Some people are criticizing President Biden for the recent U.S. air strikes in Syria as well as his refusal to sanction Saudi dictator Mohammed bin Salman, the man who U.S. officials have concluded orchestrated the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
Yes, it’s possible that Biden made those decisions. But there is another possibility, one much more likely, one that unfortunately all too many Americans are loath to consider: that it was the U.S. national-security establishment, particularly the Pentagon and the CIA, who made those decisions and that Biden simply deferred to their judgment.
That’s what many people simply cannot bring themselves to consider: that it is the national-security establishment, namely the Pentagon, the CIA, the NSA, and, to a certain extent, the FBI, that is actually running the federal government, especially in foreign affairs. The other three branches, while permitted to have the veneer of power, are expected to defer to critical judgments made by the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA.
And defer they do. When was the last time that Congress significantly reduced the budget for the national-security establishment? You’ll never see it. That’s because the national-security establishment controls Congress. No member of Congress, especially the military and CIA veterans, would dare to take them on. If he did, he would be toast because the Pentagon would immediately retaliate by threatening to close down military projects or bases in his district. The Pentagon’s and CIA’s assets in the mainstream press would immediately take the offensive and accuse the congressman of being “ineffective.” He would be out in the next election.
The Supreme Court has long deferred to the overwhelming power of the national-security branch of the federal government. The Pentagon’s and CIA’s torture and prison center in Cuba, where people have been denied the right to a speedy trial for more than a decade, is an ongoing testament of that deference to authority. So is the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the Pentagon’s and CIA’s power to assassinate people, notwithstanding the express prohibitions on assassination in the Fifth Amendment. Indeed, America’s official secrets act wasn’t a law enacted by Congress; it was a judicial doctrine that the Supreme Court crafted out of whole cloth in deference to a demand by the military.
Trump vs. Biden
With the national-security establishment’s decision that President Kennedy’s policies posed a grave threat to national security and, therefore, that he needed to be removed from office, no president has dared to take these people on. In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, it appeared that Donald Trump was going to do so. But for some unknown reason, once he entered into office, he crumbled, surrounding himself with military generals and civilian warmongers. He also surrendered to the CIA’s demands to keep its 50-year-old JFK assassination records secret, on grounds of “national security.”
But there is no doubt that Trump was different. He didn’t show the same deference to the authority of the national-security establishment that other presidents since Kennedy have. That was why the deep state went after him from the very beginning, especially with its nonsensical investigation into whether Trump was a Russian agent who was betraying America, just as they said Kennedy was doing with his policies. Perhaps with time, we will learn the full extent of the deep state’s efforts to ensure Joe Biden’s defeat of Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
Now they have Biden, which is their notion of an ideal president, one who will defer to the omnipotent power of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA. Did Biden really select military-industrial complex man Lloyd J. Austen III as Secretary of Defense? It’s much more likely that the Pentagon, not wanting to jack with a civilian overseer, chose Austin and that Biden simply deferred to its wishes.
Unheeded warnings
President Eisenhower warned about this type of governmental structure in his Farewell Address in 1961. He pointed out that it constituted a grave threat to the democratic processes and rights and liberties of the American people. That was more than 50 years ago. Since then, the Pentagon, the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI, along with their army of contractors and subcontractors feeding at the public trough, have only grown progressively more powerful and rich.
John Kennedy took these people on directly. Kennedy was not a dumb man. He knew precisely the nature of the power structure he was up against. That was why he played an instrumental role in bringing the movie Seven Days in May into production — to serve as a warning to the American people, the same type of warning that Ike issued to Americans in his Farewell Address.
The problem is that Americans have never paid heed to those warnings. They just don’t want to acknowledge that they had any validity. Indeed, many Americans still do not want to confront the fact that this brutal structure within their governmental apparatus ended up turning its omnipotent power inward against a president whose policies they deemed constituted a grave threat to national security.
Milking the rackets
For some 45 years, the national-security establishment milked the “war on communism” for all that it was worth, constantly engendering deep fear with the American people so that they would continue to vest the Pentagon, the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI with ever-increasing power, influence, and money.
It was nothing more than one great big racket, one that continually, year after year, enriched the pockets and expanded the power of those in the military-intelligence establishment.
When Kennedy decided to bring an end to the Cold War racket, he had to be dealt with. And a message needed to be sent to the American people: “We are here, we are in charge, never take us on, and just get used to it.”
When the Cold War ended, their racket quickly morphed into the “war on terrorism.” All the fears about communism that these people engendered in the American people were simply switched to terrorism — or Islam. At first the fear revolved around the notion that foreign terrorists were coming to get us. Now it’s morphed into the notion that domestic terrorists are coming to get us.
They have now come full circle, restoring Russia and China as official enemies who are supposedly coming to get us, just like they supposedly were during the 45 years of the Cold War racket. It’s now a fear-mongering perfect storm — terrorists, Muslims, Russia, and China and, for good measure, Syria, North Korea, ISIS, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, drug dealers, illegal immigrants, and an unsafe world.
An upending of values and morals
Ever since its inception, the deep state has upended America’s morals and values. How many foreign regimes, including democratically elected ones, have these people destroyed in the name of national security? How many brutal military and right-wing dictatorships have they installed into power, trained, supported, and aligned with? How many people, including a democratically elected U.S. president, have they assassinated over the years based on national security?
The obsessive quest to inflict extreme punishment on people like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden says it all. Here are people who have done nothing more than disclose the truth about the national-security establishment’s evil and immoral actions. Yet, it is people like Assange and Snowden who are considered to be the evil, immoral ones. What better evidence of an upending of America’s morals and values than that?
If our American ancestors had been told that the Constitutional Convention was bringing into existence a national-security state type of governmental structure, they never would have approved the deal. The only reason they approved the deal was because they were assured that the Constitution was bringing into existence a limited-government republic.
The national-security state is a root cause of many woes under which America is suffering. To get our nation back on the right road, it is necessary that we dismantle, not reform, the national-security establishment and restore our founding governmental system of a limited-government republic to our land.
