China lied about the bats in the lab, and WHO helped cover it up

In 2017 there was an official Chinese Academy of Science video to showcase the new Wuhan “Level 4” lab. The video shows bats in a cage there and teams monitoring the lab in case there’s “an accident”.

The latest release of video footage tells us a few important things —

  1. The Chinese Officials were lying when they said their were no live bats at the Wuhan Institute.
  2. The WHO was helping them lie.
  3. Peter Daszak, the President of the US group funneling NIH money to the lab, also lied and helped them to cover it up.
  4. In 2017 the Chinese Academy of Science admitted that ten years earlier, no one in China had known how to do this biosecurity research. The French (and presumably US collaborators) taught the Chinese how. They clashed all the way, and the Chinese threw the French out as soon as the lab was finished.
  5. French and US intelligence knew there was a high risk of bioweapons. But they didn’t tell the world, nor prepare for it. Instead they’ve done everything they can to cover it up.
  6. The Wuhan Institute of Virology viral databases went missing  on Sept 12, 2019, before the virus started to spread. This was blamed on a cyber attack, but the databases were never restored.
  7. All told, the WIV collected as many as 19,000 bat samples to study.

We’ve known since the early days that the bats this virus originated in came from Yunnan, some 800 km away from Wuhan and there was never a trail of infections connecting the native bats to Wuhan. Nor was there any bat soup at the Wet markets. The Chinese didn’t need live bats to create an infectious disease once they had the samples to start with. But they didn’t have to lie about the bats either.

We return to the question, Was the leak deliberate? The lost database just before the pandemic starts is awfully suspicious, but if it was a planned attack, why did they wait til Jan 1 or 2 to destroy all the samples? Or could it be that there was a splinter faction within China that wanted this “loose” just in time for the US election year? There are two defectors who claim it was not an accident.

Wuhan live bat video contradicts WHO investigation

Sharri Markson, The Australian

The French and US experts helped China to build the Wuhan Lab”

It states there were difficulties behind-the-scenes during the construction phase of the level 4 laboratory. The lab was initially meant to be a joint undertaking between the French and Chinese governments.

“Our collaboration with France on this project went through more than a decade of intense clashes resulting from our different cultural backgrounds and understandings,” the video says. After it was built, the French scientists and officials were evicted from the laboratory, sparking concerns among French intelligence about the type of biological research China planned to undertake there.

Wasn’t this eviction a “pretty bad” sign? Shouldn’t someone in French intelligence told the world?

The Wuhan Institute of Virology has now collected 19,000 bat samples, with coronaviruses detected in 2481 samples.

Best watched on faster speeds.

Bitchute link.

Much of this information was unearthed by a group of volunteers called DRASTIC who achieved so much more than all the worlds media and most of their spy agencies.

Citizen Scientists win again…

Sharri Markson has written a book: What Really Happened in Wuhan.

Related Posts:

9.9 out of 10 based on 57 ratings

“Huge Shock” Swiss voters reject climate tax and CO2 targets

Swiss referendum on Climate Change.

Most Cantons in Switzerland voted “No”.

The Swiss just voted down their governments plan to change the weather with increased car and airline taxes, albeit by only 51.6 to 48.4.  That nearly half the population voted yes is testament to thirty years of non-stop propaganda, and the near complete suppression of skeptics.

Imagine what the vote would have have been if they allowed skeptics equal air time and funded skeptical scientists even at 10% the rate the believer-modelers get?

BBC reporters were shocked:

Swiss voters reject key climate change measures

Switzerland’s policy on fighting climate change has been thrown into doubt after voters rejected key measures in a popular vote.

A referendum saw voters narrowly reject the government’s plans for a car fuel levy and a tax on air tickets.

The measures were designed to help Switzerland meet targets under the Paris Agreement on climate change.

But no one mentioned this on the ABC or SBS news tonight. Instead they told us “Australia is increasingly isolated” for the 440th time.

