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Funerals Have Spiked in Numerous Nations

Across the globe, many more funerals are being held this year than normal

Click to see the full chart at the Financial Times
By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | August 5, 2020

It’s difficult to know what’s happening out there. Much of our coronavirus data is of dubious quality. Different jurisdictions count cases and deaths differently. Even countries with superior health care systems are reporting miscounts, delays, and odd glitches.

Nevertheless, some conclusions are possible. The UK’s Financial Times has compared the number of deaths that particular nations and cities have experienced so far this year to the average number of deaths in recent years.

Its verdict: Iceland, Israel, and Norway appear to have no excess deaths. COVID-19 fatalities are exceptionally low in each of those countries – amounting to only 830 between them so far. These deaths seem to have been counterbalanced by fewer deaths from other causes. During lockdowns, fewer people drown or die in automobile accidents, for example.

But in most of the countries examined, funerals have definitely increased. In Austria (+8%), Denmark (+6%), and Germany (+5%) the increase has been in the single digits.

In the US, Sweden, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, deaths appear to be up by 25%. That’s a noticeable change. If you have sufficient space, staff, and medicine to treat 100 sick people, but 125 are lined up outside your door it’s going to be one horrendous day.

In some European countries, the increase has been more significant:

France +31%
Belgium +40%
Italy +44%
UK +45%
Spain +56%

The thing about this pandemic is that it isn’t evenly distributed. Many locales have been spared. But if you have the misfortune to reside in an especially hard-hit nation or city, matters have turned nightmarish:

Ecuador +117%
Peru +149%

Santiago, Chile +102%
Madrid, Spain +157%
New York City +208%
Lima, Peru +2

August 5, 2020 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , | Leave a comment

Israel’s Supreme Court: Palestinian Prisoners Have No Right to Social Distancing against COVID-19

Palestine Chronicle | July 25, 2020

Israel’s Supreme Court rejected yesterday a petition by Adalah, The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, demanding Israeli authorities to implement COVID-19 protective guidelines for prisoners at Gilboa prison, where 30 prison guards and seven Palestinian prisoners are infected, while 489 guards and 58 prisoners are in quarantine.

The court ruled late on Thursday evening that Palestinians held in Israeli prisons have no right to social distancing protection against the COVID-19 pandemic, said Adalah in a press statement.

Earlier on the day, the court had convened to hear a petition filed by Adalah demanding that the Israel Prison Service (IPS) and Israel’s Public Security Ministry take all necessary actions to avoid a COVID-19 outbreak among the 450 prisoners – overwhelmingly Palestinian political prisoners – in the overcrowded Gilboa prison.

Adalah Attorney Myssana Morany, who submitted the petition on behalf of the families of two Palestinian prisoners, responded to the ruling by the top Israeli court: “Israel’s Supreme Court has chosen to accept the fiction pitched to it by Israeli authorities that COVID-19 social distancing policies – essential for everyone else – are not relevant to the Palestinian ‘security prisoners’ it holds behind bars.”

“This precedent-setting ruling endangers the lives and health of Palestinians held by Israel, and poses a threat to society as a whole. It flies in the face of health and human rights professionals around the world who have called for social distancing within prisons, and leaves Palestinians held by Israel exposed to the virus with no option to protect themselves,” she added.

Adalah said in a statement,

“The Supreme Court justices accepted the claim promoted by Israeli occupation authorities that Palestinians held in prison are no different than family members or flatmates living in the same home, completely ignoring the fact that prisoners are held under duress and Israeli authorities are responsible for their health and the conditions of their incarceration.”

“The court ruling has freed the IPS from the obligation to maintain, and or even strive for, safe social distancing in the cells of Palestinian “security prisoners”. This runs contrary to basic COVID-19 health practices employed by prison authorities around the world,” the group added.

Materials given by state authorities to the Supreme Court and discussed in yesterday’s hearing stressed that social distancing restrictions should not apply to family members or individuals who live together, but nevertheless, they also recognized the need to reduce the population density inside Israeli facilities amongst prisoners serving time for criminal sentences.

Adalah Attorney Myssana Morany commented immediately following the hearing: “Israeli authorities claimed today in court that social distancing policies essential for protecting prisoners serving time for criminal charges are somehow not relevant for ‘security prisoners’. The Israel Prison Service should have stood together with us today and demanded that it be granted the means to protect the people for whose health and safety it holds direct responsibility.”

She continued, “We were, instead, subject to absurd arguments equating prisons with family living rooms, while prisoners continue to be forced to come into daily contact with guards potentially exposed to COVID-19 outside the prison walls.”

More than 5,000 Palestinians, including numerous women and children, are currently detained in Israeli prisons.

July 25, 2020 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

‘US must stop slander and smearing’: China rebuffs allegations it stole Covid-19 vaccine data

RT | July 22, 2020

Beijing has accused the US of waging a global smear campaign, after Chinese nationals were accused of hacking foreign companies that conduct Covid-19 vaccine research.

The US must “immediately stop its slander and smearing of China on cyber security issues,” spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry Wang Wenbin told reporters. “The Chinese government is a staunch defender of cyber security, and has always opposed and cracked down on cyber attacks and cyber crime in all forms.”

Wang said that “cyberspace must not become a new battlefield,” because upholding “peace and stability” in cyberspace is in the common interest of all countries.

The US Justice Department earlier accused two Chinese nationals of targeting companies around the world, including biotech firms in Maryland, Massachusetts, and California that are conducting research related to vaccines for the coronavirus.

The Covid-19 pandemic remains one of the areas where the US is accusing Beijing of misconduct. American officials, including President Donald Trump, claimed that China accidentally released the coronavirus from a laboratory in the city of Wuhan, where the disease was first recorded, and initially tried to hide the scale of the outbreak.

Another line of attack involves allegations that Beijing is influencing the World Health Organization (WHO). British media reported that on Tuesday that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told MPs at a “private meeting” in London that China had “bought” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus by helping him to get elected.

“There was a deal-making election and when push came to shove, you get dead Britons, because of the deal that was made,” Pompeo was quoted by the media as saying.

The Trump administration has heavily criticized the WHO over its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. The US officially initiated its withdrawal from the organization this month.

Beijing has repeatedly denied having concealed any information about the outbreak and slammed suggestions that the virus came from one of its labs as false.

American-Chinese relations hit a new low on Wednesday, when the US demanded that China shut down its consulate in Houston, Texas. The US State Department explained that this decision will help to protect American intellectual property and the personal data of US citizens. Beijing blasted the move as “escalatory” and promised to retaliate.

