As the following content may be controversial, I do not pretend to truth, even to the truth of him whose thought and findings I report. My basic knowledge rests on the understanding that the property of rain is to wet and of fire to burn, and that a great cause of the night is lack of the sun.
Furthermore, given the current rapidity of the information flow, it is possible that what I relate here, by the time it is published, may have become the majority’s opinion. Though probably not, for we should keep in mind that, historically, the fabric of superstition (religious or even scientific) has often defied the feeble efforts of reason.
Which is why I begin with Galileo. It is universally known that Galileo was tried for his unorthodox notion that the earth circled around the sun, rather than otherwise. He had to recant his findings to avoid what happened to Giordano Bruno. Hence Galileo’s reported legendary mumbling as he left the court, “And yet it moves” (‘it’ being the earth in its revolution around the sun).
Theoretically speaking, the theologians may have had a point. Those readers who in their youth used trains instead of planes for transport, may recall what happened when they sat on a train waiting to depart, while another identical train was stationed on the adjacent rail. When your train, or the other began to move, for one second or so it was difficult to say if it was yours or the other train that was moving. A phenomenon consistent with the general notion of relative motion.
But Galileo’s assertions proved even more heretical when – using his DIY telescope – he discovered that Jupiter had satellites. For the finding disproved the assumption whereby the earth is the exceptional celestial object around which all other worlds do circle – the astronomical equivalent of the ‘exceptional’ nation of Obamanian memory.
Faced with the dilemma, the bishop of Pisa issued a directive to the parishes, admonishing that it was sinful to look through a telescope, because it showed objects that didn’t exist.
As of now, it is uncertain whether the world is a large assembly of bishops of Pisa or, as it may still be not sinful to hope, common sense will prevail.
One prevailing characteristic of the current Coronavirus metaphorical fever is the fantastic and logically inconsistence of the reports.
The Latin dictum or principle “Natura non facit saltus” (nature makes no leaps) has been an important principle of natural philosophy. The sentence is attributed to Gottfried Leibniz, (1646-1746), one of the inventors of the infinitesimal calculus – though perhaps better known for his assertion, reached through elaborate reasoning, that ours is the best of all possible words.
The principle is/was also an essential element of Charles Darwin’s treatment of natural selection in his ‘Origin of Species.’ And while many may take issue with Leibnitz’ opinion of our world, less probably disagree with the notion of natural selection.
As readers know, Italy came at the forefront of the Conoravirus phenomenon for the extraordinary higher number of cases and terrifying death toll, even exceeding China’s, where it all started.
At which some dissenting voices began to be heard, disputing the earlier findings – and/or at least disputing how they were reported.
The bitter and obstinate opposition made to those who, however clearly and with tenable arguments, disputed the data, induces the unbiased observer to at least hypothesize that some dormant privilege or as yet unexplained assumption has been attacked.
I would suggest to disregard the ‘battle of qualifications’ whereby a graduate of university X knows more than a graduate of university Y. As I mentioned before, my (however tentative) assessment of the plausibility and credibility of an explanation rests on:
Whether the explanation is consistent with common sense and with what is commonly known on the debated issue,
Whether the person in question has direct experience (and for how long) with the problem on which he expresses his views, and
Whether his physiognomy is in reasonable harmony with perceivable symptoms of credibility. An idea elaborated in extreme detail with and with a massive related study, by the Swiss author Johann Lavater, at the end of the 1700.
I will begin with Dr. Stefano Montanari, a nano-pathologist who, for over twenty years, along with his wife, has researched nano-pathogens, the very minute illness-causing particles that typically float in the air of all crowded, polluted, highly trafficked, industrial cities, as well as factories.
[ For Italian speakers, the link to the original interview is at https://bit.ly/2UBuRX2 ]
Translation:
The prefix ‘nano’ refers to the dramatically small size of the items studied. It takes 25,400,000 nanometers to make an inch. The size of the smallest particle recognizable by the naked eye is 100,000 nanometers. Therefore nano-pathogens are dramatically small, though the damage they cause to the lungs is inversely proportional to their size.
The size of a nano-pathogen is between 5 and 200 nanometers. Considering that a virus is considered large at 250 nanometers, nano-pathogens and viruses (corona or otherwise), have the same order of magnitude. For expedience I will signal the questions put to Dt. Montanari by three dashes.
— Where did the virus originate?
All the news we have had so far is varied, fragmentary, and unverifiable. First it seemed it was born in China, then not in China (see previous article “Science and Fiction” – where virologist Dr. Wodarg claimed that some coronaviruses, belonging or related to the current entity called ‘the’ coronavirus, were already discovered in Georgia, USA in 2015).
Some said they come from bats, some that they were created in a laboratory to exterminate people in mass. Someone may know but they are very few. As for the bats, we may as well add the unicorn and we have completed the picture.
The fact that ‘this’ coronavirus is considered new, is anything but exceptional. There are very many coronaviruses. The common cold is often due to a coronavirus. They are viruses that by themselves cannot cause death, and very often are totally innocuous. This new strain is very infective, which means that it can more easily enter into people.
However, in the overwhelming majority of people it remains innocuous and without showing clinical indication of symptoms. But it hits, as an illness, old people, especially old people who take medicines used to treat other pulmonary diseases, or who have other pathologies.
Healthy people suffer absolutely no damage from this virus(es), which is probably ubiquitous and can be found everywhere in the billions, like billions of other viruses. Therefore I am convinced that, if we sought the virus in the 60-million Italians, we would find it at least in 30 million and probably more. As I said, this virus is found everywhere and it stays there without absolutely causing any harm, just like the enormous number of other viruses, present but harmless.
Mortality from the virus is very low and probably non-existent. But an illness with the virus is another matter. Yesterday evening (about Mar 23, my note) we heard a primary doctor in a hospital saying that the virus is the same as an illness. This gentleman should go back to school, but not to university, a bit further back, to elementary school. It is a statement that makes no logical sense.
To die of an illness means that the illness is the cause of death. For example, a myocardial infarction is a cause of death. If someone is run over by a train, the ensuing trauma is the cause of death. If he who is run over by a train happens also to have a cold, the cold is not the cause of death. He casually happened to have a cold.
I am convinced that if all deaths were checked – about 650,000 people die in Italy physiologically every year – you would find more than half having the coronavirus, probably many more than half. For they are old people who have this coronavirus in their body. The omnipresence of the coronavirus type and other coronaviruses is a fact, not a hypothesis.
— I see here the latest numbers from the official press service , indicating that Italy surpassed China in number of deaths during a single day, 475, of which 319 in Lombardy. Therefore I am asking you, Dr. Montanari, if you still use the adjective ‘harmless’ referring to the virus.
No, the virus is not harmless. It affects the lungs, just as there are viruses that affect the guts, hence diarrhea, the stomach, hence vomiting, the nervous system, hence headaches etc.
It means that, in certain cases, especially the old, they need respiratory care. If you examine the age of the dead they are on average eighty-year old. A respirator is common equipment in a hospital. I have spent more than 40 years in hospital operating rooms, and it is absolutely standard equipment.
That we do not have them or have too few (in Italy) is due to our having, through the last 10 years, destroyed our health system. We have closed entire hospital departments, as well as many smaller hospitals.
The purchasing system is bad, and all that is needed in a hospital costs double than in other countries – because the purchasing system is corrupted at the capillary level. (My note: the very governor of the region of Lombardy was recently condemned to six years in jail for a monstrous appropriation of funds (in the hundreds of millions) destined to health care)
We are facing an emergency – if we can thus call it – because we are not prepared, due to the 10-year long process of dismantling the system. And when I hear it said that the Italian health system is the best in the world my arms fall, and maybe not just the arms.
— But how do you explain the images of coffins carried away by military trucks from hospitals in the city of Bergamo. Would you still maintain that the cause of the death was not the coronavirus?
Look, and I am quoting the National Institute of Health, the actual deaths attributed or certified as having been caused by the corona virus were 3 (this was a few days ago when the numbers reported were already in the hundred). And when I hear Mario Giordano (a well-known journalist) say that we should not divulge this news, I wonder what kind of journalism we have in Italy (and maybe in the world). I’m not talking about the parish newspaper, I’m talking about a journalist of great notoriousness, who says something contrary to the very ethics of journalism… this man is advocating disinformation. It is a shame.
— If this virus mutates quickly does it mean that maybe the Italian virus is not the same as the Chinese?
It is not maybe, for sure it’s not the same as the German virus isolated in Germany, nor it is the same as the Chinese. It is the nature of viruses – they look for stability, for a state to be in in for a while. To achieve this the virus mutates at great speed. Tomorrow it will no longer be what it is today, and so on. But (the coronavirus) is not the only virus behaving this way. We host a huge number of viruses in our body. Many of them are also indispensable for our life. They are not even beings as such – they are a kind of chemical chains. The current type (Coronavirus) is particular for its relationship to RNA and DNA but let’s not go into this. There are many with similar structural characteristics. They mutate very quickly – therefore when attempting to look for a remedy for this or that virus you run after something that runs faster than us.
— But how about the images from hospitals showing people with respirators. Is your explanation that the phenomenon is not due to the severity of the virus but to the cuts to health care?
We are not prepared for a disease that affects the lungs. For our politicians have destroyed our health system. You know very well, as a journalist, how easy it is to manipulate text and images to create a message.
There are definitely people with respirators who definitely need it – and they must be helped by it. But all these coffins are part of the 650,000 deaths we have every year in Italy – there is no increase in mortality. And if you go to any hospital, you see coffins coming out every day. Many years ago I turned down a job in childhood oncology, precisely because I could not stand the spectacle of the white coffins that passed by me constantly. We are talking about nothing and, as I said, you know that it is possible to manipulate images and context to achieve the impression you wish to convey. (follow examples of unforgettable momentous events then quickly forgotten)
Here we are talking of 3 people’s death attributable to Coronavirus. If the number does not please the media that is another matter, but the facts are what they are – and that number, as I said, comes out from the National Institute for Health.
— But then the pneumonia caused by the covid-19 is different from the pneumonia we have known so far?
It is an interstitial pneumonia, it is a viral pneumonia, but there have been these types of viruses in Italy for several months. We never talk about it, but already, for example, in October, that is about 5-6 months ago, there were patients with atypical pneumonia – pneumonia not normally seen and about which we knew nothing. The source was unknown, it was impossible to counteract the virus pharmacologically, and we had to wait for those sick people to heal themselves. They healed by themselves, because, contrary to what some try to make you believe, we have immune defenses that are very much stronger than the vast majority of drugs.
We have on our skin various bacteria, fungi and viruses that are there to contrast and counteract pathogen bacteria and fungi, meaning carriers of illness. In fact when we wear gloves to combat the coronavirus, we are not helping because we do not allow our bacteria, fungi and viruses present on the skin to interact with the pathogenic ones. Then with gloves-covered hands we touch our clothes, we touch the money handed by the cashiers from the stores still open – the same gloves on which the viruses came to rest. Hence those gloves are distinctly worse than non-gloves. We are dealing with imbecils, ignorant of the elementary principles of biology.
— Therefore it is as if we couldn’t build antibodies in this way …
We don’t build antibodies to this virus – we already have immune defenses, from rhinos to elephants to goldfish, we all have the capacity to heal ourselves. If you have a headache, and I give you some enamel to apply to your nails, it was not the enamel that cured the headache. It was just that next day the body eliminated the headache – and this happens at large.
My old professor of physiology used to say that an untreated flu lasts 7 days, a treated flu lasts one week. This means that we presumptuously interfere with nature without realizing what we are doing so.
As for the masks… they are useless. There are millions, billions of viruses for every square meter of the earth, on the sidewalk and so on. It’s an illusion following from the (imagined) idea that viruses are as big as sewer rats. A notion that perhaps arose from the words of Ms. Lorenzin when, as Minister of Health, she said that viruses crawl and jump around (as if they were animals).
Viruses exist in enormous quantities and can enter in enormous quantities inside the cells, which are a few thousands of a millimeter wide. Wearing a mask compares with raising a gate to prevent mosquitoes from entering your house.
— But if the disease is not so serious why every day more and more restrictive measures are placed on us? How do the authorities of the institutions justify their behavior?
The major issue at stake is, or are, the vaccines. The regime that now encompasses the world will force the world to vaccinate – that is to vaccinate with and against a virus that does not give immunity, as this (the coronavirus) is the case.
If 50 years ago, at my exam of pharmacology, I had told my examining professor – who was one of the most knowledgeable pharmacologists of the time – something like that, I would have been thrown out of the door. For only an incompetent can imagine a vaccine against a virus that does not give immunity and has no chance of being effective. We are talking about a virus that mutates at very fast speed and we cannot possibly run after it (its mutations).
It’s a virus somehow similar to the cold virus, whose family it belongs to. You can’t vaccinate against the common cold because the common cold does not give immunity. In the course of a life, a person can have a cold 200 times, and at no time that cold will give immunity (against the next). It is a colossal fraud. We are close to 8 billion people forced to be vaccinated and it will be an unimaginably enormous business.
— But then, if the most immediate defence consists in keeping the lungs efficient how does a smoker deal with the issue?
Badly. We all have bronchi. They are tubes that become thinner and thinner (as they approach the lungs). They convey air to the 600 million small bags, called pulmonary alveoli, in which oxygen and carbon dioxide are exchanged.
Along the bronchial tubes all healthy people have a thin, but indispensable layer of mucus, which envelopes and blocks dust, viruses and bacteria. Furthermore healthy people have, in the bronchi, what are called vibratile cilia – they are a kind of whips whipping out of the lungs these dust, viruses, bacteria and fungi.
The smoker has a layer of mucus that is relatively enormously thicker. The vibratile cilia not only cannot throw out what has been enveloped by the mucus – which in the smoker becomes catarrh – but they become paralyzed. What happens then is that the invaders slip down, slip into the pulmonary alveoli and do not come out anymore. Consequently the smoker gets viruses, bacteria, fungi in much greater number than a non-smoker does.
— On the subject of swabs (to verify the presence of the coronavirus), I would like to know from you what do you think of the governor of Veneto (Mr. Zaia) who said that we will take swabs from everybody.
The governor is clearly incompetent and doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Besides, for the analysis of the swabs special equipment is needed. The analysis cannot be done in the kitchen – both equipment and expertise are required. And then there is a further problem. The results, in more than 80% of the cases are false positive. Therefore there is a real risk of telling a person that he is ‘positive’ when he is not.
But there is more. Most of those who are actually positive have no symptoms – as is the case with the vast majority of viruses that exist in this world. Therefore, should we isolate and turn perfectly healthy people into sick people?
This is very serious, because – and this has been known for many decades – depressed people have lower defenses against pathologies and get sick more often. You take from these people the possibility to go out in the sun – without which the body cannot properly metabolize vitamin D, which is essential to protect our immune system.
So we stay at home in a bad mood, we cannot metabolize vitamin D and we get sick more easily. All these ideas, taken by perfectly incompetent people, are deleterious and worsen the situation.
People should be told to stay outside in the sun, to walk, to move around, to try staying healthy and eat healthily. Not to stay indoor, in the dark and without sun. These incompetents don’t realize the harm they do or maybe they realize it, I don’t know.
— This seems a vicious circle. But, compared to the SARS (epidemic) what are the differences?
(The coronavirus) is one of the many lung viruses (like SARS), causing an atypical pneumonia. They are cousins, almost brothers. And SARS did not cause disasters.
There have been other similar pathologies, the swine flu, the avian flu… In the case of the avian flu Italy bought 27-million vaccine doses of which we disposed 26-million and 700-thousand. We paid all that money for vaccines that we threw in the sewers. We have no money for respirators but money to buy a vaccine.
We are ruled by the incompetent and I do not wish to talk about corruption, though I am tempted to. It’s like commander Schettino to the umpteenth power [Schettino was the commander of the Cruise Liner “Costa Concordia” that ran aground near an island close to Tuscany in 2012. He wanted to blow the ship’s horn to wish a Happy Birthday to a friend in the island, while showing off for his Moldavian girlfriend, a personal friend as well as unregistered passenger on board – 32 people died, the cost of the damage was in the billions range).
— There are those who claim that the coronavirus is seasonal. Could you give a prediction on when this emergency will end …
I cannot say whether it is seasonal or not. Like almost all viruses it can be affected by temperature. It is certain that nature is wiser than our statesmen and many doctors. Besides, it is not corrupt.
Nature knows well that when we get sick , the body raises the temperature because, from the point of view of fighting the illness, the higher the temperature, the more efficient is the illness-fighting system – meaning that the temperature improves the efficiency of our immune system and decreases the vital capacity of bacteria and fungi – assuming that the viruses have a life.
But what do the doctors do? They gives the patient Tachypyrine – which takes away that defense connected with higher temperature. The doctor prescribes Tachypyrine when his patient has a 37.8 C (100.04 F) temperature. It compares to a besieged city throwing down the walls to let more air in.
It is pure folly.
As for the coronavirus, it happens that in the summer the temperature rises and it is possible that this virus reduces its vital capacity. Vital capacity is a wrong expression, but let’s say so for simplicity.
It is possible that in the summer the virus presence drops. Even so, the matter is not that relevant. Every year we have 20,000 deaths from influenza but no one talks about it. Furthermore we have 49000 deaths per year due to infections contracted in the hospital. The data is official. 49000 people, (130-140 people per day) die because they are admitted into a hospital, say, for an appendicitis and then they die of pneumonia. No one is talking about it but we have many more deaths from these infections than we have had from a coronavirus, even since the beginning of this farce. We are facing something beyond absurd, which at least invites suspicion.