By Imogen Foulkes, BBC News, Bern

The no-vote to limiting emissions is a huge shock. The Swiss government drafted this law carefully. The plan: to cut greenhouse gases to half their 1990 levels by 2030, using a combination of more renewables and taxes on fossil fuels.

Voter rejection undermines Switzerland’s entire strategy to comply with the Paris Agreement. Today’s results are a devastating blow for environmentalists.

Some analysts suggest the Swiss – who traditionally pride themselves on their green policies – are nervous about taking any economic risks while the country recovers from the pandemic.

Now the government must go back to the drawing board, as Switzerland falls behind its European neighbours in efforts to tackle climate change.

It was an urban versus rural divide again, and supported by all the political parties but not the right wing “People’s Party”. How telling. The politicians wanted it, but the people didn’t.

During the referendum campaign, 160 Swiss parliamentarians stood together for a “Yes” vote, saying the CO2 law was “feasible, reasonable, and necessary.”  More than 90 civil society organisations and 200 companies also campaigned in favour of the law. For the supporters, the bill was a “good compromise” after a tough parliamentary debate.

Switzerland’s major parties expressed disappointment at the outcome.

As my Swiss friend reports:

This Swiss referendum was since long time prepared with an avalanche of climate horror propaganda in all mainstream media, specially in the Swiss state controlled TV and Radio. At the same time German part of Switzerland had the coolest spring since 100 years.

The Swiss also voted down a plan to give farming subsidies only to organic farmers by 61 to 39. Clean green drinking water was also rejected:

[ABC News] Another initiative to improve the quality of drinking water in Switzerland was rejected — it would have made it harder for farmers to get state subsidies if they use some types of pesticides and antibiotics. A ban on the use of pesticides was also rejected.

A majority of Swiss voters supported an initiative to grant police enhanced surveillance powers and take preventative actions to help fight terrorism.

Other isolated nations as well as Australia and Switzerland include India, China, Brazil, Russia, Indonesia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Africa.

All the major nations are failing to meet their Paris targets.h/t to a friend in Switzerland, and GWPF

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Weekend Unthreaded

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Infinity-Woke: but will anti-racist maths keep the lights on?

Two is two all over the world, no matter the language. Maths unites humanity — that is, until someone decides to un-race-ify that which isn’t racist. At this point in the nonsense-time-continuum everything they do to make it less racist will only make it more.

And so it comes to pass that profoundly racist people are telling us maths is white supremacist. It’s not just a one-divided-by-zero moment in rhetoric and reasoning  — it’s as if Asians don’t exist, or aren’t human, or don’t set records in Maths SATs? Whatever it is the Wokerati are protesting, it’s not about the group “the system favours most”. Instead it’s a scorecard in a secret social bingo and the winning numbers are W-H-I-T-E.

The most racist people in the world are not the ones doing differential geometry, it’s the ones dividing their community by their lowest common denominator — their skin.

What could be more racist than telling children that their melanin-type can’t get the answer right? Not only does it set them up to fail, it destroys their success if they manage it anyway. Did they really deserve that spot, that prize, or that degree?

Nothing entrenches racism like judging people by their race….

Is mathematics racist? California could blaze pathway with woke math

California education officials are considering applying a social justice paradigm to teaching K-12 mathematics that would erase “White supremacy” from the subject and eliminate gifted classes for students.

How disabling to grow up watching adults debate “your handicap”?

Proponents of new math say the way the subject currently is taught is suffused with White supremacy. They say it handicaps some minority students by insisting on what they consider racist concepts — such as arriving at correct answers.

And the poison chalice of low expectations shall pourth forth to shackle the children with failure, even before they start.

Children who are mathematically gifted apparently shouldn’t be taught gifted maths. Presumably we don’t want any sports supremacy either?

Behind every social justice mathematician is someone who can’t do maths. Luckily Will Happer can, which is why he is a climate skeptic too.

Some scholars say the idea that math supports or is based on White supremacy ignores the fact that mathematics is a universal language discovered and developed by diverse cultures over millennia.

