WHILE some well-intentioned (but ill-informed) MPs are doing their utmost to counter Covid ‘vaccine hesitancy’ in their constituencies, the remarkable Dr Tess Lawrie is continuing to try to persuade medical colleagues to pause the rollout.
She sets out her case simply and powerfully in this interview with Mark Dolan of talkRADIO, aired on Wednesday. Well worth watching, and it could be sent to friends and relatives who are wondering who to believe on the issue.
Dolan, who has had both doses of the vaccine himself, puts questions reflecting the perspective held by most people, that the vaccine is safe and effective, as repeatedly advertised by the NHS.
Lawrie, who founded the Evidence-Based Medicine Consultancy Ltd, a specialist firmcommitted to improving the quality of healthcare through rigorous research, shows a cool authority in her replies.
‘I’ve looked at the data and I think there is reason to pause,’ she says. By the end of June, 300,000 people had reported adverse events through the UK regulator’s Yellow Card system after taking the vaccine, and this is not normal.
‘If you take a vaccine like tetanus, around since 1968, there are 36 deaths attributed to it on the World Health Organisation (WHO) database, whereas six to seven thousand deaths have been reported from Covid vaccine in just a few months.
‘In the UK, there are 1,440 deaths. So this is unprecedented in the history of any medicine, to have so many deaths reported in such a short time, and indeed so many reports in such a short time.’
Pressed by Nolan on whether this meant the need for a pause, even though the reports do not prove cause and effect, she says: ‘I tend to adopt the precautionary principle. I think if there’s any cause for concern, especially in view of these alarming numbers of reports, we need to get more information, and follow up each and every report to find out a bit more about its association – indeed, is it a cause for concern.
‘I feel there is a lack of transparency from the regulatory bodies. In their report, they highlight a very rare brain clot, cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, and that there have been 30 deaths associated with this and a couple of hundred cases.
‘But when you look at the Yellow Card data, you find there have been 2,208 strokes reported – a brain bleed – and of those, 154 people died. These data are far more worrying to me than just the cerebral venous sinus thrombosis data.
‘And when you look at all sorts of bleed, and the causes of death overall, you see that many are associated with bleeding and clotting. We’re seeing brain clots and heart clots and lung clots. The commonest causes of death are brain clots – strokes – and then pulmonary embolism, which is a lung clot, and also heart clots – heart attacks.
‘I would like to know more. I personally think these should be investigated.’
Dolan: Wouldn’t pausing the vaccine rollout put us back into the mess of the pandemic?
‘Not really, because we now know there are many safe, effective treatments for Covid. It is not an untreatable condition. There’s a very safe medicine called ivermectin, very low-cost, and around for 40 years, registered on the WHO’s database since 1992. And they’ve only registered 20 deaths since 1992. It’s been given billions of times, used against tropical parasites and available over-the-counter in many countries.’
Dolan: Should the vaccine be given to children over 12?
‘It’s unnecessary and dangerous. A child has more chance of dying from a vaccination – looking at these figures – than they do from Covid.’
Dolan: Is the relatively small risk from the vaccine better than getting Covid? It’s certainly a nasty virus.
‘I think we all have a robust immune system, if you’re not vulnerable and not very elderly. Our immune systems are geared up to deal with viruses, bacteria and others. A lot of the side-effects we see from Covid – the long Covid and so on – can be prevented by early treatment.
‘The doctors using ivermectin say you don’t get long Covid if you treat with it in the early stages. If you’ve got a treatment for Covid, you don’t have to be afraid of Covid.’
Dolan: What’s your professional verdict on 16 months of rolling out lockdowns in the UK and across the world?
‘I haven’t seen any good evidence that lockdowns or masks work. More concerning, we’ve known that ivermectin works for some time, and doctors have been trying to communicate this message to the authorities, who have been very single-minded in their strategy and approach. If ivermectin had been employed last year, when the UK authorities were notified, there would have been no lockdown in my opinion.’
Dolan: Why do you think your message about applications such as ivermectin were ignored?
‘I think there are a lot of forces at play that we don’t fully understand, particularly with regard to the huge . . . Covid is probably a £100billion-a-year industry, and ivermectin and other generic medicines are very cheap.’
Lawrie adds: ‘I think it’s time everybody took more responsibility for their health. Get themselves in better shape, be careful of what they eat – not just the quantity and the calories, but the nutritional value; exercise, and sunlight, and including taking responsibility for getting the information. Anybody can go to the Yellow Card system and have a look at the data. It’s not that easy on the government system, but there is a group called UK Column with a website that’s really easy to navigate. They update the data every week. You can type in a problem, and see what other people are reporting too.
‘I would encourage everybody, if you have the vaccine today and tomorrow you have some kind of problem, to report it – it may be associated with the vaccine, and there might be many other people who are suffering a similar thing. It’s only by highlighting these things that we will be able to ask the government to investigate.’
July 18, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine |
Leave a comment
During a Covid surge, what proportion of the population is exposed to an infective dose of the virus, which they either fight off with no or minimal symptoms or are infected by? This is one of the most important questions scientists need to answer.
It’s closely related to the question of whether lockdowns work. If lockdowns work then, as per SAGE and Imperial orthodoxy, the restrictions successfully prevent the virus from reaching most people, who remain unexposed and susceptible – and hence in need of vaccination to protect them when the protective restrictions are lifted. If lockdowns don’t work, however, then they don’t prevent the virus spreading, and thus the majority of people will be exposed to it as it spreads around unimpeded by ineffectual restrictions.
Another related question is: What proportion of exposed people are infected? Using ONS data we can estimate that around 10-15% of the country tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 over the autumn and winter. How many were exposed to the virus to produce this number of infections? Was it, say, 10-20%, with half to all of them catching the virus? Or was it more like 80-90%, with around 10% being infected? It’s a question that makes all the difference in our understanding of the virus and how to respond to it.
If almost all are exposed during a surge, and relatively few of them are infected, then a number of things follow. First, most people have enough immunity to fight off the virus when exposed to it, and only a small minority become infected. Second, the surge ends when enough of that small minority who are particularly susceptible to this virus or variant acquire immunity through infection, i.e., when herd immunity is reached. Third, there won’t be another surge or wave until there is a new virus or variant which evades enough of the existing population immunity to require herd immunity to be topped up via a further spread of infections.
If, on the other hand, very few are exposed during a surge, and most of them are infected, none of these things is true. It means: Most people have little immunity and are highly susceptible. A surge which infects 10-20% of the population has exposed not much more than that. The surge does not end because of herd immunity but because of restrictions. And there will be another surge as soon as restrictions are eased or behaviour changes and the unexposed begin to be exposed again. SAGE orthodoxy, in other words.
The evidence, however, is strongly supportive of the first position – ubiquitous exposure – not the second, limited exposure.
Consider the secondary attack rate (SAR, the proportion of contacts an infected person infects). Data from Public Health England consistently shows this figure sits around 10-15%, meaning around 85-90% of the contacts of infected people do not become infected. It rises during a surge, which is typically due to the higher SAR of a novel variant, and then falls after the surge, as the new variant’s SAR also falls.
Such data is much more consistent with ubiquitous exposure than with limited exposure, as it shows that only a minority of those exposed to an infected person are themselves infected (10-15%), meaning ubiquitous exposure with a minority infected is the much more plausible scenario. This meshes with the data on high levels of prior immunity via T cells and other mechanisms.
Another key data point is the fact that surges consistently peak abruptly and begin to fall, independently of the imposition of restrictions. For instance, as Professor Simon Wood has shown, all three lockdowns in England were imposed after infections had peaked and begun to decline. Similarly, multiple peer-reviewed studies have shown no relationship between the imposition of restrictions and Covid infections or deaths across different countries and U.S. states.
The pattern of abrupt peaks and falls in incidence, independent of restrictions, is strongly indicative of hitting a herd immunity threshold (or overshooting it), as the virus or variant runs out of susceptible people to infect and exhausts itself.