— Therefore, in summary, one cannot die of covid-19 unless the patient has previous pathologies.
Listen. If I throw you from the tenth floor and you had a cold or flu or had arthritis, I cannot say that you died of arthritis, flu or cold – you died because I threw you from the tenth floor. Go and see the data from the Higher Institute of health – you find that those who died from coronavirus are all people who have cancer, who have a very strong diabetes, who are obese who are old. Eighty-year-olds, as is the average death-norm in Italy, and 80 years also remains the death-norm associated with coronavirus, because they are all people who die of other diseases.
— How about the latest news about the death of a 32-year-old young man (from coronavirus)?
I cannot blame them but I did not understand. How sure are we that he died of coronavirus and not ‘with’ coronavirus? This patient had several health problems, some caused by an infection contracted in Cuba 2 years ago. Is this not meaningful in your opinion?
Surely you cannot think that if one is infected with coronavirus then he should heal from cancer or from whatever other disease. If someone has cancer, or a heart condition, and also accidentally the coronavirus, what does it mean? We are really facing a colossal scam.
— Do you agree, however, that it is good that the most affected, the most weak should stay at home?
No, it’s good for them to go out, to sunbathe, to stay outside, to stroll, to stay healthy, because if they remain locked in the house, they are more likely to die. Do you want to speed-up the death of the elderly? Should we keep them out of the air, out of the sun? They must walk, they must stay in the sun, they must exercise. In summary, they must do all that has always been said (as good for health) and that today is denied to them for interests that are abhorrent.
— Let’s move on to England and Boris Johnson, as the last question. He wanted to rely on ‘’Herd Immunity’ but then he retracted…
His reasoning resembles his hair. We are facing pure madness . Firstly, herd immunity is a brilliant invention and fantasy created by the pharmaceutical industry. Only an imbecile can believe that there exists such a monstrosity as herd immunity, which simply doesn’t.
If you wish, we can make another show where I’ll explain why (herd immunity) is a scam. But even if it existed, how does herd immunity exist for a disease that does not give you immunity? It is as if you were saying that herd immunity exists for colds. We’re really in front of a character (Boris Johnson) who speaks because he has a tongue. He is dangerous and should be stopped.
— He cannot because he is at the head of the of Great Britain. We have touched on the most important points. Have we left anything out?
There is one point we did not touch – the economic, which is not part of my competence. We are now blocking the world and, as for Italy, the economy was already at a low point. What do they (we) do? They freeze all activities but keep the stock exchange open. The stocks reach low bottom. What does it mean? The ultra billionaire can easily purchase companies that are now worth pennies.
When eventually it will be decided that the (coronavirus) farce is ended – and nothing will end because this virus will continue undaunted to do what it’s doing now (or its evolving strains will do), the ultra-billionaires will own everything. The rich (a degree below the billionaires) will have bought, say, 3-4 restaurants and/or 10 stores that had to close. In summary, all who were rich will be infinitely richer, But we will also have a flood-tide of people who will always be poorer. This will be another consequence of this fake epidemic, perhaps, who knows, created on purpose.
— I would like to close with your comment on the possible correlation between pollution and the development of the virus…
We have talked and studied this for many years. When there are dusts, micro and nano particles, the viruses – all almost infinitely small –stick to the nano-particles, which then become the vehicles for the viruses, as well as for dioxins, furans (another toxic compound), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and an infinite number of other substances.
All this is widely known – but now some pundits say so as if it were a novelty. We have been saying this for 20 years.
End of the interview.
I started with Galileo, because I had a cunning plan to bring him up again at the end. The Vatican chief prosecutor of Galileo was Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino, the same, by the way, who was instrumental in condemning Giordano Bruno to the stake. In the circumstances Galileo’s decision to officially renege on the on the geo-centric theory of the universe was wise.
We should, however, consider that both Galileo and Bruno lived during the peak times of the Counterreformation. And the Counterreformation was the Catholic response to Lutheranism, just as the Patriot Act (never rescinded, by the way), was the response to 9/11.
Still, Cardinal Bellarmino had some remarkable skills. One of them was persuasive oratory. He attracted both Catholic and Protestants to his debates and was skilled at counter-arguing and rebutting the Calvinist theories that spread rapidly in the Dutch provinces.
In the case at hand, Dr. Montanari found a contemporary Cardinal Bellarmino in the shape of a Dr. Burioni, who has become a TV celebrity (corporate official channels) and made big bucks as an adamant advocate of the universal power of all vaccines.
It goes without saying that the pharmaceutical lobby insures that only pro-vaccine voices are heard in the syndicated (there are no other) corporate channels. The situation mirrors the US. In fact Dr. Montanari could only be heard on an Internet channel.
But whereas Cardinal Bellarmino was acknowledged as an intelligent individual – though misguided at least from a Christian or humane point of view – Dr. Burioni is an ass who uses his ass as an instrument of cogitation. And this not for his views on vaccines, which is a matter of opinion, but for his reaction to Dr. Burioni’s interview, when it became clear that it was circulating more widely than expected.
Among other things Dr. Burioni is the head of a nebulous “Coalition Across Science,” whose funding is obscure but whose aim is to make ALL scientists agree with Burioni’s interpretation of the Coronavirus and with the worth of a forthcoming vaccine. Hence the “Coalition Across Science” even includes sociologists, behaviorists and ethologists who, for example, study the mating behavior of bonobo monkeys.
To fight Dr. Montanari, Burioni has filed a legal suit, seeking penalties or incarceration for Dr. Montanari and the closure of the Internet station that published the above rendered interview.
I will spare the reader the lengthy motivations in the accusations of the braggart Burioni. The most interesting and to any same person incredible are:
quote
Montanari is a scientific popularizer – therefore his voice is perceived by people as authoritative and therefore his statements take on an even more serious aspect….
It is therefore up to the judicial authority to determine whether there are any criminal wrongdoings in Montanari’s video and in particular a breach of Art 656 (publication of criminal information or dissemination of exaggerated or tendentious false news, likely to disturb public order)….
Art 656 prescribes a prison sentence of at least 3 months and a monetary penalty.
When the judicial authority verifies criminal offences in the conduct described, it will have to consider the adoption of any measure, also aimed at obscuring and seizing the YouTube channels where these videos are present, if not already removed.
Unquote
The patient reader who read so far, may or will draw his/her own conclusions. The information published here is clearly inconsistent with the perception conveyed by the corporate channels – suggesting ubiquitous (Coronavirus) deaths and great dangers to disbelievers or disobeyers of the safety injunctions.
Puzzled by the inconsistency – and to run a check, however minute – I travelled around two local hospitals near the emergency section and saw nothing unusual, at least as measured by the traffic of ambulances.
The leaders of two controversial pandemic simulations that took place just months before the Coronavirus crisis – Event 201 and Crimson Contagion – share a common history, the 2001 biowarfare simulation Dark Winter. Dark Winter not only predicted the 2001 anthrax attacks, but some of its participants had clear foreknowledge of those attacks.
During the presidency of George H.W. Bush in the early 1990s, something disturbing unfolded at the U.S.’ top biological warfare research facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Specimens of highly contagious and deadly pathogens – anthrax and ebola among them – had disappeared from the lab, at a time when lab workers and rival scientists had been accused of targeted sexual and ethnic harassment and several disgruntled researchers had left as a result.
In addition to missing samples of anthrax, ebola, hanta virus and a variant of AIDS, two of the missing specimens had been labeled “unknown” – “an Army euphemism for classified research whose subject was secret,” according to reports. The vast majority of the specimens lost were never found and an Army spokesperson would later claim that it was “likely some were simply thrown out with the trash.”
An internal Army inquiry in 1992 would reveal that one employee, Lt. Col. Philip Zack, had been caught on camera secretly entering the lab to conduct “unauthorized research, apparently involving anthrax,” the Hartford Courant would later report. Despite this, Zack would continue to do infectious disease research for pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and would collaborate with the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) throughout the 1990s.
The Courant had also noted that: “A numerical counter on a piece of lab equipment had been rolled back to hide work done by the mystery researcher [later revealed to be Zack], who left the misspelled label ‘antrax’ in the machine’s electronic memory.” The Courant’s report further detailed the extremely lax security controls and chaotic disorganization that then characterized the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) lab in Fort Detrick.
This same lab would, a decade later, be officially labeled as the source of the anthrax spores responsible for the 2001 anthrax attacks, attacks which are also officially said to have been the work of a “deranged” USAMRIID researcher, despite initially having been blamed on Saddam Hussein and Iraq by top government officials and mainstream media. Those attacks killed 5 Americans and sickened 17.
Yet, as the investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks unfolded, accusations from major U.S. newspapers soon emerged that the FBI was deliberately sabotaging the probe to protect the Anthrax attacker and that the CIA and U.S. military intelligence had refused to cooperate with the investigation. The FBI did not officially close their investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks, nicknamed “Amerithrax,” until 2010 and aspects of that investigation still remain classified.
More recently, this past July, the same Fort Detrick lab would be shut down by the CDC, after it was found that researchers “did not maintain an accurate or current inventory” for toxins and “failed to safeguard against unauthorized access to select agents.” The closure of the lab for its numerous breaches of biosafety protocols would be hidden from Congress and the facility would controversially be partially reopened last November before all of the identified biosafety issues were resolved.
The same day that the lab was controversially allowed to partially reopen, which was the result of heavy lobbying from the Pentagon, local news outlets reported that the lab had suffered “two breaches of containment” last year, though the nature of those breaches and the pathogens involved were redacted in the inspection findings report obtained by the Frederick News Post. Notably, USAMRIID has, since the 1980s, worked closely with virologists and virology labs in Wuhan, China, where the first epicenter of the current novel Coronavirus (Covid-19) cases emerged. The Chinese government has since alleged that the virus had been brought to China by members of the U.S. military, members of which attended the World Military Games in the country last October.
Such similarities among these Fort Detrick lab breaches, from the early 1990s to 2001 to the present, may be nothing more than unfortunate coincidences that are the result of a stubborn federal government and military that have repeatedly refused to enforce the necessary stringent safety precautions on the nation’s top biological warfare laboratory.
Yet, upon examining not only these biosafety incidents at Fort Detrick, but the 2001 Anthrax attacks and the current Covid-19 outbreak, another odd commonality stands out — high-level war games exercise took place in June 2001 that eerily predicted not only the Anthrax attacks, but also the initial government narrative of those attacks and much, much more.
That June 2001 exercise, known as “Dark Winter,” also predicted many aspects of government pandemic response that would later re-emerge in last October’s simulation “Event 201,” which predicted a global pandemic caused by a novel Coronavirus just months before the Covid-19 outbreak. In addition, the U.S. government would lead its own multi-part series of pandemic simulations, called “Crimson Contagion,” that would also predict aspects of the Covid-19 outbreak and government response.
Upon further investigation, key leaders of both Event 201 and Crimson Contagion, not only have deep and longstanding ties to U.S. Intelligence and the U.S. Department of Defense, they were all previously involved in that same June 2001 exercise, Dark Winter. Some of these same individuals would also play a role in the FBI’s “sabotaged” investigation into the subsequent Anthrax attacks and are now handling major aspects of the U.S. government’s response to the Covid-19 crisis. One of those individuals, Robert Kadlec, was recently put in charge of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) entire Covid-19 response efforts, despite the fact that he was recently and directly responsible for actions that needlessly infected Americans with Covid-19.
Other major players in Dark Winter are now key drivers behind the “biodefense” mass surveillance programs currently being promoted as a technological solution to Covid-19’s spread, despite evidence that such programs actually worsen pandemic outbreaks. Others still have close connections to the insider trading that recently occurred among a select group of U.S. Senators regarding the economic impact of Covid-19 and are set to personally profit from lucrative contracts to develop not just one, but the majority, of experimental Covid-19 treatments and vaccines currently under development by U.S. companies.
This investigative series, entitled “Engineering Contagion: Amerithrax, Coronavirus and the Rise of the Biotech-Industrial Complex,” will examine these disturbing parallels between the 2001 anthrax attacks and the current scandals and “solutions” of the Covid-19 crisis as well as the simulations that eerily preceded both events. By tracing key actors in Dark Winter from 2001 to the present, it is also possible to trace the corruption that has lurked behind U.S. “biodefense” and pandemic preparedness efforts for decades and which now is rearing its ugly head as pandemic panic distracts the American and global public from the fundamentally untrustworthy, and frankly dangerous, individuals who are in control of the U.S. government’s and corporate America’s response.
Given their involvement in Dark Winter and, more recently, Event 201 and Crimson Contagion, this series seeks to explore the possibility that, just like the 2001 anthrax attacks, government insiders had foreknowledge of the Covid-19 crisis on a scale that, thus far, has gone unreported and that those same insiders are now manipulating the government’s response and public panic in order to reap record profits and gain unprecedented power for themselves and control over people’s lives.
A DARK WINTER DESCENDS
In late June 2001, the U.S. military was preparing for a “Dark Winter.” At Andrews Air Force Base in Camp Springs, Maryland, several Congressmen, a former CIA director, a former FBI director, government insiders and privileged members of the press met to conduct a biowarfare simulation that would precede both the September 11 attacks and the 2001 Anthrax attacks by a matter of months. It specifically simulated the deliberate introduction of smallpox to the American public by a hostile actor.
The simulation was a collaborative effort led by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies (part of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security) in collaboration with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Analytic Services (ANSER) Institute for Homeland Security and the Oklahoma National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism. The concept, design and script of the simulation were created by Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins Center along with Randy Larsen and Mark DeMier of ANSER. The full script of the exercise can be read here.
The name for the exercise derives from a statement made by Robert Kadlec, who participated in the script created for the exercise, when he states that the lack of smallpox vaccines for the U.S. populace means that “it could be a very dark winter for America.” Kadlec, a veteran of the George W. Bush administration and a former lobbyist for military intelligence/intelligence contractors, is now leading HHS’ Covid-19 response and led the Trump administration’s 2019 “Crimson Contagion” exercises, which simulated a crippling pandemic influenza outbreak in the U.S. that had first originated in China. Kadlec’s professional history, his decades-old obsession with apocalyptic bioweapon attack scenarios and the Crimson Contagion exercises themselves are the subject of Part III of this series.
The Dark Winter exercise began with a briefing on the geopolitical context of the exercise, which included intelligence suggesting that China had intentionally introduced Foot and Mouth disease in Taiwan for economic and political advantage; that Al-Qaeda was seeking to purchase biological pathogens once weaponized by the Soviet Union; and that Saddam Hussein of Iraq had recruited former biowarfare specialists from the Soviet Union and was importing materials to create biological weapons. It further notes that a majority of Americans had opposed a planned deployment of U.S. soldiers to the Middle East, which was also opposed by Iraq, China and Russia. The script also asserts that the soldiers were being deployed to counter and potentially engage the Iraqi military. Later, as the exercise unfolds, many of those Americans once skeptical about this troop deployment soon begin calling for “revenge.”
Amid this backdrop, news suddenly breaks that smallpox, a disease long eradicated in the U.S. and globally, appears to have broken out in the state of Oklahoma. The participants in Dark Winter, representing the National Security Council, quickly deduce that smallpox has been deliberately introduced and that this is the result of a “bioterrorist attack on the United States.” The assumption is made that the attack is “related to decisions we may make to deploy troops to the Mid-East.”
Not unlike what is unfolding currently with the Covid-19 crisis, in Dark Winter, there is no means of rapid diagnosis for smallpox, no treatments available and no surge capacity in the healthcare system. The outbreak quickly spreads to numerous other U.S. states and throughout the world. Hospitals in the U.S. soon face “desperate situations” as “tens of thousands of ill or anxious persons seek care.” This is compounded by “grossly inadequate supplies” and “insufficient isolation rooms,” among other complications.
Since this exercise occurred in June 2001, the heavy hinting that Saddam Hussein-led Iraq and Al Qaeda are the main suspects is notable. Indeed, at one point in one of the fictional news reports used in the exercise, the reporter states that “Iraq might have provided the technology behind the attacks to terrorist groups based in Afghanistan.” Such claims that Iraq’s government was linked to Al Qaeda in Afghanistan would re-emerge months later in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, and would be heavily promoted by several Dark Winter participants such as former CIA Director James Woolsey, who would later swear under oath that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. It would, of course, later emerge that Iraq’s connections to Al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks were nonexistent as well as the fact that Iraq did not possess biological weapons or other “weapons of mass destruction.”
Notably, this insertion into one of the Dark Winter news clips was not the only part of the exercise that sought to link Saddam Hussein and Iraq to biological weapons. For instance, during the exercise, satellite imaging showed that a “suspected bioresearch facility” in Iraq appeared to be expanding an “exclusionary zone” in order to limit civilian activity near the facility as well as a “possible quarantine” area in the same area as this facility. Previously in the exercise, Iraq was one of three countries, along with Iran and North Korea, who were “repeatedly rumored” to have illicitly obtained Soviet smallpox cultures from defecting scientists and Iraq was alleged to have offered employment to a leading smallpox scientist who had worked on the Soviet bioweapons program.
Then, at the end of the exercise, a “prominent Iraqi defector” emerges who claims Iraq had arranged the bioweapons attack “through intermediaries,” which is deemed “highly credible” even though “there is no forensic evidence to support this claim.” Iraq officially denies the accusation, but vows to target the U.S. in “highly damaging ways” if the U.S. “takes action against Iraq.” It is thus unsurprising that, as will be shown later in this report, key participants in Dark Winter would heavily promote the narrative that Iraq was to blame for the 2001 Anthrax attacks. Other participants, including Robert Kadlec, would then become involved in the FBI’s “sabotaged” investigation once the Bureau began to focus on a domestic, as opposed to an international source.
