Q&A #18
What would be your prediction for those who are both unvaccinated against COVID-19 and never previously infected? Let’s say those of working age(20 – 55) in fairly good health.
Should they be worried about Avian Flu and Monkeypox, since they have not experienced an infection by SARS-CoV-2?
Are they at risk for serious illness from these more infectious (and future more virulent) SARS-CoV-2 mutants?
It would be quite unbelievable that they didn’t get exposed to SC-2 given the high infectiousness of previously and currently circulating variants. Ideally, they should have their Abs tested (anti-S would be sufficient since they’re not vaccinated). They can also have their Abs tested against Flu. If all this is negative (which would point to poor activation of natural immunity), they can just take one shot of a live attenuated measles or mumps or rubella or varicella vaccine (or all together in one shot) to boost their innate immune response. (However, they should only do so if they got MMR(V)-vaccinated in the past. The better their innate immune status, the lower the likelihood they are going to catch severe disease from these viruses. But anyhow, for a person in good health, it is highly unlikely to develop severe disease from Monkeypox (as it is – for now(!) – not highly infectious) or from Avian Flu as they must at least have had contact with Flu viruses in the past and hence, have some ‘Flu-trained’ innate immunity.)
Unvaccinated can now largely forget about contracting severe C-19 disease as the next big mutation will most likely make the unvaccinated resistant to the virus. However, if they have not yet been infected at all by any of these highly infectious variants, they could still contract C-19 disease (before that new variant emerges) and become seriously ill (but not ‘severely ill’ as longas they are in good health with no comorbidities and predisposing factors). To avoid this, they should either prevent risky contacts (difficult) till the next variant appears (in my opinion, just a matter of weeks) or take Ivermectin or HCQ as soon as symptoms manifest (but not prophylactically).
July 19, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine |
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This particular note spoke loudly to me and this lovely person gave me permission to share her words
“Dear Jessica,
I have been following your work for some time now. I thank God for you and your truth telling during this dark day of medical experimentation.
I’m sending this email to you to add colour to your work analyzing data. I know the trends and the data are vitally important but so are anecdotes and stories.
I have a 3 year old daughter and gave birth to my son in November. He’s almost 8 months now and, thank God, very healthy. I live in Fort Warrior.
[JUST FOR CONTEXT] I am unvaccinated (or un-injected is maybe what we should say). I knew I wanted to get pregnant in early 2021 and decided in advance that I wouldn’t take the jab based on the precautionary principle. I tend to be more skeptical of doctors and pharma than most — I favour nutrition and lifestyle interventions first but I know a lot of people feel “safe” going to their doctor for a pill/pharmaceutical that ails them. I kept a lot of my opinions to myself.
Fast forward to my first OB appointment in June of 2021. They were all over me about getting the COVID-19 jab at my appointment. I never brought it up, they did. The nurse practitioner fielding intake questions advised me of the following:
– the vaccine was highly recommended by the College of Obstetrics and Gynecology;
– the vaccine stays in the arm, and generates an immune response through antibodies that will also protect the baby (and do cross the placenta);
– pregnant women are at an especially high ICU risk and there have been bad outcomes;
– I’m at higher risk of infection because I have a child in daycare;
– they don’t have “long-term” safety data but they have no reason to believe that the vaccine is unsafe;
– pregnant women have priority on the vaccine.
I am a rule-follower so even though I had made the decision in advance to not take this death jab, it was a rattling appointment. It honestly caused me so much stress throughout the pregnancy because I felt they made it seem like you were doing something wrong if you didn’t get this death jab. Every doctors’ appointment had me so stressed and worried. You have this guilt about not doing “as the doctor told” and then worrying that if you got COVID and something did happen, they’d all be rolling your eyes and treating you like shit. I gave birth in a mask, but thank God everything went well and my son is healthy.
Since these jabs rolled out, I know of one woman who had a stillbirth a month before her due date. Devastating. I also have a good friend whose baby is having many health problems. Her first baby was born the same time as my first and didn’t have any of these problems. I notice too that doctors are not connecting the dots. One of the issues my friend’s baby has is a heart murmur. I’m no expert on this but she said to me that the cardiologist told her that up to 1/3rd of babies have murmurs and they just go away on their own. That didn’t sound right to me but I don’t know. She also said the baby had to go to physio and had a virus (and got COVID). It just seemed like there were so many issues and she never even raised the possibility that it might be related to taking the vax during pregnancy. Another colleague of mine who got the jab and booster while she was breastfeeding said her daughter had green poop for a week after the booster and that she lost her supply. She actually took her baby to Sick Kids and they told her she was basically crazy.
My cousin also didn’t get the jab and gave birth around the same time as me. Her baby is doing good. Got Covid at 2 months old and recovered faster than my cousin’s whole family who got it at the same time. Seems to fit the trend in the data.
I have so much rage and anger over this because I was so close to putting my baby at risk because of intense pressure from the OB office and from the mandates they rolled out at my work. I was able to get an “accommodation” because I started the job in March and had been working entirely from home and was about to take a leave. But it was gross listening to the head of HR at my job talking about the news related to “pregnant people” (ugh) and how vulnerable they were as she condescendingly implied that I was a moron for not doing more to protect my son.
Babies are being maimed; harmed. Women are being gaslighted. Breastmilk, which is literally medicine for a growing baby, is contaminated and causing harm because of these disastrous injections. This is evil. My heart is breaking every day. Every time I breastfeed my son with my milk I am so emotional. I want more kids but I’m terrified of the medical system. They doctors are in on this crime and are deliberately ignoring obvious data. I don’t even want to take my son back to the doctors for anything. It feels like going to a crime scene. I think of all the women I know who got this shot but want kids one day. They don’t even know what they’re in for and for their sake I hope I’m wrong, but damn.
I still don’t get the feeling people are waking up in Fort Warrior. I have a few friends who are aware, but they oppose all vaccines (and the more I read, so do I) so they were already for sure never going to get this experimental one. It feels really repressive here. People want to forget the medical tyranny and apartheid rolled out in the fall and pretend like we can just move on from the darkness.
I don’t know where things will go from here, but I’m so very grateful for your courage. I also appreciate the way you explain scientific findings in interviews. It’s really helpful.
Sending you so much love, mental, physical and spiritual health as you do this work. I am sure it’s so taxing to comb through these tragedies, but you are performing a vital human service.”
In gratitude, I stand. With mighty power.
July 18, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
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Amid all the hysteria about next week’s extreme temperatures – which could climb to 41°, according to the Met Office – it’s worth bearing in mind that many, many more excess deaths in England and Wales are associated with cold each year than with heat. According to a recent study in the Lancet Planetary Health, between 2000 and 2019, there were an average of 65,000 excess deaths per year in England and Wales associated with cold, but fewer than 800 a year associated with heat. In other words, roughly 80 times more deaths per year are associated with cold than heat.
Needless to say, the report’s authors blame these excess deaths on ‘climate change’ in general and have nothing to say about the likelihood of the 65,000 figure increasing next winter as a result of rising energy bills.
The researchers analysed 10.7 million deaths that occurred in England and Wales between 2000 and 2019 across over 37,473 small areas that include around 1,600 residents, also known as lower super output areas (LSOAs). They then linked these data with high-resolution gridded temperature maps and potential drivers of vulnerability to heat and cold, including demographic and socio-economic factors, health and disability, housing and neighbourhood, landscape, and climatological characteristics. This allowed the researchers to characterise differences across small areas and map variation in temperature-related mortality risks across the two countries.
Dr Pierre Masselot, Research Fellow in in Environmental Epidemiology and Statistics at LSHTM and co-author of the study, said: “The results come at a critical time as countries and communities face increasing health impacts due to climate change and need to find effective ways to adapt to changing temperatures. The analytical framework also provides a flexible tool that can be adapted for future studies which aim to model temperature-related risks and impacts at small-area level under different climate change scenarios.”
The authors emphasised that, while the research showed that excess mortality attributed to cold was significantly higher than that attributed to heat, these results should be interpreted with caution as more cold than hot days were recorded throughout the year. Despite this, they highlighted that cold-related mortality is evidently a considerable health burden, particularly in deprived areas, and should be addressed with targeted public health interventions.
Nevertheless, any un-biased person reading this report cannot help but conclude that the rising cost of utility bills caused, in part, by the Government’s pursuit of ‘net zero’ will result in far more deaths than next week’s heat wave.
If you really care about reducing deaths due to extreme temperatures, shouldn’t you focus your energies on getting the Government to scrap its ‘net zero’ target, lift the ban on Fracking and start investing billions in nuclear[?], instead of disrupting traffic and sporting events?
You can read the Lancet Planetary Health study here.
July 17, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science | Human rights, UK |
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The December 2020 resignation of Dr. Deborah Birx, White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator under Trump, revealed predictable hypocrisy. Like so many other government officials around the world, she was caught violating her own stay-at-home order. Therefore she finally left her post following nine months of causing unfathomable amounts of damage to life, liberty, property, and the very idea of hope for the future.
Even if Anthony Fauci had been the front man for the media, it was Birx who was the main influence in the White House behind the nationwide lockdowns that did not stop or control the pathogen but have caused immense suffering and continue to roil and wreck the world. So it was significant that she would not and could not comply with her own dictates, even as her fellow citizens were being hunted down for the same infractions against “public health.”
In the days before Thanksgiving 2020, she had warned Americans to “assume you’re infected” and to restrict gatherings to “your immediate household.” Then she packed her bags and headed to Fenwick Island in Delaware where she met with four generations for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, as if she were free to make normal choices and live a normal life while everyone else had to shelter in place.
The Associated Press was first out with the report on December 20, 2020.
Birx acknowledged in a statement that she went to her Delaware property. She declined to be interviewed.
She insisted the purpose of the roughly 50-hour visit was to deal with the winterization of the property before a potential sale — something she says she previously hadn’t had time to do because of her busy schedule.
“I did not go to Delaware for the purpose of celebrating Thanksgiving,” Birx said in her statement, adding that her family shared a meal together while in Delaware.
Birx said that everyone on her Delaware trip belongs to her “immediate household,” even as she acknowledged they live in two different homes. She initially called the Potomac home a “3 generation household (formerly 4 generations).” White House officials later said it continues to be a four-generation household, a distinction that would include Birx as part of the home.
So it was all a sleight-of-hand: she was staying home; it’s just that she has several homes! This is how the power elite comply, one supposes.
The BBC then quoted her defense, which echo the pain experienced by hundreds of millions:
“My daughter hasn’t left that house in 10 months, my parents have been isolated for 10 months. They’ve become deeply depressed as I’m sure many elderly have as they’ve not been able to see their sons, their granddaughters. My parents have not been able to see their surviving son for over a year. These are all very difficult things.”
Indeed. However, she was the major voice for the better part of 2020 for requiring exactly that. No one should blame her for wanting to get together with family; that she worked so hard for so long to prevent others from doing so is what is at issue.
The press piled on and she announced that she would be leaving her post and not seeking a position at the Biden White House. Trump tweeted that she will be missed. It was the final discrediting – or should have been – of a person that many in the White House and many around the country had come to see as an obvious fanatic and fake, a person whose influence wrecked the liberties and health of an entire country.
It was a fitting end to a catastrophic career. So it would make sense that people might pick up her new book to find out what it was like to go through that kind of media storm, the real reasons for her visit, what it was like to know for sure that she must violate her own rules in order to bring comfort to her family, and the difficult decision she made to throw in the towel knowing that she has compromised the integrity of her entire program.