“It is absurd to accuse mathematics as being ‘racist,’” said William Happer, a professor of physics emeritus at Princeton University. “We use Indian numerals that come to us through the Arabs. There are still lots of distinguished mathematicians in India who speak the same worldwide mathematical language as mathematicians in North America, Europe, the Arab world, India, China, Japan, Africa, South America, etc.

“Greek geometry, much of it borrowed from Egypt and Mesopotamia, is still one of the most sublime human achievements,” Mr. Happer said.

But “three plus three equals a Government Grant for Me?”

h/t Charles M, and Bill


Dear commenters, be kind to the mods. There are many words which will trip the filter on this topic, and approval may be slow. Apologies. Best phrase things carefully, not color-fully. They know not what they do (most of them). A race war might be exactly what a few are secretly hoping for. We, on the other hand,  aren’t really interested in the color of anyone’s skin, we’d rather judge each by their character…

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Hydroxychloroquine, a year later, 3 times higher survival rate. Trump was right.

 200mg tablets of Hydroxychloroquine in blister pack.

Photo: Whispyhistory

The world faced the greatest global health crisis in one hundred years, but it’s taken a whole year to write up a small study that shows hydroxychoroquine could improve the survival rate of people on ventilators by a factor of three, and that the dose matters.

If anyone says “but this is not a big study”, that’s exactly my point. Why is it so hard to get a large study of a drug that was already known to be useful against SARS-1 fifteen years before SARS-2 arrived. A drug that even the President of the US was talking about in the earliest days? In January 2020 we already knew that the three drugs that were “fairly effective” were  Remdesivir, Chloroquine and Ritonavir. On February 13, the South Koreans were already recommending hydroxychloroquine and telling us the anti-virals should be “started as soon as possible”. We had that head start, we threw it away.

Apparently the kings-of-compassion in the commentariat would rather see deaths than admit Donald Trump was right. And the experts in Pharmaceutical Giants only cared about the profit line.

And so it comes to pass, finally, that we find out what happened to 255 patients in May 2020 who were treated for Covid in a hospital in New Jersey. Sadly, 78% or 201 patients are described as “expired” — as if they reached their use-by dates. It was that bad. Just 54 survived. Only 3.5% “walked out of the hospital”. These were very sick people.

The research team hunted through the data to try to figure out what was different about the group that survived. But mostly the “alive group” and the “expired group” were similar. The research team considered many different risk factors like their blood pressure, weight, age, and conditions like diabetes. They trawled laboriously through all the medications they were given as well. Convalescent plasma (blood from survivors) was one of the few things that helped, boosting survival by a factor of two. But one drug combination finally stood out even more and that was Hydroxychloroquine and and Azithromycin. (Essentially very similar to The Zelenko protocol).

The WHO, funded by taxpayers in the West, long after these patients were saved, was working to stop HCQ from being used.

WHO messages about Hydroxychloroquine and Covid.

The WHO was busy “helping” to stop people using HCQ.

 

The beneficial effect of HCQ and AZ wasn’t obvious because people had received such different doses, but the higher the dose patients were given, the more likely they were to survive:

Initial lasso and Cox proportional hazard model regression analyses showed
that higher cumulative doses of HCQ were associated with a lower mortality
rate. With every natural log increase in HCQ cumulative dose, patients were
1.12 times less likely to die [p<0.001]. Accordingly, 3,000 mg HCQ cumulative dose had a survival OR = 2.46.

Hydroxychloroqine is a very unusual drug in that our bodies are very slow to get rid of it. The half life is 40 days. Therefore a repeat dose will accumulate for quite a while. So researchers started to look at the cumulative dose and it was the key:

When AZM and HCQ were given together, the association with survival
greater than when HCQ was given alone. We finally noticed that patients,
who received cumulative doses HCQ > 3,000 mg and AZM > 1,000 mg, had a much higher survival rate than all others.

The dose dependent relationship is quite telling. Only 37 patients received the highest level of 3 grams (as a cumulative dose) of HCQ and 1 g of Azithromycin. Of those, 18 survived (48%). Of the 218 patients who got less than that dose, only 36 would survive (16%).