July 22, 2020 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

CQ Cancels SARS CV (2005)

By Ron Clutz | Science Matters | July 11, 2020

Published August 22, 2005, in the Virology Journal Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread Martin J Vincent et al. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The lead author worked at Special Pathogens Branch, Division of Viral and Rickettsial Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Virology Journal is a publication of the National Institutes of Health, which Anthony Fauci joined in 1968 and since 1984 he has directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. (NIAID).

Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is caused by a newly discovered coronavirus (SARS-CoV). No effective prophylactic or post-exposure therapy is currently available.

We report, however, that chloroquine has strong antiviral effects on SARS-CoV infection of primate cells. These inhibitory effects are observed when the cells are treated with the drug either before or after exposure to the virus, suggesting both prophylactic and therapeutic advantage. In addition to the well-known functions of chloroquine such as elevations of endosomal pH, the drug appears to interfere with terminal glycosylation of the cellular receptor, angiotensin-converting enzyme 2. This may negatively influence the virus-receptor binding and abrogate the infection, with further ramifications by the elevation of vesicular pH, resulting in the inhibition of infection and spread of SARS CoV at clinically admissible concentrations.

The infectivity of coronaviruses other than SARS-CoV are also affected by chloroquine, as exemplified by the human CoV-229E [15]. The inhibitory effects observed on SARS-CoV infectivity and cell spread occurred in the presence of 1–10 μM chloroquine, which are plasma concentrations achievable during the prophylaxis and treatment of malaria (varying from 1.6–12.5 μM) [26] and hence are well tolerated by patients. It recently was speculated that chloroquine might be effective against SARS and the authors suggested that this compound might block the production of TNFα, IL6, or IFNγ [15]. Our data provide evidence for the possibility of using the well-established drug chloroquine in the clinical management of SARS.

Conclusions

Chloroquine, a relatively safe, effective and cheap drug used for treating many human diseases including malaria, amoebiosis and human immunodeficiency virus is effective in inhibiting the infection and spread of SARS CoV in cell culture. The fact that the drug has significant inhibitory antiviral effect when the susceptible cells were treated either prior to or after infection suggests a possible prophylactic and therapeutic use.

This means, of course, that Dr. Fauci has known for 15 years that chloroquine and it’s even milder derivative hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) will not only treat a current case of coronavirus (“therapeutic”) but prevent future cases (“prophylactic”). So HCQ functions as both a cure and a vaccine. In other words, it’s a wonder drug for coronavirus. Said Dr. Fauci’s NIH in 2005, “concentrations of 10 μM completely abolished SARS-CoV infection.” Fauci’s researchers add, “chloroquine can effectively reduce the establishment of infection and spread of SARS-CoV.”

In connection with the SARS outbreak – caused by a coronavirus dubbed SARS- CoV – the NIH researched chloroquine and concluded that it was effective at stopping the SARS coronavirus in its tracks. The COVID-19 bug is likewise a coronavirus, labeled SARS-CoV-2. While not exactly the same virus as SARS-CoV-1, it is genetically related to it, and shares 79% of its genome, as the name SARS-CoV-2 implies. They both use the same host cell receptor, which is what viruses use to gain entry to the cell and infect the victim.

July 12, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Hydroxychloroquine and fake news

Fake news is keeping us away from the treatment to end the coronavirus crisis

By Jeremy Gordon | The Duran | July 8, 2020

The anti-hydroxychloroquine media has been full of the supposed dangers of hydroxychloroquine and its failure as a treatment for the virus. Does hydroxychloroquine work or does it not, is it safe or dangerous, and should we be using it as a treatment for the virus? Here we examine the evidence for and against it.

A New York doctor Vladimir Zelenko looked at treatments being used in China and Korea and gave it to 405 patients over 60 or with high-risk problems such as diabetes, asthma, obesity, hypertension or shortness of breath. In this high risk group he claimed to have cut hospital admission and mortality rates compared to what could be expected without treatment by 80 to 90%.

Dr Zelenko sent a letter to President Trump urging him to issue an executive order to roll out the treatment which the FDA was blocking. Trump announced that hydroxychloroquine looked like it could be a “game-changer”, and thus the politicization of hydroxychloroquine began.

Dr Fauci the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who was supposed to be advising Trump disagreed with him and backed Gilead’s rival treatment Remdesivir. YouTube deleted a video of Dr. Zelenko talking about the treatment on his Rabbi’s channel and despite objections that there was nothing wrong with the video YouTube never reinstated it.

In this YouTube video interview with Rudy Giulliani from July 1, which hopefully will not be deleted by the time you read this, Dr. Zelenko claims 99,3% survival rate for the high-risk patients he has treated.

Professor Didier Raoult of Marseilles used a similar protocol to Dr. Zelenko without the zinc. His study with a small group using hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin showed a fifty-fold benefit. He then went on to get similar results with a much larger group of 1,061 patients. Contrary to the warnings the media had been running that hydroxychloroquine would cause heart problems, no cardiac toxicity was observed and he achieved a mortality rate of only 0.5%.

The media quickly found critics who claimed that the only valid proof any treatment worked was a “gold-standard” double-blind clinical trial and dismissed Dr. Zelenko’s and Raoult’s results. Dr. Zelenko and Prof. Raoult both refused on ethical grounds to give placebos to half the patients in clinical trials and they defended their data as sufficient to show the treatment did work. They both stressed that the urgency of the situation made it necessary to act on available evidence, not clinical trials which would take months to produce results and be verified. There have subsequently been over a dozen studies which confirm that Dr. Zelenko’s and Prof. Raoult’s protocols do work.

A study from the New York University Grossman school of Medicine published in May found patients given hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin at an early stage had a lower need for hospitalization than those who were not. The addition of zinc improved the results even more.

“I’ll tell you what. If this is me, and I am me, and I end up getting this thing, I am going to want Zinc plus Hydroxychloroquine plus Azithromycin. I would want that treatment.” Commented Chris Martenson, PhD, in his video series about COVID-19 where he talks about this study.

Yale Professor Harvey Risch submitted a report of five trials and studies using hydroxychloroquine in the American Journal of Epistemology titled “Early Outpatient Treatment of Symptomatic, High-Risk Covid-19 Patients that Should be Ramped-Up Immediately as Key to the Pandemic Crisis.