In addition, as part of Dark Winter, mainstream media outlets, including the New York Times and others, were sent anonymous letters that threatened renewed attacks on the U.S., including anthrax attacks, if the U.S. did not withdraw its troops from the Middle East. In this simulation, those letters contained “a genetic fingerprint of the smallpox strain matching the fingerprint of the strain causing the current epidemic.” During the Anthrax attacks that would occur just a few months after Dark Winter, Judith Miller – who participated in Dark Winter – and other U.S. reporters would receive threatening letters with a white powder presumed to be Anthrax. In Miller’s case, the powder turned out to be harmless.
Other aspects of Dark Winter appear more notable now than ever, particularly in light of recent pandemic simulations that were conducted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (Event 201) and the Trump administration (Crimson Contagion) in 2019, as well as the federal government’s current options for responding to Covid-19.
For instance, Dark Winter warns of “dangerous misinformation” spreading online selling “unverified” cures and making similarly “unverified” claims, all of which are deemed as posing a threat to public safety. Such concerns over online misinformation/disinformation and narrative control have recently surfaced in connection with the current Covid-19 crisis. Notable, however, is the fact that the “Event 201” simulation held last October, which simulated a global pandemic caused by a novel coronavirus, also greatly emphasized concerns about such misinformation/disinformation and suggested increased social media censorship and “limited internet shutdowns” to combat the issue. That simulation was co-hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, which is currently led by Dark Winter co-author Thomas Inglesby.
Dark Winter further discusses the suppression and removal of civil liberties, such as the possibility of the President to invoke “The Insurrection Act”, which would allow the military to act as law enforcement upon request by a State governor, as well as the possibility of “martial rule.” The Dark Winter script also discusses how options for martial rule “include, but are not limited to, prohibition of free assembly, national travel ban, quarantine of certain areas, suspension of the writ of habeas corpus [i.e. arrest without due process], and/or military trials in the event that the court system becomes dysfunctional.”
The exercise later includes “credible allegations” that those deemed “suspicious for smallpox” by authorities were illegally arrested or detained and that these arrests largely targeted low income individuals or ethnic minorities. In terms of current events, it is worth pointing out that U.S. Attorney General William Barr and the Department of Justice he leads have recently requested new “emergency powers” that are allegedly related to the current Covid-19 outbreak. That request specifically references the ability to indefinitely detain Americans without right to a free trial.
WEAVING A NARRATIVE
After examining Dark Winter, it then becomes important to examine the events the exercise seemingly predicted, namely the 2001 anthrax attacks. This is particularly crucial for two reasons: first, that the source of the anthrax was later traced to a domestic source, allegedly the USAMRIID lab in Fort Detrick; and second, the mode of attack and the initial narrative of those attacks were straight out of the Dark Winter playbook. Furthermore, key players in the government response to the anthrax attacks, including those with apparent foreknowledge of the attacks, as well as those who sought (falsely) to link those attacks to Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were also participants in Dark Winter.
Weeks before the first Anthrax case would be discovered, on the evening of September 11, 2001, then-Vice President Dick Cheney’s staff was told to start taking injections of the antibiotic Cipro in order to prevent Anthrax infection. In addition, at least one member of the press, journalist Richard Cohen – then at the Washington Post – had also been told to take Cipro soon after September 11 after receiving a tip “in a roundabout way from a high government official.” Who exactly in the Bush administration and in the Beltway began taking Cipro weeks prior to the anthrax attacks and for how long? Unfortunately, the answer to that question remains unanswered. Yet, it has since been revealed that the person who had told these officials to take Cipro was none other than Dark Winter participant Jerome Hauer, who had previously served for nearly 8 years at the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command (USAMRDC), which oversees the USAMRIID lab at Fort Detrick.
Hauer, on September 11, 2001, was the managing director of Kroll Inc., a private intelligence and security company informally known as the “CIA of Wall Street,” a company that French intelligence had accused of acting as a front for the actual CIA. Kroll Inc., at the time of the attacks was responsible for security at the World Trade Center complex, yet Hauer was conveniently not present at his World Trade Center office on the day of the attacks, instead appearing on cable news. More on the series of “conveniences” that have followed Hauer throughout his career, especially over the course of 2001, and the massive amounts of money he stands to make off of the current Covid-19 epidemic will be discussed in detail in Part II of this series.
Then, on September 12, Donald Kagan of the neoconservative think tank the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), whose members populated key posts in the Bush administration, made an odd comment (for the time, anyway) about the September 11 attacks and anthrax. Speaking on Washington DC radio, Kagan – after suggesting that the U.S. should invade Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine in retaliation for September 11 – asks “What would have happened if they had anthrax on that plane?” That same day, James Woolsey, himself a PNAC member and also a Dark Winter participant, claimed that Iraq was to blame for September 11 during a cable news interview.
A week later, another PNAC member and advisor to the Bush White House– Richard Perle – told CNN that the next terror attack is likely to involve “chemical or biological weapons.” Soon after, Jerome Hauer re-emerges, claiming that the government now has a “new sense of urgency” regarding bioterrorist threats and asserts that “Osama Bin Laden wants to acquire these [biological] agents and we know he has links to Saddam and Saddam Hussein has them.” Of course, Saddam Hussein did not actually possess these biological weapons, although he did during the fictional Dark Winter exercise in which Hauer had actively participated. Just days after Hauer made these bold claims, ABC News reported that the alleged 9/11 hijackers may have intended to modify crop dusters to disperse Anthrax.
All of this took place several days before the first anthrax victim, photojournalist Bob Stevens, would even begin to show symptoms and over a week before doctors would even begin to suspect that his condition had been caused by anthrax poisoning.
On October 2, as Stevens’ health began to rapidly deteriorate, a new book co-written by journalist Judith Miller of the New York Times was released. Entitled “Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War,” the book asserted that the U.S. faced an unprecedented bioterrorism threat from terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. It further alleged that such groups may have teamed up with countries such as Iraq and Russia. Miller, who had participated in Dark Winter months prior, had conducted numerous interviews with senior White House officials for the book, particularly Dick Cheney’s chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.
Libby, although he had not personally attended Dark Winter, was greatly impacted by the exercise when he learned of it, so much so that he had personally arranged for Cheney to watch the video of the entire Dark Winter exercise on September 20, 2001. Cheney took the contents of Dark Winter to the National Security Council the very next day. It would later be reported in New York magazine that, “a few days after 9/11,” the principal authors of Dark Winter – Randall Larsen, Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby – would personally meet with Cheney and members of the administration’s national security staff about the exercise.
Larsen, who worked closely with Robert Kadlec throughout the 1990s, allegedly smuggled a test tube of weaponized Bacillus globigii, “almost genetically identical to anthrax,” into the meeting, according to that report. It is unclear when this meeting took place in relation to when Cheney had watched the video of the Dark Winter exercise.
The same day that Miller’s “Germs” was released, October 2, another odd occurrence took place. A former scientist at the USAMRIID lab at Fort Detrick, Dr. Ayaad Assaad, received a call from the FBI after someone who intimately knew Assaad’s work history and career in great detail (and who also claimed to have previously worked with Assaad) had anonymously accused him of being a “potential biological terrorist” with a deep-seated hatred of the U.S. government. At the time the letter was received by the FBI, neither the public nor the FBI were aware of any anthrax cases. Assaad, who was then working for the Environmental Protection Agency, told the FBI that he believed he was being framed by former co-workers. The FBI deemed this to be credible and never contacted Assaad in connection with the case again.
It later emerged in the Hartford Courant that Assaad had been the target of extensive harassment by a clique of co-workers at the USAMRIID lab in the early 1990s. One of those co-workers who had harassed Assaad would leave the lab disgruntled as a result of the controversy over Assaad’s harassment allegations. He would later return to the lab to conduct unauthorized, late night research on anthrax and be tied to several missing specimens of anthrax and other pathogens – Lt. Col. Philip Zack.
Zack, in 2001, was working for the U.S. biotechnology company Gilead Sciences. Though he first began working for Gilead in 1999, he was “handpicked” in 2001 to lead the establishment of “a new Project Management Department in conjunction with a complete restructure of R&D [Research and Development].” Donald Rumsfeld, another member of PNAC, became the chairman of Gilead Sciences in 1997 and he served as chairman of that company up until he became George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense in early 2001.
Rumsfeld would later announce on September 10, 2001 that $2.3 trillion had gone “missing” from the Pentagon’s budget. The Pentagon’s accounting office, whose staff was attempting to locate these missing trillions, would be destroyed on September 11, 2001. Though planes being flown into the Pentagon would later be described by government officials as “unimaginable” and “unthinkable” after the attacks, a simulation of planes being flown into the Pentagon had been conducted less than a year prior to September 11.
TERROR REDUX
On October 4, 2001, Bob Stevens’ anthrax poisoning diagnosis was made known to the FBI and CDC and the public was then informed via a press conference. The second anthrax case was declared soon after and was a co-worker of Stevens’, who had worked for the Florida-based newspaper, the Sun.
A day later, White House officials began to immediately pressure then-FBI Director Robert Mueller to prove that the anthrax attacks were linked to Al Qaeda, despite there being no evidence to make such a link. “They really wanted to blame somebody in the Middle East,” a then-senior FBI official would later tell the New York Daily News of the meetings.
Over the next few weeks, suspicious letters containing fine, white powder were sent to well-known American journalists, including NBC’s Tom Brokaw and The New York Times’ Judith Miller, though the powder in the letter addressed to Miller was found to be harmless. Notably, Miller and other New York Times journalists wrote a total of 27 articles specifically about anthrax and its potential use as a bioweapon between September 12, 2001 and the day before Stevens was diagnosed with anthrax poisoning.
Letters containing anthrax were also received by Senators Tom Daschle, Russ Feingold and Patrick Leahy, all of whom were – at the time – preventing the US Patriot Act from quickly passing through the Senate and who were resisting administration attempts to ram the legislation through with little to no debate. Several of the letters included the date “9-11-01” and the phrases “Death to America, Death to Israel, Allah is great” in neatly-printed block letters.
Soon after, a suspicious letter was found in the office of then-Congressman and current Vice President Mike Pence. Media Roots noted the following about Pence’s subsequent press conference in a 2018 podcast that examined the timeline of the 2001 anthrax attacks:
“…Mike Pence, who once hosted an AM talk show describing himself as ‘Rush Limbaugh on decaf,’ conducts a press conference outside the Capitol proclaiming revenge and biblical style justice to whoever conducted the anthrax attacks. His family–with news cameras in tow–gets tested for anthrax at the hospital after it is allegedly found in his office.
No news outlets questioned his grandstanding or odd performance of going to the hospital with his family, and unlike Senators Daschle and Leahy in their press appearances, Mike Pence alluded to the anthrax letters being connected to the larger ‘war on terror.’”
As public panic swelled, more letters continued to be found, not just in the United States but around the world, with anthrax and/or hoax letters being found in Japan, Kenya, Israel, China and Australia, among others. Simultaneously, efforts to link the anthrax attacks to Saddam Hussein and Iraq began to emerge and quickly grew in intensity and number.
The media push to link the attacks to Iraq began first with The Guardian and then was followed by U.S. media outlets like The Wall Street Journal. Those early reports cited unnamed “American investigators” and defense officials and largely centered on the false claim that alleged 9/11 mastermind Mohammad Atta had met with an Iraqi diplomat in Prague in late 2000 as well as similarly false allegations that members of Al Qaeda had recently obtained vials of anthrax in the Czech Republic.
A key person in disseminating that false Prague story was Dark Winter participant and PNAC member James Woolsey. It was also revealed in late October 2001 that Woolsey was serving as the personal emissary of Paul Wolfowitz, Iraq War “architect” and then-Deputy Secretary of Defense, in “investigating Iraqi involvement in the September 11 attacks and anthrax outbreaks.”
Beyond the Pentagon, foreign “experts” soon began to assert that there was a link between the anthrax attacks and Iraq, including former Israeli military intelligence officer Dany Shoham. Shoham recently resurfaced this past January after claiming that Covid-19 was developed by the Chinese government as a bioweapon.
These assertions were soon followed by a report from ABC News’ Brian Ross, who (again falsely) claimed that some of the anthrax used in the attacks had contained bentonite. Ross claimed that bentonite “is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program” and that “only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons.” Ross asserted this information had come from three “well-placed but separate sources,” which later grew to four. Yet, no tests conducted during the Anthrax investigation ever found any bentonite at all, meaning the story was an invention from the very start. ABC and Brian Ross never retracted the story.
Glenn Greenwald, then writing at Salon, would state the following about Ross’ sources in 2008:
“Ross’ allegedly four separate sources had to have some specific knowledge of the tests conducted and, if they were really “well-placed,” one would presume that meant they had some connection to the laboratory where the tests were conducted — Ft. Detrick. That means that the same Government lab where the anthrax attacks themselves came from was the same place where the false reports originated that blamed those attacks on Iraq.
It’s extremely possible — one could say highly likely — that the same people responsible for perpetrating the attacks were the ones who fed the false reports to the public, through ABC News, that Saddam was behind them. What we know for certain — as a result of the letters accompanying the anthrax — is that whoever perpetrated the attacks wanted the public to believe they were sent by foreign Muslims. Feeding claims to ABC News designed to link Saddam to those attacks would, for obvious reasons, promote the goal of the anthrax attacker(s).”
Soon, media reports began noting the contradictory messaging of the U.S. government with regards to the anthrax attacks, messaging which has striking parallels to the Trump administration’s messaging on Covid-19. In one such report, written by Matthew Engel for The Guardian, states:
“Those in charge have compounded the problems by sending out confused messages. Was the anthrax weapons-grade or not? Should Americans be alarmed or relaxed? Has President Bush himself been tested? The signals keep changing. Mr. Thompson suggested early on that Bob Stevens, the first anthrax victim, might have drunk from an infected stream.”
During the 2001 anthrax attacks, there was no shortage of contradictory actions either, such as the government’s failure to mandate that postal workers take Cipro or even take the simplest precautions even though members of the Bush administration had been taking Cipro weeks before the anthrax attacks were known to the FBI and the public. Even worse, the Bush administration waited an extremely long time to close post offices for anthrax testing, waiting until numerous postal workers had already become infected and some had already died. In addition, Ernesto Blanco – a Florida mail room worker who later recovered from Anthrax poisoning – and his family were left confused about the refusal of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to diagnose him with anthrax poisoning while he was in dire condition. Blanco’s family later claimed that his diagnosis had been kept a secret for political reasons.
BASIS FOR SURVEILLANCE AND CONTROL
The contradictory response of the Bush administration to the anthrax attacks and the panic that ensued was also paralleled by an equally contradictory sensor system, one which had been installed just a few months before the anthrax attacks in thirty cities throughout the U.S. despite a dubious record of accuracy.
Just as the fictional scenarios proposed in Dark Winter were being written, American scientists were developing a sensor system for the detection of anthrax and botulinum toxin called BASIS (Biological Aerosol Sentry and Information Systems). Months before anthrax would cause extreme panic and target American Senators, scientists from Los Alamos and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory were testing the biological sensing device at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, inside the Special Programs Division of what was once the site of the U.S. biological weapons program and where anthrax samples used at Fort Detrick are often produced.
It is worth noting that Dugway, not unlike Fort Detrick, has a longstanding issues with biosafety lapses that have resulted in numerous mishaps, such as their accidental shipment of live anthrax over 70 times to 86 different labs throughout the world from 2005-2015. Independent analyses conducted after the FBI closed its investigation into the attacks have suggested that Dugway may have been the source of the anthrax used in the attacks, as opposed to Fort Detrick.
Returning to BASIS, the results of the tests conducted on this new sensor system in 2001 showed that it was highly prone to generating false positives and was, therefore, worthless beyond the ability to “induce the very panic and social disruption it is intended to thwart“, according to the Livermore Laboratory, which nevertheless marketed BASIS as a tool to “guard the air we breathe.” Vice President Cheney, following his September 2001 briefing on Dark Winter, decided to install the system in the White House.
Days after Senator Tom Daschle’s press conference that revealed he had been targeted by the anthrax attacker, President Bush was in Shanghai attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit when he received a call from Dick Cheney on Airforce Two. Cheney delivered a chilling message — the President and Secretaries Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, who were with Bush in China, might have been exposed to the ultra-lethal botulinum toxin at the White House.
BASIS had returned two positive results for the deadly neurotoxin and – if the tests held true – three of the U.S.’ highest ranking officials were “toast.” Yet, once again, BASIS had lived up to its reputation as a great panic-inducing mechanism when the supposed botulinum toxin hits were determined to have been false positives. Apparently, this “unintended” feature was a real selling point, as proven by George W. Bush’s subsequent deployment of the system in thirty cities throughout the country under the auspices of the newly-minted Department of Homeland Security as part of a program called Bio-Watch.
Given the events described, it is noteworthy that BASIS relies on the CDC’s Laboratory Response Network (LRN) to identify the biological agents trapped by its sensors. The 150 state and local laboratories that make up the LRN use a polymerase chain reaction (PCR-based) analysis, which is ill-equipped to detect the aforementioned botulinum toxin. In addition, the Bio-Watch program is plagued by bureaucratic and logistical problems, which further undermine any potential public health benefits.
