Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Mon Apr 27, 2020 9:59 am Post subject:
'Everyone's been vaccinated around here anyway': Conspiracy theories run rampant after White House hot mic catches press room joke
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8243341/White-House-Hot-Mic-C atches-Joking-Foxs-John-Roberts-Weve-Vaccinated.html
A hot mic in the White House briefing room captured a conversation between Fox News reporter John Roberts and New York Times photographer Doug Mills
Roberts told Mills to take off his mask and quoted statistics from a California study that saw the fatality rate to be around seasonal flu levels
Mills then tells Roberts 'everyone around here has been vaccinated' for COVID coronavirus, apparently jokingly
Here’s how to help people impacted by Covid-19
By JAMES GORDON FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
A hot microphone left on in the White House press briefing room has sparked controversy, after a journalist was overheard joking that everyone there had been vaccinated against the coronavirus.
Two journalists - identified online as Fox News' John Roberts and New York Times photographer Doug Mills - were caught chatting before an official press briefing.
University of Auckland research fellow Dr Janine Paynter said one paper has shown what could be the answer.
Using the term ‘reinfection’ to describe what has occurred could be incorrect, she says. Rather than catching the virus twice, a person may not have entirely rid themselves of their original infection.
“There’s a point at which the virus has fallen so low that the test doesn’t work but it doesn’t mean the virus is not there.”
The paper, which has been peer-reviewed, looked at samples from nine patients with mild cases of Covid-19 over a number of days.
“What was happening was the virus numbers were varying, particularly towards the end of the infection, so it dropped below the sensitivity of the test.”
This could lead to somebody testing negative one day and then positive another.
“It seemed like people were getting reinfected but they weren’t. It’s a virus that hangs around.”
Are these ‘reinfected’ people infectious?
One thing Paynter found interesting about the paper was when the researchers tested the swabs taken from participants over the course of their illness to see whether the viral load was likely to be able to cause an infection in another person.
“Even though the virus came out for about 20 days, they could only get reinfection until about the seventh day.”
Could it be the tests, not the people?
University of Otago Professor David Murdoch sees a number of likely reasons for people who recovered to test positive again, with reinfection not being at the top of the list.
“There’s a quote among labs which says ‘ordering a diagnostic test is like picking your nose in public. You need to know what to do if you find something’. That’s probably what they’ve done, they’ve gone, 'we've got to keep testing’ when they don’t really need to.”
His take is it’s highly unlikely people would get a second infection in such a short timeframe.
“I would be surprised if you tested the number they have in Korea and not got a proportion with that result if they’re going to do that sort of testing.”
He feels the positive tests are more likely to be explained by the infection not being over, or issues with the test itself.
“If someone’s not taking a good sample, you could miss a few times … sometimes if the swab is not quite in the right place it might not get the right sample. Especially later on in the infection.”
If it’s not likely to be reinfections are ‘immunity passports’ a good idea?
Immunity passports based on antibody or serological tests have been touted as one way communities could get people back into the workforce safely. Only those who have been exposed to the virus and have passed an antibody test would get the green light to give up physical distancing.
British officials ordered four million antibody tests from China, however, they all turned out to be faulty. In New Zealand, officials are not planning to use them.
Paynter said she would “unambiguously advise” against the idea of immunity passports because so little is known about immunity yet.
Antibody tests can show who has been exposed, but they don’t measure the level of antibodies, these might be too low to offer immunity, or could wane over time.
“How long immunity lasts is what we don’t know. What we’re using at the moment to answer that question is how long the antibodies last for in people’s blood.”
With this virus being new, the length of time a person will be immune to the virus isn’t known. For other Coronaviruses, immunity generally lasts up to a year. Tests in four rhesus monkeys showed immunity occurs, but it is unknown yet how long it lasts.
How does immunity work with different strains of the virus responsible for Covid-19?
Not a huge amount of work has been done on this subject.
For viruses like a rhinovirus - the main cause of the common cold - there are around 100 different strains. This is why it’s so hard to create a cold vaccine which will be effective against all of them and you can catch several colds during one winter.
“This [the virus responsible for Covid-19] hasn’t reached that point because it’s still evolving and evolution takes a long time.”
Paynter had read a suggestion on social media the virus might have evolved to target people with diabetes. Her response was: ”Not on a three-month time scale. That’s just silly.”
Murdoch said while small changes to the virus had resulted in different strains of the virus these didn’t appear to be behaving differently at present.
“Seasonal influenza changes more than most viruses. That’s why we always play catch-up with the vaccine, trying to keep ahead of it. But we don’t see major changes through the season.”
If the pandemic stretches on for an extended time, though, bigger changes could occur. This could affect both immunity gained from catching a different strain and the race to develop a vaccine.
Coronavirus was widespread in UK at very start of pandemic, says genetics expert
Dr Kari Stefansson is overseeing a project in Iceland to genetically sequence every positive case of COVID-19 in the country.
Michelle Clifford - Europe correspondent
Michelle Clifford
Europe correspondent @skynewsmichelle
Tuesday 28 April 2020 08:15, UK
Police officers patrol the beach front at Portobello as the UK continues in lockdown to help curb the spread of the coronavirus.
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The UK has not been 'vigilant' enough, Dr Kari Stefansson says
One of the world's leading human genetics experts has told Sky News that coronavirus was widespread in the UK at the very start of the pandemic and a lack of vigilance allowed the virus to take hold.
Dr Kari Stefansson is overseeing a massive project in Iceland to genetically sequence every positive case of COVID-19 in the country to find out how it mutates and spreads.
He spoke to Sky News at the headquarters of his company deCODE Genetics in Reykjavik, which houses a massive database of more than half the Icelandic population's genetic material.
Lessons from Iceland in tackling COVID-19
Founded almost a quarter of a century ago, the samples are used to look into the genetic components of diseases. Now he's looking into COVID-19.
He says sequencing tells them where the cases come from.
"So the virus now has basically a barcode for every part of the world," he said.
"There is a collection of mutation that is relatively characteristic for Austria, another for Italy as well as Great Britain and for the west coast of the United States etc."
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deCODE Genetics houses a massive database of more than half the Icelandic population's genetic material
Image:
deCODE Genetics houses a massive database of more than half the Icelandic population's genetic material
Prof Stefansson said that in the beginning, almost all of the cases came into Iceland from the Alps, from people who had been skiing in Austria and Italy.
The authorities responded by trying to contain the spread of infection from those high risk countries.
He added: "But as they were doing this, the virus was actually sneaking into the country with people from all kinds of other countries.
"And the most notable there is Great Britain. So it looks like the virus had a fairly wide spread in Great Britain very, very early in this epidemic."
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Prof Stefansson said the UK - and the USA - weren't vigilant enough from the start, pointing to Iceland's policy of mass testing.
Iceland has now tested a higher percentage of the population than any other nation. 45,000 tests have been carried out in a population of 360,000.
Iceland has now tested a higher percentage of the population than any other nation
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Iceland has now tested a higher percentage of the population than any other nation
deCODE is working alongside the health service to take samples from as many people as possible - the sick as well as the seemingly healthy.
Dr Stefansson says that is the only way to discover the true spread of the disease in the community.
The policy has allowed Iceland to identify cases quickly and isolate carriers.
After it was suggested that it is easier for a small nation to test and bring the virus under control, he replied: "Yes, there may be fewer of us but countries like the United Kingdom and the United States have much, much more resources than we do.
Iceland
Iceland claims to have COVID-19 under control
"It is all just a question of using what you have. They weren't vigilant enough. They didn't react to this early enough.
"You know, the countries that taught us the methods that we are using, in doing this in a place like Iceland, they didn't use it themselves. And that is tragic."
As well as testing for COVID-19, deCODE is also taking blood from volunteers to test for antibodies to fight the virus.
And the company is examining whether there is a genetic component to coronavirus.
Dr Stefansson says it is curious how different people respond to the virus.
"There are those who describe this as a mild cold," he said.
"There are those who end up in the intensive care unit on a respirator. And there is everything in between.
"We know that women have less tendency to get infected than men. And if they get infected, they don't get as sick as men. What is it that generates this clinical diversity?"
Dr. Daniel W. Erickson of Bakersfield, California, is a former emergency-room physician who co-owns, with his partner Dr. Artin Massih, Accelerated Urgent Care in Bakersfield. They are experienced medical professionals who have 40 years of hands-on experience in dealing with viruses and respiratory infections. Watching the news in China in January, they knew the virus was on its way. They ordered many COVID-19 tests because they knew they would need them. They tested many thousands of people, and discovered for themselves what epidemiologists around the world are saying: COVID-19 came here earlier than previously believed, is more ubiquitous, and ultimately for the general population less deadly than we thought.
While this realization is gradually dawning on people around the world, they went public with their findings, which are not generated out of a predictive model but rather the actual facts of the case. In the course of their press conference, they addressed the question of whether or not California should have shut down much of its economy. Their answer is no. They conclude with the need to open up immediately, on grounds of health and human rights.
“If you’re going to dance on someone’s constitutional rights you better have a good reason, you better have a really good reason, not just a theory,” he said. “The data is showing us it’s time to lift (the stay-at-home orders) so if we don’t lift, what is the reason?”
Here are some selected quotes from their interview with a hostile reporter. The videos are embedded below.
We’d like to look at how we’ve responded as a nation, and why you responded. Our first initial response two months ago was a little bit of fear: [the government] decided to shut down travel to and from China. These are good ideas when you don’t have any facts. [Governments] decided to keep people at home and isolate them. Typically you quarantine the sick. When someone has measles you quarantine them. We’ve never seen where we quarantine the healthy.
So that’s kind of how we started. We don’t know what’s going on, we see this new virus. How should we respond? So we did that initially, and over the last couple months we’ve gained a lot of data typically. We’re going to go over the numbers a little bit to kind of help you see how widespread COVID is, and see how we should be responding to it based on its prevalence throughout society—or the existence of the cases that we already know about….
So if you look at California—these numbers are from yesterday—we have 33,865 COVID cases, out of a total of 280,900 total tested. That’s 12% of Californians were positive for COVID. So we don’t, the initial—as you guys know, the initial models were woefully inaccurate. They predicted millions of cases of death—not of prevalence or incidence—but death. That is not materializing. What is materializing is, in the state of California is 12% positives. You have a 0.03 chance of dying from COVID in the state of California. Does that necessitate sheltering in place? Does that necessitate shutting down medical systems? Does that necessitate people being out of work? 96% of people in California who get COVID would recover, with almost no significant sequelae; or no significant continuing medical problems. Two months ago we didn’t know this. The more you test, the more positives you get. The prevalence number goes up, and the death rate stays the same. So [the death rate] gets smaller and smaller and smaller. And as we move through this data—what I want you to see is—millions of cases, small death. Millions of cases, small death.
We extrapolate data, we test people, and then we extrapolate for the entire community based on the numbers. The initial models were so inaccurate they’re not even correct. And some of them were based on social distancing and still predicted hundreds of thousands of deaths, which has been inaccurate. In New York the ones they tested they found 39% positive. So if they tested the whole state would we indeed have 7.5 million cases? We don’t know; we will never test the entire state. So we extrapolate out; we use the data we have because it’s the most we have versus a predictive model that has been nowhere in the ballpark of accurate. How many deaths do they have? 19,410 out of 19 million people, which is a 0.1% chance of dying from COVID in the state of New York. If you are indeed diagnosed with COVID-19, 92% of you will recover.
We’ve tested over 4 million… which gives us a 19.6% positive out of those who are tested for COVID-19. So if this is a typical extrapolation 328 million people times 19.6 is 64 million. That’s a significant amount of people with COVID; it’s similar to the flu. If you study the numbers in 2017 and 2018 we had 50 to 60 million with the flu. And we had a similar death rate in the deaths the United States were 43,545—similar to the flu of 2017-2018. We always have between 37,000 and 60,000 deaths in the United States, every single year. No pandemic talk. No shelter-in-place. No shutting down businesses…
We do thousands of flu tests every year. We don’t report every one, because the flu is ubiquitous and to that note we have a flu vaccine. How many people even get the flu vaccine? The flu is dangerous, it kills people. Just because you have a vaccine doesn’t mean it’s gonna be everywhere and it doesn’t mean everyone’s going to take it… I would say probably 50% of the public doesn’t even want it. Just because you have a vaccine—unless you forced it on the public—doesn’t mean they’re going to take it.
Norway has locked down; Sweden does not have lock down. What happened in those two countries? Are they vastly different? Did Sweden have a massive outbreak of cases? Did Norway have nothing? Let’s look at the numbers. Sweden has 15,322 cases of COVID—21% of all those tested came out positive for COVID. What’s the population of Sweden? About 10.4 million. So if we extrapolate out the data about 2 million cases of COVID in Sweden. They did a little bit of social distancing; they would wear masks and separate; they went to schools; stores were open. They were almost about their normal daily life with a little bit of social distancing. They had how many deaths? 1,765. California’s had 1,220 with isolation. No isolation: 1,765. We have more people. Norway: its next-door neighbor. These are two Scandinavian nations; we can compare them as they are similar. 4.9% of all COVID tests were positive in Norway. Population of Norway: 5.4 million. So if we extrapolate the data, as we’ve been doing, which is the best we can do at this point, they have about 1.3 million cases. Now their deaths as a total number, were 182. So you have a 0.003 chance of death as a citizen of Norway and a 97% recovery. Their numbers are a little bit better. Does it necessitate shutdown, loss of jobs, destruction of the oil company, furloughing doctors?