March 3, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular | CIA, FBI, NSA, United States |
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Peter Ridd is right – the Great Barrier Reef is not in immediate danger of dying. James Cook University, Peter Ridd’s adversary in his unfair dismissal court case, has just slightly walked back some of their more ridiculous Great Barrier Reef extinction claims.
Coral count rethinks extinction risk
Fraser Barton
The global extinction risk of most coral species is lower than previously estimated, scientists in North Queensland claim.
In a world-first, researchers at James Cook University have assessed the number of coral colonies in the Pacific Ocean and evaluated their risk of extinction.
The study measured the population sizes of more than 300 individual coral species on reefs across the Pacific Ocean, from Indonesia to French Polynesia.
Using a combination of coral reef habitat maps and counts of coral colonies to estimate species abundances, they estimate roughly half a trillion corals in the Pacific alone.
Given the huge size of these coral populations, researchers believe it is very unlikely that they face imminent extinction.
…
Co-author Professor Terry Hughes stated while the study results have huge implications for managing and restoring coral reefs, it is is not the solution to climate change.
“You would have to grow about 250 million adult corals to increase coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef by just one percent.”
…
Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/coral-count-rethinks-extinction-risk/ar-BB1e7fD5
The abstract of the study;
The population sizes and global extinction risk of reef-building coral species at biogeographic scales
Andreas Dietzel, Michael Bode, Sean R. Connolly & Terry P. Hughes
Abstract
Knowledge of a species’ abundance is critically important for assessing its risk of extinction, but for the vast majority of wild animal and plant species such data are scarce at biogeographic scales. Here, we estimate the total number of reef-building corals and the population sizes of more than 300 individual species on reefs spanning the Pacific Ocean biodiversity gradient, from Indonesia to French Polynesia. Our analysis suggests that approximately half a trillion corals (0.3 × 1012–0.8 × 1012) inhabit these coral reefs, similar to the number of trees in the Amazon. Two-thirds of the examined species have population sizes exceeding 100 million colonies, and one-fifth of the species even have population sizes greater than 1 billion colonies. Our findings suggest that, while local depletions pose imminent threats that can have ecologically devastating impacts to coral reefs, the global extinction risk of most coral species is lower than previously estimated.
Read more: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-021-01393-4
Professor Terry Hughes, whose name appears on this paper, lodged official complaints about Peter Ridd, and in my opinion contributed to Peter Ridd’s dismissal for the crime of being right.
On one hand it is a positive that coral science seems to be edging towards a much needed correction.
But this slight shift towards Peter Ridd’s position, that claims the Great Barrier Reef is on the verge of extinction are grossly exaggerated, in my opinion puts James Cook University into an even more untenable position.
The sooner James Cook University apologises and settles Peter Ridd’s unfair dismissal claim, the better it will be for their long journey back to restoring James Cook’s in my opinion shattered scientific reputation.
March 3, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | James Cook University |
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Lockdowns or the planet gets it?
© web.archive.org / The Guardian
The Guardian accidentally confirmed the suspicions of a whole lot of conspiracy theorists with an article suggesting a “global lockdown every two years” was needed to meet Paris climate goals. The title was quickly changed.
If carbon dioxide emissions don’t drop by the equivalent of a worldwide lockdown “roughly every two years” for the next decade, the earth will heat to apocalyptic levels, a team of researchers at the University of East Anglia warned in a Nature article published Wednesday.
This apparently so excited a certain strain of climate fanatic on the Guardian staff, that they originally posted the piece under the title “Global lockdown every two years needed to meet Paris CO2 goals – study.” After being dragged mercilessly for such fear porn, the headline was changed to “Equivalent of Covid emissions drop needed every two years – study” with an explainer that “experts say” that “equivalent falls in emissions over a decade” would be “required to keep safe limits of global heating.”
Despite calling for “completely different methods” to achieve and lock in the emissions drop from the pandemic, lead researcher Corinne Le Quéré nevertheless insisted that climate change couldn’t be a “side issue. It can’t be about one law or policy, it has to be put at the heart of all policy.”
“Every strategy and every plan from every government must be consistent with tackling climate change.”
While Le Quéré didn’t come out and suggest people be arbitrarily deprived of their liberties every two years in order to please a climate model, the other “strategic actions” she mentioned to keep some of the gains of the pandemic were already being implemented – and in many cases had been implemented for years. From city planning to incentivize “active transport” (walking and cycling) and growing public transportation, to promoting remote work where possible, her suggestions were not exactly new – and unlikely to convince anyone they were sufficient enough.
“There is a real contradiction between what governments are saying they are going to do [to generate a green recovery], and what they are doing,” Le Quéré told the Guardian, calling the phenomenon “very worrisome.”
Her co-researcher Glen Peters was more explicit in what latitude countries should have to move away from fossil fuels on their own time, calling for “structural changes” to move economies toward renewable energy.
Some on social media, seeing the “quiet part” said out loud on the first edition of the Guardian article, had an “I told you so” moment. The threat of ‘climate lockdowns’ has been alternately presented and “debunked” by mainstream media for months.
… others at first assumed it had to be satire, because no one would post something that on-the-nose –
… except maybe for the World Economic Forum, which actually posted in praise of what lockdowns had done to cities – presumably turned them into uninhabitable hives of snitches where one can’t even take in a Broadway show anymore – earlier this week, before removing its tweet under public pressure.
The WEF had posted a video praising the “silence” and clearer air – and lack of humans, though they didn’t say that part out loud.
March 3, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science | The Guardian |
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16 states are now following the science
It took an entire year, but lockdowns and mask mandates are officially incredibly unpopular with half of the country, to the point that governors are rapidly making sweeping changes to their year-long COVID-19 policies.
Jumping onto the coattails of pro-individual freedom leaders like governors Ron DeSantis (R-Florida) and Kristi Noem (R-SD), the governors of Mississippi and Texas decided Tuesday to announce an end to business restrictions and statewide mask mandates.
Both Tate Reeves (R-MS) and Greg Abbott (R-TX), who had long taken a nanny state approach to the COVID-19 crisis, acted almost simultaneously to announce the end of statewide restrictions.
