effort, we tracked down the original video (slide 2).
Gates’ minions on cable and network news, his public broadcasting, social media and fact-checker toadies all now insist that Gates never said such things. They say he never intended to track and trace us with subdermal chips or injected tattoos.
They dismiss such talk as “conspiracy theories.”
Well, here it is from the horse’s mouth.
In 2019, according to a not-yet-purged Scientific American article, Gates commissioned the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to build an injectable quantum dot dye system to tattoo stored medical info beneath children’s skin. The tattoo was designed to be readable by an iPhone app.
Gates’ company, Microsoft, has patented a sinister technology that uses implanted chips with sensors that will monitor body and brain activity. It promises to reward compliant humans with crypto currency payments when they perform assigned activities.
Gates also invested approximately $20 million in MicroCHIPS, a company that makes chip-based devices, including birth-control implant chips with wireless on/off switches for remote-controlled drug-delivery by medical authorities.
In July 2019, months before the COVID pandemic, Gates bought 3.7M shares of Serco, a military contractor with U.S. and UK government contracts to track and trace pandemic infections and vaccine compliance.
To facilitate our transition to his surveillance society, Gates invested $1 billion in EarthNow, which promises to blanket the globe in 5G video surveillance satellites. EarthNow will launch 500 satellites allowing governments and large enterprises to live-stream monitor almost every “corner” of the Earth, providing instantaneous video feedback with one-second delay.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation also acquired 5.3 million shares of Crown Castle, which owns 5G spy antennas including more than 40,000 cell towers and 65,000 small cells.
Please make your own copy of these clips — as Gates’ power to disappear inconvenient facts is expanding every digital day.
from: https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/yes-bill-gates-said-that/
A Little Shot of Cancer, Perhaps?
(Please note that I have excerpted a good deal of the text which is available at the link below)
Sausage Making at FDA: How Human Cancer Cells Got Into Vaccines
In a 2012 meeting, the FDA voted to allow the use of human fetal cells and adult human tumor cells in vaccines, despite acknowledging the many risks, including that vaccine recipients might later develop cancer.
“If the American people knew some of the things that went on at the FDA, they’d never take anything but Bayer aspirin.” — Len Lutwalk, FDA scientist
“The FDA, by spinelessly knuckling under to every whim of the drug companies, has thrown away its high reputation, and in doing so, forfeited our trust.” — Drummond Rennie, deputy editor of JAMA
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Vaccines and related biological products advisory committee today
Today — Thursday, Dec. 10 — the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), which is the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) internal panel that licenses new vaccines as “safe and effective,” will meet to consider Pfizer’s COVID vaccine. VRBAC will meet in one week, Dec. 17, to consider approval of the Moderna vaccine.
The damning safety studies in Pfizer’s late release clinical trial data dump, and the severe (life-threatening) allergic reactions that bedeviled the vaccine’s UK rollout, have raised red flags and public anxiety about the safety of the companies’ mRNA vaccines. Anthony Fauci has addressed growing skepticism about COVID vaccines and the Operation Warp Speed program, by reassuring the public that “VRBPAC” is an “independent panel of leading experts” whom the public can absolutely trust to assure vaccine safety.
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How FDA originally approved use of fetal cells in vaccines
FDA allows both human fetal cells and adult human tumor cells in vaccines. Both types have cancer risks. While both Pfizer and Moderna tested their mRNA vaccine using fetal cells, there are no fetal cells, cell debris or DNA in their final products.
However, according to company documents, Johnson and Johnson (Janssen) and Altimmune’s COVID vaccines are manufactured in the human fetal cell line PER-C6, and thus the final vaccine products will contain cellular debris and DNA fragments from these cells. Researchers harvested these cell lines from the eyeball of an 18-week-old human fetus aborted in 1985, and then rendered them immortal by making them cancerous.
The AstraZeneca, Cansino, Gamayela, Vaxart, LongComm and Upitt vaccines are manufactured in the human fetal cell line HEK293, and thus the final vaccine products will contain cellular debris and DNA fragments from the fetal HEK-293 cell line. Scientists harvested this cell line from the kidney of a female Dutch fetus legally aborted in 1973 and then immortalized the cells by rendering them cancerous.
Normal primary cells, which are unable to replicate indefinitely, ultimately die. Immortalized cell lines are derived from known malignant cancer cells such as those obtained from Henrietta Lacks (HeLa) or created in the laboratory by introducing viral oncogenes or chemical exposures capable of mutating normal primary cells into immortal tumor cells.
According to FDA’s “The Pink Sheet” dated Nov. 29, 1999, for two decades the agency has been acutely aware of the inherent risks of using immortalized cell lines for vaccine development. The FDA CBER Director Dr. Peter Patriarca, M.D. explained that continuous cell lines are used for their ability to self-propagate, making them an ideal substrate on which to grow viruses, “the worst thing we are concerned about is … malignancy, because some of these continuous cells have the potential for growing tumors in laboratory animals.”
Patriarca further conceded that “the technology to make these vaccines actually exceeds the science and technology to understand how these vaccines work and to predict how they will work.” …
We call vaccines “biologics” because vaccinologists have traditionally grown their antigens on biological substrates — usually animal tissue. Competing companies culture COVID vaccines on a variety of animal strata. The Merck and IAVA COVID vaccines are manufactured in vero monkey cells, and thus contain cellular debris and DNA fragments from vero monkeys in the final product. The Sanofi, GSK, and Novavax COVID jabs are manufactured in insect cells and thus contain insect cellular debris and DNA fragments in the final products.
Public health advocates criticize the use of animal tissues in vaccines due to risks that they carry endogenous viruses, microbes, parasites and lack safety testing. (Plague of Corruption, Mikovits 2020). …
Researchers and regulatory agencies have worried for more than 50 years about the potential for injected DNA to cause cancer. …
Regulators have in the past predicted that the odds of that happening were less than 1 in a trillion. However, in early gene therapy trials this event did indeed occur in 4 of 9 boys, 1 of whom died from the leukemia the insertions caused.