In other words, most patients just didn’t get a high enough dose.

Patients receiving three grams of hydroxychloroquine, and one gram or more of Azithromycin had 3.26 times lower risk of dying. And the researchers then figured that dose per bodymass weight could also be important. They found that people need a dose higher than 80mg/kg.  This is hardly a surprise, since nearly all medicines known to man are dished out on a per kilo basis. The bigger mystery is why other studies did not use HCQ on a per kilo dosage?

Hydroxychloroquine, chemical formula

Despite all the warnings, they found no evidence that HCQ caused the longer QT Boundary side effect that the FDA worried about. Though they also note that the FDA itself didn’t seem too concerned about this effect in 150 other medical trials, only for Covid:

On April 24, 2020, the FDA issued a warning about the possible effects of low HCQ on QTc interval (47). Since 2010, the FDA has approved over 150
clinical trials, which include HCQ treatment. The FDA did and does not
require monitoring for cardiotoxicity. In each of these trials, the total HCQ
dose and expected tissue levels are markedly higher than used or seen in
Covid patients. This discrepancy lacks logic or explanation. 

This is all the more poignant given that after doctors were warned about the long QT risk they reduced doses. Even in this short trial, Smith et al noticed the effect the warnings had.

The decisions to co-administer AZM were made primarily by the ID consultants. The use of AZM with HCQ was more common in the first half of this 6-week period. During mid and late April, AZM was administered less frequently with HCQ. This decrease occurred after reports that HCQ/AZM caused QTc prolongation were published.

And marvel that weight-adjusted doses are standard practice yet no one thought to test HCQ that way?

The trials, which concluded HCQ caused QTc prolongation, did not show
that a dose-based effect. Given the weight range of hospitalized Covid
patients, it is difficult to understand how weight-adjusted dosing was not considered in these reports. At a minimum, the studies on HCQ’s effect on QTc interval in Covid patients need to be redone and the extant data reanalyzed.

The verdict was that past studies on HCQ are so worthless they need to be redone.

Past posts:

REFERENCES

Smith et al (2021) Observational Study on 255 Mechanically Ventilated Covid Patients at the Beginning of the USA Pandemic, doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.05.28.21258012 [PDF]

 

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Thursday Open Thread

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Indias Health dept stops Ivermectin use but others sue the WHO

The good news is that there is a way out of the new mutant load. The bad news is the Swamp is in the way.

India’s caseload has continued to shrink since we last looked at it. Which is great news, but instead of endorsing the approach that worked, the health ministry is now writing to doctors telling them not to use Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine.

Indeed the new recommendations even go so far as to say that zinc and multivitamins are out too.  Even zinc?

Ponder that Ivermectin is so powerful it even destroys multivitamins.

Is the day coming when we see antivirals suddenly accepted like the Wuhan Lab theory was? Lives depend on it, but vast piles of money do too. The medical censorship swamp is well equipped, and I suspect, has years of experience. There are so many anti-viral medicines, they’ve been around for years and all the financial incentives not to use cheap out-of-patent drugs have always been there.

Here are the graphs of infections in some states of India:

India cases of Covid

So who leaned on the Indian officials? Who knows?

Ivermectin, Doxycycline Dropped From List of COVID-19 Drugs by Health Ministry

New Delhi: The Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) under the Union Health Ministry has revised the COVID-19 management guidelines and decided against the usage of certain strong medicines for mild or asymptomatic cases of coronavirus. According to the new guidelines issued on May 27, the health ministry has written to the doctors’ community to drop drugs like hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, doxycycline, zinc, multivitamins etc from prescription.

As the Frontline Doctors say, psst! Want to save $650 million dollars? Merck don’t.

Merck gets $1.2 millions.

,,,

About a week ago a group in India decided to take the Indian WHO scientist to court to stop her suppressing the use of Ivermectin.