Prof. Risch agreed that, in an ideal world, randomized double-blinded controlled clinical trials would be preferable but in the meantime “for the great majority I conclude that hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, preferably with zinc can be this outpatient treatment, at least until we find or add something better. It is our obligation not to stand by as the old and infirm are killed by this disease and our economy is destroyed by it and we have nothing to offer except high-mortality hospital treatment. Available evidence of efficacy of HCQ+AZ has been repeatedly described in the media as anecdotal, but most certainly is not”

A Brazilian study found 4.6 times less hospitalization in patients who took hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin within seven days of infection. Professor Paolo Zanotto reported that there were “41% of deaths among those who did not choose therapy and were hospitalized against 0% among those who chose by therapy.”

A retrospective study of 2,541 Detroit cases showed up to 71% reduction in mortality in early treatment with hydroxychloroquine azithromycin.

A retrospective study of 3,737 cases in Marseille showed a reduction of 50% in mortality without any adverse effects in the Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin group.

A meta-analysis of 105,040 cases from 20 studies in 9 countries found a reduction in mortality by up to three times in groups treated early with Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nmni.2020.100709

A study of 6,493 patients with COVID-19 at Mount Sinai Hospital, New York, showed that hydroxychloroquine helped to reduce mortality in hospitalized patients.

On July 3 a study by a Michigan team at Henry Ford Health System found that 13 percent of patients who were given the drug early on died while 26 percent of patients who were not given the drug died. The study which included 2,541 patients was published in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases and determined that hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin provided a 71% hazard ratio reduction. “Our results do differ from some other studies. What we think was important in ours … is that patients were treated early. For hydroxychloroquine to have a benefit, it needs to begin before the patients begin to suffer some of the severe immune reactions that patients can have with COVID” said Dr. Marcus Zervos, head of infectious disease for Henry Ford Health System.

A statement from the Trump campaign hailed the study as fantastic news. “Fortunately, the Trump Administration secured a massive supply of hydroxychloroquine for the national stockpile months ago, yet this is the same drug that the media and the Biden campaign spent weeks trying to discredit and spread fear and doubt around because President Trump dared to mention it as a potential treatment for coronavirus. The new study from the Henry Ford Health System should be a clear message to the media and the Democrats: stop the bizarre attempts to discredit hydroxychloroquine to satisfy your own anti-Trump agenda. It may be costing lives.”

Also on July 3 results from another study by Dr. Takahisa Mikami and his team at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, was published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. The study analyzed the outcomes of 6,493 patients who had laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 in the New York City metropolitan area and found that hydroxychloroquine decreased mortality hazard ratio by 47% percent.

Many more studies in addition to those above also show that treating early with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin and preferably also zinc is the key to ending hospitalization and death.
The trials that confirm Dr. Zelenko’s and Prof. Raoult’s finding have been mostly ignored or dismissed by the anti-hydroxychloroquine media. The trials that they have given attention to are those that supposedly show that hydroxychloroquine doesn’t help or even increases the death rate.

Statistics from the US Veterans hospital study (Magagnoli, 2020) showed patients who were given hydroxychloroquine died more frequently than those who did not.

In this study hydroxychloroquine was only given to patients who were already seriously ill and those who were getting better without any treatment were not given it. Predictably those given hydroxychloroquine did worse than the untreated group but those conducting the study claimed it as proof that hydroxychloroquine did not work. Professor Raoult commented “In the current period, it seems that passion dominates rigorous and balanced scientific analysis and may lead to scientific misconduct. The study by Magagnoli et al is an absolutely spectacular example of this,”

One of the collaborators in the trial reportedly received a $260 million grant from Gilead Sciences Inc. which produces the rival treatment Remdesivir.

The US Secretary of Veteran Affairs Robert Wilkie, acknowledged that the drug was given to veterans at their last stages of life and added “We know the drug has been working on middle-age and young veterans … it is working in stopping the progression of the disease.”

Another study that supposedly showed that hydroxychloroquine was dangerous and didn’t work came from a group that claimed to have data on hydroxychloroquine use for Covid-19 from hospitals around the world  The study was published on 22 May in the Lancet medical journal. The results were immediately disputed by one of the Australian hospitals from which Surgisphere, the company which supplied the data claimed to have obtained it.

Following this a group of 140 scientists, researchers, and statisticians wrote an open letter to the Lancet and the authors of the study questioning the data used. A Guardian investigation revealed that Surgisphere was run by employees who lacked any scientific background. One was a science fiction author and fantasy artist and another was an “adult model and events hostess.” The Lancet conducted an independent investigation, retracted the study and in an interview with The New York Times, Dr. Richard Horton, the editor in chief admitted that the study should never have appeared in his journal.

On the basis of the flawed Lancet study the WHO suspended the hydroxychloroquine trials it was sponsoring. When the study was retracted they resumed them briefly but soon after suspended them again on the results of another faulty study, the Oxford University’s “RECOVERY Trial”.

The researchers in this trial gave patients massive doses of hydroxychloroquine without the necessary addition of azithromycin and they started treatment too late. That the RECOVERY Trial was never going to work was pointed out on the Covexit website two months before it started.

Prof. Raoult compared the Oxford academics who carried out the hydroxychloroquine section of the RECOVERY trial to the Marx Brothers in a video interview titled “The Marx Brothers are Doing Science – the Example of RECOVERY”

Prof. Raoult sarcastically commented that the good news that came out of the trial was that hydroxychloroquine is not toxic. The RECOVERY trial used a 2,400 mg dose on the first day compared to Dr.Raoult’s 600 mg. Even with such high dosage there were no cardiac side effects with any of the participants. Prof. Raoult recalled that “two weeks ago one was told everybody was dying because of cardiac issues. At least, this trial is good to assess the toxicity of hydroxychloroquine as they did not announce any toxicity, even at such high dosage”.

Although by now it should have been abundantly clear that hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin only worked in combination and if given early, not to patients in hospital more than seven days after infection, in April the US National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) started hydroxychloroquine trials on hospitalized patients too late, some already in emergency wards, and then abandoned the trials with the conclusion that “hydroxychloroquine does no harm but provides no benefit”. The FDA cancelled its emergency use authorization and the NIH halted their clinical trials of hydroxychloroquine

The media hostile to hydroxychloroquine successfully whipped up hysteria about its supposed dangers although it has an excellent safety record and it is not even alongside aspirin on the WHO list of the 100 most dangerous drugs. Specialists and doctors prescribing hydroxychloroquine for Rheumatoid Arthritis and Lupus have confirmed that thousands of patients are being prescribed the same dose Dr. Zelenko is giving for five days for years on end without problems.

Were the failed studies faulty because of ignorance or by design? Who gains from them? The drug companies can’t make much money on a generic drug, and they found in the media and the scientific community willing accomplices to stop its use. Gilead Sciences Inc. gives grants in addition to those mentioned above to Oxford University and the WHO. Is it possible that people in these prestigious institutions may have their integrity compromised by money, or is it mere coincidence that Gilead with their rival treatment is funding them?

