The Times is reporting this morning that social distancing measures will be with us until at least Autumn to reduce the transmission of Covid-19. Government sources told the newspaper that some restrictions might remain in place for the whole of 2021. The paper reported:
“The thinking is that social distancing will need to be in place for a long time to come,” a Whitehall source said. “It has repercussions for the scale of any reopening. Restaurants, pubs and offices will all need to be Covid-secure.”
Ministers believe it will allow other controls to be relaxed. A government source said: “The more restrictions we have in place like social distancing rules the more we can do in terms of easing.”
SAGE member Jeremy Farrar said that it is believed that there are around 750,000 Covid cases in the country. SAGE (the scientists advising the government), is recommending that lockdown measures remain in place until there are significantly less than 10,000 cases in total. Farrar, speaking on BBC Radio 4 said:
“If transmission were still at this level and we were not in lockdown, we would be going into lockdown. We’ve got to get it lower, we’ve got to get it, in my view, into the single thousands before we can possibly think of lifting restrictions. I appreciate that businesses have to plan and everything else. But the data has to drive us, and in 2020 we lifted restrictions too quickly when the data would not really have allowed that and as a result the transmission went back up in this country.”
Farrar’s SAGE colleague Professor John Edmunds, appearing on ITV’s Peston show, said that most of the current restrictions on daily life are likely to be in force until the end of this year, while wearing masks on public transport and indoors could possibly be in place “forever.”
If Jeremy Farrar is right and it’s a big if, and there really are 750,000 coronavirus cases in the UK right now, the great majority of them are asymptomatic people, who tested positive after a PCR test. Leaving aside the redundant, completely unreliable PCR test for a minute, the point is, these people are not sick. This is something the public has struggled to comprehend. Cases do not equate to illness.
The entire hoax hinges on this. Every day, the media gives the latest score. It goes something like this. “Yesterday there were 13,400 new coronavirus cases in the UK and 670 people died within 28 days of a positive test.” It’s the same every day of the week. I call it rinse and repeat journalism. Joe public hears 13,000 plus cases and believes that we are living through a plague, despite the fact that there is nothing wrong with the vast majority of those who have tested positive via the debunked PCR test.
He hears 670 deaths and said like that it sounds terrifying. But it’s deaths for “any reason” within four weeks of a positive test. If you drop dead of a stroke in that time, they’ll add you to the Covid death stats. If you have a brain haemorrhage and fall down dead, you’re added to the Covid death list. It is a hoax. I cannot put it any other way.
The government’s scientific advisers know this. They have not made a mistake here. They’re not simply applying the precautionary principle. They KNOW the truth, which makes them unimaginably evil. This is not about a virus. It never has been. The mainstream media is your enemy. It knows the truth too and works day and night to keep you in the dark. There are thousands of doctors and scientists, from some of the worlds most prestigious universities, calling out this hoax. But the media has denounced them as Covid deniers and banned them from the airwaves. I never saw this coming.
February 12, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, UK |
Leave a comment
“Non-pharmaceutical” interventions do not work, and are doing far more harm than good

I have chosen to write this text in addition to our two earlier contributions because of the development of the “second wave” which came afterward, and in reaction to the current relentless accumulation of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs, also called corona, “social” or lockdown measures).
These are characterized by separation/isolation of human beings through the application of masks, distance maintenance between people, stay-at-home orders and business closures.
An important study in Frontiers in Public Health on the data delivered by 160 countries has found no correlation between death rate and stringency of lockdown measures[1].
Another study showed no significant benefits of stay-at-home order and business closure on epidemic case growth[2].
The following two examples confirm these results: a country with low lockdown stringency like Sweden has at the moment the same fatality rate per million inhabitants as France, but lower than Spain, Italy and UK, where severe lockdown measures were applied.
In addition, Sweden has had for the second wave a much smaller excess mortality than France, Italy or Spain, an observation which allows one to suspect that lockdown measures are delaying the establishment of herd immunity. This is not desirable, as the time during which the old, sick and frail can be exposed to the virus gets longer.
As NPIs are imposed in an overloaded ambiance of viral threat, they are additionally in position to activate destructive neuro-immunological mechanisms as well as to trigger secondary deleterious psycho-social, medical and economic developments5. Both have a direct effect on population mortality.
Analyses indicate that at least a third, and possibly more than half, of the observed excess mortality may be caused by the applied measures[3][4]. Measure-based mortality will proceed and may even accelerate if the fear-mongering stays and no end to the nightmare is presented to a now chronically overloaded population.
We are in the typical context of a “self-fulfilling prophecy”, where, through neuro-immunological overresponses, physical immobilization, social isolation and socio-economic difficulties, the death toll gets maximized and the expected death prophecy confirmed.
This requires then the maintenance and even increase of measures, and explains why people questioning their necessity are swiftly qualified as fools, idiots, conspiracy theorists or even murderers (heartlessly risking lives).
For almost a year, cultivated virus hysteria has fuelled the belief in a necessity to suppress “Covid19”.
Epidemiological models, revealed regularly as strongly pessimistic, justify preemptive NPIs even if collected data show positive reassuring evolutions. These measures are presented as unavoidable parts of the fight to be held, and are applied relentlessly without questioning their efficiency (see reference [1]), and without considering, as mentioned above, their lethality.
PCR tests are enacted for the whole population, with their extreme sensitivity and false positives5, maintaining in the population the awareness of the dreadful presence of the virus. The fact that a large percentage (88% in Italy) of deaths happened in the presence of corona (but not due to corona) in the context of end-of-life situations is not considered.
Science moves on to find new threat markers, like the reproduction factor R and recently the rise of mutated virus variants. Thoughts and emotions remain focalized on covid-19 and its threat, taken out of the regular context of the normal human/virus interactions.
For example, tests of corona presence have never been performed before to establish what normality is along the year, and variants can be seen as the logical and usual answer of viruses to the development of human herd immunity.
In our county of Solothurn in Switzerland, 2,662 deaths have been reported for 2020[5], among which 219 were attributed to covid-19 and of these 211 were living in nursing homes[6]. Median age of covid-19 death in Switzerland is 86 years old[7], and the rate of significant premorbidities is very high (97% with at least one premorbidity).
Switzerland, in spite of a clear-cut “second wave”, has experienced no excess mortality for ages below 65, and even for 70 and above, a correction for the increasing size of this old age group shows no excess mortality for 2020[4], and a lower mortality in 2020 than in 2012, 2013 and 20156. Finally, for the whole swiss population, the total death rate per 100,000 inhabitants was the same in 2003 and even higher in 2000[8].
Where do we find, here and around the world, any motivation and necessity to limit the professional and social activities of a whole population for now almost a year?
Should we have locked populations in the past during former flu epidemics? Obviously no.
Shall we have to do that in the future? How long can our human environment resist such heavy, deleterious and questionable measures? And when shall the people of the world get their basic human rights and freedom back?
Of course, fear takes the best out of us, and nobody is to blame for damages produced unwillingly and under the pressure of fear.
