What’s going on in the fifth largest economy in the world arguably points to a major collusion scandal in which the French government is helping Big Pharma to profit from the expansion of Covid-19. Informed French citizens are absolutely furious about it.
My initial question to a serious, unimpeachable Paris source, jurist Valerie Bugault, was about the liaisons dangereuses between Macronism and Big Pharma and especially about the mysterious “disappearance” – more likely outright theft – of all the stocks of chloroquine in possession of the French government.
Respected Professor Christian Perronne talked about the theft live in one of France’s 24/7 info channels: “The central pharmacy for the hospitals announced today that they were facing a total rupture of stocks, that they were pillaged.”
With input from another, anonymous source, it’s now possible to establish a timeline that puts in much-needed perspective the recent actions of the French government.
Let’s start with Yves Levy, who was the head of INSERM – the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research – from 2014 to 2018, when he was appointed as extraordinary state councilor for the Macron administration. Only 12 people in France have reached this status.
Levy is married to Agnes Buzy, who until recently was minister of health under Macron. Buzy was essentially presented with an “offer you can’t refuse” by Macron’s party to leave the ministry – in the middle of the coronavirus crisis – and run for Mayor of Paris, where she was mercilessly trounced in the first round on March 16.
Levy has a vicious running feud with Professor Didier Raoult – prolific and often-cited Marseille-based specialist in communicable diseases. Levy withheld the INSERM label from the world-renowned IHU (Hospital-University Institute) research center directed by Raoult.
In practice, in October 2019, Levy revoked the status of “foundation” of the different IHUs so he could take over their research.
French professor Didier Raoult, biologist and professor of microbiology, specializes in infectious diseases and director of IHU Mediterranee Infection Institute, poses in his office in Marseille, France. Photo: AFP/Gerard Julien
Raoult was part of a clinical trial that in which hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin healed 90% of Covid-19 cases if they were tested very early. (Early, massive testing is at the heart of the successful South Korean strategy.)
Raoult is opposed to the total lockdown of sane individuals and possible carriers – which he considers “medieval,” in an anachronistic sense. He’s in favor of massive testing (which, besides South Korea, was successful in Singapore, Taiwan and Vietnam) and a fast treatment with hydroxychloroquine. Only contaminated individuals should be confined.
Chloroquine costs one euro for ten pills. And there’s the rub: Big Pharma – which, crucially, finances INSERM, and includes “national champion” Sanofi – would rather go for a way more profitable solution. Sanofi for the moment says it is “actively preparing” to produce chloroquine, but that may take “weeks,” and there’s no mention about pricing.
A minister fleeing a tsunami
Here’s the timeline:
On January 13, Agnes Buzyn, still France’s Health Minister, classifies chloroquine as a “poisonous substance,” from now on only available by prescription. An astonishing move, considering that it has been sold off the shelf in France for half a century.
On March 16, the Macron government orders a partial lockdown. There’s not a peep about chloroquine. Police initially are not required to wear masks; most have been stolen anyway, and there are not enough masks even for health workers. In 2011 France had nearly 1.5 billion masks: 800 million surgical masks and 600 million masks for health professionals generally.
But then, over the years, the strategic stocks were not renewed, to please the EU and to apply the Maastricht criteria, which limited membership in the Growth and Stability Pact to countries whose budget deficits did not exceed 3% of GDP. One of those in charge at the time was Jerome Salomon, now a scientific counselor to the Macron government.
On March 17, Agnes Buzyn says she has learned the spread of Covid-19 will be a major tsunami, for which the French health system has no solution. She also says it had been her understanding that the Paris mayoral election “would not take place” and that it was, ultimately, “a masquerade.”
What she does not say is that she didn’t go public at the time she was running because the whole political focus by the Macron political machine was on winning the “masquerade.” The first round of the election meant nothing, as Covid-19 was advancing. The second round was postponed indefinitely. She had to know about the impending healthcare disaster. But as a candidate of the Macron machine she did not go public in timely fashion.
In quick succession:
The Macron government refuses to apply mass testing, as practiced with success in South Korea and Germany.
Le Monde and the French state health agency characterize Raoult’s research as fake news, before issuing a retraction.
Professor Perrone reveals on the 24/7 LCI news channel that the stock of chloroquine at the French central pharmacy has been stolen.
Thanks to a tweet by Elon Musk, President Trump says chloroquine should be available to all Americans. Sufferers of lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, who already have supply problems with the only drug that offers them relief, set social media afire with their panic.
US doctors and other medical professionals take to hoarding the medicine for the use of themselves and those close to them, faking prescriptions to indicate they are for patients with lupus or rheumatoid arthritis.
Morocco buys the stock of chloroquine from Sanofi in Casablanca.
Pakistan decides to increase its production of chloroquine to be sent to China.
Switzerland discards the total lockdown of its population; goes for mass testing and fast treatment; and accuses France of practicing “spectacle politics.”
Christian Estrosi, the mayor of Nice, having had himself treated with chloroquine, without any government input, directly calls Sanofi so they may deliver chloroquine to Nice hospitals.
Because of Raoult’s research, a large-scale chloroquine test finally starts in France, under the – predictable – direction of INSERM, which wants to “remake the experiments in other independent medical centers.” This will take at least an extra six weeks – as the Elysee Palace’s scientific council now mulls the extension of France’s total lockdown to … six weeks.
If joint use of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin proves definitely effective among the most gravely ill, quarantines may be reduced in select clusters.
The only French company that still manufactures chloroquine is under judicial intervention. That puts the chloroquine hoarding and theft into full perspective. It will take time for these stocks to be replenished, thus allowing Big Pharma the leeway to have what it wants: a costly solution.
It appears the perpetrators of the chloroquine theft were very well informed.
Bagged nurses
This chain of events, astonishing for a highly developed G-7 nation proud of its health service, is part of a long, painful process embedded in neoliberal dogma. EU-driven austerity mixed with the profit motive resulted in a very lax attitude towards the health system.
As Bugault told me, “test kits – very few in number – were always available but mostly for a small group connected to the French government [ former officials of the Ministry of Finance, CEOs of large corporations, oligarchs, media and entertainment moguls]. Same for chloroquine, which this government did everything to make inaccessible for the population.
They did not make life easy for Professor Raoult – he received death threats and was intimidated by ‘journalists.’
And they did not protect vital stocks. Still under the Hollande government, there was a conscious liquidation of the stock of masks – which had existed in large quantities in all hospitals. Not to mention that the suppression of hospital beds and hospital means accelerated under Sarkozy.”
This ties in with anguished reports by French citizens of nurses now having to use trash bags due to the lack of proper medical gear.
At the same time, in another astonishing development, the French state refuses to requisition private hospitals and clinics – which are practically empty at this stage – even as the president of their own association, Lamine Garbi, has pleaded for such a public service initiative: “I solemnly demand that we are requisitioned to help public hospitals. Our facilities are prepared. The wave that surprised the east of France must teach us a lesson.”
Bugault reconfirms the health situation in France “is very serious and will become even worse due to these political decisions – absence of masks, political refusal to massively test people, refusal of free access to chloroquine – in a context of supreme distress at the hospitals. This will last and destitution will be the norm.”
Professor vs president
In an explosive development on Tuesday, Raoult said he’s not participating in Macron’s scientific council anymore, even though he’s not quitting it altogether. Raoult once again insists on massive testing on a national scale to detect suspected cases, and then isolate and treat patients who tested positive. In a nutshell: the South Korean model.
That’s exactly what is expected from the IHU in Marseille, where hundreds of residents continue to queue up for testing. And that ties in with the conclusions by a top Chinese expert on Covid-19, Zhang Nanshan, who says that treatment with chloroquine phospate had a “positive impact,” with patients testing negative after around four days.
The key point has been stressed by Raoult: Use chloroquine in very special circumstances, for people tested very early, when the disease is not advanced yet, and only in these cases. He’s not advocating chloroquine for everyone. It’s exactly what the Chinese did, along with their use of Interferon.
For years, Raoult has been pleading for a drastic revision of health economic models, so the treatments, cure and therapies created mostly during the 20th century, are considered a patrimony in the service of all humanity.“That’s not the case”, he says, “because we abandon medicine that is not profitable, even if it’s effective. That’s why almost no antibiotics are manufactured in the West.”
On Tuesday, the French Health Ministry officially prohibited the utilization of treatment based on chloroquine recommended by Raoult. In fact the treatment is only allowed for terminal Covid-19 patients, with no other possibility of healing. This cannot but expose the Macron government to more accusations of at least inefficiency – added to the absence of masks, tests, contact tracing and ventilators.
On Wednesday, commenting on the new government guidelines, Raoult said, “When damage to the lungs is too important, and patients arrive for reanimation, they practically do not harbor viruses in their bodies any more. It’s too late to treat them with chloroquine. Are these the only cases – the very serious cases – that will be treated with chloroquine under the new directive by [French Health Minister] Veran?” If so, he added ironically, “then they will be able to say with scientific certainty that chloroquine does not work.”
Raoult was unavailable for comment on Western news media articles citing Chinese test results that would suggest he is wrong about the efficacy of chloroquine in dealing with mild cases of Covid-19.
Staffers pointed instead to his comments in the IHU bulletin. There Raoult says it’s “insulting” to ask if we can trust the Chinese on the use of chloroquine. “If this was an American disease, and the president of the United States said, ‘We need to treat patients with that,’ nobody would discuss it.”
In China, he adds, there were “enough elements so the Chinese government and all Chinese experts who know coronaviruses took an official position that ‘we must treat with chloroquine.’ Between the moment when we have the first results and an accepted international publication, there is no credible alternative among people who are the most knowledgeable in the world. They took this measure in the interest of public health.”
Crucially: if he had coronavirus, Raoult says he would take chloroquine. Since Raoult is rated by his peers as the number one world expert in communicable diseases, way above Dr. Anthony Fauci in the US, I would say the new reports represent Big Pharma talking.
Raoult has been mercilessly savaged and demonized by French corporate media that are controlled by a few oligarchs closely linked to Macronism. Not by accident the demonization has reached gilets jaunes (yellow vest) levels, especially because of the extremely popular hashtag #IlsSavaient (“They knew”), with which the yellow vests stress that French elites have “managed” the Covid-19 crisis by protecting themselves while leaving the population defenseless against the virus.
That ties in with the controversial analysis by crack philosopher Giorgio Agamben in a column published a month ago, where he was already arguing that Covid-19 clearly shows that the state of exception – similar to a state of emergency but with differences important to philosophers – has become fully normalized in the West.
Agamben was speaking not as a doctor or a virologist but as a master thinker, following in the steps of Foucault, Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt. Noting how a latent state of fear has metastasized into a state of collective panic, for which Covid-19 “offers once again the ideal pretext,” he described how, “in a perverse vicious circle, the limitation of freedom imposed by governments is accepted in the name of a desire for security that was induced by the same governments that now intervene to satisfy it.”
There was no state of collective panic in South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Vietnam – to mention four Asian examples outside of China. A dogged combination of mass testing and contact tracing was applied with immense professionalism. It worked. In the Chinese case, with the help of chloroquine. And in all Asian cases, without a murky profit motive to the benefit of Big Pharma.
According to the Law, China is to implement a state immunization program, and residents living within the territory of China are legally obligated to be vaccinated with immunization program vaccines, which are provided by the government free of charge.
China: Vaccine Law Passed
(Aug. 27, 2019) On June 29, 2019, the National People’s Congress Standing Committee of the People’s Republic of China (PRC or China) adopted the PRC Law on Vaccine Administration (Vaccine Law). The official Xinhua news agency states that the Law provides for the “strictest” vaccine management with tough penalties in order to ensure the country’s vaccine safety.
https://www.loc.gov/law/foreign-news/article/china-vaccine-law-passed/
The global crackdown on parents who refuse vaccines for their kids is on
Countries like Germany and Australia are tired of measles outbreaks — so they're moving to fine anti-vaccine parents.
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/8/3/16069204/vaccine-fines -measles-outbreaks-europe-australia
Here’s a quick roundup of the global crackdown on vaccine-refusing parents:
In Germany on Thursday, lawmakers passed a law stating that parents need to prove they’ve vaccinated their kids against measles — or risk fines up to €2,500 (about $2,750). Unvaccinated children also risk losing their places in school.
Italy’s parliament passed a law that makes 10 childhood vaccinations mandatory for kids up to age 16, and requires parents to prove their children are immunized before entering school or else face a €500 (about $560) noncompliance fine. And kids who aren’t vaccinated are being told not to come to school.
In France, the health ministry made 11 vaccines — up from the current three (diphtheria, tetanus, and polio) — mandatory for children, though there’s no talk of a fine yet.
Further afield, New South Wales, Australia, passed “no jab, no play” legislation in September 2017: The law bans unvaccinated kids from preschool and day care and fine the directors of schools that admit un-immunized children $5,500 Australian dollars ($4,400). The law in New South Wales is modeled on similarly stringent laws in other Australian states, and across the country, parents with children who aren’t immunized aren’t eligible for child care benefits.
In the US, New York — where a large measles outbreak raged on for nearly a year — the government threatened parents who don’t vaccinate their children with a fine of up to $1,000.
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/8/3/16069204/vaccine-fines -measles-outbreaks-europe-australia
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Thu Oct 15, 2020 11:33 pm Post subject: Re: Smoking Guns of Covid-19 or SARS-CoV-2 Plandemic
More on smoking gun #1
Fake Lancet report which halted chloroquine Covid-19 trials is retracted
Desai has been named in three medical malpractice suits, unrelated to the Surgisphere database. In an interview with the Scientist, Desai previously described the allegations as “unfounded”.
Surgisphere, whose employees appear to include a sci-fi writer and adult content model, provided database behind Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine hydroxychloroquine studies
Melissa Davey in Melbourne and Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Washington and Sarah Boseley in London
Wed 3 Jun 2020 19.47 BSTFirst published on Wed 3 Jun 2020 11.54 BST
A tiny US company, Surgisphere, is behind flawed data which led to governments and the world health organisation changing health policy
A tiny US company, Surgisphere, is behind flawed data which led to governments and the world health organisation changing health policy Photograph: Anthony Brown/Alamy Stock Photo
The World Health Organization and a number of national governments have changed their Covid-19 policies and treatments on the basis of flawed data from a little-known US healthcare analytics company, also calling into question the integrity of key studies published in some of the world’s most prestigious medical journals.
A Guardian investigation can reveal the US-based company Surgisphere, whose handful of employees appear to include a science fiction writer and an adult-content model, has provided data for multiple studies on Covid-19 co-authored by its chief executive, but has so far failed to adequately explain its data or methodology.
Data it claims to have legitimately obtained from more than a thousand hospitals worldwide formed the basis of scientific articles that have led to changes in Covid-19 treatment policies in Latin American countries. It was also behind a decision by the WHO and research institutes around the world to halt trials of the controversial drug hydroxychloroquine. On Wednesday, the WHO announced those trials would now resume.
Two of the world’s leading medical journals – the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine – published studies based on Surgisphere data. The studies were co-authored by the firm’s chief executive, Sapan Desai.
Late on Tuesday, after being approached by the Guardian, the Lancet released an “expression of concern” about its published study. The New England Journal of Medicine has also issued a similar notice.
An independent audit of the provenance and validity of the data has now been commissioned by the authors not affiliated with Surgisphere because of “concerns that have been raised about the reliability of the database”.
Questions raised over hydroxychloroquine study which caused WHO to halt trials for Covid-19
Read more
The Guardian’s investigation has found:
A search of publicly available material suggests several of Surgisphere’s employees have little or no data or scientific background. An employee listed as a science editor appears to be a science fiction author and fantasy artist whose professional profile suggests writing is her fulltime job. Another employee listed as a marketing executive is an adult model and events hostess, who also acts in videos for organisations.
The company’s LinkedIn page has fewer than 100 followers and last week listed just six employees. This was changed to three employees as of Wednesday.
While Surgisphere claims to run one of the largest and fastest hospital databases in the world, it has almost no online presence. Its Twitter handle has fewer than 170 followers, with no posts between October 2017 and March 2020.
Until Monday, the “get in touch” link on Surgisphere’s homepage redirected to a WordPress template for a cryptocurrency website, raising questions about how hospitals could easily contact the company to join its database.
Desai has been named in three medical malpractice suits, unrelated to the Surgisphere database. In an interview with the Scientist, Desai previously described the allegations as “unfounded”.
TonyGosling wrote:
SMOKING GUN #1
FRANCE WITHDREW SARS CURE CHLOROQUINE FROM SALE ON MONDAY 13 JANUARY
What’s going on in the fifth largest economy in the world arguably points to a major collusion scandal in which the French government is helping Big Pharma to profit from the expansion of Covid-19. Informed French citizens are absolutely furious about it.
My initial question to a serious, unimpeachable Paris source, jurist Valerie Bugault, was about the liaisons dangereuses between Macronism and Big Pharma and especially about the mysterious “disappearance” – more likely outright theft – of all the stocks of chloroquine in possession of the French government.
Respected Professor Christian Perronne talked about the theft live in one of France’s 24/7 info channels: “The central pharmacy for the hospitals announced today that they were facing a total rupture of stocks, that they were pillaged.”
With input from another, anonymous source, it’s now possible to establish a timeline that puts in much-needed perspective the recent actions of the French government.
Let’s start with Yves Levy, who was the head of INSERM – the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research – from 2014 to 2018, when he was appointed as extraordinary state councilor for the Macron administration. Only 12 people in France have reached this status.
Levy is married to Agnes Buzy, who until recently was minister of health under Macron. Buzy was essentially presented with an “offer you can’t refuse” by Macron’s party to leave the ministry – in the middle of the coronavirus crisis – and run for Mayor of Paris, where she was mercilessly trounced in the first round on March 16.
Levy has a vicious running feud with Professor Didier Raoult – prolific and often-cited Marseille-based specialist in communicable diseases. Levy withheld the INSERM label from the world-renowned IHU (Hospital-University Institute) research center directed by Raoult.
In practice, in October 2019, Levy revoked the status of “foundation” of the different IHUs so he could take over their research.
French professor Didier Raoult, biologist and professor of microbiology, specializes in infectious diseases and director of IHU Mediterranee Infection Institute, poses in his office in Marseille, France. Photo: AFP/Gerard Julien
Raoult was part of a clinical trial that in which hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin healed 90% of Covid-19 cases if they were tested very early. (Early, massive testing is at the heart of the successful South Korean strategy.)
Raoult is opposed to the total lockdown of sane individuals and possible carriers – which he considers “medieval,” in an anachronistic sense. He’s in favor of massive testing (which, besides South Korea, was successful in Singapore, Taiwan and Vietnam) and a fast treatment with hydroxychloroquine. Only contaminated individuals should be confined.
Chloroquine costs one euro for ten pills. And there’s the rub: Big Pharma – which, crucially, finances INSERM, and includes “national champion” Sanofi – would rather go for a way more profitable solution. Sanofi for the moment says it is “actively preparing” to produce chloroquine, but that may take “weeks,” and there’s no mention about pricing.
A minister fleeing a tsunami
Here’s the timeline:
On January 13, Agnes Buzyn, still France’s Health Minister, classifies chloroquine as a “poisonous substance,” from now on only available by prescription. An astonishing move, considering that it has been sold off the shelf in France for half a century.
On March 16, the Macron government orders a partial lockdown. There’s not a peep about chloroquine. Police initially are not required to wear masks; most have been stolen anyway, and there are not enough masks even for health workers. In 2011 France had nearly 1.5 billion masks: 800 million surgical masks and 600 million masks for health professionals generally.
But then, over the years, the strategic stocks were not renewed, to please the EU and to apply the Maastricht criteria, which limited membership in the Growth and Stability Pact to countries whose budget deficits did not exceed 3% of GDP. One of those in charge at the time was Jerome Salomon, now a scientific counselor to the Macron government.
On March 17, Agnes Buzyn says she has learned the spread of Covid-19 will be a major tsunami, for which the French health system has no solution. She also says it had been her understanding that the Paris mayoral election “would not take place” and that it was, ultimately, “a masquerade.”
What she does not say is that she didn’t go public at the time she was running because the whole political focus by the Macron political machine was on winning the “masquerade.” The first round of the election meant nothing, as Covid-19 was advancing. The second round was postponed indefinitely. She had to know about the impending healthcare disaster. But as a candidate of the Macron machine she did not go public in timely fashion.
In quick succession:
The Macron government refuses to apply mass testing, as practiced with success in South Korea and Germany.
Le Monde and the French state health agency characterize Raoult’s research as fake news, before issuing a retraction.
Professor Perrone reveals on the 24/7 LCI news channel that the stock of chloroquine at the French central pharmacy has been stolen.
Thanks to a tweet by Elon Musk, President Trump says chloroquine should be available to all Americans. Sufferers of lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, who already have supply problems with the only drug that offers them relief, set social media afire with their panic.
US doctors and other medical professionals take to hoarding the medicine for the use of themselves and those close to them, faking prescriptions to indicate they are for patients with lupus or rheumatoid arthritis.
Morocco buys the stock of chloroquine from Sanofi in Casablanca.
Pakistan decides to increase its production of chloroquine to be sent to China.
Switzerland discards the total lockdown of its population; goes for mass testing and fast treatment; and accuses France of practicing “spectacle politics.”
Christian Estrosi, the mayor of Nice, having had himself treated with chloroquine, without any government input, directly calls Sanofi so they may deliver chloroquine to Nice hospitals.
Because of Raoult’s research, a large-scale chloroquine test finally starts in France, under the – predictable – direction of INSERM, which wants to “remake the experiments in other independent medical centers.” This will take at least an extra six weeks – as the Elysee Palace’s scientific council now mulls the extension of France’s total lockdown to … six weeks.
If joint use of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin proves definitely effective among the most gravely ill, quarantines may be reduced in select clusters.
The only French company that still manufactures chloroquine is under judicial intervention. That puts the chloroquine hoarding and theft into full perspective. It will take time for these stocks to be replenished, thus allowing Big Pharma the leeway to have what it wants: a costly solution.
It appears the perpetrators of the chloroquine theft were very well informed.
Bagged nurses
This chain of events, astonishing for a highly developed G-7 nation proud of its health service, is part of a long, painful process embedded in neoliberal dogma. EU-driven austerity mixed with the profit motive resulted in a very lax attitude towards the health system.
As Bugault told me, “test kits – very few in number – were always available but mostly for a small group connected to the French government [ former officials of the Ministry of Finance, CEOs of large corporations, oligarchs, media and entertainment moguls]. Same for chloroquine, which this government did everything to make inaccessible for the population.
They did not make life easy for Professor Raoult – he received death threats and was intimidated by ‘journalists.’
And they did not protect vital stocks. Still under the Hollande government, there was a conscious liquidation of the stock of masks – which had existed in large quantities in all hospitals. Not to mention that the suppression of hospital beds and hospital means accelerated under Sarkozy.”
This ties in with anguished reports by French citizens of nurses now having to use trash bags due to the lack of proper medical gear.
At the same time, in another astonishing development, the French state refuses to requisition private hospitals and clinics – which are practically empty at this stage – even as the president of their own association, Lamine Garbi, has pleaded for such a public service initiative: “I solemnly demand that we are requisitioned to help public hospitals. Our facilities are prepared. The wave that surprised the east of France must teach us a lesson.”
Bugault reconfirms the health situation in France “is very serious and will become even worse due to these political decisions – absence of masks, political refusal to massively test people, refusal of free access to chloroquine – in a context of supreme distress at the hospitals. This will last and destitution will be the norm.”
Professor vs president
In an explosive development on Tuesday, Raoult said he’s not participating in Macron’s scientific council anymore, even though he’s not quitting it altogether. Raoult once again insists on massive testing on a national scale to detect suspected cases, and then isolate and treat patients who tested positive. In a nutshell: the South Korean model.
That’s exactly what is expected from the IHU in Marseille, where hundreds of residents continue to queue up for testing. And that ties in with the conclusions by a top Chinese expert on Covid-19, Zhang Nanshan, who says that treatment with chloroquine phospate had a “positive impact,” with patients testing negative after around four days.
The key point has been stressed by Raoult: Use chloroquine in very special circumstances, for people tested very early, when the disease is not advanced yet, and only in these cases. He’s not advocating chloroquine for everyone. It’s exactly what the Chinese did, along with their use of Interferon.