One slogs through her entire book only to find this incredible fact: she never mentions this. The incident is missing entirely from her book.
Instead at the moment in the narrative at which she would be expected to recount the affair she says almost in passing that “When former vice president Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election, I’d set a goal for myself—to hand over responsibility for the pandemic response, with all its many elements, in the best possible place.”
At that point, the book skips immediately to the new year. Done. It’s like Orwell, the story, even though it was reported for days in the world press and became a defining moment in her career, is just wiped out from the history book of her own authorship.
Somehow it makes sense that she would neglect to mention this. Reading her book is a very painful experience (all credit to Michael Senger’s review) simply because it seems to be weaving fables on page after page, strewn with bromides, completely lacking in self awareness, punctuated by revealing comments that make the opposite point of what she is seeking. Reading it is truly a surreal experience, astonishing especially because she is able to maintain her delusionary pose for 525 pages.
Recall that it was she who was tasked – by Anthony Fauci – with doing the really crucial thing of talking Donald Trump into green-lighting the lockdowns that began on March 12, 2020, and continued to their final hard-core deployment on March 16. This was the “15 Days to Flatten the Curve” that turned into two years in many parts of the country.
Her book admits that it was a two-level lie from the beginning.
“We had to make these palatable to the administration by avoiding the obvious appearance of a full Italian lockdown,” she writes. “At the same time, we needed the measures to be effective at slowing the spread, which meant matching as closely as possible what Italy had done—a tall order. We were playing a game of chess in which the success of each move was predicated on the one before it.”
Further:
“At this point, I wasn’t about to use the words lockdown or shutdown. If I had uttered either of those in early March, after being at the White House only one week, the political, nonmedical members of the task force would have dismissed me as too alarmist, too doom-and-gloom, too reliant on feelings and not facts. They would have campaigned to lock me down and shut me up.”
In other words, she wanted to go full CCP just like Italy but didn’t want to say that. Crucially, she knew for sure that two weeks was not the real plan. “I left the rest unstated: that this was just a starting point.”
“No sooner had we convinced the Trump administration to implement our version of a two-week shutdown than I was trying to figure out how to extend it,” she admits.
“Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread was a start, but I knew it would be just that. I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them. However hard it had been to get the fifteen-day shutdown approved, getting another one would be more difficult by many orders of magnitude. In the meantime, I waited for the blowback, for someone from the economic team to call me to the principal’s office or confront me at a task force meeting. None of this happened.”
It was a solution in search of evidence she did not have. She told Trump that the evidence was there anyway. She actually tricked him into believing that locking down a whole population of people was somehow magically going to make a virus to which everyone would inevitably be exposed somehow vanish as a threat.
Meanwhile, the economy was wrecked domestically and then all over the world, as most governments in the world followed what the US did.
Where did she come up with the idea of lockdowns? By her own report, her only real experience with infectious disease came from her work on AIDS, a very different disease from a respiratory virus that everyone would eventually get but which would only be fatal or even severe for a small cohort, a fact that was known since late January. Still, her experience counted for more than science.
“In any health crisis, it is crucial to work at the personal behavior level,” she says with the presumption that avoidance at all costs was the only goal. “With HIV/AIDS, this meant convincing asymptomatic people to get tested, to seek treatment if they were HIV-positive, and to take preventative measures, including wearing condoms; or to employ other pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) if they were negative.”
She immediately hops to the analogy with Covid. “I knew the government agencies would need to do the same thing to have a similar effect on the spread of this novel coronavirus. The most obvious parallel with the HIV/AIDS example was the message of wearing masks.”
Masks = condoms. Remarkable. This “obvious parallel” remark sums the whole depth of her thinking. Behavior is all that matters. Just stay apart. Cover your mouth. Don’t gather. Don’t travel. Close the schools. Close everything. Whatever happens, don’t get it. Nothing else matters. Keep your immune system as unexposed as possible.
I wish I could say her thought is more complex than that but it is not. This was the basis for lockdowns. For how long? In her mind, it seems like it would be forever. Nowhere in the book does she reveal an exit strategy. Not even vaccines qualify.
From the very beginning, she revealed her epidemiological views. On March 16, 2020 at her press conference with Trump, she summarized her position: “We really want people to be separated at this time.” People? All people? Everywhere? Not one reporter raised a question about this obviously ridiculous and outrageous statement that would essentially destroy life on earth.
But she was serious – seriously deluded not only about how society functions but also about infectious disease of this sort. Only one thing mattered as a metric to her: reducing infections through any means possible, as if she on her own could cobble together a new kind of society in which exposure to air-born pathogens was made illegal.
Here is an example. There was a controversy about how many people should be allowed to gather in one space, as in home, church, store, stadium, or community center. She addresses how she came up with the rules:
The real problem with this fifty-versus-ten distinction, for me, was that it revealed that the CDC simply didn’t believe to the degree that I did that SARS-CoV-2 was being spread through the air silently and undetected from symptomless individuals. The numbers really did matter. As the years since have confirmed, in times of active viral community spread, as many as fifty people gathered together indoors (unmasked at this point, of course) was way too high a number. It increased the chances of someone among that number being infected exponentially. I had settled on ten knowing that even that was too many, but I figured that ten would at least be palatable for most Americans—high enough to allow for most gatherings of immediate family but not enough for large dinner parties and, critically, large weddings, birthday parties, and other mass social events.
She puts a fine point on it: “if I pushed for zero (which was actually what I wanted and what was required), this would have been interpreted as a ‘lockdown’—the perception we were all working so hard to avoid.”
What does it mean for zero people to gather? A suicide cult?
In any case, just like that, from her own thinking and straight to enforcement, birthday parties, sports, weddings, and funerals came to be forbidden.
Here we gain insight into the sheer insanity of her vision. It is nothing short of a marvel that she somehow managed to gain the amount of influence she did.
Notice her above mention of her dogma that asymptomatic spread was the whole key to understanding pandemic. In other words, on her own and without any scientific support, she presumed that Covid was both extremely fatal and had a long latency period. To her way of thinking, this is why the usual tradeoff between severity and prevalence did not matter.
She was somehow certain that the longest estimates of latency were correct: 14 days. This is the reason for the “wait two weeks” obsession. She held onto this dogma throughout, almost like the fictional movie “Contagion” had been her only guide to understanding.
Later in the book, she writes that symptoms mean next to nothing because people can always carry around the virus in their nose without being sick. After all, this is what PCR tests have shown. Instead of seeing that as a failure of PCR, she saw this as a confirmation that everyone is a carrier no matter what and therefore everyone has to lock down because otherwise we’ll deal with a black plague.
Somehow, despite her astonishing lack of scientific curiosity and experience in this area, she gained all influence over the initial Trump administration response. Briefly, she was godlike.
But Trump was not and is not a fool. He must have had some sleepless nights wondering how and why he had approved the destruction of that which he had seen as his greatest achievement. The virus was long here (probably from October 2019), it presented a specific danger to a narrow cohort, but otherwise behaved like a textbook flu. Maybe, he must have wondered, his initial instincts from January and February 2020 were correct all along.
Still, he very reluctantly approved a 30-day extension of lockdowns, entirely on Birx’s urging and with a few other fools standing around. Having given in a second time – still, no one thought to drop an email or make a phonecall for a second opinion! – this seemed to be the turning point. Birx reports that by April 1, 2020, Trump had lost confidence in her. He might have intuited that he had been tricked. He stopped speaking to her.
It would still take another month before he would fully rethink everything that he had approved at her behest.
It made no difference. The bulk of her book is a brag fest about how she kept subverting the White House’s push to open up the economy – that is, allow people to exercise their rights and freedoms. Once Trump turned against her, and eventually found other people to provide good advice like the tremendously brave Scott Atlas – it was five months later when he arrived in an attempt to save the country from disaster – Birx turned to rallying around her inner circle (Anthony Fauci, Robert Redfield, Matthew Pottinger, and a few others) plus assembling a realm of protection outside of her that included CNN reporter Sanjay Gupta and, very likely, the virus team at the New York Times (which gives her book a glowing review).
Recall that for the remainder of the year, the White House was urging normalcy while many states kept locking down. It was an incredible confusion. The CDC was all over the map. I gained the distinct impression of two separate regimes in charge: Trump’s vs. the administrative state he could not control. Trump would say one thing on the campaign trail but the regulations and disease panic kept pouring out of his own agencies.
Birx admits that she was a major part of the reason, due to her sneaky alternation of weekly reports to the states.
After the heavily edited documents were returned to me, I’d reinsert what they had objected to, but place it in those different locations. I’d also reorder and restructure the bullet points so the most salient—the points the administration objected to most—no longer fell at the start of the bullet points. I shared these strategies with the three members of the data team also writing these reports. Our Saturday and Sunday report-writing routine soon became: write, submit, revise, hide, resubmit.
Fortunately, this strategic sleight-of-hand worked. That they never seemed to catch this subterfuge left me to conclude that, either they read the finished reports too quickly or they neglected to do the word search that would have revealed the language to which they objected. In slipping these changes past the gatekeepers and continuing to inform the governors of the need for the big-three mitigations—masks, sentinel testing, and limits on indoor social gatherings—I felt confident I was giving the states permission to escalate public health mitigation with the fall and winter coming.
As another example, once Scott Atlas came to the rescue in August to introduce some good sense into this wacky world, he worked with others to dial back the CDC’s fanatical attachment to universal and constant testing. Atlas knew that “track, trace, and isolate” was both a fantasy and a massive invasion of people’s liberties that would yield no positive public-health outcome. He put together a new recommendation that was only for those who were sick to test – just as one might expect in normal life.
After a week-long media frenzy, the regulations flipped in the other direction.
Birx reveals that it was her doing:
This wasn’t the only bit of subterfuge I had to engage in. Immediately after the Atlas-influenced revised CDC testing guidance went up in late August, I contacted Bob Redfield… Less than a week later, Bob [Redfield] and I had finished our rewrite of the guidance and surreptitiously posted it. We had restored the emphasis on testing to detect areas where silent spread was occurring. It was a risky move, and we hoped everyone in the White House would be too busy campaigning to realize what Bob and I had done. We weren’t being transparent with the powers that be in the White House…
One might ask how the heck she got away with this. She explains:
[T]he guidance gambit was only the tip of the iceberg of my transgressions in my effort to subvert Scott Atlas’s dangerous positions. Ever since Vice President Pence told me to do what I needed to do, I’d engaged in very blunt conversations with the governors. I spoke the truth that some White House senior advisors weren’t willing to acknowledge. Censoring my reports and putting up guidance that negated the known solutions was only going to perpetuate Covid-19’s vicious circle. What I couldn’t sneak past the gatekeepers in my reports, I said in person.
Most of the book consists of her explaining how she headed a kind of shadow White House dedicated to keeping the country in some form of lockdown for as long as possible. In her telling, she was the center of everything, the only person truly correct about all things, given cover by the VP and assisted by a handful of co-conspirators.
Largely missing from the narrative is any discussion of the science gathering outside the bubble she so carefully cultivated. Whereas anyone could have noted the studies pouring out from February onward that threw cold water on her entire paradigm – not to mention 15 years, or make that 50 years, or perhaps 100 years of warnings against such a reaction – from scientists all over the world with vastly more experience and knowledge than she. She cared nothing about it, and evidently still does not.
It’s very clear that Birx had almost no contact with any serious scientist who disputed the draconian response, not even John Iaonnidis who explained as early as March 17, 2020, that this approach was madness. But she didn’t care: she was convinced that she was in the right, or, at least, was acting on behalf of people and interests who would keep her safe from persecution or prosecution.