DHS was fully aware of the program’s limitations from the start and issued requests for proposals (RFPs) for the development of autonomous sensor technology that would eliminate the need for manual sample collection. The Bioagent Autonomous Networked Detector (BAND) program was then initiated by HSARPA (Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency) in September of 2003 and, in 2008, awarded a multi-year contract for its development to MicroFluidic Systems, Inc., a company founded by Allen Northrup. Northup is also co-founder of Cepheid, a diagnostic testing company that received FDA approval for a 45-minute Covid-19 test less than two weeks ago.
In tandem with the development of BASIS shortly before 9/11 and the 2001 anthrax attacks, DARPA was sponsoring a surveillance program to collect data on U.S. citizens without their knowledge or consent by using their medical records. The ostensible purpose of that program was to develop algorithms that could detect a bioweapons attack based on real-time data input. The Bio-Event Advanced Leading Indicator Recognition Technology, or Bio-ALIRT, is at the heart of what Dark Winter co-author, Dr. Tara O’Toole, calls the “information supply chain.”
“We need to have a disciplined flow of information during epidemics that goes to the people who need to know what they need to know,” O’Toole recently told Ira Pastor in an interview. “That’s different from this cosmic surveillance system, that captures all the possible information all the time and tells us, in advance when an epidemic is coming. We need a supply chain of information to manage the epidemic.” O’Toole, who now works for the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, and her longstanding promotion of mass surveillance in the name of “public health” will be discussed in a subsequent installment of this series.
DARPA’s partners in this Orwellian endeavor were, perhaps unsurprisingly, recurring actors in the arena of biological attack simulations, from Johns Hopkins to the University of Pittsburgh – the Biosecurity centers of which were both previously run by O’Toole – and defense industry giants, General Dynamics and IBM.
Hovering over these draconian innovations floats the overarching narrative, which the 2001 anthrax attacks were supposed to activate in popular consciousness. Though the attacks would be pinned on USAMRIID scientist Bruce Ivins, the highly questionable investigative and prosecutorial methods employed in Ivins’ case, not to mention his timely pre-trial suicide, may instead offer clues regarding a botched false flag operation that had originally been designed to bolster the creation of a new geopolitical chessboard pitting the U.S. against its same perpetual enemies.
COVERING UP THE REAL CONSPIRACY
From its earliest moments, the FBI’s “Amerithrax” investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks was clearly botched, sabotaged and even farcical. For instance, the letter sent to Dr. Ayaad Assaad would obviously have been a clear starting point for any honest investigation, as whoever wrote it had obvious foreknowledge of the attacks, connections to USAMRIID and was attempting to frame someone else for a crime that – at the time it was sent – had yet to be committed. Yet, The Hartford Courant noted in late 2001 that “the FBI is not tracking the source of the anonymous letter, despite its curious timing, coming a matter of days before the existence of anthrax-laced mail became known.” Why would the FBI not be interested in who wrote that letter, when it presents a clear lead on someone who, at the very least, knew a bioterrorism attack would soon take place and that the attacker’s profile would fit that of Assaad (i.e. Muslim and a former USAMRIID scientist).
In addition, in the early days of the investigation on October 12, 2001 – just one week after the attacks had claimed their first victim, the FBI called the University of Iowa and demanded that they destroy their entire database on the Ames strain of anthrax, the strain that would later be revealed to have been the very strain used in the attacks.
Both the FBI and the university officially claimed that the database’s destruction was ordered in order to prevent its potential use by terrorists in the future and was thus a “precaution,” despite greatly hampering the capacity of the investigation to determine the origins of the anthrax used in the attacks. Dr. Francis Boyle, an American law professor who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, later asserted that the FBI’s decision to order the destruction of the Ames strain database was an “obstruction of justice, a federal crime,” adding that “…That collection should have been preserved and protected as evidence. That’s the DNA, the fingerprints right there.”
Can the destruction of the Ames strain database and the decision to not pursue any leads related to the anonymous letter framing Dr. Assaad be written off as merely “missteps” made in the earliest and arguably most crucial days of the investigation? The fact that the Bush administration, as previously mentioned, was strongly pressuring then-FBI Director Robert Mueller to find a connection to “someone in the Middle East” at the same time these decision were made instead suggests that the investigation was highly politicized and manipulated by top government officials from the very beginning.
The FBI investigation continued to be marred by similarly obstructive actions. For instance, the anthrax sample that was in the envelope addressed to Senator Patrick Leahy had been found to contain traces of human DNA, a crucial finding that the FBI laboratory deliberately concealed from the agency’s own investigators. The FBI lab then declined to search for a match to this human DNA sample, despite the fact that doing so would – in all probability – lead to the actual attacker.
Due to all the obstruction and deliberate sabotage that took place, the investigation progressed slowly as crucial clues were ignored or outright discarded, apparently in order to keep FBI investigators off of the real trail. After coming under political and media pressure at least name a suspect, the FBI began to focus on former USAMRIID researcher Stephen Hatfill.
Despite lacking any good reason to pursue Hatfill, the FBI – accompanied by TV crews – raided Hatfill’s apartment in biohazard suits and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft later publicly named him a “person of interest” in the case. The FBI pressured Hatfill’s then-employer to fire him and refused to clear his name years after the Bureau knew full well that he had no connection to the crime. Hatfill first sued the government in 2003 and the Department of Justice settled with Hatfill five years later, paying him $4.6 million in damages.
Though it was eventually settled, Hatfill’s lawsuit initially resulted in some odd claims from FBI investigators, with Richard Lambert – the FBI official in charge of the Amerithrax investigation, claiming that the lawsuit “could jeopardize the probe and expose national secrets related to U.S. bioweapons defense measures.” He also claimed it would “make public the vulnerabilities and capabilities of U.S. government installations to bioweapons attacks and expose sensitive intelligence collection sources and methods.” Lambert would later file a federal whistleblower lawsuit where he accused the Bureau’s Washington field office and FBI headquarters of having “greatly obstructed and impeded the investigation.”
The Department of Justice, which oversees the FBI, would make a similar argument when Maureen Stevens, the wife of the first anthrax victim Bob Stevens, sued the federal government over the lax security measures in place at the USAMRIID lab where the anthrax used in the attacks was alleged to have originated. Stevens’ lawyer said the lawsuit was also filed due to “the government’s stonewalling tactics,” which included “taking months to turn over an autopsy report, denying them access to DNA tests and even denying them money from the Sept. 11 Victims Compensation Fund.” Citing “national security concerns,” federal attorneys sought to delay Stevens’ lawsuit, arguing that the litigation “would pose a significant risk of disclosing classified or sensitive information relating to the acquisition, development and use of weapons of mass destruction such as anthrax.”
In 2008, soon after Hatfill was cleared and the lawsuit with him settled, the FBI began to focus on another USAMRIID researcher, Dr. Bruce E. Ivins. Ivins, who had previously helped the FBI analyze the anthrax used in the letters sent to politicians, journalists and others, was aggressively targeted by the FBI through aggressive surveillance and what can only be described as extreme harassment.
As Glenn Greenwald noted in Salon in 2008, “the FBI investigation was so heavy-handed that it actually entailed showing gruesome photographs of the anthrax victims to Ivins’ adult children, telling them that their father is the one who did that, while trying to entice them to turn on him with promises of a reward.” It was also revealed that addiction counselor Jean Duley, whose restraining order against Ivins was used by the media as “proof” that he was deranged and a likely “lone wolf” terrorist, had actually been egged on by none other than the FBI to seek that very restraining order.
The FBI, as it ramped up its targeting of Ivins, leaked much of its evidence to media outlets, which – for the most part – uncritically reported it. However, it eventually became clear that the case was shoddy and would never hold up in court as it was built on circumstantial evidence and questionable scientific analyses.
It was then announced on July 29, 2008 that Ivins, whose life and career had been left in ruins by the FBI’s aggressive tactics, had committed suicide just as the federal government was set to charge him as the sole culprit behind the Anthrax attacks. Few chose to question the suicide narrative despite there being legitimate reasons to do so, such as the lack of a suicide note at the scene and the fact that no autopsy was ever performed on Ivins’ corpse.
Former FBI agent Richard Lambert’s whistleblower lawsuit would later reveal that the FBI had intentionally withheld a “wealth” of evidence that proved Ivins’ innocence and further charged that the DOJ and FBI had “crafted an elaborate perception management campaign to bolster their assertion of Ivins’ guilt” that included “press conferences and highly selective evidentiary presentations which were replete with material omissions.”
After Ivins’ suicide, questions continued to arise regarding the FBI’s case against the deceased scientist, with several journalists and even Senator Patrick Leahy – who had been sent an Anthrax letter – insisting that the FBI’s case against Ivins, particularly the charge that he had acted alone, was implausible. A former co-worker of Ivins and one of the country’s top biowarfare experts, Richard Spertzel, asserted in The Wall Street Journal that Ivins couldn’t have been the culprit because Ivins did not know how to make anthrax of the quality used in the attacks as only 4-5 people in the entire country, Spertzel being one of them, knew how to do so. Spertzel asserted that one of those 4-5 people would have needed at least a year as well as a full lab and a staff dedicate to the task in order to produce the Anthrax used.
In an attempt to mollify mounting criticism, Mueller announced in September 2008 that a panel from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) would independently review the FBI’s “smoking gun” scientific analyses that had led them to accuse Ivins. However, the FBI abruptly closed the case in 2010, well before the panel could conclude its review, and stood by its controversial assertion that Ivins had acted as a “lone wolf” and that anthrax from a flask in Ivins’ lab was “conclusively identified as the parent material to the anthrax powder used in the mailings.”
When the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) did release its review of the FBI’s scientific findings a year later in 2011, it found that the Bureau’s “smoking gun” scientific evidence against Ivins was actually very inconclusive and they also identified several still, unresolved issues with the FBI’s analyses for which the Bureau could not provide an explanation.
However, because Ivins had died before the FBI’s scientific case could go to trial, the FBI’s claims would never be challenged in court. David Relman, vice chairman of the National Academy study committee, later told ProPublica that Ivins’ trial would have been the only way the FBI’s claims “could have been weighed and challenged by experts.”
The NAS study was not the only independent report that challenged the FBI’s case against Ivins after his apparent suicide. In 2014, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released its own analysis of the FBI investigation and concluded that the FBI’s approach lacked consistency, adequate standards and precision. The GAO report ultimately supported the NAS’ conclusion that the scientific evidence did not definitely prove Ivins to be the culprit.
The conclusions of both the NAS and GAO reports show that the FBI’s “smoking gun” against Ivins – its scientific analyses – were hardly a smoking gun as they were just as circumstantial as the rest of the Bureau’s evidence against the scientist. This, of course, makes the timing of the FBI’s decision to close the case, a year before any independent analysis of its evidence against Ivins could be completed, significant.
A FAMILIAR CAST OF CHARACTERS
Key players in Dark Winter would also end up playing a role in the FBI Amerithrax investigation and Bush administration efforts to link them to a foreign, rather than a domestic, source. For instance, as increasingly desperate efforts were made to link the anthrax attacks to Al Qaeda in early 2002, an “independent” team from the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies argued that the anthrax attackers were linked to Al Qaeda, citing a diagnosis made by a Florida doctor in June 2001 that alleged 9/11 hijacker Ahmed al-Haznawi had a skin lesion that was “consistent with cutaneous anthrax.”
Yet, this team from Johns Hopkins was – in reality — far from independent, as it was led by Dark Winter co-authors Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby. However, their association with Dark Winter and their September 2001 meeting with Dick Cheney went unmentioned as media outlets ran with O’Toole and Inglesby’s assertion that al-Haznawi’s allegedly anthrax-related lesion “raises the possibility that the hijackers were handling anthrax and were the perpetrators of the anthrax letter attacks.” Other scientists and analysts as well as the FBI challenged and rejected their claims.
Another Dark Winter figure involved in the Amerithrax case was current Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert Kadlec, who became an adviser on biological warfare to the Rumsfeld-led Pentagon in the days after 9/11. Kadlec’s official biography states that he “contributed to the FBI investigation of the anthrax letter attacks,” though it’s unclear exactly what those contributions were, beyond having met at least once with scientists at Fort Detrick in November 2001. Whatever his contributions were, Kadlec has long been an emphatic supporter of the official narrative regarding Bruce Ivins, who he has referred to as a “deranged scientist” and the sole culprit behind the attacks. Kadlec has also used the official narrative about Ivins to assert that bioweapons have been “democratized,” which he argues means that weaponized pathogens can be wielded by essentially anyone with “a few thousand dollars” and enough time on their hands.
Notably, Kadlec isn’t the only key figure in the current U.S. government response to Covid-19 to have ties to the botched FBI investigation as current HHS Secretary Alex Azar was also involved in the FBI investigation. In addition, Azar stated at a White House press briefing in 2018 that he had been “personally involved in much of managing the response [to the anthrax attacks]” as then-General counsel to HHS.
Yet, given that the FBI investigation into the anthrax attacks and the government response to them were so disastrous and heavily criticized by independent and mainstream media alike, it is surprising that Azar and Kadlec would so proudly tout their involvement in that fiasco, especially considering that the scientific analyses used in that investigation were fatally flawed and, by all indications, led to the death of an innocent man.
While such credentials in a “normal” world would be grounds for exclusion from public service, they apparently have the opposite effect when it comes to post-2001 HHS policy and U.S. biodefense policy, which – especially following 2001 – has championed the interests and profits of corporate pharmaceutical companies and the apocalyptic vision of bioweapons held by war hawks and perpetual Cold Warriors. This latter category, of course, includes members of the now-defunct PNAC, who infamously referred to racially-targeted bioweapons as a “politically useful tool” in a now infamous 2001 document, and their ideological descendants.
As the next installment of this series will show, Dark Winter participant and 2001 anthrax attack insider Jerome Hauer epitomizes this merging of perpetual hawkishness and corporate pharmaceutical interests, as he has long held (and continues to occupy) key board positions of the very pharmaceutical company that not only sold tens of millions of anthrax vaccine doses to HHS following the 2001 anthrax attacks, but is now a partner in the development of the majority of vaccines, drugs and experimental treatments currently under development in the United States for the treatment of Covid-19.
_________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
News review, Investigative reports: Friday the 9th of Lockdown - Thursday 27th March was the first day of 'level 4' lockdown in New Zealand. Martin Summers and Tony Gosling analyse the economics and geopolitics of the unprecedented Covid19 virus emergency measures in the UK, New Zealand and the rest of the world.
_________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Alexander Ali Mckenzie
Alexander Ali Mckenzie Yes December begining of month
1
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· Reply · 22m
Helen Quarmby
Helen Quarmby Oh hang on, The mafioso thought police will be along to stamp out that ‘ wrong think ’
1
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· Reply · 20m · Edited
Jayne Millar
Jayne Millar Yes, Mid January - had all the symptoms anyway - hacking cough, fever, headache, aching all over, ended up with laryngitis. Might have been normal flu I guess as the symptoms are more or less the same.
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Colin Loves
Colin Loves funny you should post this. Was just talking to a mate today, who the doctors told her she had it. Back in the end of Dec.
How they could tell her this, when there was no test kits, is beyond my understanding
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I-tasha Honeyghan
I-tasha Honeyghan Colin Loves mums a nurse and said there were so many "flu" cases...definitely covid 19
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Ryan Maytum
Ryan Maytum Was discussing this the other day with my pal
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Damien Mearns
Damien Mearns I got it then .. and I got it now - they are different - but both weird ... not the normal Christmas cold
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· Reply · 17m
Rochelle Moore
Rochelle Moore Yes I was so poorly Xmas through to new year. No taste no smell don’t know about temp as never took it but then turned into a raging chest infection so the doctors told me it was one of the worst infections they’d seen
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Kuris Chan
Kuris Chan And uh, where would you have got it from? You’ve been making visits to China?
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· Reply · 14m
Zelda Mann
Zelda Mann Loads of people do..not me though but I do believe it's been here months!!
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Nanny Silver
Nanny Silver Yes, from 7th December til about Jan 4th!
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· Reply · 12m
Suzanne Marie Marshall
Suzanne Marie Marshall My daughter was very sick in January. Never seen her so unwell. Bedridden for 11 days. But as this virus is so contagious!! Wouldn't I of caught it to??
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Jayne Millar
Jayne Millar Suzanne Marie Marshall that’s what I thought! All my immediate family had the same symptoms as myself but my 80 year old father didn’t and I see him every other day! He did have a chest infection which cleared with antibiotics so clearly not viral. Very strange.
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Russell Ashley
Russell Ashley Suzanne Marie Marshall u may have natural immunity or had a very mild case you've forgotten about.
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Emily Clifton
Emily Clifton February I had a really awful cough, it was constant and made me throw up it was so hard. I’d been to a part of the UK where first cases were confirmed about a week prior.
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Hanna Szymanowska
Hanna Szymanowska Around Christmas all our family might have it .. very strange high temperature ( I never have temperature when I’m ill ) very dry cough, difficult breathing ( feel like someone sit on my chest ) and aching all over whole family was very poorly around 2 weeks .. it might be just regular flu but seriously I never ever in my life been so poorly
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Debbie Mackenzie
Debbie Mackenzie I had an annoying cough for weeks in January, which turned into what the doctor thought was asthma. A couple of weeks later I had conjunctivitis, which is a symptom apparently.
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· Reply · 10m
James Browne
James Browne Middle of January for two weeks - lost my sense of taste and smell 100%
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· Reply · 10m
Hannah Hotham
Hannah Hotham Yes, had it February time. It wasn’t flu but I felt so ill, but it was a weird ill, Never had anything like it!