I wanted to talk about the effects of COVID-19, the secondary effects. COVID-19 is one aspect of our health sector. What has it caused to have us be involved in social isolation? What does it cause that we are seeing the community respond to? Child molestation is increasing at a severe rate. We could go over multiple cases of children who have been molested due to angry family members who are intoxicated, who are home, who have no paycheck. Spousal abuse: we are seeing people coming in here with black eyes and cuts on their face. It’s an obvious abuse of case. These are things that will affect them for a lifetime, not for a season. Alcoholism, anxiety, depression, suicide. Suicide is spiking; education is dropped off; economic collapse. Medical industry we’re all suffering because our staff isn’t here and we have no volume. We have clinics from Fresno to San Diego and these things are spiking in our community. These things will affect people for a lifetime, not for a season.
I’d like to go over some basic things about how the immune system functions so people have a good understanding. The immune system is built by exposure to antigens: viruses, bacteria. When you’re a little child crawling on the ground, putting stuff in your mouth, viruses and bacteria come in. You form an antigen antibody complex. You form IgG IgM. This is how your immune system is built. You don’t take a small child put them in bubble wrap in a room and say, “go have a healthy immune system.”
This is immunology, microbiology 101. This is the basis of what we’ve known for years. When you take human beings and you say, “go into your house, clean all your counters—Lysol them down you’re gonna kill 99% of viruses and bacteria; wear a mask; don’t go outside,” what does it do to our immune system? Our immune system is used to touching. We share bacteria. Staphylococcus, streptococcal, bacteria, viruses.
Sheltering in place decreases your immune system. And then as we all come out of shelter in place with a lower immune system and start trading viruses, bacteria—what do you think is going to happen? Disease is going to spike. And then you’ve got diseases spike—amongst a hospital system with furloughed doctors and nurses. This is not the combination we want to set up for a healthy society. It doesn’t make any sense.
…Did we respond appropriately? Initially the response, fine shut it down, but as the data comes across—and we say now, wait a second, we’ve never, ever responded like this in the history of the country why are we doing this now? Any time you have something new in the community medical community it sparks fear—and I would have done what Dr. Fauci did—so we both would have initially. Because the first thing you do is, you want to make sure you limit liability—and deaths—and I think what they did was brilliant, initially. But you know, looking at theories and models—which is what these folks use—is very different than the way the actual virus presents itself throughout communities….
Nobody talks about the fact that coronavirus lives on plastics for three days and we’re all sheltering in place. Where’d you get your water bottles from? Costco. Where did you get that plastic shovel from? Home Depot. If I swab things in your home I would likely find COVID-19. And so you think you’re protected. Do you see the lack of consistency here? Do you think you’re protected from COVID when you wear gloves that transfer disease everywhere? Those gloves have bacteria all over them. We wear masks in an acute setting to protect us. We’re not wearing masks. Why is that? Because we understand microbiology; we understand immunology; and we want strong immune systems. I don’t want to hide in my home, develop a weak immune system, and then come out and get disease.
When someone dies in this country right now they’re not talking about the high blood pressure, the diabetes, the stroke. They say they died from COVID. We’ve been to hundreds of autopsies. You don’t talk about one thing, you talk about comorbidities. COVID was part of it, it is not the reason they died folks. When I’m writing up my death report I’m being pressured to add COVID.
Why is that? Why are we being pressured to add COVID? To maybe increase the numbers, and make it look a little bit worse than it is. We’re being pressured in-house to add COVID to the diagnostic list when we think it has nothing to do with the actual cause of death. The actual cause of death was not COVID, but it’s being reported as one of the disease processes and being added to the death list. COVID didn’t kill them, 25 years of tobacco use killed.
There’s two ways to get rid of virus: either burns itself out or herd immunity. For hundreds of years we relied on herd immunity. Viruses kill people, end of story. The flu kills people. COVID kills people. But for the rest of us we develop herd immunity. We developed the ability to take this virus in and defeat it and for the vast majority 95% of those around the globe. Do you want your immune system built or do you want it not built? The building blocks of your immune system is a virus and bacteria. There’s normal bacteria in normal flora that we have to be exposed to bacteria and viruses that are not virulent are our friends. They protect us against bad bacteria and bad viruses.
Right now, if you look at Dr. Erikson’s skin or my skin we have strep, we have stuff—they protect us against opportunistic infections. That’s why for the first three to six months [babies are] extremely vulnerable to opportunistic infection. Which is why, when we see a little baby in the ER with fever who is one month old, you do a spinal tap, you do a chest x-ray, you do blood cultures, you do urine cultures. But if you had a fever I wouldn’t do that for you. Why? Because that baby does not have the normal bacteria and flora from the community, whereas you do. I guarantee when we reopen there’s going to be a huge, huge amount of illness that’s going to be rampant because our immune systems have weakened. That’s just basic immunology.
Do we need to still shelter in place? Our answer is emphatically no. Do we need businesses to be shut down? Emphatically no. Do we need to have it, do we need to test them, and get them back to work? Yes, we do. The the secondary effects that we went over—the child abuse, alcoholism, loss of revenue—all these are, in our opinion, a significantly more detrimental thing to society than a virus that has proven similar in nature to the seasonal flu we have every year.
We also need to put measures in place so economic shutdown like this does not happen again. We want to make sure we understand that quarantining the sick is what we do, not quarantine the healthy. We need to make sure if you’re gonna dance on someone’s constitutional rights you better have a good reason. You better have a really good scientific reason, and not just theory.
One of the most important things is we need our hospitals back up. We need our furloughed doctors back. We need our nurses back. Because when we lift this thing, we’re gonna need all hands on deck. I know the local hospitals have closed two floors. Folks, that’s not the situation you want. We’re essentially setting ourselves up to have minimal staff, and we’re going to have significant disease. That’s the wrong combination.
I’ve talked to our local head of the Health Department and he’s waiting… for the powers that be to lift. Because the data is showing it’s time to lift. I would start slowly [open up schools sporting events] I think we need to open up the schools start getting kids back to the immune system you know and the major events the sporting events these are non-essential let’s get back to those slowly let’s start with schools let’s start with cafe Rio and the pizza place here… Does that make sense to you guys and I think I can go into Costco and I can shop with people and there’s probably a couple hundred people but I can’t go in Cafe Rio so big businesses are open little businesses are not….
Eventually we treat this like we treat flu. Which is if you have the flu and you’re feeling fever and body aches you just stay home if you have coughing or shortness of breath—COVID is more of a respiratory thing—you stay home. You don’t get tested, even when people come with flu a lot of times we don’t test them. We go, “you have flu. Here’s a medication.” You have COVID, go home, let it resolve and come back negative.
If you have no symptoms you should be able to return to work. Are you an asymptomatic viral spreader? Maybe, but we can’t test all of humanity. Sure we’re gonna miss cases of coronavirus, just like we miss cases of the flu. It would be nice to capture every coronavirus patient, but is that realistic? Are we gonna keep the economy shut down for two years and vaccinate everybody? That’s an unrealistic expectation. You’re going to cause financial ruin, domestic violence, suicide, rape, violence and what are you going to get out of it? You’re still going to miss a lot of cases. So we need to treat this like the flu, which is familiar, and eventually this will mutate and become less and less virulent…
I don’t need a double-blind clinically controlled trial to tell me if sheltering in place is appropriate, that is a college-level understanding of microbiology. A lot of times in medicine you have to make you have to make educated decisions with the data that you have. I can sit up in the 47th-floor in the penthouse and say we should do this, this, and this, but I haven’t seen a patient for 20 years—that’s not realistic.
If you’re healthy and you don’t have significant comorbidities and you know you’re not immunodeficient and you’re not elderly you should be able to go out without any gloves and without a mask. If you are those things you should either shelter in place or wear a mask and gloves. I don’t think everybody needs to wear the masks and gloves because it reduces your bacterial flora… and your bacterial flora and your viruses your friends that protect you from other diseases [if they] end up going away and now you’re more likely to get opportunistic infections infections that are hoping you don’t have your good bugs fighting for you.
I particularly appreciated Dr. Erickson’s discussion of the real suffering he has observed. The one part of Dr. Erickson’s discussion I would quibble with is the extent that we can extrapolate societal infection and recovery rates based on already conducted tests. I am quite sure he would also agree with the following. Estimating societal wide infection and recovery rates would require (and researchers are doing such studies now) getting a representative sample of different people in society rather than those who have been tested to date (often those who show up to the hospital because they have symptoms), and looking at how many people (1) currently have Covid-19, (2) have recovered from Covid-19, or (3) have not had Covid-19. Serology blood tests involve looking at blood to see if individuals have Covid-19 antibodies in their blood, i.e. that a person had contact with Covid-19 and fought it off.
In a study released April 14, Stanford University epidemiologist John Iannodis conducted serology tests on 3,330 residents of Santa Clara County meant to be a “representative sample of the county by demographic and geographic characteristics” and found that the number of people who had gotten and recovered from Covid-19 was more than 50 times higher than previously thought.
On April 23, Governor Cuomo reported a study that found 21 percent of New York City residents tested already had and fought of Covid-19. Now here too, one can debate whether the researchers who identified random people at grocery stores have a truly representative sample of society. But it indicates that the number of unidentified cases is much higher than we previously thought. And as time goes on more and more people will have caught and recovered from the virus.
Dr. Daniel Murphy, Chairman of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx states, “As of today [April 27], over 43 percent of those tested are positive in The Bronx.” So although I think we should wait for better data before we extrapolate societal numbers based on previously conducted tests, I think the thrust of Dr. Erickson’s argument about society having many more unidentified cases than we previously thought is correct.
Most importantly, I think we must pay careful attention to the health costs of complete lockdown and all of the negative impacts on our medical system.
Joined: 30 Jul 2006 Posts: 6060 Location: East London
Posted: Wed Apr 29, 2020 2:15 am Post subject:
'Ex-Russian Intel Officer Exposes Coronavirus Depopulation Agenda':
https://thefreedomarticles.com/ex-russian-intel-officer-coronavirus-de population-agenda/
A very Right-Wing pro-Trump site, but they do have some interesting articles sometimes.
This article is a translation of a short interview with Vladimir Vasilievich, who was the leading researcher for the Centre for Defence and Strategic Studies of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, so his opinion carries a lot of weight.
Coronavirus is a NWO plot, made in a lab, and a stepping-stone towards a One World Government (Gulag). _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
More than 260 COVID-19 patients in South Korea tested positive for the coronavirus after having recovered, raising alarm that the virus might be capable of "reactivating" or infecting people more than once. But infectious disease experts now say both are unlikely.
Rather, the method used to detect the coronavirus, called polymerase chain reaction (PCR), cannot distinguish between genetic material (RNA or DNA) from infectious virus and the "dead" virus fragments that can linger in the body long after a person recovers, Dr. Oh Myoung-don, a Seoul National University Hospital doctor, said at a news briefing Thursday (April 30), according to The Korea Herald.
These tests "are very simple," said Carol Shoshkes Reiss, a professor of Biology and Neural Science at New York University, who was not involved in the testing. "Although somebody can recover and no longer be infectious, they may still have these little fragments of [inactive] viral RNA which turn out positive on those tests."
Related: 13 coronavirus myths busted by science
That's because once the virus has been vanquished, there is "all this garbage of broken-down cells that needs to be cleaned up," Reiss told Live Science, referring to the cellular corpses that were killed by the virus. Within that garbage are the fragmented remains of now non-infectious viral particles.
To determine whether or not someone is harboring infectious virus or has been reinfected with the virus, a completely different type of test would be needed, one that is not typically performed, Reiss said. Instead of testing the virus as it is, lab technicians would have to culture it, or place that virus in a lab dish under ideal conditions and see if it was capable of growing.
Patients in South Korea who re-tested positive had very little to no ability to spread the virus, according to the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Korea Herald reported.
Reports of patients testing positive twice aren't limited to South Korea; they have also poured in from other countries, including China and Japan. But the general consensus in the scientific community — with all the information available to date on the new coronavirus — is that people aren't being reinfected, but rather falsely testing positive, Reiss said.
What's more, "the process in which COVID-19 produces a new virus takes place only in host cells and does not infiltrate the nucleus," or the very core of the cell, Myoung-don said during the briefing, the Herald reported. Here's why: Some viruses, such as the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and the chickenpox virus, can integrate themselves into the host genome by making their way into the nucleus of human cells, where they can stay latent for years and then "reactivate." But the coronavirus is not one of those viruses and instead it stays outside of the host cell's nucleus, before quickly bursting out and infiltrating the next cell, Reiss said.
"This means it does not cause chronic infection or recurrence," he said. In other words, it's "highly unlikely" that the coronavirus would reactivate in the body soon after infection.
But reinfection at some point is a theoretical possibility. "We don't know what's going to happen a year from now, nobody has that kind of crystal ball," Reiss said.
Reassuringly, the virus is currently undergoing very small genetic changes that are "too tiny" to evade the immune systems of people who have already been infected. The genetic changes would have to be substantial enough that a person's existing antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 would no longer work against a new strain. So far, that seems unlikely.
"If this virus remains as it is [with] really tiny changes … then it's highly unlikely" that a person would be reinfected next year, Reiss added.
South Korean soldiers wearing protective gear walk on a street in front of the city hall in Daegu on March 2. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon
Experts in South Korea said that recovered coronavirus patients who tested positive again were not reinfected and that their virus was not reactivated, as was previously feared.
More than 260 people who recovered and tested negative subsequently tested positive again. The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention worried that the virus had reactivated after going dormant.
But the country's infectious-disease experts said on Thursday that the tests were detecting dead fragments of the virus left in patients' bodies.
