Gresham’s law holds that bad money drives out good money. If there are two coins with the same face value, but of different intrinsic value (assume that one is made of a more precious metal) the coin with less intrinsic worth (bad coin) will be used for currency transactions and the more valuable coin will go out of circulation.
This law applies to the pharmaceuticals today. If there are two drugs of comparable efficacy, the drug that costs more (bad coin) will drive out the good drug (less expensive one) out of the market. It is unfortunate that we are experiencing this in the midst of the humanitarian tragedy of the Covid pandemic.
The present pandemic is caused by a novel virus and mankind has no experience with how to deal with it. There are no drugs or vaccines we know will work. To fight the virus, one approach is to re-purpose approved drugs developed for other uses. A variety of drugs in the market can be tested for efficacy against the new virus. We will discuss the testing of two such drugs against Covid-19.
Remdesivir is a candidate drug. It had been developed for the Ebola virus but it was not found to be effective against it. A generic version of the drug manufactured by Hetero costs Rs 5000 to Rs 6000 per vial. The 11 vials needed for a 10-day course costs Rs 55,000. Remdesivir was subjected to a clinical trial against Covid-19 and the early results of this study were published by Beigel and colleagues in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) on 22 May 2020. There was no statistically meaningful benefit for survival with use of the drug, but among those that survived, recovery time was reduced by four days to a median of 11 days instead of 15 days. The US FDA has approved this drug for compassionate use.
Hydroxychloroqunin (HCQ) is another drug under consideration. It is an antimalarial drug that costs Rs 68 for 10 tablets and a course of treatment requires 12 tablets. The WHO studied this drug in 400 hospitals in 35 countries. It was called the Solidarity trial. However, on 22 May 2020, on the same day that the Remdesivir report appeared in the NEJM, another famous medical journal, The Lancet, published a report that HCQ caused 35% more deaths due to adverse effects of the drug in another trial. Within three days of the publication of the Lancet paper, the WHO suspended the Solidarity study.
India, however, decided to defy the WHO and continue its trial of HCQ. During the period when the Solidarity study was suspended, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) wrote to the WHO, that Solidarity schedule was employing four times the recommended dose of HCQ. The WHO schedule prescribed 1600 mg of the drug on the first day and total of 9600 mg for the full course of treatment. This dose was likely to be toxic and potentially fatal. Dr Vinod Paul in the Niti Aayog was of the opinion (New Indian Express 29 May) that the drug given in the correct dose was useful against Covid in India.
It turned out that the Lancet paper about HCQ deaths was fraudulent and used fabricated data. The Lancet paper was retracted within 13 days of publication. On 3 June, the WHO resumed the Solidarity HCQ study. Inspite of the warning about the drug dosage from the ICMR, the same toxic dose was continued.
Ten days later, Dr Meryl Nass, an US physician and expert on adverse reactions with drugs, wrote in her blog on 14 June 2020 about the lethal dose of HCQ being used in the Solidarity trial. People on Twitter, took it up. Three days later, on the 17 June, the WHO announced that it was suspending the HCQ trial because ‘there was no reduction in mortality’ with the drug, without any mention of the controversy about the drug dosage being used. No data was published.
By a strange coincidence, on the same day the WHO stopped its HCQ trial, the UK announced that it was stopping its trial of HCQ (called the Recovery trial) because they found simultaneously, that there was no reduction in mortality with the drug. The UK Recovery trial was funded in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (B&MGF) and it was also using the same toxic dosage as the Solidarity trial. No data was provided about the other outcome measures like the reduction in time to recovery.
One can see the contrast here between the trials with the two drugs. The Remdesivir trial reported in the NEJM had found no reduction in mortality but the trial was continued on the basis of an improvement in recovery time among survivors. This was not reported on in the HCQ study. Clearly there are different standards operating here for the two drugs.
We cannot let matters rest here. The Lancet paper was retracted but we need to investigate who was really behind this effort to fraudulently discredit HCQ. “Surgisphere” is reported as the organisation that manufactured the data, but who got them to do this? Did they get any extraordinary help from the journal for publication?
Was this a concerted effort by pharma to discredit the less expensive drug? While it is made to appear as a rogue company “Surgisphere” appears to have done this to improve its visibility, it is necessary to have a deeper investigation into the motives and involvement of others, including publishers.
Further, one needs to know who was responsible for putting lives at risk by recommending toxic doses of HCQ in Solidarity and Recovery trials. One cannot assume this was an unintentional mistake, as the dose was not corrected even after the error was pointed out by the ICMR. We need to get to the bottom of this and those involved need to be discredited and weeded out, if we do not want bad science, like bad coins, taking over the world. If this is not done, in all probability, the results of the ICMR HCQ study will not be allowed to be published. Gresham’s Law of Pharmacotheraputics–only expensive drugs will show positive results.
ONE OF THE MOST FRUSTRATING ASPECTS of how academic science conducts itself in the US is high reliance to SELECTIVE ATTENTION to information that suits one’s particular viewpoint in science. Graduate students writing theses or dissertations are expected to provide a reasonable approximation of a background of the foundations upon which their thesis is built. Somewhere along the way, some scientists have forgotten the ethics of the moral responsibility of providing an unbiased representation of the state of knowledge upon which they base their positions. To seek only confirming instances that match one’s own viewpoint is positivistic – and it is the essential driver of confirmation bias. CDC and Fauci’s reliance of the Selective Attention Bias is monumental is size and historically destructive in scope.
Here I outline a few rather important facts that CDC and Fauci (and thus the rest of public health and most of the US medical system) have forgotten. The result is a public health policy response in the US that is full of … holes, at immense cost to the well-being of society.
When I read headlines like “Scientists discover” X, Y or Z about Coronavirus”, I almost always groan. “We ALREADY KNOW that about coronviruses” is my response, and so off to Pubmed I go.
Here are some things we already know that are being forgotten, or ignored, in public health policy in the US (and elsewhere) on the COVID-19 response.
(1) Coronavirus antibodies don’t last. Based on a non-peer-reviewed study preprint of a King’s College Study that monitored SARS-CoV-2 antibody levels for three months, the media represents this as new because the researchers who have presented the data failed to provide a thorough representation of past studies – and the media failed to pick up on the reality of what we already know. We’ve known that the antibody response to coronaviruses in humans is shorter than that, say, for human rhinoviruses (the common cold) since 1990.
Here’s the study on coronviruses (1990):
“After preliminary trials, the detailed changes in the concentration of specific circulating and local antibodies were followed in 15 volunteers inoculated with coronavirus 229E. Ten of them, who had significantly lower concentrations of preexisting antibody than the rest, became infected and eight of these developed colds. A limited investigation of circulating lymphocyte populations showed some lymphocytopenia in infected volunteers. In this group, antibody concentrations started to increase 1 week after inoculation and reached a maximum about 1 week later. Thereafter antibody titres slowly declined. Although concentrations were still slightly raised 1 year later, this did not always prevent reinfection when volunteers were then challenged with the homologous virus. However, the period of virus shedding was shorter than before and none developed a cold. All of the uninfected group were infected on re-challenge although they also appeared to show some resistance to disease and in the extent of infection. These results are discussed with reference to natural infections with coronavirus and with other infections, such as rhinovirus infections.“
And here’s the study on rhinoviruses (1989):
“The specific humoral immune response of 17 volunteers to infection with human rhinovirus type 2 (HRV-2) has been measured both by neutralization and by ELISA. Six volunteers who had HRV-2-specific antibodies in either serum or nasal secretions before HRV-2 inoculation were resistant to infection and illness. Of the remaining 11 volunteers who had little pre-existing HRV-2-specific antibody, one was immune but 10 became infected and displayed increases in HRV-2-specific antibodies. These antibodies first increased 1-2 weeks after infection and reached a maximum at 5 weeks. All six resistant volunteers who had high pre-existing antibody and eight of the volunteers who became infected maintained their HRV-2-specific antibody for at least 1 year. At this time they were protected against reinfection. Two volunteers showed decreases in HRV-2-specific antibodies from either serum or nasal secretions. They became infected but not ill after HRV-2 inoculation 1 year later.“
So, people infected with coronaviruses have short-lived active antibodies compared to rhinovirus, but have a mild infection a year later if re-exposed. To be fair to the authors of the study, they referenced the coronavirus study from 1990, as well as length of antibody responses in SARS and MERS. But it’s still a fair question to ask:
Why then are we reading headlines such as
?