For years, Raoult has been pleading for a drastic revision of health economic models, so the treatments, cure and therapies created mostly during the 20th century, are considered a patrimony in the service of all humanity.“That’s not the case”, he says, “because we abandon medicine that is not profitable, even if it’s effective. That’s why almost no antibiotics are manufactured in the West.”
On Tuesday, the French Health Ministry officially prohibited the utilization of treatment based on chloroquine recommended by Raoult. In fact the treatment is only allowed for terminal Covid-19 patients, with no other possibility of healing. This cannot but expose the Macron government to more accusations of at least inefficiency – added to the absence of masks, tests, contact tracing and ventilators.
On Wednesday, commenting on the new government guidelines, Raoult said, “When damage to the lungs is too important, and patients arrive for reanimation, they practically do not harbor viruses in their bodies any more. It’s too late to treat them with chloroquine. Are these the only cases – the very serious cases – that will be treated with chloroquine under the new directive by [French Health Minister] Veran?” If so, he added ironically, “then they will be able to say with scientific certainty that chloroquine does not work.”
Raoult was unavailable for comment on Western news media articles citing Chinese test results that would suggest he is wrong about the efficacy of chloroquine in dealing with mild cases of Covid-19.
Staffers pointed instead to his comments in the IHU bulletin. There Raoult says it’s “insulting” to ask if we can trust the Chinese on the use of chloroquine. “If this was an American disease, and the president of the United States said, ‘We need to treat patients with that,’ nobody would discuss it.”
In China, he adds, there were “enough elements so the Chinese government and all Chinese experts who know coronaviruses took an official position that ‘we must treat with chloroquine.’ Between the moment when we have the first results and an accepted international publication, there is no credible alternative among people who are the most knowledgeable in the world. They took this measure in the interest of public health.”
Crucially: if he had coronavirus, Raoult says he would take chloroquine. Since Raoult is rated by his peers as the number one world expert in communicable diseases, way above Dr. Anthony Fauci in the US, I would say the new reports represent Big Pharma talking.
Raoult has been mercilessly savaged and demonized by French corporate media that are controlled by a few oligarchs closely linked to Macronism. Not by accident the demonization has reached gilets jaunes (yellow vest) levels, especially because of the extremely popular hashtag #IlsSavaient (“They knew”), with which the yellow vests stress that French elites have “managed” the Covid-19 crisis by protecting themselves while leaving the population defenseless against the virus.
That ties in with the controversial analysis by crack philosopher Giorgio Agamben in a column published a month ago, where he was already arguing that Covid-19 clearly shows that the state of exception – similar to a state of emergency but with differences important to philosophers – has become fully normalized in the West.
Agamben was speaking not as a doctor or a virologist but as a master thinker, following in the steps of Foucault, Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt. Noting how a latent state of fear has metastasized into a state of collective panic, for which Covid-19 “offers once again the ideal pretext,” he described how, “in a perverse vicious circle, the limitation of freedom imposed by governments is accepted in the name of a desire for security that was induced by the same governments that now intervene to satisfy it.”
There was no state of collective panic in South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Vietnam – to mention four Asian examples outside of China. A dogged combination of mass testing and contact tracing was applied with immense professionalism. It worked. In the Chinese case, with the help of chloroquine. And in all Asian cases, without a murky profit motive to the benefit of Big Pharma.
There hasn’t yet appeared the smoking gun that proves the Macron system not only is incompetent to deal with Covid-19 but also is dragging the process so Big Pharma can come up with a miracle vaccine, fast. But the pattern to discourage chloroquine is more than laid out above – in parallel to the demonization of Raoult.
So
USING Plandemic to push mRNA vaccine through
Human Gene Editing vaccine
Under EMERGENCY legislation!
another smoking gun
Transcript Interview with Tony Gosling and Stanley Laham November 2020
How Does New mRNA Pfizer Moderna Vaccine work? Immunologist Dr. Stanley Laham University of Florida.
This YouTube clip opens with an image from National Geographic from July 2020 showing an illustration and the wording: “Moderna’s mRNA vaccine reaches its final phase. Here’s how it works.
It WRONGLY says. “Spike proteins coat the surface of the VIRUS” (implying mRNA vaccine is producing viruses with the spike proteins on, instead of tricking our living cells into producing the spike proteins direct. It should be CORRECTED to read “Spike proteins coat the surface of the CELL”.
NOTES & ABBREVIATIONS:
• Messenger RNA (mRNA) copies portions of genetic code, a process called transcription, and transports these copies to ribosomes, which are the cellular factories that facilitate the production of proteins from this code.
RNA (Ribonucleic Acid)
DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid)
RT (Reverse Transcriptase)
PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction)
CRISPR (Clusters of Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) invented by Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier
HCQ (Hydroxychloroquine)
SLE (Systemic Lupus Erythematosus)
SARS (Severe Advanced Respiratory Syndrome)
GBS (Guillain-Barre Syndrome)
Dr Stanley Laham:
My name is Stanley Laham. I am speaking to you from Florida. I attained my Doctorate from the Department of Immunology and Molecular Genetics at the University of Florida, and my doctoral dissertation was the discovery of a previously unknown virus of the Retroviridae family.
Tony Gosling:
And where did you spend most of your career?
SL: Most of my career was a scientific career at the University of Florida and then after that I spent most of my time in private enterprise. I attained my PhD in 1978. My doctoral dissertation was the discovery of a new virus of the Retroviridae family, which is the same as HIV, the double-stranded RNA viruses that have Reverse Transcriptase in them, but of a different sub family. So, you could say, I do have a medical background.
TG: Ok, so how might the vaccines now being released be different to previous types of vaccine?
SL: Now, there are about 4 different vaccines that are being approved for use.
TG: What about types? Are they all the same type?
SL: No, they’re not, and the ones that I am most concerned about are the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines because they are using a novel technique. What they are doing is taking the messenger RNA from the Covid-19, what we call the SARS Corona 2 virus, that codes for the spike protein, which is what attaches to cells and allows the corona virus to penetrate into the cells and they’re injecting it directly into the public. This is basically what their vaccine is. What they’re hoping, what they’re doing and what they’ve had results with, is that our own cells will take that mRNA and make the spike protein. The spike protein will migrate to the membrane of our cells, our immune system will recognize it as a foreign antigen and mount an immune response and make antibodies. B-cells will make antibodies and T-cells will be activated to destroy the cells that are showing this antigen, and that’s the danger with that new technique, because this mRNA will be translated into protein (the process of going from Messenger RNA to protein is called Translation), but it also may be incorporated into our own DNA by the enzyme called Reverse Transcriptase, which can incorporate the RNA that we receive, transform it into DNA, and insert it into our own genomes. This way our cells are not only producing the spike protein from the mRNA piece that will gradually disintegrate, but keep producing it because it has been incorporated into our own cell DNA through Reverse Transcriptase, and what I’m afraid of is that it may cause long-term auto-immune disease. We’ve seen many examples of cases like that such as chronic hepatitis where the virus can no longer be detected, but the viral antigen is still showing up on the membrane of liver cells and we mount an immune response and we effectively destroy our own liver.
There are other vaccines that are coming out which I think would be a much better idea. As far as I’m concerned, I would probably not take the mRNA of either Pfizer or Moderna, because this is the first time such things are being used and the long-term consequences that may way outlast the corona epidemic are not known. Do you see what I mean?
TG: Yes, so can you just give us an idea and take us through again what can go wrong with this kind of vaccine? How is it that your body starts to actually reproduce something that you set out to get rid of, and what effect is that going to have if it happens on someone’s life as they move towards middle and old age?
SL: Well, like I said, the main danger is that it may create some other immune diseases. A lot of our cells that will incorporate this mRNA will become recognized as foreign by our immune system. There is no guarantee that once you get that vaccine which cells and which organs will become that RNA and start producing the viral antigen. So, because of that, it’s a big unknown.
Take the example of polio vaccines. Two polio vaccines were developed: the Salt vaccine and the Sabine vaccine. They were tested for years even though they are very conventional vaccines. One was a dead virus, the Salt vaccine, and the Sabine vaccine was an attenuated vaccine, which was given when we were kids on a piece of sugar and we ingested it.
This is what now , for example, the Russian vaccine, the Sputnik V, has more or less replicated. It has been done by taking the same piece of mRNA that Moderna and Pfizer are proposing to inject into us directly, and instead have used Reverse Transcriptase to incorporate it into a harmless human adenovirus and that becomes the vaccine, so we get infected with that adenovirus which causes extremely mild symptoms. That adenovirus will make its own proteins but also that corona spike protein, because it’s been engineered to do that, and it’s not our own bodies that has to do that spike protein, and I think that’s a safer path to a vaccine for Covid-19.
Another company that’s doing the exact same thing is Johnson & Johnson. They’re using adenovirus 5 to make a vaccine incorporating the corona spike gene into an adenovirus just like the Russians. That would be a safe vaccine. Well, let me put it this way, a safer vaccine.
In Australia there’s a company called Novavax that is producing a vaccine that will be known as NVX-CoV2373. What they’ve done is even simpler. They’ve purified the spike protein of the corona virus, so it’s just the protein, and they’ve attached it to an adjuvant. An adjuvant is an immune stimulator to make the spike protein more antigenic, so that our body reacts even more strongly against it, and that is their vaccine, so we’ll be making antibodies to the receptor sites of the corona virus. The only disadvantage to that one is that it may not produce as strong an immune response as let’s say that of the Russian or the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
TG: Some of the terms you’re using are a bit complicated. I wonder if you could explain them a bit more. This idea of Reverse Transcriptase is one of them and this concept of having the spike, the protein spike, so can you explain a little bit further what you mean by those two terms?
SL: Ok, well Reverse Transcriptase is an enzyme that was discovered by Howard Temin and David Baltimore back in 1976. Well no, they got the Nobel Prize for it back then, but they discovered it in the early 70s. I guess I would have to give you a small course in genetics. You know, our genetic material is DNA and this DNA codes for protein and it codes it to go from DNA to protein and to do this you have to use mRNA and this is elaborated by an enzyme called DNA-dependent/RNA-polymerase and this mRNA goes into the ribosome of our cells and codes for all the different proteins that we make. Reverse Transcriptase does the contrary. It reads RNA and makes the complementary DNA for that RNA. That’s why they call it Reverse Transcriptase because going from DNA to RNA is called Transcription.
There are a lot of viruses that are DNA viruses and there are a lot of viruses that are RNA viruses. Some of the RNA viruses go directly and reproduce RNA to RNA. Others go through DNA replicative stage and they carry their own Reverse Transcriptase. That is the case for HIV. HIV is two strands of RNA and a few enzymes in a capsule. When HIV gets into our cells, the Reverse Transcriptase that it carries transforms into DNA and this DNA has now become part of the cell that it has infected and the cell’s machinery reproduces the virus. Viruses cannot reproduce on their own. They are Obligate Intercellular Parasites because they don’t have a replicative mechanism. What they do is go into a cell and colonize it and use the cell’s machinery to reproduce themselves, until there’s enough in the cell, the cell (inaudible) and it is released into the bloodstream and it effects other cells and it’s a cascading effect.
Now, the Corona virus has its RNA. That RNA codes for its code, the code that it needs to go from cell to cell. In that code, or to be airborne or to infect somebody else, there is a spike and that spike is made out of a protein coded by its RNA. It codes for many other proteins also, but that spike protein is what attaches to cells and allows the virus to penetrate the cells. The mRNA that they’ve isolated from the genome from the RNA of the corona virus is that specific mRNA that codes for that spike protein on the surface of the corona virus, so if you make antibodies to it, you block it’s penetration of cells, you neutralize the virus. Have I made myself more or less clear?
TG: Yeah, I hope so. So, your idea is that you make so many antibodies, that there’s no space on these cells for the Covid spike to get into them.
SL: Correct, you literally put a cap on those spikes, a cap made out of the antibodies that neutralize the virus. They are neutralizing antibodies, the virus can no longer infect the cells, it can no longer penetrate them.
TG: What about the T-cells? Apparently they’re just about as good as antibodies at stopping Covid.
SL: That is correct. You have two kinds of what we used to call humoral immunity, that is antibodies because they are circulating in the blood, and as you know blood used to be called humor, so humoral immunity consists of antibodies and cellular immunity consists of killer T-cells and that’s where there’s a very big danger precisely of having auto-immune diseases later on.
TG: You know, when I was a kid T-cells used to be called white blood cells.
SL: Well, all of them are white blood cells. Whether it’s T-cells, which are lymphocytes. There are two types of lymphocytes: T-cells and B-cells. Leucocytes are also white blood cells as are monocytes. So, yeah, they are a member of the white blood cell population.
TG: It’s a fascinating journey you’re taking us on, Stanley, and I’m sure a lot of our listeners will be enjoying hearing a little bit of this, because there is an idea floating around in the mass media that we mustn’t trouble the listeners and the viewers or the readers of the newspapers too much with the science, but actually the science in all of this of course is absolutely crucial. I wonder could you just take us through the different types. You’ve talked about the mRNA vaccines. Are there other types of vaccines that they’re developing, because many of these vaccines encompass new technology? There are new ideas here. For example, there is the CRISPR technology (I believe one of the inventors of CRISPR is Emmanuelle Charpentier) that can edit our genes. The idea is that they are ‘smart’ vaccines. They’re not like Smallpox and Cowpox where there’s just a simple attenuated version of the dangerous virus, but it’s something that is trying to be clever and smart. It might snip the DNA or RNA of a virus, but it also might go in and start altering our DNA. Can you take us through these new types of vaccines being developed and what you make of them?
SL: Well, as I was telling you, the two main alternatives that are coming out for the Corona virus now are the Russian vaccineand the Johnson & Johnson vaccines where they are precisely using an attenuated adenovirus, a human adenovirus, in which they have incorporated the protein, the part of the genome of the corona virus, so that these adenoviruses when they infect you with a very mild infection you not only get immunized to them, you get immunized to the Corona virus as well. This is the basis of the Russian Sputnik V and the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. They’re both using very mild human adenoviruses as carriers of corona antigen to immunize us, and they will not only elicit an antibody response, but also a T-cell response.
The other one that I was telling you about is from Australia where they are just purifying that protein from the surface of the corona virus, binding it with an immune stimulant, which we call an adjuvant, and that is used as a vaccine. This will produce a lot of antibodies but it will not for sure stimulate T-cell response, but it will give you humoral protection, antibody protection, against the Corona virus.
You previously asked me the difference between T-cell immunity and antibody immunity. Well, antibodies, like I told you, are produced by B-lymphocytes and they provide humoral immunity and even when the antibody count goes down and you don’t have detectable (inaudible) of antibodies, but let’s say you are challenged by that corona virus two years later, you’re going to get what they call a secondary response, because you form what is called Memory B-cells that will immediately start to produce huge quantities of antibodies and you get a secondary response.
Now, as far as T-cell immunity, what the T-cells do is that they actually kill the infected cell that is presenting the viral antigen, and that’s why I told you that there’s a danger with these mRNA viruses because a lot of our cells are going to be producing the viral antigen, the viral spike protein that will be on the cell membrane and our immune system is going to attack them. Yes, it will immunize us against the corona virus, but at the same time a lot of our cells that will be producing that antigen will be attacked and destroyed by our killer T-cells. The danger is that we don’t know how many cells and how many organs will actually be producing that antigen because this mRNA that’s being injected into us will be circulating in our blood and we have no guarantee about which of our own cells are going to pick it up and start producing viral antigens.
TG: Ok, so what is the thinking behind actually getting our own cells to produce the viral antigen?
SL: Well, it’s obviously a much faster track. With the gene manipulation techniques that we have now, it’s very easy to identify that spike protein RNA, cleave it out, put it in what they call a liposome and inject it into the body. You don’t have to try to put it into another virus or you don’t need to attenuate the corona virus itself. It’s a real fast-track way to get the body to produce an immune response against that spike protein.
It’s another way, if I may say so, to have a new patent. As you know, whether its Moderna or Pfizer, their stock prices shot up on the stock exchange. You know Moderna has never produced any pharmaceutical at all. They haven’t produced a vaccine before and they haven’t produced any drug that’s been on the market. Yet, as soon as they announced their mRNA vaccine and that they were on a fast-track to produce that vaccine, their stocks shot up by hundreds of millions of dollars and it seems that some of their high executives, before their vaccine was proven, and I’m talking about three months ago, sold their stocks. So, they cashed in before they had a proven vaccine, but I guess that’s an example of what Naomi Klein calls Disaster Capitalism.
TG: In what way?
SL: In a way that a lot of epidemics, natural disasters and so forth are an opportunity for some companies to make a lot of money. We’ve seen that with the history of the corona virus since the beginning. For example, the criticism of certain anti-viral drugs that were shown in vitro to have antiviral properties to inhibit the corona virus and published as such in scientific articles in Nature and the Lancet were subsequently denounced as fraudulent, as quackery, while Remdesivir was being lauded as an effective drug against corona virus, which it is not; it has not saved lives. The best study they have is that it lessened a patient’s hospital stay by three days. Whereas drugs like Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine have been shown in vitro to seriously inhibit the corona virus both extracellularly and intracellularly, and they are very safe drugs.
To me, I was amazed back in February and March when everybody was warning: What! HCQ is dangerous for the heart, it can cause terrible heart conditions, that it’s unsafe. This is a drug seventy-five years old that hundreds of millions of people have taken, and that has saved tens of millions of lives, that was on the list of the United Nation’s essential drugs for humanity. We never heard about any dangers for the cardiovascular system until it was used for the corona virus outbreak.
The other drug that has proven effective is another anti-parasitic drug, Ivermectin, which has shown in vitro to be effective within 48 hours. If you had infected tissue cultures that you put in the nutrient fluid of these tissue cultures, Ivermectin, and infected them with the Corona 2 Covid-19 virus and a group of controls that did not have Ivermectin that you infected with corona virus, these tissue cultures would be totally destroyed by the corona virus, whereas those with the Ivermectin there would be no effect and no corona virus RNA detectable.
TG: Amazing. It’s incredible isn’t it? How is it that the drug that is actually designed to be used against malaria could be useful for what is effectively a rather suped-up common cold?
SL: Yeah, well, this is what you call serendipity. It just happened that we noticed that. The same for Ivermectin. Ivermectin was developed as an anti-parasitic drug by a Japanese gentleman, who got the Nobel Prize for it by the way. And these two anti-parasitic drugs have proven to be serious anti-viral agents. On top of it, HCQ has one more advantage. Here’s a drug that was developed for malaria. Do you know that now Chloroquine is part of the treatment for Systemic Lupus Erythematosus and Rheumatoid Arthritis because HCQ was found to be an excellent modulator of the immune system. So, one of the additional ways it helps with the corona infection is that it has antiviral capacities in vitro, but it can also attenuate the Cytokine Storm that the virus sometimes causes. The uncontrolled immune response, where a lot of cytokines and hystomines are released, can actually cause blood clots and respiratory failure. So, how is it that a drug developed for Malaria was found to be effective against a virus? Well, the same way it was found to be a good treatment for SLE or Rheumatoid Arthritis – by accident.
TG: What about SARS? I suppose many people heard on the news in the mid-Noughties about a virus called SARS flying around. When this corona first started, it was actually called SARS Cov2 and I wonder if this is a type of corona virus that is normal, naturally occurring? What is it doing to our body? Obviously, we know that the ordinary corona virus, the common cold, causes a lot of irritation, it makes us sneeze, it makes our nose run, maybe gives us headaches, this kind of thing, but after a while it’s gone, it’s pretty harmless except maybe if you’re very elderly or very sick, but what is SARS actually doing to us because we know that this Covid-19 was originally called SARS Cov2?
SL: It is SARS Cov2. It’s the exact same family as the SARS Corona 1.
TG: Okay, I think it stands for Severe Advanced … Oh Gosh! What is it?
SL: Respiratory Syndrome.
TG: Ah, yes, that’s it. Severe Advanced Respiratory Syndrome. Yeah. But what is it doing to our bodies?
SL: Well, what it does exactly it progresses like a flu. It first infects what we call the ciliated epithelial cells, tracheal ciliated epithelial cells, and then depending on your response, depending on the individual and depending on your immune system, it can progress down to the bronchi, to the lungs, cause a severe immune response which is as devastating as the virus itself, which is what we call the Cytokine Storm, which is why they’ve also discovered steroids, an immune depressant, in the treatment. One would think that it’s counter imaginative to use an immune depressant in a viral infection, but sometimes the immune response is more devastating precisely because you’re recognizing all these infected lung cells as foreign, because they’re producing the viral antigen, and the immune system reacts brutally and you get a Cytokine Storm, and you start destroying your own alveoli and causing a lot of micro blood clots that can eventually lead to death.
TG: Ok, so that’s one way. What’s going on with our blood for example with SARS? Can it progress into the blood stream? I mean I’m just quite amazed that the body would sort of overreact. Surely the idea is to kill off the virus, not to kill off all of our cells as well at the same time?
SL: Yeah, well, this is not new. There are a lot of cases where our bodies, by some mistake of the immune system, recognize our own cells, even without an infection, as foreign. This is what happens in rheumatoid arthritis, in Lupus, it happens in Myasthenia gravis. That’s why they are called autoimmune diseases. Viruses are notorious in acting as detonators of autoimmune responses, because they infect cells, they leave their antigen on cell membranes, and even after the virus itself is no longer active, viruses are notorious in causing immune responses that can very much effect us. I’m sure you’re familiar with Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS) and Bell’s Palsy. These are neurological autoimmune diseases that affect us because a virus deposited its antigen and our bodies began to recognize our own cells as foreign to be attacked.
TG: Is that what you’re saying that we might get the same kind of autoimmune response tricking our immune system into attacking our own cells with the mRNA vaccine?
SL: Yes, that’s exactly what I’ve been saying. When, long after the virus has gone, as a matter of fact even when we are not exposed to the virus, we are producing an antigen that is torn that our immune system will recognize as foreign. I would rather be immunized with an adenovirus that is programmed to produce that antigen instead of programming my own cells to produce that antigen.
TG: Why?
SL: Why? Well, because my own cells producing that antigen, my cells then become the virus. My cells become more recognizable as foreign by my immune system.
TG: Ok, so with all these new technologies now on the horizon, would you have one of these new types of vaccines, I wonder, because some people, particularly young people, that I speak to say they don’t want any kind of vaccine to this, preferring to catch the disease and train their own immune system to deal with viruses in a natural way so that when they’re infected, they may be quite ill and sick, but feel that a naturally-trained immune system that can deal with any kind of disease or pathogen as it comes along instead of someone training it in an artificial manner to deal . What do you make of that argument? What we should really be doing, particularly with younger people, is simply catching things, actually even going out of our way to catch things, to train our immune systems to be ready for anything that comes along.
SL: Well, that is a valid argument for a young person and for diseases such as the flu or perhaps a simple corona infection, but that is not true, and they would be under the wrong impression because for things like Poliomyelitis or Smallpox that would not be a very good idea. Thank God for immunization. Thank God for Jenner and Pasteur who started that because there are three things that saved really hundreds of millions of lives and made life expectancy a lot longer.
You have immunization, which we call vaccination, because it got this name from Cowpox, which was first used to immunize against Smallpox, so you have vaccinations, antibiotics and the chemical Chlorine. Chlorine makes unsafe water that carries cholera and many other diseases safe. Even in the fight against malaria Chlorine was useful because the larvae of the anopheles mosquito would die in chlorinated water, so you can imagine the millions and millions and millions of lives that have been saved with vaccinations, with antibiotics and with Chlorine-treated water. But, just like everything else, you can exaggerate things. For example, with antibiotics bacteria are reacting. They have their own natural selection and they’re evolving into all kinds of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, so it’s a constant fight. The same goes for immunization. This is why I myself don’t take the flu vaccine, even if I’m at the age when they say it’s most important to take it, because the flu changes every year and I haven’t seen any correlation between the percentage of people vaccinated with the flu and a decrease in flu cases. 2007 was notorious for that. But, certain vaccines should I think be obligatory, for example the tetanus vaccine. Are you going to let your body get naturally immune to the tetanus toxin? I don’t think that’s a good idea.
As far as the corona is concerned, let’s face it; this is something that has a mortality rate of 1% or less. I don’t think it’s as grave as to warrant such a reaction in shutting down and infringing on people’s liberties, so some young people may have a point there, but to say they’re anti any kind of vaccine is the wrong reaction.
TG: Will you be taking one of these vaccines?
SL: No, I will not be taking an mRNA vaccine for sure, and I will not advise my family members, young family members, to take it either. The adenovirus vaccine may be, if herd immunity doesn’t get rid of this epidemic before they become available.