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Clare Andrew
Clare Andrew Yes, loss of taste and smell and soooo tired for weeks
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· Reply · 7m
Bijal Joshi
Bijal Joshi Yes straight after Christmas, never been so ill. Lasted for two weeks
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Theresa Marie Osullivan
Theresa Marie Osullivan Was convinced I had it 4 weeks ago . I'd never been so I'll in my life . Had a very very bad cough . I coughed so much I lost my voice. Shortness of breath but no temperature. Had three lots of antibiotics and steroids. My chest is still sore and still wheezy .
Crazy thing was both of my daughters was I'll at around the same time with apparent tonsillitis and whooping cough
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Douglas Richards
Douglas Richards Last week in January, the private company I paid for an antibody test has not been back in touch 😡
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James Bird
James Bird Yep was awful
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Jen Mason
Jen Mason All my household were very I'll mid December , not sure whether was convid as saying wasnt here then.all I know is I have never been so I'll in my life.
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New epidemiological model shows urgent need for large-scale testing
If the results of the study are confirmed, they imply that fewer than one in a thousand of those infected with Covid-19 become ill enough to need hospital treatment
Clive Cookson, Science Editor March 25 2020
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The new coronavirus may already have infected far more people in the UK than scientists had previously estimated — perhaps as much as half the population — according to modelling by researchers at the University of Oxford.
If the results are confirmed, they imply that fewer than one in a thousand of those infected with Covid-19 become ill enough to need hospital treatment, said Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology, who led the study. The vast majority develop very mild symptoms or none at all.
However, the modelling by Oxford’s Evolutionary Ecology of Infectious Disease group has been challenged by other scientists. They have pointed out that the study presents possible scenarios — based on assumptions about the nature of the virus, its virulence and its arrival from China — that contradict those supported by most epidemiologists.
The Oxford research suggests that Covid-19 reached the UK by mid-January at the latest and perhaps as early as December. It spread invisibly for a month or more before the first transmissions within the UK were officially recorded at the end of February and the epidemic started to grow exponentially.
“We need immediately to begin large-scale serological surveys — antibody testing — to assess what stage of the epidemic we are in now,” Prof Gupta said.
The research presents a very different view of the epidemic to the modelling at Imperial College London, which has strongly influenced government policy. “I am surprised that there has been such unqualified acceptance of the Imperial model,” said Prof Gupta.
However, she was reluctant to criticise the government for shutting down the country to suppress viral spread, because the accuracy of the Oxford model has not yet been confirmed and, even if it is correct, social distancing will reduce the number of people becoming seriously ill and relieve severe pressure on the NHS during the peak of the epidemic.
The Oxford study is based on what is known as a “susceptibility-infected-recovered model” of Covid-19, built up from case and death reports from the UK and Italy. The researchers made what they regard as the most plausible assumptions about the behaviour of the virus.
The modelling brings back into focus “herd immunity”, the idea that the virus will stop spreading when enough people have become resistant to it because they have already been infected. The government abandoned its unofficial herd immunity strategy — allowing controlled spread of infection — after its scientific advisers said this would swamp the National Health Service with critically ill patients.
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But the Oxford results would mean the country had already acquired substantial herd immunity through the unrecognised spread of Covid-19 over more than two months. If the findings are confirmed by testing, then the current restrictions could be removed much sooner than ministers have indicated.
Although some experts have shed doubt on the strength and length of the human immune response to the virus, Prof Gupta said the emerging evidence made her confident that humanity would build up herd immunity against Covid-19.
To provide the necessary evidence, the Oxford group is working with colleagues at the Universities of Cambridge and Kent to start antibody testing on the general population as soon as possible, using specialised “neutralisation assays which provide reliable readout of protective immunity,” Prof Gupta said. They hope to start testing later this week and obtain preliminary results within a few days.
This article has been amended since original publication to clarify the fact that the modelling is controversial and its assumptions have been contested by other scientists.
_________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Last edited by Whitehall_Bin_Men on Sat Apr 04, 2020 10:03 pm; edited 1 time in total
Covid-19’s meant to be a new Black Death, but in Britain no more people are dying than NORMAL. What does this say about the virus?
31 Mar, 2020 09:07 / Updated 1 day ago
By Peter Andrews, Irish science journalist and writer, based in London. He has a background in the life sciences, and graduated from the University of Glasgow with a degree in genetics
Many people are waking up to the fact that the Covid-19 “pandemic” is not turning out as billed. When we finally emerge from it, the big question will be how many people have died from the virus. Here’s the most likely outcome.
You can bet that the institutions of international government, and the “experts” advising them, will try to massage and cherry-pick statistics to present the version of events that most closely matches their worst-case scenarios. The fact is, according to their early predictions, we are already long overdue millions of Covid-19 deaths that have failed to materialise.
But even when Covid-19 deaths are recorded, we have seen how it could be that people are dying with coronavirus rather than dying of it. This concept is easy enough to understand, and it encourages one to take a closer look at the breakdown of deaths across an entire society. The more you follow this rabbit hole down, the more interesting the numbers become. It may be somewhat morbid, but it is nonetheless very important.
The most popular two articles on the website of The Spectator over the weekend were by Dr John Lee, a recently retired NHS consultant and professor of pathology. He remarks that ‘’we have yet to see any statistical evidence for excess deaths, in any part of the world’’.
To check this out, I looked at the British government’s own statistics on total deaths registered weekly across the UK. It shows that in the week ending on the 8th of March 2019, 10,898 people died in total in the UK. This year, in the week ending the 6th of March 2020, the equivalent figure was almost identical: 10,895. Make of that what you will. Statistics are currently available up to March 20, and while there is a lag between the spread of the virus and the resulting deaths, so far only about 1 percent of all mortalities bear any relation to coronavirus, and there is no visible spike. If nothing else, it helps to view the extent of the crisis in proportion - thousands of people die each week, and from the long-term view what we are seeing is not a plague, but a blip.
So when all is said and done, will any additional people die of the coronavirus? And what is meant by extra or additional?
Risk of dying
Understanding this requires a bit of lateral thinking, but it helps to remember that everyone on Earth has a terminal disease: being alive. We all have to go sometime.
Recording exactly how and when we do is a big part of the job of statistician Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter. In a recent blog post, he outlined the concept of background risk. This is obtained by recording all of the people dying in any given year, at any given age. At its most simple, this is the percentage chance a person has of not reaching their next birthday, based solely on their age. Of course, that is not to say that if you are a 40-year-old man you have precisely a 0.2% chance of dying this year - the data are based on averages, and do not apply to individuals.
But nonetheless, across a country or given populations, the averages will be right, and it is possible to predict with great accuracy how many people will die in a given year. In the UK, for example, 600,000 people die annually. But wait a minute! A novel, brand-spanking new coronavirus is terrorising us all. Therefore surely we can expect more people to die this year than would in a normal year? And come year’s end we should be able, with simple arithmetic, to count exactly how many more there were.
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In 2009 UK government experts wildly over-hyped dangers of swine flu — is history repeating with Covid-19?
Spiegelhalter, chair of the Winton Centre for Evidence and Risk Communication at Cambridge University, won’t say exactly what he does think that figure will be. But he does say that if the deaths are towards the lower end of the current estimates, say at around 20,000 in the UK, Covid-19 will end up having ‘’a minimal impact on overall mortality for 2020’’. He told R4 that his findings showed, to his own professed astonishment, that if someone contracts the coronavirus, they’ve got almost exactly the same chance of dying over the ensuing few weeks as they would normally have of dying over the next year, no matter what their age or background health.
And depending on who you ask, that 20,000 figure might still be an overestimate. In fact, Spiegelhalter says that if extra people die it will likely be as a result of the knock-on effects of the lockdown, such as delayed normal health care, depression and isolation.
American political commentator Candace Owens has been Tweeting consistently about the apparent insignificance of Covid-19 deaths compared to overall trends. She tweeted about this issue in relation to New York City, where meaningless figures are being waved around by the media.
Candace Owens
✔
@RealCandaceO
An article this morning claims NYC is facing a catastrophe because they have had 450 Coronavirus deaths since January & someone is dying every 17 minutes.
So you know—regularly, NYC has 419 deaths every single day & loses a person every 9 minutes.
Just for perspective.
46.4K
2:47 PM - Mar 28, 2020
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Final destination
With all of the numbers being bandied about these days by various universities and governments, one would swear that they knew exactly what they were talking about. Make no mistake: this air of certainty is just a front. It is definitely too early to accurately gauge how many – if any – extra people will die because of coronavirus. It will depend on how four key pieces of information intersect.
These are:
How many people will become infected by Covid-19?
How much does Covid-19 increase the risk of death?
Are deaths being properly recorded? Of those people who die having contracted coronavirus, are they dying from the virus, or just with it?
Of those who died, how many had comorbidities that would have killed them this year anyway?
Since all of this began, the mainstream media have focused almost entirely on the first of these points, and stressing with an onslaught of material how important it is to slow the spread. The most extreme possible measures have been implemented to do that. Meanwhile, the three other points could end up comparing Covid-19 pretty much to the common flu. Only careful consideration by governments of all the key factors will result in the best future decisions.
It is hard to believe that when this all blows over, the damage that will have been done by the shutdown measures – to businesses, to civil liberties, to individual lives and, of course, to the global economy – could have been for nothing. Nonetheless, it seems entirely possible based on the present data. Remember above all to not take the figures the mainstream media throw at you at face value; there are lies, damned lies and statistics.
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
_________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Zero Hedge, a popular US news blog focussing on the capital markets, was suspended by Twitter on Friday shortly after it tweeted a post about an article on the novel coronavirus outbreak in China. The post alleged that the coronavirus was obtained by China and was being modified into a 'bioweapon'.
coronavirus cover Know all about the coronavirus outbreak in the latest issue of THE WEEK
Interestingly, the post also cited a research paper on the coronavirus by a group of Indian scientists from the school of biological sciences at IIT Delhi and Acharya Narendra Dev College of University of Delhi.
Earlier, Zero Hedge had uploaded contact details of a Chinese scientist, who it effectively held as being responsible for being behind the coronavirus outbreak. The revelation of personal details violates Twitter's policies.
The research paper was uploaded on January 31 on bioRxiv, an open source initiative containing resources on biological research. The research paper claims the spike protein in novel coronavirus contained four "insertions" that "are not present in other coronaviruses". The research paper notes, "amino acid residues in all the 4 inserts have identity or similarity to those in the HIV1 gp120 or HIV-1 Gag". HIV is the virus that causes AIDS.
The scientists argue that similarity in amino acid identity was "not a random fortuitous finding", hinting that it could have been engineered. However, the paper does not delve deeper into the possibility of virus being engineered deliberately.
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However, the study by the Indian scientists has attracted some scepticism already. Dr Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist who has been associated with Harvard and Johns Hopkins, said the research work had not been peer reviewed in order for it to be verified or refuted.
Earlier this week, an Indian news portal, GreatGameIndia, claimed the origin of the coronavirus can be traced to Canada and two Chinese biological warfare program agents who smuggled it into China
Over the past few days, the mainstream press has vigorously pushed back against a theory about the origins of the coronavirus that has now infected as many as 70,000+ people in Wuhan alone (depending on whom you believe). The theory is that China obtained the coronavirus via a Canadian research program, and started molding it into a bioweapon at the Institute of Virology in Wuhan. Politifact pointed the finger at Zero Hedge, in particular, though the story was widely shared across independent-leaning media.
The theory is that the virus, which was developed by infectious disease experts to function as a bio-weapon, originated in the Wuhan-based lab of Dr. Peng Zhou, China's preeminent researcher of bat immune systems, specifically in how their immune systems adapt to the presence of viruses like coronavirus and other destructive viruses. Somehow, the virus escaped from the lab, and the Hunan fish market where the virus supposedly originated is merely a ruse.
Now, a respected epidemiologist who recently caught flack for claiming in a twitter threat that the virus appeared to be much more contagious than initially believed is pointing out irregularities in the virus's genome that suggests it might have been genetically engineered for the purposes of a weapon, and not just any weapon but the deadliest one of all.
In "Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag", Indian researchers are baffled by segments of the virus's RNA that have no relation to other coronaviruses like SARS, and instead appear to be closer to HIV. The virus even responds to treatment by HIV medications.
For those pressed for time, here are the key findings from the paper, which first focuses on the unique nature of 2019-nCoV, and then observe four amino acid sequences in the Wuhan Coronavirus which are homologous to amino acid sequences in HIV1:
Our phylogentic tree of full-length coronaviruses suggests that 2019-nCoV is closely related to SARS CoV [Fig1].
In addition, other recent studies have linked the 2019-nCoV to SARS CoV. We therefore compared the spike glycoprotein sequences of the 2019-nCoV to that of the SARS CoV (NCBI Accession number: AY390556.1). On careful examination of the sequence alignment we found that the 2019- nCoV spike glycoprotein contains 4 insertions [Fig.2]. To further investigate if these inserts are present in any other corona virus, we performed a multiple sequence alignment of the spike glycoprotein amino acid sequences of all available coronaviruses (n=55) [refer Table S.File1] in NCBI refseq (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) this includes one sequence of 2019-nCoV[Fig.S1]. We found that these 4 insertions [inserts 1, 2, 3 and 4] are unique to 2019-nCoV and are not present in other coronaviruses analyzed. Another group from China had documented three insertions comparing fewer spike glycoprotein sequences of coronaviruses . Another group from China had documented three insertions comparing fewer spike glycoprotein sequences of coronaviruses (Zhou et al., 2020).
We then translated the aligned genome and found that these inserts are present in all Wuhan 2019-nCoV viruses except the 2019-nCoV virus of Bat as a host [Fig.S4]. Intrigued by the 4 highly conserved inserts unique to 2019-nCoV we wanted to understand their origin. For this purpose, we used the 2019-nCoV local alignment with each insert as query against all virus genomes and considered hits with 100% sequence coverage. Surprisingly, each of the four inserts aligned with short segments of the Human immunodeficiency Virus-1 (HIV-1) proteins. The amino acid positions of the inserts in 2019-nCoV and the corresponding residues in HIV-1 gp120 and HIV-1 Gag are shown in Table 1.
The first 3 inserts (insert 1,2 and 3) aligned to short segments of amino acid residues in HIV-1 gp120. The insert 4 aligned to HIV-1 Gag. The insert 1 (6 amino acid residues) and insert 2 (6 amino acid residues) in the spike glycoprotein of 2019-nCoV are 100% identical to the residues mapped to HIV-1 gp120. The insert 3 (12 amino acid residues) in 2019- nCoV maps to HIV-1 gp120 with gaps [see Table 1]. The insert 4 (8 amino acid residues) maps to HIV-1 Gag with gaps.
Why do the authors think the virus may be man-made? Because when looking at the above insertions which are not present in any of the closest coronavirus families, "it is quite unlikely for a virus to have acquired such unique insertions naturally in a short duration of time." Instead, they can be found in cell identification and membrane binding proteins located in the HIV genome.
Since the S protein of 2019-nCoV shares closest ancestry with SARS GZ02, the sequence coding for spike proteins of these two viruses were compared using MultiAlin software. We found four new insertions in the protein of 2019-nCoV- “GTNGTKR” (IS1), “HKNNKS” (IS2), “GDSSSG” (IS3) and “QTNSPRRA” (IS4) (Figure 2). To our surprise, these sequence insertions were not only absent in S protein of SARS but were also not observed in any other member of the Coronaviridae family (Supplementary figure). This is startling as it is quite unlikely for a virus to have acquired such unique insertions naturally in a short duration of time.
The insertions were observed to be present in all the genomic sequences of 2019-nCoV virus available from the recent clinical isolates. To know the source of these insertions in 2019-nCoV a local alignment was done with BLASTp using these insertions as query with all virus genome. Unexpectedly, all the insertions got aligned with Human immunodeficiency Virus-1 (HIV-1). Further analysis revealed that aligned sequences of HIV-1 with 2019-nCoV were derived from surface glycoprotein gp120 (amino acid sequence positions: 404-409, 462-467, 136-150) and from Gag protein (366-384 amino acid) (Table 1). Gag protein of HIV is involved in host membrane binding, packaging of the virus and for the formation of virus-like particles. Gp120 plays crucial role in recognizing the host cell by binding to the primary receptor CD4.This binding induces structural rearrangements in GP120, creating a high affinity binding site for a chemokine co-receptor like CXCR4 and/or CCR5.
And some visuals, which lead the paper authors to conclude that "this structural change might have also increased the range of host cells that 2019-nCoV can infect":
3D modelling of the protein structure displayed that these insertions are present at the binding site of 2019-nCoV. Due to the presence of gp120 motifs in 2019-nCoV spike glycoprotein at its binding domain, we propose that these motif insertions could have provided an enhanced affinity towards host cell receptors. Further, this structural change might have also increased the range of host cells that 2019-nCoV can infect. To the best of our knowledge, the function of these motifs is still not clear in HIV and need to be explored. The exchange of genetic material among the viruses is well known and such critical exchange highlights the risk and the need to investigate the relations between seemingly unrelated virus families.
A good recap of the findings was provided by Dr. Feigl-Ding, who started his explanatory thread by pointing out that the transmission rate outside China has surpassed the rate inside China.
But the 'smoking gun' in this case are pieces of the virus's genetic code that Indian researchers, led by Prashant Pradhan at the Indian Institute of Technology, found may have been 'embedded' from HIV, which belongs to an entirely different family of viruses.
The punchline:
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To be sure, Dr. Feigl-Ding insists that he's not trying to promote any 'conspiracies' about the virus being a bioweapon developed by the Chinese, although it is difficult to find a proper name for what appears to be an artificial, weaponized virus.