South Korea was one of the first countries to report a virus outbreak but quickly implemented widespread testing and contact tracing. It had reported 247 deaths as of Thursday.
Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Scientists said the wave of South Koreans who tested positive for COVID-19 even after they recovered did not have the virus reactivate after going dormant and that they were not reinfected.
South Korea announced in early April that some patients who had recovered from and tested negative for the virus later tested positive, suggesting that the virus could reactivate or that patients could be reinfected. The country has recorded this happening in 263 patients, The Korea Herald reported.
But the country's infectious-disease experts said on Thursday that the positive test results were likely caused by flaws in the testing process, where the tests picked up remnants of the virus without detecting whether the person was still infected, The Herald reported.
The Herald described the experts as saying that "dead virus fragments" were lingering in patients' bodies after they recovered and that the virus did not appear to be active in the patients.
Dr. Oh Myoung-don, a professor of medicine and the head of Seoul National University Hospital's division of infectious diseases, said that the committee studying the cases found little reason to believe that the patients had been reinfected or that the virus had reactivated, according to The Herald.
"The tests detected the ribonucleic acid of the dead virus," said Oh, an adviser to the Korean government and the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
South korea coronavirus seoul
People wearing face masks in central Seoul on April 22. HEO RAN/REUTERS
Experts were already skeptical about the theory that the virus could reactivate
Jeong Eun-kyeong, the director-general of the KCDC, said earlier in April that the positive test results in these patients could mean that the virus "reactivated" after going dormant, Business Insider's Holly Secon reported.
Jeong said the tests were conducted within a "relatively short time" after the patients were cleared, so it was unlikely that they were reinfected.
"While we are putting more weight on reactivation as the possible cause, we are conducting a comprehensive study on this," Jeong said. "There have been many cases when a patient during treatment will test negative one day and positive another."
But many experts said it was unlikely that the virus would go dormant and then reactivate in people. Instead, they said, it was more likely that patients' bodies still had some fragments of the virus. This would mean a person could get a positive test but not be ill or able to infect others.
Dr. Keiji Fukuda, the director of Hong Kong University's School of Public Health, told the Los Angeles Times in March that this was the most likely scenario.
"The test may be positive, but the infection is not there," Fukuda said.
The test picked up false positives, Korean officials say
Workers in protective gear spray a subway station in Seoul on February 21. Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images
Oh said the committee also strongly believes this is what happened.
He said that dead virus cells could take months to leave patients' bodies after they recover and that their test could not determine whether the virus was alive or dead, leading to false positives, according to The Herald.
Other countries have grappled with unreliable tests for the virus and its antibodies, saying that there could be high numbers of false positives and false negatives.
South Korea recorded no new domestic cases for the first time since February
People wait in line to buy face masks at a store in Daegu's Dongseongno shopping district on February 27. JUNG YEON-JE/AFP via Getty Images
South Korea on Thursday reported no new domestic infections in a day for the first time since February.
It said four new cases were from people traveling into the country.
South Korea has reported a total of 10,765 cases, of which 9,059 "have been discharged from isolation." It has reported 247 deaths.
The country has been a pioneer in the fight to control the spread of the virus — and it has done so without implementing a nationwide lockdown.
An employee of a disinfection-service company sanitizes a train at the Seoul Station on March 4. Reuters
South Korea, one of the first countries outside China to record cases of the virus, tested widely and traced the contacts of people who tested positive.
It also implemented sweeping social-distancing guidelines, including seating people far apart at restaurants. But unlike much of the rest of the world, it did not close venues.
South Korea also said it avoided any new cases stemming from the 29 million people who voted in a parliamentary election this month. Voters were made to wear masks and gloves.
TonyGosling wrote:
False Positives: Recovered Patients Who Tested Positive for COVID-19 Likely Not Reinfected
By Yasemin Saplakoglu - Staff Writer 21 hours ago
This phenomenon is likely due to the shortcomings of the coronavirus test, experts say
More than 260 COVID-19 patients in South Korea tested positive for the coronavirus after having recovered, raising alarm that the virus might be capable of "reactivating" or infecting people more than once. But infectious disease experts now say both are unlikely.
Rather, the method used to detect the coronavirus, called polymerase chain reaction (PCR), cannot distinguish between genetic material (RNA or DNA) from infectious virus and the "dead" virus fragments that can linger in the body long after a person recovers, Dr. Oh Myoung-don, a Seoul National University Hospital doctor, said at a news briefing Thursday (April 30), according to The Korea Herald.
These tests "are very simple," said Carol Shoshkes Reiss, a professor of Biology and Neural Science at New York University, who was not involved in the testing. "Although somebody can recover and no longer be infectious, they may still have these little fragments of [inactive] viral RNA which turn out positive on those tests."
Related: 13 coronavirus myths busted by science
That's because once the virus has been vanquished, there is "all this garbage of broken-down cells that needs to be cleaned up," Reiss told Live Science, referring to the cellular corpses that were killed by the virus. Within that garbage are the fragmented remains of now non-infectious viral particles.
To determine whether or not someone is harboring infectious virus or has been reinfected with the virus, a completely different type of test would be needed, one that is not typically performed, Reiss said. Instead of testing the virus as it is, lab technicians would have to culture it, or place that virus in a lab dish under ideal conditions and see if it was capable of growing.
Patients in South Korea who re-tested positive had very little to no ability to spread the virus, according to the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Korea Herald reported.
Reports of patients testing positive twice aren't limited to South Korea; they have also poured in from other countries, including China and Japan. But the general consensus in the scientific community — with all the information available to date on the new coronavirus — is that people aren't being reinfected, but rather falsely testing positive, Reiss said.
What's more, "the process in which COVID-19 produces a new virus takes place only in host cells and does not infiltrate the nucleus," or the very core of the cell, Myoung-don said during the briefing, the Herald reported. Here's why: Some viruses, such as the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and the chickenpox virus, can integrate themselves into the host genome by making their way into the nucleus of human cells, where they can stay latent for years and then "reactivate." But the coronavirus is not one of those viruses and instead it stays outside of the host cell's nucleus, before quickly bursting out and infiltrating the next cell, Reiss said.
"This means it does not cause chronic infection or recurrence," he said. In other words, it's "highly unlikely" that the coronavirus would reactivate in the body soon after infection.
But reinfection at some point is a theoretical possibility. "We don't know what's going to happen a year from now, nobody has that kind of crystal ball," Reiss said.
Reassuringly, the virus is currently undergoing very small genetic changes that are "too tiny" to evade the immune systems of people who have already been infected. The genetic changes would have to be substantial enough that a person's existing antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 would no longer work against a new strain. So far, that seems unlikely.
"If this virus remains as it is [with] really tiny changes … then it's highly unlikely" that a person would be reinfected next year, Reiss added.
In the best-case scenario, which Reiss thinks is likely, the virus will behave like the virus that causes chickenpox, "imprinting" on the host immune memory. Then, even if antibody levels drop over time, people will retain a population of memory cells that can rapidly boost production of more antibodies if they are exposed to the virus again, Reiss said. Of course, this is still an "assumption," and it will be some time before we can fully understand the strength of the army the immune system creates against this virus — and whether that army's protection is long-lasting.
_________________ --
'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."
Big-Pharma is being given billions to develop a Covid-19 “vaccine.” Would you trust your health to these profit driven criminals?
Coronavirus Disease 2019 or “Covid-19″ hysteria is sweeping the globe – with mass media-induced public panic paralyzing entire nations, gutting economies of billions as workplaces are shutdown and the public shuttered indoors all while exposed to 24 hour news cycles deliberately fanning the flames of fear.
The West’s healthcare industry is already profiting both monetarily and in terms of artificial credibility as a panicked public turn to it for answers and safety.Waiting to cash in on offering “cures” and “vaccines” for a virus is the immensely corrupt Western pharmaceutical industry in particular – notorious corporations like GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Novartis, Bayer, Merck, Johnson and Johnson, Pfizer, Lilly, and Gilead.
All corporations – without exception – pursuing government-funded vaccines and therapies for Covid-19 are corporations guilty and repeatedly convicted in courts of law around the globe of crimes including falsifying research, safety, and efficacy studies, bribing researchers, doctors, regulators, and even law enforcement officials, and marketing drugs that were either entirely ineffective or even dangerous.
Government funding from taxpayers across the Western World are being funneled into supposedly non-profit organizations like the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation (CEPI) which are in actuality fronts created and chaired by big-pharma to avoid investing their own money into costly research and development and simply profit from whatever emerges from state-funded research.
CEPI – for example – is receiving billions in government funds from various nations that will be used for R&D that results in products sold by and profited from big-pharma.
Novartis – Plumbing the Depths of the Despicable
A particularly shocking and appalling example comes from Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis – who is currently attempting to ram through approval of its drug Jakafi as a therapy for severe Covid-19 patients.
A University of Pennsylvania team headed by Dr. Carl June and funded entirely by charity had developed a gene therapy that fully and permanently cured leukemia patients who had otherwise failed to respond to more traditional treatments like bone marrow transplants. During early trials in 2010-2012, one patient – a 6 year old named Emily Whitehead – was literally on her death bed before receiving the revolutionary gene therapy.Today she is alive and well, in permanent remission.
What is more astounding about the therapy is that it is administered only one time. That is because after administration the patient’s cells are rewired permanently to fight off cancer. Old cells pass the cancer-fighting information off to new cells as they divide and multiply.
The therapy developed by Dr. June’s team is not only a one-time therapy, it is also incredibly cost effective. Under experimental conditions the procedure cost under 20,000 USD. Dr. June at a 2013 talk at The Society for Translational Oncology would state:
So the cost of goods, it’s interesting. The major cost here is gamma globulin. So the t-cells themselves, with us, for our in-house costs of an apheresis and so on is 15,000 dollars to manufacture the t-cells.
The charity that funded Dr. June’s team – Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) – would see its work sold off to Novartis, approved by the FDA in 2017 and marketed as Kymriah. What was noted by Dr. June himself as costing 15,000 USD to produce under experimental conditions was marked up by Novartis to an astronomical half-million dollars. The New York Times article that reported the drug’s cost never mentions the actual cost of the drug and instead defers to Novartis’ own explanation as to why the drug was so expensive.
The NYT had previously reported on the therapy’s progress before its acquisition by Novartis, yet NYT writers failed to hold Novartis accountable or inform readers of the actual cost of the therapy and expose price gouging by Novartis. This helps illustrate the mass media’s role in enabling and covering up for big-pharma’s corruption.
Upon closer examination – and no thanks to publications like NYT – it turns out LLS was and still is in partnership with Novartis and while it denied Novartis had anything to do with the gene therapy funded by LLS and ultimately sold to Novartis – the glaring conflict of interest remains and fits in perfectly with the wider pharmaceutical industry’s track record of corruption, abuse, and placing profits before human life.
The Novartis example is a microcosm of how the entire industry operates and indeed – precisely how it already is exploiting and profiting from Covid-19 hysteria where hard-working researchers have their work funded by shady “charities” only to be bought up by big-pharma and dangled over the heads of the desperate for movie-villain ransoms – all in cooperation with a complicit government and mass media.
GSK: A Bribery Racket that Rings the Globe
Another pharmaceutical corporation seeking to profit from Covid-19 is GlaxoSmithKline.
What those who may be exposed to whatever products GSK markets in response to the virus should know is that GSK has been convicted on every inhabited continent of the planet for operating a global bribery racket aimed at doctors, researchers, regulators, politicians, and even law enforcement officials.
GSK has been convicted in Asia. The New York Times in its article, “Drug Giant Faced a Reckoning as China Took Aim at Bribery,” would claim:
The Glaxo case, which resulted in record penalties of nearly $500 million and a string of guilty pleas by executives, upended the power dynamic in China, unveiling an increasingly assertive government determined to tighten its grip over multinationals. In the three years since the arrests, the Chinese government, under President Xi Jinping, has unleashed the full force of the country’s authoritarian system, as part of a broader agenda of economic nationalism.
GSK has also been convicted in North America. The London Guardian would report in its article GlaxoSmithKline fined $3bn after bribing doctors to increase drugs sales that:
The pharmaceutical group GlaxoSmithKline has been fined $3bn (£1.9bn) after admitting bribing doctors and encouraging the prescription of unsuitable antidepressants to children. Glaxo is also expected to admit failing to report safety problems with the diabetes drug Avandia in a district court in Boston on Thursday.
The company encouraged sales reps in the US to mis-sell three drugs to doctors and lavished hospitality and kickbacks on those who agreed to write extra prescriptions, including trips to resorts in Bermuda, Jamaica and California.
GSK corruption also takes place in Europe. In early 2014, the London Telegraph would report in its article, “GlaxoSmithKline ‘bribed’ doctors to promote drugs in Europe, former worker claims,” that:
GlaxoSmithKline, Britain’s largest drug company, has been accused of bribing doctors to prescribe their medicines in Europe.
Doctors in Poland were allegedly paid to promote its asthma drug, Seretide, under the guise of funding for education programme, a former sales rep has claimed.
Medics were also said to have been paid for lectures in the country which did not take place.
And this is only scratching the surface of GSK’s bribery racket and associated impropriety – saying nothing of the wider industry’s abuse and corruption.
GSK is currently poised to develop and deploy a Covid-19 vaccine with Innovax. Will GSK’s history of bribery and corruption influence the development of a Covid-19 vaccine and its approval for public use?
There is already a convincing answer to that question.