India Bar Association issue cease and desist notice to WHO chief scientist 

According to the notice, Dr. Swaminathan has ignored the extensive studies carried out by the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) and the British Ivermectin Recommendation Development (BIRD) showing the effectiveness of Ivermectin in the prevention and treatment of COVID-19. They add that Dr. Swaminathan has “deliberately suppressed the data regarding the effectiveness of the drug Ivermectin, with an intent to dissuade the people of India” from using the drug.

Since we’re talking about Ivermectin, here’s Slovakia too: After ivermectin was started, Covid cases fell dramatically.

Slovakia Covid

,,,

Japan, meanwhile, must be watching the Indians. Things are so desperate with the Olympics coming that it is now rushing through emergency approval for Ivermectin. The irony is that the drug was originally isolated from soil in Japan.

The censorship continues.  Many subreddits have been closed but r/ivermectin is still there.

h/t Roger K, ExWarmist

Covid cases falling in the parts of India that approved Ivermectin use

….

9.9 out of 10 based on 82 ratings

The rise of the Indian Delta variant

It’s everywhere nearly. The UK variant (called “Alpha”) has become the dominant strain (see that graph far below). But now the Indian V2 variant (the Delta strain) is taking over from the UK strain. It is rapidly spreading in Russia, Bangladesh and Portugal.

The Nextstrain country comparison site shows which variants are most common — prevalence of the strain — not the absolute numbers. There are “only” 5,000 new cases a day in the UK at the moment (far down from the peak of 60,000 cases a day). But they are increasingly the Indian variant.

In the USA there are only 12,000 new cases a day, and only a hint of the Indian Delta variant.

Coronavirus spread Delta variant.

Spread of the Delta Variant. Nextstrain. https://covariants.org/per-country

The rate of increase is easier to see if the other variants are deselected.

There are some ominous looking trajectories there. 

Coronavirus spread Delta variant.

Spread of the Delta Variant. Nextstrain.

It’s the slope of the trend change in the Delta variant that matters. (The last week of data in India is probably an anomaly.)

The Indian Delta variant has also spread to China, which is doing what it always does, mass testing and lockdowns. The Chinese presumably know more about the design of Covid than anyone, and they are not aiming for herd immunity.

The rate of spread or R0 of the Delta strain is around 5, meaning one person infects five others on average. This is twice as fast as the original Covid spread was in 2020. It is quite a different disease. It means that once it gets loose in the community, we’d need  stricter restrictions to reduce the R0 to 1 or less. — the point where the number of cases starts to shrink. It will be much harder to put back in its box.

Hotel quarantine has to keep up with the variants

The more easily these viruses spread, the more stringent the hotel quarantines will  have to be. Victoria, Australia was probably lucky (in one sense) that the newest hotel breach occurred at the same time as restrictions were already running. So one lockdown has slowed both escaped strains. Like a two-for-one deal. Hopefully long-suffering Victorians will get more freedom back on Friday.

Given the astronomical costs and pain of another lockdown — we could throw a billion dollars at building new facilities for quarantine and still come out far ahead. China built hospitals in ten days. Can’t we put mining demountables or Glam-camping type tents in a hot dry location and prevent the breaches?

Coronavirus: Double-strength Delta strain to dominate

Natasha Robinson, The Australian

The Delta variant, also known as B.1.617.2, is about 50 per cent more infectious than the Alpha strain that first emerged in Britain last year, according to the latest data from Public Health England. The Alpha strain was about 40 per cent more infectious than the original Wuhan strain, making the Delta strain almost twice as infectious as the original wild type of the virus.

Keep reading  →

9 out of 10 based on 56 ratings

Thread for the Broken Web: Many big sites down?

This may be nothing, but Reddit and The Guardian are out and intermittently there are reports also of Amazon, CNN, The New York Times, and BBC down.  Reddit says “Fastly Error” so it may be nothing more than one cloud computing service crashing.

The BBC Minutes ago (was not down for me)

A number of leading websites are currently not working, including Amazon, Reddit and Twitch.

A number of leading websites are currently not working, including Amazon, Reddit and Twitch.