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FDA as an arm of Big Pharma
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Between 2000 and 2010, pharmaceutical companies paid the FDA $3.4 billion to gain rapid drug approvals. Today, Pharma companies underwrite three-quarters of FDA’s budget for scientific reviews (ProPublica) and fund nearly 50% of the FDA’s total annual budget through PDUFA fees. In exchange, the agency increasingly fast-tracks expensive drugs and vaccines with significant side effects and unproven health benefits.
Corrupt vaccine approval panels
But as corrupt as FDA is, the internal panels — VRBAC — that approve new vaccines make the rest of the agency look like a Sunday church picnic.
When Dr. Fauci, Paul Offit, Peter Hotez and Bill Gates tell you that you needn’t worry because FDA is the “gold standard” for vaccine safety and that the ultimate licensing decision will be made by an “independent panel of experts,” they are talking about VRBPAC. But VRBPAC is far from “independent.” It is not even comprised exclusively of public officials. Instead, it is populated by outside “experts” who are almost all pharmaceutical industry insiders.
In 2003, following a 3-year investigation, the United States Congress’s House Oversight Committee found VRBAC was completely dominated by the vaccine industry.
“Examples of Conflicts of Interest:
- “For instance, 3 out of 5 FDA advisory committee (VRBPAC) members who voted to approve the rotavirus vaccine in December 1997 had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine.
- “One out of five voting members’ employer had a $9,586,000 contract for a rotavirus vaccine.
- “One out of five voting members was the principal investigator for a Merck grant to develop a rotavirus vaccine.
- “One out of five voting members received approximately $1 million from vaccine manufacturers toward vaccine development.”
Congressional investigators concluded that, “Altogether, four out of the five committee members had conflicts of interest that required waivers, and their recommendation for approval of the vaccine was unanimous.”
Here’s what happened at the 2012 FDA meeting on fetal cells
HHS acknowledges that the FDA and Centers for Disease Control committees that contract and review new vaccines have historically not used “evidence-based medicine.” To illustrate what this means, one only need read (below) the astonishing transcript of the 2012 panel that first approved the use of adult cancer tumor cells in vaccines.
This transcript shows what the public is never supposed to see: the behind-the-scenes sausage-making of federal vaccine approvals. Here, you will read for yourself how the “independent,” “gold standard” panelists entrusted with protecting your children made monumentally consequential decisions, not on evidence-based science, but by rolling the dice and taking what they knew was a horrendously risky bet on public health
In any other realm, this transcript would be proof of negligent homicide. … We are all lab rats in their high-risk population-wide experiment. At FDA’s vaccine division, that sort of reckless decision-making is routine.
In 2012, most live virus vaccines were from animal tissue and the idea of putting potentially cancerous tumor cells from adult “donors” in vaccines was still a daring and audacious gamble. That September, the FDA VRBPAC committee met to discuss this risky innovation. The transcript of that meeting — showing captive FDA officials considering a proposal by the pharma cabal to allow the use of human cancer cells (HeLa) to replace animal tissue in the manufacture of vaccines — is proof of reckless criminal conduct.
The HeLa cells are well known to cause cancer in animals, but Big Pharma wanted to lower production costs of vaccines and this method is cheaper and faster than using animal tissue for the cultivated media. …
Unbelievably, FDA voted to allow pharmaceutical companies to produce vaccines using human cells without reviewing a single scientific study to determine if the outcome would be safe.
Before, I quoted some of the criminally reckless statements from the meeting directly. A more detailed account appears in this article.
This was a full meeting of FDA’s VRBPAC in 2012 to decide on the use of human tumor cell lines for the production of vaccines. I list these speakers and their titles at that time:
- Dr. Philip Krause, Acting Deputy Director of OVRR (Office of Vaccine Research and Review) and FDA’s CBER (Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research). Also, Principal Investigator for Vaccine Safety: Virus Detection and Latency.
- Dr. Doug Lowy, Director of the National Cancer Institute of the NIH.
- Dr. Robert Daum, Chair of the VRBPAC.
- Donald W. Jehn M.S., Designated Federal Officer for VRBPAC.
- Keith Peden, PhD, Chief of LDNAV, DVP/OVRR/CBER.
- Dr. Marion Gruber, Director of the FDA’s Office of Vaccines.
- Dr. Nathanial Brady, a self-described clinician.
- Dr. Pamela McInnes, a vaccine development expert and the Director of the Division of Extramural Research at the NIH’s National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, and previously a Deputy Director under Anthony Fauci at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Pharma knew that their tumorigenic vaccines might cause tumors in recipients.
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FDA officials knew that tumors might occur decades after vaccination.
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FDA openly acknowledged that its primary objective was not to assure public safety but to help vaccine manufacturers.
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FDA officials knew that they could not prove vaccine safety using test animals to assess oncogenicity.
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FDA officials deliberately terminated animal safety tests too early in order to conceal consequences.
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FDA decided to keep the tumor cell lines secret, because doctors and the public may be alarmed and say “Oh, my God!” if they knew the truth.
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FDA decided to use deceptive language to convince doctors and the public that the vaccines were safe even when they, themselves, were unconvinced of safety.
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FDA decided to hide information about their use of tumor cells and omit it from package inserts.
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Health authorities were skeptical about safety of the tumor lines, but they decided to subject the public to the risk, so that they could perform a global population-wide live human experiment.
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FDA officials opted to toss the dice, perform the population-wide human experiment, and learn about the risks as time goes by.
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The committee formally approves the method of making vaccines from human cancer tumors.
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Prior to voting to go forward, the committee made the following conclusions:
- Making vaccines with cells that are directly derived from human cancer tumors is faster and cheaper than breeding animals for the culture media.
- Millions of potentially cancer-causing vaccines will be produced.
- The vaccines may possibly cause genetic mutations.
- Millions of dollars will be made by vaccine promoters.
- The health of millions of consumers may be jeopardized.
- Information about how vaccines are made will be hidden from doctors and
Finally, it’s worth considering that cancer treatment drugs like Keytruda are among pharmaceutical companies’ largest profit makers. Precipitating a cancer epidemic in human populations only benefits vaccine makers’ bottom line.