Big-Pharma Already Caught Faking Pandemics to Fill Their Coffers
The last wave of hysteria regarding a pandemic came in the form of the 2009 H1N1 outbreak or the “swine flu.”
If one vaguely remembers H1N1 and needs to look it up to refresh their memory – it’s probably because it was not the pandemic it was promoted as at the time by corrupt public health officials and a complicit mass media. Among these corrupt public health officials were World Health Organization (WHO) “experts” who were in the pay of big-pharma and used their positions to declare the appearance of H1N1 as a “pandemic” justifying likewise paid-off governments to stockpile big-pharma medication for patients that never ended up needing them.
The BBC in their article, “WHO swine flu experts ‘linked’ with drug companies,” would admit:
Key scientists behind World Health Organization advice on stockpiling of pandemic flu drugs had financial ties with companies which stood to profit, an investigation has found.
The British Medical Journal says the scientists had openly declared these interests in other publications yet WHO made no mention of the links.
The BBC mentions GSK by name, noting (emphasis added):
…three scientists involved in putting together the 2004 guidance had previously been paid by Roche or GSK for lecturing and consultancy work as well as being involved in research for the companies.
Roche – also mentioned – currently produces Covid-19 test kits and is obviously making massive profits by selling them amid sustained hysteria over the “pandemic.” It also profited when WHO officials it was paying off declared H1N1 a “pandemic” in 2009. It sold testing kits and anti-viral medication that made their way into entirely unnecessary government stockpiles.
Reuters in a 2014 article titled, “Stockpiles of Roche Tamiflu drug are waste of money, review finds,” would note:
Researchers who have fought for years to get full data on Roche’s flu medicine Tamiflu said on Thursday that governments who stockpile it are wasting billions of dollars on a drug whose effectiveness is in doubt.
The article also noted:
Tamiflu sales hit almost $3 billion in 2009 – mostly due to its use in the H1N1 flu pandemic – but they have since declined.
Are we really going to allow these same corporations and the corrupt officials they are in league with among national and international bodies take the reins again amid Covid-19?
Serial Offenders Drive Covid-19 Hysteria
The same WHO – in partnership with the same serial offenders among the pharmaceutical industry – are now leading the response to Covid-19 – and the same complicit mass media that enabled the corruption and abuse of both in the past is helping fuel Covid-19 hysteria today to hand over unprecedented profits and power to these same interests that have repeatedly proven themselves in the past to not only be untrustworthy but also obstacles to – rather than the underwriters of – human health.
Soon, syringes will be filled with “vaccines” produced by this conglomerate of corruption and abuse, and the public told to roll up their sleeves and have themselves injected by substances created by literal criminals or else.
Under the illusion of legitimacy, science, and medicine, people will be pressured to submit to big-pharma and their co-conspirators within regulatory bodies, advisory organizations, the government, and the media, and whatever it is they actually fill these syringes with – whether it protects the public from Covid-19 or not – and whether such a vaccine is truly necessary or not.
While Covid-19 might be an actual pathogen, evidence suggests it does not warrant the overreaction we have seen worldwide. “Covid-19 hysteria” is – by far – having a much more devastating impact on humanity than the actual virus itself. Amid this hysteria, the biggest genuine threat to human health – a corrupt pharmaceutical industry and their partners in the government – are poised to expand both their profits at the expense of the public, and their power over the public.
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Tony Cartalucci is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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Back to top _________________ --
'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."
History teaches us that epidemics are more like revelatory moments than social transformers, writes Pepe Escobar.
“The plague-stricken town, traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies – this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city.” – Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
Citizens of Tournai bury plague victims. Miniature from The Chronicles of Gilles Li Muisis (1272–1352). (Bibliothèque royale de Belgique)
By Pepe Escobar
in Bangkok
Asia Times
Predictably eyeing the Decline and Fall of the American Empire, a serious academic debate is raging around the working hypothesis of historian Kyle Harper, according to whom viruses and pandemics – especially the Justinian plague in the 6th century – led to the end of the Roman Empire.
Well, history actually teaches us that epidemics are more like revelatory moments than social transformers.
Patrick Boucheron, a crack historian and a professor at the esteemed College de France, offers a very interesting perspective. Incidentally, before the onset of Covid-19, he was about to start a seminar on the Black Death medieval plague.
Boucheron’s view of Boccaccio’s Decameron, written in 1350 and about young Florentine aristocrats who fled to the Tuscan countryside to tell stories, focuses on the plague’s character as a “horrible beginning” that tears apart social liaisons, provokes a funerary panic and has everyone wallowing in anomie.
The plague in Florence, 1348; illustrating Boccaccio’s Decameron.
19th century etching by Luigi Sabatelli (Wikimedia Commons)
Then he draws a historical parallel with Thucydides writing about the Athens plague in the summer of 430 BC. Pushing it to the limit, we may venture that Western literature actually starts with a plague – described in Book 1 of the Iliad by Homer.
Thucydides’ description of the Great Plague – actually typhoid fever – is a literary tour de force as well. In our current setting, that’s more relevant than the “Thucydides trap” controversy – as it’s idle to compare the context in ancient Athens with the current US-China hybrid war.
Both Socrates and Thucydides, incidentally, survived the plague. They were tough, and acquired immunity from their earlier exposure to typhoid. Pericles, the leading citizen of Athens, was not so lucky: he died at 66, a victim of the plague.
The City in Fear
Michiel Sweerts’ Plague in an Ancient City, circa 1652. (Wikimedia)
Boucheron wrote an immensely interesting book, Conjurer la Peur (To Conjure Fear) telling the story of Siena a few years before the Black Death, in 1338. This is the Siena pictured by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the walls of the Palazzo Pubblico – one of most spectacular allegorical frescoes in history.
In his book, Boucheron writes about political fear before it is engulfed by biological fear. Nothing could be more contemporary.
In Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Bad Government, the court of bad justice is governed by a devil holding a poisoned chalice (today that would be the “crowned poison” – or coronavirus). The devil’s eyes are crossed and one of his feet is over a goat’s horns. Floating above his head we find Avarice, Pride and Vainglory (match them with contemporary political “leaders”). War, Treason, and Fury sit to his left (the US Deep State?) and Discord, Fraud and Cruelty on his right (casino capitalist financialization?). Justice is bound, and her scales have fallen. Talk about an allegory of the “international community.”
Ambrogio Lorenzetti ‘s Allegory of Bad Government (1338), fresco in the town hall of Siena, Italy. (Photo Domain)
Boucheron pays special attention to the city as depicted by Lorenzetti. That’s the city at war – as opposed to the harmonious city in the Allegory of Good Government. The crucial point is that this is a depopulated city – much like our cities in quarantine now. Only men at arms are circulating and, as Boucheron tells it: “We guess that behind the walls, people are dying.” So this image has not changed today – deserted streets; quite a few elderly people dying in silence in their homes.
Boucheron then makes a startling connection with the frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan, published in 1651: “Here again there is a city depopulated by an epidemic. We know because at the borders of the image we identify two silhouettes with birds’ beaks, which represent the doctors of the plague,” while the people in the city have been sucked upward, ballooning the figure of the Leviathan state monster who is very confident of the fear he inspires.
Boucheron’s conclusion is that the state is always capable of obtaining an absolutely unprecedented resignation and obedience from the population. “What’s complicated is that even if what everything we say about the society of surveillance is scary and true, the state obtains this obedience in the name of its most undisputed function, which is to protect the population from creeping death. That’s what plenty of serious studies define as ‘biolegitimacy’.”
And I would add, today, a biolegitimacy boosted by widespread voluntary servitude.
The Age of Haphophobia
Foucault (Wikipedia)
Michel Foucault was arguably the premier modern cartographer of the Panopticon-derived surveillance society.
Then there’s Gilles Deleuze. In 1978, Foucault famously declared that, “perhaps, one day, this century will be called the Deleuzian century.”
Well, Deleuze is actually more 21st century than 20th. He went farther than anyone else studying societies of control – where control does not come from the center or from the top but flows through micro-vigilance, even activating the desire on everyone to be disciplined and monitored: once again, voluntary servitude.
Judith Butler, talking about South Africa-based critical theorist Achille Mbembe’s extraordinary Necropolitics, noted how he “continues where Foucault left off, tracking the lethal afterlife of sovereign power as it subjects whole populations to what Fanon called ‘the zone of non-being’.”
So a great deal of the intellectual debate ahead of us, borrowing from Fanon, Foucault, Deleuze, Mbembe and others, will necessarily have to focus on biopolitics and the widespread state of exception – which, as Giorgio Agamben has demonstrated, referring to Planet Lockdown, is now completely normalized.
We cannot even begin to imagine the consequences of the anthropological rupture caused by Covid-19. Sociologists for their part are already discussing how “social distancing” is an abstraction, defined and lived in quite unequal terms. They are discussing the reasons why the powers that be chose a martial vocabulary (“lockdown”) instead of forms of mobilization guided by a collective project.
And that will lead us to deeper studies of the Age of Haphophobia: our current condition of widespread fear of physical contact. Historians will be trying to analyze it in conjunction with how social phobias have evolved across centuries.
There’s no question that Foucault’s exhaustive mapping should be understood as a historical analysis of different techniques used by the powers that be to manage the life and death of populations. Between the crucial years 1975 and 1976, when he published Discipline and Punish (featured in this essay’s epigraph) and the first volume of History of Sexuality, Foucault, based on the notion of “biopolitics,” described the transition from a “sovereign society” to a “disciplinary society.”
His main conclusion is that techniques of biopolitical government spread out way beyond the legal and punitive spheres, and now are all over the spectrum, even lodged inside our individual bodies.
Covid-19 is presenting us with a huge biopolitical paradox. When the powers that be act like they are protecting us from a dangerous disease, they are imprinting their own immunity-based definition of the community. At the same time they have the power to decide to sacrifice part of the community (elderly people left to die; victims of the economic crisis) to the benefit of their own idea of sovereignty.
The state of exception to which many parts of the world are subjected now represents the normalization of this unbearable paradox.
House Arrest
So how would Foucault see Covid-19? He would say that this epidemic radicalizes biopolitical techniques applied to a national territory, and inscribes them in a political anatomy applied to each individual body. That’s how an epidemic extends to the whole population political measures of “immunization” that previously only applied – violently – to those that were considered “aliens,” inside and outside the national, sovereign territory.
Kara Tepe refugee camp on Greek island of Lesbos. (UN Photo)
It’s irrelevant whether Sars-Covid-2 is organic; a bioweapon; or, CIA conspiracy theory-style, part of a world domination plan. What’s happening in real life is that the virus reproduces, materializes, extends and intensifies – for hundreds of millions of people – dominant forms of biopolitical and necropolitical management that were already in place. The virus is our mirror. We are what the epidemic says we are, and how we decide to face it.
And under such extreme turbulence, as noted by philosopher Paul Preciado, we end up reaching a new necropolitical frontier – especially in the West.
The new territory of the border politics the West has been testing for years over “The Other” – blacks, Muslims, the poor – now starts at home. It’s as if Lesbos, the key entrance island for refugees in the Eastern Mediterranean coming from Turkey, now started at the entrance of each Western apartment.
With pervasive social distancing in place, the new border is each and everyone’s skin. Migrants and refugees were previously considered viruses, and only merited confinement and immobilization. But now these policies apply to whole populations. Detention centers – perpetual waiting rooms that abolish human rights and citizenship – are now detention centers inside one’s own home.
No wonder the liberal West has been plunged into a state of shock and awe.
By AURORA BOSOTTI
PUBLISHED: 09:39, Mon, May 4, 2020 | UPDATED: 10:31, Mon, May 4, 2020
France was originally believed to have recorded its first coronavirus case in late January like many other countries across Europe. But on Sunday Prof Yves Cohen from the Avicenne Hospital in Bobigny, 5.7 miles from Paris, said a second set of tests on a patient hospitalised in December showed COVID-19 was already in the country at the end of 2019. Prof Cohen said he and colleagues made the shocking discovery after carrying out the coronavirus test on samples collected in December.
Speaking to BFM TV, the French physician said: "We’ve reanalysed all negative tests on people who were diagnosed with pneumonia.
"Of the 24 patients, we found one who resulted positive to COVID-19 on December 27 when he was taken to our Avicenne Hospital."
Asked again to confirm whether the samples matched results to the coronavirus tests, Prof Cohen once again confirmed his diagnosis.
He continued: "Yes, it matched. We’ve controlled twice and it matched again, so we have COVID-19 in December."
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Prof Cohen suggested France had its first coronavirus case in December (Image: GETTY)
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France had reported its first official case of COVID-19 on January 24 (Image: BFM TV)
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The shocking findings have sent shockwaves through the French scientific community, due to previous beliefs suggesting the novel coronavirus had not spread to France until January-February 2020.
Speaking to France Bleu after the findings, Prof Cohen insisted the patient had "is well and has fully recovered, as have his children".
Prof Fabien Cohen, a spokesman for Mondor Hospital in the Val-de-Marne, admitted he did not feel surprised as concerns over a new pandemic had begun to circulate in November.
Prof Cohen said: "We have been worried since November 2019, we already knew that there was this risk of an epidemic and that we had to protect the elderly in particular."
READ MORE: Britons FURIOUS over lockdown restrictions for the elderly - 'What about the millennials!'
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Emmanuel Macron's popularity took a harsh blow during the coronavirus pandemic (Image: GETTY)
BBC Europe editor Katya Adler wrote on Twitter: "Causing a stir in France this eve: Dr Yves Cohen says his hospital re-tested the blood of patients treated in December for pneumonia.