There is, alas, no doubt about the following fact: modern, technological medicine often lacks the compassionate therapeutic dimension one expects from it, and presents the unpleasant tendency to promote huge profits through drugs and medical-technical products, with less than appropriate up to fraudulent practices[9][10]
Fraud resides in the highest levels, as exemplified by the recent withdrawal of a fraudulent article from the famous journal the Lancet[11]. This article claimed wrongly the inefficiency and dangers of a plant-based, well known, efficient and inexpensive medication.
A proper decision and information strategy in the corona crisis would have been to open the scientific, political and public debate to different views, with the goal to come up together to a balanced, consensual program, in which nobody is right or wrong and all agree to have worked together on the best possible solutions.
It is extremely counterproductive and dogmatic to promote the exclusive value of the dominant view, proposed by governments and their scientific task forces and widely distributed by the media. Other views are being seen as unacceptable, not-an-option, or even ethically wrong.
Why propagate the idea the whole world needs to be vaccinated against covid-19 in the context of the above-mentioned epidemic data? What of the recent confirmation, published by the WHO and authored by Dr. Ioannidis[12], of a general average case fatality ratio of 0.23% (analyzed from 61 studies), in the range of a flu epidemic?
In addition, to the contrary of what the WHO has proposed recently, we may strongly consider that the natural herd immunization process, established by life processes along millennia, and non-dangerous for the immense majority of the active population below 65, will be more efficient than any vaccination.
Finally, the essential role of physical and emotional health as protections against severe infectious developments has been dramatically ignored in favour of medical technical interventions, precipitating many human beings into severe disease evolutions by physical inactivity and social isolation.
Our governments should contribute to protect without coercion the old, sick and frail and free the rest of the population from all general NPIs. We have all learned what to do in winter with our old and frail parents, who particularly need our presence and can decide for themselves what they prefer: state-imposed protection, or an evening to their life surrounded by their beloved ones.
Numerous human beings have died these last months in appalling physical and emotional conditions, immobilized in their rooms and isolated from families and friends. This has lasted long enough and should be considered as inhumane and stopped. The Great Barrington Declaration enacts the reduction of measures to “focal” protection. It was proposed by 3 epidemiologists from Harvard, Stanford and Oxford and has collected more than 50,000 signatures from medical and public health scientists and medical practitioners as well as from more than 700,000 concerned citizens.
The people need to regain their democratic rights and freedom of decision without delay.
With courage and scientific data at hand, we should stop hiding away from the virus on the order of our governments. We should trust nature that things will balance back to normal, instead of tampering chaotically and arrogantly with the natural dynamics regulating the human/virus interactions.
The relentless, never-ending confinement measures have led to the appearance of a host of absurd, even pathetic measures and situations, with some citizens wearing masks alone in their own cars, or jogging masked and alone in the countryside… I have heard many people around me wonder if they were not in a nightmare or a bad movie.
We need to wake up and work to fix this.
Daniel Jeanmonod MD, Professor Emeritus of Neurosurgery at Zürich University and Physiology & Neuroscience at New York University.
February 12, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine |
Leave a comment
Good to see you again. It’s been a while. You’re here because your employer wants you to get tested?
That’s right, Doctor. It’s more or less an order. If I don’t comply, I can’t work for the company. I lose my job.
And you don’t want to get tested?
I have problems with the test.
What problems?
The number of cycles.
Excuse me?
Doctor, you’re aware they run the PCR test in cycles?
Sorry, never heard of that. What are you talking about?
Well, they take a swab sample from me. Then they amplify a tiny, tiny part of the sample many times. That’s what the test does. Each leap in amplification is called a cycle.
Fascinating.
The number of cycles determines the outcome. If they run the test at 36 cycles or higher, the result is meaningless. But at those high levels, there are many, many false positives. So I could easily register as “infected by the virus,” if the lab uses too many cycles.
Where are you getting all this information?
From a number of sources.
Name one.
Anthony Fauci.
Really?
Yes, Doctor. Let me read you a statement he made. July 16, 2020. “…If you get [perform the test at] a cycle threshold of 35 or more…the chances of it being replication-competent [aka accurate] are miniscule…you almost never can culture virus [detect a true positive result] from a 37 threshold cycle…even 36…”
Hmm. And how many of these cycles are labs using when they run the test?
The FDA and the CDC recommend up to 40 cycles, to look for evidence of the virus.
You’re sure you’re not overthinking all this?
No, Doctor, I’m not. It’s very straightforward.
The reason I ask—if what you’re saying is true, then millions of people have been wrongly diagnosed with COVID-19. Do you realize that?
I do. But right now, I’m worried about what’s going to happen to me if I take the test.
I’m not sure what you want me to do.
Well, I was hoping to get a note from you saying that I shouldn’t take the test. That there is a good chance of a false positive result.
I couldn’t do that.
Why not?
Because I would be making a blanket statement against the test, by implication.
And then?
The state medical board could yank my license to practice medicine.
Does the truth matter? Do facts matter?
Let me be frank. I think you’re misinterpreting what you’ve been reading.
Why do you say that?
Because if you’re right, the medical experts would all be wrong. And I don’t think they are. The test is valid.
How do you know?
Because they wouldn’t make such a gigantic mistake.
People do make mistakes. Even experts. Would you like to see my documentation?
That’s not necessary. You might be caught up in medical disinformation. It’s rampant these days. You should follow the guidelines. Go ahead, take the test. That would be my recommendation.
If the result is a false positive, I’d have to self-isolate for a week or two. Other people would have to move out of my home. They would have to get tested, too. And if I come down with a cough, or chills and fever, there would be a lot of pressure on me to get treated. You know, with toxic drugs, like remdesivir. When, actually, all I have is a common cold.
You’re jumping to all sorts of conclusions. I think you should speak with a COVID counselor. And maybe, a short course of therapy would help, too.
You mean psychological therapy?
I could refer you to a good person.
You think I’m a little nuts?
Just off-kilter. It happens. People with uninformed opinions can be persuasive. Perhaps you’re “under their influence.”
Or maybe you are, Doctor. Many so-called experts are uninformed.
I resent that. I spend every day helping people to the best of my ability. It’s not easy these days, believe me. I use every bit of my knowledge and experience to make a difference.
Well, then, you know how I feel when you suggest I’ve become mentally unbalanced.
There’s a difference. I’m offering a professional opinion. In this area, you’re not a professional.
I’m offering to show you evidence, documents. You don’t want to look at them. They might upset your apple cart.
They won’t.
How do you know?
Because I follow the highest authorities. The FDA, the CDC, the World Health Organization. I’m on very solid scientific and legal ground.
Legal ground? Are you suggesting I might sue you? Rest assured, I would never waste my time and energy. You’re golden. You’re protected. But that doesn’t mean you have your facts right.
You know, your wife and sister called the office. They said they want me to talk you out of your misguided opinions. They’re worried about you.
Here’s something else you can add to my pile of ideas. Testing labs never tell the patient or the doctor how many cycles they’re using in the PCR test. You can check with your staff. You won’t find that number on any of the lab reports.
We use an excellent lab. I don’t have any doubts about their work.
So you’ve got things buttoned up. You’re perfect.
I’m sad to say this is our last appointment. I won’t be seeing you anymore as a patient. When you find a new physician, let our office know, and we’ll forward your medical files to him or her.
Very good, Doctor. You pass.
What…? What are you talking about?