The high profile emphasis is followed by proclamations that natural immunity from infections might not prove to be”enough”, begging the question of definition of “enough” – Fauci and others (like Paul Offit) have already presaged that an untested vaccine might only make the infection less severe, and not prevent infection or transmission. So this high emphasis and follow-on claim that natural herd immunity might not be enough is a type of distortion used to convince the public that they may have to wait for a vaccine to save society. Of course.
2. Masks Don’t Really Work Outside of Healthcare Systems.
A meta-analysis on masks concluded that masks should work in the healthcare setting, but the three studies that focused on the utility of masks to protect the wearer outside of the healthcare system? Two of three studies say “no effect” – and the one that is significant is only marginally significant, and oh, also (like all of the other studies) only focused on the ability of masks to protect the wearer.
And, for good measure, N95 does NOT mean they stop 95% of droplets, as incorrectly reported by “Ask Ethan” on Forbes – it means they can block viruses no smaller than 5 microns. SARS-CoV-2 is 30 times smaller than N95.
In a BSL3 laboratory, workers must wear much more effective equipment that an N95 mask, or a handkerchief, or a shirt collar, to block viruses the size of coronaviruses. Clearly we are being socially conditioned to submit to pressure to conform to an agenda to accept the spate of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines as the living Savior of society. Oh, if only that could even be theoretically true. Unfortuantely, CDC, Fauci and apparently FDA also forgot that
“Objective The aim of this study was to compare the efficacy of cloth masks to medical masks in hospital healthcare workers (HCWs). The null hypothesis is that there is no difference between medical masks and cloth masks.
Setting 14 secondary-level/tertiary-level hospitals in Hanoi, Vietnam.
Participants 1607 hospital HCWs aged ≥18 years working full-time in selected high-risk wards.
Intervention Hospital wards were randomised to: medical masks, cloth masks or a control group (usual practice, which included mask wearing). Participants used the mask on every shift for 4 consecutive weeks.
Main outcome measure Clinical respiratory illness (CRI), influenza-like illness (ILI) and laboratory-confirmed respiratory virus infection.
Results The rates of all infection outcomes were highest in the cloth mask arm, with the rate of ILI statistically significantly higher in the cloth mask arm (relative risk (RR)=13.00, 95% CI 1.69 to 100.07) compared with the medical mask arm. Cloth masks also had significantly higher rates of ILI compared with the control arm. An analysis by mask use showed ILI (RR=6.64, 95% CI 1.45 to 28.65) and laboratory-confirmed virus (RR=1.72, 95% CI 1.01 to 2.94) were significantly higher in the cloth masks group compared with the medical masks group. Penetration of cloth masks by particles was almost 97% and medical masks 44%.
Conclusions This study is the first RCT of cloth masks, and the results caution against the use of cloth masks. This is an important finding to inform occupational health and safety. Moisture retention, reuse of cloth masks and poor filtration may result in increased risk of infection. Further research is needed to inform the widespread use of cloth masks globally. However, as a precautionary measure, cloth masks should not be recommended for HCWs, particularly in high-risk situations, and guidelines need to be updated.
Trial registration number Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry: ACTRN12610000887077.”
From Ref #2
“Summary:
Respiratory infection is much higher among healthcare workers wearing cloth masks compared to medical masks, research shows. Cloth masks should not be used by workers in any healthcare setting, authors of the new study say.”
C. R. MacIntyre, H. Seale, T. C. Dung, N. T. Hien, P. T. Nga, A. A. Chughtai, B. Rahman, D. E. Dwyer, Q. Wang. A cluster randomised trial of cloth masks compared with medical masks in healthcare workers. BMJ Open, 2015; 5 (4): e006577 DOI: 10.1136/bmjopen-2014-006577
Even Medpage today published an article that concluded that some politicians are pushing masks for fear mongers, not toward evidence-based medical purposes.
3. Coronavirus Vaccines Cause Pathogenic Priming… and Therefore Require Phase 1 Animal Studies to Detect Disease Enhancement
This has been covered in my blog before as suggested reading, but I’ll put those findings again right here for those expecting more from our regulatory agencies. In March 2020, FDA allowed Fauci, I mean, Moderna, to skip the critical Phase 1 animal studies that led to a halth to human studies for SARS and MERS vaccines. That was a LONG time ago now (5 months). How many times over could Moderna (I mean, Fauci) have conducted the animal studies to detect pathogenic priming by now? Maybe they have! Certainly we would have head of the results if they showed no disease enhancement. Come on, we may be – collectively- stupid, but we’re not dead. Yet.
Immunization with inactivated Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus vaccine leads to lung immunopathology on challenge with live virus.“Lung mononuclear infiltrates occurred in all groups after virus challenge but with increased infiltrates that contained eosinophils and increases in the eosinophil promoting IL-5 and IL-13 cytokines only in the vaccine groups. Inactivated MERS-CoV vaccine appears to carry a hypersensitive-type lung pathology risk from MERS-CoV infection that is similar to that found with inactivated SARS-CoV vaccines from SARS-CoV infection.”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27269431
Vaccine efficacy in senescent mice challenged with recombinant SARS-CoV bearing epidemic and zoonotic spike variants.“VRP-N vaccines not only failed to protect from homologous or heterologous challenge, but resulted in enhanced immunopathology with eosinophilic infiltrates within the lungs of SARS-CoV-challenged mice. VRP-N-induced pathology presented at day 4, peaked around day 7, and persisted through day 14, and was likely mediated by cellular immune responses.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17194199
Immunization with Modified Vaccinia Virus Ankara-Based Recombinant Vaccine against Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Is Associated with Enhanced Hepatitis in Ferrets“Immunized ferrets developed a more rapid and vigorous neutralizing antibody response than control animals after challenge with SARS-CoV; however, they also exhibited strong inflammatory responses in liver tissue.”
Animal Models for SARS and MERS coronaviruses. “The concern that is extrapolated from the FIPV vaccine experience to human SARS-CoV vaccines is whether vaccine recipients will develop more severe disease if they are exposed to or infected with SARS-CoV after neutralizing antibody titers decline. The second concern is whether recipients of a SARSCoV vaccine would be at risk of developing pulmonary immunopathology following infection with an unrelated human coronavirus e.g. 229E, OC43, HKU1 or NL63 that usually causes mild, self limited disease. Although findings from preclinical evaluation have revealed these concerns, studies in animal models may not be able to provide data to confirm or allay these concerns.”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4550498
Lab-Made Coronavirus Triggers Debate“…a study on his team’s efforts to engineer a virus with the surface protein of the SHC014 coronavirus, found in horseshoe bats in China, and the backbone of one that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice. The hybrid virus could infect human airway cells and caused disease in mice…”
There are many other bits of Science that CDC, Fauci, and the FDA have forgotten – such as how to accurately count deaths, how to design an accurate PCR test. And there will no doubt be some science they would like to forget . They seem hell bent on holding society hostage with lock-downs, and mask mandates, and destruction of small businesses, depletion of retirement accounts.
We won’t forget that the disaster is largely man-made, stemming first from CDC’s flawed PCR test, fumbled attempts to contain by early contact tracing, and made much worse by a lock-down that was supposed to last two weeks. We have not forgotten that we never signed up for lock-downs of long duration that destroy our means of making a living, feeding and housing ourselves and our children. But there is a bright light coming out of the tunnel BEFORE the untested vaccines.
A Bit of Science CDC and Fauci Would Like To Ignore
Here’s a bit of Science I want YOU to help make certain NO ONE forgets. Please share Dr. Brownstein’s case series study on his protocol used on 107 COVID-19 patients with zero deaths – and only 1 hospitalization on the core protocol – with every ND, DO, DC, nurse, geriatric specialist, nursing home employee, public health official, friend, neigbor, and family member you know. Share my editorial, too.