The UK government website – gov.uk – is also down as is parts of the BBC and a host of other media outlets.

Affected websites displayed the message: “Error 503 Service Unavailable”.

Early reports suggested it could be related to Fastly, a cloud computing provider, which underpins a lot of major websites.

UPDATE: It appears to be solved according to The Australian. Just another odd cyber thing. There seem to be a lot of them lately. Almost like someone was rattling the cage.

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Tuesday Open Thread

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US Defence sent money to Wuhan lab to counter “Weapons of Mass Destruction” and helped create one?

What does the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) do? Fund research into deadly viruses that may leak.

How’s that Threat Reduction working out?

The US military was more closely involved than they let on. What kind of crazy pays adversaries to research deadly weapons?

Grants from the Pentagon included $6,491,025 from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) from 2017 to 2020 with the description: ‘Understanding the risk of bat-borne zoonotic disease emergence in Western Asia.’

The Grants were going to a group called EcoHealth Alliance which got $123 million in total from the US Government from 2013 – 2020. Indeed it got as much as 90% of its money from the US government. It’s almost a government department, but without the accountability.  It funneled some of that $123m to the Wuhan lab. The man running Eco Health — Dr Peter Daszak was the one who helped whip up the Lancet paper saying Covid was absolutely definitely natural —  about four weeks after most people first heard of the virus. The useless World Health Organisation then invited Daszak to come along on the “investigation into the origin of Covid” in China. Bravo U.N..  Daszak went on to thank Fauci in emails for supporting the “natural origin theory”. One nice friendly circle.

The US Defence Department has fingers on this from several angles.

Great work from The Daily Mail team:

The Pentagon gave $39 MILLION to Dr. Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance – the charity that funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan lab accused of being the source of the outbreak, federal data reveals

The Daily Mail

      • Federal data seen by DailyMail.com reveals The Pentagon gave $39 million to EcoHealth Alliance, which funded a lab in Wuhan, China, between 2013 and 2020
      • The Wuhan Institute of Virology is accused of being the source of Covid-19
      • The majority of the DoD funding came from the DTRA, a military branch with a mission to ‘counter and deter weapons of mass destruction and improvised threat networks’
      • Federal grant data assembled by independent researchers shows that the charity has received more than $123 million from the government in total
      • EHA also received $64.7 million from the US Agency for International Development (USAID)
      • EHA has also funded deeply controversial ‘gain of function’ experiments, where dangerous viruses are made more infectious to study their effect on human cells

The Deep State is far too deep:

In 2014 the Obama administration outlawed gain of function research, such as the experiments funded by EHA, after concerns were raised among scientists that it could lead to a global pandemic from a genetically enhanced virus escaping a lab.

But EHA reportedly continued to legally fund the practice, using a loophole that allowed for the research in cases ‘urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.’

Is this the Greatest Own Goal Ever Scored?

Read the whole article

h.t Bill in AZ

9.6 out of 10 based on 84 ratings

If a smart guy on youtube can explain these alien videos why can’t the Department of Defence??

With the US Defence Force about to release “something” on UFO’s, these very engaging videos from Mick West are persuasive and apropos. But if smart guys with trigonometry  and metadata can explain how these aliens are mysterious camera artefacts — surely the Pentagon can too?

Why then are they called “unexplained” and why are they being released as teasers for “the big news?” Did the DoD forget parallax and gymbal corrections?

Apparently 120 incidents will be reviewed in June. Former intelligence director John Ratcliffe has hinted the report will be a big deal.  Let’s hope they saved the best stuff. I’m looking forward to a good tantalizing mystery.

Michael Shermer (of Skeptic.com infamy) wrote this all up in a long feature on Quillette:

Understanding the Unidentified

The “Go Fast” video purportedly shows an object with no heat source (and therefore propelled by some unconventional engine) that appears to move impossibly fast just above the surface of the ocean. West then conducted what he describes as “10th grade trigonometry” (based on the numbers provided in the video image itself) to show that, in fact, the object was well above the ocean surface at around 13,000 feet and was probably just a weather balloon traveling at about 30–40 knots. “Because of the extreme zoom and because the camera is locked onto this object … the motion of the ocean in this video is actually exactly the same as the motion of the jet plane itself. You’re seeing something that’s actually hardly moving at all and all of the apparent motion is the parallax effect from the jet flying by.