Another doctor chimed in with what he thought was a solid explanation for the virus's irregularities...
...Until he realized something disturbing.
Oh my god. Indian scientists have just found HIV (AIDS) virus-like insertions in the 2019-nCov virus that are not found in any other coronavirus. They hint at the possibility that this Chinese virus was designed ["not fortuitous']. Scary if true. https://t.co/h6xPX1gYvj pic.twitter.com/kCpd1I00uE
— Anand Ranganathan (@ARanganathan72) January 31, 2020
"Scary"... but relax, it's just another ridiculous "conspiracy."
By Joe Mozingo Staff Writer March 23, 2020 9:13 PM
Michael Levitt, a Nobel laureate and Stanford biophysicist, began analyzing the number of COVID-19 cases worldwide in January and correctly calculated that China would get through the worst of its coronavirus outbreak long before many health experts had predicted.
Now he foresees a similar outcome in the United States and the rest of the world.
While many epidemiologists are warning of months, or even years, of massive social disruption and millions of deaths, Levitt says the data simply don’t support such a dire scenario — especially in areas where reasonable social distancing measures are in place.
“What we need is to control the panic,” he said. In the grand scheme, “we’re going to be fine.”
Here’s what Levitt noticed in China: On Jan. 31, the country had 46 new deaths due to the novel coronavirus, compared with 42 new deaths the day before.
Although the number of daily deaths had increased, the rate of that increase had begun to ease off. In his view, the fact that new cases were being identified at a slower rate was more telling than the number of new cases itself. It was an early sign that the trajectory of the outbreak had shifted.
Think of the outbreak as a car racing down an open highway, he said. Although the car is still gaining speed, it’s not accelerating as rapidly as before.
“This suggests that the rate of increase in the number of deaths will slow down even more over the next week,” Levitt wrote in a report he sent to friends Feb. 1 that was widely shared on Chinese social media. And soon, he predicted, the number of deaths would be decreasing every day.
Workers disinfect equipment in coronavirus ward
Hospital equipment is disinfected.
(Getty Images)
Three weeks later, Levitt told the China Daily News that the virus’ rate of growth had peaked. He predicted that the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in China would end up around 80,000, with about 3,250 deaths.
This forecast turned out to be remarkably accurate: As of March 16, China had counted a total of 80,298 cases and 3,245 deaths — in a nation of nearly 1.4 billion people where roughly 10 million die every year. The number of newly diagnosed patients has dropped to around 25 a day, with no cases of community spread reported since Wednesday.
Now Levitt, who received the 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing complex models of chemical systems, is seeing similar turning points in other nations, even those that did not instill the draconian isolation measures that China did.
He analyzed data from 78 countries that reported more than 50 newcases of COVID-19 every day and sees “signs of recovery” in many of them. He’s not focusing on the total number ofcases in a country, but on the number of new cases identified every day — and, especially, on the change in that number from one day to the next.
“Numbers are still noisy, but there are clear signs of slowed growth.”
In South Korea, for example, newly confirmed cases are being added to the country’s total each day, but the daily tally has dropped in recent weeks, remaining below 200. That suggests the outbreak there may be winding down.
In Iran, the number of newly confirmed COVID-19 cases per day remained relatively flat last week, going from 1,053 last Monday to 1,028 on Sunday. Although that’s still a lot of new cases, Levitt said, the pattern suggests the outbreak there “is past the halfway mark.”
Italy, on the other hand, looks like it’s still on the upswing. In that country, the number of newly confirmed cases increased on most days this past week.
In places that have managed to recover from an initial outbreak, officials must still contend with the fact that the coronavirus may return. China is now fighting to stop new waves of infection coming in from places where the virus is spreading out of control. Other countries are bound to face the same problem.
Levitt acknowledges that his figures are messy and that the official case counts in many areas are too low because testing is spotty. But even with incomplete data, “a consistent decline means there’s some factor at work that is not just noise in the numbers,” he said.
In other words, as long as the reasons for the inaccurate case counts remain the same, it’s still useful to compare them from one day to the next.
The trajectory of deaths backs up his findings, he said, since it follows the same basic trends as the new confirmed cases. So do data from outbreaks in confined environments, such as the one on the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Out of 3,711 people on board, 712 were infected, and eight died.
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How do you become infected with the coronavirus?
March 22, 2020
This unintended experiment in coronavirus spread will help researchers estimate the number of fatalities that would occur in a fully infected population, Levitt said. For instance, the Diamond Princess data allowed him to estimate that being exposed to the new coronavirus doubles a person’s risk of dying in the next two months. Most people have an extremely low risk of death in a two-month period, so that risk remains extremely low even when doubled.
Nicholas Reich, a biostatistician at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said the analysis was thought-provoking, if nothing else.
“Time will tell if Levitt’s predictions are correct,” Reich said. “I do think that having a wide diversity of experts bringing their perspectives to the table will help decision-makers navigate the very tricky decisions they will be facing in the upcoming weeks and months.”
Levitt said he’s in sync with those calling for strong measures to fight the outbreak. The social-distancing mandates are critical — particularly the ban on large gatherings — because the virus is so new that the population has no immunity to it, and a vaccine is still many months away. “This is not the time to go out drinking with your buddies,” he said.
Spain To Impose Nationwide Lockdown To Combat The Coronavirus
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Coronavirus tips: The dos and don’ts of social distancing
March 18, 2020
Getting vaccinated against the flu is important, too, because a coronavirus outbreak that strikes in the middle of a flu epidemic is much more likely to overwhelm hospitals and increases the odds that the coronavirus goes undetected. This was probably a factor in Italy, a country with a strong anti-vaccine movement, he said.
But he also blames the media for causing unnecessary panic by focusing on the relentless increase in the cumulative number of cases and spotlighting celebrities who contract the virus. By contrast, the flu has sickened 36 million Americans since September and killed an estimated 22,000, according to the CDC, but those deaths are largely unreported.
Levitt fears the public health measures that have shut down large swaths of the economy could cause their own health catastrophe, as lost jobs lead to poverty and hopelessness. Time and again, researchers have seen that suicide rates go up when the economy spirals down.
The virus can grow exponentially only when it is undetected and no one is acting to control it, Levitt said. That’s what happened in South Korea last month, when it ripped through a closed-off cult that refused to report the illness.
“People need to be considered heroes for announcing they have this virus,” he said.
Temperature screening in China
A guard holds a thermal gun to check the body temperature of visitors at the entrance of a restaurant area in China.
(Hector Retamal / AFP-Getty Images)
The goal needs to be better early detection — not just through testing but perhaps with body-temperature surveillance, which China is implementing — and immediate social isolation.
While the COVID-19 fatality rate appears to be significantly higher than that of the flu, Levitt says it is, quite simply put, “not the end of the world.”
“The real situation is not as nearly as terrible as they make it out to be,” he said.
Dr. Loren Miller, a physician and infectious diseases researcher at the Lundquist Institute for Biomedical Innovation at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, said it’s premature to draw any conclusions — either rosy or bleak — about the course the pandemic will take.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Sun Apr 05, 2020 9:29 am Post subject:
Various facts emerging
Sunday the 10th of Lockdown
1. This 'you no longer have rights' power grab lockdown will go on and on, perhaps forever.
2. The virus is most likely a weapon which originated in Maryland US armed forces lab and was stolen by elite private interests.
3. Its release is the power elite's response to Brexit and is designed to reverse Brexit and advance the police state all over the world in preparation for US/China WWIII. To bring authoritarian surveillance measures, compulsory ID cards and social credit profiling now common in China to the West, permanently.
4. These psychological warfare lockdown measures are utterly destroying already struggling small and medium businesses, along with the regional/local media who rely on their advertising, centralising the corporate dictatorship.
5. CoVid19 will kill off lots of elderly pension drawers (but not as many, 50k, as the bad flu of 2017/1, much to actuaries' & DWP glee.
6. The World Health Organisation is owned as it's been captured by private interests since the 2008 bailouts vastly reduced state funding that funding is now largely by Gates Foundation and the pharmaceutical industry.
So - please inform your friends and colleagues that this is about much more than trying to prevent the inevitable spread of a nasty flu virus...
As former ambassador Craig Murray puts it
It is a recognised pattern for dictatorship to commence with emergency measures designed to combat a threat. These then become normalised and people exercising arbitrary power find it addictive. A new threat is then found to justify the continuation https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/04/how-it-starts/
How It Starts 829
1 Apr, 2020 in Uncategorized by craig
The brevity of this post is out of proportion to the enormous importance of the subject. But I want to let you know I am thinking and working on it.
It is a recognised pattern for dictatorship to commence with emergency measures designed to combat a threat. Those emergency measures then become normalised and people exercising arbitrary power find it addictive. A new threat is then found to justify the continuation
It is by no means clear to me that it is a rational response to covid-19 to tear up all of the civil liberties which were won by the people against authority through centuries of struggle, and for which people died. To say that is not to minimise the threat of covid-19. It is also worth pointing out that a coronavirus pandemic was a widely foreseen eventuality. People keep sending me links to various TV shows or movies based on a coronavirus pandemic, generally claiming this proves it is a man-made event. No, that just proves it is a widely foreseen event. Which it is.
The lack of contingency preparedness is completely indefensible. It is partly a result of the stupidity of Tory austerity that has the NHS permanently operating at 100% capacity with no contingency, and partly the result of the crazed just-in time thinking that permeates management in all spheres and eliminates the holding of stock.
It is incredible to me that the UK is willing to throw away some £220 billion and rising on Trident against a war scenario nobody can sensibly define, but was not willing to spend a few million on holding stock of protective clothing for the NHS against the much more likely contingency of a pandemic. What does that say about our society?
Anyway, we are where we are. Nobody knows how deadly this virus is. There have not been, anywhere, sufficient reliable large general population samples to know what percentage of people who get the virus will die. We just do not know how many people in the UK have had it and not got seriously ill. My suspicion is that in a couple of years time it will be discovered the mortality rate was under 1%. But I do not know, and I do not blame the government for making worst assumptions in the absence of reliable scientific evidence. Personally, I am obeying lockdown and would advise others to do so too until the situation is clearer. But I do not want to see the police harassing people for going on a long walk or posting a letter. It really is a problem to have police empowered to stop and question a citizen for just walking in the street. It is also a problem that Peter Hitchens is being reviled for saying, in essence, little more than that. When you can’t criticise restrictions on liberty, you know society has entered a very dark phase indeed.
I would feel much more comfortable if they were open about what they do not know. All the excuses for not testing people rather than admit they did not have the tests rather rattles trust. The ability of the rich and well-connected to access tests also rattles trust.
But none of this justifies rule by fiat – if Parliament cannot sit, I personally believe it would benefit the nations of the UK to have no new laws for a while. There are too many laws already. It does not justify banning political gathering. I don’t recommend anyone to gather, and I don’t imagine they would gather, but the evil of banning political activity is much more serious than the danger of four lonely people in Solihull getting together to talk about coronavirus restrictions.
It certainly does not justify banning jury trials, which the Scottish government has just dropped from today’s Bill after a revolt led by Joanna Cherry. The bill still weakens the defence in trials by allowing pre-taped video evidence and dispensing with the right to cross-examine. If the accusers had been allowed to get away with their lies in the Alex Salmond trial without cross-examination, the result might have been very different. For God’s sake, if you cannot do justice, suspend it. Do not dispense rough justice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQwylpsr7IE _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
"The night Cyril Ramaphosa became a wartime president" is how a leading columnist for South Africa's News24 website described the South African leader's decision to impose a nationwide lockdown to defeat coronavirus.
The three-week lockdown, which started just after midnight, is unprecedented.
It is the first time since South Africa became a democracy in 1994 that a president had stripped away the most basic freedoms of citizens - to walk, to shop, to socialise and to congregate for prayer without hindrance.
As Mr Ramaphosa told South African troops being deployed to the streets this week: "This is unprecedented, not only in our democracy but also in the history of our country, that we will have a lockdown for 21 days to go out and wage war against an invisible enemy, coronavirus."
Image copyright Reuters
Image caption Some shoppers were stocking up on alcohol before the lockdown
The government has even banned the sale of alcohol and cigarettes, as well as jogging or walking dogs, during the lockdown - warning that offenders risked being prosecuted, and either fined or jailed.
Like many other nations in the world, South Africans are ceding their rights to governments in order to fight the "invisible enemy".
Getty Images
South Africa's lockdown
To last for three weeks
Shopping restricted to food and other essentials
Sale of alcohol and cigarettes prohibited
Walking down the road for exercise is banned
Public gatherings are banned
Funerals restricted to 50 people
Security forces to patrol and set up road blocks to ensure compliance
Source: South African media
Yet governments elsewhere in the region have not seen fit to impose such stringent measures.
'Viruses know no boundary'
Zimbabwe's President Emmerson Mnangagwa has declared a national disaster, promising to marshal the government's limited resources to fight the virus.
But two weeks ago, the country's Defence Minister, Oppah Muchinguri-Kashiri, thought her nation's borders were impenetrable, claiming that the virus was the enemy of powerful Western states - not a poor African nation under US sanctions for its human rights record.
Media captionCoronavirus: South Africa prepares for three-week lockdown
"Coronavirus is the work of God punishing countries that imposed sanctions on us. They are now keeping indoors. Their economies are screaming just like they did to ours. Trump should know that he is not God," she said at a rally of the ruling Zanu-PF party on 14 March. The minister ignored the fact that the virus was first detected in China where it has killed more than 2,000.
Her hubris was short-lived: the virus has hit Zimbabwe, claiming as its first victim, 30-year-old broadcaster and filmmaker, Zororo Makamba earlier this week.
"Pandemics of this kind have a scientific explanation and knows no boundary, and like any other natural phenomenon cannot be blamed on anyone," President Mnangagwa said, effectively rebuking his defence minister for trying to politicise the global health crisis.
He banned all gatherings, shut schools and set aside three hospitals as quarantine centres as part of what are now familiar measures introduced in other parts of the world to prevent the spread of the virus.
With its economy in ruins and the government struggling to pay its bills, Zimbabwe is in no position to cope with a major outbreak, as many of its health centres do not have basic equipment, medicine, staff or a regular electricity supply.
Tough measures
Fearing that Zimbabweans will flee to its territory for treatment, South Africa's government has decided to complete the construction of a fence along the main border of the two nations within the next few weeks.
Number of coronavirus cases
South Africa
Source: National Institute for Communicable Diseases
"At the border post now, you've got health inspectors and you've got environmental professionals and they are doing the testing and screening at the border. But if somebody just walks over the border, there are no such facilities," South Africa's Public Works Minister Patricia de Lille said.
The curbing of illegal migration has been a long-standing objective of Mr Ramaphosa's government.
It has now used the special powers it took for itself after declaring the virus a national disaster to build the 1.8m (6ft) high fence quickly.
Mr Ramaphosa clearly believes - like many other world leaders - that tough measures are needed to defeat the virus.
"Without decisive action, the number of people infected will rapidly increase from a few hundred to tens of thousands, and within a few weeks, to hundreds of thousands," he warned, when announcing the lockdown.
"This is extremely dangerous for a population like ours, with a large number of people with suppressed immunity because of HIV and TB, and high levels of poverty and malnutrition," he added.
'We'd rather die of the virus than hunger'
Rwanda - with a population of about 12 million - is the only other sub-Sahara African state to impose a lockdown.
Image copyright Reuters
Image caption Market tailors in Rwanda had been making traditional African fabric face masks before the lockdown
It came into force on Sunday, with police setting up checkpoints across the country to ensure that people comply - something that they have been mostly doing with streets in the capital, Kigali, deserted.
Police say they shot dead two men in the south of the country after they got involved in a fight with them but denied the incident was linked to the lockdown.
As for the economic consequences of the two-week restrictions, it has been devastating, especially for casual labourers who live hand-to-mouth.
"We'd rather die of the virus than hunger," one man said.
Ignoring the risk of spreading the virus in a country with one of Africa's highest population densities, some poor people are said to have surreptitiously left the capital, walking long distances - sometimes more than 100km (62 miles) - to reach their home villages where they believe they will at least get food from the farms and vegetable patches of their families.
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Although the government has promised to give financial help to people and has set fixed prices for basic food items, their plight highlights the dangers posed by a lockdown - that it could worsen hunger and poverty, especially if it is extended.
In South Africa - the continent's most industrialised nation - Mr Ramaphosa announced a series of measures to cushion the economic effects of the lockdown.
These include the establishment of a solidarity fund, to which two of the country's wealthiest families - the Oppenheimers and Ruperts - have already pledged 1bn rand ($58m; £48m) each to help small businesses.
Mr Ramaphosa has also ordered the deployment of the army on to the streets to help police ensure that the population of almost 60 million stays at home for the next three weeks.
Many analysts have praised Ramaphosa imposing restrictions on movement before the virus claimed lives.
Health Minister Zweli Mkhize says that the curbs could enable South Africa to lower its infection rate just two or three weeks after the measures enter into force, adding: "The numbers, we mustn't be shocked when we see them increase. But these measures if we all work together must turn the curve around".
Attempted murder charge
But, as a warning shot to anyone thinking defying the order, police on Wednesday revealed that a businessman had been arrested for disobeying a doctor's instruction to self-quarantine for 14 days.
The 52-year-old was detained in hospital, and charged with attempted murder for endangering the lives of almost 30 people he had interacted with subsequent to the doctor's instruction, police said.
It was a reminder of the unprecedented powers that the government had taken for itself and the security forces - without parliamentary approval - to fight the "invisible enemy".
