It took an entire year, but lockdowns and mask mandates are officially incredibly unpopular with half of the country, to the point that governors are rapidly making sweeping changes to their year-long COVID-19 policies.
Jumping onto the coattails of pro-individual freedom leaders like governors Ron DeSantis (R-Florida) and Kristi Noem (R-SD), the governors of Mississippi and Texas decided Tuesday to announce an end to business restrictions and statewide mask mandates.
Both Tate Reeves (R-MS) and Greg Abbott (R-TX), who had long taken a nanny state approach to the COVID-19 crisis, acted almost simultaneously to announce the end of statewide restrictions.
The centrally planned solutions to COVID-19 have failed spectacularly, and the American people have taken notice of this reality. Hundreds of millions have now been through a full year of government-imposed tyranny on both a federal and state level. Whether it was a travel ban, an endless series of lockdowns, mask mandates, countless emergency orders, business closures, and the like, not a single top-down order from the federal or state level did anything productive for the wellbeing of Americans.
None of it worked. All of it served as a net negative. The people have noticed.
Now that their constituents have had enough, politicians on the Right are fast departing from the COVID tyranny, and attempting to secure what is left of their political aspirations.
Abbott and Reeves are not the only GOP governors moving fast in ending the restrictions, several other governors have recently acted to roll them back.
On February 12, Montana Governor Greg Gianforte lifted his statewide mask mandate.
On February 8, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds lifted Iowa’s statewide mask mandate along with several other restrictions.
On February 22, North Dakota took it a step further. Its legislative body took the bold step in voting to make mask mandates illegal.
As of March 2, there are now 16 states that no longer have statewide mask orders.
However, across the political divide, there remains no end in sight to the corona madness. Much of the Left continues to embrace and root on endless COVID-19 restrictions, and the hijacking of individual rights in the name of a virus.
Governor Gavin Newsom of California took to Twitter in describing the end of restrictions as “absolutely reckless.”
It took long enough, but it’s now official: Governors who continue to impose lockdowns and mask mandates are fast becoming as popular as Red Sox fans in the Yankee Stadium bleachers, at least in half of the country. The internal polling is out, and the draconian restrictions are being abandoned in droves. History will not be kind to the remaining high-handed holdouts.
There appears to be a pattern developing when deaths are reported shortly following COVID-19 vaccinations, in that all deaths are assumed to be only “coincidentally” associated with vaccination before all the evidence is in. This raises an obvious question: Is the assumption that the experimental COVID-19 vaccines are never the cause of death scientifically justified or is it a symptom of bias?
Following the death of Drene Keyes in Virginia within minutes of receiving the first dose of Pfizer/BioNTech’s experimental messenger RNA (mRNA) BNT162b2 vaccine for COVID-19 on Jan. 30, 2021, the doctors who treated Keyes told her daughter, Lisa Jones, that her mother had suffered from what is called “flash pulmonary edema” (a condition caused by excess fluid in the lungs) caused by a serious allergic reaction, or anaphylaxis.12
While anaphylaxis is a known side effect of many vaccines, including mRNA vaccines like the one given to Keyes, almost immediately Virginia’s health commissioner Norman Oliver, MD said that preliminary findings of the investigation into Keyes’ death indicate that the cause of death was not anaphylaxis. Dr. Oliver acknowledged that the death had occurred soon after Keyes had been vaccinated, but insisted that fact was not “evidence of it being related.”1
Dr. Oliver said, “We are currently investigating and do not yet know the cause of death.” Danny Avula, MD, who is director of the Richmond City and Henrico County health departments and Virginia’s vaccine coordinator, said, “They’re looking for patterns, they’re looking for a causation versus just a correlation based on time.”1
Weeks have passed since Keyes died and the official cause of death has yet to be determined. A news report in mid-February noted that the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia had informed Jones that an autopsy on her mother would not be performed. According to the article, Jones said she had been told the state would not do a full autopsy “due to public health concerns.”1
One can only speculate why Virginia state officials opted out of doing a full autopsy to try and better understand what caused Keyes’ death by citing “public health concerns.” The oddness of that reasoning might only be surpassed by the reason given by the Portuguese Ministry of Justice for not revealing the cause of death for 41-year-old Sonia Acevedo in Portugal on Jan. 1, 2021 two days after being given the first dose of the BNT162b2 vaccine: “secrecy of justice.”34
Other Deaths Reported Soon After Vaccination
There have been reports of other deaths that have occurred during the past two months soon after people have received the COVID-19 vaccine. In each of those cases, health authorities and vaccine providers have immediately written the deaths off as either unlikely to have been connected to the vaccine or, reportedly, the deaths are still being investigated.
There have been several well-publicized deaths after COVID-19 vaccination in the United States, including the death of 56-year-old Gregory Michael, MD in Florida on Dec. 18, 2020 two weeks after getting the first dose of Pfizer/BioNTech’s experimental messenger RNA (mRNA) BNT162b2 vaccine.4142
Dr. Gregory’s death was followed by the death of 60-year-old Tim Zook in Orange County, California on Jan. 9, 2021 four days after getting the second dose of the BNT162b2 vaccine and the death of a man in his late 40s who died on Jan. 17 in Nebraska one to two weeks after getting the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. There was also the death of a 64-year-old man in Placer County, CA on Jan. 21 three hours after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine.4344454647
More recently, there was the death of 90-year old Daniel Thayne Simpson in Michigan on Feb. 4 the day after he received the first dose of Moderna’s experimental mRNA-1273 vaccine and the death of a man in his 70s on Feb. 7 in New York 25 minutes after getting a COVID-19 vaccine, followed by the death of 36-year-old J. Barton Williams, MD, who died on Feb. 8 in Tennessee just weeks after receiving the second dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.484950
Finally, there was the death of a 78-year-old woman within minutes of getting the first dose of the BNT162b2 vaccine at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona on Feb. 12 and the death on Feb. 16 of former Detroit news anchor Karen Hudson-Samuels, 68, the day after getting a COVID-19 vaccine.5152At least thus far.
Officially, No Post-Vaccination Deaths Have Been Linked to COVID-19 Vaccines
Interestingly, despite the close proximity of the sudden and unexpected deaths of all these people to the times they were given COVID-19 vaccinations, none of the deaths have been deemed by health officials to be related to the COVID-19 vaccines recently administered. Most deaths have been judged to be merely coincidental or a specific cause of death has not yet been given.
Almost unanimously, mainstream media outlets have forwarded the narrative that nobody has died from a COVID-19 vaccination. One news report noted:
While people have died after receiving the vaccine, doctors say those deaths are not—in any way—linked to the vaccine. Every time someone gets sick or dies after getting the shot, government agencies investigate to ensure there is no link. So far, the CDC has been unable to identify a single case where the vaccine is the cause of someone passing away.53
“Scientists say it’s human nature to draw a connection between events—especially when they happen close together—but it doesn’t mean one caused the other,” wrote Stephanie Widmer, MD in an article published by ABC News.54 Dr. Widner offered the following quote from fellow physician William Schaffner, MD, professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center:
We all know that the rooster crows before the dawn, but we don’t think the rooster makes the sun come up, simply because they are related in time.54
That’s an interesting way of looking at things. But then, the same might be said of those who have been listed as having died of COVID-19. After all, an unknown number of people, whose deaths were attributed to COVID-19, had underlying poor health conditions, known as “comorbidities. ” Those underlying poor health conditions, including heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes and other co-morbidities, could have been the major reason they died. Yet, because those individuals tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 disease—whether symptomatic or asymptomatic—they were counted as having died of COVID-19.
The truth is that some people are obviously dying of COVID-19, while others are dying from well-known chronic diseases that are leading causes of death in the U.S. every year.55565758
Is There an Inherent Bias Against Blaming Vaccines?