For those interested, Chapter 8 provides a weird look into her first real scientific challenge: the seroprevalence study by Jayanta Bhattacharya published April 22, 2020. It demonstrated that the infection fatality rate – because infections and recovery was far more prevalent than Birx and Fauci were saying – was more in line with what one might expect from a severe flu but with a much more focused demographic impact. Bhattacharya’s paper revealed that the pathogen eluded all controls and would likely become endemic as every respiratory virus before. She took one look and concluded that he had unnamed “fundamental flaws in logic and methodology” and “damaged the cause of public health at this crucial moment in the pandemic.”
And that’s it: that’s Birx grappling with science. Meanwhile, the article was published in the International Journal of Epidemiology and has over 700 citations. She saw all differences of opinion as an opportunity to go on the attack in order to intensify her cherished commitment to the lockdown paradigm.
Even now, with scientists the world over in outrage, with citizens furious at their governments, with governments falling, with regimes toppling and anger reaching a fevered pitch, while studies pour out by the day showing that lockdowns made no difference and that open societies at least protected their educational systems and economies, she is unmoved. It’s not even clear she is aware.
Birx dismisses all contrary cases such as Sweden: Americans could not take that route because we are too unhealthy. South Dakota: rural and backwater (Birx is still mad that the brave Governor Kristi Noem refused to meet with her). Florida: oddly and without evidence she dismisses that case as a killing field, even though its results were better than California while the population influx to the state sets new records.
Nor is she shaken by the reality that there is not one single country or territory anywhere on the planet earth that benefitted from her approach, not even her beloved China which still pursues a zero-Covid approach. As for New Zealand and Australia: she (probably wisely) doesn’t mention them at all, even though they followed the Birx approach exactly.
The story of the lockdowns is a tale of Biblical proportions, at once evil and desperately sad and tragic, a story of power, scientific failure, intellectual insularity and insanity, outrageous arrogance, feudalistic impulses, mass delusion, plus political treachery and conspiracy. It is real-life horror for the ages, a tale of how the land of the free became a depostic hellscape so quickly and unexpectedly. Birx was at the center of it, confirming all of your worst fears right here in a book anyone can buy. She is so proud of her role that she dares to take all credit, fully convinced that the Trump-hating media will love and protect her perfidies from exposure and condemnation.
There is no getting around Trump’s own culpability here. He never should have let her have her way. Never. It was a case of fallibility matched by ego (he has still not admitted error), but it is a case of enormous betrayal that played off presidential character flaws (like many in his income class, Trump had always been a germaphobe) that ended up wrecking hope and prosperity for billions of people for many years to come.
I’ve tried for two years to put myself in that scene at the White House that day. It’s a hothouse with only trusted souls in small rooms, and the people there in a crisis have the sense that they are running the world. Trump might have drawn on his experience running a casino in Atlantic City. The weather forecasters come to say a hurricane is on the way, so he needs to shut it down. He doesn’t want to but agrees in order to do the right thing.
Was this his thinking? Perhaps. Perhaps too someone told him that China’s President Xi Jinping managed to crush the virus with lockdowns so he can too, just as the WHO said in its February 26 report. It’s also difficult in that environment to avoid the rush of omnipotence, temporarily oblivious to the reality that your decision would affect life from Maine to Florida to California. It was a catastrophic and lawless decision based on pretense and folly.
What followed seems inevitable in retrospect. The economic crisis, inflation, the broken lives, the desperation, the lost rights and lost hopes, and now the growing hunger and demoralization and educational losses and cultural destruction, all of it came in the wake of these fateful days. Every day in this country, even two and a half years later, judges are struggling to regain control and revitalize the Constitution after this disaster.
The plotters usually admit it in the end, taking credit, like criminals who cannot resist returning to the scene of the crime. This is what Dr. Birx has done in her book. But there are clearly limits to her transparency. She never explains the real reason for her resignation – even though it is known the world over – pretending like the entire Thanksgiving fiasco never happened and thus attempting to write it out of the history book that she wrote.
There is so much more to say and I hope this is one review of many because the book is absolutely packed with shocking passages. And yet her 525-page book, now selling at a 50% discount, does not contain a single citation to a single scientific study, paper, monograph, article, or book. It has zero footnotes. It offers no go-to authorities and displays not even a hint of humility that would normally be part of any actual scientific account.
And it nowhere offers an honest reckoning for what her influence over the White House and the states foisted on this country and on the world. As the country masks up yet again for a new variant, and is gradually being groomed for another round of disease panic, she can collect whatever royalties come from sales of her book while working at her new gig, a consultant to a company that makes air purifiers (ActivePure). In this latter role, she makes a greater contribution to public health than anything she did while she held the reins of power.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises.
July 17, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Deborah Birx, Human rights, New York Times, United States, WHO |
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Roughly 1 in 30 — 3.49% — of children and adolescents ages 3 to 17 were diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in 2020, according to a JAMA Pediatrics research letter published this month by a team of researchers in China.
The letter also referenced a new study showing a 53% increase in ASD in American young people since 2017.
The researchers used data, gathered in 2019 and 2020, from the U.S. National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), which collects health-related information via household interviews conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau.
During the NHIS interviews, a parent or guardian reported on ASD diagnoses made by a physician or other healthcare professional.
Of the 12,554 individuals ages 3 to 17 surveyed in 2019 and 2020, 410 were reported to have a diagnosis of ASD.
The research team, including corresponding author Dr. Wenhan Yang, M.D., Ph.D., from the School of Public Health, Guangdong Pharmaceutical University in China, compared the 2019 and 2020 NHIS results to NHIS results from the years 2014 to 2018.
“We found the prevalence of ASD increased from 2014 to 2016, decreased from 2016 to 2017, and then increased again from 2017 to 2020,” Yang and colleagues wrote.
The study showed an ASD diagnosis rate of 2.79% in 2019 and 3.39% in 2020 — which is a 53% increase since 2017 — and reported an overall ASD diagnosis rate of 3.14% in 2019 and 2020.
The researchers said the 2019 and 2020 prevalence rates were higher than those reported in other countries and geographical areas since 2014 — including Europe (0.42% to 3.13%), the Middle East (0.11% to 1.53%) and Australia (1.41% to 2.52%).
The data showed a higher prevalence of ASD in boys. For 2019 and 2020, 4.64% of boys were reported as having been diagnosed with ASD versus 1.56% of girls.
The study authors also found a statistically significant higher rate of ASD diagnosis among lower-income demographics.
The authors noted a limitation of their research is that it relied on parents’ recall of information, which may biased or incomplete.
Brian Hooker, Ph.D., P.E., said the researchers’ findings are important because their data capture ASD diagnosis information that other measurements of ASD diagnosis rates may have missed.
Hooker, chief science advisor at Children’s Health Defense, said every four years the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) publishes an update on its estimate of the rate of autism in children, through the agency’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network.
The ADDM data, however, tends to underestimate the rate of autism, according to Hooker, because it draws largely from reports of higher-income families and looks only at diagnosis rates of 8-year-olds.
The NHIS data used by Yang and colleagues “are more accurate and more reflective of where cases are missing in the CDC’s numbers because people in the ADDM Network tend to be of a higher-income demographic,” he said. “This study has really captured the lower end of poverty-level income demographics.”
Hooker added:
“I think it’s stunning that there’s a statistically significant difference [showing] that the higher levels of autism are now being diagnosed in those with lower income.
“It’s interesting because it’s something that we suspected all along, but we haven’t seen it quantified like this.”
There is no immediately clear explanation for why the child autism rate is now higher among lower-income families compared to higher-income families.
However, Hooker thought it might reflect the fact that more children in schools serving lower-income demographics are being diagnosed in order to get those children access to services.
Or, he said, it might be that people in lower-income demographics tend to be more vaccine-compliant because they’re participating in the CDC’s Vaccines for Children program, where they get their vaccines for free.
“You do have to wonder about vaccination rates because higher-income families tend to vaccinate less.”
In May 2020, Hooker and colleagues found negative health outcomes, including developmental delays, asthma, ear infections and gastrointestinal disorders, to be associated with adherence to the CDC’s recommended vaccination schedule for children.
The CDC’s website states that vaccines do not cause autism. However, in the high-profile vaccine-injury case involving Hannah Poling, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services conceded that Poling’s autism was caused by a vaccine.
The concession document in the Poling case stated:
“The vaccinations Hannah received on July 19, 2000, significantly aggravated an underlying mitochondrial disorder, which predisposed her to deficits in cellular energy metabolism, and manifested as a regressive encephalopathy with features of autism spectrum disorder.”
Future research must focus on ‘risk factors and causes of ASD’
Though the study authors said their findings warrant investigation into the risk factors for developing autism, they did not suggest what potential risk factors future researchers should consider.
“ASD is a complicated neurodevelopmental disability with an increasing prevalence worldwide and considerable implications for individuals and their families,” the authors of the JAMA Pediatrics letter wrote.
“Given that ASD is a lifelong disease in most children, future research needs to focus on understanding risk factors for and causes of ASD.”
Much recent research has focused on identifying the possible genetic components of the condition.
Autism geneticists are now studying “the final frontier” of the non-coding genome, according to Spectrum, an online outlet for autism news and analysis. The non-coding genome is the largely unexplored 99% of the human genome that lies beyond the protein-coding exome.
However, Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., a senior research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, attributes risk factors beyond genetics to the development of the condition.
Seneff — who for decades has investigated possible causes for the high rates of ASD in American children — said exposure to glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller that is also present in many foods, is a probable risk factor.
Nonetheless, the CDC’s research through the ADDM Network does not investigate what external factors might impact the prevalence of autism diagnoses.
According to the CDC website, the ADDM Network’s goals are to:
- Compare how common ASD is in different areas of the country.
- Measure progress in early ASD identification.
- Identify changes in ASD occurrence over time.
- Understand the impact of ASD and related conditions in U.S. communities.
Public health experts ‘tap dance’ on new high numbers, attributing rise to ‘greater awareness’
Some experts attributed the increase in ASD diagnoses to greater awareness of the condition among parents and doctors, the New York Post reported.
Dr. Marc Siegel, internal medicine doctor and clinical professor at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine, told FOX News he believes the rise in autism diagnoses is largely a function of more parents being on the lookout for signs of ASD in their children.
Siegel said:
“This [study] was pre-pandemic, so I want to start with that. It’s because parents were more on the lookout for resistance in routines, not meeting your glances, emotional withdrawal, obsessive behavior — all of that is what could go into being diagnosed with an autistic spectrum disorder.
“Raising awareness is a big, big part of it, but there’s also probably something that women are exposed to in the womb that we don’t yet know about that could be causing it.
“And a third thing is all of the bombardment of the internet, of social media, of iPhones, all of that leads to an inability to socialize.”
However, Kim Rossi, managing editor of Age of Autism, found Siegel’s reasons unconvincing and inadequate.
Age of Autism is a non-profit that gives “voice to those who believe autism is an environmentally induced illness, that it is treatable and that children can recover.”
Rossi, mother of three adult children with autism, said in a July 12 post that Siegel “tap danced” on the new autism numbers and failed to provide any substantial answers about what parents need to know regarding the surge in ASD diagnoses reported by the study.
Rossi wrote:
“Autism numbers continue to rise unabated. But no one is really concerned. It’s just this or that or tra la la … And no one cares in public health, pediatrics, or Washington.
“Notice how Siegel alludes to ‘something women are exposed to in the womb’ which is ‘probably’ also a factor. After thirty years of exploding autism statistics, we’re still totally uninterested in what that ‘something’ might be.”