Similarly, when restrictions are lifted there is typically no immediate surge, as there wasn’t in Europe last summer and in numerous U.S. states such as Texas and Mississippi in spring 2021. Surges only tend to occur when a new variant arrives, which again suggests it is not restrictions that are preventing spread to a still highly susceptible population but herd immunity that is preventing it, at least until a new virus or variant arrives to temporarily disturb it.
How, though, does the virus circumvent restrictions to achieve ubiquitous exposure of the population, and apparently without being noticeably even slowed down by the restrictions or voluntary distancing behaviour?
The answer, as I have suggested previously, likely lies in the airborne transmission of the virus. It is likely that the virus primarily spreads through building up to infective levels in the air, and that people are infected by breathing it in (a form of transmission which face masks do little or nothing to prevent). During a surge the virus becomes increasingly ubiquitous in the air at higher concentrations, accelerating exposure and infections until the herd immunity threshold is hit, at which point it abruptly enters decline. This explains why even though it is at its highest point of prevalence and was spreading at its fastest rate just a few days before, it suddenly stops and enters sustained decline. It is hard to see how any explanation other than herd immunity can explain this consistently abrupt change in the rate of virus transmission, particularly as there is no evidence of a similarly abrupt change in public behaviour in the mobility data.
Is there any concrete evidence that SARS-CoV-2 or other airborne viruses like influenza are ubiquitous in the air? Yes, there is. As HART notes in its bulletin this week:
For novel influenza viruses, between 7% and 8% are susceptible and develop antibodies in the first winter, much as we saw with SARS-CoV-2… If a certain proportion of the population are susceptible to infection in any one season, those individuals will end up infected sooner or later, regardless of which day they are exposed.
Studies have demonstrated that influenza is transmitted by aerosol particles and that such particles are prolific, indeed ubiquitous, in all indoor settings during the winter season. What stops people contracting the virus is their level of susceptibility, not their level of exposure.
HART refers to a study on influenza from 2014, which argues:
There are some amounts of the virus in the air constantly. These amounts are generally not enough to cause disease in people, due to infection prevention by healthy immune systems. However, at a higher concentration of the airborne virus, the risk of human infection increases dramatically. Early detection of the threshold virus concentration is essential for prevention of the spread of influenza infection.
The idea of a “threshold virus concentration” at which an outbreak is triggered (rather than just low level transmission) may be important for understanding how airborne viruses spread, and how they can become ubiquitous during a surge. Seasonal factors such as temperature, humidity, UV radiation, human behaviour (e.g. gathering indoors with little ventilation), and cycles in the human immune system may play a role in how easily this threshold concentration is reached.
A study in JAMA tested the air in hospitals for SARS-CoV-2 and found plenty, particularly in the public areas:
Overall, 14 of 42 samples (33.3%) in public areas were positive, with 9 of 16 (56.3%) in hallways, 2 of 18 (11.1%) in other indoor areas, and 3 of 8 (37.5%) in outdoor public areas (P = .01).
There isn’t yet much evidence from other settings, though a study, COVAIR by Imperial College, is underway and the results will be of great interest when they eventually appear.
To my mind, this is the explanation that (at least for now) explains all the known facts better than others – the low secondary attack rate, the ineffectiveness of lockdowns, the outbreaks that explode then suddenly end, the absence of resurgence when restrictions are lifted, the repeated hitting of herd immunity, and so on. At the heart of it is the idea of ubiquitous exposure – that almost everyone, not just a small percentage, are exposed each time the virus passes through, and the vast majority are already immune.
July 17, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19 |
Leave a comment
Once upon a time there was a little chick called Chicken Licken. One day as she was scratching about in the farmyard, she heard a message coming from the television in the farmhouse saying that everyone must stay home or else we would all die.
‘Oh no,’ cried Chicken Licken. ‘I must go into my coop and stay there.’
So off she went to stay in her coop for three weeks, which was how long the nice man on the telly reckoned it would take. On the way, she met Henny Penny.
‘Oh Henny Penny,’ cried Chicken Licken, ‘There’s a deadly virus about and if we don’t stay cooped up we’re all going to die.’
‘But why would those who are perfectly healthy need to do that?’ asked Henny Penny confused. ‘If we’re healthy, that means we haven’t got it. And if we haven’t got it, we can’t spread it.’
‘Henny Penny!’ replied Chicken Licken aghast. ‘The man on the telly said that healthy people can spread it to one another even if they haven’t got it. Stay Safe.’
‘Sounds like nonsense to me,’ said Henny Penny, ‘but I suppose they must know what they’re talking about.’
So Chicken Licken and Henny Penny hurried off to their coops. On the way they met Cocky Locky.
‘Oh Cocky Locky,’ cried Chicken Licken. ‘There’s a deadly virus about, and we need to go into Lockdown to protect vets from being overwhelmed.’
‘But we’ve never quarantined millions of the healthy before Xi Jinping did it in China,’ said Cocky Locky, ‘and there’s not a jot of scientific evidence that it will do anything to prevent deaths, although it will undoubtedly wreck our society, economy, and lead to a never-ending medical tyranny.’
‘Cocky Locky, I’m ashamed of you,’ sneered Chicken Licken. ‘You sound more like Tucker Carlson by the day. I think you need to stop watching right-wing talk shows and alternative media and instead get your news from established sources like the BBC and CNN. Follow the Science.’
So Chicken Licken, Henny Penny and Cocky Locky hurried off to their coops. On the way they met Ducky Lucky.
‘Oh Ducky Lucky,’ cried Chicken Licken, ‘There’s a deadly virus about and we all need to put pieces of cloth across our faces.’
‘But they told us we shouldn’t do that,’ replied Ducky Lucky. ‘And besides, what good is a piece of cloth with holes of an order of magnitude bigger than virus particles?’
‘Ducky Lucky,’ said Chicken Licken disapprovingly. ‘I’m shocked to hear you question the science. Wear Your Mask!’
‘Okay then,’ said Ducky Lucky in resignation as she strapped to her face a piece of old rag she found on the floor. ‘I suppose if the man on the telly says it will do us good, we’d better do it then.’
So Chicken Licken, Henny Penny, Cocky Locky and Ducky Lucky hurried off to their coops. On the way they met Drakey Lakey.
‘Oh Drakey Lakey,’ cried Chicken Licken. ‘There’s a deadly virus about and you need to take a PCR test.’
‘But I’m feeling fine,’ replied Drakey Lakey. ‘Why would I need to take a test for an illness I don’t have? And besides, the PCR test is not a clinical diagnostic tool and cannot tell whether you are infected or infectious.’
‘Drakey Lakey!’ said Chicken Licken frowning contemptuously. ‘I never dreamt you were a conspiracy fowl. Everything you say has been debunked by various factchecking websites and the mainstream media. Are you saying they’re all wrong? Get Your Test!’
‘Well okay, I don’t want to be seen as a crank,’ replied Drakey Lakey anxiously, shoving the test up his beak.
‘Aagghh!’ cried Drakey Lakey. ‘Even though I feel perfectly fine and healthy, the test tells me I have the deadly virus.’
‘You see,’ said Chicken Licken smugly. ‘I told you it was a conspiracy theory to doubt those who are trying to keep us safe. Now stop listening to Mike Yeadon, Sucharit Bhakdi and Peter McCullough and go and self-isolate.’
So Chicken Licken, Henny Penny, Cocky Locky, Ducky Lucky and Drakey Lakey hurried off to their coops. On the way they met Goosey Loosey.
‘Oh Goosey Loosey,’ cried Chicken Licken. ‘There’s a deadly virus about which is like the plague and it could kill us all.’
‘Hmm?’ replied Goosey Loosey quizzically. ‘Actually, according to John Ioannidis, the world’s most cited epidemiologist, the Infection Fatality Rate of this virus is between 0.15% – 0.23% — about the same as a bad flu season. What is more, it’s only really dangerous to the elderly and sick.’
‘Goosey Loosey! Are you saying the lives of the elderly are worth nothing?’ said Chicken Licken, sounding like Cathy Newman.