The centrally planned solutions to COVID-19 have failed spectacularly, and the American people have taken notice of this reality. Hundreds of millions have now been through a full year of government-imposed tyranny on both a federal and state level. Whether it was a travel ban, an endless series of lockdowns, mask mandates, countless emergency orders, business closures, and the like, not a single top-down order from the federal or state level did anything productive for the wellbeing of Americans.
None of it worked. All of it served as a net negative. The people have noticed.
Now that their constituents have had enough, politicians on the Right are fast departing from the COVID tyranny, and attempting to secure what is left of their political aspirations.
Abbott and Reeves are not the only GOP governors moving fast in ending the restrictions, several other governors have recently acted to roll them back.
On February 12, Montana Governor Greg Gianforte lifted his statewide mask mandate.
On February 8, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds lifted Iowa’s statewide mask mandate along with several other restrictions.
On February 22, North Dakota took it a step further. Its legislative body took the bold step in voting to make mask mandates illegal.
As of March 2, there are now 16 states that no longer have statewide mask orders.
However, across the political divide, there remains no end in sight to the corona madness. Much of the Left continues to embrace and root on endless COVID-19 restrictions, and the hijacking of individual rights in the name of a virus.
Governor Gavin Newsom of California took to Twitter in describing the end of restrictions as “absolutely reckless.”
It took long enough, but it’s now official: Governors who continue to impose lockdowns and mask mandates are fast becoming as popular as Red Sox fans in the Yankee Stadium bleachers, at least in half of the country. The internal polling is out, and the draconian restrictions are being abandoned in droves. History will not be kind to the remaining high-handed holdouts.
March 3, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, United States |
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There appears to be a pattern developing when deaths are reported shortly following COVID-19 vaccinations, in that all deaths are assumed to be only “coincidentally” associated with vaccination before all the evidence is in. This raises an obvious question: Is the assumption that the experimental COVID-19 vaccines are never the cause of death scientifically justified or is it a symptom of bias?
Following the death of Drene Keyes in Virginia within minutes of receiving the first dose of Pfizer/BioNTech’s experimental messenger RNA (mRNA) BNT162b2 vaccine for COVID-19 on Jan. 30, 2021, the doctors who treated Keyes told her daughter, Lisa Jones, that her mother had suffered from what is called “flash pulmonary edema” (a condition caused by excess fluid in the lungs) caused by a serious allergic reaction, or anaphylaxis.1 2
While anaphylaxis is a known side effect of many vaccines, including mRNA vaccines like the one given to Keyes, almost immediately Virginia’s health commissioner Norman Oliver, MD said that preliminary findings of the investigation into Keyes’ death indicate that the cause of death was not anaphylaxis. Dr. Oliver acknowledged that the death had occurred soon after Keyes had been vaccinated, but insisted that fact was not “evidence of it being related.”1
Dr. Oliver said, “We are currently investigating and do not yet know the cause of death.” Danny Avula, MD, who is director of the Richmond City and Henrico County health departments and Virginia’s vaccine coordinator, said, “They’re looking for patterns, they’re looking for a causation versus just a correlation based on time.”1
Weeks have passed since Keyes died and the official cause of death has yet to be determined. A news report in mid-February noted that the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia had informed Jones that an autopsy on her mother would not be performed. According to the article, Jones said she had been told the state would not do a full autopsy “due to public health concerns.”1
One can only speculate why Virginia state officials opted out of doing a full autopsy to try and better understand what caused Keyes’ death by citing “public health concerns.” The oddness of that reasoning might only be surpassed by the reason given by the Portuguese Ministry of Justice for not revealing the cause of death for 41-year-old Sonia Acevedo in Portugal on Jan. 1, 2021 two days after being given the first dose of the BNT162b2 vaccine: “secrecy of justice.”3 4
Other Deaths Reported Soon After Vaccination
There have been reports of other deaths that have occurred during the past two months soon after people have received the COVID-19 vaccine. In each of those cases, health authorities and vaccine providers have immediately written the deaths off as either unlikely to have been connected to the vaccine or, reportedly, the deaths are still being investigated.
Dozens of deaths following COVID-19 vaccinations have been reported in Europe, India, Israel and other regions of the world.3 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40
There have been several well-publicized deaths after COVID-19 vaccination in the United States, including the death of 56-year-old Gregory Michael, MD in Florida on Dec. 18, 2020 two weeks after getting the first dose of Pfizer/BioNTech’s experimental messenger RNA (mRNA) BNT162b2 vaccine.41 42
Dr. Gregory’s death was followed by the death of 60-year-old Tim Zook in Orange County, California on Jan. 9, 2021 four days after getting the second dose of the BNT162b2 vaccine and the death of a man in his late 40s who died on Jan. 17 in Nebraska one to two weeks after getting the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. There was also the death of a 64-year-old man in Placer County, CA on Jan. 21 three hours after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine.43 44 45 46 47
More recently, there was the death of 90-year old Daniel Thayne Simpson in Michigan on Feb. 4 the day after he received the first dose of Moderna’s experimental mRNA-1273 vaccine and the death of a man in his 70s on Feb. 7 in New York 25 minutes after getting a COVID-19 vaccine, followed by the death of 36-year-old J. Barton Williams, MD, who died on Feb. 8 in Tennessee just weeks after receiving the second dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.48 49 50
Finally, there was the death of a 78-year-old woman within minutes of getting the first dose of the BNT162b2 vaccine at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona on Feb. 12 and the death on Feb. 16 of former Detroit news anchor Karen Hudson-Samuels, 68, the day after getting a COVID-19 vaccine.51 52 At least thus far.
Officially, No Post-Vaccination Deaths Have Been Linked to COVID-19 Vaccines
Interestingly, despite the close proximity of the sudden and unexpected deaths of all these people to the times they were given COVID-19 vaccinations, none of the deaths have been deemed by health officials to be related to the COVID-19 vaccines recently administered. Most deaths have been judged to be merely coincidental or a specific cause of death has not yet been given.