According to Rossi, the surge in ASD diagnoses among U.S. children is largely “coming from the outside” in the form of environmental toxins, including vaccines — and these potential risk factors should be researched.
“Something on the outside is affecting the inside,” she told The Defender in an interview.
Rossi speculated environmental factors, including exposure to chemicals and eating non-organic foods, may play a role.
“Parents have reported for decades vaccine injury and then an autism diagnosis,” she said.
Rossi also expressed concern about the recent trend to frame autism in terms of “neurodiversity” — a view that emphasizes the potential gifts of autism and downplays the challenges presented by the condition.
“Autism has fallen under the umbrella of identity politics,” she said.
While people with autism should be proud, she said, the current framing of ASD as a personality trait does not adequately respect and honor the situation of many individuals with ASD — particularly those with severe autism — and their family members who care for them.
When ASD is no longer considered a medical condition, everyone is “off the hook” for identifying and mitigating the possible environmental risk factors.
No one is held responsible, she said. No one, except the parents caring for autistic children and the school districts serving them.
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is an independent journalist and researcher based in Fairfield, Iowa.
© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
July 16, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science | United States |
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Transcription:
Dear colleagues at the WHO, I think the time has come to admit that the mass vaccination program that you have been proposing in an attempt to put an end to the COVID-19 pandemic has been a complete failure. At the beginning of this year, I’ve been urging you to open a scientific debate on the potential risks of mass vaccination with these vaccines – in the midst of a pandemic. I’ve never received a response to that request. But shortly thereafter one of the most renowned vaccinologists on this planet wrote me an email saying; ‘vaccinating with these vaccines would only breed new variants. But that it wouldn’t make sense for me to go against the mainstream because nobody would listen to me anyway, and hopefully that second-generation vaccines would solve the problem.’
So, I wanted to let you know that it is not because you are the WHO, that you can afford to ignore the opinion of people who have long-standing expertise – in all of the different disciplines involved in this pandemic: virology, immunology, vaccinology, evolutionary biology, epidemiology, zoonoses, etc. Whereas, some of us have been predicting that mass vaccination with these vaccines in the midst of a pandemic would inevitably lead to the expansion of more infectious variants, your leading scientists have been preaching the simplistic mantra that the more we vaccinate the less the virus will replicate, and the lower the likelihood that new variants will emerge. Now, the consequences of these simplistic and erroneous viewpoints is that today we are dealing with dominant circulation of Omicron, the most infectious SARS-CoV-2 variant that we have seen so far, and probably the most infectious virus that we have seen so far.
So, given the fact that we are now dealing with a number of variants that are circulating and a multitude, of course, of sub-variants, and that infection rates are going through the roof, and that also we are already most likely having a number of animal populations that are serving as a reservoir for the virus, the likelihood that viral variants are now recombining and building reassortments within one and the same host is becoming increasingly likely. So, what that means is that it will become increasingly difficult to trace the origin of new variants, and that it will be even more challenging to predict the characteristics of those new variants in terms of infectiousness, in terms of virulence, pathogenicity, and also in terms of resistance to vaccinal antibodies or to vaccines in general.
But what is very clear is that if those new variants are to survive on a background of high population-level immune pressure, then those variants will need to be more infectious – like, for example, the Omicron variant. The Omicron variant, however, is offering a very nice opportunity, because Omicron has acquired a substantial level of resistance to the vaccinal antibodies, and that means that the vaccinal antibodies are less likely to outcompete the innate antibodies, which is very good news, because we know that innate antibodies can protect against SARS-CoV-2. This has been repeatedly reported in the literature. We also know that innate antibodies can be trained, and therefore they can even improve their recognition and protection against the virus. Innate antibodies can be trained just like other innate immune effectors can be trained, by repeated exposure to what we call pathogen-associated molecular patterns. This is, in fact, nicely shown by the data published by the UK Health Security Agency, previously Public Health England – where they have shown that basically with aging and also with more exposure to the pathogen, the number of cases in the unvaccinated people was dramatically reduced, and even to an extent such that vaccine efficacy, or we should say, in the population, vaccine effectiveness, would become negative. There is also increased evidence, or increasing evidence, that training of innate antibodies as a result of natural infection can enhance the abrogation of the infection, and that training of adaptive immunity – particularly the induction of T-cell memory, also as a result of natural infection – can enhance the abrogation of disease.
Thanks to the increased resistance of Omicron to vaccinal antibodies, the innate antibodies are set free and can now enable the vaccinees to eliminate the virus, to control viral transmission, and to lead to a dramatic decrease in the viral infection rate, just like healthy unvaccinated people are doing. So, in other words, the resistance to Omicron means, in fact, that we are freeing up a huge capacity of sterilizing immunity in vaccinees because the vaccinees are, in fact, regaining full functionality of their innate immune antibodies. That, of course, will lead to herd immunity because herd immunity requires that you induce a type of immunity that can sterilize the virus, that can dramatically diminish transmission. This would also mean: by freeing up this huge capacity of sterilizing immunity in the vaccinees – after certainly a very important incline of infectious cases – we would have a rapid decline of this wave. And we would also have a rapid decline of disease cases, and even more importantly and more dramatically, of severe disease. Now we know with (moderate) disease, when you recover from disease, you develop acquired immunity, which is long-lived and will protect you. And the few cases of severe disease, we have, of course, to treat – that is what we’ve always said.
It is important to realize that, in fact, Omicron is more or less serving, indeed, as a live attenuated vaccine, and that this is a unique opportunity. The fact that we free up the sterilizing capacity in the vaccinees, thanks to the increased level of resistance of Omicron to the vaccinal antibodies – those are no longer capable of outcompeting the innate antibodies – we may have a unique opportunity to achieve herd immunity, or to start building herd immunity. And so, it is very, very important that we leave people alone, and that we leave the children alone, and that we let the virus spread. And so, we shouldn’t have any vaccination against this Omicron variant, and we shouldn’t have lockdowns.
If we are now going to vaccinate against Omicron, we are going to take away this window of opportunity for the population to generate herd immunity, thanks to freeing up our innate antibodies. And what we are going to do is in fact we would build against antibodies, against the spike protein of Omicron, and particularly against the receptor-binding domain of this Omicron spike protein.
We know that this receptor-binding domain has already undergone a number, or several, important mutations. So, if we put again full pressure on this domain, there is a high likelihood that we are now going to promote variants that will be able to use a receptor that is different from ACE-2 to enter into the cell. And we know that SARS-CoV-2 can do that because it has already been described that SARS-CoV-2 can use receptors other than ACE-2 to enter into the cell. But so far this way of entering – this alternative way of entry into the cell – has not been the preferred way for the virus for entering the cells. But it would only take probably one or two mutations for the virus to make these alternative receptors the preferred receptors for viral entry.
By doing mass vaccination against Omicron, we may be putting enough immune pressure on viral infectiousness to give variants that are capable of entering into the cell through an alternative receptor – to give them a competitive advantage, and so, to provide them with a fitness advantage so that they can now become dominant in the population. What this means is pretty catastrophic, because this would mean that basically we end up with a situation where we have antibodies that still strongly bind to the virus, to the receptor binding domain, but that can no longer neutralize the virus because the virus is now using another domain to enter into the cell, a domain which is different from the domain that is blocked by the antibodies.
Such a situation is in fact, a textbook example, for how you provoke antibody-dependent enhancement of the disease. So, this would mean that such a situation, the virus covered with strongly binding antibodies but not being able to neutralize the virus, would basically lead, or would be similar, to a situation where the virus has acquired a higher level of virulence. This would be – this situation would really, really, really be at risk of provoking the kind of disastrous consequences that I have been warning against at the beginning of this year. And we know that industry is already gearing up for mass vaccination against Omicron. And, as this, according to my humble opinion, could potentially be – with a high likelihood – a real disaster. We must prevent such a thing from happening.
So in order to – or I would say unless – unless immediate action is taken to prevent this, it is clear that decision-makers in your organization, the WHO, will be held responsible, accountable, and liable for the dramatic consequences that this biological experiment on human beings could possibly entail. So I hope that this time you will take my warning very seriously into consideration.
Thank you.
July 16, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine, WHO |
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This article was previously published April 1, 2019, and has been updated with new information.
Magnesium is the fourth most abundant element in your body,1 and one of the seven essential minerals we can’t live without.2 It’s necessary for the healthy functioning of most cells, but especially your heart, kidneys and muscles. Low levels of magnesium impede cellular metabolic function and deteriorate mitochondrial function.
As it is also required for the activation of vitamin D, deficiency may hamper your ability to convert vitamin D from sun exposure and/or oral supplementation. Unfortunately, deficiency is common and research shows even subclinical deficiencies may jeopardize your health.
If you’ve recently had a blood panel drawn, you may assume it would reveal a magnesium deficiency. However, only 1% of magnesium is distributed in your blood, which means a blood test is not useful to determine whether you are deficient at the cellular level.3 Recent research confirms optimal levels of magnesium are necessary for your heart4 and kidney health.5
Magnesium Deficiency Affects the Vast Majority
Statistics show that at least 50% of Americans are deficient in magnesium, with some estimations going as high as 75% overall, and as many as 84% of postmenopausal women being deficient in it.6,7,8 Other scientists believe the deficiency affects the vast majority of individuals based on current dietary habits, saying:9
“[B]ecause of chronic diseases, medications, decreases in food crop magnesium contents and the availability of refined and processed foods, the vast majority of people in modern societies are at risk for magnesium deficiency.”
The recommended daily allowances (RDA) for magnesium are based on age, gender and pregnancy status.10 Although it may be difficult to pinpoint the exact percentage of individuals who suffer from magnesium deficiency, data do demonstrate subclinical levels of magnesium contribute to a number of widespread health problems.
The number who suffer from deficiency increases with an aging population as the elderly tend to consume less and don’t efficiently absorb magnesium from what is eaten.11
Digestive disorders, such as Crohn’s disease and celiac, may also affect magnesium absorption.12 Individuals who suffer from Type 2 diabetes13 or use diuretics may lose more magnesium through their urine.14
As the number of people suffering Type 2 diabetes is growing, and the age at which the condition arises is getting younger,15 the number who are also at risk for magnesium deficiency is also rising. Type 2 diabetes is associated with a number of health conditions also linked to magnesium deficiency, including heart disease and kidney disease.
Magnesium Integral to Arterial Health
Magnesium is required for energy production and is a cofactor in more than 300 enzyme systems that regulate biochemical reactions, including muscle and nerve function, and blood pressure regulation.16 Magnesium also helps regulate your blood vessels and helps prevent calcification known as coronary artery calcification (CAC).
CAC is an indicator of advanced atherosclerosis, a common predictor of cardiovascular disease and chronic kidney disease.17 In 1948, researchers undertook a nearly 70-year-long heart study under the direction of the National Heart Institute.
The Framingham Heart Study18 became a joint project of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and Boston University with the objective to identify factors contributing to cardiovascular disease.
Magnesium Is Necessary for Optimal Heart and Kidney Health
Researchers19 recently examined data of magnesium intake in those free of cardiovascular disease at the beginning of the Framingham Heart Study and followed them over a period of 11 years.
They found a strong association between higher self-reported magnesium intake and lower calcification in the coronary arteries, which translates to lower risk of atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease.
The researchers believe this may play a role in magnesium’s protective association in stroke and fatal coronary artery disease. The data also revealed a lower risk of abdominal aortic calcification,20 also associated with cardiovascular disease.21 A second study22 analyzed the associated risk of hypomagnesemia with diabetes and hypertension, which can contribute to a decline in kidney function.