"Found a man whose blood tested positive for #coronavirus This was 27 Dec. Before #COVIDー19 was thought to have arrived in France."
As of Monday morning, France recorded over 168,000 cases of COVID-19, 24,898 of whom have died since the outbreak begun.
According to data from the best-studied countries and regions, the lethality of Covid19 is between 0.1% and 0.37%, which is in the range of a severe influenza (flu) and about twenty times lower than originally assumed by the WHO.
Even in the global “hotspots”, the risk of death for the general population of school and working age is typically in the range of a daily car ride to work. The risk was initially overestimated because many people with only mild or no symptoms were not taken into account.
Up to 80% of all test-positive persons remain symptom-free. Even among 70-79 year olds, about 60% remain symptom-free. Over 95% of all persons show mild symptoms at most.
Up to one third of all persons already have a certain background immunity to Covid19 due to contact with previous coronaviruses (i.e. common cold viruses).
The median or average age of the deceased in most countries (including Italy) is over 80 years and only about 1% of the deceased had no serious preconditions. The age and risk profile of deaths thus essentially corresponds to normal mortality.
In most countries, 50 to 70% of all extra deaths occurred in nursing homes, which do not benefit from a general lockdown. Moreover, in many cases it is not clear whether these people really died from Covid19 or from extreme stress, fear and loneliness.
Up to 50% of all additional deaths may have been caused not by Covid19, but by the effects of the lockdown, panic and fear. For example, the treatment of heart attacks and strokes decreased by up to 60% because many patients no longer dared to go to hospital.
Even in so-called “Covid19 deaths” it is often not clear whether they died from or with coronavirus (i.e. from underlying diseases) or if they were counted as “presumed cases” and not tested at all. However, official figures usually do not reflect this distinction.
Many media reports of young and healthy people dying from Covid19 turned out to be false: many of these young people either did not die from Covid19, they had already been seriously ill (e.g. from undiagnosed leukaemia), or they were in fact 109 instead of 9 years old.
The normal overall mortality per day is about 8000 people in the US, about 2600 in Germany and about 1800 in Italy. Influenza mortality per season is up to 80,000 in the US and up to 25,000 in Germany and Italy. In several countries Covid19 deaths remained below strong flu seasons.
Regional increases in mortality may be influenced by additional risk factors such as high levels of air pollution and microbial contamination, as well as a collapse in the care for the elderly and sick due to infections, mass panic and lockdown. Special regulations for dealing with the deceased sometimes led to additional bottlenecks in funeral or cremation services.
In countries such as Italy and Spain, and to some extent the UK and the US, hospital overloads due to strong flu waves are not unusual. In addition, up to 15% of doctors and health workers were put into quarantine, even if they developed no symptoms.
The often shown exponential curves of “corona cases” are misleading, as the number of tests also increased exponentially. In most countries, the ratio of positive tests to tests overall (i.e. the positive rate) remained constant at 5% to 25% or increased only slightly. In many countries, the peak of the spread was already reached well before the lockdown.
Countries without curfews and contact bans, such as Japan, South Korea or Sweden, have not experienced a more negative course of events than other countries. Sweden was even praised by the WHO and now benefits from higher immunity compared to lockdown countries.
The fear of a shortage of ventilators was unjustified. According to lung specialists, the invasive ventilation (intubation) of Covid19 patients, which is partly done out of fear of spreading the virus, is in fact often counterproductive and damaging to the lungs.
Contrary to original assumptions, various studies have shown that there is no evidence of the virus spreading through aerosols (i.e. particles floating in the air) or through smear infections (e.g. on door handles, smartphones or at the hairdresser).
There is also no scientific evidence for the effectiveness of face masks in healthy or asymptomatic individuals. On the contrary, experts warn that such masks interfere with normal breathing and may become “germ carriers”. Leading doctors called them a “media hype” and “ridiculous”.
Many clinics in Europe and the US remained strongly underutilized or almost empty during the Covid19 peak and in some cases had to send staff home. Numerous operations and therapies were cancelled, including some organ transplants and cancer screenings.
Several media were caught trying to dramatize the situation in hospitals, sometimes even with manipulative images and videos. In general, the unprofessional reporting of many media maximized fear and panic in the population.
The virus test kits used internationally are prone to errors and can produce false positive and false negative results. Moreover, the official virus test was not clinically validated due to time pressure and may sometimes react to other coronaviruses.
Numerous internationally renowned experts in the fields of virology, immunology and epidemiology consider the measures taken to be counterproductive and recommend rapid natural immunisation of the general population and protection of risk groups. The risks for children are virtually zero and closing schools was never medically warranted.
Several medical experts described vaccines against coronaviruses as unnecessary or even dangerous. Indeed, the vaccine against the so-called swine flu of 2009, for example, led to sometimes severe neurological damage and lawsuits in the millions.
The number of people suffering from unemployment, psychological problems and domestic violence as a result of the measures has skyrocketed worldwide. Several experts believe that the measures may claim more lives than the virus itself. According to the UN millions of people around the world may fall into absolute poverty and famine.
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden warned that the “corona crisis” will be used for the massive and permanent expansion of global surveillance. The renowned virologist Pablo Goldschmidt spoke of a “global media terror” and “totalitarian measures“. Leading British virologist professor John Oxford spoke of a “media epidemic”.
More than 500 scientists have warned against an “unprecedented surveillance of society” through problematic apps for “contact tracing”. In some countries, such “contact tracing” is already carried out directly by the secret service. In several parts of the world, the population is already being monitored by drones and facing serious police overreach.
This is an archived page. An updated vaping illness tracker with data from 2020 is now available.
Cases and Deaths
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state agencies have reported 2,506 lung injury cases that required hospitalization and 54 deaths linked to vaping.
Cases of vaping-related lung illness
Deaths
0
10
50
100
150
250
Mont.
Ore.
Minn.
Mass.
N.Y.
2
3
3
Wis.
Mich.
2
2
Conn.
Pa.
N.J.
Neb.
Ind.
Ill.
Utah
Del.
5
5
Kan.
Calif.
Mo.
Va.
2
4
2
Tenn.
2
S.C.
Ga.
Ala.
Miss.
5
D.C.
La.
Tex.
Fla.
Virgin
Islands
Hawaii
2
The rising case count includes both recent cases and earlier pneumonia-like cases that are only now being recognized as related to vaping.
Weekly hospitalizations for vaping-related lung illness.
The recent decline is due in part to delays in reporting.
150
100
50
May
June
July
Aug.
Sept.
Oct.
Chart shows hospital admissions as of Nov. 9
Vaping-related emergency room visits peaked in September and mostly involved younger people, especially young men and boys.
Peak on Sept. 8
500 visits per
million visits
400
300
Patients aged 10–19
Number of emergency room visits
linked to vaping or e-cigarettes
200
100
2017
2018
2019
200
Aged 20–29
100
30–39
50
40–49
50–59
60–69
Patients aged 70–79
50
2017
2018
2019
By The New York Times | Source: New England Journal of Medicine
Vaping Regulations
Several states and cities have announced or enacted vaping bans in response to the recent illnesses and deaths.
Wash.
Mont.
Ore.
Mass.
S.D.
N.Y.
Mich.
R.I.
Pine Ridge
Reservation
Chicago
San Francisco
Ill.
Utah
The Trump
administration
Calif.
County of Los Angeles
City of Los Angeles
San Diego County
Considering or working on a ban
Announced or enacted ban on flavored e-cigarettes
Announced or enacted ban on all e-cigarettes
Four-month ban on all vaping products
◼ The Trump administration says it is planning a national ban on most flavored e-cigarettes.
◼ Massachusetts declared a public health emergency and ordered a four-month ban on the sale of all vaping products.
◼ New York’s ban on flavored e-cigarettes has been delayed by a state court.
◼ Michigan banned the sale of flavored e-cigarettes and Utah restricted their sale to adult-only tobacco shops.
◼ Oregon imposed a 180-day ban, Rhode Island imposed a four-month ban and Washington imposed a 120-day ban on flavored vaping products. Montana’s 120-day ban will begin Oct. 22.
◼ San Francisco banned all e-cigarettes but a measure that would overturn the ban is on the November ballot.
◼ The Oglala Sioux banned vaping on the Pine Ridge Reservation.
◼ Illinois is considering banning flavored e-cigarettes, and Chicago and Los Angeles are considering bans on all vaping devices.
Lung Damage
Patients with vaping-related lung injuries typically show up in emergency rooms with shortness of breath after several days of symptoms that resemble flu or pneumonia.
Below, a CT scan of a patient in Utah whose lungs were injured from vaping.
Sternum
Lung
Lung
Ribs
Heart
Spine
Cloudy areas in the patient’s lungs show unusual pneumonias, fluid or inflammation.
Back muscles
By The New York Times | Source: Intermountain Healthcare
A study of lung tissue samples from 17 patients found that the injuries can look like chemical burns or toxic chemical exposure.
Two examples of severe vaping-related injury. Larsen et al., New England Journal of Medicine
Patient Demographics
Seventy percent of those who became ill were male:
GenderNumber of cases
Male
70%
Female
30%
Two-thirds were between ages 18 and 34:
AgeNumber of cases
Under 18
15%
18–24
39%
25–34
26%
35 and older
20%
What They Vaped
No single substance has been shown to cause the illness, but several marijuana products have been identified as possible causes.
Percentage of lung injury patients who reported vaping each substance.
YES
NO
THC products
77%
19%
5
Nicotine products
57
34
10
Cannabidiol (CBD)
17
52
31
Synthetic cannabinoids
56
43
Flavored e-liquids
20
26
55% Unknown
Common Brands
A study of 86 lung-injury patients in Wisconsin and Illinois found that 87 percent reported using vaping products that contained THC.
“Dank Vapes” was the most commonly reported brand name, but that brand is one of many illicit labels that sellers can find online and slap on products.
Products containing THC
Nicotine products
BRAND
BRAND
Dank Vapes
JUUL
TKO
Smok
Off White
Suorin Drop
Moon Rocks
Naked
Chronic Carts
Solace
Cookies
Mr Salt-E
Smart Carts
Salt Nic
Kingpen
Air Factory
Dabwoods
Vuse Alto
Rove
0
10
20
30
Mario Carts
Number of patients
reporting use
Calif. Confidential
Cereal Carts
Supreme G
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
Number of patients reporting use
Vaping Use Among Teens
Teen vaping rates rose sharply this year, and a quarter of 12th grade students say they have used nicotine vaping products in the last month. More than 120 lung injury patients have been under 18.
It's likely that there were individual cases of coronavirus in Sweden as early as November 2019, according to the Public Health Agency, but the country is not currently working to trace the earliest cases.
The news follows a report from France that a man was infected with the coronavirus on December 27th, several days before the first cases were reported in China. The patient was diagnosed with pneumonia but a sample taken at the time has now tested positive for the coronavirus. That man has fully recovered since his illness, but reportedly has no idea how he caught the virus.
Now state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell has said there were likely infected individuals in Sweden at this time too.
"There wasn't any spread [of infection] outside Wuhan until we saw it in Europe later. But I think that you could find individual cases among Wuhan travellers who were there in November to December last year. That doesn't sound at all strange, but rather very natural," said Tegnell.
Currently the first confirmed case of the virus in Sweden was a woman in Jönköping who tested positive on January 31st after a recent trip to China. She has since recovered from the illness.
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The 2019 Summer Military World Games were held in Wuhan in late October, and a troop of more than 100 people from the Swedish Armed Forces stayed in the city for two weeks during this time. Several of those who competed fell ill and were tested for the virus, although none were reported to have tested positive.
Knowing when and how the first cases in a country occurred can be helpful to understanding the spread of infection. But there are no plans in Sweden for large-scale testing of samples from patients who received care for respiratory symptoms or flu last year to see if they had the coronavirus.
"It's not something that's being discussed in a structured way," said Tegnell. "At the moment it feels like we don't want to burden the healthcare sector with this type of investigation. They have a lot of other things to do, and this would not lead to any measure."
He added: "Instead, what could be interesting to find out is how the virus spread in China and how it behaved in the early stages of its spread. If it was an individual spread from an animal to a person or if it spread to a group of people over a longer period of time."
"There aren't many instances where we have been able to track a contagion of a completely new virus from animals to humans. We don't have much knowledge of how this happens in reality," Tegnell explained. "It would be valuable to see how people could protect themselves against this type of development in the future."
It was a tale of two interviews on the Today programme this morning. First up on the show was Neil Ferguson, professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College London, who has been instrumental in forming the UK government’s response to the coronavirus crisis, and whose virus modelling led to the current lockdown being put in place.
On the show, the professor received an almost deferential line of questioning from Sarah Smith with his views seemingly taken as near-Gospel as he declared that a 'significant level' of social distancing could have to be maintained indefinitely until a vaccine becomes available.
Then came along the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock. As you would expect, he was treated to the traditional Today programme mauling, as his record and pronouncements on testing, the growing virus outbreak in care homes and PPE were scrutinised by Nick Robinson.
While Mr S thinks it's only right that Hancock faces tough questions, Steerpike can't help but wonder whether Ferguson should receive similar treatment. After all, his advice is heavily feeding into government policy and therefore ought to face a similar level of scrutiny. What's more, Ferguson's scientific work can't exactly be described as bulletproof.
Given that it's the trend these days for former spinners, hacks and politicians to suggest questions that the media isn't currently asking of politicians, Mr S has decided to do his bit for public discourse by penning a few for Ferguson. Below are six questions Steerpike would like to see Neil Ferguson pressed on the next time he embarks on a media round:
Q1.