Remember, these are the same companies and the same FDA regulators that brought us the opioid epidemic.
from: https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/fda-cancer-cells-in-vaccines/?utm_source=salsa&eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=8fc80363-cace-4de1-bcd2-9e309b779ac5
Some Real Expert Opinions
Take a few minutes to listen to what unbiased physicians and health professionals who are not in the pay of Big Pharma have to say:
https://brandnewtube.com/watch/ask-the-experts-covid-19-vaccine-now-banned-on-youtube-and-facebook_qIsNohSIeSgfz2J.html
Rethinking Viruses
Why Everything You Learned About Viruses is WRONG
By Sayer Ji
Contributing writer for Wake Up World
Groundbreaking research indicates that most of what is believed about the purportedly deadly properties of viruses like influenza is, in fact, not evidence-based but myth.
Germ theory is an immensely powerful force on this planet, affecting everyday interactions from a handshake, all the way up the ladder to national vaccination agendas and global eradication campaigns.
But what if fundamental research on what exactly these ‘pathogens’ are, how they infect us, has not yet even been performed? What if much of what is assumed and believed about the danger of microbes, particularly viruses, has completely been undermined in light of radical new discoveries in microbiology?
Some of our readers already know that in my previous writings I discuss why the “germs as our enemies” concept has been decimated by the relatively recent discovery of the microbiome. For in depth background on this topic, read my previous article, “How The Microbiome Destroyed the Ego, Vaccine Policy, and Patriarchy.” You can also read Profound Implications of the Virome for Human Health and Autoimmunity, to get a better understanding of how viruses are actually beneficial to mammalian health.
In this article I will take a less philosophical approach, and focus on influenza as a more concrete example of the Copernican-level paradigm shift in biomedicine and life sciences we are all presently fully immersed within, even if the medical establishment has yet to acknowledge it. (a topic I cover extensively in my book REGENERATE: Unlocking Your Body’s Radical Resilience through the New Biology).
Deadly Flu Viruses: Vaccinate or Die?
The hyperbolic manner in which health policymakers and mainstream media pundits talk about it today, flu virus (or COVID-19) is an inexorably lethal force (note: viruses are obligiate parasites, at worst, with no inner motive force to actively “infect” others), against which all citizens, of all ages 6 months or older, need the annual influenza vaccine to protect themselves against, lest they (it is said) face deadly consequences. Worse, those who hold religious or philosophical objections, or who otherwise conscientiously object to vaccinating, are being characterized as doing harm to others by denying them herd immunity (a concept that has been completely debunked by a careful study of the evidence, or lack thereof). For instance, in the interview below Bill Gates tells Sanjay Gupta that he thinks non-vaccinators “kill children”:
But what if I told you that there isn’t even such a thing as “flu virus,” in the sense of a monolithic, disease vector existing outside of us, conceived as it is as the relationship of predator to prey?
First, consider that the highly authorative Cochrane collaboration acknowledges there are many different flu viruses that are not, in fact, influenza A — against which flu vaccines are targeted — but which nonetheless can contribute to symptoms identical to those attributed to influenza A:
“Over 200 viruses cause influenza and influenza-like illness which produce the same symptoms (fever, headache, aches and pains, cough and runny noses). Without laboratory tests, doctors cannot tell the two illnesses apart. Both last for days and rarely lead to death or serious illness. At best, vaccines might be effective against only Influenza A and B, which represent about 10% of all circulating viruses.” (Source: Cochrane Summaries).” [emphasis added]
This makes for a picture of complexity that powerfully undermines health policies that presuppose vaccination equates to bona fide immunity, and by implication, necessitates the herd collectively participate in the ritual of mass vaccination campaigns as a matter of life-or-death social necessity.
Even the use of the word “immunization” to describe vaccination is highly misleading. The moment the word is used, it already presupposes efficacy, and makes it appear as if non-vaccinators are anti-immunity, instead of what they actually are: pro-immunity (via clean air, food, water, and sunlight), but unwilling to subject themselves or their healthy children to “unavoidably unsafe” medical procedures with only theoretical benefits.
Why Flu Virus Doesn’t Exist (The Way We Were Told)
But the topic gets even more interesting when we consider the findings of a 2015 study entitled “Conserved and host-specific features of influenza virion architecture.” This was the first study ever to plumb the molecular depths of what influenza virus is actually composed of. Amazingly, given the long history of vaccine use and promotion, the full characterization of what proteins it contains, and where they are derived from, was never previously performed. How we invest billions of dollars annually into flu vaccines, and have created a global campaign to countermand a viral enemy, whose basic building blocks were not even known until a few years ago, is hard to understand. But it is true nonetheless.
The study abstract opens with this highly provocative line:
“Viruses use virions to spread between hosts, and virion composition is therefore the primary determinant of viral transmissibility and immunogenicity.” [emphasis added]
Influenza viral particles
Virion are also known as “viral particles,” and they are the means by which viral nucleic acids are able to move and ‘infect’ living organisms. Without the viral particle (taxi) to carry around the virus DNA (passenger), it would be harmless; in fact, viruses are often described as existing somewhere between living and inanimate objects for this reason: they do not produce their own energy, nor are transmissable without a living host. And so, in this first line, the authors are making it clear that virion composition is also the primary determinant in how or whether a virus is infectious (transmits) and what effects it will have in the immune system of the infected host.
This distinction is important because we often think of viruses as simply pathogenic strings of DNA or RNA. The irony, of course, is that the very things we attribute so much lethality to — viral nucleic acids — are not even alive, and can not infect an organism without all the other components (proteins, lipids, extra-viral nucleic acids) which are, technically, not viral in origin, participating in the process. And so, if the components that are non-viral are essential for the virus to cause harm, how can we continue to maintain that we are up against a monolithic disease entity “out there” who “infects” us, a passive victim? It’s fundamentally non-sensical, given these findings. It also clearly undermines the incessant, fear-based rhetoric those beholden to the pro-vaccine stance to coerce the masses into undergoing the largely faith-based rite of vaccination.
Let’s dive deeper into the study’s findings.