I’m now working as a contact tracer. I was asked to come in and ask you some questions and feel you out on the testing issue. The state medical board received a complaint from one of your patients, a John Jones.
I WAS CLEARED BY THE BOARD ON THAT MATTER MONTHS AGO. Mr. Jones came to my house at 4AM on a Sunday morning. He was hysterical. He’d heard that while he’d been sitting in my waiting room one afternoon, there was another patient there who subsequently tested positive for the virus. Mr. Jones was afraid he might have caught COVID from that patient. But you see, that other patient never tested positive. It was all a rumor. And my wife and I were out of town the weekend Mr. Jones came to my house. We were out of cell phone range. My service should have picked up his call, but for some reason they didn’t.
Yes, Doctor, we know all that. Nevertheless, we wanted to check up on you. Just to make sure.
I don’t appreciate this. We’re not living in a police state.
Actually, in some respects, we are. It’s necessary.
All that information you’ve just been feeding me about the test, the cycles, Fauci, the labs, and so on—
It’s all true. But we have to ignore it.
WHAT?
This is a State of Emergency. And in this situation, we need to follow orders. If we don’t, the whole system falls apart, and we’d be swimming in chaos.
What??
Don’t worry, Doctor. As I said, you’re golden. You’re protected. Unless you’re upset by what I just confided to you.
No… no… I’m fine. I was shocked to find out you’re operating undercover, so to speak. Since you’ve been a patient of mine.
I understand. All you need to do is stay on the straight and narrow. You back us up, we back you up.
Of course… thank you.
No problem. I’ll be going now. We’re all in the new normal these days. You never know who’s going to walk in your door. If you ever feel you’re experiencing onset symptoms of paranoia, I suggest you see a psychiatrist. I could recommend a very good man…
February 12, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19 |
Leave a comment

Millionaires want to make money. Billionaires want to make history. We may add that multi-billionaires take it further; they want mankind to adapt to their needs and wishes. As for people who control trillions, why, they care about our wishes as much as we care about ants while sweeping the garden. We do not apply ant-killer until anthills encroach on our flowerbeds; but we do not hesitate if we deem it necessary. Mankind came across many megalomaniacs; some of them had a lot of power. Genghis Khan was one. However, they were always territorially limited. Mighty Genghis could send tremors all the way to Rome, but the English and French didn’t have to care about the rising Mongol empire. New super-tycoons have no such limitations. Globalisation has allowed them to think outside the box. Their moves had been long anticipated by cinema, the world of dreams. As dreams allow a psychologist to ponder man’s desires and fears, cinematography offers insights into the collective ego of mankind. What did we fear in the relatively free Seventies?
A classic villain of 1970s and 80s was the evil tycoon. James Bond took on some of them. Meet Hugo Drax of the Moonraker, or Karl Stromberg of The Spy Who Loved Me; these guys were willing to destroy mankind to replace it with a better version. Stromberg planned to trigger a global nuclear war and survive it underwater. Drax intended to poison mankind with his deadly gas and repopulate the world with his new chosen ones. Another one was de Wynter, the super-villain of The Avengers, played by Sean Connery. He controlled the world weather, and could kill us all off by hurricanes and tsunamis.
Before the tycoons, when the Cold war raged, a villain was a KGB agent or a Chinese operative. As détente calmed relations between the blocks, the agents went out of fashion; later, the fantastic villains of Marvel came into a vogue. The evil tycoons were uncomfortably close to the real thing; and they moved from the cinematic world into our reality.
The world we live in is the world formed by evil tycoons. They are the modern Demiurges, the evil creators of the Gnostics, an early sect that confronted the Church. Like the Demiurges, they are practically omnipotent; stronger than the State. The government needs lot of permissions and authorisations to spend a penny. If a penny had been misspent, the dark word ‘corruption’ will sound. ‘Corruption’ is a silly concept; by applying it, the oligarchs eliminated state competition, for they can pay whatever they want to whomever they wish. The State must observe intricate arcane rules, while the tycoons have no such limits. As a result, they shape our minds and lives, making the State a poor legitimate king among powerful and wealthy barons.
The Corona crisis is a result of their activity. Now, a group of WHO scientists completed its four weeks inspection tour of Wuhan trying to find out how the virus found its way to humans; some of them think (as President Trump did) the virus escaped the Wuhan Lab. Matt Ridley of The Daily Telegraph concluded his piece analysing their findings: “A growing number of top experts [he provides the list] say that a lab leak remains a plausible scientific hypothesis to be investigated”. It is rather unlikely, said the WHO, but other explanations (pangolins etc) also border on the improbable. The Chinese are understandably upset. Hua Chunying, the spokeswoman for the Foreign Affairs ministry (the Chinese counterpart for the State Department’s Ned Price) rejected the idea saying, “The United States should open the biological lab at Fort Detrick, and invite WHO experts to conduct origin-tracing in the United States”. The Guardian report said she promoted “a conspiracy theory that it came from a US army lab”; while Ms Hua accused the US of spreading “conspiracy theories and lies” tracing the source to Wuhan. Whatever we say is a fact-based result of diligent research; whatever you say is a conspiracy theory – both the US and China representatives subscribe to this mantra.
Our own Ron Unz made an excellent analysis of these accusations and counter-accusations in his April 2020 piece. He noted that the virus attack in Wuhan took place at the worst possible time and place for the Chinese; therefore, an incidental release (or intentional release by the Chinese) is extremely unlikely. Ron Unz suggested that it was an American biowarfare attack upon China. Didn’t American people suffer from the disease? Yes, the US government is “grotesquely and manifestly incompetent” and they were likely to expect “a massive coronavirus outbreak in China would never spread back to America”.
Perhaps, but a better explanation is that some evil tycoon(s) played the part of Karl Stromberg who intended to nuke both Moscow and New York causing war and world-wide devastation, as in the James Bond movie. It could be somebody like Bill Gates, who is a major investor in Wuhan Lab. A fact-checking site with its weasel language admitted that the Lab “has received funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, but Bill Gates can hardly be called a “partner” in the laboratory.” Sure, not a partner. Just an investor, and that is more important than a partner. And he is not the only one; other multi-billionaires also are involved in bioresearch, in vaccine manufacturing, in Big Pharma. “Glaxo, BlackRock, and Bill Gates are all partners, but not owners of Pfizer”, says another fact-checker. “In 2015, Anthony Fauci did issue a USD 3.7 million grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but not to “create the coronavirus” – the fact-checking site adds. Well, you could not possibly expect Fauci to word the grant in such a straightforward way, could you?
Perhaps it is too formidable a job even for an evil tycoon like Gates. A plot of several evil tycoons is more likely. Together, they could try to change the world and mankind to suit them.
The evil tycoons could poison China on their New Year holiday and take this uppity state down a ring or two. They could import the virus into the US to undermine and remove Trump whom they hated. (He was certain to win the elections but for Corona.) They could poison Europe to weaken it and make it more docile and obedient to their demands – and to buy their assets on the cheap. Corona and lockdown did not harm them for they are normally withdrawn from the bustle of the common man’s life.