Some of the media will do anything to make Trump look like a fool and these faulty trials were the perfect opportunity. The media hostile to hydroxychloroquine downplayed or cast doubt on the many successful studies and trials with hydroxychloroquine and made the most of the faulty trials as proof that the drug Trump had touted didn’t work.

For the media it seems to have been more about scoring political points and increasing their audience ratings rather than investigative reporting which uncovers the truth. For those who are dying and their families and friends as a result of this treatment not being used because of media misinformation it is lives tragically lost, and for the rest of us it is our economies sinking, businesses failing, and unemployment, poverty and suffering rising.

Hundreds of thousands of lives could be saved, and loss ruin, suffering and devastation to our economies and societies avoided if we simply started using this safe, cheap and readily available treatment. It is a ludicrous and tragic farce that because of the massive misinformation on behalf of corporate greed and political point scoring that we are not.

July 12, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

The financial muscle of Big Pharma has been busy distorting science during the pandemic

By Malcolm Kendrick | RT | July 4, 2020

Evidence that a cheap, over-the-counter anti-malarial drug costing £7 combats Covid-19 gets trashed. Why? Because the pharmaceutical giants want to sell you a treatment costing nearly £2,000. It’s criminal.

A few years ago, I wrote a book called ‘Doctoring Data’. This was an attempt to help people understand the background to the tidal wave of medical information that crashes over us each and every day. Information that is often completely contradictory, viz ‘Coffee is good for you… no, wait it’s bad for you… no, wait, it’s good for you again,’ repeated ad nauseam.

I also pointed out some of the tricks, games and manipulations that are used to make medications seem far more effective than they truly are, or vice versa. This, I have to say, can be a very dispiriting world to enter. When I give talks on this subject, I often start with a few quotes.

For example, here is Dr Marcia Angell, who edited the New England Journal of Medicine for over 20 years, writing in 2009:

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgement of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as editor.”

Have things got better? No, I believe they’ve got worse – if that were, indeed, possible. I was recently sent the following email about a closed-door, no-recording-allowed discussion, held in May of this year under no-disclosure Chatham House rules:

“A secretly recorded meeting between the editors-in-chief of The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine reveal both men bemoaning the ‘criminal’ influence big pharma has on scientific research. According to Philippe Douste-Blazy, France’s former health minister and 2017 candidate for WHO director, the leaked 2020 Chatham House closed-door discussion was between the [editor-in-chiefs], whose publications both retracted papers favorable to big pharma over fraudulent data.

The email continued with a quote from that recording: ‘Now we are not going to be able to … publish any more clinical research data because the pharmaceutical companies are so financially powerful today, and are able to use such methodologies, as to have us accept papers which are apparently methodologically perfect, but which, in reality, manage to conclude what they want them to conclude,’ said The Lancet’s editor-in-chief, Richard Horton.”

A YouTube video where this issue is discussed can be found here. It’s in French, but there are English subtitles.

The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet are the two most influential, most highly resourced medical journals in the world. If they no longer have the ability to detect what is essentially fraudulent research, then… Then what? Then what, indeed?

In fact, things have generally taken a sharp turn for the worse since the Covid-19 pandemic struck. New studies, new data, new information is arriving at breakneck speed, often with little or no effective review. What can you believe? Who can you believe? Almost nothing would be the safest course of action.

One issue has played out over the past few months, stripping away any remaining vestiges of my trust in medical research. It concerns the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine. You may well be aware that Donald Trump endorsed it – which presents a whole series of problems for many people.

However, before the pandemic hit, I was recommending to my local NHS trust that we should look to stock up on hydroxychloroquine. There had been a great deal of research over the years strongly suggesting it could inhibit the entry of viruses into cells, and that it also interfered with viral replication once inside the cell.

This mechanism of action explains why it can help stop the malaria parasite from gaining entry into red blood cells. The science is complex, but many researchers felt there was good reason for thinking hydroxychloroquine may have some real, if not earth-shattering, benefits in Covid-19.

This idea was further reinforced by the knowledge that it has some effects on reducing the so-called ‘cytokine storm’ that is considered deadly with Covid-19. It’s prescribed in rheumatoid arthritis to reduce the immune attack on joints.

The other reason for recommending hydroxychloroquine is that it’s extremely safe. It is, for example, the most widely prescribed drug in India. Billions upon billions of doses have been prescribed. It is available over the counter in most countries. So, I felt pretty comfortable in recommending that it could be tried. At worst, no harm would be done.

Then hydroxychloroquine became the center of a worldwide storm. On one side, wearing the white hats, were the researchers who’d used it early on, where it seemed to show some significant benefits. For example, Professor Didier Raoult, of the Institut Hospitalo-universitaire Méditerranée Infection, in France:

“A renowned research professor in France has reported successful results from a new treatment for Covid-19, with early tests suggesting it can stop the virus from being contagious in just six days.”

Then came this research from a Moroccan scientist at the University of Lille:

“Jaouad Zemmouri … believes that 78 percent of Europe’s Covid-19 deaths could have been prevented if Europe had used hydroxychloroquine… Morocco, with a population of 36 million [roughly one tenth that of the US], has only 10,079 confirmed cases of Covid-19 and only 214 deaths.

“Professor Zemmouri believes that Morocco’s use of hydroxychloroquine has resulted in an 82.5 percent recovery rate from Covid-19 and only a 2.1 percent fatality rate, in those admitted to hospital.”

Just prior to this, on May 22, a study was published in The Lancet, stating that hydroxychloroquine actually increased deaths. It then turned out that the data used could not be verified and was most likely made up. The authors had major conflicts of interest with pharmaceutical companies making anti-viral drugs. In early June, the entire article was retracted by Horton.

Then a UK study came out suggesting that hydroxychloroquine did not work at all. Discussing the results, Professor Martin Landray, an Oxford University professor who is co-leading the Randomised Evaluation of Covid-19 Therapy (RECOVERY) trial, stated:

“This is not a treatment for Covid-19. It doesn’t work. This result should change medical practice worldwide. We can now stop using a drug that is useless.”

The study has since been heavily criticized by other researchers, who state that the dose of hydroxychloroquine used was potentially toxic. It was also given far too late to have any positive effect. Many of the patients were already on ventilators.

This week, I was sent a pre-proof copy of an article about a study that will be published in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases. Its author has found that hydroxychloroquine “significantly” decreased the death rate of patients involved in the analysis. The study analyzed 2,541 patients hospitalized in six hospitals between March 10 and May 2 2020, and found 13 percent of those treated with hydroxychloroquine died and 26 percent of those who did not receive the drug died.