If this virus can be so easily treated, why are we destroying America?
Having finally solved the grand monetary policy puzzle, Japan has now moved on to other crucial societal problems, like getting people to feel comfortable using public toilets.
At least, that was the thinking behind Tokyo’s new transparent public toilets: to help ease “toilet anxiety”, according to Forbes.
In Japan, where public toilets are held to a higher standard of cleanliness than most other place around the world, the country’s residents still “harbor a fear that public toilets are dark, dirty, smelly and scary.”
That’s why the non-profit Nippon Foundation has now launched “The Tokyo Toilet Project”, which has asked 16 well known architects to renovate 17 public toilets located in one of the busiest areas of Tokyo, the public parks of Shibuya.
The idea was to apply a design that would make public bathrooms comfortable and accessible to everyone. The Nippon Foundation has a goal “that people will feel comfortable using these public toilets and to foster a spirit of hospitality for the next person.”
Pritzker Prize-winning architect Shigeru Ban is the brain-child behind the transparent restrooms. The smartglass they are built with turns opaque when someone is in them. The Nippon Foundation commented: “There are two concerns with public toilets, especially those located in parks. The first is whether it is clean inside, and the second is that no one is secretly waiting inside.”
“At night, they light up the parks like a beautiful lantern,” the Foundation concluded.
Earth’s largest optical telescope, the Gran Telescopio Canarias, is closed due to COVID-19. Many others have also closed.
Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias
The alarm sounded at around 3 a.m. on April 3. An electrical malfunction had stalled the behemoth South Pole Telescope as it mapped radiation left over from the Big Bang. Astronomers Allen Foster and Geoffrey Chen crawled out of bed and got dressed to shield themselves from the –70 degree Fahrenheit temperatures outside. They then trekked a few thousand feet across the ice to restart the telescope.
The Sun set weeks ago in Antarctica. Daylight won’t return for six months. And, yet, life at the bottom of the planet hasn’t changed much — even as the rest of the world has been turned upside-down. The last flight from the region left on Feb. 15, so there’s no need for social distancing. The 42 “winterovers” still work together. They still eat together. They still share the gym. They even play roller hockey most nights.
And that’s why the South Pole Telescope is one of the last large observatories still monitoring the night sky.
The world’s largest optical telescopes, shown here, have shut down in droves in recent weeks (open sites are in green). The Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory in Texas is the largest optical telescope left observing. Construction has also halted at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory site in Chile.
Astronomy/Roen Kelly
An Astronomy magazine tally has found that more than 100 of Earth’s biggest research telescopes have closed in recent weeks due to the COVID-19 pandemic. What started as a trickle of closures in February and early March has become an almost complete shutdown of observational astronomy. And the closures are unlikely to end soon.
Observatory directors say they could be offline for three to six months — or longer. In many cases, resuming operations will mean inventing new ways of working during a pandemic. And that might not be possible for some instruments that require teams of technicians to maintain and operate. As a result, new astronomical discoveries are expected to come to a crawl.
“If everybody in the world stops observing, then we have a gap in our data that you can’t recover,” says astronomer Steven Janowiecki of the McDonald Observatory in Texas. “This will be a period that we in the astronomy community have no data on what happened.”
Yet these short-term losses aren’t astronomers’ main concern.
They’re accustomed to losing telescope time to bad weather, and they’re just as concerned as everyone else about the risks of coronavirus to their loved ones. So, for now, all that most astronomers can do is sit at home and wait for the storm to clear.
“If we have our first bright supernova in hundreds of years, that would be terrible,” says astronomer John Mulchaey, director of the Carnegie Observatories. “But except for really rare events like that, most of the science will be done next year. The universe is 13.7 billion years old. We can wait a few months.”
The prospects get darker when considering the pandemic’s long-term impacts on astronomy. Experts are already worried that lingering damage to the global economy could derail plans for the next decade of cutting-edge astronomical research.
“Yes, there will be a loss of data for six months or so, but the economic impact may be more substantial in the long run,” says Tony Beasley, director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. “It’s going to be hard to build new telescopes as millions of people are out of work. I suspect the largest impact will be the financial nuclear winter that we’re about to live through.”
Closing the windows on the cosmos
Through interviews and email exchanges with dozens of researchers, administrators, press officers and observatory directors, as well as reviewing a private list circulating among scientists, Astronomy magazine has confirmed more than 120 of Earth’s largest telescopes are now closed as a result of COVID-19.
Many of the shutdowns happened in late March, as astronomy-rich states like Arizona, Hawaii and California issued stay-at-home orders. Nine of the 10 largest optical telescopes in North America are now closed. In Chile, an epicenter of observing, the government placed the entire country under a strict lockdown, shuttering dozens of telescopes. Spain and Italy, two European nations with rich astronomical communities — and a large number of COVID-19 infections — closed their observatories weeks ago.
Even many small telescopes have now closed, as all-out shutdowns were ordered on mountaintops ranging from Hawaii’s Mauna Kea to the Chilean Atacama to the Spanish Canary Islands. Science historians say nothing like this has happened in the modern era of astronomy. Even during the chaos of World War II, telescopes kept observing.
As wartime fears gripped Americans in the 1940s, German-born astronomer Walter Baade was placed under virtual house arrest. As a result, he famously declared Mount Wilson Observatory in California to be his official residence. With the lights of Los Angeles dimmed to avoid enemy bombs, Baade operated the world’s largest telescope in isolation, making groundbreaking discoveries about the cosmos. Among them, Baade’s work revealed multiple populations of stars, which led him to realize that the universe was twice as big as previously thought.
In the decades since, astronomers have built ever-larger telescopes to see fainter and farther-off objects. Instruments have become increasingly complex and specialized, often requiring them to be swapped out multiple times in a single night. Enormous telescope mirrors need regular maintenance. All of this means observatory crews sometimes require dozens of people, ranging from engineers and technicians to observers and astronomers. Most researchers also still physically travel to a telescope to observe, taking them to far-flung places. As a result, major observatories can be like small villages, complete with hotel-style accommodations, cooks and medics.
But although observatories might be remote, few can safely operate during a pandemic.
“Most of our telescopes still work in classical mode. We do have some remote options, but the large fraction of our astronomers still go to the telescopes,” says Mulchaey, who also oversees Las Campanas Observatory in Chile and its Magellan Telescopes. “It’s not as automated as you might think.”
‘You don’t know what you missed’
Some of the most complicated scientific instruments on Earth are the gravitational-wave detectors, which pick up almost imperceptible ripples in space-time created when two massive objects merge. In 2015, the first gravitational-wave detection opened up an entirely new way for astronomers to study the universe. And since then, astronomers have confirmed dozens of these events.
The most well-known facilities, the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) — located in Washington state and Louisiana, both pandemic hot spots — closed on March 27. Virgo, their Italian partner observatory, shut down the same day. (It’s also located near the epicenter of that country’s COVID-19 pandemic.)
More than 1,200 scientists from 18 countries are involved with LIGO. And no other instruments are sensitive enough to detect gravitational waves from colliding black holes and neutron stars like LIGO and Virgo can. Fortunately, the observatories were already near the end of the third observing run, which was set to end April 30.
“You don’t know what you missed,” says LIGO spokesperson Patrick Brady, an astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “We were detecting a binary black hole collision once a week. So, on average, we missed four. But we don’t know how special they would have been.”
The gravitational-wave detectors will now undergo upgrades that will take them offline through at least late 2021 or early 2022. But the pandemic has already delayed preliminary testing for their planned fourth run. And it could prevent future work or even disrupt supply chains, Brady says. So, although it’s still too early to know for sure, astronomy will likely have to wait a couple of years for new gravitational-wave discoveries.
Then there’s the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). Last year, the EHT collaboration released the first-ever image of a black hole. And on April 7, they published another unprecedented image that stares down a black hole’s jet in a galaxy located some 5 billion light-years away. But now, EHT has cancelled its entire observing run for the year — it can only collect data in March and April — due to closures at its partner instruments.