I suspect the same may be true of those who have died so soon after getting a COVID-19 vaccination. However, there is no way to prove that there is an inherent bias against considering the possibility that a COVID-19 vaccine can, in rare instances, cause a person to die suddenly and unexpectedly shortly after vaccination. There will be no way to obtain the necessary evidence to prove it if health authorities refuse to complete full investigations (including conducting autopsies) into these cases.
Could it be that Virginia’s medical examiners, or those above them, were reluctant to conduct a full autopsy on Keyes for fear of what they might find? How much did the possibility that Keyes’ death could have been connected to the vaccine she received factor into the “public health concerns” of Virginia health officials, who refused to do an autopsy? Were they concerned that discovery of a connection might discourage some people from getting vaccinated?
The UK media is reporting this morning that as many as 200,000 staff working in the National health Service have refused a jab or have indicated that they will not take one.
Rather than try to ascertain why so may health workers are reluctant to take it, the media is instead asking whether or not the staff can be compelled to have a vaccine. The media has dubbed this “no jab, no job.” No reporter in the UK’s mainstream media has dared to ask the only question that matters, that is, what do they know?
The Daily Mail reported this morning that the government’s forthcoming review into vaccine passports, will pay special attention to whether health staff who decline the jab, can be legally compelled to have one.
The review will also look at whether mandating covid vaccines can be applied to care home staff, most of whom are not employed by the state. Questioning the motives of the staff who have declined the vaccine is verboten.
I have a number of sources who work in hospitals, hospices and care homes, people I have met along the road. A nurse who works at Salford Royal told me yesterday that as far as she knows, at least six of her colleagues will not take the vaccine. When I asked her why, she promptly said, “Swine Flu.”
It’s only a decade ago, that Professor Gabriel Scally (now President of Epidemiology & PH, Royal Society of Medicine) told NHS staff to take the Swine Flu vaccine to keep themselves and their patients safe. At that time he was Director of Public Health for South-West England. Scally urged doctors, nurses, cleaners, porters etc to take Pandemrix. He declared it safe and efficacious. Here’s the video. YouTube deleted it. I wonder why?
Pandemrix was withdrawn because a lot of people who took it came down with narcolepsy. The UK government paid out tens of millions of pounds in compensation. Professor Gabriel Scally has been on UK TV and radio channels several times a week in the past year, pushing coronavirus vaccines. No media outlet in the UK has dared ask Scally about Swine Flu injuries.
NHS staff know all about the damage caused by the Swine Flu vaccine. This might account for some (not all) of the refuseniks. Others will be hearing horror stories emerging from care homes in Norway, Gibraltar and Basingstoke here in the UK, where a wave of deaths occurred shortly after residents were vaccinated.
Health workers will no doubt have heard of reported adverse events in Northern Italy and Germany. Dozens of teachers became very ill after receiving their vaccines, resulting in the closure of one primary school. Hundreds of hospital staff and ambulance drivers became unwell in two cities in Germany, after having their jabs.
The UK media cannot and will not ask the question “what do they know.” The public has a right to know why 200,000 health workers won’t touch a vaccine that they are being pressured into taking.
The world has been fixated for months on novel-coronavirus PCR testing, contact tracing and vaccination.
Meanwhile, another major part of the Covid biomedical complex has received far less attention: the use of antibodies for detecting, diagnosing and treating infection with the novel coronavirus.
Hundreds of antibodies have been approved for these purposes since January 2020. And hundreds more are poised to start being marketed soon.
This is part of the biomedical gold rush: by last summer already, antibodies were on track to become the most lucrative medical product, with global revenue projected to reach nearly half a trillion dollars by 2024. Profit margins in the range of 67% aren’t uncommon.
Pharma giants such as AstraZeneca, Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline and Eli Lilly are among the companies grabbing the largest chunks of the novel-coronavirus-antibody market. And some of the most muscular government agencies, including Anthony Fauci’s US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the US’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, are part of the action (see, for example, the second-last section of this article, on antibodies used to treat Covid).
Virtually every study and piece of marketing material related to Covid is premised on scientists having positively and correctly identified the presence of the novel coronavirus (also known as SARS-CoV-2) in the material they’re working with.
The job of that identification is usually given to antibodies that are said to bind to the novel coronavirus. The assumption is these antibodies are able to pick out the virus and only the virus from among every other organism and substance surrounding it.
Unfortunatelyit turns out that the antibodies rarely (if ever) do that. This is because of, among other things, inadequateverification of the antibodies’ accuracy in targeting the virus by the companies that manufacture and sell them. And there’s even less verification by government regulators.
Let’s take a 30,000-foot tour of a couple of the main features of the antibody-industry landscape, which is awash in complexity and cash.
Can Antibodies be Created That Only Bind to One Type of Virus or Another?
Antibodies are tiny, finely-tuned, parts of our immune system. One of their main functions is to seek out viruses and bacteria that may have the potential to cause disease. Antibodies bind to and neutralize these microbes so they can’t multiply and spread.
Humans and our ancestors have been making antibodies in our bodies to fend off infections for millions of years. Then a few decades ago companies got involved in the discovery and manipulation of antibodies, partnering with university labs.
There are two main categories of antibodies. One is ‘polyclonal’ antibodies. These are garden-variety antibodies that bind to a variety of different substances and/or organisms.
The other is monoclonal antibodies. As the name implies, cloning is involved in their creation. First an antibody that is specific to a particular amino-acid sequence (amino acids are the building blocks of proteins) of interest – for example, one from a protein on the surface of a virus or bacterium — is identified. Then the immune-system cell which produced that antibody is ‘cloned’ in the lab. As a result, each set of monoclonal antibodies binds to that particular amino-acid sequence.
I emailed one of the English-speaking world’s leading authorities on monoclonal antibodies, Harvard Medical School professor Clifford Saper, to get clarity on this. I asked him if it’s true that, as most in the antibody-commercializing arena claim, a monoclonal antibody can be created that’s specific for (that is, binds to) just one type of virus or just one other type of organism.
Saper replied [bolding and italics added by me for emphasis]: “No, there is no such thing as a monoclonal antibody that, because it is monoclonal, recognizes only one protein or only one virus. It will bind to any protein having the same (or a very similar) sequence.”
The implication of Saper’s statement is that any attempt to use a monoclonal antibody to verify the presence of the novel coronavirus will yield a large rate of false-positive results. That is, they will indicate that the novel coronavirus is detected when in fact it hasn’t been. That’s because there’s a high probability that the monoclonal antibody is binding to something else besides the virus (this is known as ‘cross-reacting’).
(I recommend this review paper by Saper, and this one and this one co-authored by Yale pathology professor David Rimm, to anyone wishing to learn about antibody validation.)
And in fact, the vast majority of antibodies and monoclonal antibodies marketed as being specific for the novel coronavirus were developed years ago fordetecting SARS-CoV-1. They were then simply repurposed for identifying SARS-CoV-2 — with very few if any checks for whether they also cross-react to other organisms or substances.
I sought confirmation of this repurposing from Zhen Lu. She’s the North American marketing manager for Sino Biological, a Beijing-headquartered company that develops and sells, among other things, hundreds of antibodies. Lu replied to me via email, “Yes, antibodies are repuposed [sic].”
I also checked and received confirmation from Pratiek Matkar, a senior staffer from BenchSci, an antibody-database company. And to see for myself, I logged into the BenchSci database (Matkar granted me a guest account), selected all antibodies for the novel coronavirus, and looked to see which organisms had been used in cross-reactivity tests for them. SARS-CoV-1 was the only one that came up in this check.
This all explains something I observed last week: Sino Biological had just changed the content of its home page for the section of their website on antibodies against SARS-CoV-2. The page now announces that they’ve introduced new “matched antibody pairs” that work better at finding the virus. The pair consists of a “capture antibody” and a “detection antibody.”
And they claim these pairs are more accurate at finding the novel coronavirus: that they “have high specificity without cross-reactivity with MERS-CoV, [or with the common human coronaviruses] 229E, NL63, HKU1, [and] OC43.”