The next line of the abstract addresses the fact we opened this article with: namely, that there is great complexity involved at the level of the profound variability in virion composition:
“However, the virions of many viruses are complex and pleomorphic, making them difficult to analyze in detail”
But this problem of the great variability in the virion composition of influenza is exactly why the study was conducted. They explain:
“Here we address this by identifying and quantifying viral proteins with mass spectrometry, producing a complete and quantifiable model of the hundreds of viral and host-encoded proteins that make up the pleomorphic virions of influenza virus. We show that a conserved influenza virion architecture, which includes substantial quantities of host proteins as well as the viral protein NSI, is elaborated with abundant host-dependent features. As a result, influenza virions produced by mammalian and avian hosts have distinct protein compositions.”
In other words, they found that the flu virus is as much comprised of biological material from the host the virus ‘infects,’ as the viral genetic material of the virus per se.
How then, do we differentiate influenza virus as fully “other”? Given that it would not exist without “self” proteins, or those of other host animals like birds (avian) or insects, this would be impossible to do with any intellectual honesty intact.
There’s also the significant problem presented by flu vaccine production. Presently, human flu vaccine antigen is produced via insects and chicken eggs. This means that the virus particles extracted from these hosts would contain foreign proteins, and would therefore produce different and/or unpredictable immunological responses in humans than would be expected from human influenza viral particles. One possibility is that the dozens of foreign proteins found within avian influenza could theoretically produce antigens in humans that cross-react with self-structures resulting in autoimmunity. Safety testing, presently, does not test for these cross reactions. Clearly, this discovery opens up a pandora’s box of potential problems that have never sufficiently been analyzed, since it was never understood until now that “influenza” is so thoroughly dependent upon a host for its transmissability and immunogenecity.
Are Flu Viruses Really “Hijacked” Exosomes?
Lastly, the study identified something even more amazing:
“Finally, we note that influenza virions share an underlying protein composition with exosomes, suggesting that influenza virions form by subverting micro vesicle” production.”
What these researchers are talking about is the discovery that virion particles share stunning similarities to naturally occurring virus-like particles produced by all living cells called exosomes. Exosomes, like many viruses (i.e. enveloped viruses) are enclosed in a membrane, and are within the 50-100 nanometer size range that viruses are (20-400 nm). They also contain biologically active molecules, such as proteins and lipids, as well as information-containing ones like RNAs — exactly, or very similar, to the types of contents you find in viral particles.
Watch this basic video on exosomes to get a primer:
When we start to look at viruses through the lens of their overlap with exosomes, which as carriers of RNAs are essential for regulating the expression of the vast majority of the human genome, we start to understand how their function could be considered neutral as “information carriers,” if not beneficial. Both exosomes and viruses may actually be responsible for inter-species or cross-kingdom communication and regulation within the biosphere, given the way they are able to facilitate and mediate horizontal information transfer between organisms. Even eating a piece of fruit containing these exosomes can alter the expression of vitally important genes within our body.
Exosomes
In light of this post-Germ Theory perspective, viruses could be described as pieces of information in search of chromosomes; not inherently “bad,” but, in fact, essential for mediating the genotype/phenotype relationship within organisms, who must adapt to ever-shifting environmental conditions in real-time in order to survive; something the glacial pace of genetic changes within the primary nucleotide sequences of our DNA cannot do (for instance, it may take ~ 100,000 years for a protein-coding gene sequence to change versus seconds for a protein-coding gene’s expression to be altered via modulation via viral or exosomal RNAs).
This does not mean they are “all good”, either. Sometimes, given many conditions outside their control, their messages could present challenges or misinformation to the cells to which they are exposed, which could result in a “disease symptom.” These disease symptoms are often if not invariably attempts by the body to self-regulate and ultimately improve and heal itself.
In other words, the virion composition of viruses appears to be the byproduct of the cell’s normal exosome (also known as microvesicle) production machinery and trafficking, albeit being influenced by influenza DNA. And like exosomes, viruses may be a means of extracellular communication between cells, instead of simply a pathological disease entity. This could explain why an accumulating body of research on the role of the virome in human health indicates that so-called infectious agents, including viruses like measles, confer significant health benefits. [see: the Health Benefits of Measles and The Healing Power of Germs?].
Other researchers have come to similar discoveries about the relationship between exosomes and viruses, sometimes describing viral hijacking of exosome pathways as a “Trojan horse” hypothesis. HIV may provide such an example.
Concluding Remarks
The remarkably recent discovery of the host-dependent nature of the influenza virus’ virion composition is really just the tip of an intellectual iceberg that has yet to fully emerge into the light of day, but is already “sinking” ships; paradigm ships, if you will.
One such paradigm is that germs are enemy combatants, and that viruses serve no fundamental role in our health, and should be eradicated from the earth with drugs and vaccines, if possible.
This belief, however, is untenable. With the discovery of the indispensable role of the microbiome, and the subpopulation of viruses within it — the virome — we have entered into an entirely new, ecologically-based view of the body and its environs that are fundamentally inseparable. Ironically, the only thing that influenza may be capable of killing is germ theory itself.
For an in-depth exploration of this, watch the lecture below on the virome. I promise, if you do so, you will no longer be able to uphold germ theory as a monolithic truth any longer. You may even start to understand how we might consider some viruses “our friends,” and why we may need viruses far more than they need us.
from: https://wakeup-world.com/2020/09/03/why-everything-you-learned-about-viruses-is-wrong-2/
Ah, Vaccines! They Are Not What You Think
by Jon Rappoport
December 10, 2020
Now that governments are going to roll out “a vaccine to save the world” (see here and here), people should become aware of a history they don’t know exists.
The article below was a small section of my book, AIDS INC., which I wrote in 1987-8. At the time, I decided to take a look at vaccines and see what I could find out about them.
My ensuing research led me into all sorts of surprising areas.