In 2005, Ferguson said that up to 200 million people could be killed from bird flu. He told the Guardian that ‘around 40 million people died in 1918 Spanish flu outbreak… There are six times more people on the planet now so you could scale it up to around 200 million people probably.’ In the end, only 282 people died worldwide from the disease between 2003 and 2009.
How did he get this forecast so wrong?
Q2.
In 2009, Ferguson and his Imperial team predicted that swine flu had a case fatality rate 0.3 per cent to 1.5 per cent. His most likely estimate was that the mortality rate was 0.4 per cent. A government estimate, based on Ferguson’s advice, said a ‘reasonable worst-case scenario’ was that the disease would lead to 65,000 UK deaths.
In the end swine flu killed 457 people in the UK and had a death rate of just 0.026 per cent in those infected.
Why did the Imperial team overestimate the fatality of the disease? Or to borrow Robinson's words to Hancock this morning: 'that prediction wasn't just nonsense was it? It was dangerous nonsense.'
Q3.
In 2001 the Imperial team produced modelling on foot and mouth disease that suggested that animals in neighbouring farms should be culled, even if there was no evidence of infection. This influenced government policy and led to the total culling of more than six million cattle, sheep and pigs – with a cost to the UK economy estimated at £10 billion.
It has been claimed by experts such as Michael Thrusfield, professor of veterinary epidemiology at Edinburgh University, that Ferguson’s modelling on foot and mouth was ‘severely flawed’ and made a ‘serious error’ by ‘ignoring the species composition of farms,’ and the fact that the disease spread faster between different species.
Does Ferguson acknowledge that his modelling in 2001 was flawed and if so, has he taken steps to avoid future mistakes?
Q4.
In 2002, Ferguson predicted that between 50 and 50,000 people would likely die from exposure to BSE (mad cow disease) in beef. He also predicted that number could rise to 150,000 if there was a sheep epidemic as well. In the UK, there have only been 177 deaths from BSE.
Does Ferguson believe that his ‘worst-case scenario’ in this case was too high? If so, what lessons has he learnt when it comes to his modelling since.
Q5.
Ferguson’s disease modelling for Covid-19 has been criticised by experts such as John Ioannidis, professor in disease prevention at Stanford University, who has said that: ‘The Imperial College study has been done by a highly competent team of modellers. However, some of the major assumptions and estimates that are built in the calculations seem to be substantially inflated.’
Has the Imperial team’s Covid-19 model been subject to outside scrutiny from other experts, and are the team questioning their own assumptions used? What safeguards are in place?
Q6.
On 22 March, Ferguson said that Imperial College London’s model of the Covid-19 disease is based on undocumented, 13-year-old computer code, that was intended to be used for a feared influenza pandemic, rather than a coronavirus.
How many assumptions in the Imperial model are still based on influenza and is there any risk that the modelling is flawed because of these assumptions? _________________ --
'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."
Blimey! It’s getting hairy. Pearl Harbour was deliberately induced (as we know) in order to bring America into WWII, by FDR.
See ‘Day of Deceit’ by Robert B. Stinnett.
LBJ referred to presenting Congress with a ‘New Pearl Harbour’ when he was discussing the coming Six Day War in 1967 with Ephraim ‘Eppie’ Evron, Deputy Israeli Ambassador to America, regarding the coming Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, which was to be blamed on Egypt, in how it would be presented to Congress (‘Operation Cyanide’ by Peter Hounam). And of course. it was used in the PNAC (Project for a New American Century) document ‘Rebuilding America’s Defenses’ (September 2000), part of which reads: “the process of [military] transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor …
… advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.”…’
Well, well, well, the Orange Dumbo has put Covid – 19 in context….!
It certainly looks like this virus ‘False Flag’ attack is bigger than people realise – remember what the 9/11 ‘False Flag’ brought about…
Fasten your seat-belts!
Trump might be stupid, but he shore as hell ain't smart! _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
DAR ES SALAAM (Reuters) - Tanzania has suspended the head of its national health laboratory in charge of testing for the coronavirus and ordered an investigation, a day after President John Magufuli questioned the tests’ accuracy.
Magufuli said on Sunday the imported test kits were faulty as they had returned positive results on a goat and a pawpaw — among several non-human samples submitted for testing, with technicians left deliberately unaware of their origins.
He did not say where the kits had been imported from or why the authorities had been suspicious of the results.
Catherine Sungura, acting head of communications at the ministry of health, said in a statement on Monday the director of the laboratory and its quality assurance manager had been immediately suspended “to pave way for the investigation”.
Sungura said a 10-person committee had been formed to investigate the laboratory’s operations, including its process of collecting and testing samples.
On Sunday, Magufuli also fired the head of the government Medical Stores Department, which is in charge of distributing medical supplies and equipment to government hospitals, but gave no reason.
As of Monday, Tanzania had recorded 480 cases of COVID-19 and 18 deaths, according to a Reuters tally based on government and World Health Organization data.
Unlike most other African countries, Tanzania sometimes goes for days without offering updates, with the last bulletin on cases on Wednesday.
COVID-19 infections and fatalities reported across Africa have been relatively low compared with the United States, parts of Asia and Europe. But Africa also has extremely low levels of testing, with rates of only around 500 per million people.
In neighbouring Kenya, a senate body sought an explanation from the Health Ministry over the circumstances leading to the demotion of the head of the rapid response and team director in charge of the centre for virus research at the state-run Kenya Medical Research Institute.
“In relation to the above, the committee observes that the timing of the dismissal is wrong as it is likely to have a significant impact on the morale and motivation of the various staff that were working under him,” the Senate Ad Hoc Committee on the COVID-19 situation in Kenya said in a report on April 28.
Writing by George Obulutsa; Editing by Alison Williams
Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. _________________ --
'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."
Politicians must answer for the alarming number of non-Covid excess deaths CREDIT: JUSTIN SETTERFIELD/GETTY
The Government's strategy is political genius – and scientifically questionable
So concludes another surreal week of watching a government-by-focus-group pretend to “follow the science”. In particular, the Government overlooked two vital pieces of evidence that raise frightening questions about the impact of its draconian lockdown strategy – and whether lockdown was ever even necessary.
First is the latest ONS data, which suggests that lockdown could be killing people insofar as people who are suffering from non-Covid diseases and conditions may not be seeking help. Figures for Week 16 (up to April 17) showed 11,854 excess deaths in Week 16 (compared with the five year average) – but just 8,758 were Covid-related. Are these other 3,096 non-Covid excess deaths anything to do with the fact that urgent referrals by GPs for cancer tests, and chemotherapy appointments have plummeted? Could it be that thousands of seriously ill people are not seeking treatment because they are following the Government's petrifying instructions to Stay At Home to deadly effect?... _________________ --
'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."
Desultory Heroics A Chronicle of Dystopia and Resistance By Robert J. Burrowes
As the elite coup against humanity continues to gather pace – see ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup Against a Terrified Humanity: Resisting Powerfully’ – it is invaluable to observe the way in which the dysfunctional and violent psychology of the global elite, including those of its members who have a significant public profile such as Bill Gates, is revealed more starkly.
At the same time, it is interesting to observe the vast number of fearfully submissive people who are willing to accept, or even ask for, greater constraints on our rights, freedom and economic security, ostensibly to ‘protect’ them from a virus. Sadly, too, the fear of these people plays a critical collaborative role in both advancing the elite coup and condemning millions of others to death as the economic consequences of the destruction of the global economy inflicts its devastating impacts on those least able to cope with it.
Clearly complicated by a number of factors, including the locust plagues that have been devastating several countries in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia during early 2020 – see ‘360 Billion Locusts And Growing – A Plague Of “Biblical Proportions” Is Destroying Crops Across The Middle East And Africa’ – but now particularly because of official responses to COVID-19, as World Food Programme (WFP) Executive Director, David Beasley, has recently warned:
If we don’t prepare and act now to secure access, to avoid funding shortfalls and disruptions to trade, we could be facing multiple famines of biblical proportions within a short few months… our analysis shows that 300,000 people could starve to death every single day over a three-month period. See ‘WFP chief warns of “hunger pandemic” as Global Food Crises Report launched’.
That is 27,000,000 people, if arithmetic is not your strong point, that will die of starvation, not COVID-19. And this figure, of course, is quite separate from the phenomenal hardship that millions are already experiencing as a result of the economic dislocation which has created a staggering number of newly unemployed people around the world.
In this article I will do three things. I will briefly explain the dysfunctional psychology of the global elite, using Bill Gates as an example, which explains why they seek vastly greater control over our lives at staggering expense to our rights, freedom and economic security. I will briefly explain why so many people are fearfully submissive victims of this coup, unable to perceive the deeper strands of what is taking place. And I will briefly reiterate what those people in a third category, ranging from those skeptical of the fear-mongering in relation to COVID-19 to those already resisting the lockdowns, curfews, martial law and other serious impositions on our lives, can do to ensure that their resistance has strategic impact.
The Violently Dysfunctional Psychology of the Global Elite
While the world is in turmoil, partly in response to the fear-mongering by WHO, governments, the medical industry and the corporate media that has profoundly inflated people’s fear of COVID-19 but also because of the adverse cascading impacts of the long list of ill-advised decisions, particularly those that impact national economies made to supposedly deal with COVID-19, the primary concern of Bill Gates is that we all submit to vaccination and acquire a ‘digital certificate’ to prove that we have done so. For explanations of Gates’ unsavory motives in promoting and conducting extensive vaccination, see ‘Gates’ Globalist Vaccine Agenda: A Win-Win for Pharma and Mandatory Vaccination’ and ‘Bill Gates and the Depopulation Agenda. Robert F. Kennedy Junior Calls for an Investigation’.
While this has led to substantial resistance on social media, including that Gates be arrested for crimes against humanity – see ‘“Arrest Bill Gates” – Says every Instagrammer on Gates Account’ – it is, in fact, only the most public initiative by a member of the global elite even though it constitutes a key element of how the global elite intends to capture complete control of our lives to create what Whitney Webb describes as a ‘techno tyranny’.
Citing a range of evidence obtained from official but largely ignored organizations, decisions and documents in recent years, Webb thoughtfully describes a frightening view of the techno tyranny that is almost upon us and for which the latest moves are being rapidly implemented under the guise of combating COVID-19. Involving an unsavory alliance of the ‘intelligence’ community, the Pentagon and Silicon Valley, COVID-19 is being used as cover to remove economic and social ‘obstacles’ (including so-called ‘legacy systems’ with which we are all familiar) to implementing the so-called fourth industrial revolution – ‘a revolution characterized by discontinuous technological development in areas like artificial intelligence (AI), big data, fifth-generation telecommunications networking (5G), nanotechnology and biotechnology, robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), and quantum computing’ – to achieve everything from a cashless society and AI-driven technologies (particularly for mass surveillance and law enforcement) to driverless cars and ‘telemedicine’.
For a sample of the documentation, see ‘Competing With China on Technology and Innovation’, the US National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, the ‘Chinese Tech Landscape Overview’, US Attorney General William Barr’s ‘Implementation of National Disruption and Early Engagement Programs to Counter the Threat of Mass Shootings’, the ‘American Artificial Intelligence Initiative: Year One Annual Report’ of the US Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the recent advice by the White House that ‘President Donald J. Trump Announces Great American Economic Revival Industry Groups’. Whitney Webb has written two recent articles – ‘Meet The Companies Poised To Build The Kushner-Backed “Coronavirus Surveillance System”’ and ‘Techno-Tyranny: How The US National Security State Is Using Coronavirus To Fulfill An Orwellian Vision’ – and been interviewed – see ‘Security State using coronavirus to implement Orwellian nightmare’ – that thoughtfully describe what is taking place.
In short, it will leave those of us who are still alive and who haven’t been replaced by robots as little more than digital entities, devoid of rights and freedoms, who are monitored and controlled to serve elite ends. You might still be able to choose what you buy, provided you do it online.
But while you can consider this evidence at your leisure, my own concern in this article is to explain why members of the global elite are so willing to inflict their violence on us, and to exploit us so mercilessly, without even caring. Why does their vision for the world and their effort to create it resemble the works of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, rather than something that many more of us would consider desirable? Is profit really all that matters? What about people?
In short, the explanation for their behavior is that they are completely insane. But like some other versions of insanity that are also defined as ‘normal’ – essentially because they are so widespread (like over-consumption in industrialized countries) that few think to question whether or not the behavior is actually functional – it is fairly straightforward to explain both the origin and outcomes of their insanity.
At birth, every human child has enormous unique potential. However, to fully realize that potential, the child must be nurtured physically, emotionally, intellectually and in other ways so that their unique potential unfolds. This includes caring for them in their unique physical environment while allowing their natural inclination to learn, an evolutionary gift, to guide the manner and nature of their inquiry.
Unfortunately, however, adult humans do not appreciate and value the innate learning capacities of their children so we ‘teach’ them, in the ways of our choosing (particularly by funneling them all through the one-size-fits-all institution we call ‘school’), what we want them to know instead. Because the child naturally resists this, the child is subjected to an extraordinary range of ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ violence to force them to conform to societal norms.
Then, using what I have labeled ‘utterly invisible violence’, we ensure that the feelings of fear, sadness, anger and pain (among many others) that this causes are suppressed so that we do not have to deal with the emotional and behavioral consequences of the violence we inflict on the child. This leaves the child with an unconscious legacy of fear, self-hatred and powerlessness that will manifest, depending on the context, throughout the child’s life. For a thorough explanation of this, see ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.