The billionaires control the media; that much we know, and the part media has played in the Corona crisis was enormous. The media coverage of the crisis has a huge hidden cost. Try to publish information you consider important on the front page of a newspaper. It will cost you a lot. Still, all newspapers belonging to the Billionaires’ Media block beginning with the New York Times and ending with Haaretz gave at least a third of its front page to Corona news each day. The sheer cost of this advertising runs into billions. Will we ever know who paid for it?
Steven Soderbergh’s (2011) film Contagion predicted many features of the Covid-19, notably the origin of the virus. In the film, the disease originates from bats in China and is spread through markets where contaminated pork meat is sold. How could Soderbergh (or his script writer Scott Z. Burns) possibly know eight years before the event that the contagion should originate in the Chinese bats? Who told him? Wouldn’t you expect he knew something? Burns was instructed by WHO experts, the CNN site explains. Isn’t it interesting that the same Bill Gates is a major donor of WHO? Is it entirely impossible that already in 2011 Gates’ people began to leak some details of the future virus through their own WHO to Hollywood?
The tycoons could force a weak state to follow their instructions. Scientists do obey orders: otherwise, no grants, no positions. In April 2020, the German scientists were ordered, “to instill the fear of Corona”. And they did it, as we learned this week, producing numbers of dead on demand.
It seems that tycoons gained most from the Corona Crisis. Their assets grew by trillions, while the assets of the middle classes decreased by the same amount. More importantly, all states suffered from the crisis; they took loans and credit, they were responsible for their citizens’ health, while billionaires just had fun and enjoyed it. For this reason, I tend to dismiss the case against states, be it the US or China, while (some) billionaires appear the only possible villains.
These billionaires are able to influence people much better that the state. Consider Pierre Omidyar. Besides being the owner of eBay, he is the force behind hundreds of NGOs. His organisations form the ‘progressive’ agenda and train the foot soldiers of the Green Deal. Roslyn Fuller of Spiked-online checked the plethora of NGOs he employs.
She says his NGOs and charities are “engaged in ‘social engineering’ – that is, using their resources to artificially change the structure of society to how they think it should be. If successful this would amount to an extreme circumvention of democracy, utilising money not just to win elections, but to substitute paid or subsidised content for actual support, and thereby flip an entire political culture on to a different track by amplifying some voices and drowning out others.”
He is just one of the Masters of Discourse, next to the infamous George Soros. Facebook, Google, Twitter and Amazon are even more powerful. The billionaires have immense clout and they decide what we can and can’t say and write. Just last week Amazon banned my Cabbala of Power, a book that was sold by them for some ten years. The estimable The Unz Review is banned on Facebook and shadow-banned on Google. Twitter switched-off President Trump, showing who is the real boss of the United States. Probably almost all movements described as ‘leftists’ nowadays are engineered by the tycoons like Omidyar or Soros. True left had been left for dead on the battlefield of ideas.
The tycoons are directly involved in the Corona Crisis, because its results are good for them. And it means they have us where they want to have us, and they won’t let us out. We are cancelled until we regain the government and cancel them.
SAGE, as British Corona management team rather presumptuously named itself (it included the ridiculous figure of Neil Ferguson, he of the millions of predicted deaths), already declared that lockdowns will be a part of British life for years to come, vaccine or no vaccine. The Guardian, the Voice of the Oligarchs, gently pooh-poohed them, for it is not good to declare what must happen right away. Let people have some hope, so they run to vaccinate themselves, and then only afterwards can we reveal that, sorry, it does not help, you still have to don a mask and observe social distance and, yes, suffer lockdowns. “It’s much easier to follow the rules if we think of them as temporary.”
The plotters’ plans aren’t secret; they were described by Klaus Schwab in his book The Great Reset. Schwab is not a great thinker, being merely a weak scientist with just a few publications, and not a good or even decent writer. He had to collaborate with a journalist Thierry Malleret to produce the book. He is just a voice for the tycoons. But the question is, will he/they get what they want?
My preliminary answer is No. We recently had an important event, Davos-2021, the online gathering of tycoons and their intellectual henchmen. For the first time in many years, they invited Vladimir Putin. Chairman Xi gave the first talk. The idea was to demonstrate that Russia and China agree to their plans. I was very worried, I must admit, and the Chinese leader’s speech didn’t calm me (as opposed to our friend Pepe Escobar who celebrated his appearance). Yes, Xi said China will proceed at its own speed and by its own route but towards the same goals. Sustainable, inclusive, all the dog-whistle words were there. I expected an even worse talk by Putin. For years he has wanted to be invited and co-opted by the Western decision-makers, and here was a great opportunity to jump on their bandwagon.
Putin surprised me. He flatly refused the offer of Schwab and his ilk. He condemned the manner of recent pre-Covid growth, for all the growth went into a few deep pockets. Moreover, he noted that digital tycoons are dangerous for the world. In his own words, “Modern technological giants, especially digital companies, are de facto competing with states. In the opinion of these companies, their monopoly is optimal. Maybe so but society is wondering whether such monopolism meets public interests”.
The tycoons were probably amazed. In 2007 in Munich, they laughed at him. Max Boot, a Russian Jewish émigré, called Putin, “The louse that roared” and added, “in Putin’s sinister and absurd rhetoric, you can hear an empire dying”. Mad Max didn’t know yet which empire is dying.
Putin was supposed to be softened up by pro-Navalny demos on January 23 (The Davos talk was on January 27), but he was not. Quite the reverse. The Russian President does not like to be pushed. The demo on January 31 was met with force; those detained were sentenced to heavy (by Russian standards) fines. Three European diplomats were expelled from Russia for joining the demonstration. Josep Borrell, a Spanish diplomat and a representative of the EU, went to Moscow and was harshly treated. In the concluding press-conference, the Russian minister for foreign affairs Sergey Lavrov told the press that Russia does not (repeat, not) consider the EU to be a “reliable partner”. The expulsions were carried out at the same time. In addition, Putin warned the West that ‘sanctions’ (acts of economic warfare) could cause Russia to use direct military force. It was probably the first such warning since 1968.
At the same time, Russia practically ended corona restrictions. Bars and restaurants have been opened for night revellers; sport events have returned; schools are open; in some parts of Russia, the masks became “recommended” instead of “compulsory”. Russians are now allowed to travel and return freely from many countries. The Russians have easy access for their vaccine Sputnik-V that was deemed by The Lancet the best of all existing Corona vaccines. It is a coup comparable to the first Sputnik launched in 1957, the Western experts said. Thus Russia has derailed the Grand Reset.
This development had caused a huge shift in consciousness in Russia. If until now (since 1970, at least) the Russian educated classes tended to feel inferior to the West, the prosperous lands of the free, then this has now changed. One of the leading Russian theatre directors, Constantine Bogomolov declared that the West is undone. The West’s compulsory political correctness, its culture-cancelling, its kneeling and boot-licking of BLM, its cult of transgenders, its fear of ‘harassment’ and sex, its obligatory smile, its wokeness, its fear of death (and of life!), are comparable to the behaviour of Alex, the victim of Clockwork Orange therapy, said Bogomolov.
The young man [Alex] does not just get rid of aggression – he is sick of music, he cannot see a naked woman, sex disgusts him. And in response to the blow, he licks the boot of the striker. The modern West is such a criminal who has undergone chemical castration and lobotomy. Hence this false smile of goodwill and all-acceptance, frozen on the face of a Western person. This is not the smile of Culture. It is a smile of degeneration.