Around the world, only a handful of large optical telescopes remain open.
The Green Bank Observatory, Earth’s largest steerable radio telescope, is still searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, observing everything from galaxies to gas clouds.
The twin Pan-STARRS telescopes on the summit of Hawaii’s Haleakala volcano are still scouting the sky for dangerous incoming asteroids. Both instruments can run without having multiple humans in the same building.
“We are an essential service, funded by NASA, to help protect the Earth from (an) asteroid impact,” says Ken Chambers, director of the Pan-STARRS Observatories in Hawaii. “We will continue that mission as long as we can do so without putting people or equipment at risk.”
The 10-meter Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory in Texas is now operating with just one person in the building.
Marty Harris/McDonald Observatory
The last of large telescopes left open
With observatory domes closed at the world’s newest and best telescopes, a smattering of older, less high-tech instruments are now Earth’s largest operating observatories.
Sporting a relatively modest 6-meter mirror, the biggest optical telescope still working in the Eastern Hemisphere is Russia’s 45-year-old Bolshoi Azimuthal Telescope in the Caucasus Mountains, a spokesperson there confirmed.
And, for the foreseeable future, the largest optical telescope on the planet is now the 10-meter Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) at McDonald Observatory in rural West Texas. Astronomers managed to keep the nearly-25-year-old telescope open thanks to a special research exemption and drastic changes to their operating procedures.
To reduce exposure, just one observer sits in HET’s control room. One person turns things on. And one person swaps instruments multiple times each night, as the telescope switches from observing exoplanets with its Habitable Zone Finder to studying dark energy using its now-poorly-named VIRUS spectrograph. Anyone who doesn’t have to be on site now works from home.
“We don’t have the world’s best observatory site. We’re not on Mauna Kea or anything as spectacular,” says Janowiecki, the HET’s science operations manager. “We don’t have any of the expensive adaptive optics. We don’t even have a 2-axis telescope. That was [intended as] a massive cost savings.”
But, he added, “In this one rare instance, it’s a strength.”
The supervising astronomer of HET now manages Earth’s current largest telescope from a few old computer monitors he found in storage and set up on a foldout card table in his West Texas guest bedroom.
Like the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, the handful of remaining observatories run on skeleton crews or are entirely robotic. And all of the telescope managers interviewed for this story emphasized that even if they’re open now, they won’t be able to perform repairs if something breaks, making it unclear how long they could continue operating in the current environment.
The 48-inch Samual Oschin Telescope is the workhorse of the Zwicky Transient Facility at Palomar Observatory in Southern California.
Palomar/Caltech
‘We will miss some objects’
The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) utilizes the robotic, 48-inch Samual Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory in Southern California to produce nightly maps of the northern sky. And, thanks to automation, it remains open.
The so-called “discovery engine” searches for new supernovas and other momentary events thanks to computers back at Caltech that compare each new map with the old ones. When the software finds something, it triggers an automatic alert to telescopes around the world. Last week, it sent out notifications on multiple potentially new supernovas.
Similarly, the telescopes that make up the Catalina Sky Survey, based at Arizona’s Mount Lemmon, are still searching the heavens for asteroids. In just the past week, they found more than 50 near-Earth asteroids — none of them dangerous.
Another small group of robotic telescopes, the international Las Cumbres Observatory network, has likewise managed to stay open, albeit with fewer sites than before. In recent weeks, their telescopes have followed up on unexpected astronomical events ranging from asteroids to supernovas.
“We are fortunate to still be keeping an eye on potential new discoveries,” says Las Cumbres Observatory director Lisa Storrie-Lombardi.
But, overall, there are just fewer telescopes available to catch and confirm new objects that appear in our night sky, which means fewer discoveries will be made.
Chambers, the Pan-STARRS telescope director, says his team has been forced to do their own follow-ups as they find new asteroids and supernovas. “This will mean we make fewer discoveries, and that we will miss some objects that we would have found in normal times,” he says.
NASA’s DART spacecraft is scheduled to launch in 2021 on a mission to visit the binary asteroid Didymos. Astronomers need additional observations to help plot the course.
NASA/JHUAPL
‘It’s stressing them out’
Astronomer Cristina Thomas of Northern Arizona University studies asteroids. She was the last observer to use the 4.3-meter Lowell Discovery Telescope before it closed March 31 under Arizona’s stay-at-home order.
Thomas warns that, in the short term, graduate students could bear the brunt of the lost science. Veteran astronomers typically have a backlog of data just waiting for them to analyze. But Ph.D. students are often starved for data they need to collect in order to graduate on time.
“It’s stressing them out in a way that it doesn’t for me. We’re used to building in a night or so for clouds,” Thomas says. “If this goes on for months, this could put [graduate students] pretty far behind.”
One of Thomas’ students was set to have observations collected for their dissertation by SOFIA, NASA’s airborne observatory. But the flying telescope is currently grounded in California, leaving it unclear when the student will be able to complete their research. And even when astronomy picks back up, everyone will be reapplying for telescope time at once.
But the damage isn’t only limited to graduate students. An extended period of observatory downtime could also have an impact on Thomas’ own research. Later this year, she’s scheduled to observe Didymos, a binary asteroid that NASA plans to visit in 2021. Those observations are supposed to help chart the course of the mission.
“The big question for us is: ‘When are we going to be able to observe again?’” Thomas says. “If it’s a few months, we’ll be able to get back to normal. If it ends up being much longer, we’re going to start missing major opportunities.”
The Keck Observatory telescopes in Hawaii use high-tech adaptive optics equipment that changes their mirrors’ shape 1,000 times per second to counter the twinkling caused by Earth’s atmosphere. Keck instruments also need to be chilled below freezing to reduce noise. If the warm up, cooling them down can take days or weeks.
W. M. Keck Observatory/Andrew Richard Hara
Can’t just flip a switch
The same qualities that brought observational astronomy to a standstill in the era of social distancing will also make it tough to turn the telescopes back on until the pandemic has completely passed. So, even after the stay-at-home orders lift, some observatories may not find it safe to resume regular operations. They’ll have to find new ways to work as a team in tight spaces.
“We are just starting to think about these problems now ourselves,” says Caltech Optical Observatories deputy director Andy Boden, who also helps allocate observing time on the Keck Observatory telescopes in Hawaii. “There are aspects of telescope operations that really do put people in shared spaces, and that’s going to be a difficult problem to deal with as we come out of our current orders.”
Astronomers say they’re confident they can find solutions. But it will take time. Tony Beasley, the NRAO director, says his team is already working around a long list of what they’re now calling “VSDs,” or violation of social distancing problems. Their workarounds are typically finding ways to have one person do something that an entire team used to do.
Beasley’s research center operates the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, as well as the Very Large Array in New Mexico and the global Very Long Baseline Array — all of which are still observing, thanks to remote operations and a reimagined workflow.
Although the new workflow is not as efficient as it was in the past, so far there haven’t been any problems that couldn’t be solved. However, Beasley says some work eventually may require the use of personal protective equipment for people who must work in the same room. And he says they can’t ethically use such gear while hospitals are in short supply.
But Beasley and others think interesting and valuable lessons could still come out of the catastrophe.
“There’s always been kind of a sense that you had to be in the building, and you’ve got to stare the other people down in the meeting,” he says. “In the space of a month, I think everyone is surprised at how effective they can be remotely. As we get better at this over the next six months or something, I think there will be parts where we won’t go back to some of the work processes from before.”
Modern-day cathedrals
Despite best efforts and optimistic outlooks, some things will remain outside astronomers’ control.
Right now, researchers are completing the 2020 Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey, a kind of scientific census. The guiding document sets priorities and recommends where money should be spent over the next 10 years. NASA and Congress take its recommendations to heart when deciding which projects get funded. Until recent weeks, the economy had been strong and astronomers had hoped for a decade of new robotic explorers, larger telescopes, and getting serious about defending Earth from asteroids.