Since the period of 1987-8, much more has come to light about vaccine safety and efficacy. Here is what I discovered way back when—
“The combined death rate from scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough and measles among children up to fifteen shows that nearly 90 percent of the total decline in mortality between 1860 and 1965 had occurred before the introduction of antibiotics and widespread immunization. In part, this recession may be attributed to improved housing and to a decrease in the virulence of micro-organisms, but by far the most important factor was a higher host-resistance due to better nutrition.” Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis, Bantam Books, 1977
“In a recent British outbreak of whooping cough, for example, even fully immunized children contracted the disease in fairly large numbers; and the rates of serious complications and death were reduced only slightly. In another recent outbreak of pertussis, 46 of the 85 fully immunized children studied eventually contracted the disease.
“In 1977, 34 new cases of measles were reported on the campus of UCLA, in a population that was supposedly 91% immune, according to careful serological testing. Another 20 cases of measles were reported in the Pecos, New Mexico, area within a period of a few months in 1981, and 75% of them had been fully immunized, some of them quite recently. A survey of sixth-graders in a well-immunized urban community revealed that about 15% of this age group are still susceptible to rubella, a figure essentially identical with that of the pre-vaccine era.” Richard Moskowitz, MD, The Case Against Immunizations, 1983, American Institute of Homeopathy.
“Of all reported whooping cough cases between 1979 and 1984 in children over 7 months of age – that is, old enough to have received the primary course of the DPT shots (diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus) – 41% occurred in children who had received three or more shots and 22% in children who had one or two immunizations.
“Among children under 7 months of age who had whooping cough, 34% had been immunized between one and three times…
“… Based on the only U.S. findings on adverse DPT reactions, an FDA-financed study at the University of California, Los Angeles, one out of every 350 children will have a convulsion; one in 180 children will experience high-pitched screaming; and one in 66 will have a fever of 105 degrees or more.” Jennifer Hyman, Democrat and Chronicle, Rochester, New York, special supplement on DPT, dated April, 1987.
“A study undertaken in 1979 at the University of California, Los Angeles, under the sponsorship of the Food and Drug Administration, and which has been confirmed by other studies, indicates that in the U.S.A. approximately 1,000 infants die annually as a direct result of DPT vaccinations, and these are classified as SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) deaths. These represent about 10 to 15% of the total number of SIDS deaths occurring annually in the U.S.A. (between 8,000 and 10,000 depending on which statistics are used).” Leon Chaitow, Vaccination and Immunization, CW Daniel Company Limited, Saffron Walden, Essex, England, 1987.
“Assistant Secretary of Health Edward Brandt, Jr., MD, testifying before the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources, rounded… figures off to 9,000 cases of convulsions, 9,000 cases of collapse, and 17,000 cases of high-pitched screaming for a total of 35,000 acute neurological reactions occurring within forty-eight hours of a DPT shot among America’s children every year.” DPT: A Shot in the Dark, by Harris L. Coulter and Barbara Loe Fischer, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
“While 70-80% of British children were immunized against pertussis in 1970-71, the rate is now 39%. The committee predicts that the next pertussis epidemic will probably turn out to be more severe than the one in 1974/75. However, they do not explain why, in 1970/71, there were more than 33,000 cases of pertussis with 41 fatal cases among the very well immunized British child population; whereas in 1974/75, with a declining rate of vaccination, a pertussis epidemic caused only 25,000 cases with 25 fatalities.” Wolfgang Ehrengut, Lancet, Feb. 18, 1978, p. 370.
“… Barker and Pichichero, in a prospective study of 1232 children in Denver, Colorado, found after DTP that only 7% of those vaccinated were free from untoward reactions, which included pyrexia (53%), acute behavioral changes (82%), prolonged screaming (13%), and listlessness, anorexia and vomiting. 71% of those receiving second injections of DTP experienced two or more of the reactions monitored.” Lancet, May 28, 1983, p. 1217
“Publications by the World Health Organization show that diphtheria is steadily declining in most European countries, including those in which there has been no immunization. The decline began long before vaccination was developed. There is certainly no guarantee that vaccination will protect a child against the disease; in fact, over 30,000 cases of diphtheria have been recorded in the United Kingdom in fully immunized children.” Leon Chaitow, Vaccination and Immunization, p. 58.
“Pertussis (whooping cough) immunization is controversial, as the side effects have received a great deal of publicity. The counter claim is that the effectiveness and protection offered by the procedure far outweigh the possible ill effects… annual deaths, per million children, from this disease over the period from 1900 to the mid-nineteen seventies, shows that from a high point of just under 900 deaths per million children (under age 15) in 1905, the decline has been consistent and dramatic. There had been a lowering of mortality rates of approximately 80% by the time immunization was introduced on a mass scale, in the mid-nineteen fifties. The decline has continued, albeit at a slower rate, ever since. No credit can be given to vaccination for the major part of the decline since it was not in use.” Chaitow, Vaccination and Immunization, p. 63.
“… the swine-flu vaccination program was one of its (CDC) greatest blunders. It all began in 1976 when CDC scientists saw that a virus involved in a flu attack outbreak at Fort Dix, N.J., was similar to the swine-flu virus that killed 500,000 Americans in 1918. Health officials immediately launched a 100-million dollar program to immunize every American. But the expected epidemic never materialized, and the vaccine led to partial paralysis in 532 people. There were 32 deaths.” U.S. News and World Report, Joseph Carey, October 14, 1985, p. 70, “How Medical Sleuths Track Killer Diseases.”
“Despite (cases) in which (smallpox) vaccination plainly failed to protect the population, and despite the rampant side-effects of the methods, the proponents of vaccination continued their attempts to justify the methods by claims that the disease had declined in Europe as a whole during the period of its compulsory use. If the decline could be correlated with the use of the vaccination, then all else could be set aside, and the advantage between its current low incidence could be shown to outweigh the periodic failures of the method, and to favour the continued use of vaccination. However, the credit for the decline in the incidence of smallpox could not be given to vaccination. The fact is that its incidence declined in all parts of Europe, whether or not vaccination was employed.” Chaitow, Vaccination and Immunization, pp. 6-7.
“Smallpox, like typhus, has been dying out (in England) since 1780. Vaccination in this country has largely fallen into disuse since people began to realize how its value was discredited by the great smallpox epidemic of 1871-2 (which occurred after extensive vaccination).” W. Scott Webb, A Century of Vaccination, Swan Sonnenschein, 1898.