The only way I can interpret that is they know the antibodies they’ve been marketing for months as being specific for the novel coronavirus bind to other things, such as common human coronaviruses.
How Are Antibodies Harnessed in Tests for the Novel Coronavirus?
One of the main types of tests for the virus contains antibodies that are ostensibly specific for the novel coronavirus. The way they’re designed to work is that if the virus is present in a blood sample the antibodies bind to it and, as a result, the test gives a positive signal.
The other type of test contains sequences of protein from the novel coronavirus; if antibodies to the virus are present in a blood sample, they bind to the protein sequences and produce a positive result.
The manufacturers are supposed to conduct accuracy checks of their test kits before they put them on the market. These checks largely consist of estimation of the rates of false positives and false negatives (the latter is a negative result when the antibody or protein of interest is contained in the sample being tested by the kit).
However, companies do this cursory accuracy check with only very few samples of a small number of viruses — and rarely on bacteria or any other of the millions of biological substances that can be present in the blood.
Despite this very inadequate validation and the strong incentive for the companies to make their products look good, as documented last May by David Crowe, the manufacturers often record a significant rate of false positives. The false positives areto everything from West Nile virus to various types of human coronaviruses.
Usually the companies and governments wave that off as insignificant. Occasionally though, the test kits are so bad that they’re taken off the market.
For example, an antibody-testing kit sold by a company called Chembio Diagnostics was launched on March 31, 2020. It was almost immediately granted Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). An EUA allows companies to rush products onto the market with very minimal oversight. Brazil and the European Union also gave the nod for the Chembio test to be sold in their jurisdictions in April and May 2020, respectively.
Then in June 2020 the FDA pulled it off the market.The agency said ”this test generates a higher than expected rate of false results.” (Note that the top table on page 13 of the product insert for that “revoked” Chembio test indicates it cross-reacts to the human coronavirus 229E.)
Is it identical to the rest that was so inaccurate it was pulled off the market last June? It’s hard to tell. There is no product insert for it that I could find. In fact there’s very little information about it on the webpage for the test; you have to request the information. I submitted a request on Jan. 23 and haven’t received it yet.
Two of the heads of the FDA branch that approves testing devices penned a February 18, 2021, New England Journal of Medicine article. In it, the pair admitted that the FDA’s EUAs allowed too-loose approvals for serology tests.
They indicated the FDA has tightened its criteria for approval of these tests. They also point to efforts by other government agencies to evaluate serology tests. But the pair don’t say a word about the need to move toward objective, thorough test validation. They also are mute on the fact that EUAs are still being issued.
(Also note that the FDA and Health Canada listings of the 65 serology tests approved to date in the US and 19 approved to date in Canada continue to give the sensitivity [correct identification of positive samples] of the tests by ‘positive percent agreement’ and specificity [correct identification of negative samples] by ‘negative percent agreement.’ These are relative measures of accuracy – that is, compared to other tests – rather than objective/absolute accuracy, and therefore are poor facsimiles of accuracy.)
One of the many major figures in the Covid-biomedical complex who are priming the pump of the antibody pipeline is Ian Lipkin. He’s director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University in New York. Lipkin is involved at high levels in many global organizations including the World Health Organization and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well in pharmaceutical companies. (And he is quoted in a ‘fact-check’ of a July 2020 article I co-authored with Patrick Corbett titled, “No one has died from the coronavirus.” Lipkin states, among other things, in the fact-check piece that “Conspiracy theorists are not persuaded by data.”)
Lipkin co-authored a Feb. 12, 2021, paper in which he and his team claimed to have identified, using a new ‘peptide-microarray’ technology they invented, 29 amino-acid sequences unique to the novel coronavirus. They assert that antibodies specific to the sequences could be created – and that these in turn could be harnessed “to facilitate diagnostics, epidemiology, and vaccinology” for Covid. (The only conflict Lipkin and some of his co-authors disclose in the ‘competing interests’ paragraph at the end of article is that they invented the peptide-microarray technology described in the article.)
Do Antibodies Used to Treat Covid Fare Any Better?
Antibodies are also being marketed to treat Covid. Some are sold singly (known as ‘monotherapy’) and others in pairs. They are deemed to confer ‘passive immunity.’
Among the most-reported-on set of antibodies for treating Covid is the Regeneron monoclonal antibodies casirivimab and imdevimab. This pair reportedly was used in October 2020 to treat then-U.S. President Donald Trump. The combo subsequently was granted an EUA by the FDA on November 21, 2020. It also is being considered for approval by Health Canada.
I’d like to focus on a somewhat lesser-known monoclonal antibody called bamlanivumab. It’s being used both singly and as one half of a pair for treatment of symptomatic Covid patients early in the course of their infection. The antibody was discovered, and clinical study of it started, by the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (which is headed by Anthony Fauci) and a Vancouver, British Columbia-based company called AbCellera Diagnostics. The antibody is being manufactured and sold by Eli Lilly. It costs more than $1,200 a vial.
(AbCellera also has received hundreds of millions of dollars from the Canadian government, including for building an antibody-manufacturing plant. And Peter Thiel, who co-founded both PayPal and Palantir, is a board member. So is John Montalbano, who’s also on the board of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and until 2015 was CEO of RBC [Royal Bank of Canada] Global Asset Management. This and significant positive media coverage helped propel the company to the biggest Canadian-biotech-company Initial Public Offering to date, on Dec. 11, 2020.)
Bamlanivumab was given an EUA by the FDA on November 9, 2020, for treatment of mild to moderate Covid. And Health Canada gave the monotherapy an interim authorization on November 17. It’snot getting much tractionin clinical practice so far in Canada, though, perhaps because of the less-than-stellar results from clinical trials (see below).
But this hasn’t deterredthe Canadian and US federal governments, which combined have purchased close to half a million of these tests. For example, most recently, on February 26, the US government bought 100,000 vials.
The only study on bamlanivimab made public prior to the November 9 FDA approval was one posted October 1, 2020, on the website of the online-only journal bioRχiv. [My Feb. 3, 2021, and Feb. 11, 2021, articles — on the new variants and the associated modelling papers, respectively – noted that the journal and its sister publication medRχiv contain only non-peer-reviewed articles and were created by an organization headed by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife.]
The study used rhesus monkeys and provided very extensive details about how the antibody was discovered and checked for specificity to the novel coronavirus. The researchers concluded that the antibody – at that time known as LY-CovV555 — has “potent neutralizing activity” against SARS-CoV-2.
On January 14 I emailed the lead author of that paper, Bryan Jones. He’s a researcher in Lilly’s Biotechnology Research Program. I asked Jones where in their paper is the proof the antibody is specific to SARS-CoV-2 (and therefore isn’t binding to something else instead of, or in addition to, the novel coronavirus).
He responded promptly, as follows [bolding added by me for emphasis]: “While we did determine that LY-CoV555 is specific to SARS-CoV-2 (and doesn’t bind to the spike protein of SARS-CoV), that is not specified or detailed in any of the figures or tables [in the paper].”
Jones pointed me to several parts of the paper and supplemental material published with it that he said show, viaindirect extrapolation, that the antibody is specific for the novel coronavirus.
That’s not exactly convincing.
Then on December 22 a study in the New England Journal of Medicine gave a thumbs-down to the usefulness of bamlanivimab in people hospitalized after receiving a Covid diagnosis. The paper noted that in late October the study was stopped because the antibody didn’t help the patients any more than did placebo.
But this didn’t deter Lilly.
On January 21, 2021, the company issued a news release about a study of bamlanivumab in residents and staff of nursing homes. They claimed their research showed that the antibody “significantly reduced the risk of contracting symptomatic COVID-19.”
However, they didn’t back this up with much information. The study hasn’t been published in a journal or presented at a scientific/medical meeting. And there’s no word on when it will be.