Almost unanimously, mainstream media outlets have forwarded the narrative that nobody has died from a COVID-19 vaccination. One news report noted:
While people have died after receiving the vaccine, doctors say those deaths are not—in any way—linked to the vaccine. Every time someone gets sick or dies after getting the shot, government agencies investigate to ensure there is no link. So far, the CDC has been unable to identify a single case where the vaccine is the cause of someone passing away.53
“Scientists say it’s human nature to draw a connection between events—especially when they happen close together—but it doesn’t mean one caused the other,” wrote Stephanie Widmer, MD in an article published by ABC News.54 Dr. Widner offered the following quote from fellow physician William Schaffner, MD, professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center:
We all know that the rooster crows before the dawn, but we don’t think the rooster makes the sun come up, simply because they are related in time.54
That’s an interesting way of looking at things. But then, the same might be said of those who have been listed as having died of COVID-19. After all, an unknown number of people, whose deaths were attributed to COVID-19, had underlying poor health conditions, known as “comorbidities. ” Those underlying poor health conditions, including heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes and other co-morbidities, could have been the major reason they died. Yet, because those individuals tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 disease—whether symptomatic or asymptomatic—they were counted as having died of COVID-19.
The truth is that some people are obviously dying of COVID-19, while others are dying from well-known chronic diseases that are leading causes of death in the U.S. every year.55 56 57 58
Is There an Inherent Bias Against Blaming Vaccines?
I suspect the same may be true of those who have died so soon after getting a COVID-19 vaccination. However, there is no way to prove that there is an inherent bias against considering the possibility that a COVID-19 vaccine can, in rare instances, cause a person to die suddenly and unexpectedly shortly after vaccination. There will be no way to obtain the necessary evidence to prove it if health authorities refuse to complete full investigations (including conducting autopsies) into these cases.
Could it be that Virginia’s medical examiners, or those above them, were reluctant to conduct a full autopsy on Keyes for fear of what they might find? How much did the possibility that Keyes’ death could have been connected to the vaccine she received factor into the “public health concerns” of Virginia health officials, who refused to do an autopsy? Were they concerned that discovery of a connection might discourage some people from getting vaccinated?
One can only ask the questions.
March 3, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine |
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The UK media is reporting this morning that as many as 200,000 staff working in the National health Service have refused a jab or have indicated that they will not take one.
Rather than try to ascertain why so may health workers are reluctant to take it, the media is instead asking whether or not the staff can be compelled to have a vaccine. The media has dubbed this “no jab, no job.” No reporter in the UK’s mainstream media has dared to ask the only question that matters, that is, what do they know?
The Daily Mail reported this morning that the government’s forthcoming review into vaccine passports, will pay special attention to whether health staff who decline the jab, can be legally compelled to have one.
The review will also look at whether mandating covid vaccines can be applied to care home staff, most of whom are not employed by the state. Questioning the motives of the staff who have declined the vaccine is verboten.
I have a number of sources who work in hospitals, hospices and care homes, people I have met along the road. A nurse who works at Salford Royal told me yesterday that as far as she knows, at least six of her colleagues will not take the vaccine. When I asked her why, she promptly said, “Swine Flu.”
It’s only a decade ago, that Professor Gabriel Scally (now President of Epidemiology & PH, Royal Society of Medicine) told NHS staff to take the Swine Flu vaccine to keep themselves and their patients safe. At that time he was Director of Public Health for South-West England. Scally urged doctors, nurses, cleaners, porters etc to take Pandemrix. He declared it safe and efficacious. Here’s the video. YouTube deleted it. I wonder why?
Pandemrix was withdrawn because a lot of people who took it came down with narcolepsy. The UK government paid out tens of millions of pounds in compensation. Professor Gabriel Scally has been on UK TV and radio channels several times a week in the past year, pushing coronavirus vaccines. No media outlet in the UK has dared ask Scally about Swine Flu injuries.
NHS staff know all about the damage caused by the Swine Flu vaccine. This might account for some (not all) of the refuseniks. Others will be hearing horror stories emerging from care homes in Norway, Gibraltar and Basingstoke here in the UK, where a wave of deaths occurred shortly after residents were vaccinated.
Health workers will no doubt have heard of reported adverse events in Northern Italy and Germany. Dozens of teachers became very ill after receiving their vaccines, resulting in the closure of one primary school. Hundreds of hospital staff and ambulance drivers became unwell in two cities in Germany, after having their jabs.
The UK media cannot and will not ask the question “what do they know.” The public has a right to know why 200,000 health workers won’t touch a vaccine that they are being pressured into taking.
March 3, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, UK |
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The Antibody Deception from Rosemary Frei on Vimeo.
The world has been fixated for months on novel-coronavirus PCR testing, contact tracing and vaccination.
Meanwhile, another major part of the Covid biomedical complex has received far less attention: the use of antibodies for detecting, diagnosing and treating infection with the novel coronavirus.
Hundreds of antibodies have been approved for these purposes since January 2020. And hundreds more are poised to start being marketed soon.
This is part of the biomedical gold rush: by last summer already, antibodies were on track to become the most lucrative medical product, with global revenue projected to reach nearly half a trillion dollars by 2024. Profit margins in the range of 67% aren’t uncommon.
Pharma giants such as AstraZeneca, Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline and Eli Lilly are among the companies grabbing the largest chunks of the novel-coronavirus-antibody market. And some of the most muscular government agencies, including Anthony Fauci’s US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the US’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, are part of the action (see, for example, the second-last section of this article, on antibodies used to treat Covid).
Virtually every study and piece of marketing material related to Covid is premised on scientists having positively and correctly identified the presence of the novel coronavirus (also known as SARS-CoV-2) in the material they’re working with.
The job of that identification is usually given to antibodies that are said to bind to the novel coronavirus. The assumption is these antibodies are able to pick out the virus and only the virus from among every other organism and substance surrounding it.