The hypothesis was that subclinical levels contributed to a decline in glomerular filtration rate. Researchers engaged over 2,000 participants from the Dallas Heart Study. During a median follow-up of seven years, researchers evaluated glomerular filtration rate, biochemical parameters, C-reactive proteins and the prevalence of hypertension and diabetes.
The results led the researchers to conclude subclinical levels of magnesium were independently associated with decline in glomerular filtration rates indicating declining kidney function.23
Magnesium is a natural calcium antagonist and has several effects on vasodilation, regulation and changes in metabolism enhancing atherosclerotic changes in arterial stiffness, likely in part contributing to heart and kidney disease.24
Magnesium for Your Bone and Muscle Health
Magnesium contributes to the structural development of bone, and adult bone contains nearly 60% of the total magnesium in your body.25 As it is involved in bone formation, subclinical levels may contribute to the development of osteoporosis.
Research26 has found women with osteoporosis have lower serum magnesium levels than those without osteoporosis or osteopenia. Magnesium is also fundamental for physical performance.27 Just as it contributes to heart muscle contraction, skeletal muscles also require magnesium to relax muscle cramping and it is a cornerstone for circulatory health.
Magnesium is also important in energy regulation and plays a role in oxygen delivery and uptake in muscle. The relationship between magnesium and circulation also affects your brain. Dr. Maiken Nedergaard, co-director of the University of Rochester Center for Translational Neuromedicine, commented on the energy supply needed by the brain:28
“Our brains require a tremendous amount of energy and in order to meet this demand the flow of blood must be precisely choreographed to ensure that oxygen is being delivered where it is needed and when it is needed. This study demonstrates that microvessels in the brain play a key role in reacting to spikes in demand and accelerating the flow of blood to respond to neuronal activity.”
Magnesium Deficiency Affects Migraines, Anxiety, Depression
Although the brain is just 2% of your body weight, it uses nearly 20% of your oxygen supply in metabolic processes,29 remaining remarkably constant despite changes in mental and motor activities. Magnesium facilitates processing in the neural networks and is used to keep the blood-brain barrier healthy.30
Magnesium has proven to be essential for learning, concentration and memory and enables the brain’s plasticity, or its ability to adapt to challenges.31 Additionally, maintaining optimal levels of magnesium has proven effective in reducing the number of attacks and the number of days per month you may experience a migraine.32
In a comparison against valproate sodium, a medication used to help prevent migraine headache attacks, a randomized, controlled, double-blind study indicated 500 milligrams (mgs) of magnesium per day was an effective prophylaxis, similar to the effectiveness experienced by those taking valproate sodium, without side effects.
Anxiety disorders affect up to 13% of the population in the U.S.33 The condition may be debilitating, and like other mental disorders, it exists on a spectrum. Low levels of magnesium have been associated with increasing levels of noradrenaline, leading to a higher heart rate and blood pressure.
Conversely, optimal levels of magnesium may decrease the release of adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), responsible for the controlled release of cortisol. Essentially, this means the release of fewer stress hormones and the modulation of the ones released.34
Optimal levels of dietary intake are also inversely associated with anxiety and depression.35 In an outpatient clinic treating 126 adults with mild to moderate symptoms, researcher found supplementation with magnesium chloride for six weeks resulted in clinically significant improvements in depression and anxiety without side effects.36
Higher Magnesium Intake Lowers Risk of Vitamin D Deficiency
Vitamin D levels below 20 nanograms per milliliter (ng/mL) or 50 nanomoles per liter (nmol/L) have repeatedly been shown to raise your risk of a number of health conditions, including depression and Type 2 diabetes. According to the most recent research, a vitamin D level between 60 and 80 ng/mL (150 and 200 nmol/L) appears to offer the greatest protection against cancer and other chronic diseases.37
Adequate vitamin D levels may also help prevent or treat dry eye syndrome,38 macular degeneration,39 neurological diseases,40 fractures41 and obesity.42 Adequate levels of vitamin D also lower your mortality risk associated with heart disease,43 and may lower your risk of mortality from all causes.44
However, without adequate levels of magnesium, any vitamin D supplementation may be ineffective,45 as magnesium is required for the activation of vitamin D, and vitamin D may trigger vascular calcification if magnesium and vitamin K2 levels are not optimal.46 Higher levels of magnesium may actually lower your risk of vitamin D deficiency by allowing for the activation of more vitamin D.47
Magnesium — Supplementation and Natural Sources
One of the biggest culprits behind deficiencies is processed foods, which unfortunately has become a staple in the American diet. Some of the magnesium rich foods you may add to your diet include:48,49
- Spinach
- Swiss chard
- Avocado
- Papaya
- Bok Choy
- Beet greens
- Turnip greens
- Seeds and nuts, such as pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, cashews and raw almonds
- Fatty fishes like wild-caught Alaskan salmon
- Dried seaweed or agar
- Brussels sprouts
An interesting number of factors may affect your ability to absorb magnesium from your foods. Herbicides like glyphosate act as agricultural chelators, effectively obstructing the uptake of minerals from the soil in many foods grown today. As a result, it may be quite difficult to find truly magnesium-rich foods. Cooking and processing further depletes magnesium.
Meanwhile, certain foods may actually influence your body’s absorption of magnesium. High levels of sugar intake may trigger excretion of magnesium through your kidneys, “resulting in a net loss,” according to Dr. Danine Fruge, associate medical director at the Pritikin Longevity Center in Florida.50
When it comes to oral supplementation, my personal preference is magnesium threonate, as it appears to be the most efficient at penetrating cell membranes, including your mitochondria and blood-brain barrier. Other effective ways to boost your magnesium level include:
•Taking Epsom salt (magnesium sulfate) baths, as the magnesium will effectively absorb through your skin.
•Using a topical solution — I prepare a supersaturated solution of Epsom salt by dissolving 7 tablespoons of the salt into 6 ounces of water and heating it until all the salt has dissolved. I pour it into a dropper bottle and then apply it to my skin and rub fresh aloe leaves over it to dissolve it.
This is an easy and inexpensive way to increase your magnesium and will allow you to get higher dosages into your body without having to deal with its laxative effects.
Magnesium can be taken with or without food. If you’re also taking calcium, take them together. If you exercise regularly, consider taking your calcium and magnesium in a ratio of one part calcium to two parts magnesium with your pre-workout meal.
While the ideal ratio of magnesium to calcium is thought to be 1-to-1, most people get far more calcium than magnesium from their diet, so your need for supplemental magnesium may be two to three times greater than calcium.
Sources and References
July 16, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular |
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This month’s release of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine documents by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reveals three more reports of deaths among vaccine trial participants and further instances of Pfizer downplaying serious adverse events sustained by participants and listing the injuries as “not related” to the vaccine.
Of the approximately 80,000 pages released this month, the most revelatory is a 3,611-page “confidential” document with no title — only the file name “fa_interim_narrative_sensitive.”
The document contains information about vaccine trial participants who died, who sustained adverse events during the trial or who contracted COVID-19 during the trial.
All participants listed in the document received the 30 μg dose of the BNT162b2 candidate vaccine, which the FDA in August 2021 granted Emergency Use Authorization.
The FDA on July 1 released the documents as part of a court-ordered disclosure schedule stemming from an expedited Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed in August 2021.
Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, a group of doctors and public health professionals, initially submitted the FOIA request.
Document details deaths of three trial participants
The “interim narrative” document contains reports of three clinical trial participants who died — and in all cases, the investigator ruled out the possibility the deaths were related to Pfizer’s vaccines.
One instance pertains to a 56-year-old white female in the U.S. (unique Subject ID C4591001 1007 10071101), who suffered cardiac arrest on Oct. 18, 2021, and died three days later. She was vaccinated on July 30, 2020, and Aug. 20, 2020.
The “narrative comments” accompanying the report on the woman’s death stated her death could not have been related to the vaccine, due to the amount of time that had elapsed following her second dose:
“In the opinion of the investigator, there was no reasonable possibility that the cardiac arrest was related to the study intervention or clinical trial procedures, as the death occurred 2 months after receiving Dose 2.”
The woman’s medical history did not indicate any cardiovascular problems, although ongoing obesity, gastroesophageal reflux disease and sleep apnea syndrome were listed.
The second report of a death was that of a 60-year-old white male in the U.S. (unique Subject ID C4591001 1162 11621327), who received one dose of the vaccine (on Sept. 10, 2020) and died sometime in the following three days of atherosclerotic disease.
According to the document:
“The study site received a police report indicating that the police visited the subject’s home to perform a welfare check on 13 Sep 2020 (Day 4) and found him dead.”
The participant’s medical history indicated ongoing autoimmune thyroiditis, obesity and depression, and a prior craniocerebral injury and prior hip arthroplasty.
According to the report:
“It was reported that the subject’s body was cold and had visible lividity. According to the medical examiner, the probable cause of death was progression of atherosclerotic disease. Relevant tests were unknown. Autopsy results were not available at the time of this report.
“In the opinion of the investigator, there was no reasonable possibility that the arteriosclerosis was related to the study intervention, concomitant medications, or clinical trial procedures, but rather it was related to suspected [emphasis added] underlying disease. Pfizer concurred with the investigator’s causality assessment.”
In other words, the participant’s death was attributed to a “suspected” cause, while the possibility that it was vaccine-related in any way, was dismissed.
The third death listed in the “fa_interim_narrative_sensitive” documents was listed under the section in the document listing reports from trial participants who withdrew, not those who died.
The report pertained to a 72-year-old Hispanic/Latino male in the U.S. (unique Subject ID: C4591001 1152 11521497) who received one dose of the vaccine, on Oct. 7, 2020.
The subject sustained vasovagal syncope (a fainting incident) on Oct. 26, 2020, and was admitted to the hospital, causing him to miss his scheduled follow-up vaccination appointment on Oct. 28, 2020.
According to the document:
“The subject was transferred to the intensive care unit. Family medical history relevant to the syncope was unknown.
“On an unspecified date, the syncope resolved and the subject was discharged from the hospital.”
He was withdrawn from the study on Nov. 6, 2020. However, according to the subject’s sister, he died of “unknown” causes on Nov. 11, 2020.
As stated by the document (dated Nov. 22, 2020):
“The cause of death was reported as unknown. It was not reported if an autopsy was performed. A death certificate might be available at a later date.”
Nevertheless, this lack of information did not prevent the study investigator or Pfizer from dismissing the possibility that the participant’s death was vaccine-related. The document states:
“In the opinion of the investigator, there was no reasonable possibility that the syncope was related to the study intervention, concomitant medications, or clinical trial procedures.
“Pfizer concurred with the investigator’s causality assessment. Per Pfizer, the syncope was most likely coincidental and associated with underlying clinical conditions.”
The document contained no reports of deaths among trial participants who received the placebo.
Investigators attribute 4 serious adverse events to vaccine, Pfizer disagrees
According to the latest document release, investigators attributed the vaccine to serious adverse events in four cases, however, Pfizer disagreed with the investigators’ conclusions in three out of the four cases.
The incidents are:
• A 53-year-old white female in the U.S. (unique Subject ID: C4591001 1018 10181159), who developed “lower back pain and bilateral lower extremity pain with radicular paresthesia” on Oct. 20, 2020, which was ongoing as of the date of the document (Nov. 22, 2020).
She was vaccinated on Aug. 14 and Sept. 4, 2020.