Engineers prep NASA’s Mars InSight lander for launch to the Red Planet. It is currently stationed on Mars investigating the planet’s deep interior.
(Credit: NASA)
“Many of NASA’s most important activities — from Mars exploration to studying extrasolar planets to understanding the cosmos — are centuries-long projects, the modern version of the construction of the great medieval cathedrals,” Princeton University astrophysicist David Spergel told the website SpaceNews.com last year as the process got underway. “The decadal surveys provide blueprints for constructing these cathedrals, and NASA science has thrived by being guided by these plans.”
However, many experts are predicting the COVID-19 pandemic will send the U.S. into a recession; some economists say job losses could rival those seen during the Great Depression.
If that happens, policymakers could cut the funding needed to construct these cathedrals of modern science — even after a crisis has us calling on scientists to save society.
These days it seems there is not much good news out there. People are still panicked over the coronavirus, governments are still trampling civil liberties in the name of fighting the virus, the economy –already teetering on the edge of collapse – has been kicked to the ground by what history may record as one of the worst man-made disasters of all time: shutting down the country to fight a cold virus.
That’s why we’ll take good news wherever we can get it, and President Trump’s hiring of Dr. Scott Atlas to his coronavirus task force may just be that good news we need. As the media has reported, President Trump has sidelined headline-hogging Anthony Fauci in favor of Atlas, the former Stanford University Medical Center chief of neuroradiology.
Recall, Fauci was the “expert” who told us a few months ago that we would never be able to shake hands again.
Fauci’s advice, forecasts, and assessments proved to be wildly wrong, contradictory, and just plain bizarre: Don’t wear a mask! You must wear a mask. Masks are important as symbols. Put on goggles. Stay home! Churches must be severely restricted but Black Lives Matter marches and encounters with strangers met over the Internet are perfectly fine.
When Anthony Fauci demanded a lockdown of the economy for an indefinite period he actually seemed oblivious to the havoc it would wreak on the economy and on people’s lives. People like Fauci and others who demanded lockdowns and stay-at-home orders were still collecting their paychecks, so what did they care about anyone else?
Dr. Scott Atlas is not only a former top physician and hospital administrator: as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution he also understands the policy implications of locking a country down.
On April 22, Dr. Atlas wrote an op-ed in The Hill titled, “The data is in — stop the panic and end the total isolation.” In the article he made five main points that are as true today as when he wrote them: an overwhelming majority of people are at no risk of dying from Covid; protecting older people prevents hospital overcrowding; locking down a population actually prevents the herd immunity necessary to defeat the virus; people are dying because they are not being treated for non-Covid illnesses; we know what part of the population is at risk and we can protect them.
Imagine how many thousands of lives could have been saved had the Administration listened to Dr. Atlas back in April. CDC Director Robert Redfield admitted last month that lockdowns were killing more Americans than Covid. “First do no harm” was thrown out the window and nearly six months of wrong-headed policy has done perhaps irreparable harm to the country.
South Dakota and Sweden did virtually nothing to lock down or restrict their populations and they actually fared better than lockdown states in the US. They had lower death rates, their hospitals were never over-run with Covid patients, and they have an economy to go back to.
We very much hope that Dr. Atlas will not “moderate” his message to please the blob in Washington. Trump’s Covid policies to this point have caused more harm than good. With Fauci out of the driver’s seat we finally have a chance of turning things around.
The Facts:More than 500 German doctors & scientists have signed on as representatives of an organization called the “Corona Extra-Parliamentary Inquiry Committee” to investigate what’s happening on our planet with regards to COVID-19.
Reflect On:Why are so many professionals and experts in the field being censored, ridiculed and shut down by organizations like the WHO? Should we not have the right to examine information openly, freely, and transparently?
Is this article ‘fake news?’ No, because the statement in the title that reads “we have a lot of evidence that it’s a fake story all over the world” is an actual quote from a representative of the group discussed in the article. The statement was said. Whether or not what the quote says is true, on the other hand, is up for you to decide or according to multiple governments, is up for the World Health Organization (WHO) to decide. Is the title misleading or inaccurate? No, again, it’s a direct quote and represents the opinion of multiple health professionals. Are these health professionals implying that COVID-19 is a fake virus? No, they are simply implying that it’s not as dangerous as it’s being made out to be., and I summarize some of that information below that has them coming to that conclusion.
These doctors and scientists are being heavily censored across all social media platforms, and those who write about them are experiencing the same. Many of the claims these doctors make have been ‘debunked’ by mainstream media, federal health regulatory agencies and ‘fact-checkers’ that are patrolling the internet. Any information that does not come from the (WHO) is not considered reliable, truthful or accurate, and that would include the information presented in this article and information shared by these experts in the field. People are being encouraged to visit the WHO’s website for real and accurate information about COVID-19 instead of listening to doctors and scientists who oppose the narrative of these health authorities.
What Happened: More than 500 German doctors & scientists have signed on as representatives of an organization called “Außerparlamentarischer Corona Untersuchungsausschuss.” Außerparlamentarischer Corona Untersuchungsausschuss stands for the “Corona Extra-Parliamentary Inquiry Committee and was established to investigate all things that pertain to the new coronavirus such as the severity of the virus, and whether or not the actions taken by governments around the world, and in this case the German government, are justified and not causing more harm than good.
As the Corona-Extra-Parliamentary Inquiry Committee, we will investigate why these restrictive measures were imposed upon us in our country as part of COVID-19, why people are suffering now and whether there is proportionality of the measures to this disease caused by the SARS-COV-2 virus. We have serious doubts that these measures are proportionate. This needs to be examined, and since the parliaments – neither the opposition parties nor the ruling parties – have not convened a committee and it is not even planned, it is high time that we took this into our own hands. We will invite and hear experts here in the Corona speaker group. These are experts from all areas of life: Medicine, social affairs, law, economics and many more. (source)
You can access the full english transcripts on the organizations website if interested.
This group has been giving multiple conferences in Germany, in one of the most recent, Dr. Heiko Schöning, one of the organizations leaders, stated that “We have a lot of evidence that it (the new coronavirus) is a fake story all over the world.” To put it in context, he wasn’t referring to the virus being fake, but simply that it’s no more dangerous than the seasonal flu (or just as dangerous) and that there is no justification for the measures being taken to combat it.
I also think it’s important to mention that a report published in the British Medical Journal has suggested that quarantine measures in the United Kingdom as a result of the new coronavirus may have already killed more UK seniors than the coronavirus has during the peak of the virus.
Below is a press conference held by representatives of the group that took place last month, you can find more important information below that.
Why This Is Important: It can be confusing for many people to see so many doctors and many of the world’s most renowned scientists and infectious disease experts oppose so much information that is coming from the WHO and global governments.
Many scientists and doctors in North America are also expressing the same sentiments. For example, The Physicians For Informed Consent (PIC) recently published a report titled “Physicians for Informed Consent (PIC) Compares COVID-19 to Previous Seasonal and Pandemic Flu Periods.” According to them, the infection/fatality rate of COVID-19 is 0.26%. You can read more about that and access their resources and reasoning here.
John P. A. Ioannidis, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at Stanford University has said that the infection fatality rate “is close to 0 percent” for people under the age of 45 years old. You can read more about that here. He and several other academics from the Stanford School of Medicine suggest that COVID-19 has a similar infection fatality rate as seasonal influenza, and published their reasoning in a study last month. You can find that study and read more about that story here.
Michael Levitt, a Biophysicist and a professor of structural biology at Stanford University criticized the WHO as well as Facebook for censoring different information and informed perspectives regarding the Coronavirus and has claimed that, with regards to lockdown measures, that “the level of stupidity going on here is amazing.” You can read more about this here.
Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, a specialist in microbiology and one of the most cited research scientists in German history is also part of Corona Extra-Parliamentary Inquiry Committee mentioned above and has also expressed the same thing, multiple times early on in the pandemic all the way up to today.