Despite that, on the same morning the release was sent out by Lilly, glowing articles appeared in major media outlets stating that the study showed bamlanivumab appears to significantly reduce Covid symptoms in the frail elderly.
For example a Bloomberg article was posted at 8 a.m. on Jan. 21 with the headline, “Eli Lilly Antibody Cuts Covid-19 Risk Up to 80% in Nursing Home Study.” The article was carried in many other media outlets such as the Globe & Mail.
The article quoted Lilly’s Chief Scientific Officer Daniel Skovronsky as saying, “This is an urgent situation. Where there’s an outbreak in nursing homes and people haven’t yet received the vaccine, this could be a potential way to protect them before they get it.”
And January 21 New York Times piece bysenior science journalist Gina Kolata quotes a vaccine expert at Boston Children’s Hospital, Ofer Levy, who wasn’t one of the scientists involved in the study, as saying, “I see only positives here. This is a win.”
Kolata also reported that Lilly plans to ask the FDA for an EUA for bamlanivimab for prevention of Covid in the frail elderly, focusing on those in nursing homes and long-term-care homes.
In parallel, Lilly ispivoting to using bamlanivumab in combinationwith another monoclonal antibody called etesevimab. A study on this combination in people with mild or moderate Covid was published on January 21, 2021. The results indicate it doesn’t reduce symptoms, but only lowers the viral load of people.
This didn’t deter Lilly either; it’s spinning this in the media as a very positive result. And so is the FDA:on February 9 the agency issued an EUA for the combination of the two antibodies for treating mild or moderate COVID.
Then the next twist in the plot happened, on February 16: a paper published that day in bioRχiv indicated that bamlanivumab doesn’t neutralize the South African and Brazilian variants of the novel coronavirus.
I’ll Leave the Last Words to Scott Adams
Dilbert-cartoon creator Scott Adams makes this observation on page 13 of his book Loserthink: “One thing I can say with complete certainty is that it is a bad idea to trust the majority of experts in any domain in which both complexity and large amounts of money are involved.”
This perfectly describes the situation with antibodies for the novel coronavirus.
Buyer beware, follow the money, and stay tuned.
After obtaining an MSc in molecular biology from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Calgary, Rosemary Frei became a freelance writer. For the next 22 years she was a medical writer and journalist. She pivoted again in early 2016 to full-time, independent activism and investigative journalism. Her website is RosemaryFrei.ca.
The graph looks consistent with mild warming following the Little Ice Age. About 30 cms. or 1 foot of sea level rise in 130 years since 1890 is nothing remarkable. The average duration of solar cycles was longer in the 19th century than in the 20th but that trend is reversing now, with a lot more sunspot-free days per cycle. Climatic effects may follow.
– – –
A study published by University of Liverpool scientists, alongside colleagues from the Liverpool branch of the National Oceanography Centre, has uncovered and analyzed new sea level records from the nineteenth century which show that the increased rate of the rise of British sea level took place from 1890 onwards, says Phys.org.
Nowadays, sea level measurements around the British Isles are made by tide gauges which record digitally and transmit the data automatically.
The best of these records are fed into the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL) which brings together the long, reliable tide gauge records from around the world.
However, in the nineteenth century the only long tide gauge records for Britain which stretched back beyond 1895 were from Aberdeen, Liverpool and Sheerness, and of these only Sheerness has records from before 1858.
None of these records is continuous, and it is not clear whether they represent the sea level of Britain as a whole, but they suggest that there was little in the way of British sea level rise prior to 1890.
Now in a paper published in the journal Progress in Oceanography, Liverpool researchers have for the first time produced a continuous sea level rise record for Britain dating back to 1820 by piecing together new sources of information from more than 100 new sites.
The new sources include old manuscripts, maps, admiralty dockyard data and tidal ledgers and provide a huge amount of detailed sea level data for different times and different locations around Britain.
Just one year after climate activists and their media allies spread fear with claims that global warming is causing the world’s ocean currents to speed up, CNN.com is now claiming the opposite – and claiming scientists predicted a slowing of ocean currents all along. CNN’s attempt at “Gaslighting” (a term derived from the 1944 movie Gaslight, in which a man attempts to convince his wife that she cannot believe her own memory) reveals the lack of honesty and lack of scientific basis for alarmist climate claims.
CNN published an article this morning titled, “The slowing down of ocean currents could have a devastating effect on our climate.” In the course of claiming all sorts of existential threats caused by slow ocean currents – including stronger hurricanes, heat waves, and sea-level rise – CNN asserted, “The slowdown of ocean circulation is directly caused by warming global temperatures and has been predicted by climate scientists.”
Except that “climate scientists” and the activist media were telling us exactly the opposite just one year ago.
On February 6, 2020, NASA published an article titled, “Arctic Ice Melt Is Changing Ocean Currents.” The article claimed global warming is speeding up ocean currents. According to the article, “A major ocean current in the Arctic is faster and more turbulent as a result of rapid sea ice melt, a new study from NASA shows. The current is part of a delicate Arctic environment that is now flooded with fresh water, an effect of human-caused climate change.”
On February 6, 2020, Scientific American published an article titled, “Ocean Currents Are Speeding Up, Driven by Faster Winds.” The article claims, “Climate change may in part be spurring the acceleration, which could change how heat and nutrients are pushed around the oceans.”
On February 5, 2020, Science magazine published an article titled, “Global warming is speeding up Earth’s massive ocean currents.” Quoting a scientist reviewing data on ocean-current speeds derived from instruments on Argo robotic floats, Science reported, “The evidence in the Argo data is absolutely astonishing,”
On February 6, 2020, the website Live Science published an article titled, “Ocean currents are getting faster.” The article claimed, “The change is driven by global warming and wind.”
To ensure the public was sufficiently aware and sufficiently alarmed about accelerating ocean currents, Washington Post climate change reporter Chris Mooney published a February 5, 2020, article titled, “World’s oceans are speeding up – another mega-scale consequence of climate change.” According to the article, “It’s the latest dramatic finding about the stark transformation of the global ocean — joining revelations about massive coral die-offs, upheaval to fisheries, ocean-driven melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, increasingly intense ocean heat waves and accelerating sea level rise. … This suggests the Earth might actually be more sensitive to climate change than our simulations can currently show.”
On February 11, 2020, NBC News published an article titled, “Climate change models predicted ocean currents would speed up – but not this soon.” According to the article, “Climate models had predicted that ocean circulation would accelerate with unmitigated climate change, but the changes had not been expected until much later this century … The disparity suggests that some climate models may underestimate the effects of global warming.”
Now, quickly and completely forget everything you just read. New data are destroying all those claims of climate change speeding up ocean currents. As CNN reports this morning, ocean currents now appear to be slowing down, not speeding up, due to global warming. And, remember, as CNN tells us, climate scientists predicted this all along.
A study from the National Institutes of Health claims wearing a moist mask is actually good for you because inhaling through the wet mask hydrates your lungs and boosts your immune system. However, it’s important to realize that the humidity inside the mask will rapidly allow pathogenic bacteria to grow and multiply. This is a documented fact not addressed by the NIH.
Medical doctors have warned that bacterial pneumonia, facial rashes, fungal infections on the face, “mask mouth” (bad breath, tooth decay and gum inflammation) and candida mouth infections are all on the rise.
By breathing through a bacteria-infested mask, you risk inhaling bacteria deep into your lungs, and according to recent research, the presence of microbes in your lungs can worsen lung cancer pathogenesis and contribute to advanced stage lung cancer.
Face masks can also reduce oxygen intake, leading to hazardous oxygen deficiency (hypoxia), along with rapid accumulation of harmful carbon dioxide, which can have significant cognitive and physical impacts.
Research1 also shows asymptomatic individuals pose virtually no risk, as they rarely ever spread live virus, thereby undermining the idea that everyone must be masked simply because you don’t know who’s infectious and who’s not.