TG: Ok, so your whole approach to this seems to be very, very well educated. Can you tell us again about your contribution to this, and how come you know quite a bit about the topic?
SL: Well, as I told you, my doctoral dissertation consisted of discovering a new virus. After my doctoral qualifying exams, I was working with tissue cultures that we thought were infected with the Rhabdo virus, this is the rabies virus, but I was seeing formations and pathogenesis that could not be explained with the rabies virus, so I investigated and isolated a new virus of the retroviridae family, retrovirus, which like I told you is the same family as the AIDS virus HIV, of the sub family Spumavirinae, so I spent years working with viruses, tissue cultures, isolating them, proving that they are RNA viruses as opposed to DNA viruses, doing reverse transcriptase assays when Reverse Transcriptase assay was a long and laborious thing in the 70s. Technologically, there have been incredible advances that permit genetic manipulations that were not possible back in the 70s. It’s not so much basic scientific dogma discoveries in biology or genetics, it’s more the incredible techniques that have been developed. For example the tests that they do now for what they call the Rt-PCR test with the swabs. Rt stands for Reverse transcriptase and PCR for Polymerase Chain Reaction. The gentleman (Kary Mullis) who elaborated the Polymerase Chain Reaction technique got the Nobel Prize for it in 1988, the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology, and that permits us to take a small piece of DNA and multiply it a million times. Most of the advances that we are having in genetic engineering are thanks to this PCR technique. Now, this did not exist when I was getting my doctorate in 1978.
TG: Ok, so what about this PCR test, is it reliable, is it being used correctly deployed in the population in the right manner?
SL: Do you want me to give you an honest answer? The honest answer is: I don’t know. Theoretically, it should work, but unfortunately I don’t know what is going wrong. I don’t know whether there’s corruption in as much as labs claiming they’re doing it correctly but are not doing it adequately for, unfortunately, there have been a lot of false positives and false negatives.
TG: It seems that a lot of effort has been put into this particular type of test. Would it not have been better maybe to have used a different test?
SL: Well, I was always advocating for the antibody test, what they call the Immunodiffusion Test. These are very simple tests with results obtained in half an hour where you put the serum of the patient to be tested in a well and you put the antigen in another well and you see if you get an antibody precipitation band. I did quite a few Immunodiffusion Tests with the virus I discovered. When I experimentally infected animals I was working with I could test as I went along and it was almost one hundred percent accurate. But, you know, they say that when you have a new toy, you tend to use it, especially if it’s an expensive one. But, I have to say that PCR is an incredible technique, which I wish we had back in the 70s when I was doing my viral research.
TG: But is it actually being deployed in the right manner across the population? For example they’re using it to try and test everyone in Liverpool.
SL: Let me tell you some of the things that are wrong with it. First of all, in order for you to test positive, when they swab you they have to take enough RNA from your nasal pharynx – this is the first part of the Rt-PCR – then they incubate it with Reverse Transcriptase which turns that RNA into DNA, then they use the PCR which is the DNA Polymerase Chain Reaction to multiply it a million-fold so that it’s detectable. Now, I could get tested let’s suppose at a time I am positive but at that time I have no viral RNA in my throat, so it will get a false negative. It’s possible that one was infected a long time ago, and you still have some remnant of this RNA, it will give you a positive when really you are over it. So, this test should be complemented with a simple antibody test that shouldn’t cost more that $5 to do, an antibody precipitation test, because if you’re PCR test is positive, then within two weeks after that you should be antibody positive, so I think one should be supplemented with the other.
TG: What do you think of this idea of mandating these treatments with the vaccine particularly? There are also conspiracy theories circulating as well about a medical dictatorship that people are using this pandemic in order to make a lot of money by forcing vaccines on people that might otherwise not wish to have. What do you make of this whole idea of mandating?
SL: Mandating for the corona Covid-19 vaccine is unacceptable as far as I’m concerned. It should be completely voluntary. There is this idea that they’re accusing people, saying that if you don’t get vaccinated you’re putting me in danger. That is fallacious reasoning because if you’re vaccinated I’m certainly not putting you in danger. Your vaccine should protect you even though I might be contagious.
TG: I imagine that when you were at university you had some guide in ethics because there seems to be quite a few doctors saying that this is an ethical dilemma here, that we should be taking a different approach rather than going towards mandating. I wonder what you make of the move to saying that people have to have this vaccine for example if they want to travel.
SL: This is the great problem whereby you can be forced to getting vaccinated by restricting your movements if you elect not to be vaccinated. That is an ethical, political and a civil liberties problem.
Like I said, there are some vaccines that I, as an immunologist, ythink are extremely necessary. For example, the DTP vaccine for kids. The Diptheria, Tetanus, Pertussis vaccines are life-savers. But, with this, just like the flu vaccine, the corona epidemic has been used to make billions, even hundreds of billions of dollars by pharmaceutical companies that have up to now given us nothing, and I took the example of Moderna where their stocks went up by billions even before we knew anything was going to be produced and a company that has never ever put a drug out for anything, even a headache. As soon as Dr. Anthony Fauci gave it his blessing, Moderna’s stocks shot up as did Gilead’s Remdesivir as an antiviral drug. Yes, this pandemic has been used to make a lot, a lot of money in a very, very unethical fashion.
TG: And what about the 64-thousand dollar question, Stanley? Could this be a man-made, engineered virus besides the idea that it was released from a Wuhan Lab accidentally or on purpose? What do you think is a possibility that the Covid-19 thing was actually a man-made thing that got released?
SL: Well, I don’t think it was something released on purpose. Could it be a genetically modified corona virus that accidentally got released? Yes, that possibility does exist; it’s a very plausible possibility. Back in the 70s we removed four corona virus serotypes. By the ways, there was a sero positive for one of the corona strains that we knew back then. They’ve been in the laboratory. epidemiological study done in 1974 where they found that 25% of kids between the ages of 7 and 14 years old had antibodies to one of the serotypes of corona virus, and they were totally harmless. It passed. _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
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Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
The phrase “fog of war” is attributed to Carl von Clausewitz. It has come to refer to the confusion and uncertainty felt by everyone in the midst of conflict. It is often unclear who is making decisions and why, and what the relationships are between the strategies and the goals. Even the rationale can become elusive as frustration and disorientation displace clarity and rationality.
In 2020, we’ve experienced the fog of disease mitigation.
The initial round of lockdowns was not about suppressing the virus but slowing it for one reason: to preserve hospital capacity. Whether and to what extent the “curve” was actually flattened will probably be debated for years but back then there was no question of extinguishing the virus. The volume of the curves, tall and quick or short and long, was the same either way. People were going to get the bug until the bug burns out (herd immunity).
Gradually, and sometimes almost imperceptibly, the rationale for the lockdowns changed. Curve flattening became an end in itself, apart from hospital capacity. Perhaps this was because the hospital crowding issue was extremely localized in two New York boroughs while hospitals around the country emptied out for patients who didn’t show up: 350 hospitals furloughed workers.
That failure was embarrassing enough, given the overwhelming costs. Schools closed, commercial rights were vanquished, shelter-in-place orders from wartime were imposed, travel nearly stopped, all large events were cancelled, and so on. Clearly there needed to be a good, solid, science-based reason for why the politicians and their advisers had, on their own, decided to take away much of what we once regarded as human rights.
Talk about this began in March but faded. Sometime in summer, the idea of asymptomatic spread started to trend, bit by bit. It finally went to an explosion of interest in the first week of June. It trailed off again until very recently.
Asymptomatic spread was the answer given to the great question: I’m not sick so why should I have to be locked down? Why are we quarantining the healthy? And what possibly could it mean, in any case, to be sick without symptoms? Why are half the PCR-positive tests assigned to people who otherwise seem to be perfectly fine?
All these valid questions came to be answered by this one phrase: asymptomatic spread. You might not feel sick. You might not ever have symptoms from SARS-CoV-2. Still, you could be an even worse super spreader without knowing it, infecting people all around you who will carry it to people who will die from the disease. This was also the moment when, subtly and imperceptibly, we were being asked to think of our fellow citizens not as human beings with dignity and rights but pathogen-carrying disease vectors. We had to be masked, all of us, because we are secretly filthy and unclean: we cannot be allowed to breath near others, so even with a mask we must stay 6 feet away.
(As I type these words, I feel sure that if anyone reads them in ten years, the reader will assume I’m writing fiction or engaged in wild hyperbole. To the future reader: this is all true.)
On June 7, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, head of the WHO’s emerging diseases and zoonosis unit, told a press conference that from the known research, asymptomatic spread was “very rare.” “From the data we have, it still seems to be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a secondary individual.” She added for emphasis: “It’s very rare.”
There was an understandable explosion of fury on all sides. People against lockdowns were screaming all over Twitter that if this is true, the rationale for the lockdowns mostly disappears. We can go back to our normal lives. We can open up everything again!
I wrote at the time:
What this suggests, of course, is that there is nothing mysteriously magical or insidious about this new virus. It behaves like the viruses that scientists have been studying for one hundred years. What we do with a normal virus is be careful around others when we have symptoms. We don’t cough and sneeze on people and generally stay home if we are sick. That’s how it’s always been. You don’t need lockdown to achieve that; you just proceed with life as normal, treating the sick and otherwise not disrupting life.
If that is the case with this one, everything we’ve done over the months – the mask wearing, the grasshopper dance not to be next to people, the canceling of everything, the wild paranoia and premodern confusions – has been a calamitous and destructive waste of time, energy, and money.
On the other side, there was the predictably pro-lockdown mainstream media which decried her heresy. The cry was so loud that the WHO immediately started walking back the claim, mostly with hints and suggestions that didn’t say untrue things but did not repudiate the initial claim either: “There is much to be answered on this. There is much that is unknown. It’s clear that both symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals are part of the transmission cycle. The question is what is the relative contribution of each group to the overall number of cases.”
Following that, the question seemed to fade. We went back to assuming that potentially everyone had a disease, enabling fellow citizens to become virtuous enforcers of mask wearing, staying home, and separating, screaming and yelling at others for failing to comply. The science on the question was unsettled, we were told, so let us go back to wrecking life as we once knew it.
The fog of disease mitigation, indeed. But as with most of the “science” throughout this ordeal, it eventually came to be revealed that good sense and rationality would prevail over implausible claims and predictions that led to experiments in social control without any precedent.
In this case, the carrier of rationality is a gigantic study conducted in Wuhan, China, of 10 million people. The article appears in Nature Communications, published November 20, 2020.
The conclusion is not that asymptomatic spread is rare or that the science is uncertain. The study revealed something that hardly ever happens in these kinds of studies. There was not one documented case. Forget rare. Forget even Fauci’s previous suggestion that asymptomatic transmission exists but not does drive the spread. Replace all that with: never. At least not in this study for 10,000,000.
Stringent COVID-19 control measures were imposed in Wuhan between January 23 and April 8, 2020. Estimates of the prevalence of infection following the release of restrictions could inform post-lockdown pandemic management. Here, we describe a city-wide SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid screening programme between May 14 and June 1, 2020 in Wuhan. All city residents aged six years or older were eligible and 9,899,828 (92.9%) participated. No new symptomatic cases and 300 asymptomatic cases (detection rate 0.303/10,000, 95% CI 0.270–0.339/10,000) were identified. There were no positive tests amongst 1,174 close contacts of asymptomatic cases. 107 of 34,424 previously recovered COVID-19 patients tested positive again (re-positive rate 0.31%, 95% CI 0.423–0.574%). The prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in Wuhan was therefore very low five to eight weeks after the end of lockdown.
One might suppose that this would be huge news. It would allow us to open up everything immediately. With the whole basis for post-curve-flattening lockdowns crumbled, we could go back to living a normal life. The fear could evaporate. We could take comfort in our normal intuition that healthy people can get out and about with no risk to others. We could take off our masks. We could go to movies and sports events.
From what I can tell, there was only one news story that was posted about this. It was on Russia Today. I’ve not been able to find another one. People not following the right accounts on Twitter wouldn’t even know about it at all.
We keep hearing about how we should follow the science. The claim is tired by now. We know what’s really happening. The lockdown lobby ignores whatever contradicts their narrative, preferring unverified anecdotes over an actual scientific study of 10 million residents in what was the world’s first major hotspot for the disease we are trying to manage. You would expect this study to be massive international news. So far as I can tell, it is being ignored.
With solid evidence that asymptomatic spread is nonsense, we have to ask: who is making decisions and why? Again, this brings me back to the metaphor of fog. We are all experiencing confusion and uncertainty over the precise relationship between the strategies and the goals of panoply of regulations and stringencies all around us. Even the rationale has become elusive – even refuted – as frustration and disorientation have displaced what we vaguely recall as clarity and rationality of daily life.
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Jeffrey A. Tucker
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research.
People who wear face masks could be putting themselves more at risk of contracting coronavirus, England's deputy chief medical officer has warned.
Dr Jenny Harries said it is "not a good idea" for the average member of the public to put on a face mask unless they have been advised to by a healthcare worker.
Speaking to BBC News on Thursday, she warned the virus could even become trapped in face masks, resulting in the wearer breathing it in.
Slideshow preview image
100 PHOTOS
Coronavirus across the globe
SEE GALLERY
Dr Harries said: "For the average member of the public walking down a street, it is not a good idea.
"What tends to happen is people will have one mask. They won't wear it all the time, they will take it off when they get home, they will put it down on a surface they haven't cleaned.
Salisbury incident
Dr Jenny Harries advised against the general public wearing face masks (Andrew Matthews/PA)
"Or they will be out and they haven't washed their hands, they will have a cup of coffee somewhere, they half hook it off, they wipe something over it.
"In fact, you can actually trap the virus in the mask and start breathing it in."
Asked if people are putting themselves more at risk by wearing masks, Dr Harries said: "Because of these behavioural issues, people can adversely put themselves at more risk than less."
Dr Harries said people should wear masks when they are advised to by healthcare workers, particularly if they have tested positive for Covid-19, as it can "prevent any virus from coming out".
The World Health Organisation (WHO) said healthy individuals only need to wear a mask if they are taking care of a person with a suspected coronavirus infection.
Vikram Dodd, Jessica Elgot, Sean Ingle, Peter Walker and Jasper Jolly
Mon 11 Jan 2021 20.18 GMTLast modified on Tue 12 Jan 2021 00.34 GMT
The police have set themselves up for a conflict with ministers by insisting that they will not enforce mask-wearing in supermarkets amid growing calls for tougher Covid measures including a crackdown on the number of people in workplaces.
Sources said the government was actively considering telling people to wear masks outdoors as the NHS faces its “most dangerous” point. A further 4,193 people were reported to have gone to hospital with coronavirus on Monday, bringing the current total to 32,294.
A ban on people in England walking or exercising with anyone from outside their household is also on the table, with sources saying it was “under active consideration”.
Ministers have been urged by trade unions to focus on underlining the need for home working as figures show that traffic on the tube in London – often used by commuters – is more than three times higher than in the first lockdown.
The government is keen to intensify efforts to keep contact limited in supermarkets amid concern about infection rates linked to stores. Stores have said they will require help from police if ministers want to increase enforcement of rules such as mask-wearing and social distancing.
On Monday, Morrisons announced that shoppers who refuse to wear a mask without a medical exemption will be told to leave stores. Sainsbury’s followed suit, saying it would be posting trained security guards at shop entrances, rather than shop staff, to challenge any customers not wearing a mask or shopping in groups. The supermarket said it had also significantly reduced the number of customers allowed into stores at any one time.
It is understood that Morrisons is prepared to call in police as a last resort if customers do not comply with requests to wear a mask.
At Monday’s Downing Street briefing, the health secretary, Matt Hancock, cranked up pressure on law enforcement and supermarkets, saying stronger action was needed, and applauded Morrisons. “That’s the right approach, and I want to see all parts of society playing their part in this,” he said.
“Stronger enforcement is necessary, and I’m delighted that the police are stepping up their enforcement. But it isn’t just about the government and the rules we set, or the police and the work that they do. It’s about how everybody behaves.”
You don't have to be a lockdown sceptic to worry about how Covid is being policed | John Harris
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But multiple law enforcement sources said it would be impossible for officers to police supermarkets and insisted forces needed greater clarity about how the rules should be imposed. On Monday Derbyshire police said it had withdrawn controversial £200 fines handed to two women who drove five miles from their home to meet for a walk. Apologising, the force said it had been “working hard to understand the ever-changing guidance and legislation”.
Asked about enforcing rules in supermarkets, one senior police leader said “we won’t be doing that”, adding: “Do people really want the police telling you: ‘that’s not above your nose’? There are no extra officers. Everything else [crime] is still happening. Where is the greater risk: do you put two people in a supermarket not wearing masks before a woman suffering domestic violence?
“You need clearer, consistent messaging, not new rules and more enforcement.”
A chief constable said: “I do not think we need additional powers; I need additional clarity about the exceptions, about how far people can travel.”
Another senior police source added: “The government wants to see more enforcement but that will not regulate behaviour. There is no way the 40,000 officers you can deploy can enforce regulations on 65 million people if they do not want to follow.”
Police are being quicker to issue fines to those they believe will not comply with the rules but are wedded to an approach of trying to encourage people. Police in England and Wales have issued around 30,000 penalty notices, while counterparts in France have issued over 1 million.
A government source insisted there were no imminent changes to the rules planned and said the emphasis was on messaging and enforcement, urging people to stay within existing rules rather than any tighter legal restrictions.
However, it is understood discussions in government took place over the weekend and on Monday about returning to some of the rules of the first lockdown in March, which limited people to one form of outside exercise a day either alone or with people from their household.
Hancock has said he would not remove the right for people to access “support bubbles” where people can form tightly restricted bubbles with one other household if they live alone or if family members provide childcare.
“I can rule out removing the bubbles that we have in place,” he said. “Childcare bubbles and support bubbles are very important, and we’re going to keep them.”
Hancock declined to say what extra rules might be brought in and implored people to “act like you have the virus”. He said: “I know there’s been speculation about more restrictions. We don’t rule out taking more action if it’s needed but it’s your actions now that can make a difference.”
Concerns have been raised by trade unions about home working, with statistics suggesting many more people are in the workplace compared with the March lockdown.
Figures from Transport for London suggested there are four times the number of tube passengers compared with the first lockdown, when there was just 4% of normal demand in mid-April. On Monday, demand on buses was at 29% compared to 18% in mid-April.
Unite’s general secretary, Len McCluskey, said the government must instruct employers to use the furlough scheme to keep employees out of the workplace and enforce the stay at home message, but he said support from the Treasury was lacking.
“Time and again, ministers have been told that unless employers are instructed to use the furlough scheme, too many will demand that workers come to work, therefore undermining an essential public health message,” he said. “And unless the low paid and insecure are paid enough to stay at home then they cannot do so.”
The government has also been urged to emphasise the need for civil servants to stay at home. Lucille Thirlby, assistant general secretary of the FDA, which represents civil servants, said: “The civil service should be leading the example and ensuring that staff do not attend the workplace and work from home, unless their role is of immediate critical delivery or importance.”
The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, said harsher restrictions should be considered within 24 hours and highlighted estate agents and house viewings as one area where rules could be tightened, as well as nurseries.
On Monday, Wales’s health minister, Vaughan Gething, said he believed it would be “easier” not to remove a face covering when moving between essential shops.
A government spokesperson said: “We are incredibly grateful for the work the police are doing to explain and enforce the current coronavirus restrictions.
“As they have throughout the pandemic, the police will support enforcement of the regulations and will attend retail settings as necessary to respond to reports of crime and public order offences.
“We are at a critical point in this pandemic and all of us need to be doing the right thing. People should only be leaving home if it is essential for them to do so and they must follow the rules when they do.”
People who wear face masks could be putting themselves more at risk of contracting coronavirus, England's deputy chief medical officer has warned.
Dr Jenny Harries said it is "not a good idea" for the average member of the public to put on a face mask unless they have been advised to by a healthcare worker.
Speaking to BBC News on Thursday, she warned the virus could even become trapped in face masks, resulting in the wearer breathing it in.
Slideshow preview image
100 PHOTOS
Coronavirus across the globe
SEE GALLERY
Dr Harries said: "For the average member of the public walking down a street, it is not a good idea.
"What tends to happen is people will have one mask. They won't wear it all the time, they will take it off when they get home, they will put it down on a surface they haven't cleaned.
Salisbury incident
Dr Jenny Harries advised against the general public wearing face masks (Andrew Matthews/PA)
"Or they will be out and they haven't washed their hands, they will have a cup of coffee somewhere, they half hook it off, they wipe something over it.
"In fact, you can actually trap the virus in the mask and start breathing it in."
Asked if people are putting themselves more at risk by wearing masks, Dr Harries said: "Because of these behavioural issues, people can adversely put themselves at more risk than less."
Dr Harries said people should wear masks when they are advised to by healthcare workers, particularly if they have tested positive for Covid-19, as it can "prevent any virus from coming out".
The World Health Organisation (WHO) said healthy individuals only need to wear a mask if they are taking care of a person with a suspected coronavirus infection.
WHO said masks are only effective when used in combination with frequent hand washing, and must be disposed of properly.
Brandy Vaughan, 45, was found dead on December 7 by her 9-year-old son in the family's California home.
On Monday, the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Office announced an investigation into the circumstances surrounding her death.
"The decedent has been positively identified and the death is believe [sic] to be a result of natural causes based on an autopsy exam conducted last week," Santa Barbara County Sheriff Public Information Officer Raquel Zick said in a statement. "The final cause and manner of death determination are pending toxicology screening which normally takes 4-6 weeks."
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Vaughan, a former Merck pharmaceutical representative, was an outspoken critic of mandatory vaccinations and pharmaceutical companies.
She founded non-profit organization Learn The Risk in a bid to educate people "on the dangers of pharmaceutical products, including vaccines and unnecessary medical treatments," according to its website.
A fundraising website set up by close friend Tina Marie describes Vaughan as an "amazing warrior" and "loving mom."
"This past Thanksgiving Brandy, her son, and their dog took a road trip to come spend the holiday with our family," Marie wrote. "We enjoyed an amazing dinner, played games, and laughed together into the wee hours of the night. She told me that this is what she always dreamed of for her son, to be part of a large family enjoying time together... and wanted me to raise him for her, if anything should happen to her (as she had asked multiple times in the past). This last time that she asked was exactly 8 days before her passing."
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The Santa Barbara resident and UC Santa Barbara alum once worked for Merck pharmaceutical as a sales representative for Vioxx, a painkiller eventually taken off the market.
Vaughan "never meant to take on the world's most powerful industry" her website reads, but "felt she had no choice when the industry's agenda to keep us all sick began to spiral out of control."
READ MORE
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"From that experience, I realized that just because something is on the market doesn't mean it's safe," Vaughan writes. "Much of what we are told by the healthcare industry just simply isn't the truth."
Johns Hopkins University ‘newsletter’ throws work of director under the bus while claiming ‘real’ science from the WHO and CDC is more accurate than the facts.
We reported yesterday how an article in a newsletter published at Johns Hopkins University showed that total deaths in the US have not increased dramatically in 2020 when compared to prior years. This article was taken down. The university could not let it stand:
We were provided more on this unfortunate situation overnight. The university claims the following in regards to taking down the post showing deaths have not increased in 2020 due to the China coronavirus [emphasis ours]:
TRENDING: We Got It! TGP to Release SMOKING GUN Video from TCF Center in Detroit! ...Update: OH BOY! Our Report WILL SHAKE the Political World!
By YANNI GU |
[No doubt Yanni has connections with Mainland China. Just a hunch. We say this in part due to the tight connections between Johns Hopkins and China.]
November 27, 2020 Editor’s Note: After The News-Letter published this article on Nov. 22, it was brought to our attention that our coverage of Genevieve Briand’s presentation “COVID-19 Deaths: A Look at U.S. Data” has been used to support dangerous inaccuracies that minimize the impact of the pandemic.
[Of course no mention of what ‘dangerous inaccuracies’ have occurred – just that they have.]
We decided on Nov. 26 to retract this article to stop the spread of misinformation, as we noted on social media. However, it is our responsibility as journalists to provide a historical record. We have chosen to take down the article from our website, but it is available here as a PDF.
[The university labels its published work as the spread of misinformation and takes it down.]