Seriously, these are much better videos than I expected. Very well done.

…Flir1 and Gimbal, says [Mick West, a columnist for Skeptic magazine], are what one would see if a jet were flying away from the camera, thus accounting for the eyewitness accounts that the object showed no directional control surfaces or exhaust. The apparent saucer-like shape of the Gimbal object, West continues, are due to glare on the lens of the camera. As he told the San Diego Union-Tribune reporter Andrew Dyer, “What we’re seeing in the distance is essentially just the glare of a hot object,” most likely that “of an engine — maybe a pair of engines with an F/A-18 — something like that.”

The odd pyramid aliens spring from an unfocused triangular aperture.

 

Commenters are getting into the swing after the Just Bokeh video:

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Weekend Unthreaded

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Waking up one year too late

Suddenly there is pandemonium about the Lab Leak idea as the West wakes up a year too late. If only they’d been reading unfunded bloggers? It’s old news to readers here, but watch the pea. Why is it suddenly OK to mention now, after being banned on Facebook for months? Because timing is everything in politics.

Imagine how different it would have been in February last year if Western leaders knew then that it was possible the Wuhan flu had leaked from a lab? And talk of it being a bioweapon was all over twitter even in January last year. How fast would those borders have slammed shut, saving literally a million lives or three and so many businesses? Neighbours around China were already snapping doors closed in the first days of February. Remember all the nations that wouldn’t accept, the poor infected Diamond Princess?  Even if the West wasn’t sure, the possibility that it was a laboratory leak would have changed everything about the early response. Italy would hardly have run a “hug a Chinese (bioweapon)” campaign.

Coronavirus structure

Image: Scientific Animations

Politics explains so much. Sixteen months of silence served Biden’s backers well.  If Donald Trump could have closed those borders, as he tried to in early February, and protected US citizens from an artificial pandemic, he would have been an unstoppable force in 2020, even in a rigged arena. Look at the popularity of leaders who kept the virus out like Mark McGowan?

The secrecy also helped China. Think of the trauma in China by late February, with 80% of the economy shut down and funeral pyres that showed up on satellites. If those borders had closed in early February, the rest of the world would have had a near normal 2020.

Anthony Fauci is being offered as a sacrificial lamb

Not that Fauci is much of a lamb. It’s surely no accident that those FOIA emails were released now, when we all know they could have been delayed. Sundance at The Last Refuge argues that the current Fauci bonfire may be a diversion from an even more important topic that the Deep Bureaucrats don’t want people to discuss.

They don’t want people to say “Trump was right”. Nor do they want people to discuss how the Democrats took advantage of it, and were singularly partisan, and coldly manipulative in exploiting it.

And then there is the bioweapons word –if China was *very likely* researching bioweapons it’s a Weapons of Mass Destruction incident. Not only is it likely Chinese scientists were hunting for dangerous pathogens, they were building on beginnings made with US knowhow and money, and not being remotely helpful good citizens in return.

And if we blame Fauci for everything, others may escape attention — academia, science journals, experts,  public broadcasters, media and The World Health Organisation — they all worked to help the potential bioweapon spread.

Do they think we won’t notice the backflips?

The Babylon Bee strikes again.

Satire that cuts close to the bone:

“Did COVID escape from a Wuhan lab? Well, it depends! Did a Republican say it? Does it serve the official narrative of trusted sources like CNN? We have to keep all these important questions in mind as we continue to live our truth, which is what Snopes is all about.”

History will record that this round of lab leak news was started by Nicolas Wade in his excellent feature article a month ago. Even though there was much discussion in corners of the web last year, Wade showed how utterly corrupted science journals were in a way that any ordinary political junky could understand. One of the world top medical journals leapt suspiciously too fast to declare there was an overwhelming consensus that the virus was natural. Not only was the Lancet paper based on almost nothing at all, but it was written by a man in the US who ran a group that was funding the work in the Wuhan Institute itself.