One outcome of being terrorized into submissive obedience throughout childhood is that the human ‘individual’ enters adulthood with no sense of their unique identity but fully comfortable with the socially constructed delusional identity they gradually took on during childhood. Having been terrorized into obedient submission to parents, teachers and religious figures, virtually all people readily take on the role of submissive worker/soldier and citizen fulfilling some fairly meaningless role in a society largely devoid of meaning. Understanding no other way and in a last resort to feel some sense of control over their life, they also then terrorize their own children into being submissively obedient.
And people like Bill Gates are not all that different except that the opportunities provided by their wealth and the privilege that goes with it, enable them to inflict their dysfunctional and violent behaviors on a vastly greater number of people in a fruitless endeavor to feel ‘in control’. And they can do so without attracting the sanctions, legal and otherwise, that might constrain the behaviors of the rest of us.
So, as documented in the articles about Bill Gates cited above, his vaccination programs have wreaked havoc on adults and children throughout the global south, killing or incapacitating substantial numbers of people. This is unsurprising given the historical role of vaccination in precipitating a great many disorders and deaths, by introducing into the body contaminants such as aluminium and glyphosate. See Sayer Ji’s 326 page bibliography with a vast number of references to the literature explaining the exceptional range of shocking dangers from vaccination – see ‘Vaccination’ – or, if you wish to just read straightforward accounts of the history of vaccine damage and the ongoing dangers, see these articles by Gary G. Kohls MD: ‘A Comprehensive List of Vaccine-Associated Toxic Reactions’ and ‘Identifying the Vaccinology-Illiterate among Us’.
But does Bill Gates care about the staggering harm these vaccinations are causing? Does he care that future vaccinations are intended to be used to grotesquely infringe our rights and freedoms with the insertion of biometric data? See ‘COVID-19: Perfect Cover for Mandatory Biometric ID’. What of his love? Compassion? Empathy? Sympathy? Does he have a conscience to call him to account, even if no legal system does? Does he respect people? Does he believe everyone should be given an individual and informed choice about whether or not they are vaccinated?
Tragically, Bill Gates is so psychologically damaged that he is simply devoid of qualities such as these. They were never given the chance to develop by parents who showed him the same lack of love, sympathy, care, respect and consideration. Moreover, because of his fear of being out of control, as he was when endlessly suffering the incredible violence of his parents throughout childhood, he now endlessly seeks control in the highly dysfunctional ways that his unconscious fear projects. That is, by seeking to control us all.
If you want to read more about the psychological dysfunctionality of Bill Gates and other members of the global elite, as well as their agents, and how this always manifests to our detriment, you can do so in articles such as ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’, ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’ and ‘Understanding Self-Hatred in World Affairs’.
Sadly, however, it is not just members of the global elite who are psychologically dysfunctional. There is a substantial portion of the human population who have suffered a similar fate, even if it manifests very differently. However, while this dysfunctionality might manifest in an extraordinarily wide variety of ways, it almost invariably includes fearful submission to those considered to be ‘in authority’.
The Dysfunctional Psychology of Victims
Because each human being is unique, the individual is born with a powerful evolutionary gift: Self-will. This means that the individual has an incredible range of tools, including the capacity to apply sensory perception (sight, sound, touch…) to observe what is happening, the emotional capacity to feel what this means (is it satisfying, enjoyable, frightening, infuriating…), to think for themself about the significance of it, to compare and contrast it with relevant memories, to gauge it against one’s conscience and so on until an integrated sense of how to behave in response is formulated and then acted on.
If a person is doing this then we might describe them as ‘Self-aware’. And they are, truly, an individual.
However, because of the experience of childhood terrorization, briefly touched on above, most children are compelled to surrender the essence of these various capacities, and hence their Self-will, by a very young age. In these circumstances, the child becomes a fairly malleable instrument, easily transformed into a victim who is now devoid of the capacity to look deep within themselves to make sound judgments about what is taking place and to behave powerfully in response.
Instead, they simply obey the will of another: parent, teacher, religious figure, employer, political leader…. and act more out of habit than consideration. Given the endless violence (usually labeled ‘punishment’) that is inflicted to ensure that children are obedient to others, rather than allowed to follow their own self-will, it takes an extraordinary child to survive with even a semblance of the potential with which they were born. As a result, most human behavior lacks consideration, conviction, courage and strategy, and is simply driven compulsively by the predominant fear in each context.
For elaboration of this explanation, see ‘The Disintegrated Mind: The Greatest Threat to Human Survival on Earth’ and ‘The Psychology of Victimhood: Obama, Cameron, Netanyahu, Clinton, Kissinger’.
A primary outcome of this childhood terrorization experience in materialist cultures is that the child learns to suppress their awareness of how they feel by using food and material items to distract themself. By doing this, the child rapidly loses their emerging self-awareness and learns to consume as the substitute for this awareness. Clearly, this has catastrophic consequences for the child, their society and for nature (although it is immensely profitable for elites and their agents whose Self-awareness is non-existent). For a fuller explanation, see ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’.
In essence, a victim is utterly terrified and powerless. These feelings are unconscious to the victim, which is why they are incapable of intelligently seeking out and personally assessing evidence (such as that in relation to COVID-19 and how it is being used) and they simply submit without protest once told to obey.
An equally important outcome for the victim, is that they have little, if any, capacity to see beyond themselves or their immediate concerns (which might include an activist preoccupation). They are incapable of perceiving and considering the wider ramifications of what is taking place – the ‘big picture’ – such as for those millions of starving people referred to by WFP Executive Director David Beasley above. Any sense of a ‘wider self’, of human solidarity beyond the most superficial kind, is incomprehensible to them.
Making sure our Resistance to this Coup has Strategic Impact
So this is why a third group in relation to this elite coup is so important: Those individuals who are already resisting the coup or those who will soon choose to do so. Clearly, these people have sufficient sense of Self, the intelligence and emotional capacity (including courage) to consider the evidence in relation to COVID-19 and what lies beneath it, and to draw conclusions at variance with those presented by the elite through its international organizations (such as the World Health Organization), governments and corporate media.
And it is to these people that this final section is particularly addressed.
I have previously explained a nonviolent strategy to resist this elite coup against humanity. See ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup Against a Terrified Humanity: Resisting Powerfully’.
This included identifying its political purpose – obviously ‘To defend humanity against a political/military coup conducted by the global elite’ – and setting out a basic list of 26 strategic goals for achieving this purpose. You can read the ‘Strategic goals for defeating a political/military coup conducted by the global elite against humanity’ by scrolling down the page at ‘Strategic Aims’.
Remaining pages on the website fully explain the twelve components of the strategy, as illustrated by the Nonviolent Strategy Wheel, as well as articles and videos explaining all of the vital points of strategy and tactics, such as those to help you understand ‘Nonviolent Action: Why and How it Works’ and how to prepare, frame and conduct any nonviolent action to minimize the risk of violent repression. See ‘Nonviolent Action: Minimizing the Risk of Violent Repression’.
While many of the tactics identified are designed to make it very easy for individuals to be involved, an increasing number of people are already participating in nonviolent actions based on public gatherings to ‘End the Lockdown’ using social media messaging with that or similar labels. See, for example, ‘Protesting the Lockdowns is Getting Going – #endthelockdown’.
Therefore, as more people become aware of the coup and the energy to resist it continues to gather pace, it will be worthwhile to choose a locally significant date on which as many people who are willing to do so act to ‘End the Lockdown’ in your country. Using a locally relevant focus, or perhaps several, for which many people would traditionally be together – a cultural or sporting event, a community activity such as working to establish a community garden to increase local self-reliance, a birthday celebration and/or a return to work – we can mobilize people to collectively resist the coup that is taking place.
Because the actions taken can be dispersed with large numbers of people responding in a vast number of locations, it will be impossible for police and military forces to inflict violent repression against everyone, particularly if local organizers have implemented the points in ‘Nonviolent Action: Minimizing the Risk of Violent Repression’.
Equally importantly to any of the points above, particularly given the pressing threat of human extinction – see ‘Human Extinction Now Imminent and Inevitable? A Report on the State of Planet Earth’ – but also because becoming more self-reliant is vital to our ongoing capacity to resist elite encroachments on our rights, freedom and economic security, consider joining those participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’. This project also explains how to take full advantage of non-monetary forms of community where goods and services are exchanged directly, without money as a medium of exchange. Money only has value in certain types of economy and these types of economy must be superseded if humans are to survive.
Moreover, given the enormous pressure on children at the moment, as their lives are upended, it would be useful to spend time listening to them. Of course, if you know an adult who is having trouble coping, it will help them enormously as well if you listen while giving them the opportunity to talk about, and focus on feeling, their own emotional reactions to what is taking place. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’. If you do not have anyone who can listen to you, try ‘Putting Feelings First’.
In addition, because the foundation of this entire elite-controlled world, and the coup it is now implementing, is the submissively obedient individual, the world can only be rebuilt as we might like it if we stop terrorizing children into being submissive. So I would start by parenting and educating children so that they become powerful. See ‘My Promise to Children’ and ‘Do We Want School or Education?’
Finally, as touched on above, apart from the ongoing elite coup the Earth is under siege from our assaults on a vast range of fronts. See ‘Human Extinction Now Imminent and Inevitable? A Report on the State of Planet Earth’. So if we are serious about tackling this crisis too, we must be willing to consider committing to:
The Earth Pledge
Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:
I will listen deeply to children (see explanation above)
I will not travel by plane
I will not travel by car
I will not eat meat and fish
I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
I will not buy rainforest timber
I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.
Conclusion
Given that any serious investigation of the circumstances underlying the so-called COVID-19 ‘pandemic’ reveals that the entire global episode has been contrived to further an unsavory elite end, at staggering cost to humans everywhere, it is imperative that those who are capable of perceiving this reality also take action to bring this ongoing coup to an early end.
The longer it takes to muster a full response to defeat this coup, the more damage – to our rights, freedoms, economic security, opportunities, democratic governance, the global economy and the environment – will have been inflicted, making the struggle to restore them vastly more difficult.
More importantly, if human solidarity means anything to you, the lives of millions of people (in the global south) are at stake and the economic security (through lost employment) of millions more.
And these lives, if lost or marginalized, while suiting some elite depopulation agenda, will be a stark but ugly reminder that COVID-19 was never about a virus but about our fear.
Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.
Related
The Elite's COVID-19 Coup Against a Terrified Humanity: Resisting Powerfully
In "Activism"
Observing Elites Manipulate Our Fear: COVID-19, Propaganda and Knowledge
In "Authoritarianism"
Defending Humanity Against the Elite Coup
In "Activism"
April 29, 20202 Replies
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truthman_2012 on April 30, 2020 at 1:46 pm
Liked most of this post. I don’t advocate pollution or violence. However, this Earth Pledge is an exercise in capitulation. It says, Don’t worry elite. We won’t use or do anything that may threaten your overwhelming power. Environmentalism has been hijacked to sell the new authoritarian dystopia. Cheap energy lifts folks out of poverty. Look it up. I prefer forms of clean energy, but come on. Wake up. Now they’re saying staying in lockdown is good for the environment. Just watch what a worldwide economic depression does. Environmental protection philosophies are a first world luxury. Do you think Africans stealing fuel from a pipeline care about carbon emissions?
Reply
ChilKat on May 2, 2020 at 12:39 am
It has indeed been hijacked.
There is of course a method in their madness re the imminent banning of fossil fuels wood stoves, natural gas, a controlled demolition of the global food supply , putting small farmers out of business , the migratory issue to Europe of the young African men and similar.
We are imminently, or very very soon going to be entering the next grand solar minimum, and it also seems, we have an magnetic excursion underway.
Our magnetosphere is weakening faster than it has done for thousands of years ( I believe we are at present around 20 % down, and galactic cosmic rays are at an all time high and they are set to keep increasing.
One result of the GSM is that the Jets streams are changing, the weather is cooling , becoming more extreme at both ends, it’s what it does as it enters this climatic shift. the Growing time is shortening at both ends of the growing season, and the agricultural zone is shifting south. Global warming has always been natural since time immemorial. Check out these subjects and the former grow zones from the Maunder minimum / little ice age and former GSMs for further Info .
China was already aware of this climatic shift due to their meticulous record keeping of sunspot monitoring, and they are also aware that every GSM they don’t come out of it well This is why they were so prominent in Africa, trying to set up a route to transfer food back to their country in this lean time, their civilisation collapses every GSM, they are trying to prevent this occurring again.
They who must never be, they dammed well know about ALL this, and they want these grow zones for themselves.
They have been so for many years hence the frantic excavating and fitting out of underground bunkers, the on off disappearing long term / canned food and prepper long term food supply unavailability and SO much more prior to COVID-1984.
Wake up people !! _________________ --
'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."
In the version published on Sage’s government website, almost a page and a half of text was heavily redacted. The Guardian understands the blocked text related to SPI–B’s criticism about possible government proposals around that time.
These included the idea of reducing the amount of time Britons could spend exercising or shopping, and stricter financial penalties for those found to be breaking the lockdown. A third proposal involved requiring people to self-validate their movements, as was occurring in France, where citizens were required to complete permits before leaving home.
Experts on SPI-B, which includes professors in psychology, epidemiology and anthropology, said they felt the proposals were too punitive and more likely to result in unfair treatment among people in deprived economic circumstances _________________ --
'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."
Utilize Evidence From, By and For Health Care Providers.