When things get this messed up, I tend to look for the potential conflicts of interest. By which I mean, who stands to make money from slamming the use of hydroxychloroquine, which is a generic drug that’s been around since 1934 and costs about £7 for a bottle of 60 tablets?

In this case, first, it’s those companies who make the hugely expensive antiviral drugs such as Gilead Sciences’ remdesivir, which, in the US, costs $2,340 for a typical five-day course. Second, it’s the companies that are striving to get a vaccine to market. There are billions and billions of dollars at stake here.

In this world, cheap drugs such as hydroxychloroquine don’t stand much chance. Neither do cheap vitamins, such as vitamin C and vitamin D. Do they have benefits for Covid-19 sufferers? I’m sure they do. Will such benefits be dismissed in studies that have been carefully manipulated to ensure they don’t work? Of course. Remember these words: “Pharmaceutical companies are so financially powerful today, and are able to use such methodologies, as to have us accept papers which are apparently methodologically perfect, but which, in reality, manage to conclude what they want them to conclude.”

Unless and until governments and medical bodies act decisively to permanently sever the financial ties between researchers and Big Pharma, these distortions and manipulations in the pursuit of Big Profit will continue. Just please don’t hold your breath in anticipation.

Malcolm Kendrick is a doctor and author who works as a GP in the National Health Service in England. His blog can be read here and his book, ‘Doctoring Data – How to Sort Out Medical Advice from Medical Nonsense,’ is available here.

July 4, 2020 Posted by | Book Review, Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

COVID-19 Has Been Present In Brazil Since November: Study

teleSUR | July 3, 2020

A new study from the University of Santa Catarina in Brazil revealed that SARS-CoV-2 particles were found in human sewage at the end of November 2019, which might be the oldest sample of the COVID-19 in Latin America so far.

The authors of the study published in the MedRxiv science journal analyzed human sewage located in Florianópolis from late October until the Brazil lockdown in early March.

The scientists detected SARS-CoV-2 in two samples collected independently on November 27, 2019. Subsequent samplings were positive until March 4, 2020, coinciding with the first COVID-19 case reported in Santa Catalina.

“Researchers explained the discovery of a new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, which were found in two-shot lamps harvested from Florianópolis in November 2019.”

“Our results show that SARS-CoV-2 has been circulating in Brazil since late November 2019, much earlier than the first reported case in the Americas,” the study highlights.

Other research from China, Spain, and Italy that indicates that the virus was already circulating in those three countries before the first cases were diagnosed.

The study remarks that SARS-CoV-2 RNA was detected as early as November 27, 2019, 66 days in advance of the first COVID19 confirmed case in the Americas -in the U.S. – 91 days in advance of the first case in Brazil, and 97 days in advance of the first confirmed case in Santa Catalina Region.

The findings demonstrate that SARS-CoV-2 was being passed within the community for several months before the first cases being reported by regional, national, or Pan-American authorities, according to the researchers.

July 4, 2020 Posted by | Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Covid-19 was in Spanish sewage as early as MARCH 2019, study claims

RT | June 26, 2020

Traces of the novel coronavirus have been discovered in Barcelona sewage water months before the first case of the dreaded disease was reported in China, claims a new study by a group of Spanish researchers.

Scientists with the Enteric Virus Group at the University of Barcelona detected the presence of the virus in frozen samples of the city’s wastewater collected as early as March 12, 2019. The group, led by Rosa Maria Pintó and Albert Bosch, was exploring the potential of wastewater analysis in early warning systems and the prevention of future Covid-19 outbreaks when it made the surprise discovery.

Initially, the team found the virus in samples dated January 15, 2020 – some 41 days before the first confirmed case of Covid-19 in Spain. They decided to check earlier samples, taken between January 2018 and December 2019, and all proved negative “except for the one from March 12, 2019, in which the SARS-CoV-2 levels were very low but were clearly positive,” the team said in a statement, using the official name of the virus.

The researchers came to the conclusion that the virus might have spread around the world much earlier than initially thought.

“Barcelona receives many visitors for tourist or professional reasons,” said Borsch. “It is more than likely that a similar situation has occurred in other parts of the world.”

The group assumed that some early cases of Covid-19 might have been mistaken for a severe flu. While the study published in the medRxiv repository has not been peer-reviewed so far, the revelation was extensively covered by the Spanish media, such as the El Mundo daily.

The virus has spread almost all over the world, infecting more than 9 million people and claiming almost 500,000 lives. Scientists have hypothesized that it originated at a wet market in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019.

The first confirmed European case of the coronavirus was recorded in France in January 2020. Various studies that have appeared since have challenged that, however. Italian research also focused on sewage water analysis said that traces of the virus were found in Milan and Turin samples dating back to mid-December 2019.

June 26, 2020 Posted by | Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

If black lives matter, then why are African leaders with a different take on Covid-19 being taunted?

Tanzanian President John Pombe Magufuli  ©  AFP / Michele Spatari
By Neil Clark | RT | June 24, 2020

The criticism of Tanzania’s and Madagascar’s presidents, John Magufuli and Andry Rajoelina, for challenging the Covid ‘consensus’ shows that, for some, Black Lives Matter counts only if black voices are saying the ‘right’ things.

YouTube has ‘Black Lives Matter’ as its Twitter bio. Pretty worthy, eh? But that didn’t stop the internet platform removing a video made by a Canadian activist who calls herself ‘Amazing Polly’ that featured claims made about Covid-19 and its treatment by the leaders of Tanzania and Madagascar. It has subsequently restored it, but the fact it took it down in the first place, alongside the sneering, hostile reaction from others to what the African leaders said, speaks volumes about the double standards currently on display.

Magufuli’s great crime was that he decided to test the testers. He instructed his country’s security services to send to Covid-19 testing labs samples taken from a pawpaw, a goat, some engine oil and a type of bird called a kware, among other non-human sources, but to assign them human names and ages. The pawpaw sample was given the name ‘Elizabeth Ane, 26 years, female.’ And guess what? The sample came back positive for Covid-19. As did those from the kware and the goat.

The testing kits had been imported from abroad. Clearly, as Magufuli – a PhD in chemistry – stated, something wasn’t quite right. “When you notice something like this, you must know there’s a dirty game played in those tests,” he said.

He advised his people, in relation to his government’s Covid-19 strategy, “Let us put God first. We must not be afraid of each other” – in stark contrast to the ‘Social distancing is here to stay’ Project Fear approach adopted elsewhere.