He concludes:
The West tells us: Russia is at the tail of progress.
Wrong.
Just by chance, we have found ourselves at the tail of a runaway train, rushing headlong into [Hieronymus] Bosch’s hell, where we will be greeted by smiling multicultural, gender-neutral devils.
We should uncouple our carriage off the train, make a sign of cross and start rebuilding our good old Europe, the Europe we dreamed of. The Europe they have lost.
Take notice of his call to ‘make the sign of the cross’. In the West, the churches are barred, service had been discontinued. The Anglican Church is on the verge of dying, with its Archbishop of Canterbury celebrating BLM, removing statues from the churches, accepting every SAGE edict locking the churches up. Meanwhile Russian churches are all open and worshippers are pouring into their cathedrals every feast and Sunday.
Russian boys and girls are flirting with each other, fearless of MeToo and harassment charges. Russian cafes are open. Whoever wants, can get a jab against Covid, or ignore it.
For the first time in many years, Russia shows the way for the West. This is good. Perhaps, the West, after a long-needed correction, will be able to overtake Russia again. Though Russia showed the way of socialism to Europe, the best results of socialism were achieved elsewhere, in the North of Europe. Good old Europe (and the US, its overseas offshoot) are still able to repeat this feat and get rid of the plotting tycoons and their preaching of compulsory love. At this occasion, perhaps banning all tycoons is a good idea. In the better world before their rise, there were no multi-billionaires. History is not over; we are entering the most interesting part of it. Be of good cheer!
Israel Shamir can be reached at adam@israelshamir.net
February 11, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Facebook, George Soros, Google, Russia, Twitter |
Leave a comment
Queensland University and Oxford University Medical researchers investigating why asthma sufferers were “under-represented” in severe Covid cases have completed a clinical trial of Budesonide asthma inhalers. According to researchers the randomised trial was stopped early, because the results were so remarkable, the researchers did not believe it ethical to deny treatment to placebo patients.
Over-the-counter inhalers suppress severe COVID symptoms, trial finds
By Stuart Layt | February 10, 2021
… QUT associate professor Dan Nicolau, one of the lead researchers on the trial at the University of Oxford, said the results showed the method was extremely effective at preventing severe COVID-19 symptoms.
“When we first began the trial back in March [2020], we were hoping for 50 per cent reduction [in risk of developing serious symptoms], which itself would have been very high,” he said.
“We got 90 per cent, which even with only a few hundred people is off the charts.
“And it’s not just the overall result – their temperatures are less, they get less fever, and they recover faster.”
Professor Nicolau said they realised in the early stages of the pandemic that people with asthma were under-represented in severe and fatal cases of COVID-19. […]
The randomised trial ended up looking at 146 patients, who were given regular doses of either corticosteroid budesonide via an inhaler, or a placebo.
If other teams confirm this finding, it is a remarkable breakthrough. And confirmation should be very straightforward, given the widespread availability of this inhaler.
February 11, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Aletho News | Covid-19 |
Leave a comment
To watch the full length verion of PLannedilLusion Episode 6 visit https://www.plannedillusion.com/specialfeature
For subscriptions visit https://www.subscribestar.com/plannedillusion/subscribe
Dr. Kevin Corbett featured in the latest PLannedilLusion Episode 6.
Here is the full length version of the interview he did for PLannedilLusion 6, detailing why it is reasonable to suggest HIV
was the blueprint for Covid19 and that it was a lab created retro-virus designed for use in the vaccines.
A Jimuphy Production – https://plannedillusion.com
brought to you by https://PLannedSupplies.com
February 10, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Covid-19, HIV |
Leave a comment
Since at least October 2020, some Canadians have been concerned about rumours of Covid-19 “internment camps.” In reality, there may be no barbed wire or gun turrets, but a number of travellers have experienced detention firsthand.
Last October, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked about this. His reply didn’t address the specific claim at hand, instead he spoke generally of “noise and harmful misinformation on the Internet,” and bizarrely urged people to resist “people who would sow chaos within our communities and our democracy.” (I shudder to think which foreign interference he imagined.)
Earlier that month, Ontario member of provincial parliament (MPP) Randy Hillier had asked the province’s legislature about potential “internment camps,” referring to a federal government call for expressions of interest regarding “quarantine/isolation camps throughout every province and every territory in Canada.”
These camps fall under Canada’s Quarantine Act (2005), which specifies that the country can“designate any place in Canada as a quarantine facility.”
So fears of “being confined as a prisoner,” the standard definition of “internment,” can be laid to rest, right?
Well, while a temporary, mandatory, expensive hotel stay certainly isn’t the same as being kept in an internment camp, it is the 2021 plan for travellers flying to Canada, even if they “test negative” for Covid-19.
And many are rightly complaining that it is unlawful and goes against Canadians’ rights, including that those whisked away to secret locations are not given the right to legal counsel, much less right to contact families/friends.
At the end of January 2021, Canada decided to suspend flights to/from Mexico and Caribbean countries, and, effective February 3, implemented the three night stay-at-your-own-expense (or do jail time) hotel quarantine policy for travellers entering Canada with “positive tests” (or the “wrong” negative one). These rules were extended to travellers flying from the US, Central and South America as well.
Trudeau, on January 29, said the cost was expected to be more than Can$2000 (US$1575).
Further, as noted in the government’s news release on these measures, a violation of the quarantine instructions “is also an offence under the Quarantine Act and could lead to serious penalties, including six months in prison and/or $750,000 in fines.”
Whereas until recently it was enough to provide a negative coronavirus test, now travellers to Canada must provide specifically a “negative COVID-19 molecular (PCR) test” or do hotel time at their own expense until receiving such a result.
These new measures have already been trialled on passengers who have recently flown to Canada.
In one instance on January 30, a panicked mother (Rebekah McDonald) spoke of her son being taken away to a quarantine facility, saying, “They won’t let me talk to him. They won’t let me see him. They won’t tell me where he’s going.”
As it later turned out, while the son had complied and done a Covid-19 test (two, actually, the antigen and the PCR), he only had the paperwork for the former, and unbeknownst to him, Canada demanded the latter.
He and others likewise sent to hotel prison could be forgiven for missing the January 7, 2021 Transport Canada update specifying that antigen tests would not be accepted. Just two months prior, Government Canada listed antigen tests as a test for Covid-19.
In Ontario some days later, a passenger (Steve Duesing) also arriving with a negative test was shuttled to an approved quarantine hotel, apparently itself isolated from the public, with a “detention centre feel to it,” to wait for the Government Canada approved test results.
More recently, another passenger (Neil McCullough) subject to Canada’s arbitrary and draconian new rules spent 11 days in hotel isolation, because paperwork for his test didn’t list the clinic’s address.
In the latter case, there was an additional element of totalitarianism: according to McCullough, he and the woman in the next room he tried to speak with were allegedly both informed by the security guard that their quarantine period “would restart” if they didn’t stop talking about their experiences.
Rules for thee, but not…
The government paints its measures as precautions to limit the “spread” of Covid-19, but when numerous government officials themselves have repeatedly violated the regulations, it is clear that they don’t believe in the need for such rules.
This is not about “public safety,” but is about control of the populace.