Fill the gap between "anecdotal" and "gold standard" evidence for promising treatments
Minimal effort and changes to treatment routines needed; nearly all this work can be done by assistants; ethical aspects are favorable
Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) has shown uneven results in earlier studies. We hypothesize that HCQ works in large part by making zinc more bioavailable, so its effect is limited by the level of free serum zinc in each patient. "Bioavailability studies are usually conducted as crossover studies." [2] Thus we propose a short longitudinal trial to determine the efficacy of HCQ with and without zinc. Trials may need some flexibility, as acute care for patients comes first.
An ideal way to quickly gather retrospective and new trial data can be to enlist independent physicians who are currently treating coronavirus patients. An estimated 60% of physicians worldwide have prescribed HCQ, but fewer than 20% have added zinc, and we can assume that even fewer prescribe high-dose zinc. [3] Yet if the zinc ionophore thesis and field reports are valid, high-dose zinc should be prescribed as often as its auxiliary HCQ.
PRE-EXISTING DATA: Solicit datasets and papers from practitioners who have been prescribing HCQ and zinc, typically along with Zpack, vitamins, Ivermectin, etc.
PROPOSED CONTROLLED TRIAL DESIGN
Inclusion: Coronavirus patients, any setting, from mild to critical condition. Exclusion: No HCQ where contraindicated.
All patients get standard dose HCQ (typically 2x 400 mg on day 1, followed by 200 to 400mg , according to Sermo.com) for the entire study, e.g. 9 to 10 days. The simplest trial is to have each patient on zinc vs. no zinc/placebo/vitamins on alternating periods of 2 to 5 days, and compare progress of symptoms between the zinc and no zinc periods. Larger groups of patients can be divided into two, which take turns getting high dose zinc (approx. 5 times the daily requirement, e.g. 220 mg zinc sulfate). It might be preferable to give a vitamin as a placebo, for instance 1000 mg Vit C or Vit D.
On enrollment of each patient, record age, gender, and any high-risk chronic conditions such as obesity, hypertension, diabetes… For outpatients, record their condition at the start and end of each period. Serum zinc should also be measured at these intervals if possible. When zinc level testing is not available, trials could eventually be done remotely, with self-reporting of symptoms and even mailing of follow-on tablets to patients.
Already after the first period the trend in condition can be compared between the zinc and no-zinc groups. After two or more periods, the change in condition with and without zinc can be compared more precisely for each patient.
This is a practical test that mirrors the usual way doctors proceed, trying different medications to see what works. At the same time, the design produces objective data that third parties can use to assess and validate the results.
The trial can be double blind in research hospitals, but need not be in private doctor's offices. A trial with zinc as the control and HCQ as the test variable may not be practical, due to the long half-life of HCQ. Instead, an OTC ionophore with a short half-life like Quercetin or perhaps Niacin could be used. This could be a suitable test where HCQ is contra-indicated.
It is intended for the trial design to be simple, inexpensive and flexible. It can be modified to suit, to assess the efficacy of different zinc compounds, different ionophores (for instance those not requiring a prescription), and compounding or complexing the zinc with its ionophore directly in tablets.
Assignment to first or second group can be randomized by alternating assignment to groups as patients come in. Higher-risk patients can be assigned to zinc in the first period and even kept on zinc if medically needed.
The design doesn't put any patient at a disadvantage by getting placebo only. This makes it more ethical and easier to recruit subjects. Patients continue on Standard of Care and their usual medications; HCQ and zinc are merely added to that. Ethical and regulatory issues are minimal, since no new drug is being developed. HCQ is on the WHO list of safe, essential medicines, but at intake an EKG may be given to allay concerns about rare instances of arrhythmia. Treatment should normally covered by insurance, and the extra effort of the trial format may be compensated by increased local goodwill for participating doctors.
The primary aim of the proposed trial model is not to maximize statistical rigor. It is a vehicle for hospitals and physicians to share their experiences with a promising therapy with each other and the community, and to validate or refute the claims for it, so as to help meet the challenges we face.
DATASET (Suggestions welcome. Contributors may make adjustments as needed)
Type of trial, e.g. crossover HCQ+zinc vs. HCQ+placebo.
Name of doctor or clinic if to be made public. Each contributor (participating doctor or clinic) may maintain a component section on the Field Trials project page. Since doctors are usually very busy, much of the trial busywork could be handled by nurses and clerical assistants.
SymptomsSymptoms: List of typical symptoms. For each symptom, mark a value from 0 for none to 4 for severe. This will facilitate evaluation of the course of disease between crossover points, and comparison between patients.
Medications. At-risk chronic conditions (required). Hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, obesity, and chronic respiratory disease. Anonymized: list only the number of conditions, not the names.
Gender and Age (required). Age can be anonymized by cohorts: 0-25, 26-50, 51-65, 66-75, >75
Zinc level(s), if possible, for HCQ+zinc trial.
Does patient consent to share above anonymized data, or full data. Participation in the crossover trial needs to be voluntary. If patient prefers maximum anonymity, then a few items like condition (mild, severe), crossover treatment and outcome still need to be reported on all cases for statistical validity.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Mon May 11, 2020 12:20 am Post subject:
Boris Johnson will tell UK to 'stay alert, control the virus and save lives' in new government coronavirus slogan
He will introduce a five-tier warning system to monitor the virus risk in Britain during an address tonight
Pressure for a large-scale loosening will be rejected by the PM as the government tweaks the lockdown
Garden centres will be given the green light to reopen from Wednesday with 'social distancing' rules in place
Once-a-day-rule on outdoor exercise set to be ditched and bigger focus on going to work where possible
There are concerns No 10's order to 'stay at home' had been too effective and damaged the UK economy
PM has come under fire from politicians and union leaders for 'mistake' and 'total joke' new 'stay alert' mantra
It comes as Britain recorded 346 coronavirus deaths yesterday, taking the country's death toll to 31,587
Here’s how to help people impacted by Covid-19
PROFESSOR Neil Ferguson, the Government's senior coronavirus science adviser, yesterday resigned after flouting his own advised lockdown rules - but it is not the first time the epidemiologist has made a serious blunder as adviser, with several other epidemics having been blown out of proportion through his work.
By JOEL DAY
PUBLISHED: 10:38, Wed, May 6, 2020 | UPDATED: 13:20, Wed, May 6, 2020
Neil Ferguson resigns from government advisory position
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Yesterday evening Professor Neil Ferguson, one of the Government’s most senior coronavirus science advisers and member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) resigned. It came after the Daily Telegraph revealed how the epidemiologist had broken his own lockdown rules by meeting with his married lover at his London flat.
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Prof Ferguson’s prediction models prompted Prime Minister Boris Johnson to enforce the current lockdown towards the end of March.
His modelling of the virus’ transmission suggested 250,000 people could die without drastic action.
Under the lockdown’s measures, people were told to go outside as little as possible.
Partners who live separately were later told they should "ideally" stay in their own homes.
Neil Ferguson latest: The UK government's senior coronavirus adviser yesterday evening resigned
Neil Ferguson latest: The UK government's senior coronavirus adviser yesterday evening resigned (Image: Imperial College London)
Coronavirus UK: Boris Johnson is yet to comment on the resignation
Coronavirus UK: Boris Johnson is yet to comment on the resignation (Image: GETTY)
In a statement, Prof Ferguson said: "I accept I made an error of judgement and took the wrong course of action.
"I have therefore stepped back from my involvement in SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies).
"I acted in the belief that I was immune, having tested positive for coronavirus and completely isolated myself for almost two weeks after developing symptoms.
"I deeply regret any undermining of the clear messages around the continued need for social distancing."
He also called the advice on social distancing "unequivocal", adding that it was there "to protect all of us".
JUST IN: Coronavirus adviser Neil Ferguson resigns for breaking lockdown rules
Coronavirus adviser: Prof Ferguson was the most prominent virus adviser alongside Chris Whitty
Coronavirus adviser: Prof Ferguson was the most prominent virus adviser alongside Chris Whitty (Image: GETTY)
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As it stands, nearly 30,000 people have died from coronavirus, with a further 200,000 confirmed cases.
Many credit Prof Ferguson’s initial 250,000 deaths figure and subsequent lockdown as having prevented further catastrophe.
However, attention has been drawn to his previously botched predictions concerning epidemics and virus outbreaks of the past.
For example, in 2001, he and his team at Imperial College produced prediction modelling on the UK’s foot and mouth outbreak.
Their work suggested animals in neighbouring farms should be culled, even if there was no evidence of infection.
Government policy soon took on board the modelling, leading to the subsequent culling of more than six million cattle, sheep, and pigs – a cost to the UK economy that totalled some £10billion.
Michael Thrusfield, professor of veterinary epidemiology at Edinburgh University, later claimed the model was “severely flawed” and the event a “serious error”.
Fast forward to 2002, Prof Ferguson predicted between 50 and 50,000 people would likely die as a result of exposure to mad cow disease (BSE) in beef.
He said the number could rise to 150,000 should there be an outbreak among sheep – there have since only been 177 deaths from BSE.
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Professor Ferguson news: The epidemiologist has made several prediction blunders in the past
Professor Ferguson news: The epidemiologist has made several prediction blunders in the past (Image: GETTY)
Dominic Cummings: The Guardian last week revealed how Cummings had been sitting in on SAGE meetings
Dominic Cummings: The Guardian last week revealed how Cummings had been sitting in on SAGE meetings (Image: GETTY)
Then, in 2005, Prof Ferguson said up to 200 million people could die from Bird Flu epidemic that broke out in South-East Asia.
In the end only 282 people died worldwide from the disease between 2003 and 2009.
Four years on, in 2009, he and his team at Imperial College predicted that the Swine Flu (N1H1) pandemic “reasonable worst-case scenario” in the UK would lead to 65,000 deaths, telling BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme that it would affect “about one-third of the world's population”.
As an adviser to both the Government and the emergency committee at the World Health Organisation (WHO) Prof Ferguson’s predictions were overtly influential, leading to the WHO declaring a pandemic level 6.
Eventually, Swine Flu went on to kill 457 people in the UK.
Many countries (and members of their press media) have marvelled at Sweden's relaxed strategy in the face of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic: schools and most workplaces have remained open, and police officers were not checking one's errands in the street. Severe critics have described it as Sweden sacrificing its (elderly) citizens to quickly reach herd immunity.1 The death toll has surpassed our three closest neighbours, Denmark, Norway, and Finland, but the mortality remains lower than in the UK, Spain, and Belgium.2
It has become clear that a hard lockdown does not protect old and frail people living in care homes—a population the lockdown was designed to protect.3 Neither does it decrease mortality from COVID-19, which is evident when comparing the UK's experience with that of other European countries.
• View related content for this article
PCR testing and some straightforward assumptions indicate that, as of April 29, 2020, more than half a million people in Stockholm county, Sweden, which is about 20–25% of the population, have been infected (Hansson D, Swedish Public Health Agency, personal communication). 98–99% of these people are probably unaware or uncertain of having had the infection; they either had symptoms that were severe, but not severe enough for them to go to a hospital and get tested, or no symptoms at all. Serology testing is now supporting these assumptions.4
These facts have led me to the following conclusions. Everyone will be exposed to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, and most people will become infected. COVID-19 is spreading like wildfire in all countries, but we do not see it—it almost always spreads from younger people with no or weak symptoms to other people who will also have mild symptoms. This is the real pandemic, but it goes on beneath the surface, and is probably at its peak now in many European countries. There is very little we can do to prevent this spread: a lockdown might delay severe cases for a while, but once restrictions are eased, cases will reappear. I expect that when we count the number of deaths from COVID-19 in each country in 1 year from now, the figures will be similar, regardless of measures taken.
Measures to flatten the curve might have an effect, but a lockdown only pushes the severe cases into the future —it will not prevent them. Admittedly, countries have managed to slow down spread so as not to overburden health-care systems, and, yes, effective drugs that save lives might soon be developed, but this pandemic is swift, and those drugs have to be developed, tested, and marketed quickly. Much hope is put in vaccines, but they will take time, and with the unclear protective immunological response to infection, it is not certain that vaccines will be very effective.
In summary, COVID-19 is a disease that is highly infectious and spreads rapidly through society. It is often quite symptomless and might pass unnoticed, but it also causes severe disease, and even death, in a proportion of the population, and our most important task is not to stop spread, which is all but futile, but to concentrate on giving the unfortunate victims optimal care.
I declare no competing interests.
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Article Info
Publication History
Published: May 05, 2020
Identification
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)31035-7
Published on 4 Apr 2020
Coronavirus Video Two
Dr Vernon Coleman reveals facts about the coronavirus which bring into question government policies on dealing with the disease.
For unbiased truths visit http://www.vernoncoleman.com _________________ --
'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."
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.14320.40967/1
Projects: Science reviews relevant to COVID-19I'm trying to know how the world works, the foundational elements
D. G. Rancourt
Abstract
Masks and respirators do not work. There have been extensive randomized controlled trial (RCT) studies, and meta-analysis reviews of RCT studies, which all show that masks and respirators do not work to prevent respiratory influenza-like illnesses, or respiratory illnesses believed to be transmitted by droplets and aerosol particles. Furthermore, the relevant known physics and biology, which I review, are such that masks and respirators should not work. It would be a paradox if masks and respirators worked, given what we know about viral respiratory diseases: The main transmission path is long-residence-time aerosol particles (< 2.5 μm), which are too fine to be blocked, and the minimum-infective-dose is smaller than one aerosol particle. The present paper about masks illustrates the degree to which governments, the mainstream media, and institutional propagandists can decide to operate in a science vacuum, or select only incomplete science that serves their interests. Such recklessness is also certainly the case with the current global lockdown of over 1 billion people, an unprecedented experiment in medical and political history. _________________ --
'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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