Despite all of that, government officials insist that universal mask wearing is an essential strategy to combat COVID-19, now even recommending wearing two,2 three3,4 or even four5 layers of face masks. And, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, Americans may have to wear masks all the way through 2022.6
Is Wearing A Wet Mask Good For You?
Just when you thought mainstream propaganda could not propose a greater irrational perversion of the truth, a new study7 from the National Institutes of Health claims wearing a moist mask — which is a breeding ground for harmful bacteria — is actually good for you because inhaling through the wet mask hydrates your lungs and boosts your immune system. As reported by Healthing.ca, February 16, 2021:8
“The study, published in the Biophysical Journal, tested an N95 mask, a three-ply disposable surgical mask, a two-ply cotton-polyester mask and a heavy cotton mask, measuring the level of humidity by having a volunteer breathe into a sealed steel box.
When the person did not wear a mask, the water vapor of the exhaled breath filled the box, leading to a rapid increase in humidity inside the box. When the person wore a mask, the buildup of humidity inside the box greatly decreased as most of the water vapor remained in the mask, became condensed, and was re-inhaled. The researchers conducted the tests at three different temperatures ranging from 7 to 36 degrees Celsius.
‘We found that face masks strongly increase the humidity in inhaled air and propose that the resulting hydration of the respiratory tract could be responsible for the documented finding that links lower COVID-19 disease severity to wearing a mask,’ said Adriaan Bax, Ph.D., a NIH Distinguished Investigator and the study’s lead author.
‘High levels of humidity have been shown to mitigate severity of the flu, and it may be applicable to severity of COVID-19 through a similar mechanism.’”
However, it’s important to realize that the humidity inside the mask will allow pathogenic bacteria to rapidly grow and multiply — a documented fact not addressed by the NIH — and since the mask makes it more difficult to breathe, you’re likely to breathe heavier, thereby risking inhaling the microbes deep inside your lungs. As you’ll see below, this can have significant health risks that vastly outweigh any benefit you might get from breathing more humid air.
Occupational Respirator Testing Expert Speaks Out
In June 2020, Schaefer wrote an open letter9 addressed to the chief medical officer in Alberta, Canada, Dr. Deena Hinshaw, pointing out the errors of recommending universal wearing of N95 masks, surgical masks or nonmedical masks as protection against SARS-CoV-2. In it, he writes:10
“I have been teaching and conducting respirator fit testing for over 20 years and now currently for my company SafeCom Training Services Inc. My clients include many government departments, our military, healthcare providers with Alberta Health Services, educational institutions and private industry. I am a published author and a recognized authority on this subject.
Filter respirator masks, especially N95, surgical and non-medical masks, provide negligible COVID-19 protection for the following reasons:
1. Viruses in the fluid envelopes that surround them can be very small, so small in fact that you would need an electron microscope to see them. N95 masks filter 95% of particles with a diameter of 0.3 microns or larger. COVID-19 particles are .08 – .12 microns.
2. Viruses don’t just enter us through our mouth and nose, but can also enter through our eyes and even the pores of our skin. The only effective barrier one can wear to protect against virus exposure would be a fully encapsulated hazmat suit with cuffs by ankles taped to boots and cuffs by wrists taped to gloves, while receiving breathing air from a self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA).
This barrier is standard gear to protect against a biohazard (viruses) and would have to be worn in a possible virus hazard environment 24/7 and you wouldn’t be able to remove any part of it even to have a sip of water, eat or use the washroom while in the virus environment. If you did, you would become exposed and would negate all the prior precautions you had taken.”
Face Masks Pose Several Health Hazards
In his letter, and in the video above, Schaefer also stresses that these kinds of face masks pose “very real risks and possible serious threats to a wearer’s health” for a number of reasons, including the following:
1. Wearing a face mask increases breathing resistance, and since it makes both inhaling and exhaling more difficult, individuals with pre-existing medical conditions need to be screened by a medical professional to make sure they won’t be at risk of a medical emergency if wearing a face mask.
This includes those with shortness of breath, lung disease, panic attacks, breathing difficulties, chest pain on exertion, cardiovascular disease, fainting spells, claustrophobia, chronic bronchitis, heart problems, asthma, allergies, diabetes, seizures, high blood pressure and those with pacemakers. The impact of wearing a face mask during pregnancy is also wholly unknown.
2. Face masks can reduce oxygen intake, leading to potentially hazardous oxygen deficiency (hypoxia).
3. They also cause rapid accumulation of harmful carbon dioxide, which can have significant cognitive and physical impacts. That said, there is some evidence to support that this may be one of the few benefits of mask wearing, as slightly elevated CO2 levels can also contribute to health benefits as per my interview with Patrick McKeown. (We’re not talking about dangerously high levels, however.)
4. Wearing a face mask increases your body temperature and physical stress, which could result in an elevated temperature reading that is not related to infection.
5. All face masks can cause bacterial and fungal infections in the user as warm, moist air accumulates inside the mask. This is the perfect breeding ground for pathogens. “That is why N95 and other disposable masks were only designed to be short duration, specific task use and then immediately discarded,” Schaefer notes.
Medical doctors have warned that bacterial pneumonia, facial rashes, fungal infections on the face,11 “mask mouth” (symptoms of which include bad breath, tooth decay and gum inflammation) and candida mouth infections12 are all on the rise.
What’s worse, a study13,14 published in the February 2021 issue of the journal Cancer Discovery found that the presence of microbes in your lungs can worsen lung cancer pathogenesis and can contribute to advanced stage lung cancer. As reported by Global Research :15
“While analyzing lung microbes of 83 untreated adults with lung cancer, the research team discovered that colonies of Veillonella, Prevotella, and Streptococcus bacteria, which may be cultivated through prolonged mask wearing, are all found in larger quantities in patients with advanced stage lung cancer than in earlier stages.
The presence of these bacterial cultures is also associated with a lower chance of survival and increased tumor growth regardless of the stage.”
6. With extended use, medical masks will begin to break down and release chemicals that are then inhaled. Tiny microfibers are also released, which can cause health problems when inhaled. This hazard was highlighted in a performance study16 being published in the June 2021 issue of Journal of Hazardous Materials.
Schaefer also points out that to provide any benefit whatsoever, users must be fitted with the right type and size of respirator, and must undergo fit testing by a trained professional. However, N95 respirators, even when fitted properly, will not protect against viral exposures but can adequately protect against larger particles.
Surgical masks, which do not seal to your face, “do not filter anything,” Schaefer notes. These types of masks are designed to prevent bacteria from the mouth, nose and face from entering the patient during surgical procedures, and researchers have warned that contaminated surgical masks actually pose an infection risk.17 After just two hours, a significant increase in bacterial load on the mask was observed.
Nonmedical cloth masks are not only ineffective but also particularly dangerous as they’re not engineered for “easy inhalation and effective purging of exhaled carbon dioxide,” making them wholly unsuitable for use.
In the video, Schaefer demonstrates the only type of mask that is actually safe to wear — the gas mask kind of respirator you’d use to protect yourself against painting fumes, organic vapors, smoke and dust.
Real respirators are built to filter the air you breathe in, and get rid of the carbon dioxide and humidity from the air you breathe out, thereby ensuring there’s no dangerous buildup of carbon dioxide or reduction in oxygen inside the mask.
I’ve written many articles detailing the evidence showing that face masks do not prevent viral illnesses. To these we can now add an updated Cochrane review,18 which summarizes randomized trial evidence from studies that looked at face masks, hand-washing and/or physical distancing as prevention against respiratory infections.
There are many limitations to the included studies, including the facts that none was specific to COVID-19 and most had questionable adherence. They did not include the one COVID-19 specific trial that also included adherence parameters. With regard to medical and surgical masks, they found that:
“Compared with wearing no mask, wearing a mask may make little to no difference in how many people caught a flu-like illness (9 studies; 3507 people); and probably makes no difference in how many people have flu confirmed by a laboratory test (6 studies; 3005 people).”