In accordance with our standards for transparency, we are sharing with our readers how we came to this decision. The News-Letter is an editorially and financially independent, student-run publication. Our articles and content are not endorsed by the University or the School of Medicine, and our decision to retract this article was made independently.
[Does anyone believe that the decision to take down the article was made ‘independently’? This is transparency?]
Briand’s study should not be used exclusively in understanding the impact of COVID-19, but should be taken in context with the countless other data published by Hopkins, the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
[Of course the WHO which claimed the mortality rates for the China coronavirus were 3.4% should be trusted! We knew this was a lie in March. Johns Hopkins was silent.]
As assistant director for the Master’s in Applied Economics program at Hopkins, Briand is neither a medical professional nor a disease researcher. At her talk, she herself stated that more research and data are needed to understand the effects of COVID-19 in the U.S.
[Johns Hopkins throws the author and her exceptional and courageous paper under the bus. She doesn’t have the smarts to do a proper study they claim and therefore should not be trusted like the WHO and CDC.]
Briand was quoted in the article as saying, “All of this points to no evidence that COVID-19 created any excess deaths. Total death numbers are not above normal death numbers.” This claim is incorrect and does not take into account the spike in raw death count from all causes compared to previous years. According to the CDC, there have been almost 300,000 excess deaths due to COVID-19. Additionally, Briand presented data of total U.S. deaths in comparison to COVID-19-related deaths as a proportion percentage, which trivializes the repercussions of the pandemic. This evidence does not disprove the severity of COVID-19; an increase in excess deaths is not represented in these proportionalities because they are offered as percentages, not raw numbers.
[Johns Hopkins discounts the results from the study and uses some bizarre chart to support their claims. However, Briand’s report is consistent with the results of studies we published during the summer.]
Briand also claimed in her analysis that deaths due to heart diseases, respiratory diseases, influenza and pneumonia may be incorrectly categorized as COVID-19-related deaths. However, COVID-19 disproportionately affects those with preexisting conditions, so those with those underlying conditions are statistically more likely to be severely affected and die from the virus.
[This point doesn’t address Briand’s claims. The point Briand is making is that many COVID categorized deaths are more properly related to other illnesses. The CDC actually reported that only 6% of all COVID deaths are related to COVID alone. The rest are related to other causes and on average 2-3 other causes. We reported on this previously as well.]
Because of these inaccuracies and our failure to provide additional information about the effects of COVID-19, The News-Letter decided to retract this article. It is our duty as a publication to combat the spread of misinformation and to enhance our fact-checking process. We apologize to our readers.
[We believe Ms. Briand was behind the most honest and courageous report coming out of Johns Hopkins this year. She supports it with data. Her report is substantiated from prior reports and the CDC itself. But instead of giving the young scholar an award, they throw her under the bus because the narrative is not the picture Johns Hopkins and China want.]
You see, the only measurement we can use to really see the impact of COVID is overall deaths. This is because we really have no faith in what deaths are classified as COVID due to issues with the classification process. So by looking at overall deaths we see that overall deaths are not any higher than prior years. This then indicates that the COVID is not as terrible as China and the US medical profession would like us to think. This is why this report at Johns Hopkins had to be taken down. It has nothing to do with the truth and everything to do with the message.
What happened to just studying and reporting the truth?
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Effectiveness of Ivermectin against Covid-19 (IVMMETA)
Published: February 6, 2021 (upd.)
The fight against low-cost and highly effective Ivermectin has begun.
Dozens of studies and several meta-studies have already found low-cost ivermectin to be highly effective against covid. In January, even the US NIH had to change its stance from ‘negative’ to ‘neutral’. Detractors of ivermectin had to act, but they knew that this time, it wouldn’t be easy.
In their fight against low-cost HCQ – which was also found to be effective in the early treatment of high-risk patients, thanks to its anti-inflammatory and anti-thrombotic properties – detractors published a made-up study in the Lancet (the Surgisphere scandal) and ran trials with toxic overdoses in ICU patients (the ‘SOLIDARITY’ and ‘RECOVERY’ trials). But Ivermectin is very difficult to overdose, and unlike HCQ, it works as a prophylaxis against infection and even in ICU patients.
Thus, it would be much more difficult to design a deceptive study against ivermectin.
Finally, a ‘solution’ was found: US pharmaceutical company Merck – one of the manufacturers of patent-free Ivermectin – has just published a statement simply claiming, without evidence, that their (unpublished) “analysis” had identified “no scientific basis for a potential therapeutic effect against COVID-19 from pre-clinical studies; no meaningful evidence for clinical activity or clinical efficacy in patients with COVID-19 disease; and a concerning lack of safety data in the majority of studies.”
An NIH operative quickly retweeted the Merck statement, adding: “Merck’s statement on ivermectin is the leadership and commitment to quality translational science that we need to see from pharma/biotech.” In reality, Merck’s claim is completely baseless and also ironic: after having sold ivermectin for several decades without safety issues, Merck now suddenly questions its safety.
Interestingly, Merck recently signed a $356 million deal to supply the US with a much more expensive, newly developed experimental anti-covid drug. Meanwhile, Youtube removed a C-SPAN video of FLCCC President Dr Pierre Kory’s US Senate testimony on ivermectin.
The reality is this: a low-cost and highly effective drug against covid, like Ivermectin, would disrupt not only the multi-billion dollar global vaccine campaign (which does indeed lack long-term safety and efficacy data), but also follow-up ‘lock step’ policies like vaccine passports, smartphone-based global contact monitoring, as well as programs like ID2020 and ‘Known Traveler’ promoted by vaccine investor Bill Gates, the World Economic Forum, and similar groups.
See also: Why Ivermectin works, and where to buy it
Update 1: FLCCC Alliance Response to Merck (FLCCC)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi2cY_-GMSU _________________ --
'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."
A so-called independent fact-checker website FactCheck.org is exposed to be funded by the same $1.9 billion vaccine lobby group that it is supposed to check. The site is a Facebook partner whose articles are used to censor critical voices on the social media platform. It is headed by the former CDC director, which is again a conflit of interest.
EXPOSED: Facebook Partnered COVID Fact-checker Site FactCheck.org Funded By $1.9 Billion Vaccine Lobby
A U.S. congressman Thomas Massie has pointed out a fact that a COVID-19 vaccination “fact-checking” project conducted by Facebook-partnered website is actually funded by a group that holds $1.9 billion in Johnson & Johnson stock. The group is headed by the former CDC director.
U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky tweeted Saturday, “NOTHING TO SEE HERE … Former director of CDC is now CEO of the foundation that funds FACTCHECK.org’s vaccine fact checking program. Roughly 15% of said foundation’s assets are J&J stock.”
“Bless your heart if you think factcheck.org is an unbiased source of vaccine information,” he continued.
In a screenshot from Factcheck.org attached by Massie, it can be seen that the site explains that it’s SciCheck “COVID-19/Vaccination Project is made possible by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation,” which it reveals is worth $53,501.
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SciCheck is a section of the FactCheck website that it says “focuses exclusively on false and misleading scientific claims that are made by partisans to influence public policy.”
“Vaccines benefit those who have had COVID-19, contrary to viral posts,” is the title of another recent SciCheck article.
The SciCheck arm of the FactCheck.org site is funded by the group named Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF).
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The CEO and president of RWJF is Richard E. Besser. Besser has been leading RWJF since April 2017. Besser’s bio on the RWJF website states – “Besser is the former acting director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”
Besser’s bio further explains that he worked as director of the ‘Coordinating Office for Terrorism Preparedness and Emergency Response’ at the CDC, then he joined ABC News in 2009, where he was the chief health and medical director.
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“He also served as acting director of the CDC from January to June 2009, during which time he led the CDC’s response to the H1N1 influenza pandemic.”
Readers of GreatGameIndia would remember how the WHO faked the H1N1 pandemic a decade ago on behalf of the vaccine lobby.
Interestingly, while Factcheck.org has directly denied Rep. Massie’s accusation of bias in the article, “SciCheck and our Commitment to Transparency,” it ignores the possibility of bias stemming from Besser’s former role at the CDC.
FactCheck.org defended itself against Rep. Massie’s accusation of bias, saying, “Contrary to Massie’s suggestion, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation — as is the case with all of our funders — has no control over our editorial content. Period. Full stop.”
However, Massie nowhere says that RWJF has “control” over the editorial content of FactCheck.org. It is commonly acknowledged that outside parties can exercise influence upon an organization in a more indirect manner, such as through quid pro quo exchanges.
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It is also noteworthy that FactCheck.org partnered with Facebook “shortly after the 2016” allegedly in order to “debunk hoaxes and malicious falsehoods posted on the social media site,” according to the University of Pennsylvania Almanac.
Modelling is no substitute for quality data and research
From magazine issue: 11 July 2020
The fatal mistakes which led to lockdown
John Lee
Over the past few weeks, my sense of the surreal has been increasing. At a time when rational interpretation of the Covid data indicates that we should be getting back to normal, we instead see an elaboration of arbitrary responses. These are invariably explained as being ‘guided by science’. In fact, they are doing something rather different: being guided by models, bad data and subjective opinion. Some of those claiming to be ‘following the science’ seem not to understand the meaning of the word.
At the outset, we were told the virus was so pernicious that it could, if not confronted, claim half a million lives in the UK alone. Its fatality rate was estimated by the World Health Organisation at 3.4 per cent. Then from various sources, we heard 0.9 per cent, followed by 0.6 per cent. It could yet settle closer to 0.1 per cent — similar to seasonal flu — once we get a better understanding of milder, undetected cases and how many deaths it actually caused (rather than deaths where the virus was present). How can this be, you might ask, given the huge death toll? Surely the figure of 44,000 Covid deaths offers proof that calamity has struck?
But let us look at the data. Compare this April with last and yes, you will find an enormous number of ‘excess deaths’. But go to the Office for National Statistics website and look up deaths in the winter/spring seasons for the past 27 years, and then adjust for population. This year comes only eighth in terms of deaths. So we ought to put it in perspective.
Viruses have been chasing men since before we climbed down from the trees. Our bodies fight them off and learn in the process. We get sick. It’s horrible, sometimes fatal. But viruses recede, our body’s defences learn and strengthen. The process has been happening for millions of years, which is why more than 40 per cent of our genome is made of incorporated viral genetic material. The spread of viruses like Covid-19 is not new. What’s new is our response.
Now we have new tools that let us spot (and name) new viruses. We watch their progress in real time, plotting their journeys across the world, then sharing the scariest stories on social media. So the standard progress of a virus can, in this way, be made to look like a zombie movie. The whole Covid drama has really been a crisis of awareness of what viruses normally do, rather than a crisis caused by an abnormally lethal new bug.
Let’s go back to the idea of Covid taking half a million lives: a figure produced by modelling. But how does modelling relate to ‘the science’ we heard so much about? An important point — often overlooked — is that modelling is not science, for the simple reason that a prediction made by a scientist (using a model or not) is just opinion.
To be classified as science, a prediction or theory needs to be able to be tested, and potentially falsified. Einstein is revered as a great scientist not just for the complexity of general relativity but because of the way his theory enabled scientists to predict things. This forward--looking capacity, repeatedly verified, is what makes it a scientific theory.
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The ability to look backwards and retrofit a theory to the data via a model is not nearly so impressive. Take, for example, a curve describing the way a virus affects a population in terms of the number of infections (or deaths). We can use models to claim that lockdown had a dramatic effect on the spread, or none at all. We can use them to claim that social distancing was vital, or useless. Imperial College London has looked at the data and claimed lockdown has saved three million lives. A study from Massachusetts looked at the data and concluded that lockdown ‘might not have saved any life’. We can, through modelling alone, choose pretty much any version of the past we like.
The only way to get an idea of the real-world accuracy of models is by using them to predict what will happen — and then by testing those predictions. And this is the third problem with the current approach: a wilful determination to ignore the quality of the information being used to set Covid policy.
In medical science there is a well-known classification of data quality known as ‘the hierarchy of evidence’. This seven-level system gives an idea of how much weight can be placed on any given study or recommendation. Near the top, at Level 2, we find randomised controlled trials (RCTs) where a new approach is tried on a group of patients and compared with (for example) a placebo. The results of such studies are pretty reliable, with little room for bias to creep in. A systematic review of several RCTs is the highest, most reliable form of medical evidence: Level 1.
Further down (Levels 5 and 6) comes evidence from much less compelling, descriptive-only studies looking for a pattern, without using controls. This is where we find virtually all evidence pertaining to Covid-19 policy: lockdown, social distancing, face masks, quarantine, R-numbers, second waves, you name it. And — to speed things up — most Covid research was not peer- reviewed.
Right at the bottom of the hierarchy — Level 7 — is the opinion of authorities or reports of expert committees. This is because, among other things, ‘authorities’ often fail to change their minds in the face of new evidence. Committees, containing diversity of opinion and inevitably being cautious, often issue compromise recommendations that are scientifically non-valid. Ministers talk about ‘following the science’. But the advice of Sage (or any committee of scientists) is the least reliable form of evidence there is.
Such is the quality of decision-making in the process generating our lockdown narrative. An early maintained but exaggerated belief in the lethality of the virus reinforced by modelling that was almost data-free, then amplified by further modelling with no proven predictive value. All summed up by recommendations from a committee based on qualitative data that hasn’t even been peer-reviewed.
Tyler Durden's Photo
BY TYLER DURDEN
TUESDAY, JUN 01, 2021 - 07:22 PM
In January, 2020, when the World Health Organization insisted that COVID-19 wasn't transmissible between humans, and Dr. Anthony Fauci said that the risk to the American public from the virus was "low," officials at the National Institutes of Health were scrambling to perform damage control after a controversial - and now withdrawn - study suggested that there were HIV-like 'insertions' included in SARS-CoV-2.
The study, "Uncanny similarity of unique inserts on the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag," posited that segments of the virus's RNA had no relation to other coronaviruses such as SARS, and instead appeared to be closer to HIV.
Specifically:
To further investigate if these inserts are present in any other corona virus, we performed a multiple sequence alignment of the spike glycoprotein amino acid sequences of all available coronaviruses (n=55) [refer Table S.File1] in NCBI refseq (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) this includes one sequence of 2019-nCoV[Fig.S1]. We found that these 4 insertions [inserts 1, 2, 3 and 4] are unique to 2019-nCoV and are not present in other coronaviruses analyzed.
...
We then translated the aligned genome and found that these inserts are present in all Wuhan 2019-nCoV viruses except the 2019-nCoV virus of Bat as a host [Fig.S4]. Intrigued by the 4 highly conserved inserts unique to 2019-nCoV we wanted to understand their origin. For this purpose, we used the 2019-nCoV local alignment with each insert as query against all virus genomes and considered hits with 100% sequence coverage. Surprisingly, each of the four inserts aligned with short segments of the Human immunodeficiency Virus-1 (HIV-1) proteins.
The now-withdrawn paper piqued the interest of several journalists, including Zero Hedge (whose account Twitter banned one day after we updated our coverage of the article, claiming we 'doxed' a Chinese scientist in an earlier report).
Thanks to a recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for Fauci's emails, we now know that the National Institutes of Health was not only aware of the Indian report, but were actively discussing how to handle it.
A January 31 email from AFP's Issam Ahmed asks NIH immunologist Dr. Barney Graham for comment:
"I was told by a contact you may be willing to give an opinion of this paper that has just gone live. It suggests the new Coronavirus has four inserts similar to HIV-1 and this is not a coincidence," reads the email.
Graham immediately forwards the correspondence to the Office of Communications and Government Relations (OCGR), saying "This is one we don't want to answer without high-level input, but wanted you to know about the rising controversy."
Two days later, Jennifer Routh OCGR replies, telling Graham: "OCGR is going to send a note to the reporter to decline, noting that the paper is not peer-reviewed. Please let us know if you receive similar requests."
That same Sunday morning, Fauci is looped in - with Sir Jeremy Farrar forwarding Zero Hedge's article after mentioning how World Health Organization Director Tedros Adhanom and the organization's cabinet chief were in 'conclave' - ostensibly on how to manage the narrative - noting "If they do prevaricate [bs the public], I would appreciate a call with you later tonight or tomorrow to think how we might take forward."
"Do you have a minute for a quick call?" Fauci replies, after having called the Indian paper "really outlandish."
Of course, the Indian paper was quickly withdrawn by its authors, and the notion that COVID-19 could have been man-made was rendered radioactive - for a while.
In April of last year, Dr Luc Montagnier - winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2008 for “discovering” HIV as the cause of the AIDS epidemic - claimed that SARS-CoV-2 is a manipulated virus that was accidentally released from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
“With my colleague, bio-mathematician Jean-Claude Perez, we carefully analyzed the description of the genome of this RNA virus,” explains Luc Montagnier, interviewed by Dr Jean-François Lemoine for the daily podcast at Pourquoi Docteur, adding that others have already explored this avenue:
Indian researchers have already tried to publish the results of the analyses that showed that this coronavirus genome contained sequences of another virus, … the HIV virus (AIDS virus), but they were forced to withdraw their findings as the pressure from the mainstream was too great.
The plot thickened further as a study by Chinese scientists published in May 2020 found that the novel coronavirus uses the same strategy to evade attack from the human immune system as HIV.
Then, last June, former MI-6 head Sir Richard Dearlove said he believes COVID-19 is a manmade virus which contains 'inserted' sections that accidentally escaped from a Chinese laboratory, according to The Telegraph.
But Sir Richard, 75, pointed to a scientific paper published this week by a Norwegian-British research team who claim to have discovered clues within Covid-19's genetic sequence suggesting key elements were "inserted" and may not have evolved naturally.
Entitled "A Reconstructed Historical Aetiology of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike", the new study, seen by The Telegraph, suggests the virus is "remarkably well-adapted virus for human co-existence" and is likely to be the result of a Wuhan lab experiment to produce "chimeric viruses of high potency".
The paper concludes: "Henceforth, those who would maintain that the Covid-19 pandemic arose from zoonotic transfer need to explain precisely why this more parsimonious account is wrong before asserting that their evidence is persuasive, most especially when, as we also show, there are puzzling errors in their use of evidence." -The Telegraph
The Australian government canceled further development of a COVID-19 vaccine in December 2020 after several trial participants had false positive tests for HIV.
More recently, two European virologists say they've found genetic 'fingerprints' which prove COVID-19 was man made.
British professor Angus Dalgleish - best known for creating the world's first 'HIV vaccine', and Norwegian virologist Dr. Birger Sørensen - chair of pharmaceutical company, Immunor, who has published 31 peer-reviewed papers and holds several patents, wrote that while analyzing virus samples last year, the pair discovered "unique fingerprints" in the form of "six inserts" created through gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
They also conclude that "SARS-Coronavirus-2 has "no credible natural ancestor" and that it is "beyond reasonable doubt" that the virus was created via "laboratory manipulation."
We can only imagine what the NIH and Fauci are saying about this theory now.
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THE PERFECT SET-UP FOR THE NEXT LEG UP
Source: Goldman cross-asset
During this little mini-consolidation and "rangemania", risk appetite indicators have come down a lot and so has also and momentum factors. Here pictured in the GS cross-asset model. We also know that sentiment and positioning is somewhat (a lot) cleaner. What are you waiting for...?
15h ago at 11:00
BITCOIN - READY TO SQUEEZE?
Source: Refinitiv
Bitcoin is showing signs of life over past sessions. Nothing huge, yet, but it is currently attempting to establish a trading range above the negative trend channel.
Note the sharp trajectory of the 21 day moving average, currently around the 40k level which is the first resistance, followed by the bigger 42k (if).
The positive RSI divergence has continued, with RSI printing new highs since mid May.
As we noted yesterday, skew remains rather extreme to the downside, which shows people are still "scared" of the downside.
17h ago at 8:46
THAT'S UNUSUAL: GS LOWERING GDP FORECASTS FOR THE US
Source: Goldman, Goldman
We have not seen a lot (anything) of this in the past 12 months. GS lowered US GDP forecasts (Q2 GDP forecast lowered by 1pp to +9.5%). Not a lot a magnitude of growth still good, but what if this is the beginning of a trend? For many months now forecasts have been revised up and growth was accelerating. What if now forecasts will be reduced (and we know already that QoQ growth has peaked). Economic surprise index negative (second chart)
18h ago at 8:20
LUMBER CAN GO DOWN TOO
Around the world, scientists race to develop a vaccine or treatment against the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Now, a team of researchers has found that a drug already available around the world can kill the coronavirus in a lab setting in just 48 hours.
Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 Colorized scanning electron micrograph of an apoptotic cell (green) heavily infected with SARS-COV-2 virus particles (yellow), isolated from a patient sample. Image captured at the NIAID Integrated Research Facility (IRF) in Fort Detrick, Maryland. Credit: NIAID
Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 Colorized scanning electron micrograph of an apoptotic cell (green) heavily infected with SARS-COV-2 virus particles (yellow), isolated from a patient sample. Image captured at the NIAID Integrated Research Facility (IRF) in Fort Detrick, Maryland. Credit: NIAID
The drug, Ivermectin, an antiparasitic medicine, is an inhibitor of the virus SARS-CoV-2 in-vitro and can effectively cause a reduction in virus at 48 hours in cell cultures. The FDA-approved drug can be used for repurposing to treat patients affected by COVID-19, which has spread to 184 countries and territories.
The researchers at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, have published their study in the journal Antiviral Research, showing how this already widely-used drug may help combat the current global pandemic rippling across continents.
Reduced COVID-19 viral RNA
The team worked with the Peter Doherty Institute of Infection and Immunity. They showed that Ivermectin reduced COVID-19 viral RNA present in cell culture by as much as 93 percent after 24 hours and by 99.8 percent after 48 hours, at around a 5,000-fold reduction in coronavirus RNA, hinting that the medicine can potentially eradicate the virus.
"We found that even a single dose could essentially remove all viral RNA by 48 hours and that even at 24 hours, there was a significant reduction in it," Dr. Kylie Wagstaff of the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute, said.
"Ivermectin is very widely used and seen as a safe drug. We need to figure out now whether the dosage you can use it in humans will be effective – that's the next step," Dr. Wagstaff added.
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The researchers, however, cautioned that the tests performed in the study were in vitro, and human trials are still needed to determine the efficacy and safety of the drug against the coronavirus. Ivermectin has also shown effectiveness in vitro against a wide range of other viruses, such as the influenza virus, Zika virus, and the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
Repurposing Ivermectin
Ivermectin is an approved drug to treat parasitic conditions, such as rosacea, head lice, and scabies. It was developed in 1975 and has been widely used across the globe since the early 1980s.
"In times when we're having a global pandemic, and there isn't an approved treatment, if we had a compound that was already available around the world, then that might help people sooner. Realistically, it's going to be a while before a vaccine is broadly available," Dr. Wagstaff explained.
Though the mechanism of action by which Ivermectin works on the coronavirus is still unknown, the drug works on other viruses by stopping them from inhibiting down the host cells' ability to detect and fight them.
Ivermectin, therefore, warrants further investigation for possible benefits in humans. Further trials should be performed to make sure the drug is effective. If it is effective on humans with coronavirus, it can be widely used to treat affected populations since it already went through approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Countries grapple against COVID-19
Many countries are unprepared for the coming of the coronavirus disease, which has emerged in China in December 2019. Since then, it has spread to most countries across the globe, touching all continents except Antarctica.
The United States reports the highest infections, with more than 368,000 people affected by the virus. It has a staggering 10,923 deaths. Italy has the highest number of deaths, with its death toll reaching 16,523, while Spain has more than 136,000 confirmed cases and 13,341 deaths. Canada has more than 16,000 confirmed cases, while Germany, France, and China have more than 103,000, 98,000, and 82,000 cases, respectively.
The coronavirus has dramatically affected the United Kingdom and Australia also, with more than 52,000 and more than 5,700 cases, respectively.
This is an anonymously posted document by someone who calls themselves Spartacus. Because it’s anonymous, I can’t contact them to ask for permission to publish. So I hesitated for a while, but it’s simply the best document I’ve seen on Covid, vaccines, etc. Whoever Spartacus is, they have a very elaborate knowledge in “the field”. If you want to know a lot more about the no. 1 issue in the world today, read it. And don’t worry if you don’t understand every single word, neither do I. But I learned a lot.
The original PDF doc is here: Covid19 – The Spartacus Letter
Hello,
My name is Spartacus, and I’ve had enough.
We have been forced to watch America and the Free World spin into inexorable decline due to a biowarfare attack. We, along with countless others, have been victimized and gaslit by propaganda and psychological warfare operations being conducted by an unelected, unaccountable Elite against the American people and our allies.