Patty Hadju, Canada’s minister of health, is quoted as valiantly saying:
“No one should be travelling right now. Each of us has a part in keeping our communities safe, and that means avoiding non-essential travel, which can put you, your loved ones, and your community at risk.”
However, let’s recall that Hadju three times in April 2020 flew “between Ottawa and her home in Thunder Bay,” at a time when she advocated that “now is not the time for gatherings with family and friends. Connect with others with a phone call or video chat instead.”
And actually, she did more of the same in the following months, amounting to at least 11 flights.
The PM himself violated “the rules” over Easter last year, when he took his family, staff and a motorcade across provincial lines to the summer residence (after telling Canadians to suck it up and stay home).
Time will tell if the PM, health minister, and cohorts in positions of authority also violate these newest measures.
Legal action against Trudeau government
The Government Canada page on the new mandate notes that travellers will need to do the PCR test on arrival to Canada (in addition to having already just done it in order to arrive in Canada in the first place). So, according to this logic (and I use that term lightly), even if one has jumped through the absurd 2020 hoops and adapted to the early 2021 hoops, they’ll still need to do expensive hotel time upon arrival in Canada.
In any case, since the PCR test being pushed by Government Canada has long been shown to be unreliable and generate false positives, it thus becomes quite plausible that Canada’s preference of that test is because it will generate more “cases” and thus rack up fear of the pandemic.
An aside: The $2000+ for the three-night stay at government-approved hotels goes towards, Government Canada says, the test, the stay, and “all associated costs for food, cleaning and security.”
And although stays at hotels near airports are never cheap, in this case the food seems to be bordering on prison fare. A photo of Duesing’s Radisson meal shows a skimpy sandwich in a styrofoam container.
On February 3, the Justice Centre For Constitutional Freedoms published an update that it is “preparing to file legal action imminently,” regarding Government Canada’s mandatory hotel quarantine, noting they had “received hundreds of emails” since Canada announced the new travel measures.
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association views these measures as an affront against civilians’ rights:
“The quarantine rules will almost certainly impact those who travel to care for ill relatives or attend funerals, those who travel to receive specialized medical care, and those who have health conditions that will make isolating in a hotel a particularly challenging and potentially dangerous proposition.”
In a follow-up video on February 3, McDonald reflected on the lack of accountability for her son’s detention, with no means to speak to anyone to ask for information or help.
Likewise, McCullough was met with vagueness during his unlawful detention of 11 days.
“When I asked the health nurse who I could call, they just answered, ‘the department of health’ … I had no rights. No one to call, no one was accountable, no option to do anything but go along.”
While Canada’s forced quarantine at travellers’ expense program has been temporarily paused, it is allegedly scheduled to rebegin in the weeks after February 14.
So yes, while these stories of being forcibly locked away with no access to lawyers are happening in hotels and not internment camps, the people being locked up aren’t citizens living under the shining democracy of Trudeau’s fantasy world.
Canadians are right to be worried about what comes next, including potentially outsourcing the 11 federally run (non-hotel) quarantine sites to a “third party service provider.”
As with the government’s other totalitarian Covid-19 policies, Canadians have no say in the matter, as their lives become increasingly controlled, and destroyed, by these policies.
Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist and activist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years). Follow her on Twitter @EvaKBartlett
February 10, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties | Canada, Covid-19, Human rights |
Leave a comment
My great friend Jeananne Crowley said to me on the phone this morning, “You were right about the variants Richie, when you were jesting last year about the Daddy Long-Legs variant!” I was right. For a change it must be said. I shoot at a lot of targets on the radio show but my aim is, shall we say, a little erratic. As I write this, a SKY News reporter is ramping up the fear-porn on location in Bristol. There’s another variant! The Kent Covid strain has allegedly mutated again, into another potentially dangerous strain and it’s been discovered in Bristol!
Cue thousands of surge-testing kits and hundreds of volunteers rushing to Bristol, to demand that perfectly healthy Bristolians swab themselves and return the samples. Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jonathan Van Tam told the BBC this morning that there are thousands of covid-19 mutations now. UK prime Minister Boris Johnson told the House of Commons this lunchtime, that there will be new covid variant jabs for us all in the Autumn. Surprise surprise. These goons are nothing if not predictable.
Yes I saw this coming. I wasn’t alone. Covid-19, if it exists, is harmless to the vast majority of us. 99.7 per cent survival rate, average age of someone dying is 82 blah blah blah. Old news. The government knew last year that they were on shaky ground, so they came up with the concept of Long Covid. They spun wild yarns about Covid toes. They said that stuttering was a covid symptom as was hearing voices. Look it up. The public lapped it up.
It was inevitable that they would eventually warn us of new and potentially deadly mutations that would require new vaccines and keeping us in lockdown cycles. It’s a zero-sum game. Today there’s a new and potentially more transmissible Bristol variant. Tomorrow it might be one found in Poland, Edinburgh the day after. I can’t get near these liars. They’ll never speak to me. UK broadcasters nod along and sound worried. “This is concerning Professor” they say, “when will you know how deadly this new strain is?” It’s a game of softball.
If I was presenting BBC News At One today, this nightmare would be over in a matter of minutes. And as for Johnson, Hancock, Whitty, Vallance and that moron Van Tam? They would be running for their lives.
Richie Allen is the host of The Richie Allen Radio show, Europe’s most listened to independent radio show and is a passionate supporter of free speech. He lives in Salford with the future Mrs Allen and their two dogs.
February 10, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19 |
Leave a comment
Dr. Stella Immanuel, a medical doctor from Houston who has cured hundreds of her patients with COVID symptoms by using hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), was one of a group of doctors who went to Washington D.C. last summer to tell the nation that there was a cure for COVID, which included the older, already FDA-approved drug, hydroxychloroquine.
Many other doctors, some with very prestigious credentials, from around the world were seeing the same results with early treatment of COVID patients, and a near 100% success rate with no deaths.
But the FDA and Anthony Fauci refused to endorse an emergency use authorization to let hospitals use the drug, stating that their clinical experiences were not enough, and that there was a lack of peer-reviewed literature.
They allowed this lack of published studies to be used as an excuse to prevent patients from receiving this treatment, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths, while TRILLIONS of dollars were poured into new vaccines and drugs instead. This is one of the real crimes committed during the Plandemic.
To learn more about this scandal, see our page on hydroxychloroquine.
Now, at the beginning of 2021, many studies have been published documenting the effectiveness of HCQ, and Facebook has announced they will stop censoring information related to HCQ, and the American Journal of Medicine has also admitted that their stand on HCQ was wrong. (Source.)
Dr. Stella Immanuel is now demanding an apology from the Pharma-controlled media, and the government health agencies who attacked her and her character for recommending HCQ, stating that someone “has to be accountable” for all these needless deaths.
See our previous coverage on Dr. Immanuel:
“Nobody Needs to Die” – Frontline Doctors Storm D.C. Claiming “Thousands of Doctors” are Being Silenced on Facts and Treatments for COVID
Frontline Doctor Stella: “I should let people die because I’m scared of Anthony Fauci? I should let people die because I’m scared of the WHO? I’m not scared of any of them. I’m not going to let people die.”