‘Well no, that wasn’t what I meant,’ replied Goosey Loosey looking somewhat shamed. ‘But if we know which people it effects, surely targeted protection towards them would make more sense than this scattergun approach.’
‘If you’re referring to the so-called Great Barrington Declaration,’ said Chicken Licken dismissively, ‘not only did Matt Hancock dismiss it out of hand, but you won’t find it coming up in the Google rankings – that’s how thoroughly discredited it is.’
‘Oh,’ replied Goosey Loosey taken aback. ‘Well, I suppose if Google, Facebook and other Big Tech companies have decided it’s not something we should see, it can’t have any credibility, can it?’
‘Indeed,’ said Chicken Licken. ‘Now come along and Don’t Kill Granny.’
So Chicken Licken, Henny Penny, Cocky Locky, Ducky Lucky, Drakey Lakey and Goosey Loosey hurried off to their coops. On the way they met Turkey Lurkey.
‘Oh Turkey Lurkey,’ cried Chicken Licken. ‘There’s a deadly virus about for which there’s no known treatments.’
‘I don’t think that’s the case,’ replied Turkey Lurkey. ‘A number of highly qualified physicians and scientists have put in place treatment protocols, some of which prevent up to 85% of deaths.’
‘Turkey Lurkey,’ sneered Chicken Licken. ‘You sound like a card-carrying Covidiot. Do you really think if such treatments existed, the Government and the scientists on the telly would ignore them?’
‘But they’ve been suppressed and censor…’
‘Stop it!’ screeched Chicken Licken. ‘Stop spreading disinformation. Now come along with us and Help Save Lives.’
So Chicken Licken, Henny Penny, Cocky Locky, Ducky Lucky, Drakey Lakey, Goosey Loosey and Turkey Lurkey hurried off to their coops, keeping two wings apart as they went. On the way they met Foxy Loxy.
‘Oh Foxy Loxy,’ cried Chicken Licken. ‘There’s a deadly virus about, it’s mutating into new variants, and we’re all going to die.’
‘If you come with me,’ said Foxy Loxy with a glint in his eye. ‘I’ll keep you safe and give you your freedom back.’
With sighs of relief, Chicken Licken, Henny Penny, Cocky Locky, Ducky Lucky, Drakey Lakey, Goosey Loosey and Turkey Lurkey followed Foxy Loxy who took them to a yard surrounded by black and yellow walls covered in slogans, such as ‘Watch Out for Invisible Dangers,’ whilst over the gates were the words, ‘Safety and Freedom for All’.
‘This, my friends, is where you can lay aside all your fears,’ explained Foxy Loxy calmly. ‘Once you enter here, I not only give you my personal guarantee for your safety, since it is guarded day and night by my own family, but we will give you all the freedom you like, within these four walls. As if that weren’t enough, we’re actually giving away two shots of our brand new Virus Vanquisher as part of the entry package. We’ve been working on it flat out for days, so you really are very lucky birds indeed. What are you waiting for?’
As they received their shots and filed into the yard, the gates clanged shut behind them. Looking up at the top of the walls, they were reassured to see the kindly eyes of the smiling Loxy family keeping watch over them, and glad to hear the ping of the app they’d been given telling them what to do and when to do it. But most of all they were comforted by the words on the inside of the gates:
‘All who attempt to leave do so at their own risk.
Stay Safe. Be Free. Never Leave.’
July 17, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19 |
Leave a comment
Someone wrote this in 2017. Some people thus knew ivermectin had antiviral properties. In fact, the drug has all kinds of possibly miraculous effects. It is just missing the important one: patentability. (It was patented but the patent expired in 1997.)
Recent research has confounded the belief, held for most of the past 40 years, that ivermectin was devoid of any antiviral characteristics. Ivermectin has been found to potently inhibit replication of the yellow fever virus, with EC50 values in the sub-nanomolar range. It also inhibits replication in several other flaviviruses, including dengue, Japanese encephalitis and tick-borne encephalitis, probably by targeting non-structural 3 helicase activity.97 Ivermectin inhibits dengue viruses and interrupts virus replication, bestowing protection against infection with all distinct virus serotypes, and has unexplored potential as a dengue antiviral.98 Ivermectin has also been demonstrated to be a potent broadspectrum specific inhibitor of importin α/β-mediated nuclear transport and demonstrates antiviral activity against several RNA viruses by blocking the nuclear trafficking of viral proteins. It has been shown to have potent antiviral action against HIV-1 and dengue viruses, both of which are dependent on the importin protein superfamily for several key cellular processes. Ivermectin may be of import in disrupting HIV-1 integrase in HIV-1 as well as NS-5 (non-structural protein 5) polymerase in dengue viruses.99,100…
Anti-cancer
There is a continuously accumulating body of evidence that ivermectin may have substantial value in the treatment of a variety of cancers. The avermectins are known to possess pronounced antitumor activity,107 as well as the ability to potentiate the antitumor action of vincristine on Ehrlich carcinoma, melanoma B16 and P388 lymphoid leukemia, including the vincristine-resistant strain P388.108 Over the past few years, there have been steadily increasing reports that ivermectin may have varying uses as an anti-cancer agent, as it has been shown to exhibit both anti-cancer and anti-cancer stem cell properties. An in silico chemical genomics approach designed to predict whether any existing drugs might be useful in tackling glioblastoma, lung and breast cancer, indicated that ivermectin may be a useful compound in this respect.109 In human ovarian cancer and NF2 tumor cell lines, high-dose ivermectin inactivates protein kinase PAK1 and blocks PAK1- dependent growth. PAK proteins are essential for cytoskeletal reorganization and nuclear signaling, PAK1 being implicated in tumor genesis while inhibiting PAK1 signals induces tumor cell apoptosis (cell death). PAK1 is essential for the growth of more than 70% of all human cancers, including breast, prostate, pancreatic, colon, gastric, lung, cervical and thyroid cancers, as well as hepatoma, glioma, melanoma, multiple myeloma and for neurofibromatosis tumors.110 Globally, breast cancer is the most common cancer among women but treatment options are few. Ivermectin suppresses breast cancer by activating cytostatic autophagy, disrupting cellular signaling in the process, probably by reducing PAK1 expression… https://www.nature.com/articles/ja201711.pdf
July 17, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular | Ivermectin |
Leave a comment
Former Pfizer Vice President and Chief Science Officer Michael Yeadon today told America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS) that a Reuters “fact checker” article calling his statements “misinformation” is “a mixture of straw men and sheer invention,” saying the Reuters article was “well worth rebutting”.
This is not the first time Reuters has tried to discredit Yeadon by “fact checker” obfuscation, although past attempts have been less half-hearted. This time, Reuters called Yeadon an “anti-vax proponent” who “has made unfounded claims”. Relying on an entity that calls itself “Meedan’s Health Desk, a group of public health scientists working to tackle medical misinformation online,” the Reuters “fact check” addresses Yeadon statements on asymptomatic spread, variants, the COVID-19 vaccine, and its use in pregnancy. The article’s concluding “verdict” tries to claim that “infected but symptom-free people can spread the coronavirus; vaccinated people are better protected but not 100% immune; research shows COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective for adults and pregnant women.”
Relating to the article, Yeadon said: “The narrative statements that have repeatedly been claimed by the authorities which are a pack of lies are:
“1. Asymptomatic transmission. It’s definitely a lie. Have you seen that video where Fauci states that ‘it’s always a symptomatic person who drives an epidemic and never people without symptoms’?
“A WHO doctor said exactly the same thing.
“There’s also a terrific peer-reviewed journal article showing that domestic transmission in asymptomatic cases was effectively zero.
“All marries up with the statements I’ve made, and with biological logic.
“2. Variants. They’re just being idiotic. I can show several good quality papers demonstrating that T-cells from a convalescent person or an immunized person each recognize all the then-available variants, again, as anticipated by fundamentals of immunology. The weak twaddle in their piece about antibodies is risible.