Our mental and physical health have suffered immensely over the course of the past year and a half. We have felt the sting of isolation, lockdown, masking, quarantines, and other completely nonsensical acts of healthcare theater that have done absolutely nothing to protect the health or wellbeing of the public from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Now, we are watching the medical establishment inject literal poison into millions of our fellow Americans without so much as a fight.
We have been told that we will be fired and denied our livelihoods if we refuse to vaccinate. This was the last straw.
We have spent thousands of hours analyzing leaked footage from Wuhan, scientific papers from primary sources, as well as the paper trails left by the medical establishment.
What we have discovered would shock anyone to their core.
First, we will summarize our findings, and then, we will explain them in detail. References will be placed at the end.
Summary:
COVID-19 is a blood and blood vessel disease. SARS-CoV-2 infects the lining of human blood vessels, causing them to leak into the lungs.
Current treatment protocols (e.g. invasive ventilation) are actively harmful to patients, accelerating oxidative stress and causing severe VILI (ventilator-induced lung injuries). The continued use of ventilators in the absence of any proven medical benefit constitutes mass murder.
Existing countermeasures are inadequate to slow the spread of what is an aerosolized and potentially wastewater-borne virus, and constitute a form of medical theater.
Various non-vaccine interventions have been suppressed by both the media and the medical establishment in favor of vaccines and expensive patented drugs.
The authorities have denied the usefulness of natural immunity against COVID-19, despite the fact that natural immunity confers protection against all of the virus’s proteins, and not just one.
Vaccines will do more harm than good. The antigen that these vaccines are based on, SARS-CoV- 2 Spike, is a toxic protein. SARS-CoV-2 may have ADE, or antibody-dependent enhancement; current antibodies may not neutralize future strains, but instead help them infect immune cells. Also, vaccinating during a pandemic with a leaky vaccine removes the evolutionary pressure for a virus to become less lethal.
There is a vast and appalling criminal conspiracy that directly links both Anthony Fauci and Moderna to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
COVID-19 vaccine researchers are directly linked to scientists involved in brain-computer interface (“neural lace”) tech, one of whom was indicted for taking grant money from China.
Independent researchers have discovered mysterious nanoparticles inside the vaccines that are not supposed to be present.
The entire pandemic is being used as an excuse for a vast political and economic transformation of Western society that will enrich the already rich and turn the rest of us into serfs and untouchables.
COVID-19 Pathophysiology and Treatments:
COVID-19 is not a viral pneumonia. It is a viral vascular endotheliitis and attacks the lining of blood vessels, particularly the small pulmonary alveolar capillaries, leading to endothelial cell activation and sloughing, coagulopathy, sepsis, pulmonary edema, and ARDS-like symptoms. This is a disease of the blood and blood vessels. The circulatory system. Any pneumonia that it causes is secondary to that.
In severe cases, this leads to sepsis, blood clots, and multiple organ failure, including hypoxic and inflammatory damage to various vital organs, such as the brain, heart, liver, pancreas, kidneys, and intestines.
Some of the most common laboratory findings in COVID-19 are elevated D-dimer, elevated prothrombin time, elevated C-reactive protein, neutrophilia, lymphopenia, hypocalcemia, and hyperferritinemia, essentially matching a profile of coagulopathy and immune system hyperactivation/immune cell exhaustion.
COVID-19 can present as almost anything, due to the wide tropism of SARS-CoV-2 for various tissues in the body’s vital organs. While its most common initial presentation is respiratory illness and flu-like symptoms, it can present as brain inflammation, gastrointestinal disease, or even heart attack or pulmonary embolism.
COVID-19 is more severe in those with specific comorbidities, such as obesity, diabetes, and hypertension. This is because these conditions involve endothelial dysfunction, which renders the circulatory system more susceptible to infection and injury by this particular virus.
The vast majority of COVID-19 cases are mild and do not cause significant disease. In known cases, there is something known as the 80/20 rule, where 80% of cases are mild and 20% are severe or critical. However, this ratio is only correct for known cases, not all infections. The number of actual infections is much, much higher. Consequently, the mortality and morbidity rate is lower. However, COVID-19 spreads very quickly, meaning that there are a significant number of severely-ill and critically-ill patients appearing in a short time frame.
In those who have critical COVID-19-induced sepsis, hypoxia, coagulopathy, and ARDS, the most common treatments are intubation, injected corticosteroids, and blood thinners. This is not the correct treatment for COVID-19. In severe hypoxia, cellular metabolic shifts cause ATP to break down into hypoxanthine, which, upon the reintroduction of oxygen, causes xanthine oxidase to produce tons of highly damaging radicals that attack tissue. This is called ischemia-reperfusion injury, and it’s why the majority of people who go on a ventilator are dying. In the mitochondria, succinate buildup due to sepsis does the same exact thing; when oxygen is reintroduced, it makes superoxide radicals. Make no mistake, intubation will kill people who have COVID-19.
The end-stage of COVID-19 is severe lipid peroxidation, where fats in the body start to “rust” due to damage by oxidative stress. This drives autoimmunity. Oxidized lipids appear as foreign objects to the immune system, which recognizes and forms antibodies against OSEs, or oxidation-specific epitopes. Also, oxidized lipids feed directly into pattern recognition receptors, triggering even more inflammation and summoning even more cells of the innate immune system that release even more destructive enzymes. This is similar to the pathophysiology of Lupus.
COVID-19’s pathology is dominated by extreme oxidative stress and neutrophil respiratory burst, to the point where hemoglobin becomes incapable of carrying oxygen due to heme iron being stripped out of heme by hypochlorous acid. No amount of supplemental oxygen can oxygenate blood that chemically refuses to bind O2.
The breakdown of the pathology is as follows:
SARS-CoV-2 Spike binds to ACE2. Angiotensin Converting Enzyme 2 is an enzyme that is part of the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system, or RAAS. The RAAS is a hormone control system that moderates fluid volume in the body and in the bloodstream (i.e. osmolarity) by controlling salt retention and excretion. This protein, ACE2, is ubiquitous in every part of the body that interfaces with the circulatory system, particularly in vascular endothelial cells and pericytes, brain astrocytes, renal tubules and podocytes, pancreatic islet cells, bile duct and intestinal epithelial cells, and the seminiferous ducts of the testis, all of which SARS-CoV-2 can infect, not just the lungs.
SARS-CoV-2 infects a cell as follows: SARS-CoV-2 Spike undergoes a conformational change where the S1 trimers flip up and extend, locking onto ACE2 bound to the surface of a cell. TMPRSS2, or transmembrane protease serine 2, comes along and cuts off the heads of the Spike, exposing the S2 stalk-shaped subunit inside. The remainder of the Spike undergoes a conformational change that causes it to unfold like an extension ladder, embedding itself in the cell membrane. Then, it folds back upon itself, pulling the viral membrane and the cell membrane together. The two membranes fuse, with the virus’s proteins migrating out onto the surface of the cell. The SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid enters the cell, disgorging its genetic material and beginning the viral replication process, hijacking the cell’s own structures to produce more virus.
SARS-CoV-2 Spike proteins embedded in a cell can actually cause human cells to fuse together, forming syncytia/MGCs (multinuclear giant cells). They also have other pathogenic, harmful effects. SARS-CoV- 2’s viroporins, such as its Envelope protein, act as calcium ion channels, introducing calcium into infected cells. The virus suppresses the natural interferon response, resulting in delayed inflammation. SARS-CoV-2 N protein can also directly activate the NLRP3 inflammasome. Also, it suppresses the Nrf2 antioxidant pathway. The suppression of ACE2 by binding with Spike causes a buildup of bradykinin that would otherwise be broken down by ACE2.
This constant calcium influx into the cells results in (or is accompanied by) noticeable hypocalcemia, or low blood calcium, especially in people with Vitamin D deficiencies and pre-existing endothelial dysfunction. Bradykinin upregulates cAMP, cGMP, COX, and Phospholipase C activity. This results in prostaglandin release and vastly increased intracellular calcium signaling, which promotes highly aggressive ROS release and ATP depletion. NADPH oxidase releases superoxide into the extracellular space. Superoxide radicals react with nitric oxide to form peroxynitrite. Peroxynitrite reacts with the tetrahydrobiopterin cofactor needed by endothelial nitric oxide synthase, destroying it and “uncoupling” the enzymes, causing nitric oxide synthase to synthesize more superoxide instead. This proceeds in a positive feedback loop until nitric oxide bioavailability in the circulatory system is depleted.
Dissolved nitric oxide gas produced constantly by eNOS serves many important functions, but it is also antiviral against SARS-like coronaviruses, preventing the palmitoylation of the viral Spike protein and making it harder for it to bind to host receptors. The loss of NO allows the virus to begin replicating with impunity in the body. Those with endothelial dysfunction (i.e. hypertension, diabetes, obesity, old age, African-American race) have redox equilibrium issues to begin with, giving the virus an advantage.
Due to the extreme cytokine release triggered by these processes, the body summons a great deal of neutrophils and monocyte-derived alveolar macrophages to the lungs. Cells of the innate immune system are the first-line defenders against pathogens. They work by engulfing invaders and trying to attack them with enzymes that produce powerful oxidants, like SOD and MPO. Superoxide dismutase takes superoxide and makes hydrogen peroxide, and myeloperoxidase takes hydrogen peroxide and chlorine ions and makes hypochlorous acid, which is many, many times more reactive than sodium hypochlorite bleach.
Neutrophils have a nasty trick. They can also eject these enzymes into the extracellular space, where they will continuously spit out peroxide and bleach into the bloodstream. This is called neutrophil extracellular trap formation, or, when it becomes pathogenic and counterproductive, NETosis. In severe and critical COVID-19, there is actually rather severe NETosis.
Hypochlorous acid building up in the bloodstream begins to bleach the iron out of heme and compete for O2 binding sites. Red blood cells lose the ability to transport oxygen, causing the sufferer to turn blue in the face. Unliganded iron, hydrogen peroxide, and superoxide in the bloodstream undergo the Haber- Weiss and Fenton reactions, producing extremely reactive hydroxyl radicals that violently strip electrons from surrounding fats and DNA, oxidizing them severely.
This condition is not unknown to medical science. The actual name for all of this is acute sepsis.
We know this is happening in COVID-19 because people who have died of the disease have noticeable ferroptosis signatures in their tissues, as well as various other oxidative stress markers such as nitrotyrosine, 4-HNE, and malondialdehyde.
When you intubate someone with this condition, you are setting off a free radical bomb by supplying the cells with O2. It’s a catch-22, because we need oxygen to make Adenosine Triphosphate (that is, to live), but O2 is also the precursor of all these damaging radicals that lead to lipid peroxidation.
The correct treatment for severe COVID-19 related sepsis is non-invasive ventilation, steroids, and antioxidant infusions. Most of the drugs repurposed for COVID-19 that show any benefit whatsoever in rescuing critically-ill COVID-19 patients are antioxidants. N-acetylcysteine, melatonin, fluvoxamine, budesonide, famotidine, cimetidine, and ranitidine are all antioxidants. Indomethacin prevents iron- driven oxidation of arachidonic acid to isoprostanes. There are powerful antioxidants such as apocynin that have not even been tested on COVID-19 patients yet which could defang neutrophils, prevent lipid peroxidation, restore endothelial health, and restore oxygenation to the tissues.
Scientists who know anything about pulmonary neutrophilia, ARDS, and redox biology have known or surmised much of this since March 2020. In April 2020, Swiss scientists confirmed that COVID-19 was a vascular endotheliitis. By late 2020, experts had already concluded that COVID-19 causes a form of viral sepsis. They also know that sepsis can be effectively treated with antioxidants. None of this information is particularly new, and yet, for the most part, it has not been acted upon. Doctors continue to use damaging intubation techniques with high PEEP settings despite high lung compliance and poor oxygenation, killing an untold number of critically ill patients with medical malpractice.
Because of the way they are constructed, Randomized Control Trials will never show any benefit for any antiviral against COVID-19. Not Remdesivir, not Kaletra, not HCQ, and not Ivermectin. The reason for this is simple; for the patients that they have recruited for these studies, such as Oxford’s ludicrous RECOVERY study, the intervention is too late to have any positive effect.
The clinical course of COVID-19 is such that by the time most people seek medical attention for hypoxia, their viral load has already tapered off to almost nothing. If someone is about 10 days post-exposure and has already been symptomatic for five days, there is hardly any virus left in their bodies, only cellular damage and derangement that has initiated a hyperinflammatory response. It is from this group that the clinical trials for antivirals have recruited, pretty much exclusively.
In these trials, they give antivirals to severely ill patients who have no virus in their bodies, only a delayed hyperinflammatory response, and then absurdly claim that antivirals have no utility in treating or preventing COVID-19. These clinical trials do not recruit people who are pre-symptomatic. They do not test pre-exposure or post-exposure prophylaxis.
This is like using a defibrillator to shock only flatline, and then absurdly claiming that defibrillators have no medical utility whatsoever when the patients refuse to rise from the dead. The intervention is too late. These trials for antivirals show systematic, egregious selection bias. They are providing a treatment that is futile to the specific cohort they are enrolling.
India went against the instructions of the WHO and mandated the prophylactic usage of Ivermectin. They have almost completely eradicated COVID-19. The Indian Bar Association of Mumbai has brought criminal charges against WHO Chief Scientist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan for recommending against the use of Ivermectin.
Ivermectin is not “horse dewormer”. Yes, it is sold in veterinary paste form as a dewormer for animals. It has also been available in pill form for humans for decades, as an antiparasitic drug.
The media have disingenuously claimed that because Ivermectin is an antiparasitic drug, it has no utility as an antivirus. This is incorrect. Ivermectin has utility as an antiviral. It blocks importin, preventing nuclear import, effectively inhibiting viral access to cell nuclei. Many drugs currently on the market have multiple modes of action. Ivermectin is one such drug. It is both antiparasitic and antiviral.
In Bangladesh, Ivermectin costs $1.80 for an entire 5-day course. Remdesivir, which is toxic to the liver, costs $3,120 for a 5-day course of the drug. Billions of dollars of utterly useless Remdesivir were sold to our governments on the taxpayer’s dime, and it ended up being totally useless for treating hyperinflammatory COVID-19. The media has hardly even covered this at all.
The opposition to the use of generic Ivermectin is not based in science. It is purely financially and politically-motivated. An effective non-vaccine intervention would jeopardize the rushed FDA approval of patented vaccines and medicines for which the pharmaceutical industry stands to rake in billions upon billions of dollars in sales on an ongoing basis.
The majority of the public are scientifically illiterate and cannot grasp what any of this even means, thanks to a pathetic educational system that has miseducated them. You would be lucky to find 1 in 100 people who have even the faintest clue what any of this actually means.
COVID-19 Transmission:
COVID-19 is airborne. The WHO carried water for China by claiming that the virus was only droplet- borne. Our own CDC absurdly claimed that it was mostly transmitted by fomite-to-face contact, which, given its rapid spread from Wuhan to the rest of the world, would have been physically impossible.
The ridiculous belief in fomite-to-face being a primary mode of transmission led to the use of surface disinfection protocols that wasted time, energy, productivity, and disinfectant.
The 6-foot guidelines are absolutely useless. The minimum safe distance to protect oneself from an aerosolized virus is to be 15+ feet away from an infected person, no closer. Realistically, no public transit is safe.
Surgical masks do not protect you from aerosols. The virus is too small and the filter media has too large of gaps to filter it out. They may catch respiratory droplets and keep the virus from being expelled by someone who is sick, but they do not filter a cloud of infectious aerosols if someone were to walk into said cloud.
The minimum level of protection against this virus is quite literally a P100 respirator, a PAPR/CAPR, or a 40mm NATO CBRN respirator, ideally paired with a full-body tyvek or tychem suit, gloves, and booties, with all the holes and gaps taped.
Live SARS-CoV-2 may potentially be detected in sewage outflows, and there may be oral-fecal transmission. During the SARS outbreak in 2003, in the Amoy Gardens incident, hundreds of people were infected by aerosolized fecal matter rising from floor drains in their apartments.
COVID-19 Vaccine Dangers:
The vaccines for COVID-19 are not sterilizing and do not prevent infection or transmission. They are “leaky” vaccines. This means they remove the evolutionary pressure on the virus to become less lethal. It also means that the vaccinated are perfect carriers. In other words, those who are vaccinated are a threat to the unvaccinated, not the other way around.
All of the COVID-19 vaccines currently in use have undergone minimal testing, with highly accelerated clinical trials. Though they appear to limit severe illness, the long-term safety profile of these vaccines remains unknown.
Some of these so-called “vaccines” utilize an untested new technology that has never been used in vaccines before. Traditional vaccines use weakened or killed virus to stimulate an immune response. The Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines do not. They are purported to consist of an intramuscular shot containing a suspension of lipid nanoparticles filled with messenger RNA. The way they generate an immune response is by fusing with cells in a vaccine recipient’s shoulder, undergoing endocytosis, releasing their mRNA cargo into those cells, and then utilizing the ribosomes in those cells to synthesize modified SARS-CoV-2 Spike proteins in-situ.
These modified Spike proteins then migrate to the surface of the cell, where they are anchored in place by a transmembrane domain. The adaptive immune system detects the non-human viral protein being expressed by these cells, and then forms antibodies against that protein. This is purported to confer protection against the virus, by training the adaptive immune system to recognize and produce antibodies against the Spike on the actual virus. The J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines do something similar, but use an adenovirus vector for genetic material delivery instead of a lipid nanoparticle. These vaccines were produced or validated with the aid of fetal cell lines HEK-293 and PER.C6, which people with certain religious convictions may object strongly to.
SARS-CoV-2 Spike is a highly pathogenic protein on its own. It is impossible to overstate the danger presented by introducing this protein into the human body.
It is claimed by vaccine manufacturers that the vaccine remains in cells in the shoulder, and that SARS- CoV-2 Spike produced and expressed by these cells from the vaccine’s genetic material is harmless and inert, thanks to the insertion of prolines in the Spike sequence to stabilize it in the prefusion conformation, preventing the Spike from becoming active and fusing with other cells. However, a pharmacokinetic study from Japan showed that the lipid nanoparticles and mRNA from the Pfizer vaccine did not stay in the shoulder, and in fact bioaccumulated in many different organs, including the reproductive organs and adrenal glands, meaning that modified Spike is being expressed quite literally all over the place. These lipid nanoparticles may trigger anaphylaxis in an unlucky few, but far more concerning is the unregulated expression of Spike in various somatic cell lines far from the injection site and the unknown consequences of that.
Messenger RNA is normally consumed right after it is produced in the body, being translated into a protein by a ribosome. COVID-19 vaccine mRNA is produced outside the body, long before a ribosome translates it. In the meantime, it could accumulate damage if inadequately preserved. When a ribosome attempts to translate a damaged strand of mRNA, it can become stalled. When this happens, the ribosome becomes useless for translating proteins because it now has a piece of mRNA stuck in it, like a lace card in an old punch card reader. The whole thing has to be cleaned up and new ribosomes synthesized to replace it. In cells with low ribosome turnover, like nerve cells, this can lead to reduced protein synthesis, cytopathic effects, and neuropathies.
Certain proteins, including SARS-CoV-2 Spike, have proteolytic cleavage sites that are basically like little dotted lines that say “cut here”, which attract a living organism’s own proteases (essentially, molecular scissors) to cut them. There is a possibility that S1 may be proteolytically cleaved from S2, causing active S1 to float away into the bloodstream while leaving the S2 “stalk” embedded in the membrane of the cell that expressed the protein.
SARS-CoV-2 Spike has a Superantigenic region (SAg), which may promote extreme inflammation.
Anti-Spike antibodies were found in one study to function as autoantibodies and attack the body’s own cells. Those who have been immunized with COVID-19 vaccines have developed blood clots, myocarditis, Guillain-Barre Syndrome, Bell’s Palsy, and multiple sclerosis flares, indicating that the vaccine promotes autoimmune reactions against healthy tissue.
SARS-CoV-2 Spike does not only bind to ACE2. It was suspected to have regions that bind to basigin, integrins, neuropilin-1, and bacterial lipopolysaccharides as well. SARS-CoV-2 Spike, on its own, can potentially bind any of these things and act as a ligand for them, triggering unspecified and likely highly inflammatory cellular activity.
SARS-CoV-2 Spike contains an unusual PRRA insert that forms a furin cleavage site. Furin is a ubiquitous human protease, making this an ideal property for the Spike to have, giving it a high degree of cell tropism. No wild-type SARS-like coronaviruses related to SARS-CoV-2 possess this feature, making it highly suspicious, and perhaps a sign of human tampering.
SARS-CoV-2 Spike has a prion-like domain that enhances its infectiousness.
The Spike S1 RBD may bind to heparin-binding proteins and promote amyloid aggregation. In humans, this could lead to Parkinson’s, Lewy Body Dementia, premature Alzheimer’s, or various other neurodegenerative diseases. This is very concerning because SARS-CoV-2 S1 is capable of injuring and penetrating the blood-brain barrier and entering the brain. It is also capable of increasing the permeability of the blood-brain barrier to other molecules.
SARS-CoV-2, like other betacoronaviruses, may have Dengue-like ADE, or antibody-dependent enhancement of disease. For those who aren’t aware, some viruses, including betacoronaviruses, have a feature called ADE. There is also something called Original Antigenic Sin, which is the observation that the body prefers to produce antibodies based on previously-encountered strains of a virus over newly- encountered ones.
In ADE, antibodies from a previous infection become non-neutralizing due to mutations in the virus’s proteins. These non-neutralizing antibodies then act as trojan horses, allowing live, active virus to be pulled into macrophages through their Fc receptor pathways, allowing the virus to infect immune cells that it would not have been able to infect before. This has been known to happen with Dengue Fever; when someone gets sick with Dengue, recovers, and then contracts a different strain, they can get very, very ill.
If someone is vaccinated with mRNA based on the Spike from the initial Wuhan strain of SARS-CoV-2, and then they become infected with a future, mutated strain of the virus, they may become severely ill. In other words, it is possible for vaccines to sensitize someone to disease.
There is a precedent for this in recent history. Sanofi’s Dengvaxia vaccine for Dengue failed because it caused immune sensitization in people whose immune systems were Dengue-naive.
In mice immunized against SARS-CoV and challenged with the virus, a close relative of SARS-CoV-2, they developed immune sensitization, Th2 immunopathology, and eosinophil infiltration in their lungs.
We have been told that SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines cannot be integrated into the human genome, because messenger RNA cannot be turned back into DNA. This is false. There are elements in human cells called LINE-1 retrotransposons, which can indeed integrate mRNA into a human genome by endogenous reverse transcription. Because the mRNA used in the vaccines is stabilized, it hangs around in cells longer, increasing the chances for this to happen. If the gene for SARS-CoV-2 Spike is integrated into a portion of the genome that is not silent and actually expresses a protein, it is possible that people who take this vaccine may continuously express SARS-CoV-2 Spike from their somatic cells for the rest of their lives.
By inoculating people with a vaccine that causes their bodies to produce Spike in-situ, they are being inoculated with a pathogenic protein. A toxin that may cause long-term inflammation, heart problems, and a raised risk of cancers. In the long-term, it may also potentially lead to premature neurodegenerative disease.
Absolutely nobody should be compelled to take this vaccine under any circumstances, and in actual fact, the vaccination campaign must be stopped immediately.
COVID-19 Criminal Conspiracy:
The vaccine and the virus were made by the same people.
In 2014, there was a moratorium on SARS gain-of-function research that lasted until 2017. This research was not halted. Instead, it was outsourced, with the federal grants being laundered through NGOs.
Ralph Baric is a virologist and SARS expert at UNC Chapel Hill in North Carolina. This is who Anthony Fauci was referring to when he insisted, before Congress, that if any gain-of-function research was being conducted, it was being conducted in North Carolina.
This was a lie. Anthony Fauci lied before Congress. A felony.
Ralph Baric and Shi Zhengli are colleagues and have co-written papers together. Ralph Baric mentored Shi Zhengli in his gain-of-function manipulation techniques, particularly serial passage, which results in a virus that appears as if it originated naturally. In other words, deniable bioweapons. Serial passage in humanized hACE2 mice may have produced something like SARS-CoV-2.