Unfortunately it turns out that the antibodies rarely (if ever) do that. This is because of, among other things, inadequate verification of the antibodies’ accuracy in targeting the virus by the companies that manufacture and sell them. And there’s even less verification by government regulators.
Let’s take a 30,000-foot tour of a couple of the main features of the antibody-industry landscape, which is awash in complexity and cash.
Can Antibodies be Created That Only Bind to One Type of Virus or Another?
Antibodies are tiny, finely-tuned, parts of our immune system. One of their main functions is to seek out viruses and bacteria that may have the potential to cause disease. Antibodies bind to and neutralize these microbes so they can’t multiply and spread.
Humans and our ancestors have been making antibodies in our bodies to fend off infections for millions of years. Then a few decades ago companies got involved in the discovery and manipulation of antibodies, partnering with university labs.
There are two main categories of antibodies. One is ‘polyclonal’ antibodies. These are garden-variety antibodies that bind to a variety of different substances and/or organisms.
The other is monoclonal antibodies. As the name implies, cloning is involved in their creation. First an antibody that is specific to a particular amino-acid sequence (amino acids are the building blocks of proteins) of interest – for example, one from a protein on the surface of a virus or bacterium — is identified. Then the immune-system cell which produced that antibody is ‘cloned’ in the lab. As a result, each set of monoclonal antibodies binds to that particular amino-acid sequence.
I emailed one of the English-speaking world’s leading authorities on monoclonal antibodies, Harvard Medical School professor Clifford Saper, to get clarity on this. I asked him if it’s true that, as most in the antibody-commercializing arena claim, a monoclonal antibody can be created that’s specific for (that is, binds to) just one type of virus or just one other type of organism.
Saper replied [bolding and italics added by me for emphasis]: “No, there is no such thing as a monoclonal antibody that, because it is monoclonal, recognizes only one protein or only one virus. It will bind to any protein having the same (or a very similar) sequence.”
The implication of Saper’s statement is that any attempt to use a monoclonal antibody to verify the presence of the novel coronavirus will yield a large rate of false-positive results. That is, they will indicate that the novel coronavirus is detected when in fact it hasn’t been. That’s because there’s a high probability that the monoclonal antibody is binding to something else besides the virus (this is known as ‘cross-reacting’).
(I recommend this review paper by Saper, and this one and this one co-authored by Yale pathology professor David Rimm, to anyone wishing to learn about antibody validation.)
And in fact, the vast majority of antibodies and monoclonal antibodies marketed as being specific for the novel coronavirus were developed years ago for detecting SARS-CoV-1. They were then simply repurposed for identifying SARS-CoV-2 — with very few if any checks for whether they also cross-react to other organisms or substances.
I sought confirmation of this repurposing from Zhen Lu. She’s the North American marketing manager for Sino Biological, a Beijing-headquartered company that develops and sells, among other things, hundreds of antibodies. Lu replied to me via email, “Yes, antibodies are repuposed [sic].”
I also checked and received confirmation from Pratiek Matkar, a senior staffer from BenchSci, an antibody-database company. And to see for myself, I logged into the BenchSci database (Matkar granted me a guest account), selected all antibodies for the novel coronavirus, and looked to see which organisms had been used in cross-reactivity tests for them. SARS-CoV-1 was the only one that came up in this check.
This all explains something I observed last week: Sino Biological had just changed the content of its home page for the section of their website on antibodies against SARS-CoV-2. The page now announces that they’ve introduced new “matched antibody pairs” that work better at finding the virus. The pair consists of a “capture antibody” and a “detection antibody.”
And they claim these pairs are more accurate at finding the novel coronavirus: that they “have high specificity without cross-reactivity with MERS-CoV, [or with the common human coronaviruses] 229E, NL63, HKU1, [and] OC43.”
The only way I can interpret that is they know the antibodies they’ve been marketing for months as being specific for the novel coronavirus bind to other things, such as common human coronaviruses.
How Are Antibodies Harnessed in Tests for the Novel Coronavirus?
One of the main types of tests for the virus contains antibodies that are ostensibly specific for the novel coronavirus. The way they’re designed to work is that if the virus is present in a blood sample the antibodies bind to it and, as a result, the test gives a positive signal.
The other type of test contains sequences of protein from the novel coronavirus; if antibodies to the virus are present in a blood sample, they bind to the protein sequences and produce a positive result.
The manufacturers are supposed to conduct accuracy checks of their test kits before they put them on the market. These checks largely consist of estimation of the rates of false positives and false negatives (the latter is a negative result when the antibody or protein of interest is contained in the sample being tested by the kit).
However, companies do this cursory accuracy check with only very few samples of a small number of viruses — and rarely on bacteria or any other of the millions of biological substances that can be present in the blood.
Despite this very inadequate validation and the strong incentive for the companies to make their products look good, as documented last May by David Crowe, the manufacturers often record a significant rate of false positives. The false positives are to everything from West Nile virus to various types of human coronaviruses.
Usually the companies and governments wave that off as insignificant. Occasionally though, the test kits are so bad that they’re taken off the market.
For example, an antibody-testing kit sold by a company called Chembio Diagnostics was launched on March 31, 2020. It was almost immediately granted Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). An EUA allows companies to rush products onto the market with very minimal oversight. Brazil and the European Union also gave the nod for the Chembio test to be sold in their jurisdictions in April and May 2020, respectively.
Then in June 2020 the FDA pulled it off the market. The agency said ”this test generates a higher than expected rate of false results.” (Note that the top table on page 13 of the product insert for that “revoked” Chembio test indicates it cross-reacts to the human coronavirus 229E.)
But in November 2020 the Chembio antibody test again was approved for use in Brazil. And on January 14, 2021, the test got the nod in the European Union, the UK and Ireland.
Is it identical to the rest that was so inaccurate it was pulled off the market last June? It’s hard to tell. There is no product insert for it that I could find. In fact there’s very little information about it on the webpage for the test; you have to request the information. I submitted a request on Jan. 23 and haven’t received it yet.
Two of the heads of the FDA branch that approves testing devices penned a February 18, 2021, New England Journal of Medicine article. In it, the pair admitted that the FDA’s EUAs allowed too-loose approvals for serology tests.