“3. Vaccines. The bastards are actually claiming they’re safe. Got them. We have VAERS, Yellow Card, and EMA monitoring. We have mechanism of toxicity. We have multiple open letters to EMA (warning of blood clots) which were immediately followed by vaccine withdrawals (for blood clots).
“4. Pregnancy/fertility. No one in their right mind thinks giving experimental treatments to pregnant women is other than reckless. Especially when reproductive toxicity testing is incomplete.”
Yeadon continued: “But on top of this stupidity, are two recent public disclosures: (I) the distribution of vaccine to tissues in mice shows a very disturbing concentration into ovaries. No one has followed it up, so the assumption has to be this is happening in humans too, and (II) our concern expressed in the December 2020 petition to EMA about immune cross-reactivity between spike protein and human syncytin-1 has been confirmed. A paper was very recently published showing young women making antibodies to syncytin-1 within days of vaccination.”
Summarizing, Yeadon concluded: “Of course this is wholly fraud. Imagine that the number of people in U.K. who’d actually been killed by the virus, instead of dying with it, was just a couple of thousand; you’d been on the streets with torches and pitchforks.
“You should be. Governments everywhere have lied and lied and lied about every one of the central narrative points about this virus.
“The effect of compliance with their ludicrous policy responses has been to hollow out and arguably to have destroyed economically several G20 counties, and actually increased the number of avoidable deaths, not least by deprivation of healthcare.
“These people all need locking up in that new high-security facility being built at speed at Wellingborough, Northants. The prima facie case against a dozen or so people in U.K. warrants their arrest pending criminal prosecutions.
“If these figures are of the same order of magnitude for other countries as well, and there is no reason to assume otherwise, then the plague is a deception of unprecedented proportions, and crimes committed against humanity on a huge scale have been committed here.”
July 16, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Reuters |
Leave a comment
Jews in America are demanding the United States intervene in Chile’s internal politics in the run up to their presidential election next November.
Daniel Jadue, a descendant of Palestinian refugees and member of the Chilean Communist Party, is currently the frontrunner in polls. Jadue is an unapologetic anti-Zionist who has in the past directly confronted the Jewish power structure of his country.
Gerardo Gorodischer, president of Chilean Jewish lobby, has successfully recruited Democrats and Republicans in the US Congress to call on Secretary of State Antony Blinken — a Jew himself — to meddle in Chile’s internal affairs and prevent Jadue from becoming president.
Jadue has in the past called attention to Jewish control of the media in his country. Last year, he was listed as one of the top 10 anti-Semites in the world by the Simon Wiesenthal Center after he passed a strict Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) law as mayor of the city of Recoleta. He is currently supporting a law in the parliament that would make Chile the first nation in the world to officially institute a total boycott of Israel.
With 400,000 descendants, Chile is home to the world’s largest Palestinian diaspora outside of the Middle East. Chilean-Palestinians are overwhelmingly Christians who were forced to flee their homeland after being ethnically cleansed by Israel. Chile’s Jewish population is much smaller, currently estimated at 150,000 people. Jews in the country have started immigrating to Israel in larger than usual numbers out of fear of Jadue potentially becoming the nation’s next leader.
So far, Jewish attempts at “Corbyning” Jadue have failed. Complaints from Zionist organizations in Latin America and the US to stop Jadue have largely been ignored by the local population. Their trump card appears to be using the United States to intimidate the Chilean government with threats of economic retaliation or more.
In her letter to Blinken, Democratic congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz made a collective racial attack on the entire Chilean Palestinian community for protesting against Israel’s attacks on Arabs last May:
“Militant leaders of the 400,000-strong Chilean Palestinian community, and their partners, from a variety of political parties, were quite aggressive during and after the Gaza crisis, burning Israeli and U.S. flags, brandishing Nazi symbols and accusing Israel of apartheid and Chilean Jews of controlling the media. This dangerous climate has been intensifying for many years and has already affected Chile’s social fabric despite alarms sounded by the local Jewish community and U.S. Jewish organizations like the American Jewish Committee.”
The billionaire neo-conservative president of Chile, Sebastián Piñera, also received the letter. His allies in the parliament have started grilling Jadue over his 1983 high school yearbook entry, where he declared himself an “anti-Semite” and vowed revenge against Jews for what they did to his family. Jadue, a 54-years-old man, responded by making fun of Chilean conservatives asking him to “clarify” comments he made as a teenager as the country suffers through an economic crisis.
Jews have been encountering resistance from all across the political spectrum and diverse countries in recent months. Earlier this month, Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko gave a speech suggesting that Jews use the “Holocaust” to intimidate and control people. Yesterday in Poland, local nationalists crashed a Jewish ceremony racially defaming Poles as genocidal killers.
July 16, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | Chile, Israel, Latin America, Palestine, Zionism |
Leave a comment
The legal authorities have been rounding up suspects in the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse. Criminal prosecutions will follow. If those accused are found guilty, they will be punished with long terms in jail.
Ironically, however, if the CIA or the Pentagon had been the ones that assassinated Moïse, the situation would be completely different. There would be no arrests or criminal prosecutions. That’s because the CIA and the Pentagon wield the authority to do what private individuals are not allowed to do — the authority to assassinate political leaders and, well, for that matter, anyone else in the world.
Recall the assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassim Suleimani. He was in charge of Iran’s security and intelligence apparatus. The U.S. national-security establishment fired a missile at him, killing him instantly.
Unlike the recent assassination in Haiti, there were no arrests or prosecutions of any Pentagon or CIA official after Suleimani’s assassination. That’s because they wield the authority to snuff out people’s lives on grounds of national security.
Moreover, assassination is not some new power wielded by the CIA and the Pentagon. It actually stretches all the way back to the conversion of the U.S. government to a national-security state after World War II. As far back as 1953, the CIA was developing an assassination manual for its assassins. The manual trained the CIA’s assassins not only in the art of assassination but also in the art of covering up the CIA’s role in assassinations.
The following year — 1954 — the CIA instigated a regime-change operation in Guatemala in which it prepared a list of Guatemalan officials to be targeted for assassination. While the CIA still will not release that top-secret list — on grounds of “national security” of course — there is no doubt that the democratically elected president of the country, Jacobo Arbenz, was at the top of the assassination list. Fortunately for him, he was able to escape the country before they could kill him.
In 1961, just before President Kennedy was sworn into office, the CIA conspired to assassinate Congo leader Patrice Lumumba. They actually rushed the assassination because they knew that Kennedy would oppose it. Lumumba was assassinated on January 17. Kennedy was sworn into office on January 20.
In 1970, CIA officials conspired with other U.S. officials to kidnap and assassinate Gen. Rene Schneider, the overall commander of Chile’s armed forces. Although the CIA denied any role in the assassination at the time it was carried out, it later came out that the CIA had conspired to violently kidnap Schneider.
The CIA claimed that its conspiracy was limited to kidnapping, not assassinating, Schneider. However, that was clearly a lie because the CIA’s intent was to remove him from his position in the government because he opposed the U.S. plan for a coup in Chile. Thus, there was no way they ever would have returned him after kidnapping him. In any event, Schneider was shot dead on the streets of Santiago during the kidnapping attempt. The CIA was later caught paying hush money to the killers.
One of the things that has long fascinated me about all this assassination mayhem is how some Americans find it inconceivable that the CIA and Pentagon planned and carried out the assassination of President Kennedy. How can such an assassination be inconceivable when that’s what the Pentagon and the CIA do — they assassinate political leaders on grounds of protecting U.S. national security.
No one seems surprised when they learn about the Pentagon’s or CIA’s assassination of a foreign leader. In fact, most everyone seems pretty nonchalant about the matter. But when one brings up the Kennedy assassination, there is a segment in mainstream American society that goes absolutely ballistic. I don’t get it.
I suppose they would claim that the CIA and the Pentagon would never assassinate an American citizen. But that’s ridiculous. If the CIA or the Pentagon conclude that an American citizen poses a threat to national security, why would they hesitate to take him out? In fact, during the Chilean coup, they authorized Chilean officials to execute two American citizens, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi. More recently, they assassinated two American citizens — Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman.