Four health care studies and one small community study looked at the use of N95/P2 respirators. Here they found that:
“Compared with wearing medical or surgical masks, wearing N95/P2 respirators probably makes little to no difference in how many people have confirmed flu (5 studies; 8407 people); and may make little to no difference in how many people catch a flu-like illness (5 studies; 8407 people) or respiratory illness (3 studies; 7799 people).”
COVID-19 Specific Mask Trial Failed To Prove Benefit
Cochrane’s review certainly would have been more complete had they included the only COVID-19-related study to date. Unfortunately, they only included studies published before April 1, 2020. The trial in question, which was done in Denmark, was published November 18, 2020.
This COVID-19-specific randomized controlled surgical mask trial19,20 confirmed and strengthened previous findings, showing that mask wearing may either reduce your risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection by as much as 46%, or increase your risk by 23%. Either way, the vast majority — 97.9% of those who didn’t wear masks, and 98.2% of those who did — remained infection free.
The study included 3,030 individuals assigned to wear a surgical face mask and 2,994 unmasked controls. Of them, 80.7% completed the study. Based on the adherence scores reported, 46% of participants always wore the mask as recommended, 47% predominantly as recommended and 7% failed to follow recommendations.
Among mask wearers, 1.8% ended up testing positive for SARS-CoV-2, compared to 2.1% among controls. When they removed those who did not adhere to the recommendations for use, the results remained the same — 1.8%, which suggests adherence makes no difference.
Among those who reported wearing their face mask “exactly as instructed,” 2% tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 compared to 2.1% of the controls. So, essentially, we’re destroying economies and lives around the world to protect a tiny minority from getting a positive PCR test result which, as detailed in “Asymptomatic ‘Casedemic’ Is a Perpetuation of Needless Fear,” means little to nothing.
This article was brought to you by Dr. Mercola, a New York Times bestselling author. For more helpful articles, please visit Mercola.com today and receive your FREE Take Control of Your Health E-book!
During the past 10 years that Health Impact News has been publishing the truth about vaccines and exposing the corruption and lies in the pharmaceutical industry and their marketing branch, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), regarding the annual flu statistics, we have usually run stories around this time of year explaining to people that the number of people dying from the flu according to the CDC is false, and that the CDC themselves have always admitted that they do not know the exact number of people who die from the flu each year, but instead base their data on “estimates.”
For years this was published very clearly on the CDC website for all to see, at least for those who bother to “fact check” the CDC’s claims regarding annual flu deaths.
Many others over the years have exposed this scam as well.
The CDC’s decision to play up flu deaths dates back a decade, when it realized the public wasn’t following its advice on the flu vaccine.
During the 2003 flu season “the manufacturers were telling us that they weren’t receiving a lot of orders for vaccine,”Dr. Glen Nowak, associate director for communications at CDC’s National Immunization Program, told National Public Radio.
Flu results in “about 250,000 to 500,000 yearly deaths” worldwide, Wikipedia tells us.
“The typical estimate is 36,000 [deaths] a year in the United States,” reports NBC, citing the Centers for Disease Control.
“Somewhere between 4,000 and 8,000 Canadians a year die of influenza and its related complications, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada,” the Globe and Mail says, adding that “Those numbers are controversial because they are estimates.”
“Controversial” is an understatement, and not just in Canada, and not just because the numbers are estimates. The numbers differ wildly from the sober tallies recorded on death certificates — by law every certificate must show a cause — and reported by the official agencies that collect and keep vital statistics.
According to the National Vital Statistics System in the U.S., for example, annual flu deaths in 2010 amounted to just 500 per year — fewer than deaths from ulcers (2,977), hernias (1,832) and pregnancy and childbirth (825), and a far cry from the big killers such as heart disease (597,689) and cancers (574,743).
The story is similar in Canada, where unlikely killers likewise dwarf Statistics Canada’s count of flu deaths.
Even that 500 figure for the U.S. could be too high, according to analyses in authoritative journals such as the American Journal of Public Health and the British Medical Journal.
Only about 15-20 per cent of people who come down with flu-like symptoms have the influenza virus — the other 80-85 per cent actually caught rhinovirus or other germs that are indistinguishable from the true flu without laboratory tests, which are rarely done.
In 2001, a year in which death certificates listed 257 Americans as having died of flu, only 18 were positively identified as true flus. The other 239 were simply assumed to be flus and most likely had few true flus among them.
This article takes issue with the 36,000 flu-death figure commonly claimed, and with describing “influenza/pneumonia” as the seventh leading cause of death in the U.S.
As you can see from Mr. Solomon’s 2014 article, he quoted sources dating all the way back to the early 2000s where this scam was exposed. It just wasn’t published in the pharma-controlled corporate media, so those spoon-fed the propaganda from this corporate media lined up every year to get their flu shots, as Big Pharma raked in huge profits from producing over 300 million doses of the flu vaccine each year.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that the 2017-2018 flu season killed 80,000 and hospitalized 900,000 Americans. Of course, the mainstream media reported this as fact as shown in this September 27, 2018 article in the Washington Post.
The Powers-That-Be, including the CDC and the mainstream media, are using these estimates to promote the flu shot for the upcoming flu season.
Keep in mind, the 80,000 deaths and 900,000 hospitalizations are ESTIMATES. And, I can state, with authority, that they are very poor estimates.
You see, deaths from flu are always estimates because if the Powers-That-Be reported the true numbers of deaths from actual influenza infections, the numbers would be much lower and people would not be so inclined to receive a flu shot.
How does the CDC overestimate the number of flu deaths? The CDC accomplishes this by reporting a combined pneumonia and influenza death rate. Every time I try to analyze this data, I know I will have to spend at least an hour searching for the true number who died from influenza because the CDC tries to hide that data.
Why does the CDC do this? The answer is easy: The more people that receive the flu vaccine, the more money the CDC makes. You see, the CDC holds patents on many vaccines including the flu vaccine. (1)
Perhaps I could tolerate the CDC combining pneumonia with flu deaths IF the flu vaccine prevented both. However, the flu vaccine has never been shown to have any impact on the number of deaths from pneumonia.
In fact, for the vast majority who receive it, the flu vaccine has little impact on preventing the flu, but I digress.
In 2001 the CDC reported that 62,034 died from influenza and pneumonia. That year, I would bet that CDC proclaimed that flu killed over 50,000 Americans. After a painful hour of searching the CDCs database, I found the true 2001 numbers: 257 died from influenza and 61,777 died from pneumonia. Keep in mind, any death from the flu is tragic, but those numbers are out of a population of over 300 million. In 2010 (the latest year data are available) there were 55,227 deaths due to pneumonia and flu. Flu killed 4,605 while pneumonia killed the rest. (2)
So, let’s go back to last year’s flu season. The flu season lasts about six months. 80,000 deaths would lead one to conclude that 13,333 died per month (80,000/6 months) from the flu. If we further divide that number by 50 (the number of states), we can conclude that there were 267 people dying each month in every state from the flu. Since the internet provides 24-hour news cycles, I think we all would have heard that about 9 people (267/30 days per month) in every state dying daily from the flu. (3)
I have five practitioners in my office. We have over 100 years of experience in treating patients. None of us has can recall a single patient dying from the flu.
In fact, I can guarantee you that if 9 people were dying in my state daily from the flu, my partners and I would hear about it. In fact, there are always headlines on the internet when one person dies from the flu.
Studying the past CDC data shows that each year a few hundred to a few thousand die from the flu.
This annual flu death scam continued through 2019, as again Dr. Brownstein wrote:
The headline in the January 5, 2019 edition of the Wall Street Journal reads “Six Feet, 48 Hours, 10 Days: How to Avoid the Flu.”
This article, like nearly all main stream media flu articles was written to scare the reader into getting the flu vaccine. As with most mainstream medical articles about the flu, it is filled with fake news.
Let’s analyze the article.