“In this incident (Kyoto, Japan, 1948) – the most serious of its kind – a toxic (vaccine) batch of alum-precipitated toxoid (APT) was responsible for illness in over 600 infants and for no fewer than 68 deaths.
“On 20 and 22 October, 1948, a large number of babies and children in the city of Kyoto received their first injection of APT. On the 4th and 5th of November, 15,561 babies and children aged some months to 13 years received their second dose. One to two days later, 606 of those who had been injected fell ill. Of these, 9 died of acute diphtheritic paralysis in seven to fourteen days, and 59 of late paralysis mainly in four to seven weeks.” Sir Graham Wilson, Hazards of Immunization, Athone Press, University of London, 1967.
“Accidents may, however, follow the use of this so-called killed (rabies) vaccine owing to inadequate processing. A very serious occurrence of this sort occurred at Fortaleza, Ceara, Brazil, in 1960. No fewer than 18 out of 66 persons vaccinated with Fermi’s carbolized (rabies) vaccine suffered from encephalomyelitis and every one of the eighteen died.” Sir Graham Wilson, Hazards of Immunization.
“At a press conference in Washington on 24 July, 1942, the Secretary of War reported that 28,585 cases of jaundice had been observed in the (American) Army between 1 January and 4 July after yellow fever vaccination, and of these 62 proved fatal.” Sir Graham Wilson, Hazards of Immunization.
“The world’s biggest trial (conducted in south India) to assess the value of BCG tuberculosis vaccine has made the startling revelation that the vaccine ‘does not give any protection against bacillary forms of tuberculosis.’ The study said to be ‘most exhaustive and meticulous,’ was launched in 1968 by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) with assistance from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia.
“The incidence of new cases among the BCG vaccinated group was slightly (but statistically insignificantly) higher than in the control group, a finding that led to the conclusion that BCG’s protective effect ‘was zero.’” New Scientist, November 15, 1979, as quoted by Hans Ruesch in Naked Empress, Civis Publishers, Switzerland, 1982.
“Between 10 December 1929 and 30 April 1930, 251 of 412 infants born in Lubeck received three doses of BCG vaccine by the mouth during the first ten days of life. Of these 251, 72 died of tuberculosis, most of them in two to five months and all but one before the end of the first year. In addition, 135 suffered from clinical tuberculosis but eventually recovered; and 44 became tuberculin-positive but remained well. None of the 161 unvaccinated infants born at the time was affected in this way and none of these died of tuberculosis within the following three years.” Hazards of Immunization, Wilson.
“We conducted a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial to test the efficacy of the 14-valent pneumococcal capsular polysaccharide vaccine in 2295 high-risk patients… Seventy-one episodes of proved or probable pneumococcal pneumonia or bronchitis occurred among 63 of the patients (27 placebo recipients and 36 vaccine recipients)… We were unable to demonstrate any efficacy of the pneumococcal vaccine in preventing pneumonia or bronchitis in this population.” New England Journal of Medicine, November 20, 1986, p. 1318, Michael Simberkoff et al.
“But already before Salk developed his vaccine, polio had been constantly regressing; the 39 cases out of every 100,000 inhabitants registered in 1942 had gradually diminished from year to year until they were reduced to only 15 cases in 1952… according to M. Beddow Baylay, the English surgeon and medical historian.” Slaughter of the Innocent, Hans Reusch, Civitas Publishers, Switzerland, and Swain, New York, 1983.
“Many published stories and reports have stated, implied and otherwise led professional people and the public to believe that the sharp reduction of cases (and of deaths) from poliomyelitis in 1955 as compared to 1954 is attributable to the Salk vaccine… That it is a misconception follows from these considerations. The number of children inoculated has been too small to account for the decrease. The sharp decrease was apparent before the inoculations began or could take effect and was of the same order as the decrease following the immediate post-inoculation period.” Dr. Herbert Ratner, Child and Family, vol. 20, no. 1, 1987.
“So far it is hardly possible to gain insight into the extent of the immunization catastrophe of 1955 in the United States. It may be considered certain that the officially ascertained 200 cases (of polio) which were caused directly or indirectly by the (polio) vaccination constitute minimum figures… It can hardly be estimated how many of the 1359 (polio) cases among vaccinated persons must be regarded as failures of the vaccine and how many of them were infected by the vaccine. A careful study of the epidemiologic course of polio in the United States yields indications of grave significance. In numerous states of the U.S.A., typical early epidemics developed with the immunizations in the spring of 1955… The vaccination incidents of the year 1955 cannot be exclusively traced back to the failure of one manufacturing firm.” Dr. Herbert Ratner, Child and Family, 1980, vol. 19, no. 4, “Story of the Salk Vaccine (Part 2).”
“Suffice it to say that most of the large (polio) epidemics that have occurred in this country since the introduction of the Salk vaccine have followed the wide-scale use of the vaccine and have been characterized by an uncommon early seasonal onset. To name a few, there is the Massachusetts epidemic of 1955; the Chicago epidemic of 1956; and the Des Moines epidemic of 1959.” Dr. Herbert Ratner, Child and Family, 1980 vol. 19, no. 4.
“The live (Sabin) poliovirus vaccine has been the predominant cause of domestically arising cases of paralytic poliomyelitis in the United States since 1972. To avoid the occurrence of such cases, it would be necessary to discontinue the routine use of live poliovirus vaccine.” Jonas Salk, Science, March 4, 1977, p. 845.
“By the (U.S.) government’s own admission, there has been a 41% failure rate in persons who were previously vaccinated against the (measles) virus.” Dr. Anthony Morris, John Chriss, BG Young, “Occurrence of Measles in Previously Vaccinated Individuals,” 1979; presented at a meeting of the American Society for Microbiology at Fort Detrick, Maryland, April 27, 1979.