The woman’s medical history did not indicate lower back or lower extremity pain, just ongoing migraines and a prior history including a right shoulder dislocation, fibrocystic breast disease and Vitamin D deficiency.
The study investigator and Pfizer disagreed on whether the serious adverse event she experienced was related to the vaccination. As stated in the document:
“In the opinion of the investigator, there was a reasonable possibility that the lower back pain and bilateral lower extremity pain with radicular paresthesia were related to the study intervention, but not related to concomitant medications or clinical trial procedures.
“Pfizer did not concur with the investigator’s causality assessment and considered that there is not enough evidence to establish a causal relationship with the study vaccine apart from a chronological association at this time of the report.
“Based on the information currently available, it was more likely that the lower back pain and bilateral lower extremity pain with radicular paresthesia was associated with the subject’s underlying known neurological condition.”
• A 71-year-old white female in the U.S. (unique Subject ID: C4591001 1142 11421247) sustained ventricular arrhythmias on Oct. 14, 2020 — the same day she received the second dose of the vaccine — and which continued until Oct. 21, 2020.
The woman received her first dose on Sept. 21, 2020. Her medical history indicated she was wearing a cardiac pacemaker and was experiencing ongoing atrioventricular block (complete), atrial fibrillation and supraventricular tachycardia.
Again, the study investigator and Pfizer could not agree as to whether this adverse event was related to the vaccination. The document states:
“In the opinion of the investigator, there was a reasonable possibility that the ventricular arrhythmia was related to the study intervention based on the temporal relationship since the arrhythmias began within 24 hours of Dose 2, but not related to concomitant medications or clinical trial procedures.
“Pfizer did not concur with the investigator’s causality assessment. Additionally, Pfizer commented that there was not enough evidence to establish a causal relationship with the study intervention apart from a chronological association at this time of the report.
“In absence of evidence for an inflammatory response to study intervention, it was more likely that the ventricular arrhythmia was associated with the subject’s underlying known cardiac conditions.”
Pfizer dismissed the possibility that the vaccine may have exacerbated the subject’s existing cardiac conditions.
• A 48-year-old white female in the U.S. (unique Subject ID: C4591001 1178 11781107), who received one dose of the vaccine on Sept. 4, 2020, and withdrew from the study on Sept. 25, 2020.
In the interim, the participant sustained right axilla lymphadenopathy, with “at least four enlarged lymph nodes” — a condition that was still ongoing as of the document date of Nov. 22, 2020.
Her medical history indicated ongoing positional vertigo, osteoarthritis, eczema, sinus headaches, seasonal allergies and a Pitocin allergy, as well as prior menorrhagia, uterine fibroids and a past hysterectomy. In addition, her body mass index (BMI) was listed as being 36.9.
Pfizer also in this case did not agree with the study investigator’s assessment:
“In the opinion of the investigator, there was a reasonable possibility that the lymphadenopathy was related to the study intervention. Pfizer did not concur with the investigator’s causality assessment.”
• A 30-year-old Asian female in the U.S. sustained a shoulder injury related to vaccine administration (SIRVA).
The documents did not list any severe adverse events occurring in anyone outside the U.S., even though the documents contain reports from trials in Argentina, Brazil and South Africa.
‘Unrelated’ adverse event reports habitually dismiss possibility injuries were vaccine-related
The documents reveal a large discrepancy between the number of adverse events deemed to be related to the vaccination (four) compared to those reported to be “not related” (113 non-placebo participants).
The reports associated with each incident reveal an ongoing tendency to dismiss any possibility injuries were vaccine-related — even in instances where no alternative cause was identified or where patients had no relevant prior medical history.
In still other instances, the cause of the adverse event was attributed to itself, while in several other cases, pre-existing conditions worsened following vaccination.
A significant number of accidents and falls — and subsequent injuries — also were reported.
Instances where severe adverse events were brushed over as being “not related” to the vaccination, despite no relevant medical history, include:
• A 75-year-old white male in the U.S. (unique Subject ID: C4591001 1013 10131176), who was vaccinated on Aug. 13 and Oct. 7, 2020, sustained 13 adverse events between Aug. 29 and Sept. 16, 2020, many of which were ongoing as of the document date of Nov. 22, 2020.
These adverse events included congestive heart failure, acute hypoxic respiratory failure, acute renal failure, aspiration pneumonia, anemia, hypokalemia, hyponatremia, leukopenia, sepsis, small bowel obstruction and mild concentric left ventricular hypertrophy.
The participant had ongoing gastroesophageal reflux disease, hiatus hernia, hypercholesterolemia, hypertension and constipation, in addition to prior small intestinal and knee surgery.
The report attributed the patient’s adverse events to his prior surgical history. The document stated:
“In the opinion of the investigator, there was no reasonable possibility that the abdominal adhesions, small intestinal obstruction, pneumonia aspiration, and acute respiratory failure were related to the study intervention, concomitant medications, or clinical trial procedures, but were rather likely related to subject’s previous surgery.
“Pfizer concurred with the investigator’s causality assessment.”
• A 73-year-old white female in the U.S. (unique Subject ID: C4591001 1079 10791246) sustained a “cerebrovascular accident” (stroke), as well as expressive aphasia, on Oct. 22, 2020. She was vaccinated on Sept. 4 and Sept. 25, 2020.
Her medical history listed osteoarthritis, seasonal allergies and being postmenopausal. Nevertheless, her stroke and aphasia were deemed to be “not related” to the vaccine, although no cause was listed. Instead, the document stated, “pending medical records” with regard to the cause of her adverse events.
• A 66-year-old white female in the U.S. (unique subject ID: C4591001 1021 10211190) suffered a stroke on Nov. 2, 2020, with ongoing symptoms as of the document date on Nov. 22, 2020. She was vaccinated on Sept. 10 and Oct. 1, 2020.
Her medical history indicated ongoing gastroesophageal reflux disease, seasonal allergies and postmenopause, as well as a BMI of 28.5.
Her stroke was dismissed as being “not related” to the vaccine, although no alternative cause was listed.
• A 68-year-old white male in the U.S. (unique Subject ID: C4591001 1092 10921015) sustained arrhythmia atrial fibrillation and elevated troponin on Aug. 26, 2020. He received his first dose on Aug. 19, 2020, and his second dose on Oct. 6, 2020, as it required “clearance from his cardiologist.”
His medical history did not specifically indicate heart conditions. Instead, it indicated ongoing basal cell carcinoma on his nose, as well as hypersensitivity, seasonal allergies, myopia, dyslipidemia, hypertension, actinic keratosis and gastroesophageal reflux disease.
Although the study investigator wrote, in reference to the cause of his injuries, that “medical records [are] being reviewed not able to answer at this time,” the report dismissed possibility that his adverse events were related to the vaccine.
• A 45-year-old Black male in the U.S. (unique Subject ID: C4591001 1156 11561006) with ongoing Type 1 diabetes sustained deep vein thrombosis and a pulmonary embolism on Aug. 31, 2020. He received one dose of the vaccine, on Aug. 20, 2020, and was discontinued from the study on Sept. 8, 2020, “because he no longer met the eligibility criteria.”
Both adverse events were deemed as being “not related” to his vaccination, and were instead indicated as being “related to medical history of Type 1 diabetes mellitus.”
• A 67-year-old white male in the U.S. (unique Subject ID: C4591001 1178 11781015) sustained several adverse events on Oct. 10-11, 2020, including ascending aorta ectasia, diastolic dysfunction of the left ventricle and transient global amnesia. These conditions were ongoing as of the document date of Dec. 4, 2020. He was vaccinated on Aug. 25 and Sept. 15, 2020.
The patient’s medical record indicated ongoing depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, hypertension, insomnia and neck pain.
While the cause of his adverse events was deemed as being “not related” to the vaccination, the study did state a cause, listing it as “possibly” having been hypertension.
• A 58-year-old Hispanic/Latino female from Argentina (unique Subject ID: C4591001 1231 12313674) sustained adverse events including panlobular emphysema, pneumonitis, and left submaxillary sialadenitis beginning on Sept. 29, 2020. The first two conditions were indicated as continuing as of the document date of Dec. 4, 2020.
She was vaccinated on Aug. 24 and Sept. 13, 2020. Her medical record indicated ongoing Sjogren’s syndrome and insomnia.
The cause of these adverse events was deemed as being “not related” to the vaccines, although for the first two adverse events, the stated cause was listed as “unknown,” while for the third, the cause was listed as Sjogren’s syndrome.
• A 56-year-old Hispanic/Latino female from Argentina (unique Subject ID: C4591001 1231 12314001) was diagnosed with acute coronary syndrome on Nov. 8, 2020, which was still ongoing as of the document date of Dec. 4, 2020. She was vaccinated on Aug. 25 and Sept. 15, 2020.
Her medical history consisted of ongoing hypothyroidism, allergic rhinitis and asthma — but no coronary troubles.
Nevertheless, according to the study investigator, her condition was determined to be “not related” to the vaccination, although the cause was listed as “unknown.”
‘Cause unknown’ but no chance the vaccine was to blame
In other examples, adverse events were assigned no specific cause or only a “probable” cause, but investigators dismissed the possibility the vaccines may have caused the injuries.
For example:
• A 34-year-old Hispanic/Latino male from Brazil (unique subject ID: C4591001 1226 12261745) developed a Leydig cell tumor in his left testicle on Sept. 23, 2020. He received the first dose of the vaccine on Sept. 16, 2020, and second dose on Oct. 7, 2020.
His medical history listed only ongoing allergic rhinitis.
While the study investigator claimed that the adverse event was “not related” to the vaccination, the cause was listed as “unknown.”
• A 19-year-old Hispanic/Latino female from Brazil (unique Subject ID: C4591001 1231 12311281) with no indicated medical history was diagnosed with acute appendicitis and QT interval prolongation — a heart condition — on Sept. 18, 2020. She was vaccinated on Aug. 15 and Sept. 4, 2020.
These conditions were deemed to be “not related” to the vaccination, although the causes were indicated as “unknown.”
• A 41-year-old Hispanic/Latino female from Argentina (unique Subject ID: C4591001 1231 12311315) was diagnosed with anemia and malignant melanoma on Sept. 25, 2020, with symptoms continuing as of the document date of Dec. 4, 2020.
She was vaccinated on Aug. 15 and Sept. 3, 2020.
The adverse events were indicated as being “not related” to the vaccination, but instead due to a “probable relationship with [a] vaginal tumor under study.”
• A 44-year-old Hispanic/Latino male from Argentina (unique Subject ID: C4591001 1231 12312854) was diagnosed with supraventricular arrhythmia on Sept. 17, 2020. He received the two vaccine doses on Aug. 21 and Sept. 11, 2020.
His medical history listed only ongoing sleep apnea syndrome and a BMI of 50.4.
According to the study investigator, the arrhythmia was “not related” to the vaccines, but instead “probably” corresponded “to an accessory intraventricular line.”
• A 56-year-old mixed-race male from Brazil (unique subject ID: C4591001 1241 12411825) was diagnosed with acute pyelonephritis on Nov. 2, 2020, and hypochromic anemia two days later. Both conditions were still listed as ongoing as of the document date of Dec. 4, 2020.
The participant was vaccinated on Sept. 17 and Oct. 8, 2020. His medical history listed ongoing hypertension.
According to the study investigator, these adverse events were “not related” to the vaccination. Instead, his acute pyelonephritis was due to a “possible” bacterial urinary tract infection, while the hypochromic anemia cause was “to be clarified.”