Implementation of the current draconian measures that so extremely restrict fundamental rights can only be justified if there is reason to fear that a truly, exceptionally dangerous virus is threatening us. Do any scientifically sound data exist to support this contention for COVID-19? I assert that the answer is simply, no. – Bhakdi. You can read more about him here.
Below are some interesting statistics from Canada. (source)
This article is based on my study and investigation of so-called epidemics over the past 30 years.
In the case of COVID-19, I’ve written at least one piece covering, in detail, each main element of the illusion. Here, I’m laying out the pattern. It is the same for each fake epidemic.
ONE: Through many meetings, exercises, planning sessions, a structure is welded in place to promote and launch the IDEA of an epidemic. World Health Organization, CDC, influential public health officials attached to governments around the world, etc.
TWO: There is a purported incident. An outbreak. The most obvious cause is intentionally overlooked. For example, horrendous air pollution, or the grotesque feces and urine pollution on a giant commercial pig factory-farm. Instead, the world is told a new virus has been found. Local researchers, if any, are augmented by researchers from CDC, WHO.
THREE: There is no air-tight chain of evidence explaining exactly how the purported new virus was discovered. From details released, there is NO proof of discovery by convincing methods, no proper unified study of MANY supposed epidemic patients.
FOUR: But WHO/CDC tells the world this is an epidemic in the making, caused by the new virus. The promotion and propaganda/media apparatus moves into high gear. Ominous pronouncements.
FIVE: Diagnostic tests for the unproven new virus are rolled out. They spit out false “proof” of “infection” like coins from a jackpot slot machine. These false-positives are an inherent feature of the tests.
SIX: Thus, all case numbers and death numbers, which are based on the tests, are rendered meaningless. And…they were already meaningless, because the supposed new virus “being tested for” was never properly discovered in the first place.
SEVEN: Nevertheless, these tests (plus useless eyeball diagnosis) are used to build official reports on case numbers. For the duration of the “epidemic,” reports keep coming, and escalating numbers are trumpeted. Within the basically meaningless structure of these reports, there is fiddling with totals, to make them more impressive and frightening.
EIGHT: Real people are really getting sick and dying, but for the most part, they are people who are dying from traditional and long-standing conditions—flu-like illness, pneumonia, other lung infections, etc. These people are “re-packaged” under the new epidemic label—e.g., “COVID”. The official description of the “new epidemic disease”—the clinical symptoms—is sufficiently general to easily allow this re-packaging.
NINE: If there is new illness, it can be explained by causes having nothing to do with the purported new virus. For example, a toxic vaccine campaign. A highly destructive drug. Highly toxic pesticides.
TEN: Over time, the definition of the epidemic is arbitrarily widened to include more symptoms and clinical features, in order to inflate case numbers.
ELEVEN: Control of information about the “epidemic” is hardened at the top. The talking heads, from the press and public health agencies, know as much about actual science as rabbits know about drone strikes. But they are “in charge.” Dissident information is attacked and censored.
TWELVE: Medical drugs and procedures (e.g., ventilators) used to treat patients are quite harmful. If a vaccine is rolled out, it, too, is toxic. Illness and death resulting from these and other medical attacks are counted as “epidemic cases caused by the virus.”
THIRTEEN: ABOVE ALL OTHER ILLUSIONS, the main deception is: “the epidemic is one disease or syndrome caused by one germ.” This is sold with unceasing propaganda. Most people fall for it. They will even argue among themselves about which “it” is the single cause of the “it” disease. There is no “it” cause or disease.
FOURTEEN: The public is sold lie after lie about contagion and the “spread” of the “it.”
FIFTEEN: The public chants (as if no one has ever died before), “People are dying, it must be the virus.”
SIXTEEN: The virus fairy tale always functions as a cover story for government or corporate or medical crimes. It obscures and hides these crimes. For example, a large factory is spewing horrendous pollution into the ground and water of an area, and people are getting sick and dying? Wait, the researchers say, the cause is actually a new virus no one has ever seen before.
As I wrote at the outset of the COVID illusion, the only difference this time, in 2020, is the weight of the lies—because they led to the lockdowns and the economic devastation. This is West Nile, SARS, Swine Flu, Zika, writ large.
Needless to say, the persons and groups responsible for launching these illusion-operations must hide their crimes.
The criminals have their weapons, of course. Among their most powerful: control of the press, and arcane technical language which pretends to relevance. This language is so dense, the uninitiated stand no chance of penetrating it.
For instance, researchers can babble for hours about their vaunted diagnostic test, the PCR. However, the simple truth is, the test has never been vetted. The test has never been tested in the real world outside the lab.
I have written about this extensively. Using a little guideline called SCIENCE, you would “test the test” by lining up, say, a thousand patients, some healthy, some sick from a supposed virus. Any virus. Tissue samples would be taken from each patient.
PCR mavens would run these samples through their equipment, reporting which patients show what they call high “viral load.”
This means: these particular patients have millions and millions of virus actively replicating in their bodies, and they will be unmistakably and visibly sick.
The PCR princes would then announce, “Patients 3,45,65,76,132…are all definitely sick.”
Now we un-blind the study and see what’s what and who’s who. Are these designated patients ill or are they running marathons? That’s called simple scientific method. Not technical gobbledygook.
This chunk of research has never been done. It never will be done. It’s too real. Too naked. Proponents of the PCR would have too much to lose, if their assessments of who are healthy and who are sick turned out to be absurdly wrong, and their arcane technical rhetoric about the PCR ended up being useless gibberish.
I include this illustration to indicate there are, indeed, ways of exposing professional liars, if you change the venue on them, if you use common sense, if you stand outside their self-appointed temples of mystical pretense and observe what their lies look like when you boil them down to human terms…
Here is another study of the PCR test that has never been done and never will be done, in the real world: line up a thousand patients, take tissues samples from them and send the samples to 40 different labs. Have the labs run their PCRs and announce their specific findings. Compare the results. You can bet the farm the labs will come up with contrary results.
This is part of a pattern: keep “scientific details” close to the vest; keep them “in-house”; don’t permit large-scale independent studies that will either confirm or deny basic tenets of official research.
COVID is a fraud from top to bottom. From beginning to end.
One of the worst parts of the Covid-19 “pandemic” are the decrees to wear masks in public. What’s wrong with masks? Let me count the ways. First, they do not keep out “viruses.” The pores in the best of masks are ten times bigger than any “virus”—it’s like a six-foot man walking through a sixty-foot door. Labels on boxes of masks specifically warn that the masks “will not provide any protection against Covid-19 (Coronavirus) or other viruses or contaminants.” Two, we are constantly exposed to bits of cellular material called viruses—our body is home for three hundred sixty trillion viruses. The air we breathe is constantly raining billions of virus particles that float through the air and are blown from one end of the earth to the other. Three, viruses are good for us; they communicate changes in the environment and help us adjust. Four, the masks force us to breathe in more carbon dioxide than is healthy; they are particularly dangerous for those with respiratory problems. A recent study involving one hundred fifty-nine healthcare workers, ages twenty-one to thirty-five, found that 81 percent developed headaches from wearing a face mask (https://www.globalresearch.ca/face-masks-pose-serious-risks-healthy/5712649). Five, lots of bacteria build up inside the mask, and these might indeed become toxic. Six, the masks can be deadly. Several young people have dropped dead while wearing masks in gym class or while running. (https://nypost.com/2020/05/06/two-boys-drop-dead-in-china-while-wearing-masks-during-gym-class/) And seven, masks hide our facial expressions, thereby removing our main way of communicating friendship and approval.