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Against this backdrop, Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng has told judges to be on standby for possible legal challenges against the government in a nation known to be litigious, suspicious and even defiant of authority.
A possible sign of how judges would rule came last week, when the health department obtained a court order to forcibly put a man in quarantine after he walked out of a hospital, refusing to be tested despite the fact that his wife and daughter had been diagnosed with Covid-19, the respiratory illness caused by the virus.
The case highlighted the fact that ignorance and complacency are probably the biggest obstacles in efforts to combat the spread of the virus.
With the largest number of cases of coronavirus and introducing some of the most stringent measures to deal with it, South Africa has now become a test case for the rest of the continent to see if it is the model to follow.
The UK plans to roll out “immunity passports” to allow people who have contracted COVID-19 to leave the lockdown early.
UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the certificates would be issued to people who have built up immunity to the coronavirus so they can return to “normal life.”
Citizens would need to test positive in an antibody test before being issued with the certificates.
However, the UK has yet to identify a reliable test for antibodies to the virus.
Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
The UK plans to roll out “immunity passports” to people who have already contracted COVID-19 to allow them to return to “normal life,” the Health Secretary Matt Hancock said on Thursday.
How traditional French butter is made in Brittany
Insider's Claudia Romeo traveled to Brittany, France to meet with Jean-Yves Bordier, a butter artisan who brought back to France the 19th-century technique of malaxage...
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Duration 15:02
How traditional French butter is made in Brittany
“We are looking at an immunity certificate,” Hancock said at a Downing Street press conference.
“People who have had the disease have got the antibodies and then have immunity can show that and therefore get back as much as possible to normal life.”
He added: “That is something we will be doing and will look at, but it is too early in the science … to be able to put clarity around that.”
The UK has already ordered millions of antibody tests. However, the tests have so far proven ineffective, and the government has yet to approve them for use.
“The early results of some of them have not performed well,” Hancock said. “But we hope the later tests we have got are reliable enough for people to be confident in using.”
Hancock said hundreds of thousands of tests could take place every day once an antibody test is identified.
However, coronavirus testing has so far had mixed success around the world. Spain was recently forced to return tens of thousands of rapid coronavirus tests from a Chinese company after they were found to provide inconsistent results.
Some tests have demonstrated false positives, detecting antibodies to much more common coronaviruses, Quartz reported.
Scientists also remain unsure about the extent to which a past infection could prevent reinfection and how long an immunity would remain.
Germany is also examining the possibility of issuing immunity passports.
Researchers at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research in Germany plan to send out hundreds of thousands of antibody tests over the coming weeks that could allow people to break free of their lockdowns, Der Spiegel reported on Friday.
If the project is approved, the researchers will test 100,000 people at a time starting this month, Der Spiegel said.
The tests are designed to detect whether a person has developed antibodies to the COVID-19 virus. The antibodies indicate that the tested person was at one time a carrier and may have built up immunity.
A positive test could allow the person to leave the lockdown while many positive tests could allow governments to ease restrictions in areas with “herd immunity.”
Gerard Krause, the epidemiologist leading the project, told the magazine that people who are immune “could be given a type of vaccination card that, for example, allows them to be exempted” from “restrictions on their work.”
The former Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption, QC, has denounced the police response to the coronavirus, saying the country is suffering 'collective hysteria'.
This is an edited transcript of his interview with BBC Radio 4's World at One programme earlier today.
BBC interviewer Jonny Dymond
'A hysterical slide into a police state. A shameful police force intruding with scant regard to common sense or tradition. An irrational overreaction driven by fear.' These are not the accusations of wild-eyed campaigners, they come from the lips of one our most eminent jurists Lord Sumption, former Justice of the Supreme Court. I spoke to him just before we came on air.
Lord Sumption
The real problem is that when human societies lose their freedom, it's not usually because tyrants have taken it away. It's usually because people willingly surrender their freedom in return for protection against some external threat. And the threat is usually a real threat but usually exaggerated. That's what I fear we are seeing now. The pressure on politicians has come from the public. They want action. They don't pause to ask whether the action will work. They don't ask themselves whether the cost will be worth paying.
They want action anyway. And anyone who has studied history will recognise here the classic symptoms of collective hysteria. Hysteria is infectious. We are working ourselves up into a lather in which we exaggerate the threat and stop asking ourselves whether the cure may be worse than the disease.
Dymond
At a time like this, as you acknowledge, citizens do look to the state for protection, for assistance, we shouldn't be surprised then if the state takes on new powers if it responds. That is what it has been asked to do, almost demanded of it.
Sumption
Yes that is absolutely true. We should not be surprised. But we have to recognise that this is how societies become despotisms. And we also have to recognise this is a process which leads naturally to exaggeration. The symptoms of coronavirus are clearly serious for those with other significant medical conditions, especially if they're old. There are exceptional cases in which young people have been struck down, which have had a lot of publicity, but the numbers are pretty small. The Italian evidence, for instance, suggests that only in 12 per cent of deaths is it possible to say coronavirus was the main cause of death. So yes this is serious and yes it's understandable that people cry out to the government.
But the real question is: is this serious enough to warrant putting most of our population into house imprisonment, wrecking our economy for an indefinite period, destroying businesses that honest and hardworking people have taken years to build up, saddling future generations with debt, depression, stress, heart attacks, suicides and unbelievable distress inflicted on millions of people who are not especially vulnerable and will suffer only mild symptoms or none at all, like the Health Secretary and the Prime Minister.
Dymond
The executive, the government, is all of a sudden really rather powerful and really rather unscrutinised. Parliament is in recess, it's due to come back in late April, we're not quite sure whether it will or not, the Prime Minister is closeted away, communicating via his phone, there is not a lot in the way of scrutiny is there?
Sumption
No. Certainly, there's not a lot in the way of institutional scrutiny. The press has engaged in a fair amount of scrutiny, there has been some good and challenging journalism. But mostly the press has, I think, echoed and indeed amplified the general panic.
Dymond
The restrictions in movement have also changed the relationship between the police and those whose, in name, they serve. The police are naming and shaming citizens for travelling at what they see as the wrong time or driving to the wrong place. Does that set alarm bells ringing for you, as a former senior member of the judiciary?
Sumption
Well, I have to say, it does. I mean, the tradition of policing in this country is that policemen are citizens in uniform. They are not members of a disciplined hierarchy operating just at the government's command. Yet in some parts of the country, the police have been trying to stop people from doing things like travelling to take exercise in the open country, which are not contrary to the regulations, simply because ministers have said that they would prefer us not to. The police have no power to enforce ministers' preferences, but only legal regulations - which don't go anything like as far as the government's guidance. I have to say that the behaviour of the Derbyshire police in trying to shame people into using their undoubted right to take exercise in the country and wrecking beauty spots in the Fells so that people don't want to go there, is frankly disgraceful.
This is what a police state is like. It's a state in which the government can issue orders or express preferences with no legal authority and the police will enforce ministers' wishes. I have to say that most police forces have behaved in a thoroughly sensible and moderate fashion. Derbyshire police have shamed our policing traditions. There is a natural tendency of course, and a strong temptation for the police to lose sight of their real functions and turn themselves from citizens in uniform into glorified school prefects. I think it's really sad that the Derbyshire police have failed to resist that.
Dymond
There will be people listening who admire your legal wisdom but will also say 'well, he's not an epidemiologist, he doesn't know how disease spreads, he doesn't understand the risks to the health service if this thing gets out of control'. What do you say to them?
Sumption
What I say to them is I am not a scientist but it is the right and duty of every citizen to look and see what the scientists have said and to analyse it for themselves and to draw common sense conclusions. We are all perfectly capable of doing that and there's no particular reason why the scientific nature of the problem should mean we have to resign our liberty into the hands of scientists. We all have critical faculties and it's rather important, in a moment of national panic, that we should maintain them.
Dymond
Lord Sumption, former Justice of the Supreme Court, speaking to me earlier. We put his criticism of Derbyshire police to the force and they sent us this statement: 'Our advice to the public was in line with national government instruction and echoed what people in our communities were saying following thousands of people that travelled to the Peak District National Park the previous weekend. The weekend just gone saw much smaller numbers and we thank the public for their response.'
* * * _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
[GREAT CULLING] Diseases Pendemic by DR. Rima Laibow M.D. and Jesse Ventura.
https://www.telleyz.com/great-culling-diseases-pendemic-by-dr-rima-lai bow-m-d-and-jesse-ventura/ _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Mike Kenner @WellBright
Replying to @TonyGosling
Did you ever consider that the official was mistaken and that the Porton/CCRC involvement was with the Public Health Laboratory Service (PHLS)/CAMR Porton Down and not CBDE Porton Down?
Did you ever consider that the official was mistaken and that the Porton/CCRC involvement was with the Public Health Laboratory Service (PHLS)/CAMR Porton Down and not CBDE Porton Down?
Back in 1993 I did a BBC piece on the Common Cold Research Centre in Salisbury which was being demolished/redeveloped. The official told me off mic it was not NHS but really an MoD Porton Down & Burroughs Wellcome run unit https://t.co/VzymuGldOa
Back in 1993 I did a BBC piece on the Common Cold Research Centre in Salisbury which was being demolished/redeveloped. The official told me off mic it was not NHS but really an MoD Porton Down & Burroughs Wellcome run unit
_________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
🚨It doesn't get better than this, hahahaha--->"Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for Global Health at the *Council on Foreign Relations*, recently wrote an article for Foreign Affairs that is dismissive of conspiracy theories about the origins of the pandemic.." #COVID19Pandemichttps://t.co/SPGzpKCNRL
I don’t know about you but I have been sceptical of the COVID-19 panic since day 1. Nothing that has happened since has changed my mind. Most of the MSM news is full of panic stories, stories aimed at locking people down and preventing social interaction. Ask yourself this simple question. How many people do you know who have COVID-19?
For me the answer is none. It is even less than none (joke) because I do not know anyone who knows anyone who has been infected with COVID-19. Yet the news is full of them. They include high profile people like Prince Charles, Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock and others who have allegedly spent their time in isolation. Matt Hancock as soon as his confinement was over issued a statement to the effect that he was thinking of introducing certificates to those, like him presumably, who have had the virus. Others presumably will remain in a state of lockdown. Anyone believing that has the gullibility of a fish that repeatedly gets caught.
We get nothing but coverage of something which most likely isn’t an issue. Although we are not in the military we are ordered to confine ourselves to barracks. There are several who think the whole affair is a total hoax. Ron Paul is one of them. He claims that the whole issue is aimed at controlling us. Unfortunately it seems to be working. Everybody is complying and social gatherings have become a thing of the past. This is what the powermongers and fat controllers want.
One of the controllers, a Bilderberger and the richest man in the world, Bill Gates, claimed in February 2017 that a new flu-type virus could kill 30 million people like it did in 1919. Forbes reported:
“Whether it occurs by a quirk of nature or at the hand of a terrorist, epidemiologists say a fast-moving airborne pathogen could kill more than 30 million people in less than a year. And they say there is a reasonable probability the world will experience such an outbreak in the next 10 to 15 years.”
When the coronavirus, one of several coronaviruses, COVID-19, hit China Bill Gates was fast to update his prediction to 33 million in six months. Fortunately, even by the hyperinflated figures, this looks unlikely to happen now. However the world economy is in a desperate state based on trying to defend against this fairly innocuous virus by adopting extreme measures. Through unnecessary isolation it has killed off social interaction (its purpose) had politicians lying to businesses that they will be bailed out when they won’t, stopped all sports events or meetings where a group of people could actually discuss this issue rationally, given 24/7 coverage to frighten people of a non-existent danger, had local news taken from the screens to make sure everybody gets a single message and left the world in a state which will see millions die from starvation, cold and the diseases brought about by penury. That is the aim – depopulation.
If you believe Bill Gates knew something we didn’t, you’re almost certainly right. He and the other members of that tiny elite of super-rich have been planning this for years. So many videos exist about this it would be unfair on the others to post a single link. The wise know about this. Personally I think their aim will fail. People will start gathering in groups. They already do. There are the police, the armed forces, hospital staff who are still allowed to meet in groups and will eventually see that they are being manipulated. What the super-rich elite hope is that they will always be able to control these establishment assets. But these establishment assets have families who will be suffering privation.
Once a year the people who plan global control meet in a group called the Bilderberg Group. My advice would be for everyone to ignore the fake news put out by mainstream media. This needs to be done in a unified manner. The power of trades’ unions has been very badly weakened but over this issue society really needs to get together. The ability to do that has been taken away through the fake news that the majority believes. Wake up world. Or as Shelley put it:
“Rise like lions after slumber in unvanquishable number – Shake your chains to earth like dew which in sleep had fallen on you – Ye are many – they are few.”
Wake up world! It is not too late yet! _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Mon Apr 06, 2020 12:10 am Post subject:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this Cold War Regional Government in all but name? A network of strategic coordination centres; bringing together the emergency services, NHS and councils; supported by the armed forces; for Gold Commanders read Regional Commissioners? https://t.co/nRYiNGU8yP
Author imageSam Courtney-GuySaturday 4 Apr 2020 10:52 am
A senior science adviser to the government has said the UK should consider letting people catch coronavirus in the safest way possible.
Professor Graham Medley, who leads the government’s disease modelling team, argued Britain has ‘painted itself into a corner’ with a lockdown which could eventually lead to more harm than the disease itself.
He told The Times today: ‘We will have done three weeks of this lockdown so there’s a big decision coming up on 13 April. In broad terms are we going to continue to harm children to protect vulnerable people, or not?’
‘The measures to control [the disease] cause harm. The principal one is economic, and I don’t mean to the economy generally, I mean to the incomes of people who rely on a continuous stream of money and their children, particularly the school closure aspect .
LONDON, ENGLAND - MARCH 19: Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty (L) and Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance (R) look on as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson (C) gestures as he speaks during a coronavirus news conference inside number 10 Downing Street on March 19, 2020 in London, England. Coronavirus (Covid-19) has spread to over 177 countries in a matter of weeks, claiming over 8,000 lives and infecting over 230,000. There are currently 2,692 diagnosed cases in the UK with 137 deaths. (Photo by Leon Neal - WPA Pool/Getty Images)
Many countries are struggling to identify how to ease lockdowns without a renewed outbreak (Picture: GETTY IMAGES)
‘There will also be actual harms in terms of mental health, in terms of domestic violence and child abuse, and in terms of food poverty.’
Professor Medley said scientific models had found no way of easing the lockdown while controlling the virus.
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Only those who work outside could be safely allowed to return to work, he added.
Professor Medley added: ‘If we carry on with lockdown it buys us more time, we can get more thought put into it, but it doesn’t resolve anything – it’s a placeholder.’
Screen grab of Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance during a media briefing in Downing Street, London, on coronavirus (COVID-19). PA Photo. Picture date: Monday March 30, 2020. See PA story HEALTH Coronavirus. Photo credit should read: PA Video/PA Wire
Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance has previously suggested herd immunity could be a long-term goal (Picture: PA)
The government’s chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, suggested in March that the public could be allowed to build up immunity enough to stop the virus spreading, while protecting the most vulnerable.
Ministers denied ‘herd immunity’ was ever the government’s goal, though only after three days.
It was argued mass immunisation would be a natural consequence of a plan to allow the outbreak’s peak to hit in summer when the NHS was more able to cope.
Boris Johnson has said plans to buy hundreds of thousands of antibody tests to detect if someone has recovered from the virus could be a ‘gamechanger’.
10 Downing Street handout photo of Health Secretary Matt Hancock answering questions from the media via a video link during a media briefing in Downing Street, London, on coronavirus (COVID-19). Issue date: Friday April 3, 2020. See PA story HEALTH Coronavirus. Photo credit should read: Pippa Fowles/Crown Copyright/10 Downing Street/PA Wire NOTE TO EDITORS: This handout photo may only be used in for editorial reporting purposes for the contemporaneous illustration of events, things or the people in the image or facts mentioned in the caption. Reuse of the picture may require further permission from the copyright holder.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock defended the government against accusations of failing to build up testing capacities in time (Picture: PA)
But Professor Medley suggested antibody testing was not currently effective and has never successfully been used to manage an epidemic.
Around a million people have started receiving welfare payments and millions more have been furloughed. Some data has pointed to a recession steeper than that of the 1930s.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Mon Apr 06, 2020 1:32 am Post subject:
BBC #FAKENEWS DOUBLE LIE spotted by
Giancarlo Pagganinni @pagganinni
Mis-reporting total Covid-19 deaths so far as if that was the daily total! THEN reporting these deaths as 'from' rather than 'with' Coronavirus...
No wonder people do not trust the mainstream media. 218 people have died from #CoronaVirus in #Scotland in the past 24 hours?
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Mon Apr 06, 2020 6:39 am Post subject:
Prepare for the mother of all s**t storms if Sweden pulls this off
If Sweden, which has not locked down its economy and society, emerges with a death toll from COVID-19 that is somewhere in the middle of the pack of European countries, there is going to be a lot of recrimination, particularly against those who have tried to silence any discussion about the true extent of the threat that COVID-19 actually poses
Sweden
Cheers, say the Swedes
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/7649/prepare_for_the_mother_of_a ll_s_t_storms_if_sweden_pulls_this_off
On 3 April 2020 08:36
In a word: Sweden. What happens if they pull this off? What happens if it turns out that we could have coped with COVID-19 without collapsing entire sectors of the economy putting millions on the dole, and imposing some of the most draconian restrictions on civil liberties in living memory?
Sweden has not closed the bars. Shopping malls are open. Schools and companies are open too. There are some restrictions such as on gatherings of over 50 people. But, in comparison with most European countries, life in Sweden is relatively normal.