Worsening of pre-existing conditions ‘not related’ to vaccine
In other instances, participants experienced a worsening of pre-existing conditions. However, in all instances, no relation to the COVID-19 vaccine was determined.
For instance:
• A 72-year-old white male in the U.S. (unique Subject ID: C4591001 1092 10921187) sustained congestive heart failure on Oct. 1, 2020. He received his first dose of the vaccine on Sept. 15, 2020, and his second dose on Oct. 6, 2020.
The participant’s medical history included ongoing coronary artery disease, atrial fibrillation, type 2 diabetes, asthma, obesity, dyslipidemia, hypertension, insomnia and seasonal allergies. Moreover, he had previously had a defibrillator installed.
The cause of his adverse event was simply indicated as “progression of cardiovascular disease” unrelated to the vaccine. The possibility that the vaccine may potentially have precipitated the worsening of his heart condition was not considered.
• A 73-year-old white female in the U.S. (unique Subject ID: C4591001 1111 11111095) was reported as having sustained an “undiagnosed mental disorder” on Sept. 25, 2020, which was still ongoing as of the document date of Dec. 4, 2020. She was vaccinated on Aug.11 and Sept. 1, 2020.
The participant’s medical history did not indicate any prior mental disorders or conditions. Nevertheless, the cause of the adverse event was indicated by the study indicator as being “not related” to the vaccination and instead simply due to “mental instability.”
• A 58-year-old white male from the U.S. (unique Subject ID: C4591001 1109 11091387), who sustained worsening osteoarthritis of the right knee on Oct. 14, 2020, and later also experienced deep vein thrombosis on Oct. 20, 2020, which was still ongoing as of the document date of Dec. 4, 2020.
The participant’s medical history indicated ongoing osteoarthritis, ongoing hypercholesterolemia, hypothyroidism, sleep apnea syndrome, rosacea and an enlarged prostate. A prior knee surgery was also listed.
Both adverse events were deemed to be “not related” to the vaccination and instead attributed to the patient’s prior knee surgery and “previous medical history.”
• A 70-year-old white female from the U.S. (unique subject ID: C4591001 1127 11271023) experienced a worsening of her asthma on Oct.1, 2020. She later also developed malignant invasive ductal carcinoma in her left breast, on Nov. 5, 2020. Both cases were still ongoing as of the document date of Dec. 4, 2020.
She received her two doses of the vaccine on July 30 and Aug. 18, 2020. Her medical history, aside from ongoing asthma, also indicated a recurrent urinary tract infection and ongoing bronchitis, seasonal allergies, myopia, migraines, hypothyroidism, hypertension, insomnia, hyperlipidemia, osteoarthritis, bilateral deafness and postmenopause.
According to the document, both adverse events were “not related” to the vaccination, and instead were attributed to an “allergy” and to a “malignancy,” respectively.
Reports of multiple adverse events ignored
Other examples include cases where patients sustained multiple adverse events, many of which were entirely ignored by the study investigators’ assessments.
These include:
• A 61-year-old white male from the U.S. (unique Subject ID: C4591001 1114 1114108), who sustained 10 vaccine injuries beginning on Sept. 12, 2020, after he received the first dose of the vaccine on Aug. 24, 2020, and his second dose on Sept. 30, 2020.
The adverse events he experienced included acute kidney injury, atrial fibrillation, chest pain, left ventricular hypertrophy, mitral valve regurgitation, bilateral hand pain, pulmonary hypertension, skin avulsion on his left finger, a Staphylococcal infection and tricuspid regurgitation. Several of these conditions were still ongoing as of the document date of Dec. 4, 2020.
The patient’s medical history indicated ongoing peripheral neuropathy, type 2 diabetes, anxiety, depression, asthma, Staphylococcal infection, hypertension, hyperlipidemia and a prior leg amputation.
According to the study investigator, “the staphylococcal infection” was “not related” to the vaccine, but instead was connected to the patient’s hypertension, musculoskeletal causes and an “infection.” No mention was made in this assessment as to the probable causes of the other adverse events.
Some adverse events ‘caused’ by … the adverse event
In still other cases, the “cause” of participants’ adverse events was indicated as being the same as the adverse event itself.
Examples include:
• A 68-year-old white male from the U.S. (unique Subject ID: C4591001 1095 10951204), who was diagnosed with bladder cancer on Nov. 2, 2020. He was vaccinated on Sept. 2 and Sept. 21, 2020.
According to the document, the participant’s ongoing medical history included hypertension, benign prostatic hyperplasia, hypercholesterolemia, angina pectoris, coronary arterial stent insertion, coronary artery disease, erectile dysfunction and osteoarthritis.
However, the cause of his bladder cancer was attributed as “cancer” and deemed to be “not related” to the vaccination and “most likely coincidental and associated with the underlying clinical conditions.”
• A 48-year-old white male from the U.S. (unique Subject ID: C4591001 1124 11241106) sustained an acute myocardial infarction on Sept. 27, 2020. He previously received two doses of the vaccine, on Aug. 26 and Sept. 16, 2020.
His medical history indicated ongoing high cholesterol, gastroesophageal reflux disease and back pain.
According to the study investigator, the adverse event sustained by the participant was “not related” to the vaccination, but instead “related to cardiovascular risk,” with no further elaboration provided.
• A 73-year-old white female in the U.S. (unique Subject ID: C4591001 1223 12231159) was found to have a pancreatic mass on Nov. 5, 2020. She was vaccinated on Sept. 10 and Oct. 1, 2020.
Her medical records indicated ongoing osteoarthritis, menopause, gastroesophageal reflux disease, hypertension, dyslipidemia, hypothyroidism, Eustachian tube dysfunction, prophylaxis, irritable bowel syndrome, osteoporosis and benign monoclonal hypergammaglobulinemia.
The cause of her adverse event, which was indicated to be “not related” to the vaccination, was listed as “new development of pancreatic mass” without any elaboration as to the factors that may have caused it to appear.
‘Cause unknown’ but no chance the vaccine was to blame
In other examples, adverse events were assigned no specific cause or only a “probable” cause, even as the possibility that they were related to the vaccination was dismissed.
For example:
• A 34-year-old Hispanic/Latino male from Brazil (unique Subject ID: C4591001 1226 12261745) developed a Leydig cell tumor in his left testicle on Sept. 23, 2020. He received the first dose of the vaccine on Sept. 16, 2020, and second dose on Oct. 7, 2020.
His medical history listed only ongoing allergic rhinitis.
While the study investigator claimed that the adverse event was “not related” to the vaccination, the cause was listed as “unknown.”
• A 19-year-old Hispanic/Latino female from Brazil (unique Subject ID: C4591001 1231 12311281) with no indicated medical history was diagnosed with acute appendicitis and QT interval prolongation — a heart condition — on Sept. 18, 2020. She was vaccinated on Aug. 15 and Sept. 4, 2020.
These conditions were deemed to be “not related” to the vaccination, although the causes were indicated as “unknown.”
• A 41-year-old Hispanic/Latino female from Argentina (unique Subject ID: C4591001 1231 12311315) was diagnosed with anemia and malignant melanoma on Sept. 25, 2020, with symptoms continuing as of the document date of Dec. 4, 2020.
She was vaccinated on Aug. 15 and Sept. 3, 2020.
The adverse events were indicated as being “not related” to the vaccination, but instead due to a “probable relationship with [a] vaginal tumor under study.”
• A 44-year-old Hispanic/Latino male from Argentina (unique Subject ID: C4591001 1231 12312854) was diagnosed with supraventricular arrhythmia on Sept. 17, 2020. He received the two vaccine doses on Aug. 21 and Sept. 11, 2020.
His medical history listed only ongoing sleep apnea syndrome and a BMI of 50.4.
According to the study investigator, the arrhythmia was “not related” to the vaccines, but instead “probably” corresponded “to an accessory intraventricular line.”
• A 56-year-old mixed-race male from Brazil (unique Subject ID: C4591001 1241 12411825) was diagnosed with acute pyelonephritis on Nov. 2, 2020, and hypochromic anemia two days later. Both conditions were still listed as ongoing as of the document date of Dec. 4, 2020.
The participant was vaccinated on Sept. 17 and Oct. 8, 2020. His medical history listed ongoing hypertension.
According to the study investigator, these adverse events were “not related” to the vaccination. Instead, his acute pyelonephritis was due to a “possible” bacterial urinary tract infection, while the hypochromic anemia cause was “to be clarified.”
Other explanations for participants’ vaccine injuries include:
• A 78-year-old white male from the U.S. (unique Subject ID: C4591001 1097 10971011), who suffered from pneumonia between Sept. 20 and Oct. 5, 2020. He had previously received two doses of the vaccine, on Aug. 20 and Sept. 9, 2020.
According to the document, the cause of his pneumonia was “not related” to the vaccines. Instead, the listed cause was “pt [patient] contracted pneumonia from somewhere.”
• An 84-year-old white male from the U.S. (unique Subject ID: C4591001 1097 10971084) contracted pneumonia on Oct. 7, 2020, symptoms of which were still ongoing as of the document date of Dec. 4, 2020. He had previously been vaccinated on Sept. 1 and Sept. 23, 2020.
Similar to the patient above, the cause of the participant’s pneumonia was indicated as being “not related” to the vaccination. The narrative comment instead stated that “Pt [patient] contracted pneumonia from unknown source.”
Very few severe adverse events — and no deaths — were reported in other countries, although Argentina, for instance, was home to the largest of the Pfizer vaccine trials in 2020.
The next 80,000-page cache of FDA documents pertaining to the FDA’s authorization of the vaccine is set to be released on Aug. 1.
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., is an independent journalist and researcher based in Athens, Greece.
© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
July 16, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | COVID-19 Vaccine, FDA |
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Two-and-a-half years ago, the Grand Poobahs of global vaccinology admitted — in behind-closed-door confessions caught on camera at the World Health Organization (WHO) — that public and professional confidence in vaccines was “wobbly,” and deservedly so.
As the gathered experts conceded, the glaring inadequacies of vaccine safety science and the dysfunctional safety monitoring systems that permit routine “obfuscation” of serious adverse events were understandable reasons for public distrust.
At the time, it seemed as though such momentous disclosures would presage a death knell for vaccine “business as usual” — but then along came COVID-19, and with it, the instant memory-holing of the WHO’s stunning admissions.
Rather than finally address the self-confessed vaccine disaster, public health officials and global leaders — ranging from presidents to private-sector employers to top military brass to central bankers — used COVID-19 as an opportunity to double down in the opposite direction, forcibly stuffing the “vaccine hesitancy” genie back in the bottle with ethically untenable vaccine mandates.
After 18 months of force-feeding the COVID-19 jabs, however, manufacturers are now discarding tens of millions of doses “amid sagging demand.”
In some respects, this could be construed as evidence of policy failure, but the fact is that the COVID-19 shots accomplished a significant goal for the parties that pushed them, launching a renewed vaccine gold rush that — with growing emphasis on voguish, biotech-reliant biopharmaceuticals — seems likely to extend well beyond the COVID-19 era.
As the head of Bayer’s pharmaceuticals division observed in late 2021, mRNA vaccine technology and other forms of cell and gene therapy — for all of their by now well-documented and even species-threatening dangers — have crossed over both the regulatory and public palatability threshold.
Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson (J&J), AstraZeneca, Sanofi and Eli Lilly — some of major players in the biopharma space — are actively prioritizing “strategic alliances” and “collaborations to expand their [biopharmaceutical] product portfolios.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are poised to roll out, at breakneck speed, approvals and recommendations for whatever new childhood and adult vaccines are sent their way.