They indicated the FDA has tightened its criteria for approval of these tests. They also point to efforts by other government agencies to evaluate serology tests. But the pair don’t say a word about the need to move toward objective, thorough test validation. They also are mute on the fact that EUAs are still being issued.
(Also note that the FDA and Health Canada listings of the 65 serology tests approved to date in the US and 19 approved to date in Canada continue to give the sensitivity [correct identification of positive samples] of the tests by ‘positive percent agreement’ and specificity [correct identification of negative samples] by ‘negative percent agreement.’ These are relative measures of accuracy – that is, compared to other tests – rather than objective/absolute accuracy, and therefore are poor facsimiles of accuracy.)
One of the many major figures in the Covid-biomedical complex who are priming the pump of the antibody pipeline is Ian Lipkin. He’s director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University in New York. Lipkin is involved at high levels in many global organizations including the World Health Organization and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well in pharmaceutical companies. (And he is quoted in a ‘fact-check’ of a July 2020 article I co-authored with Patrick Corbett titled, “No one has died from the coronavirus.” Lipkin states, among other things, in the fact-check piece that “Conspiracy theorists are not persuaded by data.”)
Lipkin co-authored a Feb. 12, 2021, paper in which he and his team claimed to have identified, using a new ‘peptide-microarray’ technology they invented, 29 amino-acid sequences unique to the novel coronavirus. They assert that antibodies specific to the sequences could be created – and that these in turn could be harnessed “to facilitate diagnostics, epidemiology, and vaccinology” for Covid. (The only conflict Lipkin and some of his co-authors disclose in the ‘competing interests’ paragraph at the end of article is that they invented the peptide-microarray technology described in the article.)
Do Antibodies Used to Treat Covid Fare Any Better?
Antibodies are also being marketed to treat Covid. Some are sold singly (known as ‘monotherapy’) and others in pairs. They are deemed to confer ‘passive immunity.’
Among the most-reported-on set of antibodies for treating Covid is the Regeneron monoclonal antibodies casirivimab and imdevimab. This pair reportedly was used in October 2020 to treat then-U.S. President Donald Trump. The combo subsequently was granted an EUA by the FDA on November 21, 2020. It also is being considered for approval by Health Canada.
I’d like to focus on a somewhat lesser-known monoclonal antibody called bamlanivumab. It’s being used both singly and as one half of a pair for treatment of symptomatic Covid patients early in the course of their infection. The antibody was discovered, and clinical study of it started, by the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (which is headed by Anthony Fauci) and a Vancouver, British Columbia-based company called AbCellera Diagnostics. The antibody is being manufactured and sold by Eli Lilly. It costs more than $1,200 a vial.
AbCellera is developing a significant pipeline of other antibodies. Its capabilities for this were developed over the past two-plus years as part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Pandemic Prevention Platform program.
(AbCellera also has received hundreds of millions of dollars from the Canadian government, including for building an antibody-manufacturing plant. And Peter Thiel, who co-founded both PayPal and Palantir, is a board member. So is John Montalbano, who’s also on the board of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and until 2015 was CEO of RBC [Royal Bank of Canada] Global Asset Management. This and significant positive media coverage helped propel the company to the biggest Canadian-biotech-company Initial Public Offering to date, on Dec. 11, 2020.)
Bamlanivumab was given an EUA by the FDA on November 9, 2020, for treatment of mild to moderate Covid. And Health Canada gave the monotherapy an interim authorization on November 17. It’s not getting much traction in clinical practice so far in Canada, though, perhaps because of the less-than-stellar results from clinical trials (see below).
But this hasn’t deterred the Canadian and US federal governments, which combined have purchased close to half a million of these tests. For example, most recently, on February 26, the US government bought 100,000 vials.
The only study on bamlanivimab made public prior to the November 9 FDA approval was one posted October 1, 2020, on the website of the online-only journal bioRχiv. [My Feb. 3, 2021, and Feb. 11, 2021, articles — on the new variants and the associated modelling papers, respectively – noted that the journal and its sister publication medRχiv contain only non-peer-reviewed articles and were created by an organization headed by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife.]
The study used rhesus monkeys and provided very extensive details about how the antibody was discovered and checked for specificity to the novel coronavirus. The researchers concluded that the antibody – at that time known as LY-CovV555 — has “potent neutralizing activity” against SARS-CoV-2.
On January 14 I emailed the lead author of that paper, Bryan Jones. He’s a researcher in Lilly’s Biotechnology Research Program. I asked Jones where in their paper is the proof the antibody is specific to SARS-CoV-2 (and therefore isn’t binding to something else instead of, or in addition to, the novel coronavirus).
He responded promptly, as follows [bolding added by me for emphasis]: “While we did determine that LY-CoV555 is specific to SARS-CoV-2 (and doesn’t bind to the spike protein of SARS-CoV), that is not specified or detailed in any of the figures or tables [in the paper].”
Jones pointed me to several parts of the paper and supplemental material published with it that he said show, via indirect extrapolation, that the antibody is specific for the novel coronavirus.
That’s not exactly convincing.
Then on December 22 a study in the New England Journal of Medicine gave a thumbs-down to the usefulness of bamlanivimab in people hospitalized after receiving a Covid diagnosis. The paper noted that in late October the study was stopped because the antibody didn’t help the patients any more than did placebo.
But this didn’t deter Lilly.
On January 21, 2021, the company issued a news release about a study of bamlanivumab in residents and staff of nursing homes. They claimed their research showed that the antibody “significantly reduced the risk of contracting symptomatic COVID-19.”
However, they didn’t back this up with much information. The study hasn’t been published in a journal or presented at a scientific/medical meeting. And there’s no word on when it will be.
Despite that, on the same morning the release was sent out by Lilly, glowing articles appeared in major media outlets stating that the study showed bamlanivumab appears to significantly reduce Covid symptoms in the frail elderly.