Magufuli also assured his people he would be sending a plane to collect an herbal cure for Covid-19 that was being promoted by Madagascar’s President Andry Rajoelina.

In her video, Amazing Polly not only includes extracts of speeches by the leaders of Magufuli and Rajoelina, but also focuses on the criticism they received from the global health establishment.

The subtext: How dare these uppity Africans challenge what we say! How dare they promote their own traditional medicines (instead of Big Pharma’s) or claim coronavirus tests are returning false positives!

“Caution must be taken about misinformation, especially on social media, about the effectiveness of certain remedies,” declared the World Health Organization (WHO). But should we really be so quick to dismiss Magufuli and Rajoelina, and what they have to say? The point is not whether we agree or disagree with the Tanzanian and Madagascan approaches, but rather that, at the very least, there should be some proper, grown-up debate.

At the time of writing, Madagascar has reported 15 deaths due to Covid-19, while Magufuli declared Tanzania coronavirus-free in early June, after a total of 21 deaths. Now, you might want to challenge those figures, which is your prerogative, but you can’t automatically presume they are not accurate.

“I’m certain many Tanzanians believe that the corona disease has been eliminated by God,” Magufuli said. Now there is nothing more likely to trigger a virtue-signaling ‘anti-racist’ Western global public health ‘consensus’ follower than a black African leader defying the ‘party line’ on Covid and citing the Lord. Just look at Western press coverage of Magufuli’s stance: ‘”Africa’s ‘bulldozer’ runs into Covid and claims God is on his side” was the headline of one very hostile piece on Bloomberg.com.

Another journalist declared that Magufuli was “a strong contender for the most asinine coronavirus global leader.”

The oft-repeated claim in reports on Tanzania is that there’s been a cover-up. Right on cue, the US Embassy to Tanzania weighed in on May 13, claiming the risk of contracting Covid-19 in Dar es-Salaam was “extremely high.” The intimation was that the Tanzanian leader couldn’t possibly be telling the truth about Covid. But wasn’t that assumption, just a tiny bit, er, racist?

Another African leader who challenged the ‘consensus’ on Covid-19 was Burundi’s Pierre Nkurunziza. Burundi, which didn’t impose a lockdown, actually expelled the WHO’s team from the country in May, accusing it of “unacceptable interference.” On June 8, Nkurunziza died suddenly, aged 55. Yet again, this didn’t get too much coverage, save for some articles in the West claiming he had died of coronavirus, even though the official cause was given as a heart attack. African leaders can be lauded, but only if they toe the politically correct line set by self-proclaimed ‘anti-racist’ men in suits in the West, it seems.

And this colonial mindset permeates even the ‘anti-imperialist’ movement. A friend of mine told me he went on a demonstration against NATO’s attack on Libya in 2011. Some Libyans present had banners of their country’s president, Muammar Gaddafi. They were told to take them down by the non-Libyan organisers. That’s right: Africans weren’t allowed to display banners of their country’s leader at a march opposing the bombing of their country.

Rajoelina hit the nail on the head when he said the only reason the rest of the world has refused to treat what he believes is his country’s cure for the coronavirus with the urgency and respect it deserves is that the remedy comes from Africa.

Isn’t it ironic that, at a time when Western establishment figures are trying to show us every day how wonderfully ‘anti-racist’ they are, black voices outside the US and Britain are being ignored, even laughed at?

Only last week, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson expressed his disapproval that Britain gave 10 times as much aid to Tanzania as “we do to the six countries of the Western Balkans, who are acutely vulnerable to Russian meddling.” How interesting that aid money sent to Tanzania gets questioned only now, after the country didn’t follow the script on Covid-19.

One wonders how many of the celebrities, politicians and pundits publicly expressing support for Black Lives Matters today have actually read the work of inspirational black African leaders such as Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, or, in fact, have even heard of them? I imagine the answer would be very few, if any.

The arrogant dismissal of voices from Africa that dare to defy Western-elite orthodoxy, and the failure to even consider the possibility that African leaders have got it right and their Western counterparts might have got it wrong, is in itself a form of neo-colonialism. And, lest we forget, Nkrumah described that as “the worst form of imperialism.”

If Black Lives Matter,  then ‘politically incorrect’ black opinions ought to be listened to with respect, and not with a smug, superior facial expression before being loftily dismissed in the way a teacher might deal with a naughty child. But in this dumbed-down era in which many unthinkingly follow the dominant globalist narrative, it’s simpler for some to ‘take a knee’ and post a photo of themselves on social media doing so than it is to take a moment to see the bigger picture.

Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. His award winning blog can be found at http://www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. He tweets on politics and world affairs @NeilClark66

June 24, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Financial Conflicts & the Retracted COVID Research

Lead author, paid by drug companies, gives the all-clear to products those companies sell. World’s leading medical journal fails transparency test.

By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | June 22, 2020

Mandeep Mehra is a professor at Harvard Medical School, and the medical director of a Boston hospital department. That city being a coronavirus hotspot, life hasn’t been normal there for some time.

He’s also the lead author of two COVID-19 research papers that were retracted shortly after being published in prestigious medical journals. Lancet boss Richard Horton calls the one published in his journal a “monumental fraud.”

The other, which has received less attention, appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). Titled Cardiovascular Disease, Drug Therapy, and Mortality in Covid-19, it runs to seven pages and was retracted because its authors now admit the data on which it relies cannot be validated.

During this pandemic, physicians have been desperate for information to help guide their decisions. Eric Rubin, editor-in-chief of the NEJM, recently explained to the New York Times,

I’m an infectious disease doctor, I treat Covid-19 patients. I’ve been in the hospital recently treating patients, and we have no idea what to do. I’m the primary driver at the journal of saying, ‘We have to get data out there that people can use.’ [bold added]

Many hypotheses have been advanced. Many questions remain unanswered. For example, there’s uncertainty about whether some widely prescribed medications might be complicating the picture. Are people who take high blood pressure pills – ACE inhibitors and ARBs (angiotensin receptor blockers) – at higher risk? Should they switch to alternatives until the pandemic is over (see here, here, and here)?

Similarly, should people on cholesterol-lowering statins follow advice published in the British Medical Journal and stop taking these drugs if they develop a serious case of COVID-19? Statins are, after all, prescribed for preventative purposes, to help avert heart problems longer term.

Mehra’s paper claimed to have examined patient records from three continents and to have found no evidence that any of these drugs increase the death rate of those who had heart issues prior to the coronavirus. Indeed, it declares that “the use of ACE inhibitors, and the use of statins were associated with a better chance of survival” in women.