The funding for the gain-of-function research being conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology came from Peter Daszak. Peter Daszak runs an NGO called EcoHealth Alliance. EcoHealth Alliance received millions of dollars in grant money from the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (that is, Anthony Fauci), the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (part of the US Department of Defense), and the United States Agency for International Development. NIH/NIAID contributed a few million dollars, and DTRA and USAID each contributed tens of millions of dollars towards this research. Altogether, it was over a hundred million dollars.
EcoHealth Alliance subcontracted these grants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab in China with a very questionable safety record and poorly trained staff, so that they could conduct gain-of-function research, not in their fancy P4 lab, but in a level-2 lab where technicians wore nothing more sophisticated than perhaps a hairnet, latex gloves, and a surgical mask, instead of the bubble suits used when working with dangerous viruses. Chinese scientists in Wuhan reported being routinely bitten and urinated on by laboratory animals. Why anyone would outsource this dangerous and delicate work to the People’s Republic of China, a country infamous for industrial accidents and massive explosions that have claimed hundreds of lives, is completely beyond me, unless the aim was to start a pandemic on purpose.
In November of 2019, three technicians at the Wuhan Institute of Virology developed symptoms consistent with a flu-like illness. Anthony Fauci, Peter Daszak, and Ralph Baric knew at once what had happened, because back channels exist between this laboratory and our scientists and officials.
December 12th, 2019, Ralph Baric signed a Material Transfer Agreement (essentially, an NDA) to receive Coronavirus mRNA vaccine-related materials co-owned by Moderna and NIH. It wasn’t until a whole month later, on January 11th, 2020, that China allegedly sent us the sequence to what would become known as SARS-CoV-2. Moderna claims, rather absurdly, that they developed a working vaccine from this sequence in under 48 hours.
Stephane Bancel, the current CEO of Moderna, was formerly the CEO of bioMerieux, a French multinational corporation specializing in medical diagnostic tech, founded by one Alain Merieux. Alain Merieux was one of the individuals who was instrumental in the construction of the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s P4 lab.
The sequence given as the closest relative to SARS-CoV-2, RaTG13, is not a real virus. It is a forgery. It was made by entering a gene sequence by hand into a database, to create a cover story for the existence of SARS-CoV-2, which is very likely a gain-of-function chimera produced at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and was either leaked by accident or intentionally released.
The animal reservoir of SARS-CoV-2 has never been found.
This is not a conspiracy “theory”. It is an actual criminal conspiracy, in which people connected to the development of Moderna’s mRNA-1273 are directly connected to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and their gain-of-function research by very few degrees of separation, if any. The paper trail is well- established.
The lab-leak theory has been suppressed because pulling that thread leads one to inevitably conclude that there is enough circumstantial evidence to link Moderna, the NIH, the WIV, and both the vaccine and the virus’s creation together. In a sane country, this would have immediately led to the world’s biggest RICO and mass murder case. Anthony Fauci, Peter Daszak, Ralph Baric, Shi Zhengli, and Stephane Bancel, and their accomplices, would have been indicted and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Instead, billions of our tax dollars were awarded to the perpetrators.
The FBI raided Allure Medical in Shelby Township north of Detroit for billing insurance for “fraudulent COVID-19 cures”. The treatment they were using? Intravenous Vitamin C. An antioxidant. Which, as described above, is an entirely valid treatment for COVID-19-induced sepsis, and indeed, is now part of the MATH+ protocol advanced by Dr. Paul E. Marik.
The FDA banned ranitidine (Zantac) due to supposed NDMA (N-nitrosodimethylamine) contamination. Ranitidine is not only an H2 blocker used as antacid, but also has a powerful antioxidant effect, scavenging hydroxyl radicals. This gives it utility in treating COVID-19.
The FDA also attempted to take N-acetylcysteine, a harmless amino acid supplement and antioxidant, off the shelves, compelling Amazon to remove it from their online storefront.
This leaves us with a chilling question: did the FDA knowingly suppress antioxidants useful for treating COVID-19 sepsis as part of a criminal conspiracy against the American public?
The establishment is cooperating with, and facilitating, the worst criminals in human history, and are actively suppressing non-vaccine treatments and therapies in order to compel us to inject these criminals’ products into our bodies. This is absolutely unacceptable.
COVID-19 Vaccine Development and Links to Transhumanism:
This section deals with some more speculative aspects of the pandemic and the medical and scientific establishment’s reaction to it, as well as the disturbing links between scientists involved in vaccine research and scientists whose work involved merging nanotechnology with living cells.
On June 9th, 2020, Charles Lieber, a Harvard nanotechnology researcher with decades of experience, was indicted by the DOJ for fraud. Charles Lieber received millions of dollars in grant money from the US Department of Defense, specifically the military think tanks DARPA, AFOSR, and ONR, as well as NIH and MITRE. His specialty is the use of silicon nanowires in lieu of patch clamp electrodes to monitor and modulate intracellular activity, something he has been working on at Harvard for the past twenty years. He was claimed to have been working on silicon nanowire batteries in China, but none of his colleagues can recall him ever having worked on battery technology in his life; all of his research deals with bionanotechnology, or the blending of nanotech with living cells.
The indictment was over his collaboration with the Wuhan University of Technology. He had double- dipped, against the terms of his DOD grants, and taken money from the PRC’s Thousand Talents plan, a program which the Chinese government uses to bribe Western scientists into sharing proprietary R&D information that can be exploited by the PLA for strategic advantage.
Charles Lieber’s own papers describe the use of silicon nanowires for brain-computer interfaces, or “neural lace” technology. His papers describe how neurons can endocytose whole silicon nanowires or parts of them, monitoring and even modulating neuronal activity.
Charles Lieber was a colleague of Robert Langer. Together, along with Daniel S. Kohane, they worked on a paper describing artificial tissue scaffolds that could be implanted in a human heart to monitor its activity remotely.
Robert Langer, an MIT alumnus and expert in nanotech drug delivery, is one of the co-founders of Moderna. His net worth is now $5.1 billion USD thanks to Moderna’s mRNA-1273 vaccine sales.
Both Charles Lieber and Robert Langer’s bibliographies describe, essentially, techniques for human enhancement, i.e. transhumanism. Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum and the architect behind the so-called “Great Reset”, has long spoken of the “blending of biology and machinery” in his books.
Since these revelations, it has come to the attention of independent researchers that the COVID-19 vaccines may contain reduced graphene oxide nanoparticles. Japanese researchers have also found unexplained contaminants in COVID-19 vaccines.
Graphene oxide is an anxiolytic. It has been shown to reduce the anxiety of laboratory mice when injected into their brains. Indeed, given SARS-CoV-2 Spike’s propensity to compromise the blood-brain barrier and increase its permeability, it is the perfect protein for preparing brain tissue for extravasation of nanoparticles from the bloodstream and into the brain. Graphene is also highly conductive and, in some circumstances, paramagnetic.
In 2013, under the Obama administration, DARPA launched the BRAIN Initiative; BRAIN is an acronym for Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies®. This program involves the development of brain-computer interface technologies for the military, particularly non-invasive, injectable systems that cause minimal damage to brain tissue when removed. Supposedly, this technology would be used for healing wounded soldiers with traumatic brain injuries, the direct brain control of prosthetic limbs, and even new abilities such as controlling drones with one’s mind.
Various methods have been proposed for achieving this, including optogenetics, magnetogenetics, ultrasound, implanted electrodes, and transcranial electromagnetic stimulation. In all instances, the goal is to obtain read or read-write capability over neurons, either by stimulating and probing them, or by rendering them especially sensitive to stimulation and probing.
However, the notion of the widespread use of BCI technology, such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink device, raises many concerns over privacy and personal autonomy. Reading from neurons is problematic enough on its own. Wireless brain-computer interfaces may interact with current or future wireless GSM infrastructure, creating neurological data security concerns. A hacker or other malicious actor may compromise such networks to obtain people’s brain data, and then exploit it for nefarious purposes.
However, a device capable of writing to human neurons, not just reading from them, presents another, even more serious set of ethical concerns. A BCI that is capable of altering the contents of one’s mind for innocuous purposes, such as projecting a heads-up display onto their brain’s visual center or sending audio into one’s auditory cortex, would also theoretically be capable of altering mood and personality, or perhaps even subjugating someone’s very will, rendering them utterly obedient to authority. This technology would be a tyrant’s wet dream. Imagine soldiers who would shoot their own countrymen without hesitation, or helpless serfs who are satisfied to live in literal dog kennels.
BCIs could be used to unscrupulously alter perceptions of basic things such as emotions and values, changing people’s thresholds of satiety, happiness, anger, disgust, and so forth. This is not inconsequential. Someone’s entire regime of behaviors could be altered by a BCI, including such things as suppressing their appetite or desire for virtually anything on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
Anything is possible when you have direct access to someone’s brain and its contents. Someone who is obese could be made to feel disgust at the sight of food. Someone who is involuntarily celibate could have their libido disabled so they don’t even desire sex to begin with. Someone who is racist could be forced to feel delight over cohabiting with people of other races. Someone who is violent could be forced to be meek and submissive. These things might sound good to you if you are a tyrant, but to normal people, the idea of personal autonomy being overridden to such a degree is appalling.
For the wealthy, neural laces would be an unequaled boon, giving them the opportunity to enhance their intelligence with neuroprosthetics (i.e. an “exocortex”), and to deliver irresistible commands directly into the minds of their BCI-augmented servants, even physically or sexually abusive commands that they would normally refuse.
If the vaccine is a method to surreptitiously introduce an injectable BCI into millions of people without their knowledge or consent, then what we are witnessing is the rise of a tyrannical regime unlike anything ever seen before on the face of this planet, one that fully intends to strip every man, woman, and child of our free will.
Our flaws are what make us human. A utopia arrived at by removing people’s free will is not a utopia at all. It is a monomaniacal nightmare. Furthermore, the people who rule over us are Dark Triad types who cannot be trusted with such power. Imagine being beaten and sexually assaulted by a wealthy and powerful psychopath and being forced to smile and laugh over it because your neural lace gives you no choice but to obey your master.
The Elites are forging ahead with this technology without giving people any room to question the social or ethical ramifications, or to establish regulatory frameworks that ensure that our personal agency and autonomy will not be overridden by these devices. They do this because they secretly dream of a future where they can treat you worse than an animal and you cannot even fight back. If this evil plan is allowed to continue, it will spell the end of humanity as we know it.
Conclusions:
The current pandemic was produced and perpetuated by the establishment, through the use of a virus engineered in a PLA-connected Chinese biowarfare laboratory, with the aid of American taxpayer dollars and French expertise.
This research was conducted under the absolutely ridiculous euphemism of “gain-of-function” research, which is supposedly carried out in order to determine which viruses have the highest potential for zoonotic spillover and preemptively vaccinate or guard against them.
Gain-of-function/gain-of-threat research, a.k.a. “Dual-Use Research of Concern”, or DURC, is bioweapon research by another, friendlier-sounding name, simply to avoid the taboo of calling it what it actually is. It has always been bioweapon research. The people who are conducting this research fully understand that they are taking wild pathogens that are not infectious in humans and making them more infectious, often taking grants from military think tanks encouraging them to do so.
These virologists conducting this type of research are enemies of their fellow man, like pyromaniac firefighters. GOF research has never protected anyone from any pandemic. In fact, it has now started one, meaning its utility for preventing pandemics is actually negative. It should have been banned globally, and the lunatics performing it should have been put in straitjackets long ago.
Either through a leak or an intentional release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a deadly SARS strain is now endemic across the globe, after the WHO and CDC and public officials first downplayed the risks, and then intentionally incited a panic and lockdowns that jeopardized people’s health and their livelihoods.
This was then used by the utterly depraved and psychopathic aristocratic class who rule over us as an excuse to coerce people into accepting an injected poison which may be a depopulation agent, a mind control/pacification agent in the form of injectable “smart dust”, or both in one. They believe they can get away with this by weaponizing the social stigma of vaccine refusal. They are incorrect.
Their motives are clear and obvious to anyone who has been paying attention. These megalomaniacs have raided the pension funds of the free world. Wall Street is insolvent and has had an ongoing liquidity crisis since the end of 2019. The aim now is to exert total, full-spectrum physical, mental, and financial control over humanity before we realize just how badly we’ve been extorted by these maniacs.
The pandemic and its response served multiple purposes for the Elite:
Concealing a depression brought on by the usurious plunder of our economies conducted by rentier-capitalists and absentee owners who produce absolutely nothing of any value to society whatsoever. Instead of us having a very predictable Occupy Wall Street Part II, the Elites and their stooges got to stand up on television and paint themselves as wise and all-powerful saviors instead of the marauding cabal of despicable land pirates that they are.
Destroying small businesses and eroding the middle class.
Transferring trillions of dollars of wealth from the American public and into the pockets of billionaires and special interests.
Engaging in insider trading, buying stock in biotech companies and shorting brick-and-mortar businesses and travel companies, with the aim of collapsing face-to-face commerce and tourism and replacing it with e-commerce and servitization.
Creating a casus belli for war with China, encouraging us to attack them, wasting American lives and treasure and driving us to the brink of nuclear armageddon.
Establishing technological and biosecurity frameworks for population control and technocratic- socialist “smart cities” where everyone’s movements are despotically tracked, all in anticipation of widespread automation, joblessness, and food shortages, by using the false guise of a vaccine to compel cooperation.
Any one of these things would constitute a vicious rape of Western society. Taken together, they beggar belief; they are a complete inversion of our most treasured values.
What is the purpose of all of this? One can only speculate as to the perpetrators’ motives, however, we have some theories.
The Elites are trying to pull up the ladder, erase upward mobility for large segments of the population, cull political opponents and other “undesirables”, and put the remainder of humanity on a tight leash, rationing our access to certain goods and services that they have deemed “high-impact”, such as automobile use, tourism, meat consumption, and so on. Naturally, they will continue to have their own luxuries, as part of a strict caste system akin to feudalism.
Why are they doing this? Simple. The Elites are Neo-Malthusians and believe that we are overpopulated and that resource depletion will collapse civilization in a matter of a few short decades. They are not necessarily incorrect in this belief. We are overpopulated, and we are consuming too many resources. However, orchestrating such a gruesome and murderous power grab in response to a looming crisis demonstrates that they have nothing but the utmost contempt for their fellow man.
To those who are participating in this disgusting farce without any understanding of what they are doing, we have one word for you. Stop. You are causing irreparable harm to your country and to your fellow citizens.
To those who may be reading this warning and have full knowledge and understanding of what they are doing and how it will unjustly harm millions of innocent people, we have a few more words.
Damn you to hell. You will not destroy America and the Free World, and you will not have your New World Order. We will make certain of that.
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This PDF document contains 14 pages, followed by another 17 pages of references.
For those, please visit the original PDF file at Covid19 – The Spartacus Letter.
www.frontiersin.orgShican Zhou‡, www.frontiersin.orgHang Wu‡, www.frontiersin.orgWenjuan Ning, www.frontiersin.orgXiao Wu, www.frontiersin.orgXiaoxiao Xu, www.frontiersin.orgYuanqiao Ma, www.frontiersin.orgXingwang Li, www.frontiersin.orgJunhong Hu*†§, www.frontiersin.orgChenyu Wang§ and www.frontiersin.orgJunpeng Wang*§
Infection and Immunity Institute and Translational Medical Center of Huaihe Hospital, Henan University, Kaifeng, China
Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third most common cancer worldwide and still lacks effective therapy. Ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug, has been shown to possess anti-inflammation, anti-virus, and antitumor properties. However, whether ivermectin affects CRC is still unclear. The objective of this study was to evaluate the influence of ivermectin on CRC using CRC cell lines SW480 and SW1116. We used CCK-8 assay to determine the cell viability, used an optical microscope to measure cell morphology, used Annexin V-FITC/7-AAD kit to determine cell apoptosis, used Caspase 3/7 Activity Apoptosis Assay Kit to evaluate Caspase 3/7 activity, used Western blot to determine apoptosis-associated protein expression, and used flow cytometry and fluorescence microscope to determine the reactive oxygen species (ROS) levels and cell cycle. The results demonstrated that ivermectin dose-dependently inhibited colorectal cancer SW480 and SW1116 cell growth, followed by promoting cell apoptosis and increasing Caspase-3/7 activity. Besides, ivermectin upregulated the expression of proapoptotic proteins Bax and cleaved PARP and downregulated antiapoptotic protein Bcl-2. Mechanism analysis showed that ivermectin promoted both total and mitochondrial ROS production in a dose-dependent manner, which could be eliminated by administering N-acetyl-l-cysteine (NAC) in CRC cells. Following NAC treatment, the inhibition of cell growth induced by ivermectin was reversed. Finally, ivermectin at low doses (2.5 and 5 µM) induced CRC cell arrest. Overall, ivermectin suppressed cell proliferation by promoting ROS-mediated mitochondrial apoptosis pathway and inducing S phase arrest in CRC cells, suggesting that ivermectin might be a new potential anticancer drug therapy for human colorectal cancer and other cancers.
Introduction
Colorectal cancer (CRC) refers to malignant tumors in the ascending colon, transverse colon, descending colon, sigmoid colon, and rectum and is one of the most common malignant tumors worldwide. Among all malignant tumors globally, CRC ranks third in incidence and second in mortality (Siegel et al., 2020). CRC has caused a heavy economic burden on the country and individuals (Maida et al., 2017). At present, the treatment of CRC mainly adopts a comprehensive treatment based on surgery, combined with radiotherapy, chemotherapy, targeted therapy, and other treatments (Modest et al., 2019). However, due to the complicated mechanism of the occurrence, development, and metastasis of CRC, there is still a lack of specific drugs for CRC treatment.
Ivermectin is a derivative of the 16-membered macrolide compound abamectin, which was first widely used in clinical practice as an antiparasitic drug (Laing et al., 2017). Ivermectin can increase the activity of γ-aminobutyric acid receptor or glutamate-chloride ion channel (Glu-Cl), increase the influx of chloride ions, and cause the cell membrane hyperpolarization, thereby blocking signal transmission between neurons and muscles (Martin et al., 2021), which exerts its antiparasitic effects. Ivermectin could be used, in addition to as an antiparasitic drug, as antiviral agents such as Flavivirus, HIV-1 virus, and SARS-CoV-2 virus (Mastrangelo et al., 2012; Wagstaff et al., 2012; Caly et al., 2020). Moreover, studies have shown that ivermectin has an inhibitory effect on various tumor cells and may be a potential broad-spectrum antitumor drug (Juarez et al., 2020). Juarez et al. (2020) have demonstrated that ivermectin is the most sensitive to breast cancer cells MDA-MB-231, MDA-MB-468, MCF-7, and ovarian SKOV-3; whereas ivermectin is the most nonsensitive to the prostate cancer cell line DU145. The induction of cell cycle arrest at G0/G1 mediates this effect of ivermectin on these sensitive cancer cells. Furthermore, ivermectin can inhibit the proliferation of cancer cells through p21-activated kinase 1 (PAK1)-induced autophagy, Caspase-dependent apoptosis, or immunogenic cell death regulate the signal pathways, including Hippo, Akt/mTOR, and WNT-TCF pathways to inhibit cancer cell proliferation (Liu et al., 2020). As known, ROS plays a vital role in the apoptosis caused by oxidative stress. ROS is a by-product of normal mitochondrial respiration. Stimuli such as infection, drought, cold, and ultraviolet light result in increased ROS in cells. Then, accumulative ROS could induce cells mitochondrial dysfunction and promote apoptosis in cells (Sinha et al., 2013). Evidence has shown that ivermectin-induced apoptosis is closely related to the production of ROS. Currently, there are few reports on the research of ivermectin in colorectal cancer.
Furthermore, new use of old drugs (that is, drug relocation) is a strategy for expanding old drugs and developing new uses, which has the advantages of low research and development cost and short development time (Pushpakom et al., 2019). Research on drug relocation of ivermectin is a shortcut to developing new antitumor drugs. Given this, we designed a study to explore the impact of ivermectin on the proliferation and apoptosis of CRC cells and the underlying mechanism.
Materials and Methods
Cell Culture
SW480 and SW1116 cells were acquired from ATCC and grown in DMEM medium (Biological Industries, Israel) supplemented with 10% FBS (Biological Industries, Israel), 1% penicillin/streptomycin (Coolaber, Beijing, China), and 2.5% HEPES buffer (Procell, Wuhan, China) in an incubator with a humidified air atmosphere of 5% CO2 at 37°C.
Cell Viability Assay
Cells were seeded at a density of 1 × 104 cells/well in a 96-well plate. After being cultured overnight, cells were treated with ivermectin (Figure 1) (MCE Chemicals, Shanghai, China) at the indicated concentrations for 12, 24, or 36 h or cells were pretreated with N-Acetyl-l-cysteine (NAC, 5 mM) (Aladdin, Shanghai, China) for 1 h and then were cultured in ivermectin (20 μM) for 6 h. Then, 10 μL of CCK-8 solution was added to each well and incubated at 37°C for 1 h. The absorbance was detected at 450 nm by a microplate reader (SpectraMax i3x, Molecular Devices, United States). The cell viability was calculated as follows: (absorbance of drug-treated sample/absorbance of control sample) × 100.
FIGURE 1
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FIGURE 1. The chemical structure of ivermectin which is composed of ivermectin B1a (>90%) and ivermectin B1b.
Cell Morphology
Colorectal cancer cells were plated at 1 × 105 cells/well in twelve-well plates. After being cultured overnight, the cells were treated with ivermectin at the indicated dose for 24 h. Cell morphology was evaluated using an optical microscope.
Flow Cytometry
Apoptosis was determined using the Annexin V-FITC/7-AAD Apoptosis Kit. Briefly, after colorectal cancer cells were exposed to ivermectin (0, 5, 10, and 20 μM) for 6 h, cells were centrifuged at 1,500 rpm for 5 min, washed, and suspended in PBS. Then, cells were stained with Annexin V-FITC and 7-AAD for 15 min. In addition, cells (1 × 106 cells/well) were cultured onto 6-well plates overnight and treated with indicated concentrations (0, 2.5, 5, and 10 μM) of ivermectin. Then, the cells were harvested and resuspended in PBS and fixed with 70% ethanol, and left at −20°C overnight. After 12 h of fixation, cells were centrifuged, washed, and resuspended in cold PBS. Then, the cells were added with 100 μL of RNase and incubated at 37°C for 30 min. The PI staining solution was then added and incubated at 4°C for 30 min. Cells were acquired by flow cytometry (FACSCanto Plus), and data were analyzed using Flowjo 10.0 software. The percentage of Q2 (early apoptosis, Annexin V+7-AAD-) plus Q3 (late apoptosis, Annexin V+7-AAD+) region was counted as the percentage of apoptosis cells.
Caspase 3/7 Activity Assay
Caspase 3/7 assay was performed using the Caspase 3/7 Activity Apoptosis Assay Kit (Sangon Biotech, Shanghai, China). Briefly, after colorectal cancer cells (SW480 or SW1116) were treated with different concentrations of ivermectin (0, 5, 10, and 20 μM) for 6 h, we added 100 μL of Caspase 3/7 reagent into each well and mixed using a plate shaker. The Caspase 3/7 activity was then determined using a microplate reader (SpectraMax i3x). The Caspase 3/7 activity was expressed as a fold of the untreated control (Con) treatment.
Western Blot Assay
After colorectal cancer cells (SW480 and SW1116) were treated with 0, 5, and 10 μM ivermectin for 6 h, they were collected, washed with PBS, and lysed with RIPA buffer. Protein quantification was determined using BCA Protein Assay Kit (EpiZyme Biotechnology, Shanghai, China). Equal amounts of protein were loaded onto an SDS-PAGE gel for electrophoresis and transferred to nitrocellulose. After blocking with 5% nonfat milk for 1 h, the membranes were incubated with the primary antibody [Bcl-2 (1:2000), Bax (1:2000), PARP (1:20,000) (all from Proteintech, Rosemont, IL, United States), and β-actin (1:5000) (Sigma-Aldrich)] on a 4°C shaker overnight. The membranes were then incubated with a secondary antibody for another 1 h at room temperature. A chemiluminescent gel imaging system detected the change in target protein expression (Universal Hood II, Bio-Rad, Hercules, CA, United States).
ROS Measurement
For total ROS measurement, colorectal cancer cells (SW1116) were seeded (1 × 105 cells/well) in a 12-well plate and incubated overnight. Cells were treated with different concentrations of ivermectin for another 6 h, and then they were co-cultured with DCFH-DA (Invitrogen, Carlsbad, CA, United States) and DAPI (Biolegend, San Diego, CA, United States) for 20 min at 37°C in the dark. The cell fluorescence was photographed by fluorescence microscopy (OLYMPUS, Tokyo, Japan).