For example a Bloomberg article was posted at 8 a.m. on Jan. 21 with the headline, “Eli Lilly Antibody Cuts Covid-19 Risk Up to 80% in Nursing Home Study.” The article was carried in many other media outlets such as the Globe & Mail.
The article quoted Lilly’s Chief Scientific Officer Daniel Skovronsky as saying, “This is an urgent situation. Where there’s an outbreak in nursing homes and people haven’t yet received the vaccine, this could be a potential way to protect them before they get it.”
And January 21 New York Times piece by senior science journalist Gina Kolata quotes a vaccine expert at Boston Children’s Hospital, Ofer Levy, who wasn’t one of the scientists involved in the study, as saying, “I see only positives here. This is a win.”
Kolata also reported that Lilly plans to ask the FDA for an EUA for bamlanivimab for prevention of Covid in the frail elderly, focusing on those in nursing homes and long-term-care homes.
In parallel, Lilly is pivoting to using bamlanivumab in combination with another monoclonal antibody called etesevimab. A study on this combination in people with mild or moderate Covid was published on January 21, 2021. The results indicate it doesn’t reduce symptoms, but only lowers the viral load of people.
This didn’t deter Lilly either; it’s spinning this in the media as a very positive result. And so is the FDA: on February 9 the agency issued an EUA for the combination of the two antibodies for treating mild or moderate COVID.
Then the next twist in the plot happened, on February 16: a paper published that day in bioRχiv indicated that bamlanivumab doesn’t neutralize the South African and Brazilian variants of the novel coronavirus.
I’ll Leave the Last Words to Scott Adams
Dilbert-cartoon creator Scott Adams makes this observation on page 13 of his book Loserthink: “One thing I can say with complete certainty is that it is a bad idea to trust the majority of experts in any domain in which both complexity and large amounts of money are involved.”
This perfectly describes the situation with antibodies for the novel coronavirus.
Buyer beware, follow the money, and stay tuned.
After obtaining an MSc in molecular biology from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Calgary, Rosemary Frei became a freelance writer. For the next 22 years she was a medical writer and journalist. She pivoted again in early 2016 to full-time, independent activism and investigative journalism. Her website is RosemaryFrei.ca.
March 3, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Covid-19 |
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Hamas said yesterday that detention campaigns carried out by Israeli occupation against Islamic Bloc activists aim to affect the results of the Palestinian election.
Recently, Israeli occupation forces escalated detention campaigns targeting Hamas leaders, members, and activists in the occupied West Bank.
Hamas MP Sheikh Nayef Al-Rajoub said that the Israeli occupation detains Hamas members and holds them under administrative detention.
These detention campaigns aimed at “targeting the will of Palestinian youth, who are at the core of the upcoming elections,” Hamas said in a statement.
“We stress that achieving national consensus and partnership is a national priority,” Hamas added, reiterated that it “will continue its efforts to rearrange the Palestinian national home on the basis of achieving partnership, ending divisions and setting up a comprehensive, national programme to face off the Israeli occupation and settlement activities.”
Hamas called on all free people of the world and parliaments to impose sanctions on the Israeli occupation, which has been targeting Palestinian democracy for years.
“The detention campaigns come as part of a policy adopted by the Israeli occupation since 2006 to undermine the Palestinian political system and exclude any influential Palestinian party that gained legitimacy through the ballot boxes,” Hamas concluded.
March 3, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | Hamas, Human rights, Israel, Palestine, West Bank, Zionism |
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We have been discussing erosion of free speech and academic freedom protections at colleges and universities around the United States. Most faculty have been conspicuously silent as their colleagues are attacked, suspended, or even fired for taking opposing views on systemic racism, police brutality, or movements like Black Lives Matter. In Sweden, the response has been quite different after Professor Jonas Ludvigsson, announced that he would stop all further research on Covid-19 after a campaign of abuse and harassment following his study on the low threat that the virus poses to children and teachers. The country is ramping up protections for academics to combat such cancelling campaigns.
Ludvigsson researches and teaches clinical epidemiology at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute. His research is consistent with studies that have long found a low risk to students and teachers. This research was highlighted during the Trump Administration in a call for the resumption of classes but largely ignored by the media. The argument for reopening schools, particularly for young children, was portrayed as political and “not following the science.” Commercials ran [stating] that calls to returning to the classroom were tantamount to “murder.” However, the science has been overwhelmingly supportive of such reopening. Indeed, Catholic and other private schools in many states never closed without surges in the virus.
Ludvigsson looked at children from age 1 to 16 during the first wave of COVID-19 and found that only 15 children went to the ICU, for a rate of 0.77 per 100,000. Moreover, in the 1-16 age group, there was only a slight increase from the four-month period before the pandemic to the four-month period following the period.
Such studies contradict the media narrative and the position of teacher unions, including many which continue to oppose a return to the classroom despite the science. Accordingly, Ludvigsson was attacked and hounded out of further research.
The response of the country however has been different from the response in the United States. Various academic leaders and groups are pushing for legislation designed to protect academic freedom. They are citing a Swedish government study in 2018 found “21 out of 26 universities said that there is a risk that researchers will be exposed to harassment, threats and violence.”
The response in the United States is strikingly different. We have been discussing efforts to fire professors who voice dissenting views on various issues including an effort to oust a leading economist from the University of Chicago as well as a leading linguistics professor at Harvard and a literature professor at Penn. Sites like Lawyers, Guns, and Money feature writers like Colorado Law Professor Paul Campus who call for the firing of those with opposing views (including myself). Such campaigns have targeted teachers and students who contest the evidence of systemic racism in the use of lethal force by police or offer other opposing views in current debates over the pandemic, reparations, electoral fraud, or other issues.
Faculty have largely stayed silent as campaigns targeting these professors and teachers. While some may relish such cleansing of schools of opposing voices, many are likely intimidated by such campaigns and do not want to be the next targeted by such groups. We have often defended the free speech rights of faculty on the left who have made hateful comments about whites, males, and conservatives. Yet, there is an eerie silence when conservatives are targeted for their own views. Sweden has shown how this is a global issue but that the response outside of the United States has been markedly different.