“Prior to the time doctors began giving rubella (German measles) vaccinations, an estimated 85% of adults were naturally immune to the disease (for life). Because of immunization, the vast majority of women never acquire natural immunity (or lifetime protection).” Dr. Robert Mendelsohn, Let’s Live, December 1983, as quoted by Carolyn Reuben in the LA WEEKLY, June 28, 1985.
“Adminstration of KMV (killed measles vaccine) apparently set in motion an aberrant immunologic response that not only failed to protect children against natural measles, but resulted in heightened susceptibility.” JAMA Aug. 22, 1980, vol. 244, p. 804, Vincent Fulginiti and Ray Helfer. The authors indicate that such falsely protected children can come down with “an often severe, atypical form of measles. Atypical measles is characterized by fever, headache… and a diverse rash (which)… may consist of a mixture of macules, papules, vesicles, and pustules… ”
The above quotes reflect only a mere fraction of an available literature which shows there is a need for an extensive review of vaccination. It is certain that undisclosed, unlooked for illness occurs as a result of vaccines, or as a result of infection after protective immunity should have been conferred but wasn’t. A certain amount of this sort of illness is immunosuppressive in the widest sense, and some in a narrower sense (depression of T-cell numbers, etc.). When looking for unusual illness and immune depression, vaccines are one of those areas which remain partially hidden from investigation. That is a mistake. It is not adequate to say, “Vaccines are simple; they stimulate the immune system and confer immunity against specific germ agents.” That is the glossy presentation. What vaccines often do is something else. They engage some aspect of the body’s immune-response, but to what effect over the long term? Why, for example, do children who have measles vaccine develop a susceptibility to another more severe, atypical measles? Is that virulent form of the disease the result of reactivation of the virus in the vaccine?
Official reports on vaccine reactions are often at odds with unofficial estimates because of the method of analysis used. If vaccine-reaction is defined as a small set of possible effects experienced within 72 hours of an inoculation, then figures will be smaller. But doctors like G.T. Stewart, of the University of Glasgow, have found through meticulous investigation, including visits to hospitals and interviews with parents of vaccinated children, that reactions as severe as brain-damage (e.g., from the DPT vaccine) can be overlooked, go unreported and can be assumed mistakenly to have come from other causes.
from: https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2020/12/10/covid-vaccine-history-matters/
Doctors Speak: The Great Barrington Declaration
A Sensible and Compassionate Anti-COVID Strategy
Jay Bhattacharya
Stanford University
Jay Bhattacharya is a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, where he received both an M.D. and a Ph.D. in economics. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and director of the Stanford Center on the Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. A co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, his research has been published in economics, statistics, legal, medical, public health, and health policy journals.
The following is adapted from a panel presentation on October 9, 2020, in Omaha, Nebraska, at a Hillsdale College Free Market Forum.
My goal today is, first, to present the facts about how deadly COVID-19 actually is; second, to present the facts about who is at risk from COVID; third, to present some facts about how deadly the widespread lockdowns have been; and fourth, to recommend a shift in public policy.
1. The COVID-19 Fatality Rate
In discussing the deadliness of COVID, we need to distinguish COVID cases from COVID infections. A lot of fear and confusion has resulted from failing to understand the difference.
We have heard much this year about the “case fatality rate” of COVID. In early March, the case fatality rate in the U.S. was roughly three percent—nearly three out of every hundred people who were identified as “cases” of COVID in early March died from it. Compare that to today, when the fatality rate of COVID is known to be less than one half of one percent.
In other words, when the World Health Organization said back in early March that three percent of people who get COVID die from it, they were wrong by at least one order of magnitude. The COVID fatality rate is much closer to 0.2 or 0.3 percent. The reason for the highly inaccurate early estimates is simple: in early March, we were not identifying most of the people who had been infected by COVID.
“Case fatality rate” is computed by dividing the number of deaths by the total number of confirmed cases. But to obtain an accurate COVID fatality rate, the number in the denominator should be the number of people who have been infected—the number of people who have actually had the disease—rather than the number of confirmed cases.
In March, only the small fraction of infected people who got sick and went to the hospital were identified as cases. But the majority of people who are infected by COVID have very mild symptoms or no symptoms at all. These people weren’t identified in the early days, which resulted in a highly misleading fatality rate. And that is what drove public policy. Even worse, it continues to sow fear and panic, because the perception of too many people about COVID is frozen in the misleading data from March.
So how do we get an accurate fatality rate? To use a technical term, we test for seroprevalence—in other words, we test to find out how many people have evidence in their bloodstream of having had COVID.
This is easy with some viruses. Anyone who has had chickenpox, for instance, still has that virus living in them—it stays in the body forever. COVID, on the other hand, like other coronaviruses, doesn’t stay in the body. Someone who is infected with COVID and then clears it will be immune from it, but it won’t still be living in them.
What we need to test for, then, are antibodies or other evidence that someone has had COVID. And even antibodies fade over time, so testing for them still results in an underestimate of total infections.
Seroprevalence is what I worked on in the early days of the epidemic. In April, I ran a series of studies, using antibody tests, to see how many people in California’s Santa Clara County, where I live, had been infected. At the time, there were about 1,000 COVID cases that had been identified in the county, but our antibody tests found that 50,000 people had been infected—i.e., there were 50 times more infections than identified cases. This was enormously important, because it meant that the fatality rate was not three percent, but closer to 0.2 percent; not three in 100, but two in 1,000.
When it came out, this Santa Clara study was controversial. But science is like that, and the way science tests controversial studies is to see if they can be replicated. And indeed, there are now 82 similar seroprevalence studies from around the world, and the median result of these 82 studies is a fatality rate of about 0.2 percent—exactly what we found in Santa Clara County.
In some places, of course, the fatality rate was higher: in New York City it was more like 0.5 percent. In other places it was lower: the rate in Idaho was 0.13 percent. What this variation shows is that the fatality rate is not simply a function of how deadly a virus is. It is also a function of who gets infected and of the quality of the health care system. In the early days of the virus, our health care systems managed COVID poorly. Part of this was due to ignorance: we pursued very aggressive treatments, for instance, such as the use of ventilators, that in retrospect might have been counterproductive. And part of it was due to negligence: in some places, we needlessly allowed a lot of people in nursing homes to get infected.