For the mitochondrial ROS measurement, colorectal cancer cells (SW1116) were seeded in a 12-well plate and incubated overnight. After that, cells were treated with 0, 2.5, 5, 10, and 20 μM ivermectin for another 6 h, and then they were tinted with oxidation of MitoSOX Red (Invitrogen, Carlsbad, CA) and DAPI, which is oxidized by superoxide in the mitochondria, emitting red fluorescence. Cultures were incubated for 10 min at 37°C and washed twice with warm HBSS. Production of mitochondrial ROS was analyzed using MitoSOX Red. The cell fluorescence was photographed by fluorescence microscopy.
Data Analysis
All experiments were repeated at least three times, and data were presented as mean ± S.E.M. The statistics were analyzed using a one-way or two-way ANOVA analysis (ANOVA) followed by Tukey’s test using Prism 9.0 software (Graphpad Software). p values are *, p < 0.05, #, p < 0.05;
Results
Ivermectin Inhibits the Proliferation of Colorectal Cancer Cells
To explore the effect of ivermectin on the proliferation of colorectal cancer cells, we used different concentrations of ivermectin (0, 2.5, 5, 10, 15, 20, and 30 μM) to culture colorectal cancer cells SW480 and SW1116. CCK-8 assay was performed to measure SW480 and SW1116 cancer cell proliferation after cells were incubated for 12, 24, and 36 h. As shown in Figure 2, the cell viability of SW480 and SW1116 cells decreased dose-dependently by ivermectin treatment (Dose, D: p < 0.01). Furthermore, ivermectin inhibited SW480 and SW1116 cell viability in a time-dependent manner (Time, T: p < 0.01). Finally, Table 1 showed that the IC50 of SW480 cells treated with ivermectin for 12, 24, and 36 h was 16.17 ± 0.76 μM, 15.34 ± 0.81 μM, and 12.11 ± 0.97 μM, respectively; and the IC50 of SW1116 cells treated with ivermectin for 12, 24, and 36 h were 7.60 ± 0.62 μM, 6.27 ± 0.70 μM and 5.76 ± 0.81 μM, respectively. The present data indicate that ivermectin might have more sensitive to SW1116 cells than that of SW480 cells.
FIGURE 2
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FIGURE 2. Ivermectin inhibits cell proliferation of SW480 and SW1116 cells. SW480 (A) and SW1116 cells (B) were cultured at different concentrations of ivermectin (0, 2.5, 5, 10, 15, 20, and 30 μM) for 12, 24, and 36 h, and then CCK-8 assay was performed to detect the cell proliferation. The experiment was repeated three times, and data were presented as mean ± S.E.M. The interaction between dose (D) and time (T) effect were analyzed using two-way ANOVA following Tukey’s t-test. D: dose effect; T: time effect: T × D: the interaction between time and dose effect.
TABLE 1
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TABLE 1. Inhibitory concentration (IC50) of IVM on the viability of colorectal cells.
Ivermectin Changes the Morphology of Colorectal Cancer Cells
To study the impact of ivermectin on the cell morphology of colorectal cancer cells, we treated colorectal cancer cells SW480 and SW1116 with different concentrations of ivermectin and then observed the alteration of cell morphology under an optical microscope. After 24 h culture, the cell morphology changed significantly. For the SW480 cells, as the ivermectin concentration increased, the cells became more and more sparse. Especially at 20 μM, the cells lost their original shape, became rounded, and shrunk or floated in the medium (Figure 3). Consistent with IC50 of ivermectin, ivermectin had more sensitivity to SW1116 cells since ivermectin at 5 μM resulted in the cells shrunk; when the concentration of ivermectin was 10 μM, the cells became round, shrunk, and floated in the medium, and the concentration of ivermectin increased to 20 μM, most of the cells shed and floated in the culture medium (Figure 3). These results suggest that ivermectin could promote the death of colorectal cancer cells in a dose-dependent manner.
FIGURE 3
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FIGURE 3. The effect of ivermectin on the morphology of colorectal cancer cells SW480 and SW1116 cells. Colorectal cancer SW480 (A) and SW1116 (B) cells were treated with different concentrations of ivermectin (0, 5, 10, and 20 μM) for 24 h, and then the cell morphology was determined using an optical microscope (200 ×). This experiment was repeated three times, and representative images were shown. IVM, ivermectin.
Ivermectin Induces Apoptosis in Colorectal Cancer Cells
To determine whether ivermectin decreased the cell viability and the cell morphology of colorectal cancer cells via inducing cell apoptosis, we cultured colorectal cancer cells SW480 and SW1116 cells with indicated concentrations of ivermectin for 6 h, and apoptosis was evaluated by flow cytometry using Annexin V-FITC/7-AAD co-staining. As shown in Figure 4, ivermectin increased the proportion of apoptosis cells of SW1116 cells from 9.48% in the control group to 10.5%, 19.87%, and 30.5% in 5, 10, and 20 μM, respectively. Like this, ivermectin increased the proportion of apoptosis SW480 cells from 4.65% in the control cells to 8.51, 12.27, and 12.66% in 5, 10, and 20 μM, respectively. The results indicated that ivermectin had a dose-dependent effect on the induction of colorectal cancer cell apoptosis.
FIGURE 4
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FIGURE 4. Ivermectin induced apoptosis in colorectal cancer cells. SW480 and SW1116 cells were treated with different concentrations of ivermectin (0, 5, 10, and 20 μM) for 6 h and then were stained, described in the “Materials and Methods” section. The total percentage of apoptosis is equal to the percentage of early apoptosis (Q2, Annexin V+7-AAD-) plus the percentage of late apoptosis (Q3, Annexin V+7-AAD+). Representative images from flow cytometry were shown in (A). Data for SW480 (B) and SW480 (C) cells were summarized and analyzed using one-way ANOVA following Tukey’s t-test. The data are shown as the means ± S.E.M. of three independent experiments. (a–d): same letters, no statistical difference; different letters, the statistical difference (p < 0.05). IVM, ivermectin.
Ivermectin Increases Caspase 3/7 Activity in SW480 and SW1116 Cells
Caspase-3 plays a vital role in the initiation of cell apoptosis. Caspase-3 typically exists in the cytoplasm in the form of zymogen (32KD). Caspase-3 activated by upstream signaling molecules can cleave the downstream key apoptosis proteins in the early stages of apoptosis and ultimately lead to apoptosis. In this study, the Caspase 3/7 Activity Apoptosis Assay kit was used to determine the effect of ivermectin on cell apoptosis. As shown in Figure 5, ivermectin increased Caspase 3/7 activity of SW480 and SW1116 cells in a dose-dependent manner.
FIGURE 5
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FIGURE 5. Effect of ivermectin on Caspase 3/7 in SW480 and SW1116 cells. SW480 (A) and SW1116 (B) cells were treated with different concentrations of ivermectin (0, 5, 10, and 20 μM) for 6 h, and then the Caspase 3/7 activity was measured described in the “Materials and Methods” section. Data were analyzed using one-way ANOVA following Tukey’s t-test. The data are shown as the means ± SD of three independent experiments. (a–c): same letters, no statistical difference; different letters, the statistical difference (p < 0.05). IVM, ivermectin.
Ivermectin Affects the Expression of Apoptosis-Related Proteins in SW480 and SW1116 Cells
Bax and Bcl-2 are critical molecules in the endogenous apoptotic pathway. PARP (poly ADP-ribose polymerase) is a DNA repair enzyme, cleaved into Cleaved-PARP by the Caspase family protein, and cannot perform the repair function. The Western blot assay was used to determine the changes of apoptosis-related proteins Bax, Bcl-2, PARP, and Cleaved-PARP after treatment of colorectal cancer SW480 and SW1116 cells with ivermectin at the indicated doses. As the concentration of ivermectin increased, the expression of the proapoptotic protein Bax increased significantly, and the expression of the antiapoptotic protein Bcl-2 decreased; that is, the expression of the Bax/Bcl-2 ratio was gradually increasing (Figure 6). Also, the expression of Cleaved-PARP increased following the increase of ivermectin concentration (Figure 6).
FIGURE 6
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FIGURE 6. Influence of ivermectin on the Bax, Bcl-2, PARP, and Cleaved-PARP expression in SW480 and SW1116 cells. SW480 and SW1116 cells were treated with indicated concentrations of ivermectin (0, 5, and 10 μM) for 6 h and then were collected to determine the expression of apoptosis-related genes (Bax, Bcl-2, PARP, and Cleaved-PARP) by Western blot assay described as the “Materials and Methods” section. Representative gels for SW480 (A, Left panel) and SW1116 (B, Right panel) cells were shown, and data were summarized from three independent experiments (B and C). The relative value was presented as fold induction to that of the control, which was normalized to β-actin. *p < 0.05, compared with the control group (0 µM); #p < 0.05, compared with the 5 µM group. IVM, ivermectin.
Ivermectin Increases Total and Mitochondrial ROS Generation in SW1116 Cells
To determine total intracellular total ROS and mitochondrial ROS levels, we treated SW1116 cells with ivermectin at the indicated concentrations for 6 h. After that, the cells were stained by DCFH-DA or MitoSOX with DAPI; cells were visualized using a fluorescence microscope. With the increase of the ivermectin concentration, the fluorescence of DCFA-DA (Figure 7) and MitoSOX (Figure intensity gradually increased, indicating that ivermectin dose-dependently could increase the total and mitochondrial ROS content.
FIGURE 7
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FIGURE 7. Ivermectin increased total intracellular ROS generation in SW1116 cells. SW1116 cells were treated with ivermectin at the indicated concentrations (0, 2.5, 5, 10, and 20 μM) for 6 h. Then the cells were co-stained by DCFH-DA and DAPI, described as the “Materials and Methods” section; cells were visualized using a fluorescence microscope. Representative images were shown, and the experiment was repeated three times. IVM, ivermectin.
FIGURE 8
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FIGURE 8. Ivermectin increased mitochondrial ROS generation in SW1116 cells. SW1116 cells were treated with ivermectin at the indicated concentrations (0, 2.5, 5, 10, and 20 μM) for 6 h. Then the cells were co-stained by MitoSOX and DAPI, described as the “Materials and Methods” section; cells were visualized using a fluorescence microscope. Representative images were shown, and the experiment was repeated three times. IVM, ivermectin.
NAC Reversed Ivermectin-Induced ROS and Cell Death in Colorectal Cancer Cells
To further illuminate the relationship between ROS and mitochondrial signal pathways in ivermectin-induced apoptosis, colorectal cancer cells were pretreated with ROS inhibitor NAC (5 mM) for 1 h and cultured in ivermectin (20 μM) for another 6 h. The cells were stained by MitoSOX and detected by flow cytometry. Compared with the control (Con, 0 µM) group, the peak shifted significantly to the right after treatment with ivermectin (20 µM); the peak shifted to the left after NAC administration (Figures 9A,B). This result illustrated that the NAC inhibited the ivermectin-induced ROS accumulation. Furthermore, this study used the CCK-8 kit to detected cell viability. For colorectal cancer cells SW480 (Figure 9C) and SW1116 (Figure 9D), compared with the control group without ivermectin, the cell viability decreased after ivermectin treatment could be reversed by administration of NAC.
FIGURE 9
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FIGURE 9. NAC reversed ivermectin-induced ROS and cell death in colorectal cancer cells. After SW480 (A, C) and SW1116 (B, D) cells were pretreated with ROS inhibitor NAC (5 mM) for 1 h and then were cultured in ivermectin (20 μM) for 6 h, they were stained by MitoSOX and detected by flow cytometry. The experiment was repeated three times, and representative histogram images were shown in (A, B). (C) and (D), after SW1116 and SW480 cells, were pretreated with NAC (5 mM) for 1 h and then were cultured in ivermectin (20 μM) for 6 h; the CCK-8 assay was performed to determine the cell viability described as the “Material and Methods” section. The experiment was performed three times with three biological replicates in each group. *p < 0.05, compared with the control group (0 µM).#p < 0.05, compared with the IVM group. IVM, ivermectin; NAC, N-acetyl-l-cysteine.
Ivermectin Induces Cell Cycle Arrest at S→G2/M in SW480 and SW1116 Cells
The intercellular phase is divided into stationary phase (G0), early DNA synthesis phase (G1), DNA synthesis phase (S), and late DNA synthesis phase (G2/M). Propidium iodide (PI) single staining combined with flow cytometry could be used to detect the cell cycle changes after treating SW480 and SW1116 cells with different concentrations of ivermectin for 12 h. The fluorescent dye PI can bind to DNA in cells. The higher the DNA content, the more fluorescent dyes it binds, and the stronger the fluorescence intensity detected by flow cytometry. The cell cycle stages are divided, and the number of cells in different cycles is measured. Our results showed that the proportion of SW480 cells in the control group (0 µM) in the S phase is 5.31%. The proportion of S phase in each experimental group after 2.5, 5, and 10 μM ivermectin treatments were 25.2, 31.8, and 32.4%, showing an upward trend, indicating that ivermectin could block SW480 in the S phase, slow down the process of S phase entering G2/M phase, block cell growth, and division, and inhibit tumor cell proliferation (Figures 10A,B). It could also be seen from the same principle that the proportions of the S phase of SW1116 cells treated with 0, 2.5, 5, and 10 μM for 12 h were 15, 23, 29, and 37%, respectively (Figures 10A,C).
FIGURE 10
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FIGURE 10. Ivermectin resulted in S-phase cell cycle arrest in a dose-dependent manner in colorectal cancer cells. (A) Different concentrations of ivermectin (0, 2.5, 5, 10, and 20 μM) were applied to SW480 and SW1116 cells for 12 h; flow cytometry was used to detect cell cycle changes. Representative cell cycle histograms were shown in (A), and analysis of periodic distribution statistical results was shown in (B) and (C). IVM, ivermectin.
Discussion
Even though the incidence of colorectal cancer has been declined for a long time, more than one-third of patients who underwent curative resection experience local and systemic recurrence (Wu et al., 2017). Therefore, colorectal cancer is still in an area of high unmet need for effective new treatments. Among different approaches, the new use of old drugs for colorectal cancer therapy is gaining importance. Ivermectin, a broadly-used old drug as an antiparasitic compound, is a drug candidate for repurposing as an anticancer drug (Alout and Foy, 2017). Accumulating evidence suggests that ivermectin has anticancer activities against breast cancer, digestive system cancer, urinary system cancer, hematological cancer, reproductive system cancer, brain glioma, respiratory system cancer, and Melanoma (Tang et al., 2021).
To evaluate the cytotoxicity of ivermectin on colorectal cancer cells, we used the CCK-8 assay to assess the effects of different concentrations of ivermectin on the viability of colorectal cancer cells. The results showed that ivermectin could effectively inhibit the proliferation of colorectal cancer cells in a concentration-dependence and time-dependence manner. There was a significant interaction between drug concentration and time of culture. After treatment with different concentrations, colorectal cancer cells showed inhibition of cell growth by optical microscopy.
Three pathways can lead to cell death, namely apoptosis, autophagy, and cell necrosis (D’Arcy, 2019). At present, targeting apoptosis is the most successful way to treat cancer in addition to surgery (Pfeffer and Singh, 2018). As an essential manner of cell death, apoptosis involves morphological changes with a series of stereotypy, DNA laddering fragments, phosphatidylserine (PS) eversion, mitochondrial transmembrane potential decreasing, and Caspase 3 activation (Kaczanowski, 2016; Majtnerová and Roušar, 2018). Therefore, we detected whether ivermectin is involved in the apoptosis of colorectal cancer cells by detecting these landmark events of apoptosis. Firstly, our study used Annexin V-FITC/7-AAD Apoptosis Kit to detect PS eversion. In normal cells, PS is mainly located on the cytoplasmic side of the plasma membrane. When apoptosis begins, PS transfers from the inside of the plasma membrane to the outside (Zhang et al., 2018b). Annexin V has a high affinity for PS and can bind to PS exposed to the external cellular environment. Our study used an Annexin V-FITC/7-AAD kit combined with flow cytometry to detect the effects of different concentrations of ivermectin on the apoptosis of colorectal cancer cells. As shown in the flow cytometry, ivermectin could induce the apoptosis rate of colorectal cancer cells in a dose-dependent manner which further confirmed the apoptosis effect of ivermectin. Secondly, our study used the Caspase 3/7 Apoptosis Kit to detect Caspase-3 activation. In the early stages of apoptosis, Caspase-3 is activated by upstream signal molecules. It can cleave the critical protein of apoptosis downstream and finally lead to cell apoptosis (Porter and Jänicke, 1999). This study showed that caspase3/7 activity increased with increasing ivermectin concentration.
As we all know, apoptosis pathways are mainly divided into extrinsic and intrinsic pathways (Carneiro and El-Deiry, 2020). Under the stimulation of drugs, the Bcl-2 family proteins regulate the permeability of the mitochondrial membrane change. Then cyt c is released into the cytoplasm, triggering the Caspase cascade reaction and finally leading to cell death (Elmore, 2007).
Considerable evidence indicates that both proapoptotic and antiapoptotic Bcl-2 family proteins were implicated in apoptosis induced by ivermectin-induced apoptosis. Song et al. (2019) revealed that ivermectin induced glioma cells apoptosis by upregulating the expressions of p53 and Bax, downregulating Bcl-2, activating cleaved caspase-3, and cleaved caspase-9. Zhang et al. (2019) observed that the ratio of Bax/Bcl-2 in the cytoplasm increased in ivermectin-induced apoptosis of Hela cells. In this study, as we expected, ivermectin inhibited apoptosis protein Bcl-2, increased the expression of apoptosis protein Bax and Cleaved PARP, suggesting that ivermectin may be involved in the intrinsic apoptotic pathway.
Intracellular ROS is involved in regulating apoptosis, cell cycle, and participating in various signal transduction pathways in cells (Yang et al., 2016). Deng et al. (2018) found that ivermectin can increase the content of intracellular ROS, and the increased ROS can activate the TFE3-dependent autophagy pathway. Similarly, Singh and Czaja (2007) found that ROS could ultimately induce hepatocyte death via caspase-dependent apoptotic pathways. This study used DCFH-DA and MitoSOX to detect the change of total ROS and mitochondrial ROS. As our results showed, ivermectin increased both total ROS and mitochondrial ROS in a dose-dependent manner. The flow cytometry results had shown that NAC could eliminate ROS induced by ivermectin to a certain extent. Next, the result of CCK-8 elucidated that NAC reversed ivermectin-induced cell death.
Cell cycle progression is one of the critical signaling mechanisms of homeostasis maintenance in healthy tissues and normal cells (Zhang et al., 2018a). Therefore, induction of cell arrest in cancer cells is a valuable strategy for anticancer drug development (Dominguez-Brauer et al., 2015). Several studies support that ivermectin leads to cell cycle arrest at G0/G1 phase in some cancer cells. For example, Song et al. (2019) found that ivermectin could block the cell cycle of C6 and U251 glioma cells at the G0/G1 phase. In addition, ivermectin could also cause cholangiocarcinoma cell arrest at the S phase (Intuyod et al., 2019). The present study demonstrated that ivermectin induced S-phase arrest in SW480 and SW1116 cells. Further characterization of ivermectin regarding CDK4 and cyclin A (S phase regulators) expression is needed to better characterize ivermectin’s effects upon the cell cycle.
In conclusion, we have demonstrated that ivermectin may regulate the expression of crucial molecules Caspase-3, Bax, Bcl-2, PARP, and Cleaved-PARP in the apoptosis pathway by increasing ROS production and inhibiting the cell cycle in the S phase to inhibit colorectal cancer cells (Figure 11). Therefore, current results indicate that ivermectin might be a new potential anticancer drug for treating human colorectal cancer and other cancers.
FIGURE 11
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FIGURE 11. Diagram of the mechanism of ivermectin inhibiting the proliferation of colorectal cancer cells.
Data Availability Statement
The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/Supplementary Material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding authors.
Funding
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (U2004104), the Natural Science Foundation of Henan Province (202300410080), the Science and Technology Development Project of Henan Province (192102310104, 202102310369, 212102310696, and 202102310094), the Key Project of Henan Education Committee (21A310005), and the Postgraduate “Talent Program” of Henan University (SYL20060187 and SYL20060189).
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Publisher’s Note
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
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Citation: Zhou S, Wu H, Ning W, Wu X, Xu X, Ma Y, Li X, Hu J, Wang C and Wang J (2021) Ivermectin has New Application in Inhibiting Colorectal Cancer Cell Growth. Front. Pharmacol. 12:717529. doi: 10.3389/fphar.2021.717529
Received: 31 May 2021; Accepted: 05 August 2021;
Published: 13 August 2021.
Edited by:
Ilkay Erdogan Orhan, Gazi University, Turkey
Rights Reserved _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
THE HAGUE, 12 October 2021 – A ggroup of holocaust survivors and Israeli rabbis have appealed to the International Criminal Court (ICC) to start investigating available evidence of genocide, crimes against humanity and violation of the Nuremberg Code by the governments of the UK, France, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Said evidence, such as sworn affidavits from recognized experts that qualify both the SARS Cov 2 virus and experimental “vaccination†as bioweapons, had been submitted to the court months ago by a group of international lawyers.
The group’s letter represents an escalation after an earlier appeal to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and other regulatory authorities failed to produce any human emotion in view of the appalling number of the “vaccination†victims.
Covid-19: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial
BMJ 2021; 375 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n2635 (Published 02 November 2021) Cite this as: BMJ 2021;375:n2635
Read our latest coverage of the coronavirus pandemic
Revelations of poor practices at a contract research company helping to carry out Pfizer’s pivotal covid-19 vaccine trial raise questions about data integrity and regulatory oversight. Paul D Thacker reports
In autumn 2020 Pfizer’s chairman and chief executive, Albert Bourla, released an open letter to the billions of people around the world who were investing their hopes in a safe and effective covid-19 vaccine to end the pandemic. “As I’ve said before, we are operating at the speed of science,” Bourla wrote, explaining to the public when they could expect a Pfizer vaccine to be authorised in the United States.1
But, for researchers who were testing Pfizer’s vaccine at several sites in Texas during that autumn, speed may have come at the cost of data integrity and patient safety. A regional director who was employed at the research organisation Ventavia Research Group has told The BMJ that the company falsified data, unblinded patients, employed inadequately trained vaccinators, and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported in Pfizer’s pivotal phase III trial. Staff who conducted quality control checks were overwhelmed by the volume of problems they were finding. After repeatedly notifying Ventavia of these problems, the regional director, Brook Jackson, emailed a complaint to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Ventavia fired her later the same day. Jackson has provided The BMJ with dozens of internal company documents, photos, audio recordings, and emails.
Poor laboratory management
On its website Ventavia calls itself the largest privately owned clinical research company in Texas and lists many awards it has won for its contract work.2 But Jackson has told The BMJ that, during the two weeks she was employed at Ventavia in September 2020, she repeatedly informed her superiors of poor laboratory management, patient safety concerns, and data integrity issues. Jackson was a trained clinical trial auditor who previously held a director of operations position and came to Ventavia with more than 15 years’ experience in clinical research coordination and management. Exasperated that Ventavia was not dealing with the problems, Jackson documented several matters late one night, taking photos on her mobile phone. One photo, provided to The BMJ, showed needles discarded in a plastic biohazard bag instead of a sharps container box. Another showed vaccine packaging materials with trial participants’ identification numbers written on them left out in the open, potentially unblinding participants. Ventavia executives later questioned Jackson for taking the photos.
Early and inadvertent unblinding may have occurred on a far wider scale. According to the trial’s design, unblinded staff were responsible for preparing and administering the study drug (Pfizer’s vaccine or a placebo). This was to be done to preserve the blinding of trial participants and all other site staff, including the principal investigator. However, at Ventavia, Jackson told The BMJ that drug assignment confirmation printouts were being left in participants’ charts, accessible to blinded personnel. As a corrective action taken in September, two months into trial recruitment and with around 1000 participants already enrolled, quality assurance checklists were updated with instructions for staff to remove drug assignments from charts.
In a recording of a meeting in late September2020 between Jackson and two directors a Ventavia executive can be heard explaining that the company wasn’t able to quantify the types and number of errors they were finding when examining the trial paperwork for quality control. “In my mind, it’s something new every day,” a Ventavia executive says. “We know that it’s significant.”