In short, using technologies both “conventional” and new, a multipronged effort is afoot to jump-start and ensure a frenzied vaccine-palooza.
The mRNA pipeline
Having succeeded in foisting COVID-19 mRNA injections on an initially unsuspecting public, manufacturers and government agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are now salivating at the prospect of an endless series of mRNA vaccines.
It is no coincidence that the mRNA jabs in the works target some of the very conditions being reported as COVID-19 vaccine adverse events, a neat “create-a-problem, develop-a-drug-to-manage-the problem” trick that accounts for many other drugs already on the market.
In the pipeline are mRNA vaccines for the following:
- Cancer: Researchers are conducting dozens of clinical trials to test “mRNA treatment vaccines in people with various types of cancers.” Dr. Ryan Cole, a pathologist, described the dramatic surge in endometrial and other cancers following the rollout of COVID-19 shots.
- Shingles: Cole and others also noted the uptick of shingles in COVID-19 vaccine recipients. Moderna in March announced its development of an mRNA shingles vaccine, as well as mRNA vaccines for herpes and cancer.
- Other forms of immune suppression: With numerous indications that COVID-19 shots are reprogramming the immune response, officials and manufacturers are dusting off HIV as the supposed bogeyman. Moderna and NIH are partnering in mRNA vaccine clinical trials for HIV. This would represent a particular coup for Dr. Anthony Fauci, who over four decades has found development of an HIV vaccine to be “a daunting scientific challenge.”
- Heart attacks: Cardiac problems are among the few COVID-19-vaccine-related adverse events grudgingly acknowledged by manufacturers and the FDA. In the U.K., researchers are investigating the use of “exactly the same technology as the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to inject micro RNAs to the heart,” claiming they can get whatever heart cells survive after a heart attack to proliferate.
- COVID and influenza: Manufacturers also are gearing up for a new generation of mRNA-based flu shots and mRNA combination vaccines which, they promise, will “protect against several different infections at the same time, such as influenza, COVID-19 and other respiratory infections.”In the meantime, CDC just recommended that seniors (aged 65 years or older) receive “enhanced” flu shots — either high-dose, adjuvanted or recombinant — in lieu of “standard-dose unadjuvanted, inactivated vaccines.” Adjuvanted influenza vaccines feature a new generation of “smart” vaccine adjuvants designed to ensure even the most mediocre vaccine sends recipients’ immune systems into overdrive.
For babies — something old, something new
In June, the FDA reaffirmed its long-standing allegiance to an agenda of guaranteed harm when it authorized emergency use COVID-19 shots for infants as young as 6 months old.
After the conflict-of-interest-riddled FDA advisors’ 21-0 vote, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) commented, “[I]n balancing the risk to rewards here, all the risks are to the innocent children and all of the billion-dollar rewards go to the government-protected pharmaceuticals.”
Seizures and psychosis are already being reported as adverse events in the under-5 age group.
In decrying FDA’s decision to give COVID-19 shots to tots, some dissenters waxed nostalgic about the perceived “rigor” of the pre-COVID-19 vaccine approval process, seemingly amnesiac about the FDA’s lengthy history of regulatory capture and business-friendly shortcuts.
As a reminder, at least two-thirds of the vaccines approved by the FDA from 2006 through late 2020 benefited from “flexibility in the evidence required for approval,” resulting in accelerated approvals.
This “turn-a-blind-eye” pattern also held sway in the FDA’s and CDC’s recent decisions to pile on two more options to the childhood schedule, options that will do nothing to improve the safety of measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) and pneumococcal conjugate vaccines (PCV) that have been injuring children for decades.
First, on June 3, the FDA approved GlaxoSmithKline’s (GSK’s) Priorix, an MMR vaccine initially launched in Europe in the late 1990s.
GSK developed Priorix using the MRC-5 cell line (derived from the lung tissue of a male fetus aborted at 14 weeks).
A 2020 analysis by the Italian association CORVELVA of a version of Priorix that also contains a varicella component found that the amount of DNA in the vaccine was “well above the allowed threshold,” and that continuous use of the cell line over time resulted in “vaccines containing progressively more and more modified human genetic material, that is dangerous for the health of the vaccinees themselves.”
The FDA’s go-ahead for Priorix shatters Merck’s position as the sole U.S. purveyor of MMR vaccines. Previously, FDA showed no sign of being troubled by Merck’s monopoly, despite the pharmaceutical behemoth being dogged by “a slew of controversies” that included whistleblower allegations of MMR-related fraud and undeniable evidence of a link with autism.
Moreover, as Children’s Health Defense Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. pointed out in late 2019, when the FDA belatedly began to “tee up” Priorix as a replacement for Merck’s scandal-ridden MMR-II, rather than use an inert placebo to test Priorix, the FDA allowed GSK to use MMR-II as the comparator!
Even these sham clinical trials, Kennedy noted, had “horrifying” results. Within 42 days, nearly 50% of recipients of both manufacturers’ formulations experienced adverse events, with over 10% ending up in the emergency room. By six months, almost 4% of recipients had been diagnosed with a “new onset chronic disease.”
To date, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) has received more than 37,000 adverse event reports for Priorix and another 11,000-plus for the varicella-containing version — with 58% and 79% of adverse events, respectively, occurring in the under-two age group that will now receive the jabs in the U.S.
Following the nominal slap on the wrist for Merck’s MMR-II, the FDA and CDC also offered Merck some good news, approving on June 17 and then recommending — for routine use in infants and children 6 weeks to 2 years of age — the company’s 15-valent PCV15 (brand name “Vaxneuvance”) as an interchangeable alternative to Pfizer’s Prevnar 13 (PCV13).
The CDC stopped short of issuing a “preferential recommendation” for PCV15, however. Admitting to “certain uncertainties, including concerns related to potentially higher reactogenicity” — with “reactogenicity” defined as the “state of being able to produce adverse reactions” — the CDC leaves it up to the hapless infants who receive Vaxneuvance to discover the shots’ “higher reactogenicity” for themselves.
Even without the addition of Vaxneuvance to the schedule, pneumococcal conjugate vaccines — with ingredients like aluminum and polysorbate 80 — have shown themselves plenty capable of wreaking havoc on the health of the infants expected to get four doses by the time they are 12 to 15 months old.
Eager to add even more injections to the childhood vaccine schedule, the industry is also eyeing as a potential cash cow a pediatric (and adult) mRNA vaccine against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).
In 2019, 30 candidate RSV vaccines were in the pipeline, and in 2021, the FDA fast-tracked an mRNA-based RSV vaccine developed by Moderna.
HPV downsizing — getting HPV shots into young people by any means necessary
The competition between Merck and GSK is also fierce where human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines are concerned.
In the U.S., Merck’s Gardasil (and later, Gardasil 9) handily beat out GSK’s Cervarix, which is no longer available to American youth — but with 100 or more countries having added HPV jabs to their national vaccination schedules, much more than the U.S. market is in play.
Data suggest HPV vaccine coverage in the U.S. starts out relatively high, with an estimated 66% of 13- to 17-year-olds getting a first dose, but the percentage completing the series (an additional one to two doses) drops off to 49%.
Worldwide, acceptance of HPV vaccines is even lower — for girls, global coverage is estimated at about 15% of those in the target age range.
Undoubtedly, one of the reasons for the global public’s lukewarm stance on HPV vaccination is the occurrence of serious adverse autoimmune reactions that have left many recipients, both female and male, disabled for life.
Merck is mired in lawsuits (with attorneys, including Kennedy) alleging it knowingly concealed Gardasil-associated adverse events.
Rather than re-evaluate — as some researchers have strongly urged — the adverse event profile that, until COVID-19 shots, made HPV vaccines some of the most dangerous on the market, agencies like the National Cancer Institute (NCI) are instead beginning to argue in favor of single-dose HPV vaccination (either Cervarix or Gardasil 9).
Punting to a one-dose regimen would, NCI officials disingenuously say, “simplify the logistics of vaccination, which could allow more girls [and boys] worldwide to be vaccinated.”
Monkeypox profiteering
As Rob Verkerk, Ph.D., reported last month, the suspected case definition of monkeypox is broad enough to include anyone with a common cold — or with post-COVID-19-vaccine immune suppression — who has a shingles rash.
Verkerk’s counsel is to worry about “what the WHO and collaborating institutions, governments and corporations are up to,” rather than succumb to fear-mongering about monkeypox itself.
In the U.S., what the government is “up to” is ordering more than 4 million doses of monkeypox vaccine — a whitewashed smallpox vaccine linked to heart inflammation — and formulating a “national monkeypox vaccine strategy,” including a protocol aimed at the vaccine’s use in children.
In other words, with a “COVID-19 corporatocracy playbook” that, in Verkerk’s words, “is now well and truly oiled,” corporate and government leaders of ill intent appear to believe they can continue to play the vaccine game indefinitely, using “fear and manipulated science to engender support for the global control of health.”
It is up to us to prove them wrong.
© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
July 15, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | CDC, COVID-19 Vaccine, FDA, United States |
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We’re only three days removed from our last monkeypox article – We’re “losing the fight against monkeypox”… apparently – and already it’s time for an update.
It’s been a busy two days for the monkeypox madness.
First, the World Health Organization announced their plans to hold a second “emergency meeting” on the monkeypox outbreak, to discuss if it merits being declared a “global emergency”.
As if trying to supply fuel for the WHO’s meeting next week, countries all around the world are reporting up ticks in cases.
Yesterday Global News reported that Canada’s monkeypox cases had “risen by 59% in just 9 days” (from 300 to 477 if you’re one of those people who likes hard figures in place of scary-sounding percentages).
According to the Associated Press, the UK’s “cases” have risen to 1735. One nursery school even shut down for the summer two weeks early…just because one their pupils may have come into contact with monkeypox.
Elsewhere in the UK press, one “expert” was “warning” that Monkeypox will become “endemic” if we don’t “take action”.
The “expert” also suggests that it would be wrong to “sit back and watch” monkeypox become endemic in “men who have sex with men”. Perhaps revealing the point of that part of the narrative – that if you reject monkeypox as anything to be worried about at all, you’re just being homophobic or speaking with “straight privilege”.
A similar angle is taken in this NPR piece, which claims that “the warning signs were there” with monkeypox for over a decade, and the only reason we never did anything about it is that it only affected poor African nations. Ergo, if you don’t care about monkeypox you’re a racist.
New York is apparently experiencing “urgent” vaccine shortages amid “rising cases”… rising from 223 to 267.
The US generally has seen cases increase from 700 to over a thousand since Monday. Monday was also the day they started allowing private labs to begin running tests. It’s baffling, isn’t it?
Australia has had the “killer virus spread to another state”. (To be clear, there are currently 28 reported cases of monkeypox on Australia, including “probable cases”, and not one of them is alleged to have died)
It’s not just the West either – India reported their first case in the last hour.
Argentina reports cases surging up to twelve whole people, while Bosnia & Herzogovina reported their first.
Meanwhile, on the other side of Iron Curtain 2.0, Russia reported their first monkeypox case on Tuesday. A handy reminder of their current position on the great reset agenda.
So, given all this, will the WHO declare monkeypox a “public health emergency of international concern”?
The smart money is very much on “yes”.
But there’s good news too… for biotech shareholders. China’s ZJ Biotech has seen its share prices increase by over 10% in just a day after the WHO announced a supply deal with the tech firm to manufacture Monkeypox test kits.
They still haven’t told us what they’re changing the name to, though. Maybe they can discuss that at the emergency meeting too.
July 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | WHO |
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