But even if this data was 100% reliable, there would still be two enormous problems with this research:

#1: The lead author has financial ties to companies that sell those drugs.

#2: Neither the authors nor the journal informed us of this salient fact up front, in a transparent manner.

The paper reports, on page 1, that the research was “Funded by the William Harvey Distinguished Chair in Advanced Cardiovascular Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.”

Mehra’s Harvard e-mail address also appears on page 1. Readers are told that’s where reprint requests should be addressed (reprints are frequently distributed to third party doctors by drug companies as marketing material, and can be a considerable source of revenue for medical journals).

At the very end of the paper, on page 7, in fine print, we’re reminded that the research was supported by the William Harvey Distinguished Chair. Only then are we advised that “Disclosure forms by the authors are available with the full text of this article at NEJM.org.”

One must go to the trouble of tracking down the online version of the paper, and downloading that separate 16-page PDF, to discover the lead author has a serious conflict of interest. There, on page 12, we read:

Dr. Mehra reports personal fees from Abbott, personal fees from Medtronic, personal fees from Janssen, personal fees from Mesoblast , personal fees from Baim Institute for Clinical Research, personal fees from Portola, personal fees from Bayer, personal fees from Triple Gene, personal fees from Leviticus, personal fees from NupulseCV, personal fees from FineHeart, other from Riovant, outside the submitted work;. [sic, bold added]

Abbott Laboratories sells statins and ACE inhibitors. The company is described as a “top key player,” a “major giant,” and a “leading player” in those global marketplaces.

Likewise, Bayer AG is a major global player in the ARB market.

So a lead author who has financial relationships with two companies that sell certain classes of drugs took the time, during a pandemic, to give those drugs an all-clear.

On it’s website, the New England Journal of Medicine calls itself “the world’s leading medical journal.” Why did it choose to bury this vital piece of information?

June 22, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Retracted Papers Written by Journal VIP

By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | June 17, 2020

The lead author of two retracted COVID-19 papers is editor-in-chief of an Elsevier medical journal.

Earlier this month, two high-profile research papers were retracted on the same day. One, published in The Lancet, had concluded that coronavirus patients treated with malaria drugs were more likely to die. Published on May 22, it was officially withdrawn 13 days later.

Another, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found no evidence that widely prescribed medications increase the death rate of hospitalized COVID-19 patients with pre-existing heart problems.

The lead author in both instances was Mandeep Mehra, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and the person in charge of the Heart and Vascular Center at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

The second listed author was Sapan Desai. An online bio describes him as an “internationally-recognized double board certified vascular surgeon.” Desai is the founder of Surgisphere Corporation, a data analytics firm which claimed to have acquired 96,000 highly-detailed electronic medical records of COVID-19 patients from 671 hospitals on six continents.

The Lancet paper’s dramatic findings interrupted drug trials and changed government policy in multiple countries. It also increased the anxiety of coronavirus patients who’d been participating in those trials.

But six days after the paper appeared, more than 100 “clinicians, medical researchers, statisticians, and ethicists” addressed an open letter to the authors, and to Lancet editor-in-chief Richard Horton, questioning the integrity of the cited data.

Why were the hospitals which supplied this data not identified? Why weren’t standard statistical practices employed? Why no ethics review? Why didn’t the paper invite other researchers to examine for themselves the underlying data and computer code?

According to these experts, the medication dose sizes discussed were odd, drug ratios sounded “implausible,” the Australian data was obviously erroneous, and the African data seemed “unlikely.”

Yet none of The Lancet‘s peer-reviewers apparently noticed. “In the interests of transparency,” said the signatories of the open letter, “we also ask The Lancet to make openly available the peer review comments that led to this manuscript to be accepted for publication [sic].”

An article in the New York Times says these events “have alarmed scientists worldwide who fear that the rush for research on the coronavirus has overwhelmed the peer review process.” Lancet editor Horton, it reports, now describes the retracted paper as a “fabrication” and “a monumental fraud.”

A headline in the UK Guardian says The Lancet has made one of the biggest retractions in modern history. How, asks the article that follows,

did a paper of such consequence get discarded like a used tissue by some of its authors only days after publication? If the authors don’t trust it now, how did it get published in the first place?…the sad truth is peer review in its entirety is struggling…

Neither of those articles mentioned an astonishing fact. Lead author Mehra is himself the editor-in-chief of The Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation. Part of Elsevier’s scholarly publishing empire, this monthly journal hires editors for five-year terms. Mehra’s second term is coming to end, and last year the search for a replacement began.

As the posted job description explains, the editor-in-chief is responsible for overseeing the peer review of papers submitted to that journal. He or she is constantly evaluating research, sorting solid science from weak science. The new editor-in-chief, we’re told, must have “a demonstrated understanding of statistics and statistical methods.”

So how could a man who has spent the past 10 years in such a role have authored this pair of retracted papers? How could anyone with any statistical sophistication have taken such dodgy data at face value?

“No matter which way you examine the data, use of these [malaria] drug regimens did not help,” Mehra declared in a press release when The Lancet paper was published. But it now appears he didn’t directly examine the data at all. On the day the paper was retracted, he explained in a subsequent statement:

Dr. Desai, who served as a co-author and whose team maintained this observational database, conducted various analyses. As first author, these were provided to me, and on the basis of these analyses, we published two peer-reviewed papers…

In other words, this longtime editor-in-chief took someone else’s word for it. He failed to ask elementary questions. He took it on faith that the analyses had been properly conducted. Mehra continued:

It is now clear to me that in my hope to contribute this research during a time of great need, I did not do enough to ensure that the data source was appropriate for this use. For that, and for all the disruptions – both directly and indirectly – I am truly sorry.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the vaunted peer review system in action. Naive trust. Blind faith. By Mehra. By The Lancet. By the New England Journal of Medicine. Even when real lives, right now, hang in the balance.

Four years ago, I authored a report demonstrating that peer review is merely a sniff test. Typically performed by unpaid volunteers, it’s based on wholly subjective criteria, and is highly influenced by the pre-existing beliefs of those doing the reviewing. My report contains this paragraph:

In 2014, Science announced measures to provide deeper scrutiny of statistical claims in the research it publishes. John Ioannidis, the author of a seminal 2005 paper asserting that most published research findings are false, called this announcement “long overdue”. In his opinion, statistical review has become more important than traditional peer review for a “majority of scientific papers”.

In many places, statistical review still doesn’t occur. Even in our current situation, when COVID-19 research has the power to halt drug trials and change history, the vetting process at medical journals is a joke.

June 21, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Were COVID-19 and COVID-20 Created in a US Lab?