Dr. Stella Emmanuel Cleared by Texas Medical Board for Complaint while Real Criminal Doctors Still Free After Murdering Millions
February 9, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Covid-19, HCQ, Human rights, United States |
Leave a comment
Dr Reiner Fuellmich is a German American lawyer with experience going after large companies like Deutsche Bank. He is a member of the German Corona Investigative Committee. He discusses the current situation and his efforts to bring justice to the situation.
This interview was done as apart of the full length documentary. We are releasing the full interview for the betterment of public understanding of the situation.
The full film, when released, will be available at https://www.PlanetLockdownFilm.com
February 9, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | Covid-19 |
Leave a comment

According to what we hear from officials and the mainstream media, the new variants are the most dangerous and unpredictable beings since Osama bin Laden.
Everyone needs to stay safe from these invisible but murderously mighty microbes by shunning contact with the unwashed, unmasked and unvaccinated.
But is that drastic approach — which is accompanied by severe curtailment of civil liberties and constitutional rights — warranted?
It turns out that the case for the variants’ contagiousness and dangerousness centres largely on the theoretical effects of just one change said to stem from a mutation in the virus’s genes. And, as I’ll show in this article, that case is very shaky.
I also have an accompanying nine-minute ‘explainer’ video, below:
That one change is known as N501Y — scientific shorthand for the substitution of one protein building block (amino acid) for another at position 501 in the part of the virus called the spike protein.
Specifically, position 501 lies in the portion of the spike protein that’s responsible for the intimate coupling between the virus and cells that lets the virus slip inside and multiply.
[Note that any such amino-acid switcheroo is correctly called a change, not a mutation. Mutations occur only in genes. For some reason many scientists and scribes who ought to know better are mistakenly calling N501Y and other amino-acid changes ‘mutations.’ ]
A very preliminary study published Dec. 22, 2020, suggested that N501Y also is present in the South African variant named 501Y.V2. And another very preliminary study, published January 12, 2021, asserted it was also present in the new strain emerging from the Brazilian jungle, dubbed P.1.
On top of that, the South African variant is being reported as evading immunity and B.1.1.7 sharing this escape route. And scientists are depicting new variants with N501Y on board as spreading very fast. Some say they make herd immunity impossible, so every single person on earth has to be vaccinated. The models also suggest B.1.1.7 is up to 91% deadlier than the regular novel coronavirus.
(Yet so far it seems the main basis for officials saying it’s more deadly is shown in the minutes of the Jan. 21, 2021 meeting of an influential UK committee called New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group [NERVTAG ]. There, they cite modeling papers which haven’t yet been published – which means that until they’re published there’s no way to check their work.)
THREE NON-PEER-REVIEWED THEORETICAL-MODELING PAPERS WHICH CATAPULTED VARIANTS INTO THE SPOTLIGHT
Public-health officials, politicians and the mainstream media around the world turned their collective headlights on the variants right after the publication of three theoretical-modeling papers on B.1.1.7, a variant originating in the U.K. The first was a Technical Briefing by Public Health England published Dec. 21 (it’s the first of an ongoing series of reports on the variant authored by people working at the agency and at other institutions), the second a paper published Dec. 23 by a mathematical-modeling group at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and the third a theoretical-modeling manuscript posted Dec. 31 by a large group of UK scientists.
None of the three papers was checked over for accuracy by objective observers – a process called ‘peer review.’ Nonetheless, all three were portrayed as solid science by many scientists, politicians, public-health officials and the press.
(I reached out for comment to Public Health England, as well as to the first author of the second paper Nicholas Davies, and to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The only reply I received was from a media-relations person at Public Health England; she told me no one was available for an interview.)
(Neil Ferguson was a co-author of the first and third papers. The UK government has relied on Ferguson’s mathematical modeling for many years. This is despite his work turning out to be highly inaccurate time after time. He also supposedly stepped down from his government-advisory role last May after being caught secretly meeting with his married lover during a time when it was illegal to make contact with anyone outside of one’s household, thanks in large part to his modelling. But he was quickly restored to positions of influence. In an article and accompanying video coming out next week, I describe the connections and conflicts of interest surrounding Ferguson and the modeling papers’ other authors.)
WHAT EFFECT IS N501Y SAID TO HAVE?
In N501Y, the amino acid that’s swapped out at position 501 in the spike protein is asparagine; by scientific convention it’s represented by the letter ‘N.’ The amino acid that’s swapped in in its place is tyrosine, and it’s represented by the letter ‘Y.’ Hence ‘N501Y.’
Position 501 in the amino-acid sequence sits in the part of the spike protein that protrudes from the surface of the virus. Specifically, it’s said to lie in the region of the spike protein that latches or ‘binds’ to the mechanism that is the gatekeeper for whether the virus can enter the cell. That gate-keeping mechanism is known as the ‘ACE2 receptor.’
This region of the spike protein – known as the ‘receptor binding domain’ (RBD) — binds to the gate keeping mechanism, the ACE2 receptor. When the RBD and the ACE2 receptor bind, the cell membrane, which is the circular barrier between the area outside the cell and the cell contents, opens up and allows the virus to enter.
N501Y is posited to make the spike protein bind tighter to the ACE2 receptor. Influential theoreticians have performed mathematical modeling based on this hypothesis. This modeling suggests that this tighter binding allows the virus to enter more easily, and that therefore this makes the virus more transmissible.
Yet as far as I’ve been able to find, there is still no concrete, direct proof of this. And note that epidemiological data cannot be used to definitively detect the effect of an amino-acid in a virus. Only experiments involving direct observation of the virus’s interaction with the body can determine that.
The main evidence that the top three theoretical-models cite as proof of stronger bonding between the N501Y form of the novel coronavirus and the RBD is from just three scientific manuscripts, and these describe experiments with the virus in mice or petri dishes, not observation of whether in fact the variants are truly more contagious or more deadly.
DETAILS OF THE THREE PAPERS THAT UNDERPIN THE ASSERTION THAT N501Y BOLSTERS CONTAGIOUSNESS
One of those three papers was published Sept. 25, 2020, in Science. It describe experiments involving involving six rounds of division of the virus in mice.
The researchers found a large amount of the virus in the mice lungs right from the first round of division. Based on this, they pronounced the virus to have “enhanced infectivity.” However, they didn’t actually test whether the virus is more transmissible/contagious – that is, whether it moves from mouse to mouse more easily.
They performed ‘deep sequencing’ and reported that they found the N501Y change in the ‘mouse-adapted’ virus. Next they did ‘structural remodeling’ on it and wrote that this analysis…
suggested that the N501Y substitution in the RBD of SARS-CoV[-2] S protein increased the binding affinity of the protein to mouse ACE2.
All of this is very different than direct observations of the variant virus’s behaviour in mice or humans.