The author starts off by writing,
“After a slow start, the flu season has taken off. Between Christmas and New Years Day, there was a marked rise in flu illnesses across the U.S.”
So far, no fake news to report.
However, as with most main stream media influenza stories, the writer misstates the true numbers of Americans who die from the flu.
“In a mild year, influenza, a highly contagious viral infection of the respiratory system, kills as many as 12,000 people in the U.S., and in a bad year, it could be as many as 56,000.”
I have two words to state here:
FAKE NEWS!
Folks, that is a blatant LIE. Over the last 38 years, neither twelve nor fifty-six thousand deaths from influenza infections occurred. In fact, the deaths from influenza are not even close to those numbers.
Why would the mainstream media and the Powers-That-Be continually lie about the numbers of people that die from the flu?
It is not hard to understand why—they want to scare the public in order to increase the number of people vaccinated with the flu vaccine.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention keeps annual death statistics. When searching through that data, it is easy to find the first Table (Table B) which lists the number of deaths from the top fifteen causes of death (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr67/nvsr67_05.pdf -page 6).
In fact, every year that the CDC reports the final data for deaths, the CDC combines influenza and pneumonia together as one of the top 15 causes of death. No other separate illnesses are combined, so why combine pneumonia and influenza which are two separate illnesses?
The answer is easy: the CDC artificially inflates the numbers of deaths from influenza to scare us into getting the flu shot. You see, if a very small percentage of Americans died yearly from the flu vaccine, why would so many of them want to get vaccinated for influenza?
The CDC has a direct financial interest in vaccinating the entire population since it holds multiple patents on vaccines including the flu vaccine.
In order to frighten the public to get the flu vaccine, the CDC’s scare tactics include annual statements that the flu kills 36,000 Americans per year.
The Great Flu Reset 2020-21: COVID Deaths Take Over to Sell New Novel COVID “Vaccines”
So now we come to the 2020-21 flu season, where we are being told the flu has “vanished.” Hardly anyone is getting the flu. Nobody is dying from the flu.
And if you still get your news only from the pharma-owned corporate media, you are being told that the lockdowns, social distancing, handwashing, and of course masks, have worked to eliminate all those horrible flu cases and deaths.
To believe this, of course, one has to overlook that these measures did nothing to slow down COVID deaths, as according to CDC statistics we have seen more COVID deaths in January and February than all the rest of the months since the “pandemic” started combined.
The “logic” of this is so absurd, that they even hired an editorialist at the New York Times to explain to people that they should not try to figure this out, because “Critical thinking, as we’re taught to do it, isn’t helping in the fight against misinformation.”
Despite all those warnings from Dr. Anthony Fauci about COVID-19 and the flu joining forces in 2020 and 2021 to create some kind of super-deadly double-whammy viral pandemic, it’s no longer a secret at this point that worries about a super-charged flu season simply never came to pass. We’ve reported on the phenomenon of falling flu cases before.
February is usually the peak of flu season, when doctors’ offices and hospitals are packed with patients. But that’s not the case this year. Instead, the flu has virtually disappeared from the US, with reports coming in at far lower levels than the world has seen in decades. Some areas, like San Diego, have seen such low numbers, health authorities have demanded audits of COVID-positive patients to see whether some might have been misdiagnosed.
According to the CDC, the cumulative positive influenza test rate from late September into the week of December 19th was just 0.2%, compared to 8.7% from a year before.
Hospitals say the expected army of flu-sickened patients never materialized, and that nationally “this is the lowest flu season we’ve had on record,” according to a surveillance system that is about 25 years old.
One source from Maine Medical Center in Portland, the state’s largest hospital, said “I have seen zero documented flu cases this winter,” said Dr. Nate Mick, the head of the emergency department.
Ditto in Oregon’s capital city, where the outpatient respiratory clinics affiliated with Salem Hospital have not seen any confirmed flu cases.
The phenomenon isn’t unique to the US.
In the UK, data released this week show that the number of active flu cases in the country has fallen to zero. (Source.)
Of course for those of us who have followed this issue for more than a decade now, we know that the flu deaths have not gone anywhere, because they were never there to begin with.
What we actually had, based on the Department of Justice quarterly reports on settlements paid out from the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, is many people being injured and killed by the flu shots.
The CDC simply stopped estimating and inflating the flu deaths, and concentrated on COVID deaths instead, to support the TRILLIONS spent to fast-track experimental COVID vaccines which Big Pharma is now rushing to manufacture and distribute.
So has this “Great Reset” simply replaced one scam for another one?
I’ll let Dr. Scott Jensen, a medical doctor and Senator from Minnesota, tell you in his own words:
The number of COVID cases has been faked in various ways.
By far, the most extensive strategy is re-labeling. Flu is called COVID.
We don’t need charts and graphs to see this. It’s right in front of our eyes.
The definition of a COVID case allows flu in the door. There is nothing unique about that definition. For example, a cough, or chills and fever, would constitute “a mild case of COVID.” [1] [2]
A positive PCR test for SARS-CoV-2 would also be required, but as I’ve shown in my recent series on the test, obtaining a false positive is as easy as pie. [3]
All you have to do is run the test at more than 35 cycles. Most labs run the test at 40 cycles. A cycle is a quantum leap in magnification of the swab sample taken from the patient. When you run the test at more than 35 cycles, false-positives come pouring out like water from a fire hose. [4] [5] [5a] [5b]
So… with ordinary flu symptoms plus a false-positive PCR test… voila, you have a COVID case.
Keep in mind that, overwhelmingly, most COVID cases are mild. In other words, they’re indistinguishable from ordinary flu.
But there is a rabbit hole here, and we can go down that hole much farther. The next question is: what is a flu case? What is it really?
Researcher Peter Doshi did much to answer that question. In December of 2005, the British Medical Journal (online) published his shocking report, which created tremors through the halls of the CDC, where “the experts” used to tell the press that 36,000 people in the US die every year from the flu.
Here is a quote from Doshi’s report, “Are US flu death figures more PR than science?” (BMJ 2005; 331:1412): [6] [7]
“[According to CDC statistics], ‘influenza and pneumonia’ took 62,034 lives in 2001—61,777 of which were attributable to pneumonia and 257 to flu, and in only 18 cases was the flu virus positively identified.”
Boom.
You see, the CDC creates one overall category that combines both flu and pneumonia deaths. Why do they do this? Because they disingenuously assume the pneumonia deaths are complications stemming from the flu.
This is an absurd assumption. Pneumonia has a number of causes.
But even worse, in all the flu and pneumonia deaths, only 18 revealed the presence of an influenza virus.
Therefore, the CDC could only say, with assurance, that 18 people died of influenza in 2001. Not 36,000 deaths. 18 deaths.
Doshi continued his assessment of published CDC flu-death statistics: “Between 1979 and 2001, [CDC] data show an average of 1348 [flu] deaths per year (range 257 to 3006).” These figures refer to flu separated out from pneumonia.
This death toll is obviously far lower than the old parroted 36,000 figure.
However, when you add the sensible condition that lab tests have to actually find the flu virus in patients, the numbers of annual flu deaths plummet even further.
In other words, it’s all promotion and hype.
But we’re not finished yet. Because…what test were researchers using to decide there were 18 cases of honest flu, in which a virus was found and identified? Answer: unknown.
It’s quite probable the test didn’t really isolate a flu virus at all. It only identified some marker that was ASSUMED, without proof, to be unique to a flu virus.
If so—ZERO cases of actual flu were found in the population.
Instead, what we had was “flu-like illness.” Chills, cough, congestion, fever, fatigue; the ubiquitous symptoms that describe about a billion cases of illness, every year, worldwide.
The cause of those billion cases? There is no single cause. Instead, there are many factors, ranging from sudden weather changes to air pollution, to malnutrition, to sub-standard sanitation…on and on.
That being the case, we can now say: Many, many cases of FAKE FLU are being relabeled FAKE COVID.