Ventavia was not keeping up with data entry queries, shows an email sent by ICON, the contract research organisation with which Pfizer partnered on the trial. ICON reminded Ventavia in a September 2020 email: “The expectation for this study is that all queries are addressed within 24hrs.” ICON then highlighted over 100 outstanding queries older than three days in yellow. Examples included two individuals for which “Subject has reported with Severe symptoms/reactions … Per protocol, subjects experiencing Grade 3 local reactions should be contacted. Please confirm if an UNPLANNED CONTACT was made and update the corresponding form as appropriate.” According to the trial protocol a telephone contact should have occurred “to ascertain further details and determine whether a site visit is clinically indicated.”
Worries over FDA inspection
Documents show that problems had been going on for weeks. In a list of “action items” circulated among Ventavia leaders in early August 2020, shortly after the trial began and before Jackson’s hiring, a Ventavia executive identified three site staff members with whom to “Go over e-diary issue/falsifying data, etc.” One of them was “verbally counseled for changing data and not noting late entry,” a note indicates.
At several points during the late September meeting Jackson and the Ventavia executives discussed the possibility of the FDA showing up for an inspection (box 1). “We’re going to get some kind of letter of information at least, when the FDA gets here . . . know it,” an executive stated.
Box 1
A history of lax oversight
When it comes to the FDA and clinical trials, Elizabeth Woeckner, president of Citizens for Responsible Care and Research Incorporated (CIRCARE),3 says the agency’s oversight capacity is severely under-resourced. If the FDA receives a complaint about a clinical trial, she says the agency rarely has the staff available to show up and inspect. And sometimes oversight occurs too late.
In one example CIRCARE and the US consumer advocacy organisation Public Citizen, along with dozens of public health experts, filed a detailed complaint in July 2018 with the FDA about a clinical trial that failed to comply with regulations for the protection of human participants.4 Nine months later, in April 2019, an FDA investigator inspected the clinical site. In May this year the FDA sent the triallist a warning letter that substantiated many of the claims in the complaints. It said, “[I]t appears that you did not adhere to the applicable statutory requirements and FDA regulations governing the conduct of clinical investigations and the protection of human subjects.”5
“There’s just a complete lack of oversight of contract research organisations and independent clinical research facilities,” says Jill Fisher, professor of social medicine at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and author of Medical Research for Hire: The Political Economy of Pharmaceutical Clinical Trials.
Ventavia and the FDA
A former Ventavia employee told The BMJ that the company was nervous and expecting a federal audit of its Pfizer vaccine trial.
“People working in clinical research are terrified of FDA audits,” Jill Fisher told The BMJ, but added that the agency rarely does anything other than inspect paperwork, usually months after a trial has ended. “I don’t know why they’re so afraid of them,” she said. But she said she was surprised that the agency failed to inspect Ventavia after an employee had filed a complaint. “You would think if there’s a specific and credible complaint that they would have to investigate that,” Fisher said.
In 2007 the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the Inspector General released a report on FDA’s oversight of clinical trials conducted between 2000 and 2005. The report found that the FDA inspected only 1% of clinical trial sites.6 Inspections carried out by the FDA’s vaccines and biologics branch have been decreasing in recent years, with just 50 conducted in the 2020 fiscal year.7
RETURN TO TEXT
The next morning, 25 September 2020, Jackson called the FDA to warn about unsound practices in Pfizer’s clinical trial at Ventavia. She then reported her concerns in an email to the agency. In the afternoon Ventavia fired Jackson—deemed “not a good fit,” according to her separation letter.
Jackson told The BMJ it was the first time she had been fired in her 20 year career in research.
Concerns raised
In her 25 September email to the FDA Jackson wrote that Ventavia had enrolled more than 1000 participants at three sites. The full trial (registered under NCT04368728) enrolled around 44 000 participants across 153 sites that included numerous commercial companies and academic centres. She then listed a dozen concerns she had witnessed, including:
Participants placed in a hallway after injection and not being monitored by clinical staff
Lack of timely follow-up of patients who experienced adverse events
Protocol deviations not being reported
Vaccines not being stored at proper temperatures
Mislabelled laboratory specimens, and
Targeting of Ventavia staff for reporting these types of problems.
Within hours Jackson received an email from the FDA thanking her for her concerns and notifying her that the FDA could not comment on any investigation that might result. A few days later Jackson received a call from an FDA inspector to discuss her report but was told that no further information could be provided. She heard nothing further in relation to her report.
In Pfizer’s briefing document submitted to an FDA advisory committee meeting held on 10 December 2020 to discuss Pfizer’s application for emergency use authorisation of its covid-19 vaccine, the company made no mention of problems at the Ventavia site. The next day the FDA issued the authorisation of the vaccine.8
In August this year, after the full approval of Pfizer’s vaccine, the FDA published a summary of its inspections of the company’s pivotal trial. Nine of the trial’s 153 sites were inspected. Ventavia’s sites were not listed among the nine, and no inspections of sites where adults were recruited took place in the eight months after the December 2020 emergency authorisation. The FDA’s inspection officer noted: “The data integrity and verification portion of the BIMO [bioresearch monitoring] inspections were limited because the study was ongoing, and the data required for verification and comparison were not yet available to the IND [investigational new drug].”
Other employees’ accounts
In recent months Jackson has reconnected with several former Ventavia employees who all left or were fired from the company. One of them was one of the officials who had taken part in the late September meeting. In a text message sent in June the former official apologised, saying that “everything that you complained about was spot on.”
Two former Ventavia employees spoke to The BMJ anonymously for fear of reprisal and loss of job prospects in the tightly knit research community. Both confirmed broad aspects of Jackson’s complaint. One said that she had worked on over four dozen clinical trials in her career, including many large trials, but had never experienced such a “helter skelter” work environment as with Ventavia on Pfizer’s trial.
“I’ve never had to do what they were asking me to do, ever,” she told The BMJ. “It just seemed like something a little different from normal—the things that were allowed and expected.”
She added that during her time at Ventavia the company expected a federal audit but that this never came.
After Jackson left the company problems persisted at Ventavia, this employee said. In several cases Ventavia lacked enough employees to swab all trial participants who reported covid-like symptoms, to test for infection. Laboratory confirmed symptomatic covid-19 was the trial’s primary endpoint, the employee noted. (An FDA review memorandum released in August this year states that across the full trial swabs were not taken from 477 people with suspected cases of symptomatic covid-19.)
“I don’t think it was good clean data,” the employee said of the data Ventavia generated for the Pfizer trial. “It’s a crazy mess.”
A second employee also described an environment at Ventavia unlike any she had experienced in her 20 years doing research. She told The BMJ that, shortly after Ventavia fired Jackson, Pfizer was notified of problems at Ventavia with the vaccine trial and that an audit took place.
Since Jackson reported problems with Ventavia to the FDA in September 2020, Pfizer has hired Ventavia as a research subcontractor on four other vaccine clinical trials (covid-19 vaccine in children and young adults, pregnant women, and a booster dose, as well an RSV vaccine trial; NCT04816643, NCT04754594, NCT04955626, NCT05035212). The advisory committee for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is set to discuss the covid-19 paediatric vaccine trial on 2 November.
Footnotes
Provenance and peer review: commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Competing interests: PDT has been doubly vaccinated with Pfizer’s vaccine.
This article is made freely available for use in accordance with BMJ's website terms and conditions for the duration of the covid-19 pandemic or until otherwise determined by BMJ. You may use, download and print the article for any lawful, non-commercial purpose (including text and data mining) provided that all copyright notices and trade marks are retained.
https://bmj.com/coronavirus/usage
References
View Abstract _________________ --
'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."
Authored by Vinay Prasad via The Brownstone Institute,
I recently came across two tweets that caught my eye...
Here is the first one from the CDC director:
And here is the second one, from a couple months back:
Together they got me thinking. What do they have in common?
What do they tell us about the state of the public communication of science?
Let’s start with the one by Dr. Walensky. I don’t know how to put this politely, but it is a lie, and a truly unbelievable one at that.
First, of all, if it were true, it would mean that masking was more effective that the J&J vaccine (implausible). Second of all, we have actual cluster RCT data from Bangladesh showing a 11% (relative risk reduction). This occurred in a massive trial where masks were provided for free and encouraged. Even here, only surgical masks worked, and cloth did not, and had no where near this effect size. The idea that masks could reduce the chance of infection by 80% is simply untrue, implausible, and cannot be supported by any reliable data.
The mathematician Wes Pegden had this to say about it, and Wes is right!
"The head of the agency responsible for providing Americans with accurate and trustworthy information about interventions (like vaccines) that we actually know are really effective should not also be making fabricated quantitative statements in support of poorly evidenced ones."
Yet, as far as I can see no organization nor twitter has fact checked this tweet and labeled it misleading. It is an untruth we are allowed to say.
Now let us turn to the AP’s fact checking claim. This is where things get interesting.
There are two types of COVID19 survivors— those who have documented recovery from sars-cov-2 (either PCR, antigen or serology + tests) or those who have self-identified recovery from sars-cov 2 (said they had it).
When it comes to the former group, we know with confidence, the chance they get re-infected and severely ill is very very low, and far lower than people who have not yet had and recovered from COVID19 (this is called natural immunity). The data in support of this is massive, and quite certain. Antibody data is beside the point— we care about the thing in itself getting sick.
So do these people (those who recovered) benefit from vaccination? Current data is solely observational— and that is a huge problem. If you compare people with recovery who chose to get the vax vs. those who chose not to get it— you are comparing very different types of people. Their behavior, and appetite to take risks (going out to crowded places) may also be different. We know both groups have very low rates of re-infection, but direct comparisons to assess vaccine efficacy after recovery are fraught.
The right answer would be to conduct an RCT of vaccination among those who recovered. It could have 3 arms. No further doses; 1 dose, or 2 doses. It could be large (after all, millions have recovered), and powered to look for rates of severe disease. In the absence of this, experts are largely speculating.
So here is what blows my mind: We are living in a world where the CDC director can say something that is false, made-up and no institution will say otherwise. At the same time, major, venerable fact checking institutions are literally asserting as fact something which is at best unproven.
No matter how you feel about these issues; these are dangerous times.
Truth and falsehood is not a matter of science but cultural power - the ability to proclaim and define the truth. If this continues, dark times lie ahead. Someday soon, we may not like who defines the truth.
* * *
ZH: Prasad and Pegden are not alone in their criticism, as Greg Piper writes at JustTheNews.com, the new study contradicts a much larger Israeli study this summer.
Attorney Jenin Younes, whose New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) files legal challenges against COVID vaccine mandates, tweeted that the study contradicts a meta-analysis touted by the CDC, which found "no significant difference" in protection between vaccination and natural immunity.
Immunologist Hooman Noorchashm, the medical expert for multiple NCLA challenges, called the study "another teleological piece of propaganda" by the CDC because it excludes the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and likely includes recovered people in the vaccinated group.
Harvard Medical School epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff tweeted that the study has a "major statistical flaw" - falsely portraying hospitalized respiratory patients as "representative of the population" — which renders the odds ratio "wrong."
Former New York Times journalist Alex Berenson argued the study "is meaningless gibberish that would never have been published if the agency did not face huge political pressure to get people vaccinated."
It's not even clear enough naturally immune people were hospitalized to reach statistical significance, he said, noting there's no unadjusted odds ratio. _________________ --
'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."
A journalist writing for The BMJ has won a British Journalism Award1 for his series on the financial interests of medical experts advising US and UK governments during the covid-19 pandemic.
As a result of the articles written by Paul Thacker, an investigative journalist, the financial disclosures of members of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) were published for the first time.2
Awarding the prize for specialist journalism, the judges said, “This was expertly researched and written journalism on a subject of huge national importance.”
Thacker’s first story3 looked at two groups critical to the UK government’s pandemic response—SAGE and the Vaccine Taskforce. He examined both and found that they did not disclose their members’ financial conflicts. Some members were tied to companies with a monetary interest in the government’s purchases.
The names and financial interests of both groups’ members were requested from government departments but were denied. Thacker then filed freedom of information (FoI) requests with multiple government departments and Oxford University. In a second story4 he wrote about the government’s repeated refusal to turn over these data. However, the FoI turned up heavily redacted emails with government officials discussing their strategy for not disclosing documents. It revealed that Thacker’s original request was apparently sent to a special government department to handle any reporter considered a “campaigner” or to have “extreme views.”
Eventually, the government relented and published the financial conflicts for the members of SAGE.5
In the final story of the series6 Thacker looked at the panels that the US and UK governments used to authorise vaccines and revealed that these disclosure policies were inadequate. Some experts evaluating the vaccines had significant industry ties that were not disclosed in government forms.
Also nominated in the specialist journalism category was Gareth Iacobucci, The BMJ’s assistant news editor, for his coverage of leaked government “moonshot” plans to spend £100bn to expand covid-19 testing.78
References
↵British Journalism Awards winners 2021: ITV’s Robert Moore named journalist of the year for Capitol riots and Guardian is best news provider. 2021. https://pressgazette.co.uk/british-journalism-awards-winners-2021.
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Coombes R. Covid-19: SAGE members’ interests published by government 10 months into pandemic. BMJ2020;371:m4911. doi:10.1136/bmj.m4911 pmid:33334782
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Thacker PD. Conflicts of interest among the UK government’s covid-19 advisers. BMJ2020;371:m4716. doi:10.1136/bmj.m4716 pmid:33298559
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Thacker PD. Tracking down John Bell: how the case of the Oxford professor exposes a transparency crisis in government. BMJ2021;372:n490. doi:10.1136/bmj.n490 pmid:33622805
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Thacker PD. Covid-19: How independent were the US and British vaccine advisory committees?BMJ2021;373:n1283. doi:10.1136/bmj.n1283 pmid:34039565
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Iacobucci G, Coombes R. Covid-19: Government plans to spend £100bn on expanding testing to 10 million a day. BMJ2020;370:m3520. doi:10.1136/bmj.m3520 pmid:32907851
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Iacobucci G. Operation Moonshot: Leaked documents prompt questions over cost, evidence, and reliance on private sector. BMJ2020;370:m3580. doi:10.1136/bmj.m3580 pmid:32938638
FREE Full TextGoogle Scholar _________________ --
'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."
Covid modelling that prompted first UK lockdown based on ‘inaccurate’ case numbers
Report published in March 2020 suggested more than 500,000 people could die from the virus if Britain took no action
By Sarah Knapton, SCIENCE EDITOR
26 February 2022 • 7:00pm
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/02/26/covid-modelling-prompted-f irst-uk-lockdown-based-inaccurate/
Scientists did not have accurate Covid case numbers, and were unsure of hospitalisation and death rates when they published models suggesting that more than 500,000 people could die if Britain took no action in the first wave of the pandemic, it has emerged.
On March 16 2020, Imperial College published its “Report 9” paper suggesting that failing to take action could overwhelm the NHS within weeks and result in hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Before the paper, the UK coronavirus strategy was to flatten the peak rather than suppress the wave, but after the modelling was made public, the Government made a rapid u-turn, which eventually led to lockdown on March 23.
However SPI-M (Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling) minutes released to the Telegraph under a Freedom of Information request show that by March 16, modellers were still “uncertain” of case numbers “due to data limitations”.
The minutes show that members were waiting for comprehensive mortality data from Public Health England (PHE) and said that current best estimates for the infection fatality rate, hospitalisation rates, and the number of people needing intensive care were still uncertain.
They also believed that modelling only showed “proof of concept” that lockdowns could help, and warned that “further work would be required”.
The team was also encouraged to look for collaborators and resources outside of the infectious diseases network.
Imperial College held a press briefing about its model on the afternoon of March 16, and on the same day, Boris Johnson ordered the public to avoid pubs, restaurants and non-essential contact and work from home if possible.
At the briefing, Prof Ferguson told journalists that the new conclusions had been reached because “the last few days” had provided “refinements” in the estimates of intensive care demand and hospital surge capacity.
But the minutes now show that SPI-M did not believe the data were complete.
Bob Seely, the MP for the Isle of Wight, who has been critical of modelling throughout the pandemic, said: “The arguments for and against lockdown are complex, but what is becoming clear is that the evidence that the Government saw was incomplete and potentially inaccurate.
“This is a national scandal. No question about it. The data that petrified politicians was inaccurate.”
‘Concerning’ tendency to ‘go directly to the media’
Prof Carl Heneghan, the director of the centre for evidence based medicine (CEBM) at the University of Oxford, said: “This has always concerned me about the modelling. Throughout the two years there has been systematic error, consistent over-estimation and a tendency to go directly to the media with conclusions, without validation or peer review.
“It’s clear from the SPI-M minutes there were issues with the data, it wasn’t robust. And it shows that they should have been looking for additional outside expertise.
“What concerns me is if we don’t fix these problems we will end up being bounced back into restrictions or end up spending money in ways that detracts from the healthcare problems at hand.”
Minutes from the following day, March 17, also show that the Department of Health wanted to know whether Prof Neil Ferguson had referenced other papers in the Imperial model.
And both Imperial and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) were asked to renew modelling ahead of a Sage meeting on March 18 which would “include reviewing the commonality of assumptions” and look specifically at a London lockdown, where cases were rising more quickly.
The minutes continue to show uncertainties in data throughout the next year. On September 23, members said that “operational issues” with NHS Test and Trace had made it “difficult to interpret trends in the data, and added further uncertainty to the modelling”.
On January 6 2021, the minutes reveal that NHS England was “unwilling” to share vaccine rollout timelines, making it difficult to estimate the impact of vaccines in modelling.
And by January 17, modellers were concerned that “different data streams are presenting conflicting messages on how the epidemic is changing” while they spoke of the “great uncertainty” in the transmission dynamics of Covid by February 10.
On May 26, minutes show that committee members were asked to base their future assumptions on vaccine efficacy and coverage on PHE’s weekly vaccine surveillance report, or explain the reasons for the disparity.
Yet despite the plea, models used by the Government to delay Freedom Day on June 21 did not use the most up-to-date figures, which was criticised by MPs at the Science and Technology Select Committee.
Early pandemic modelling ‘irresponsible’
Dr Tom Jefferson of the CEBM at Oxford branded the early pandemic modelling “irresponsible”.
“They should have said ‘I’m sorry, we do not have the data,” he said. “Any forecast based on limited data is just a guess, it’s unethical and reckless, and we can now see the consequences of this behaviour with people dying because of the destruction of our services.”
However a spokesman for Imperial’s Covid-19 Response Team said that modellers had “always been open about the uncertainty inherent in the modelling, especially at the early stages of the pandemic”.
“The ‘uncertainty’ in this minute is nothing new and can be seen in publications from the time, including Report 9.
“Despite the limited data at the time, Report 9 provided a useful understanding of the epidemic, including an accurate estimate of the infection fatality rate.
“Imperial modelling was repeatedly updated as new data became available."
The minutes also reveal that from the beginning of March, experts were concerned about outbreaks in care homes and hospitals, yet little was done to stop the spread or protect the most vulnerable at the start of the pandemic.
On April 13, SPI-M members agreed that “transmission in healthcare is a significant contributor to cases in hospitals” which they said needed further attention.
The minutes also show that by October 21, SPI-M believed there was some evidence that the rate of growth may be slowing in some parts of the country, which had not yet been reflected in the hospital admission and death data.
However after modelling from Cambridge University and Public Health England (PHE) suggested that without immediate restrictions there could be 4,000 deaths per day by the end of December, a second lockdown was announced by the Prime Minister on October 31. _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
The messenger RNA (mRNA) from Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine is able to enter human liver cells and is converted into DNA, according to Swedish researchers at Lund University.
The researchers found that when the mRNA vaccine enters the human liver cells, it triggers the cell’s DNA, which is inside the nucleus, to increase the production of the LINE-1 gene expression to make mRNA.
The mRNA then leaves the nucleus and enters the cell’s cytoplasm, where it translates into LINE-1 protein. A segment of the protein called the open reading frame-1, or ORF-1, then goes back into the nucleus, where it attaches to the vaccine’s mRNA and reverse transcribes into spike DNA.
Reverse transcription is when DNA is made from RNA, whereas the normal transcription process involves a portion of the DNA serving as a template to make an mRNA molecule inside the nucleus.
“In this study we present evidence that COVID-19 mRNA vaccine BNT162b2 is able to enter the human liver cell line Huh7 in vitro,” the researchers wrote in the study, published in Current Issues of Molecular Biology. “BNT162b2 mRNA is reverse transcribed intracellularly into DNA as fast as 6 [hours] after BNT162b2 exposure.”
BNT162b2 is another name for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine that is marketed under the brand name Comirnaty.
The whole process occurred rapidly within six hours. The vaccine’s mRNA converting into DNA and being found inside the cell’s nucleus is something that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said would not happen.
“The genetic material delivered by mRNA vaccines never enters the nucleus of your cells,” the CDC said on its web page titled “Myths and Facts about COVID-19 Vaccines.”
This is the first time that researchers have shown in vitro or inside a petri dish how an mRNA vaccine is converted into DNA on a human liver cell line, and is what health experts and fact-checkers said for over a year couldn’t occur.
The CDC says that the “COVID-19 vaccines do not change or interact with your DNA in any way,” claiming that all of the ingredients in both mRNA and viral vector COVID-19 vaccines (administered in the United States) are discarded from the body once antibodies are produced. These vaccines deliver genetic material that instructs cells to begin making spike proteins found on the surface of SARS-CoV-2 that causes COVID-19 to produce an immune response.
Pfizer didn’t comment on the findings of the Swedish study and said only that its mRNA vaccine does not alter the human genome.
“Our COVID-19 vaccine does not alter the DNA sequence of a human cell,” a Pfizer spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email. “It only presents the body with the instructions to build immunity.”
More than 215 million or 64.9 percent of Americans are fully vaccinated as of Feb. 28, with 94 million having received a booster dose.
Epoch Times Photo
A 3D print of a spike protein of SARS-CoV-2—the virus that causes COVID-19—in front of a 3D print of a SARS-CoV-2 virus particle. (Courtesy of NIAID/RML)
Autoimmune Disorders
The Swedish study also found spike proteins expressed on the surface of the liver cells that researchers say may be targeted by the immune system and possibly cause autoimmune hepatitis, as “there [have] been case reports on individuals who developed autoimmune hepatitis after BNT162b2 vaccination.”
The authors of the first reported case of a healthy 35-year-old female who developed autoimmune hepatitis a week after her first dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine said that there is a possibility that “spike-directed antibodies induced by vaccination may also trigger autoimmune conditions in predisposed individuals” as it has been shown that “severe cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection are characterized by an autoinflammatory dysregulation that contributes to tissue damage,” which the virus’s spike protein appears to be responsible for.
Spike proteins may circulate in the body after an infection or injection with a COVID-19 vaccine. It was assumed that the vaccine’s spike protein would remain mostly at the injection site and last up to several weeks like other proteins produced in the body. But studies are showing that is not the case.
The Japanese regulatory agency’s biodistribution study (pdf) of the Pfizer vaccine showed that some of the mRNAs moved from the injection site and through the bloodstream, and were found in various organs such as the liver, spleen, adrenal glands, and ovaries of rats 48 hours following injection.
In a different study, the spike proteins made in the body after receiving a Pfizer COVID-19 shot have been found on tiny membrane vesicles called exosomes—that mediate cell-to-cell communication by transferring genetic materials to other cells—for at least four months after the second vaccine dose.
The persistence of the spike protein in the body “raises the prospect of sustained inflammation within and damage to organs which express the spike protein,” according to experts at Doctors for COVID Ethics, an organization consisting of physicians and scientists “seeking to uphold medical ethics, patient safety, and human rights in response to COVID-19.”
“As long as the spike protein can be detected on cell-derived membrane vesicles, the immune system will be attacking the cells that release these vesicles,” they said.
Dr. Peter McCullough, an internist, cardiologist, and epidemiologist, wrote on Twitter that the Swedish study’s findings have “enormous implications of permanent chromosomal change and long-term constitutive spike synthesis driving the pathogenesis of a whole new genre of chronic disease.”
Whether the findings of the study will occur in living organisms or if the DNA converted from the vaccine’s mRNA will integrate with the cell’s genome is unknown. The authors said more investigations are needed, including in whole living organisms such as animals, to better understand the potential effects of the mRNA vaccine.
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intensity gradually increased, indicating that ivermectin dose-dependently could increase the total and mitochondrial ROS content.