By Larry Romanoff | Moon of Shanghai | June 21, 2020

It was amusing to watch the emergence of this debate on the US-China stage. The Chinese were understandably unwilling to be blamed for the emergence of a virus in which they had no part, and thus reacted strongly to accusations the virus originated in a Wuhan lab. The Americans proved to be even more terrified at the possibility of scientific proof that the virus escaped from one of their bio-labs, and resorted to the only weapon they had which was to turn up the volume on blaming China. There were two main reasons for this state of affairs: (1) The US was the only country known to contain all the varieties that were being spread worldwide. (2) The US is the only nation in the world known to have repeatedly used biological weapons on other countries, beginning with North Korea and never ceasing. Of even more damning consequence is the known locations of about 400 American bio-weapons labs spread throughout the world, to say nothing of the pathetically-lax institution at Fort Detrick. (1) (2) (3)

Moreover, Trump recently claimed he could kill the entire population of Afghanistan within days. “Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the Earth. It would be gone and this is not using nuclear. It would be over in – literally, in 10 days.” Biological weapons would seem the only alternative. Hemorrhagic Fever and Hantavirus worked for the US in North Korea; perhaps also Afghanistan. (4) (5) (6) Mr. Trump later denied intention to carry out his threat, but let’s dispense with the fiction of the US having no biological weapons and that Fort Detrick and the 400 foreign labs  are performing only benevolent “peace medicine” functions. If it were China with the above history and SARS, MERS, AIDS, EBOLA, bird flu, swine flu, and COVID-19 first erupted in the US, the Americans would claim this as 100% proof that China was responsible. It cannot be a surprise that much of the world today is naturally tending to lay these outbreaks at America’s doorstep.

But returning to our topic of man-made COVID-19 or COVID-20, it seems everyone has been a little too eager to dismiss the possibility (or probability) of these viruses having a (human) helping hand.

Dr. Mae-Wan Ho of the Institute for Science in Society cites a Journal of Virology report (Feb 2000) (7) that described a method for inducing desired mutations into coronavirus to create new viruses. “Manipulating viral genomes is now routine, and it is easy to create new viruses that jump host species in the laboratory in the course of apparently legitimate experiments in genetic engineering. It is not even necessary to intentionally create lethal viruses, if one so wishes. It is actually much faster and much more effective to let random recombination and mutation take place in the test tube. Using a technique called ‘molecular breeding’, millions of recombinants can be generated in a matter of minutes. These can be screened for improved function in the case of enzymes, or increased virulence, in the case of viruses and bacteria. In other words, geneticists can now greatly speed up evolution in the laboratory to create viruses and bacteria that never existed in all the billions of years of evolution on earth.” (8) It wasn’t widely publicised, but Dr. Ho called for a full investigation into the possible genetic engineering and dissemination of the SARS virus. (9)

Then another article in which the author explained that scientists eager to dispel the notion of an artificial origin, do so by pointing out that these new coronaviruses didn’t reflect their computer simulations, the author stating, “To put it simply, the authors are saying that SARS-CoV-2 was not deliberately engineered because if it were, it would have been designed differently.” However, the London-based molecular geneticist Dr Michael Antoniou commented that this line of reasoning fails to take into account that there are a number of laboratory-based systems that can select for high affinity RBD variants that are able to take into account the complex environment of a living organism. “So the fact that COVID-19 didn’t have the same RBD amino acid sequence as the one that the computer program predicted in no way rules out the possibility that it was genetically engineered.” (10)

The article further states that “[The] authors of the Nature Medicine article seem to assume that the only way to genetically engineer a virus is to take an already known virus and then engineer it to have the new properties you want. On this premise, they looked for evidence of an already known virus that could have been used in the engineering of SARS-CoV-2. Since they failed to find that evidence, they stated, “Genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone.” But Dr Antoniou told us that while the authors did indeed show that SARS-CoV-2 was unlikely to have been built by deliberate genetic engineering from a previously used virus backbone, that’s not the only way of constructing a virus. A well-known alternative process that could have been used has the cumbersome name of “directed iterative evolutionary selection process”. In this case, it would involve using genetic engineering to generate a large number of randomly mutated versions of the SARS-CoV spike protein receptor binding domain (RBD), which would then be selected for strong binding to the ACE2 receptor and consequently high infectivity of human cells.

“This selection can be done either with purified proteins or, better still, with a mixture of whole coronavirus (CoV) preparations and human cells in tissue culture. This preparation of phage, displaying on its surface a “library” of CoV spike protein variants, is then added to human cells under laboratory culture conditions in order to select for those that bind to the ACE2 receptor. This process is repeated under more and more stringent binding conditions until CoV spike protein variants with a high binding affinity are isolated. Once any of the above selection procedures for high affinity interaction of SARS-CoV spike protein with ACE2 has been completed, then whole infectious CoV with these properties can be manufactured. Such a directed iterative evolutionary selection process is a frequently used method in laboratory research.”

There is, incidentally, another possible way that COVID-19 could have been developed in a laboratory, but in this case without using genetic engineering. This was pointed out by Nikolai Petrovsky, a researcher at the College of Medicine and Public Health at Flinders University in South Australia. Petrovsky says that coronaviruses can be cultured in lab dishes with cells that have the human ACE2 receptor. Over time, the virus will gain adaptations that let it efficiently bind to those receptors. Along the way, that virus would pick up random genetic mutations that pop up but don’t do anything noticeable. “The result of these experiments is a virus that is highly virulent in humans but is sufficiently different that it no longer resembles the original bat virus. Because the mutations are acquired randomly by selection, there is no signature of a human gene jockey, but this is clearly a virus still created by human intervention.”

Notes

(1) https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/virus-biological-us-army-weapons-fort-detrick-leak-ebola-anthrax-smallpox-ricin-a9042641.html
(2) https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/02/gary-d-barnett/the-u-s-is-the-world-leader-of-bio-weapons-research-production-and-use-against-mankind/
(3) https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-military-bio-labs-in-ukraine-production-of-bio-weapons-and-disease-causing-agents/5605307
(4) https://www.globalresearch.ca/did-trump-tacitly-threaten-use-biological-weapons/5687936
(5) https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-24/why-did-donald-trump-say-he-could-kill-10-million-afghans/11342794
(6) https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2019/08/21/604070/US-President-Donald-Trump-Afghanistan-war-win-without-nuclear-weapons
(7) http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/10627550
(8) https://www.i-sis.org.uk/SAGE.php
(9) m.w.ho@i-sis.org.uk
(10) https://gmwatch.org/en/news/latest-news/19383-where-did-the-covid-19-virus-come-from

Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com.

June 21, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

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