Now we’re getting real.
The medical cartel “discovers” (markets) huge numbers of so-called unique diseases—each disease with a purported specific cause: virus A, virus B, virus C…
For each virus, there must be at least several highly profitable drugs that supposedly kill the germ. And for each germ, there must be a vaccine that prevents the disease.
Billions and trillions in rewards follow.
And so does CONTROL. Control of minds.
Because the population is tuned up by ceaseless propaganda to believe in the rigid one-disease one-germ notion.
And when the time is right, the medical cartel can even claim a new germ is decimating the world, and they must “destroy the village in order to save it.”
Which is the psychotic fiction we are in the middle of, right now.
The Holy Church of Biological Mysticism needs your support. Give them your time, your money, your livelihood, your future, your loyalty, your faith.
Leading promoter of hazardous experimental covid jabbing NYT expressed angst over mass rejection of getting them by US military families.
According to The Vaccine Reaction on February 21, a Blue Star Families (BSF) survey found that 53% of US military families reject being used as Pharma guinea pigs for unapproved Pfizer and Moderna experimental mRNA jabs.
According to BSF head Kathy Roth-Douquet, “military families are expressing a lot of concern about” jabbing with what they don’t trust.
One military spouse likely spoke for many others, saying she, her family, and other service members don’t want to be “guinea pigs” for what hasn’t be adequately tested or proved safe.
According to Air Force General Paul Friedrichs, the US war department cannot or will not mandate what hasn’t received FDA approval, just emergency use authorization even though no real emergency exists.
At this time — what could change ahead — to be jabbed or not jabbed for covid is a personal decision by US military personnel at all levels.
Vaccines take years to develop. Pfizer and Moderna entries into the covid mass-jabbing sweepstakes are high-risk, experimental, gene altering mRNA technology.
They’re not vaccines. They were rushed to market with inadequate testing.
Since mass-jabbing began in December, large numbers of adverse events and deaths were reported, especially among elderly nursing home residents in the US and Europe.
If what’s experimental and unapproved is mandated, it would be an unprecedented experiment with human health virtually certain to turn out badly because of what’s already known.
According to one nursing home health worker, residents and some staff are “dying like flies” after jabbed.
No credible evidence suggests that mRNA technology is safe or effective.
The same holds for Johnson and Johnson’s covid vaccine about to be granted emergency use authorization.
Joseph Mercola explained that rushed Pfizer and Moderna trials were “rigged” to produce results that aren’t credible.
Their mRNA technology wasn’t evaluated on the ability to prevent infection and viral transmission.
Last November, associate editor of the BMJ publication for health professionals Peter Doshi said Pfizer’s claim of 95% effectiveness is false.
Its risk reduction to flu-renamed covid is less than 1%, rendering it virtually useless for protection.
The same holds for Modern’s mRNA technology and most likely for J & J’s vaccine as well.
On Friday, the NYT understated the number of US military families who decline to be jabbed for covid, claiming it’s about “one-third” of US forces, mostly younger personnel.
Young healthy people need no protection for flu, now called covid.
Over 99% of young people who contract covid recover normally with no special medical intervention for help.
The Times expressed concern about millions of US military personnel who refuse to be jabbed with what may cause irreversible harm to their health, saying:
It’s “a warning to civilian health officials about the potential hole in the broad-scale immunity that medical professionals say is needed for Americans to reclaim their collective lives.”
Unexplained by the Times and other establishment media is that mass-jabbing provides no protection, no immunity, no ability to prevent covid from spreading from one person to others.
It only risks great harm to health that in some cases is lethal.
What major media should headline and repeat time and again, they suppress.
Instead of wanting public health protected and preserved, the corporate fourth estate is pushing what risks unprecedented harm to millions of people in the US and elsewhere by promoting hazardous mass-jabbing.
The Times is the lead print culprit, providing press agent services for US dark forces and Pharma profiteers — at the expense of public health.
The broadsheet falsely claimed that concerns shared by countless millions of people in the US and elsewhere is from “misinformation that has run rampant on Facebook and other social media.”
What the self-styled newspaper of record calls “misinformation” is refuted by indisputable hard evidence of mass-jabbing hazards.
Protecting and preserving what’s too precious to lose requires saying “no” to what won’t protect and risks great harm if use as directed.
History is littered with examples of the atrocities which ensue when doctors abandon their traditional principles and judgement in favour of unquestioning subservience to government diktat – medical involvement in torture, human experimentation and psychiatric punishment of political dissidents being familiar examples.
Abbasi takes as axiomatic that there was no prior immunity in the population, that lockdowns are effective, that computer modelling is realistic, that statistics have been accurate and that WHO statements are reliable. All of these parameters have been widely challenged by knowledgeable and conscientious researchers whose findings were often disregarded, censored or vilified.
From a medical perspective, it was clear early on in the crisis that disregarding clinical acumen in favour of blind obedience to abnormal ventilation measures, reliance on an unsuitable laboratory test for diagnosis and management, and abandoning the duty of care to elderly hospitalised patients and those awaiting diagnosis and treatment of serious diseases, would create severe problems down the line.
Doctors who had empirically found effective pharmaceutical remedies and preventative treatments were ignored, or worse, denigrated or silenced. Information regarding helpful dietary supplements was suppressed.
This was further compounded by rule-changes to death certification, coroners’ instructions, autopsy guidelines, DNR notices and the cruel social isolation policy enforcement regarding family visits to the sick and dying.
When medical professionals allow themselves to be manipulated by corrupt politicians and influenced by media propaganda instead of being guided by their own ethical principles and common sense based on decades of clinical experience, the outlook becomes very bleak indeed.
Historically, public respect for and trust in doctors has exceeded that awarded to politicians. The unquestioning capitulation of medicine to an authoritarian executive and predatory corporate power may have undermined the doctor-patient relationship for a generation.
Competing interests: No competing interests
Important editorial notice for readers: This is a rapid response (online comment by a third party) and not an article in The British Medical Journal. It is attributed in a misleading way on certain websites and social media. The Editor, 10/02/2021.
The Atlantic current system which maintains mild weather in Europe is at its weakest in over a millennium, most likely because of climate change, scientists have found.
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is part of a system of ocean currents which acts as a conveyor belt to move water around the Earth, redistributing heat and acting as a key link in maintaining the world’s climate.
It began a serious slowdown around 1850 and is now at its lowest point in 1,000 years, according to a new study in the journal Nature Geoscience.
It is not certain what the impact of further weakening will be on weather patterns, but scientists believe it could bring more heatwaves in Europe, and sea level rise on the east coast of the US.
The impact of changing water temperatures is also potentially devastating for some marine life, with the slowdown already linked to lower cod numbers off Maine.
Some evidence suggests there could be a ‘tipping point’ sometime after 2100 when the system collapses, which could cause intense winter storms in Europe and a significant cooling effect across the northern hemisphere that would not be offset by global
Co-author Dr David Thornalley, from University College London said: “This study shows the increasing evidence in support of the modern Atlantic Ocean undergoing unprecedented changes in comparison to the last millennium, and in some cases longer.”
Scientists from Ireland, Britain and Germany looked at 11 different sources of data, including tree rings, ocean sediment and corals.
The AMOC has only been directly measured since 2004, leaving scientists to rely on indirect measurements such as these to monitor historic change, which produce imprecise results.
Dr Laura Jackson, a Met Office scientist specialising in AMOC who was not involved in the study, said there were “still uncertainties associated with using these indirect observations.”
But the paper adds to previous research that found a weakening of the AMOC, with one study suggesting there has been a 15 per cent decrease since the mid-century. – Telegraph
In other words they only have data since 2004, and are relying highly unreliable proxies further back Translation – Junk Science!
I try not to write about anyone who has died because if it was my family member I would not want to read any speculations about their death. However, in this case I feel that justice has not been given a chance and therefore it needs highlighting. ... continue
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
Aletho News
Aletho News 