Right now, Sweden's death rate from coronavirus is 33 per million of the population. In France it is 83. In Italy it is 230. In Britain it is 43. In the Netherlands it is 78.
In the United States the number of deaths per million of the population is 18, but many argue that the outbreak in America took off later, and European levels of fatality from the virus are on their way. We shall see.
But, in any case, which levels of European fatality? The figures are all over the place. Partly this must be due to different ways in which the death toll is being counted.
In some countries, COVID-19 is being listed as the cause of death merely if it appears somewhere on the death certificate. In other words, you may have been days away from dying from terminal lung cancer, but if you had contracted COVID-19 in the meantime, your death will be listed in the overall COVID-19 fatality numbers. In other countries, it has to have been the single most obvious cause of death to make it into the same statistics.
Sweden appears to be in the latter category, which may be making their numbers look a little lower than in countries which list things differently. But probably not enough to radically change the comparisons.
Related
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That will all be looked at closely when all this is over.
But if, when all such necessary adjustments have been made, Sweden emerges with a death toll from COVID-19 that is somewhere in the middle of the pack of European countries, there is going to be a lot of recrimination, particularly against those who have tried to silence any discussion about the extent of the threat that COVID-19 actually poses.
What is interesting though, is that precisely because it is Sweden, the usual suspects in our politics who benefit from disillusionment with the establishment may find it hard to profit from this. The Swedish government is led by Stefan Loeven, a Social Democrat.
Sweden is practically a role model for mainstream, left of centre politics. If you're a European populist, it's going to be more than a little incongruous to start singing the praises of Sweden, of all countries.
Similarly in America. Donald Trump has, albeit reluctantly, broadly followed the lockdown policies we see across most of Europe. Unless he very quickly does a 180 degree turn (and don't rule that out) how can he profit from his usual disdain for the way things are done by the establishment?
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Mon Apr 06, 2020 6:55 am Post subject:
Trusting in science rather than God
'We will succeed', but who are 'we' and what is the mission?
he Queen's Coronavirus broadcast: 'We will meet again' - BBC
Zero Hedge, a popular US news blog focussing on the capital markets, was suspended by Twitter on Friday shortly after it tweeted a post about an article on the novel coronavirus outbreak in China. The post alleged that the coronavirus was obtained by China and was being modified into a 'bioweapon'.
coronavirus cover Know all about the coronavirus outbreak in the latest issue of THE WEEK
Interestingly, the post also cited a research paper on the coronavirus by a group of Indian scientists from the school of biological sciences at IIT Delhi and Acharya Narendra Dev College of University of Delhi.
Earlier, Zero Hedge had uploaded contact details of a Chinese scientist, who it effectively held as being responsible for being behind the coronavirus outbreak. The revelation of personal details violates Twitter's policies.
The research paper was uploaded on January 31 on bioRxiv, an open source initiative containing resources on biological research. The research paper claims the spike protein in novel coronavirus contained four "insertions" that "are not present in other coronaviruses". The research paper notes, "amino acid residues in all the 4 inserts have identity or similarity to those in the HIV1 gp120 or HIV-1 Gag". HIV is the virus that causes AIDS.
The scientists argue that similarity in amino acid identity was "not a random fortuitous finding", hinting that it could have been engineered. However, the paper does not delve deeper into the possibility of virus being engineered deliberately.
also read
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Coronavirus in Kerala: Patient's condition is improving, says health minister
However, the study by the Indian scientists has attracted some scepticism already. Dr Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist who has been associated with Harvard and Johns Hopkins, said the research work had not been peer reviewed in order for it to be verified or refuted.
Earlier this week, an Indian news portal, GreatGameIndia, claimed the origin of the coronavirus can be traced to Canada and two Chinese biological warfare program agents who smuggled it into China
Over the past few days, the mainstream press has vigorously pushed back against a theory about the origins of the coronavirus that has now infected as many as 70,000+ people in Wuhan alone (depending on whom you believe). The theory is that China obtained the coronavirus via a Canadian research program, and started molding it into a bioweapon at the Institute of Virology in Wuhan. Politifact pointed the finger at Zero Hedge, in particular, though the story was widely shared across independent-leaning media.
The theory is that the virus, which was developed by infectious disease experts to function as a bio-weapon, originated in the Wuhan-based lab of Dr. Peng Zhou, China's preeminent researcher of bat immune systems, specifically in how their immune systems adapt to the presence of viruses like coronavirus and other destructive viruses. Somehow, the virus escaped from the lab, and the Hunan fish market where the virus supposedly originated is merely a ruse.
Now, a respected epidemiologist who recently caught flack for claiming in a twitter threat that the virus appeared to be much more contagious than initially believed is pointing out irregularities in the virus's genome that suggests it might have been genetically engineered for the purposes of a weapon, and not just any weapon but the deadliest one of all.
In "Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag", Indian researchers are baffled by segments of the virus's RNA that have no relation to other coronaviruses like SARS, and instead appear to be closer to HIV. The virus even responds to treatment by HIV medications.
For those pressed for time, here are the key findings from the paper, which first focuses on the unique nature of 2019-nCoV, and then observe four amino acid sequences in the Wuhan Coronavirus which are homologous to amino acid sequences in HIV1:
Our phylogentic tree of full-length coronaviruses suggests that 2019-nCoV is closely related to SARS CoV [Fig1].
In addition, other recent studies have linked the 2019-nCoV to SARS CoV. We therefore compared the spike glycoprotein sequences of the 2019-nCoV to that of the SARS CoV (NCBI Accession number: AY390556.1). On careful examination of the sequence alignment we found that the 2019- nCoV spike glycoprotein contains 4 insertions [Fig.2]. To further investigate if these inserts are present in any other corona virus, we performed a multiple sequence alignment of the spike glycoprotein amino acid sequences of all available coronaviruses (n=55) [refer Table S.File1] in NCBI refseq (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) this includes one sequence of 2019-nCoV[Fig.S1]. We found that these 4 insertions [inserts 1, 2, 3 and 4] are unique to 2019-nCoV and are not present in other coronaviruses analyzed. Another group from China had documented three insertions comparing fewer spike glycoprotein sequences of coronaviruses . Another group from China had documented three insertions comparing fewer spike glycoprotein sequences of coronaviruses (Zhou et al., 2020).
We then translated the aligned genome and found that these inserts are present in all Wuhan 2019-nCoV viruses except the 2019-nCoV virus of Bat as a host [Fig.S4]. Intrigued by the 4 highly conserved inserts unique to 2019-nCoV we wanted to understand their origin. For this purpose, we used the 2019-nCoV local alignment with each insert as query against all virus genomes and considered hits with 100% sequence coverage. Surprisingly, each of the four inserts aligned with short segments of the Human immunodeficiency Virus-1 (HIV-1) proteins. The amino acid positions of the inserts in 2019-nCoV and the corresponding residues in HIV-1 gp120 and HIV-1 Gag are shown in Table 1.
The first 3 inserts (insert 1,2 and 3) aligned to short segments of amino acid residues in HIV-1 gp120. The insert 4 aligned to HIV-1 Gag. The insert 1 (6 amino acid residues) and insert 2 (6 amino acid residues) in the spike glycoprotein of 2019-nCoV are 100% identical to the residues mapped to HIV-1 gp120. The insert 3 (12 amino acid residues) in 2019- nCoV maps to HIV-1 gp120 with gaps [see Table 1]. The insert 4 (8 amino acid residues) maps to HIV-1 Gag with gaps.
Why do the authors think the virus may be man-made? Because when looking at the above insertions which are not present in any of the closest coronavirus families, "it is quite unlikely for a virus to have acquired such unique insertions naturally in a short duration of time." Instead, they can be found in cell identification and membrane binding proteins located in the HIV genome.
Since the S protein of 2019-nCoV shares closest ancestry with SARS GZ02, the sequence coding for spike proteins of these two viruses were compared using MultiAlin software. We found four new insertions in the protein of 2019-nCoV- “GTNGTKR” (IS1), “HKNNKS” (IS2), “GDSSSG” (IS3) and “QTNSPRRA” (IS4) (Figure 2). To our surprise, these sequence insertions were not only absent in S protein of SARS but were also not observed in any other member of the Coronaviridae family (Supplementary figure). This is startling as it is quite unlikely for a virus to have acquired such unique insertions naturally in a short duration of time.
The insertions were observed to be present in all the genomic sequences of 2019-nCoV virus available from the recent clinical isolates. To know the source of these insertions in 2019-nCoV a local alignment was done with BLASTp using these insertions as query with all virus genome. Unexpectedly, all the insertions got aligned with Human immunodeficiency Virus-1 (HIV-1). Further analysis revealed that aligned sequences of HIV-1 with 2019-nCoV were derived from surface glycoprotein gp120 (amino acid sequence positions: 404-409, 462-467, 136-150) and from Gag protein (366-384 amino acid) (Table 1). Gag protein of HIV is involved in host membrane binding, packaging of the virus and for the formation of virus-like particles. Gp120 plays crucial role in recognizing the host cell by binding to the primary receptor CD4.This binding induces structural rearrangements in GP120, creating a high affinity binding site for a chemokine co-receptor like CXCR4 and/or CCR5.
And some visuals, which lead the paper authors to conclude that "this structural change might have also increased the range of host cells that 2019-nCoV can infect":
3D modelling of the protein structure displayed that these insertions are present at the binding site of 2019-nCoV. Due to the presence of gp120 motifs in 2019-nCoV spike glycoprotein at its binding domain, we propose that these motif insertions could have provided an enhanced affinity towards host cell receptors. Further, this structural change might have also increased the range of host cells that 2019-nCoV can infect. To the best of our knowledge, the function of these motifs is still not clear in HIV and need to be explored. The exchange of genetic material among the viruses is well known and such critical exchange highlights the risk and the need to investigate the relations between seemingly unrelated virus families.
A good recap of the findings was provided by Dr. Feigl-Ding, who started his explanatory thread by pointing out that the transmission rate outside China has surpassed the rate inside China.
But the 'smoking gun' in this case are pieces of the virus's genetic code that Indian researchers, led by Prashant Pradhan at the Indian Institute of Technology, found may have been 'embedded' from HIV, which belongs to an entirely different family of viruses.
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To be sure, Dr. Feigl-Ding insists that he's not trying to promote any 'conspiracies' about the virus being a bioweapon developed by the Chinese, although it is difficult to find a proper name for what appears to be an artificial, weaponized virus.
Another doctor chimed in with what he thought was a solid explanation for the virus's irregularities...
...Until he realized something disturbing.
Oh my god. Indian scientists have just found HIV (AIDS) virus-like insertions in the 2019-nCov virus that are not found in any other coronavirus. They hint at the possibility that this Chinese virus was designed ["not fortuitous']. Scary if true. https://t.co/h6xPX1gYvj pic.twitter.com/kCpd1I00uE
— Anand Ranganathan (@ARanganathan72) January 31, 2020
"Scary"... but relax, it's just another ridiculous "conspiracy."
_________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
We don’t have enough evidence yet to know if recovering from covid-19 induces immunity, or whether any immunity would give long-lasting protection against the coronavirus
HEALTH 25 March 2020
By Graham Lawton
New Scientist Default Image
SARS-CoV-2 virus particles (yellow), as seen using an electron microscope
CDC/Science Photo Library
SAY you have caught covid-19 and recovered – are you now immune for life, or could you catch it again? We just don’t know yet.
In February, reports emerged of a woman in Japan who had been given the all-clear after having covid-19 but then tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus a second time. There have also been reports of a man in Japan testing positive after being given the all-clear, and anecdotal cases of second positives have emerged from China, too.
This has raised fears that people may not develop immunity to the virus. This would mean that, until we have an effective vaccine, we could all experience repeated rounds of infection.
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But the science is still uncertain. “There is some anecdotal evidence of reinfections, but we really don’t know,” says Ira Longini at the University of Florida. It may be that the tests used were unreliable, which is a problem with tests for other respiratory viruses, says Jeffrey Shaman at Columbia University in New York.
Podcast: When will we get a safe covid-19 vaccine? An expert explains
Early signs from small animal experiments are reassuring. A team from the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in Beijing exposed four rhesus macaques to the virus. A week later, all four were ill with covid-19-like symptoms and had high virus loads. Two weeks later, the macaques had recovered and were confirmed to have antibodies to the virus in their bloodstream.
“You can be infected with other coronaviruses over and over. We don’t know if that’s true for this virus”
The researchers then tried to reinfect two of them but failed, which suggests the animals were immune (bioRxiv, doi.org/ggn8r8). “That finding is very encouraging, as it suggests that it is possible to induce protective immunity against the virus,” says Alfredo Garzino-Demo at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean long-term immunity. There are other coronaviruses circulating among humans and although they induce immunity, this doesn’t last. “Some other viruses in the coronavirus family, such as those that cause common colds, tend to induce immunity that is relatively short-lived, at around three months,” says Peter Openshaw at Imperial College London.
“Because [the virus] is so new, we do not yet know how long any protection generated through infection will last. We urgently need more research looking at the immune responses of people who have recovered from infection to be sure,” says Openshaw.
Other immunologists agree. “Immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is not yet well understood and we do not know how protective the antibody response will be in the long-term,” says Erica Bickerton at the Pirbright Institute in the UK.
Read more: How to fight infection
“For ordinary coronavirus infections, you do not get lasting immunity,” says Longini. “You can be infected over and over, and we really don’t know for this novel coronavirus if that’s also true.”
Other infectious disease specialists are more optimistic. “The evidence is increasingly convincing that infection with SARS-CoV-2 leads to an antibody response that is protective. Most likely this protection is for life,” says Martin Hibberd at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. “Although we need more evidence to be sure of this, people who have recovered are unlikely to be infected with SARS-CoV-2 again.”
Published on 31 Mar 2020
Recorded on March 27, 2020
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine at Stanford University. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a senior fellow at both the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute. His March 24, 2020, article in the Wall Street Journal questions the premise that “coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines.” In the article he suggests that “there’s little evidence to confirm that premise—and projections of the death toll could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high.” In this edition of Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson we asked Dr. Bhattacharya to defend that statement and describe to us how he arrived at this conclusion. We get into the details of his research, which used data collected from hotspots around the world and his background as a doctor, a medical researcher, and an economist. It’s not popular right now to question conventional wisdom on sheltering in place, but Dr. Bhattacharya makes a strong case for challenging it, based in economics and science.
Renowed German Mathematician and Professor of Statistics Slams Dramatization of Covid-19
A horde of scientists are pointing out the obvious — infection rates are far higher and lethality far lower than is being reported
The Great Hysteria Pandemic Jens Berger 27 Mar 20 6090 1.73k Shares 1.73k 1 
Gerd Bosbach, is a mathematician and an Emeritus Professor of Statistics whose main field of interest and research is statistics on demographics and health care. He is renowned enough in his country that he has a giant German Wikipedia page The media reports daily the new «number of infected», while everyone involved actually knows that they are far too low. The next part of the sentence then deals with “death rates”, while everyone involved knows that they are far too high. There is a confusion of terms, and politicians have to make decisions based on highly uncertain assumptions, with serious effects for society. Jens Berger spoke with professor in statistics Gerd Bosbach about definitions, numbers and the lessons that we have not drawn from past crises and hopefully will draw from this crisis in the future. Jens Berger: Last Friday, the German Society for Epidemiology warned that in one hundred days we will have more than a million patients in Germany who will need intensive care. A horror scenario that was immediately picked up by many media, but was clearly put into proper perspective by the epidemiologists a few hours later. This forecast was made on the basis of assumptions that, let’s say politely, are not really scientifically reliable. Can you explain to our readers how such reports come about? Gerd Bosbach: I can only guess. Such societies and associations want to get public attention. Perhaps this unconsciously prompts the acceptance of statistical models that result in extreme statements. Such statements are happily received and disseminated by the media.
https://www.anti-empire.com/renowed-german-mathematician-and-professor -of-statistics-slams-dramatization-of-covid-19/ _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
The gentlemen on the right is Rinat Maksiutov, General Director of the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology Vektor. Last time I posted an interview by a US specialist, I was told that he was part of the system, a liar with a stake in lying.
Fine, please look up the following to get an idea of what Vector was and is:
Russia and the USA are “in cahoots”
That Putin is Netanyahu’s best friend
Jews are always responsible for everything bad
That there is a world government of Illuminatis
Please stop reading right now and save yourself a ton of painful cognitive dissonance!
For everybody else.
This is the link to the original interview, which I am posting for Russian speakers:
This is the link to a specific moment in the interview:
When Rinat Maksiutov says on Russian national TV the following:
“я уверен, что это природный вариант”
meaning
“I am sure that this is a natural variant”
Right before, he specifically EXCLUDED a synthesized virus (for reasons that I don’t need to understand).
Okay, as far as I am concerned, this now comes from one of the world’s foremost authority on biowarfare, offensive and defensive. This lays the issue to rest, at least for me.
If somebody speaking Russian could translate the full interview with Maksiutov into English I would be most grateful, I don’t have physical the time.
Finally, I am not allowing comments under this post for reasons I have already explained in detail here.
This will be the last post about the medical aspects of this pandemic sine die.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2020 12:15 am Post subject:
Why didn't the government put all those most vulnerable: elderly, diabetics, lung patients, underlying conditions etc into self-isolation and allow the rest of us to catch it and gain immunity into our old age?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k05b8aGDCNI _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Keeping tabs on the global figures of those who died WITH the virus
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
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, much to actuaries' & DWP glee.