March 3, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Covid-19, United States |
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After public schools in Buffalo, New York have been called out for blaming “all white people” for perpetuating systematic racism, “fact-checkers” tried to disprove it – only to be left red-faced when confronted with evidence.
Journalist Chris Rufo has been vindicated after fact-checkers accused him of misreporting the contents of a Black Lives Matter-themed curriculum being employed at Buffalo Public Schools (BPS) last month. The magazine quietly confirmed that BPS was, in fact, teaching its students to blame all white people for the suffering of others.
While Rufo showed the curriculum claimed that “all white people play a part in perpetuating systemic racism,” citing lesson plans and teaching materials received from a whistleblower at the Erie County schools, Newsweek argued his claims were only “half true,” because BPS was “not organizing lesson plans around that one phrase, which is for middle school students only, nor are they pushing any of the research as hard and fast facts.”
However, Rufo was quick to respond, presumably supplying more of the lesson material he’d been slipped by his inside contact, and by Monday had “forced” Newsweek’s fact-checkers to retract their judgement and issue his story a ‘true’ rating. Indeed, according to the materials Rufo obtained from the whistleblower, the lessons directed at younger children are even more divisive and controversial.
Students as young as kindergarten were shown a video depicting dead black children, for example, supposedly in an effort to warn four-to-six year olds about “racist police and state-sanctioned violence” and learn about the “sickness” of American society. Students in fourth and fifth grades were also encouraged to embrace “the disruption of Western nuclear family dynamics” in order to “return to the ‘collective village’ that takes care of each other,” and finish the fifth grade with an essay exploring “a society without ‘separate, nuclear family units.’”
Ten-year-olds also learned their country was operating a “school-to-grave pipeline” for black children.
Only once they hit middle and high school were children to be instructed in “systemic racism,” taught the all-important self-flagellatory lesson that American society itself was designed for the “impoverishment of people of color and enrichment of white people.” The very fabric of the US social system is based on “racist economic inequality,” the materials claimed, stating that modern economic inequality is “the result of black slavery, which created unjust wealth for white people.”
And having been thoroughly indoctrinated since the age of four, the high school students were at last presented with the BLM curriculum’s declaration that “all white people play a part in perpetuating systemic racism,” a declaration that is accompanied by “often unconsciously, white elites work to perpetuate racism through politics, law, education, and the media.”
Equipped with such ideological bludgeons (which, contrary to BPS’ protestations, seem to be put forward as very much “hard and fast facts”), students are expected to get to work solving the problem they were born guilty of, “confronting whiteness in [their] classrooms,” atoning for their “white privilege,” and “us[ing] their voices” to crusade for anti-racism.
Nor are children the only group to be radically reeducated under the program – one teacher told City Journal that meetings with the curriculum’s author, associate superintendent for Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Initiatives Fatima Morrell, devolved into “scoldings, guilt-trips, and demands to demean oneself simply to make another feel ‘empowered,’” with the teachers forced to play these “manipulative mind games” lest Morrell retaliate against them professionally. The curriculum has only been in place since last year, but news of its contents has traveled far and wide, outraging parents all over the nation.
March 3, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | United States |
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US House Republicans are introducing legislation that would broaden US sanctions law to ban social media platforms from letting foreign persons or organizations which were put under sanctions for terrorism from using their services, Fox News reported Tuesday citing a copy of the bill.
The law bill is reportedly proposed by representatives Andy Barr, Jim Banks, and Joe Wilson, and is reportedly co-sponsored by 40 other members of the House Republican Study Committee. The social media platforms mentioned in the proposed law include Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
“US law gives big tech a free pass to provide platforms to terrorist groups and dictators,” Representative Barr of Kentucky is quoted in the report as saying. “Social media companies should not provide a vehicle for terrorist groups like ISIS to raise money or for dictators like the Ayatollah of Iran to spread propaganda.”
The bill reportedly aims to clarify the current sanctions legislation by empowering the president with authority to limit the “provision of services,” including the management of accounts by Big Tech platforms to foreign persons or organizations sanctioned for terrorism by the US, and top officials of states, which are listed as sponsors of terrorism.
“Economic sanctions prohibiting the provision of services to individuals and entities sanctioned for terrorism should apply to social media platforms, while still supporting the free flow of information and maintaining the important principle that information should remain free of sanctions,” the legislation reportedly reads.
The bill also reportedly encourages the Treasury Department to “ensure that consumer communications technologies, as well as tools to circumvent government censorship, are available to civil society and democratic activists in such countries.”
Representative Jim Banks of Indiana, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, a conservative caucus within the House, claimed because of “outdated sanctions laws, social media platforms are able to ban President Trump and other conservatives but let the Iranian Supreme Leader and President Bashar Assad of Syria continue having accounts on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube.”
“Thanks to Rep. Barr, we have a bill that would fix this double standard and hold Big Tech accountable to the same sanctions laws other American companies are required to follow,” Banks said.
Controversially enough, the lawmakers claim at the same time that the US Department of Treasury “should encourage the free flow of information in Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, and other countries,” which, according to Washington, are “controlled by authoritarian regimes,” in order to counter them.
Under the existing law, the US president does not have the authority to compel social networks to comply with US sanctions law as it pertains to designated terrorists due to the International Economic Emergency Powers Act of 1976, and especially the so-called Berman Amendments, adopted in 1988 and revised in 1994 to include electronic media. Those amendments forbid the president from even implicitly restricting or banning anything that deals with the free flow of informational services.
Republicans have repeatedly challenged social media’s liability protections under Section 230 that shield social networks from being held responsible for the content posted on their platforms, while enabling them to moderate it.
Tech giants have incurred criticism for the permanent suspension of then-President Trump’s accounts from social media platforms in the aftermath of the violent events on January 6 at the US Capitol. Particularly, Trump’s ban on Twitter has raised concerns that Big Tech could silence practically everybody online, even a country leader.
Following the criticism, Twitter suspended the account of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and removed the tweet where he said that Western COVID-19 vaccines were “completely untrustworthy.”
March 3, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance | Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, United States, YouTube |
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