FALSE POSITIVES
The test used to “determine whether someone has contracted coronavirus” actually does no such thing. What it looks at are snippets of RNA, not actual “viruses.” By some estimates, the test can give up to 80 percent false positives (www.collective-evolution.com/2020/03/16/study-suggests-potential-high-rate-of-false-positives-for-covid-19-testing/). Yet, many people have been hospitalized and subjected to dangerous treatments like anti-virals and ventilators on the basis of these tests. Probably the wisest world ruler alive today is President John Magufuli of Tanzania. A chemist by training, Magufuli submitted a number of samples to the World Health Organization (WHO) for testing. Says Magufuli, “We took samples from goats; we sent samples from sheep; we took samples from pawpaws; we sent samples from car oil; and we took samples from other different things; and we took the samples to the laboratory without them knowing.” His officials named the sample of car oil Jabil Hamza, thirty years old, male. The results came back negative. They named a sample of jackfruit Sarah Samuel, forty-five years old, female. The results came back inconclusive. Pawpaw got sent in as Elizabeth Anne, twenty-six years old, female. The poor pawpaw came back positive. Samples from a bird called kware and from a goat also tested positive; rabbit was undetermined; sheep was negative. President Magufuli is not wasting any government money on test kits for his people.
WARP SPEED? NOT SO FAST!
Moderna is one of over a dozen companies working on a Covid-19 vaccine, leading the pack in getting out a vaccine as part of Operation Warp Speed. An optimistic press release on their progress sent their stock price soaring. However, the clinical trial results for the vaccine did not give cause for optimism. The vaccine, developed and promoted by Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and financed by Bill Gates, used an experimental mRNA technology said to allow rapid manufacture of the shot. Moderna skipped animal studies on the vaccine, opting to try it out on “exceptionally healthy” volunteers. But three of the fifteen in the high-dose cohort (250 mcg) suffered a “serious adverse event” within forty-three days of receiving the vaccine. One of them, Ian Haydon, age twenty- nine of Seattle, had to seek medical care at an urgent care center just twelve hours after his shot, and when he returned home, he fainted. Says Haydon, he “felt sicker than he ever had before.” Moderna did not release its clinical trial study or raw data, but its press release acknowledged that three volunteers developed grade-three systemic events defined by the FDA as “preventing daily activity and requiring medical intervention.” A vaccine with those reaction rates could cause grave injuries in one and one-half billion humans if administered to “every person on earth” (childrenshealthdefense.org, May 22, 2020).
INEFFECTIVE
Not only are these new vaccines dangerous, they are also ineffective. Oxford University researchers are developing a vaccine called ChAdOx1 nCov-19, which they tested on six rhesus monkeys. All six contracted the disease (www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8331709/Oxford-coronavirus-vaccine-does-not-stop-infection-experts-warn.html). Just two days earlier, in an example of extreme wishful thinking, webmd.com reported that the Oxford vaccine was a success (www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200518/vaccine-protects-monkeys-against-covid-19)!
DISEASE ENHANCEMENT
The development and licensure of Dengvaxia vaccine for dengue fever by Sanofi took more than twenty years and cost more than one and one-half billion dollars. Researchers found that the vaccine provoked a strong antibody response, which often made the disease worse, especially in infants and children—a phenomenon that researchers call “disease enhancement.” In spite of these dodgy results, Dengvaxia was subsequently administered to thousands of children in the Philippines, resulting in the deaths of six hundred and leading to a permanent ban on the vaccine in that country. Did the FDA call for a halt to Dengvaxia? Quite the contrary, the FDA went ahead and licensed the vaccine in the U.S. In 2016, Peter Hotez, MD, PhD, Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, tried to develop a vaccine for coronavirus. Hotez told a U.S. Congressional Committee that “coronavirus vaccines are scientifically challenging and have a unique potential safety problem,” that of disease enhancement. When Hotez observed this immune pathology in his coronavirus laboratory animals, he thought, “Oh my God, this is going to be problematic” (childrenshealthdefense.org, April 23, 2020).
BLOOD VESSEL DISEASE
Originally described as a disease of the lungs, akin to pneumonia, the emerging consensus now describes Covid-19 as a blood vessel disease caused by a “one-of-a-kind respiratory virus” that enters through the lungs and then attacks the blood vessels leading to high rates of blood clots. In the U.S., as many as 40 percent of Covid-19 patients develop clots and in China the rate is 71 percent. Autopsies show lungs filled with microclots. Even without a Covid-19 diagnosis, young people in their thirties and forties are having strokes in record numbers. On April 22, a New York doctor told CNN he had seen a sevenfold increase in the number of young people with strokes in the previous two weeks. At Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital, a doctor removing a clot from a patient’s brain “saw new clots forming in real time around it” as he was pulling it out. Bad, bad virus. . . or is it? Russian scientists saw the same symptoms in workers servicing ultra-high frequency generators way back in 1978. In addition to fatigue, drowsiness, headaches and loss of memory, the workers experienced a decrease in the amount of hemoglobin and a tendency toward hypercoagulation. There is no need to invoke “viruses” to explain cases of severe EMF poisoning (www.5gSpaceAppeal.org, May 20, 2020).
IT CAN BE DONE!
Mark Steele, a campaigner against 5G, worked to highlight the dangers of a secret 5G rollout in Gateshead, UK. Citing complaints of increased illness and cancer in 5G areas, Steele argued that the new smart 5G arrays on the top of new LED lampposts emit class-one radiation frequencies and should be treated as a danger to the public. The Gateshead Council launched a campaign against Steele, with false allegations on social media posts and printed leaflets stating that Steele was spreading pseudo-science; the leaflets claimed that the arrays were not dangerous and were not 5G. “Please be assured that there is no scientific basis or credible evidence of any of these scare stories about street lights causing cancer and other illnesses.” A court ruled that the council misused police powers to gag Steele and ordered the council to pay eleven thousand pounds to cover court costs. In court, none of the council officers could explain what 5G was and their leading government expert refused to attend the hearing. In conclusion the judge refused to gag Steele, stating, “The public have a right to know.” The secret 5G rollout in Gateshead is now officially an issue of public interest and will be treated as a landmark case for other people to start using this court’s ruling to challenge their Councils (https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/, October 12, 2018). Here in the U.S., one small town, Easton, in Fairfield County, Connecticut recently decided to put the brakes on the 5G rollout. On May 7, 2020, the Easton Board of Selectmen unanimously approved a 5G cease-and-desist resolution “until such technologies have been proven safe to human health and the environment through independent research and testing” (childrenshealthdefense.org, May 22, 2020). Other U.S. towns that have taken steps to stop 5G include Farragut, Tennessee; Hallandale Beach, Florida; Greendale, Wisconsin; Keene, New Hampsuire; and Santa Barbara, California.
VITAMIN A AND OBESITY
Obesity impairs the body’s ability to use vitamin A appropriately and leads to deficiencies of this key nutrient in major organs. This was the conclusion of research conducted at Weill Cornell Medicine. “Our research shows that, even if an obese animal consumes normal amounts of vitamin A, they have deficiencies of the vitamin A in major organs,” said first author Dr. Steven Trasino. “Obesity is categorized as a state of malnutrition, typically associated with consumption of too many calories and poor intake of essential nutrients. Our data expand on that definition by showing that obesity plays a role in the body’s ability to use this essential nutrient properly.” The report notes that vitamin A is critical for vision, fetal development, reproduction, immune responses and wound healing, and that vitamin A deficiency is also implicated in increased risk of respiratory infections, diabetes, infertility, delayed growth and poor bone development. Unfortunately, obesity interferes with the body’s ability to use vitamin A, even with adequate intake. (news.weill.cornell.edu/news, November 2, 2015). These findings may explain why obesity is a risk factor for severe Covid-19 disease, since vitamin A is also a critical nutrient for protecting us against environmental toxins, including electromagnetic toxicity.
UNTO THE THIRD GENERATION
Grandmothers with higher blood levels of PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl, fluorine-containing industrial toxins released into the air, soil and water) are significantly more likely to have granddaughters with obesity, according to a report given at the virtual ENDO 2020 meeting sponsored by the Endocrine Society. According to Barbara Cohn, PhD, of the Public Health Institute in Berkeley, California, “Pregnancy appears to be. . . a critical window of exposure for at least three generations of humans.” These compounds are designed to persist in the environment, and they also obviously do in the human body (https://www.medpagetoday.com/meetingcoverage/endo/85719). Major sources include non-stick pans, food packaging, household products, stain- and water-repellent fabrics, cleaning products and fire-fighting foams. They are associated with low infant birth weights, negative effects on the immune system, cancer, thyroid hormone disruption and lowered testosterone.