That leaves the final inconceivable argument — that it is simply inconceivable that the Pentagon and the CIA would exercise their power of assassination against a U.S. president. But what if they conclude that the president poses a grave threat to national security and that that country will fall to the communists or the terrorists or to Russia owing to the president’s policies? Would the Pentagon and the CIA really just let the country go down, or would they take the necessary steps to save the country?
We know the answer to that question from the coup in Chile. Like the United States, the Chilean Constitution did not allow for an assassination or coup to save the country from a president whose policies were deemed to pose a grave threat to national security. That’s why Gen. Schneider opposed a coup. The position of the Pentagon and the CIA was that regardless of the Chilean constitution, the Chilean national-security establishment had a moral duty to save the country by forcibly removing its democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, from office. After Schneider was removed from the scene through assassination, the Pentagon’s and the CIA’s view prevailed. The U.S.-inspired coup occurred on September 11, 1973, and left Allende dead.
Thus, the real questions are: (1) Did the Pentagon and the CIA conclude that Kennedy posed a grave threat to national security owing to the radically different direction he was taking America? (2) Does the evidence establish that Kennedy’s assassination was a highly sophisticated regime-change operation on the part of the U.S. national-security establishment?
Those are the two questions that the inconceivable crowd declines to confront and address. They remain stuck within their inconceivable doctrine.
The answers to those two questions were provided in FFF’s recent online conference “The National Security State and the Kennedy Assassination.” I have no doubts that anyone who watches the presentations delivered in that conference from beginning to end will conclude beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty that the Pentagon and the CIA exercised their power of assassination on November 22, 1963, to protect the country from a president whose policies they concluded posed a grave threat to national security.
July 16, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | CIA, Haiti, JFK Assassination, Latin America, United States |
Leave a comment
Yesterday we reported evidence given to the German-led international Corona Investigative Committee on Friday July 9 by Dr David Martin, who runs a US company monitoring innovations relevant to financial interests. He said a review of more than 4,000 patents issued around the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) coronavirus had led to the dramatic conclusion: ‘We made SARS’. Today we continue an account of his evidence, of which the live-streamed video is here.
THE United States has a federal law known as the RICO Act. It sounds friendly, but is aimed at something deadly: Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations. It was introduced due to the complexity of bringing successful charges against organised crime gangs.
Dr David Martin told the Corona Investigative Committee that in April 2003, a US drug company applied for a patent on anti-viral agents, treatment, and control of infections by coronavirus, just three days after the Centres for Disease Control sought to patent the SARS coronavirus itself – in a supposedly secret application. The first SARS outbreak had occurred in February that year in China.
His description led the inquiry committee chairman, German lawyer Reiner Fuellmich, who specialises in exposing corporate swindles, to comment: ‘This could well blow up into a RICO case ultimately.’
Martin replied: ‘Not could blow up – it is a RICO case. And the RICO pattern which was established in April 2003 for the first coronavirus was played out to exactly the same schedule when we see SARS-COV-2 show up.’
He claimed that Moderna (originally ModeRNA) were given the genetic sequence for the spike protein that forms the basis of their Covid vaccine by phone from the vaccine research centre at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases even before the novel subclade of the virus had been defined. ‘How do you treat a thing before you actually have the thing?’ he asked.
Moderna (originally ModeRNA Therapeutics) is a Massachusetts-based company founded in 2010 by a team of investors to develop RNA (ribonucleic acid) technology, thought to hold huge promise in harnessing the power of RNA code to make new medicines inside our bodies.
Another important date, Martin said, is June 5, 2008. This was around the time when the Defence Advanced Research Programme (DARPA) in the US took an interest in coronavirus as a biological weapon. It was also the date when a drug company, now part of the Paris-based pharma giant Sanofi, filed a series of patents targeting genes that 12 years later are said to be the novel features of SARS-COV-2 that make it a health hazard for humans.
From 2008 onwards, patent filings from numerous organisations identified ‘every attribute’ of the virus, as it eventually came to be described. The reference paper routinely used to identify it, published in March 2020, claimed to show that the novel features had come about in nature, and that the virus ‘originated from multiple naturally-occurring recombinant events among those viruses present in bats and other wildlife species’.
Martin said: ‘Unfortunately, if you actually take what they report to be novel, you find 73 patents, issued between 2008 and 2019, which have the elements which are allegedly novel in SARS-COV-2. So – there was no outbreak of SARS, because we had engineered all of the elements of that.’
The supposedly new virus had been said since 2016 to be poised for human emergence. But ‘it was not only poised for human emergence, it was patented for commercial exploitation – 73 times,’ Martin said. ‘Any assertion that this pathogen is somehow unique or novel falls apart on the actual gene sequences, which are published in the patent record.’
Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (who collaborated with the laboratory in Wuhan, China, in the coronavirus ‘gain of function’ work) along with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Moderna, began the sequencing of a spike protein vaccine in November 2019, a month before the Wuhan outbreak happened.
Martin also challenged the idea that injecting people with the RNA sequence for the spike protein is a true vaccine. The theory behind it is that by teaching the immune system to recognise the protein, which in itself has toxic effects, the body will be better equipped to deal with the toxin when exposed to the virus.
‘The illusion that we continue unfortunately to see very well-meaning people get trapped in, is conversations about whether we are having a vaccine for a virus. The fact is, we’re not. We are injecting a spike protein RNA sequence, which is a computer simulation of a sequence which has been known and patented for years. It’s not derived from nature.
‘The ludicrous nature of the story that this is somehow prophylactic or preventative flies in the face of 100 per cent of the evidence, because the evidence makes it abundantly clear that there has been no effort by any pharmaceutical company to combat the virus. This is about getting people injected with the known-to-be harmful spike protein.’
The reason for doing that, he argues, is to get people ‘addicted’ to a pan-coronavirus vaccine. There had been a decade-long, pan-influenza vaccine mandate, ‘desperately, desperately, desperately promoted by governments around the world. They failed. And they decided if influenza doesn’t deliver, on the public promise of getting everybody to get an injection, let’s change the pathogen.
‘You need to create the illusion of a demand, and there is nothing right now that does a better job of creating the illusion of demand than the urgency of an event you have manufactured.
‘Here’s the sad and sober irony: I raised these issues in 2002, after the anthrax scare, and the tragedy is we are now sitting in a world where we have hundreds of millions of people who are being injected with a pathogen-stimulating computer sequence which is being sold under what the Patent Office, the medical profession, and the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) in its own clinical standards would not suggest is a vaccine. But by using the term, we are now subjecting hundreds of millions of people to what was known by 2005 to be a biological weapon.’
The video of Martin’s live-streamed evidence is already receiving tens of thousands of views. At the very least, the data he presents surely should put to rest the idea of the virus as a product of nature that just happened to develop the capacity to jump from animals to humans.
This in itself has enormous implications. For one thing, why should we believe the claims by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness (CEPI), launched in 2017 with a huge cash infusion from the Gates Foundation, that a proposed 3.5billion-dollar quest for a universal coronavirus vaccine to ‘contain SARS-COV-2 and its variants’ is either a desirable or an achievable goal?
Urging support for the plan, co-founder Bill Gates said ‘CEPI has helped the global science community do something incredible: develop Covid-19 vaccines in less than a year.’ That claim sounds more than hollow in the light of the 20-year patent trail revealed by Martin.
What’s more, Martin spelled out a case that even the alleged SARS ‘variants’ of the coronavirus are artificial, representing the identification of different gene fragments rather than genuine variations.
‘It’s just an alteration in when you start and stop what you call the reading frame,’ he said. ‘If what we are looking for is something we have decided is worth looking for, then we’ll find it … where I choose to start or stop, I can say I found it. Or I didn’t find it! I didn’t find the match that I projected on to the data, because I chose to look at the data in a way that I could not find the match.’
With government advisers seemingly pulling ‘new variants’ out of the bag whenever they feel the grip of terror is lessening, this is another area calling for a sober reassessment of what is really going on.
July 15, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine |
Leave a comment
Who needs privacy?