The second paper was posted on bioRχiv on Dec. 21, 2020. It describes an “engineered decoy receptor for SARS-CoV-2.” The complicated series of molecular-biological manoeuvers in vitro were performed that is hard to follow and understand – there is no ‘Methods’ section laying out the details and sequence of what they did; rather, the researchers’ approach to their experiments is scattered across all sections of the paper including in the accompanying Supplementary Material. This is many steps removed from real-life situations. The authors conclude from their manoeuvers that laboratory-mutated novel coronavirus with the N501Y mutation seems to bind more tightly to their ‘engineered decoy’ form of the RBD receptor than the RBD receptor that normally occurs in nature. (The idea, it seems, is that this ‘engineered decoy’ could be injected into people with the goal of getting the new variant to bind to it rather than to cells, thereby stopping it from gaining entry into cells and reproducing.)
bioRχiv is an online-only journal. (It’s pronounced ‘bioarchive’; that’s because the Greek letter χ is pronounced ‘kai.’ I presume the letter χ is used in the journal’s title because the χ2 [‘chi-square’] test is a widely used form of statistical analysis in scientific papers.) The journal has the tagline ‘The Preprint Server for Biology.’ ‘Preprint’ means non-peer-reviewed. bioRχiv focuses entirely on Covid-19-papers and is sponsored by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. It has a sister publication medRχiv that also focuses on Covid-19,
The Initiative is the creation of Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan. Facebook has been among the very active censors of information including scientific papers that diverge from the official narrative about Covid.
The third paper was posted on the website of the online journal bioRχiv on June 17, 2020, and then in Cell on Sept. 3, 2020.
Like the other two papers, it is extremely removed from direct observation of the virus’s behaviour in live animals or humans. In fact, the third paper doesn’t even use human or animal cells. It involves a ‘yeast-surface-display platform’ as a basis for performing ‘deep mutational scanning’ of the novel coronavirus’s RBD. That ‘platform’ is an artificial structure the paper’s authors constructed for measuring binding between antibodies and various RBD regions containing an array of mutations.
According to this paper, the N501Y amino-acid change results in stronger binding of the virus to the RBD.
However, the papers’ authors state in the last section of their paper that:
It is important to remember that our maps define biochemical phenotypes of the RBD, not how these phenotypes relate to viral fitness. There are many complexities in the relationship between biochemical phenotypes of yeast-displayed RBD and viral fitness.
Translation: “Just because our biochemistry experiments showed that the presence of N501Y or other changes in the RBD seems to make the RBD bind tighter to the ACE2 receptor, we don’t know whether any of these changes make the virus more ‘fit’/transmissible.”
And note also that one of the authors of the third paper, Allison Greaney, is quoted as saying in an August 2020 article from the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center where she and several of the other authors work, that:
The virus already has a ‘good enough’ ability to bind to ACE2. There’s no reason to believe that going beyond that level will make it more pathogenic or transmissible…[b]ut the RBD may be able to tolerate a number of mutations.
As another note, the third paper was first published in bioRχiv and then published three months later in the peer-reviewed journal Cell. In Cell the paper is labelled ‘Elsevier-Sponsored Documents’ (see image below) (Elsevier is the publishing empire that owns Cell, among hundreds of other journals). I couldn’t find anything online about what ‘Sponsored’ means, nor about what or who sponsored this particular paper; and I couldn’t find any other papers with this designation. So I emailed Cell’s PR manager John Caputo on the evening of Jan. 18 and followed up by leaving him a voicemail message on Jan. 19. I haven’t heard back from him.

‘Deep Mutational Scanning of SARS-CoV-2 Receptor Binding Domain Reveals Constraints on Folding and ACE2 Binding’ (Tyler N. Starr et al.)
A BRIEF WORD ABOUT ANOTHER AMINO-ACID CHANGE IN B.1.1.7
I’ll quickly turn to another of the key changes said to be present in B.1.1.7. This change, the deletion of three amino acids was described in a paper published on the website of medRχiv on November 13, 2020. (Earlier in this article I mention that medRχiv is a creation of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.)
The mutation purportedly makes B.1.1.7 invisible to one of the three key functions of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test. That function is detection of the gene that has the genetic code for one of the two main spike proteins on the outer surface of the novel coronavirus.
However, that conclusion is based on only sequencing of the virus in a mere six people who tested positive for the novel coronavirus. On top of that, the paper was not subjected to scrutiny by other scientists (a process known as ‘peer review’) before it was published.
In addition, the Covid diagnoses of those six people were themselves determined by PCR. And PCR has been shown to have a very high rate of false positives — that is, to very frequently give a positive result in people who in fact do not harbour the novel coronavirus at all.
The authors of that paper themselves conclude that:
this result should be interpreted with caution. As a limited number of samples with the S-negative profile [i.e., tests that were positive for two of the three portions of the PCR test but not for the third, S-gene, portion] were sequenced, we could not exclude the presence of other S mutations associated with this profile…. Moreover we could not determine whether the deletion affected the primer or other probe-binding region as their coordinates were not available.
It’s a good bet that similar sleights of hand are behind the new wave of papers and headlines focusing on the amino-acid change dubbed E484K.
WHAT’S THE LESSON FROM ALL THIS?
That the pronouncements about the dire danger posed by the new variants aren’t based on solid science.
They appear to be aimed more at scaring the public into submitting to harsher and longer restrictions than helping to create truly evidence-based policies.
So follow the golden rules. Read the primary scientific-paper sources. Analyze them and think for yourself. Don’t let your reasoning be swept away by the 24-7, fear-filled news cycle.
Rosemary Frei has an MSc in molecular biology from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Calgary, was a freelance medical writer and journalist for 22 years and now is an independent investigative journalist. You can watch her June 15 interview on The Corbett Report, read her other Off-Guardian articles and follow her on Twitter.
February 8, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19 |
Leave a comment
Facebook is expanding the list of ‘false’ and ‘debunked’ claims about the coronavirus and vaccines that will be grounds for ban from the platform, while launching the largest ‘authoritative’ vaccination campaign worldwide.
Under the ‘Community Standards’ policy, posts with “debunked claims” that Covid-19 is “man-made or manufactured,” or that vaccines are ineffective, unsafe, dangerous or cause autism will be removed starting Monday, VP of Integrity Guy Rosen announced on the Facebook blog.
The new policy was implemented following consultations with the World Health Organization (WHO) and others, and will help Facebook “continue to take aggressive action against misinformation” about Covid-19 and vaccines, Rosen added.
Even if they don’t violate any of the listed policies, posts about Covid-19 or vaccines will still be subject to review by “third-party fact-checkers” and labeled and “demoted” if rated false.
Meanwhile, the company’s Head of Health Kang-Xing Jin announced that Facebook – along with Instagram and WhatsApp, which it owns – will be “running the largest worldwide campaign to promote authoritative information about [Covid-19] vaccines.”
In addition to “expanding our efforts to remove false claims,” Facebook is giving $120 million in ad credits to health ministries, NGOs and UN agencies to send out vaccine and health information to “billions of people around the world,” and providing data “to inform effective vaccine delivery and educational efforts to build trust” about the vaccines.
The social media behemoth will also help people “find where and when they can get vaccinated — similar to how we helped people find information about how to vote during elections.”
Boasting about removing “more than 12 million pieces of content” that contained “misinformation that could lead to imminent physical harm,” and successfully influencing millions of people around the world to wear masks, Jin said the company’s focus in 20201 is to build trust and confidence in the vaccines using the same “insights and best practices.”
In the US, Facebook will partner with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to reach “Native American communities, Black communities and Latinx communities” and use “science and evidence-based content that addresses the questions and concerns” they might have about the vaccines.
February 8, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Facebook |
Leave a comment