But the bottom line is that the COVID fatality rate is in the neighborhood of 0.2 percent.
2. Who Is at Risk?
The single most important fact about the COVID pandemic—in terms of deciding how to respond to it on both an individual and a governmental basis—is that it is not equally dangerous for everybody. This became clear very early on, but for some reason our public health messaging failed to get this fact out to the public.
It still seems to be a common perception that COVID is equally dangerous to everybody, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. There is a thousand-fold difference between the mortality rate in older people, 70 and up, and the mortality rate in children. In some sense, this is a great blessing. If it was a disease that killed children preferentially, I for one would react very differently. But the fact is that for young children, this disease is less dangerous than the seasonal flu. This year, in the United States, more children have died from the seasonal flu than from COVID by a factor of two or three.
Whereas COVID is not deadly for children, for older people it is much more deadly than the seasonal flu. If you look at studies worldwide, the COVID fatality rate for people 70 and up is about four percent—four in 100 among those 70 and older, as opposed to two in 1,000 in the overall population.
Again, this huge difference between the danger of COVID to the young and the danger of COVID to the old is the most important fact about the virus. Yet it has not been sufficiently emphasized in public health messaging or taken into account by most policymakers.
3. Deadliness of the Lockdowns
The widespread lockdowns that have been adopted in response to COVID are unprecedented—lockdowns have never before been tried as a method of disease control. Nor were these lockdowns part of the original plan. The initial rationale for lockdowns was that slowing the spread of the disease would prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. It became clear before long that this was not a worry: in the U.S. and in most of the world, hospitals were never at risk of being overwhelmed. Yet the lockdowns were kept in place, and this is turning out to have deadly effects.
Those who dare to talk about the tremendous economic harms that have followed from the lockdowns are accused of heartlessness. Economic considerations are nothing compared to saving lives, they are told. So I’m not going to talk about the economic effects—I’m going to talk about the deadly effects on health, beginning with the fact that the U.N. has estimated that 130 million additional people will starve this year as a result of the economic damage resulting from the lockdowns.
In the last 20 years we’ve lifted one billion people worldwide out of poverty. This year we are reversing that progress to the extent—it bears repeating—that an estimated 130 million more people will starve.
Another result of the lockdowns is that people stopped bringing their children in for immunizations against diseases like diphtheria, pertussis (whooping cough), and polio, because they had been led to fear COVID more than they feared these more deadly diseases. This wasn’t only true in the U.S. Eighty million children worldwide are now at risk of these diseases. We had made substantial progress in slowing them down, but now they are going to come back.
Large numbers of Americans, even though they had cancer and needed chemotherapy, didn’t come in for treatment because they were more afraid of COVID than cancer. Others have skipped recommended cancer screenings. We’re going to see a rise in cancer and cancer death rates as a consequence. Indeed, this is already starting to show up in the data. We’re also going to see a higher number of deaths from diabetes due to people missing their diabetic monitoring.
Mental health problems are in a way the most shocking thing. In June of this year, a CDC survey found that one in four young adults between 18 and 24 had seriously considered suicide. Human beings are not, after all, designed to live alone. We’re meant to be in company with one another. It is unsurprising that the lockdowns have had the psychological effects that they’ve had, especially among young adults and children, who have been denied much-needed socialization.
In effect, what we’ve been doing is requiring young people to bear the burden of controlling a disease from which they face little to no risk. This is entirely backward from the right approach.
4. Where to Go from Here
Last week I met with two other epidemiologists—Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University and Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University—in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The three of us come from very different disciplinary backgrounds and from very different parts of the political spectrum. Yet we had arrived at the same view—the view that the widespread lockdown policy has been a devastating public health mistake. In response, we wrote and issued the Great Barrington Declaration, which can be viewed—along with explanatory videos, answers to frequently asked questions, a list of co-signers, etc.—online at www.gbdeclaration.org.
The Declaration reads:
As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection.
Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted our careers to protecting people. Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings, and deteriorating mental health—leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.
Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.
Fortunately, our understanding of the virus is growing. We know that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young. Indeed, for children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza.
As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all—including the vulnerable—falls. We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity—i.e., the point at which the rate of new infections is stable—and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine. Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.
The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.
Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19. By way of example, nursing homes should use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent PCR testing of other staff and all visitors. Staff rotation should be minimized. Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home. When possible, they should meet family members outside rather than inside. A comprehensive and detailed list of measures, including approaches to multi-generational households, can be implemented, and is well within the scope and capability of public health professionals.
Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sports, and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.
***
I should say something in conclusion about the idea of herd immunity, which some people mischaracterize as a strategy of letting people die. First, herd immunity is not a strategy—it is a biological fact that applies to most infectious diseases. Even when we come up with a vaccine, we will be relying on herd immunity as an end-point for this epidemic. The vaccine will help, but herd immunity is what will bring it to an end. And second, our strategy is not to let people die, but to protect the vulnerable. We know the people who are vulnerable, and we know the people who are not vulnerable. To continue to act as if we do not know these things makes no sense.
My final point is about science. When scientists have spoken up against the lockdown policy, there has been enormous pushback: “You’re endangering lives.” Science cannot operate in an environment like that. I don’t know all the answers to COVID; no one does. Science ought to be able to clarify the answers. But science can’t do its job in an environment where anyone who challenges the status quo gets shut down or cancelled.
To date, the Great Barrington Declaration has been signed by over 43,000 medical and public health scientists and medical practitioners. The Declaration thus does not represent a fringe view within the scientific community. This is a central part of the scientific debate, and it belongs in the debate. Members of the general public can also sign the Declaration.
Together, I think we can get on the other side of this pandemic. But we have to fight back. We’re at a place where our civilization is at risk, where the bonds that unite us are at risk of being torn. We shouldn’t be afraid. We should respond to the COVID virus rationally: protect the vulnerable, treat the people who get infected compassionately, develop a vaccine. And while doing these things we should bring back the civilization that we had so that the cure does not end up being worse than the disease.
from: https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/sensible-compassionate-anti-covid-strategy/