The White House is tying itself in knots to silence anyone questioning the mainstream Covid-19 narrative, and, whatever you think of vaccines, its latest plans are only the first step toward making thoughtcrime a reality.
The US government is done playing “good cop” with regard to the “vaccine hesitant.” The Biden administration, which recently opted to send ‘volunteer’ vaccinators door to door in what may be the most ill-thought-out public health campaign in US history, doesn’t just want to meddle with your body anymore – its plans to control “misinformation” you may send by SMS text message indicate it’s intent on controlling your mind as well.
White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci is leading the crusade, blaming “Fox News or whomever” for crafting the vision of “a bunch of federal workers knocking on your door, telling you you’ve got to do something that you don’t want to do.” Fauci clarified that it wasn’t government officials, but “trusted messengers who are part of the community”. Noticeably, he didn’t address the “doing something you don’t want to do” part – a telling oversight in the minds of those who are convinced the campaign is indeed a coercive one and those who’ve been paying closer attention to who makes up the door-to-door vax packs.
While Politico insisted on Monday that these teams talked up by Biden and Psaki were merely delivering information on vaccination, not administering the jabs, a Tuesday report from a local TV network in Mecklenburg, North Carolina showed precisely the opposite, proudly announcing one man was so excited by the visit he chose to get the shot right then and there on his porch.
Who are you going to believe, then, America? The TV or your lying eyes?
And this campaign is far from a single-pronged strategy. According to Politico, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and “Biden-allied groups” – whatever that last phrase means – have plans to “engage fact-checkers more aggressively” and “work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages.”
Yes, you read that correctly. The White House plans to interfere with people’s ability to send text messages if it doesn’t like what they say. This is not a question of whether one supports or rejects the Covid-19 vaccine campaign, or what one thinks about vaccines at all; this is the curtain being yanked back on the police state the US has long insisted it isn’t (but that all its enemies are). It’s Washington rearing up with bared teeth, concealing its scabrous pelt in a lab coat, and hoping you don’t see the claws grasping the syringe. The US gave up its moral authority regarding freedom of the press somewhere between the Pentagon Papers and the revelations of Operation Mockingbird, but interfering with the content of individual text messages sent between innocent civilians brings the nation much deeper into the thickets of fascism than it has ever dared venture before, to a spot where it seems intent on setting up shop permanently.
Shots in the Hood ‘Strike Force’
Ultimately, the issue goes far beyond the pandemic to how much power Americans are willing to cede to a government that – based on statistics, at least – less than a quarter actually supported in the last election, a result framed as an accomplishment that speaks more to apathy. This is why the narrative managers don’t replace Fauci. When they really need credibility, they deputize trusted community members – a tactic they’ve been quite open about using, recently to middling success in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, where a local barber shop participated in Biden’s “Shots at the Shops” campaign to flood some of the city’s most dangerous, crime-plagued black neighborhoods with what were portrayed as clever, street-smart vaccination teams eager to save the lives of their fellow man.
That way, when whatever health campaign (or other government initiative) those barber shops (or other incursion on constitutional freedoms) have tied their credibility to suffers a hit – and the Englewood appearance wasn’t anything to write home about – it’s the trusted local institution that takes the blame. The overarching public-private partnership – that Faustian (Faucian?) pact between business and government – is one of the defining elements of fascism. But it’s become so common and normalized under Biden’s Covid-19 “Build Back Better” project that the average American thinks nothing about seeing all their local businesses getting into bed with the private equity firms such as BlackRock and Blackstone that have quietly bought up their neighborhoods during the pandemic – or as far back as the 2008 crash. After all, these groups know enough to shroud themselves in rainbows and climate-babble, and that’s all most people care about these days when vetting who they will allow to own them.
Search and Stick
More importantly, if White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki can look Americans in the eye and claim no one’s being vaccinated on the search-and-inoculate missions in North Carolina, while the next TV channel shows exactly that happening, a seed of cognitive dissonance is successfully sown that allows a person to believe two mutually exclusive “truths.” Even if we know at some basic level the government is lying to us, we don’t want to believe our trusted neighborhood fixtures are also doing so. The Biden administration’s recently declared scorched-earth campaign thus has the potential to sabotage trust in as many ways as there are trusting relationships in a community, and it doesn’t care what happens to those people as long as it gets control of the American mind at the end of the road. Families might be shredded and homes torn apart over the FBI’s recent announcement that we must snitch on our fellow man lest ill-defined “extremism” take root somewhere, but Blackstone and Vanguard turned record profits this year, and that’s what matters.
Americans seem to believe the Covid-19 pandemic is winding down – a Gallup poll early last month suggested nearly three in five Americans believe their lives are either “somewhat” or “completely” back to normal after 18 months of being put through their Pavlovian paces in what the World Economic Forum admits was the world’s largest-ever psychological experiment. But the narrative managers have only begun declaring war – not on the virus, or even so much on how we think about it, but how we think about them.
Former George W. Bush administration official John Bridgeland warned Politico on Tuesday that “lies” (not necessarily about vaccines, but that create “communities already wary of the vaccines”) are “potentially a death sentence.” Now what kind of government official would he be if he allowed some family who just wanted to be left alone with their “death sentence” to go back to their dinner? Not a very effective one, that’s for sure! Bridgeland didn’t say what kind of “lies” made people more susceptible to death by Covid-19, but no doubt he’d like to spend a long time digging through your phone to make sure you’re not harboring any.
Humanity must be primed for the next crisis, after all. Whether that’s a “climate lockdown” or a fake alien invasion, we’re being primed for another metaphysical gut punch meant to turn us against ourselves. At that point, resistance will no longer be optional, it will be a matter of survival – but your phone won’t let you text that to anybody.
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Telegram
July 15, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
Leave a comment
You know the story…
In just a few centuries, the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals
to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism. Are we about to follow
their lead?
Jared Diamond, 2005
While it is true that the Easter Islanders deforested their island, forensic historians have now determined that by converting the forest to farmland and innovatively adapting to prolonged Little Ice Age droughts, they avoided collapse.
BingUNews
Resilience, not collapse: What the Easter Island myth gets wrong
By Jennifer Micale
JULY 08, 2021
You probably know this story, or a version of it: On Easter Island, the people cut down every tree, perhaps to make fields for agriculture or to erect giant statues to honor their clans. This foolish decision led to a catastrophic collapse, with only a few thousand remaining to witness the first European boats landing on their remote shores in 1722.
But did the demographic collapse at the core of the Easter Island myth really happen? The answer, according to new research by Binghamton University anthropologists Robert DiNapoli and Carl Lipo, is no.
Their research, “Approximate Bayesian Computation of radiocarbon and paleoenvironmental record shows population resilience on Rapa Nui (Easter Island),” was recently published in the journal Nature Communications. Co-authors include Enrico Crema of the University of Cambridge, Timothy Rieth of the International Archaeological Research Institute and Terry Hunt of the University of Arizona.
Easter Island, or Rapa Nui in the native language, has long been a focus of scholarship into questions related to environmental collapse. But to resolve those questions, researchers first need to reconstruct the island’s population levels to ascertain whether such a collapse occurred and, if so, the scale.
“For Rapa Nui, a big part of scholarly and popular discussion about the island has centered around this idea that there was a demographic collapse, and that it’s correlated in time with climate changes and environmental changes,” explained DiNapoli, a postdoctoral research associate in environmental studies and anthropology.
Sometime after it was settled between the 12th to 13th centuries AD, the once-forested island was denuded of trees; most often, scholars point to human-prompted clearing for agriculture and the introduction of invasive species such as rats. These environmental changes, the argument goes, reduced the island’s carrying capacity and led to a demographic decline.
Additionally, around the year 1500, there was a climactic shift in the Southern Oscillation index; that shift led to a dryer climate on Rapa Nui.
[…]
In short, there is no evidence that the islanders used the now-vanished palm trees for food, a key point of many collapse myths. Current research shows that deforestation was prolonged and didn’t result in catastrophic erosion; the trees were ultimately replaced by gardens mulched with stone that increased agricultural productivity. During times of drought, the people may have relied on freshwater coastal seeps.