PROTECT YOUR KIDS WITH RAW MILK
A January 2015 study published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology found that children who drink raw milk have less rhinitis and fewer respiratory tract infections and ear aches. The highest rates of these illnesses were in children who drank UHT milk, with lower rates in those drinking pasteurized milk and boiled farm milk. The best outcome was in children on raw milk. The results were especially significant for ear infections—something that makes children especially miserable. Interestingly, children who drank raw milk had about the same rate of fever as those who drank pasteurized milk or boiled farm milk, an indication that fever is just a normal and possibly protective occurrence for children.
New Censorship Czars: Tech Titans Aim to Restrict Access to Information in the Vaccine Debate
By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Chairman, Children’s Health Defense
When I was a boy, it was unthinkable that an American liberal would acquiesce to censorship. It was axiomatic that all the Nazi atrocities had begun with censorship and silencing of critics of government policies. Our civics teachers taught that the free flow of information—even inconvenient truths—was the lifeblood of democracy.
We must know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms.
My uncle, John F. Kennedy, commented in 1962 that American “libraries should be open to all—except the censor. We must know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms. Let us welcome controversial books and controversial authors. For the Bill of Rights is the guardian of our security as well as our liberty.”
History will record that, in 2020, it was men who called themselves “liberal” who lead the clamor for censorship. Harry Truman warned us against such men: “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”
Today they openly silence the tragic stories of American mothers of vaccine-injured children and all of the other unapproved criticism of pharmaceutical products.
In early 2019, Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff asked the CEOs of Google, Facebook, and Amazon to censor “vaccine misinformation”, a euphemism for any statement that departs from official declarations by Pharma and its captured regulatory officials. Each of these Silicon Valleytyrants is partnered in rich deals with vaccine makers. They were therefore delighted to comply. Today they openly silence the tragic stories of American mothers of vaccine-injured children and all other unapproved criticism of pharmaceutical products.
Where does Adam Schiff think this will end? Does he imagine Bill Gates as a friend of liberty? In one short moment, the worm will turn. To Schiff, I paraphrase St. Thomas Moore’s query: “When you have obliterated the First Amendment to get at the Devil, and the Devil then turns on you, then where will you hide?”
Last Sunday I didn’t finish scheduling blogs this week. There’s a reason for that, and it’s because my inbox was stuffed once again with articles in one way or another having to do with the Fauci-Lieber-Wuhan virus planscamdemic. So I was at a loss as to what to blog about. So I woke up this morning – in part due to the gentle urgings of Shiloh, who has a whole routine worked out now on how to wake me up – determined to schedule a blog for today and the rest of the week. As for her routine, this consists first of scratching herself furiously, then pawing at her blanket in order to move it closer to me, and then, with great drama, plopping herself down so that the effort literally pushes me toward the edge of the bed. If that doesn’t work, then it’s the circle-next-to-him-endlessly, and another plop-and-push. And if that doesn’t work, it’s the old paw-on-the-cheek-with-accompanying-sweet-whine trick.
But I digress. Back to the Fauci-Lieber-Wuhan virus planscamdemic narrative. I received, as I said, so many articles about it, I’ve decided once again to gather up the best of them for this weekend’s “honorable mentions”. I was still at a loss about today’s blog, however, until I opened my email inbox and found this article sent along by E.U., and I read the headline.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said aloud. Shiloh was sitting next to my chair, and I told her, “listen to this, Shiloh,” and read the headline to her. Even she gets how crazy it is, and cocked her head and whined. But in a way, you just knew this one was coming. After all, some crazy county – I think it was in Florida – actually announced they were considering mandatory nose feeder bags for people in their own homes, so you just knew this one was coming:
Yes, you read that correctly: you should now wear a mask during sex, to make sure the sex is completely safe sex. Get this:
The university reportedly sent out notices to on-campus students that said they should “consider wearing a face mask during sex. Heavy breathing and panting can further spread the virus, and wearing a mask can reduce the risk,” according to OutKick.
That’s right folks, not only wear a mask, but try to limit the heavy breathing during the activity, a difficult proposition, since masks tend to interfere with normal breathing to begin with. But the real insanity of the article is that the galloping, somersaulting kookery that is modern Amairikuhn edgyjkayshun in the modern Amairikuhn quackademy has now reached out and married itself to the gymnastic idiocy that is the Fauci-Lieber-Wuhan virus narrative. Ahh, but wait, dear reader, there’s more:
“You are your safest sex partner. Practice solo sex, or limit the number of sexual partners you have,” said the University of Georgia recommendations, according to OutKick, which identifies itself on Twitter as “fearless, data-driven sports reporting.”
Yes, that’s right, better just to have sex with yourself.
Ahh, but wait, dear reader, there’s even more:
In June, a study from researchers at Harvard University said that in order to prevent transmitting COVID-19 from one person to another, both people should be wearing a face mask while having sex.
The study also advised against kissing. It suggested partners shower before and after the act, and clean everything with alcohol wipes or soap.
“Data are lacking regarding other routes of sexual transmission,” said the study, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. “Two small studies of SARS-CoV-2–infected people did not detect virus in semen or vaginal secretions. An additional study of semen samples from 38 patients detected the virus by reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction in 6 patients (15.8%). However, the relevance regarding sexual transmission remains unknown. Until this is better understood, it would be prudent to consider semen potentially infectious.”
Yes, this lunacy is coming straight out of that hellish pit of quackademic lunacy, Harvard, home of Dr. Charles Lieber.
Wear your masks during sex, don’t kiss, and whatever you do, don’t breathe heavily (in fact, better not to breathe at all. We’ll get back to that).
Now, we all know where this is headed. Why, just a few weeks ago I was joking in blogs and interviews about the narrative leading to people wearing masks during sex. Apparently someone at Haaahvaaahd was taking me seriously, and did a study about it (I wonder how much of the missing trillions went to fund that one?!). So let’s press this “logic” a bit more. I seem to recall the whole purpose of wearing nose feederbags was to prevent the spread of “droplets” that could contain THE DREADED BUG, and then were were also informed that THE DREADED BUG’S way into the body could also be through the eyes or other mucus membranes as per the “wash-your-hands-at-all-times-and-don’t-touch-your-face-or-eyes” narrative. So some people are walking around now with feederbags and goggles. But now there’s that all-too-human activity – sex – to be concerned about. So, not only “practice safe sex”, but in order to be really, completely, totally and uncompromisingly safe, both partners should wrap themselves in cellophane or latex body-condoms (without breathing heavily of course), and have sex in cellophane, or better yet, if you have the money, buy a hazmat suit or buy a military grade gas mask. (Oh, but wait, aren’t the pores in cellophane or latex much larger than the size of viruses? It’s all so confusing…) And while we’re at it, we really should be wearing feederbags and goggles when we sleep, especially you married folk who like to sleep in the same bed, and if you do sleep in the same bed together, you might want to rethink that, and buy twin beds and practice Social Sleep Distancing. Hmmm, I just thought of something else, too… best to avoid public restrooms altogether; if you have to go, just go where you are and suffer the indignity of a little embarrassment rather than risk getting THE DREADED BUG. If you do have to use one, best to carry a pair of rubber gloves and toilet bowl cleaner in your “New Normal Backpack” at all times.
And come to think of it, investing in a little mustard gas would be helpful too, for that post-sex clean-up, to make sure your dwelling is really free of THE DREADED BUG, and a propane tank outside, rigged for hand sanitizer, and connected to your shower, would be helpful too. If your local industrial chemical supplier is out of mustard gas, you can make a simple version for yourselves out of chlorine bleach and… oh, I’d better stop now, because some soulless humorless product of the modern quackademy will not appreciate my satire and think “hey! that’s a good idea!”
I’m waiting for the next study from Haaahvaaahd: “Not breathing helps to slow the spread of THE DREADED BUG” and “Social Distancing During Sex Helps Limit the Spread of THE DREADED BUG.”
We must know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms.