Construction of the moai statues, considered by some to be a contributing factor of collapse, actually continued even after European arrival.
In short, the island never had more than a few thousand people prior to European contact, and their numbers were increasing rather than dwindling, their research shows.
“Those resilience strategies were very successful, despite the fact that the climate got drier,” Lipo said. “They are a really good case for resiliency and sustainability.”
Burying the myth
Why, then, does the popular narrative of Easter Island’s collapse persist? It likely has less to do with the ancient Rapa Nui people than ourselves, Lipo explained.
The concept that changes in the environment affect human populations began to take off in the 1960s, Lipo said. Over time, that focus became more intense, as researchers began to consider changes in the environment as a primary driver of cultural shifts and transformations.
But this correlation may derive more from modern concerns with industrialization-driven pollution and climate change, rather than archaeological evidence. Environmental changes, Lipo points out, occur on different time scales and in different magnitudes. How human communities respond to these changes varies.
[…]
Binghamton University
However future forensic historians (archaeologists & anthropologists) will be right when they determine that our society collapsed because we decimated our reliable and affordable energy infrastructure in order to build a lot of useless statues due to “modern concerns with industrialization-driven pollution and climate change.”
Myth Busting…
The full text of the paper is available… Approximate Bayesian Computation of radiocarbon and paleoenvironmental record shows population resilience on Rapa Nui (Easter Island).
Discussion
When we assess the uncertainties of the Rapa Nui data and those involved in the analytic steps, the current evidence indicates that the island experienced relatively steady population growth from initial human settlement ca. 800 cal BP until the period following European arrival. The “wiggles” in the observed SPD curve all fall within the simulation envelope and result from details of the calibration curve combined with sampling error, and importantly, not genuine paleodemographic signals. Given these facts, we are unable to confidently distinguish between the four hypotheses. All of the fitted models, however, are consistent with a logistic growth pattern only marginally influenced by changes in climate and forest cover. The wide HPDs of the environmental parameters suggest a range of possible positive or negative effects, yet no values appear strong enough to cause major population declines (Fig. 3). Given the comparatively small number of radiocarbon dates, we cannot determine whether our inability to discern between the competing models is the consequence of small sample size, the small ‘effect size’ in models 2–4 (i.e., the absolute deviation of βpalm and βSOI from 0), or a combination of both factors. Nonetheless, none of the fitted models support the notion of pre-contact population collapse (Fig. 3). Therefore, our results suggest that if deforestation or increasing SOI had effects on the island, Rapa Nui populations were resilient to them. These findings are independently supported by recent research showing that monument construction steadily continued even after European arrival57,77. In addition, research now demonstrates that deforestation was a prolonged process, did not result in catastrophic erosion, and that land cover was quickly replaced by lithic mulch gardens that increased agricultural productivity66,67,80,81,82,83,84,85. Moreover, while some claim that deforestation resulted in the loss of food29,68, there is no evidence that palms were a significant dietary resource for islanders66,86. Thus, it is more likely that the loss of the palm forest represented an expansion of cultivation opportunities and positively contributed to the initial growth and overall resilience of the population. In summary, there is no empirical support for the notion that deforestation resulted in strong negative impacts on the human population of Rapa Nui.
Our results also have implications for the effects of climate change on the island. Rull71,73 has recently claimed that climate-induced droughts caused a large-scale societal disruption resulting in the cessation of monument construction and intra-island migration from coastal settlements to the crater lake at Rano Kau. Similar to previous analyses of the tempo of monument construction around the island57, the vast majority of our 14C data derive from coastal settlements and do not show declines in activity or support claims of major climate-induced disruptions from drought. While climate perturbations seem to have led to desiccation of the crater lake at Rano Raraku72, recent research suggests Rapa Nui populations adapted to these changes by relying primarily on coastal groundwater sources87,88,89.
DiNapoli et al., 2021
It turns out that the Malthusian myth of Easter Island’s demographic and ecological collapse was just a bunch of Rapa Hooey!
Reference
DiNapoli, R.J., Crema, E.R., Lipo, C.P. et al. Approximate Bayesian Computation of radiocarbon and paleoenvironmental record shows population resilience on Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Nat Commun 12, 3939 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-24252-z
July 15, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Easter Island |
Leave a comment
Since COVID-19 hit the scene at the beginning of 2020, one of the key elements driving the fear around this disease is that there appeared to be no cure. And, for people who got infected with COVID-19, the guidance coming from major global institutions such as the NIH (US National Institutes of Health) and the CDC (US Centres for Disease Control) was basically “do nothing, stay home, and when you turn blue go to the hospital.” This public health policy prescription was usually followed by the qualifying caveat, “this is our only approach until a vaccine arrives.”
This, clearly, has terrified people all around the world. For the majority of the world’s population the belief has been that catching COVID-19 is a veritable death sentence. Which leads us to an important question. How would things change if there were, in fact, effective treatments for COVID-19?
I have just come out of a fascinating 90-minute press conference and Zoom call, delivered by the Malaysian Alliance for Effective COVID Control (MAECC). This was very much a “good news” presentation. The main message? There are very effective treatments for COVID-19.
The essence of the discussion in the MAECC session focused on the drug Ivermectin. The Doctors found it necessary to do a press conference and public presentation because the widespread use of Ivermectin in Malaysia is currently illegal. A doctor prescribing Ivermectin for his COVID-19 patients was recently raided by police!
Malaysian doctors are not doing leading edge research here, but simply trying to care for their patients by working to get a proven treatment officially accepted for use in Malaysia. Ivermectin has already been used very successfully in many places around the world where media hysteria did not get it banned from the shelves. Mexico has used it to great effect, as did Peru. Over the last few weeks, reports coming out of India are demonstrating massive benefits from Ivermectin.
There is already a 97% decline in cases in New Delhi, India. Indeed, four other Indian states that are using Ivermectin now report decreases in cases by 60% to 95%. However, other states that have blocked the use of Ivermectin have increases in cases by several hundred percent – the exponential explosion that everyone is terrified of!
As The Desert Review says in their report, “It is a clear refutation of the WHO, FDA, NIH, and CDC’s policies of ‘wait at home until you turn blue’ before you get treatment.”
Before you buy into the criticism that these are only “observational studies” and haven’t been tested by large scale, randomized control trials approved by the WHO, CDC, NIH, FDA etc. it’s important to realize that the only type of studies that are apparently good enough for such institutions these days are those which are so large and complex that only multi-national pharmaceutical companies are able to run and fund them.
That said, you should know that 56 studies on Ivermectin, 17 of them being Randomized Control Trials, have clearly demonstrated very positive effects from Ivermectin. A site doing real-time meta-analysis of all the Ivermectin studies as they get published summarizes the results as follows: “100% of the 17 Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) for early treatment and prophylaxis report positive effects, with an estimated improvement of 73% and 83% respectively”.
They also make the point that “The probability that an ineffective treatment generated results as positive as the 56 studies to date is estimated to be 1 in 2 trillion (p = 0.00000000000041).” You can check this information yourself directly on their site (Source: https://ivmmeta.com).
Another effective protocol for prophylaxis and early treatment of COVID-19 is Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) with Zinc. As of this writing, 248 trials of HCQ used for treating COVID-19 have been completed, by 3,972 scientists, with 378,812 patients. We can see 66% improvement in 26 early treatment trials, 75% improvement in 11 early treatment mortality results, and 24% improvement in 35 randomized controlled trials. These results are publicly available on a database that is tracking all HCQ studies to date. You can see those studies here at https://c19hcq.com.
There are also a number of other effective treatments for COVID-19 that we don’t have space for here.
What’s important to understand is that these effective treatments have been used since mid-2020. Which raises a very important point. If these treatments are so effective, why haven’t we heard about them? Why aren’t they being used everywhere? It appears that, for some reason, information about the effectiveness of these treatments is being suppressed.
For instance, “Fact checkers” will tell you that HCQ or Ivermectin aren’t authorized by major institutions like the FDA, CDC, or WHO (as if such organizations are supposed to set and police policy rather than simply providing guidance). They will also try to discount any positive results using ad hominem attacks and smears, such as pointing out that a person using one of these treatments may have at some time in the past, voiced “anti-vaccine sentiments” (whatever that may be). You can see an example here: https://factcheck.afp.com/ivermectin-and-hydroxychloroquine-are-not-proven-covid-19-treatments
The censorship extends to Social Media. A whole list of front-line doctors who have successfully used some of these treatments have had their accounts removed from Social Media platforms, simply because information they provided about their successes was deemed “contrary to guidelines from the WHO” by the various Big Tech platforms. I have personally witnessed the de-platforming of literally dozens of highly respected, professional, front line doctors and researchers.
De-platforming is not the only concern. It appears that in the attempts to discredit effective treatments for COVID-19, anything goes. A study which came out in The Lancet mid-2020 supposedly showing that HCQ was dangerous was subsequently withdrawn due to the study being fraudulent.
Sadly, this withdrawal happened only after the damage was done, and HCQ had been successfully kicked to the curb in many places around the world – even up to the point that in some jurisdictions doctors could be jailed for prescribing it!
You may ask: “How did these studies that were apparently designed to falsify the effects of a widely used drug, pass peer review in the world’s premier medical science journals – The Lancet as well as The New England Journal of Medicine ?” The details of this sordid tale can be found here:
https://ahrp.org/the-lancet-published-a-fraudulent-study-editor-calls-it-department-of-error/
If one digs, it appears that the main reason that we have not heard of these effective treatments is that the WHO and the CDC and other major institutions do not approve of the use of any alternative treatments, unless these are being tested in a clinical trial (which it seems only they can approve of). For instance, the US National Institutes for Health (NIH) guidelines state: “The COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel (the Panel) recommends against the use of any drugs for SARS-CoV-2 pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), except in a clinical trial (AIII).” See the PDF document here: https://files.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/guidelines/covid19treatmentguidelines.pdf
This is indeed strange, especially in the middle of a pandemic. One would expect that, in order to save patient lives, doctors would look for and try medicines that might possibly work, as long as there were no safety issues. When clearly there is evidence of no-harm, and increasingly powerful evidence that certain treatments can save lives, it would be highly unethical for Doctors NOT to start using such treatments. Doctors use medicines for purposes other than those listed on the label all the time!
Since Ivermectin and HCQ are both on the WHO list of essential medicines and have been so for a long time – decades in the case of HCQ – the world knows about the safety and dosage of these medicines. As an example, since 1992, Ivermectin has only been linked to 16 deaths, whereas deaths linked to the COVID-19 vaccines are now in the thousands (information from the Uppsala Drug Monitoring Centre run by the WHO (https://www.who-umc.org) via Prof Paul Marik, Chief of Critical Care & Pulmonary Medicine, EVM, USA).
Clearly, something appears very much out of balance here. There ARE effective treatments for COVID-19, yet the institutions that we rely on for medical guidance appear to be ignoring, or even suppressing these treatments – even though they are known to be safe after many decades of use. Despite their known safety, neither Ivermectin nor HCQ have been able to obtain even an EAU (Emergency Use Authorization)!
At the same time, new creations that have only had very limited testing, and for which the safety cannot be known in such a short period of time, are approved for emergency use.
The world economy is now in dire straits, with entire populations having been essentially under house arrest for the better part of 18 months. People continue to die from (or with) COVID-19 without treatments being available. And we are now seeing important examples of breakout infections in people who have already been vaccinated against COVID-19. As Reuters reported just a few days ago, “Hundreds of vaccinated Indonesian health workers get COVID-19, dozens in hospital”. This is just one many similar news stories reporting the very same phenomenon.
According to the pharmaceutical manufacturers themselves, the current range of emergency use vaccines do not actually provide immunity and only “reduce severe symptoms” of COVID-19. While this issue has yet to be fully resolved, many in the mainstream are still claiming that these vaccines will “inoculate” the recipient against the novel coronavirus. Therefore, these jabs should rightly be categorised as a type of treatment against the disease of COVID-19, and not a vaccine against the said pathogen, the SARSCoV2 coronavirus.
It goes without saying that the wide availability of cheap and effective drug treatments for COVID would severely undermine the widely touted mainstream claim that mass-vaccinations are the only solution to slowing down or ‘defeating’ a supposed global pandemic.
Clearly, effective treatments are absolutely required at this point. The good news is that there are such treatments available.
With effective treatments in hand, the global COVID-19 situation could end in as little as a few weeks. The world CAN return to normal. Sadly, there seem to be forces at work blocking such an outcome.
We need to ask: why are these effective treatments not being allowed in so many places? Why is information about these treatments being suppressed? Perhaps the fact that treatments like Ivermectin and HCQ are off patent and extremely cheap might give us a clue.
***
Author Chris Lonsdale is a psychologist, linguist, educator, entrepreneur, dialogue facilitator and corporate advisor with over thirty years experience doing business in Asia.
July 15, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | CDC, Covid-19, HCQ, Ivermectin, NIH, WHO |
Leave a comment
THIS week we’ve been making a concerted plea to parents and all adults to resist or counter any suggestion by the Government or schools or any other institutions that children need to be, or should be, vaccinated for Covid.
On Monday we published a tour de force by Belinda Brown, a researcher, writer and mother, concerned that mothers and families were in ignorance of the facts. She set out the key reasons why child vaccination should not even be mooted.
Yesterday we featured a film made by doctors who are mothers, explaining why they, with their medical knowledge, would not let their own children be vaccinated.
Today I want to share with you a report entitled Covid-19 Vaccines and Children: A Scientist’s Guide for Parents. It is authored by Dr Byram Bridle of the Canadian Covid Care Alliance – a group of doctors, scientists and health practitioners committed to providing independent, evidence-based information about Covid.
Dr Bridle’s paper consists of more than 40 pages with appendices and it is worth reading thoroughly.
He starts with the key point that ‘authorisation under interim order’ – the basis on which the vaccines have been rushed out – means that ‘additional information is needed on the safety, efficacy, and quality of the vaccine, including in children and adolescents, to support the future full market approval and licensing of the vaccine’.
This in itself really should be sufficient to dissuade any moral and rational adult from dreaming of imposing a vaccine on a child for an infection from which they are at no risk or negligible risk.
Dr Bridle goes on to explain that key safety studies appear to have been missed in the clamour to roll out the vaccines and that, as reported in TCW by Neville Hodgkinson, more is being learned about the vaccines every day.
The most important aspect of this is that the spike protein generated by the vaccine is not just an antigen that is recognised by the immune system as being foreign. In addition, it ‘can interact with receptors throughout the body, called ACE2 receptors, potentially causing undesirable effects such as damage to the heart and cardiovascular system, blood clots, bleeding, and neurological effects’.
Dr Bridle concludes that ‘the current scientific uncertainties demand that the administration of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine to children, adolescents, and young adults of child-bearing age be paused until proper scientific studies that focus on the safety and pharmacokinetics and biodistribution of the vaccines and the vaccine encoded spike protein can be conducted’.
He explains furthermore that there is no safety issue with this course of action, because:
• The risk of severe and potentially lethal Covid-19 in these specific populations is so low that we need to be very certain that risks associated with mass vaccination are not higher.
• Asymptomatic members of this population are not a substantial risk for passing Covid-19 to others.
• There are effective early-treatment strategies for the very few children, adolescents, and young adults of childbearing age who may be at risk of developing severe Covid-19, such as ivermectin, fluvoxamine, and budesonide.
This is the most authoritative ‘science’ guide I have found. It is what I forward to people who say they trust the Government and who think scientists are agreed.
This is the document I forward to friends and relations who question young adults for refusing vaccination or add to the pressure on them to do so. Since they make this their business, I make it mine to send them this fully referenced piece of dispassionate scientific analysis!
July 15, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine |
Leave a comment
Aletho News
Aletho News 