Science papers are just a political tool these days. Note the name “Peter Daszak”.

The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?

Nicholas Wade, May 5th, 2020

“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” a group of virologists and others wrote in the Lancet on February 19, 2020, when it was really far too soon for anyone to be sure what had happened. Scientists “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife,” they said, with a stirring rallying call for readers to stand with Chinese colleagues on the frontline of fighting the disease.

…It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Daszak’s organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Daszak would be potentially culpable. This acute conflict of interest was not declared to the Lancet’s readers. To the contrary, the letter concluded, “We declare no competing interests.”

That story has evolved now into late night cable TV, where Tucker Carlson points out that the Lancet paper was used to justify silencing anyone who mentioned the lab leak.

 

Sundance writes about the convenient timing:

Behind The SARS-CoV-2 Origination Backstory All Roads Lead to Stop Trump

Nothing happens in a vacuum and as we have noted within these pages for years if you follow the sequence and timeline you get a better picture of what is really going on.  Consider this sequence:

      • A once beloved Bill Gates, the primary advocate for COVID vaccines, suddenly became a target by the political left.  It was quite a shift.
      • The White House announces their support of investigation into the origin of COVID-19.
      • Media report on State Dept investigators who were handcuffed during their research into the COVID origination.
      • Suddenly discussion of the “Lab Leak Theory” was permitted by those who control the platforms of speech.
      • Media then report of Anthony Fauci gaining a lucrative book deal.
      • Joe Biden gives a speech in Oklahoma on Tuesday; and immediately thereafter the White House announces no more public appearances for the remainder of the week.
      • The Fauci emails are released under the auspices of a FOIA fulfillment.

The world still is not talking about Bioweapons of Mass Destruction.

9.5 out of 10 based on 89 ratings

The CCP in China has managed to alienate nearly the whole advanced world

China just doesn’t know how to make friends in a free world

China lion statues, Taiwan.

Image by AngMoKio

China’s great weakness — or rather the Chinese Communist Party’s is that no one likes authoritarian rulers, or people that lie, steal, spy and send out bioweapons. As I said over a year ago, The one thing China may have achieved with the Covid is to rally the rest of the world against it.  It’s taken a year because the craven media couldn’t admit Trump was right about the lab leak, but there’s no hiding it now.

China has few friends. As well as infecting the whole world, it has fought with Indians, threatened the Philippines and Malaysia over the South Sea, flown fighter jets over Taiwan, and bullied Australia, even saying our weak military would be the first hit in a war.  China is leaning on Japan to give it strategic islands, and to distance itself from the US. Like a mafia state, the threat is blunt:  “no rational country would want to contain or offend its biggest trading partner” says Beijing.  Nice economy you have there, be a shame if something happened to it. The PRC even took on a boy band in South Korea last year and lost.

To give just a taste of the pushback coming: In Budapest, Mayor Gergely Karacsony said he will rename all the streets around the planned Fudan Chinese University. One will be named after a Chinese Catholic Bishop who was jailed. The rest will be called Free Hong Kong Road, Dalai Lama street, and Uyghur Martyrs’ Road. It shows a great sense of humour. Every day the administration at the Fudan Uni will have to tell people to park at “Free Hong Kong Road” and such. Like a shot of daily pain.

With the world showing signs of rallying against it, Xi’s new big plan is an advertising campaign on global media to boost the image of China and create a loveable trustworthy image. It’s straight out of a communist propaganda book. As if a few nice adverts will undo the threats, petty trade wars, and the creation of a deadly disease.

As Thomas Lifson argues, it may sound hard to believe but President Xi may be mismanaging things even more than Joe Biden.

China’s Xi may be screwing up as badly as Biden, maybe even worse

American Thinker

But China under the near-dictatorial rule of Xi Jinping is alienating most of the world’s great economies.

Late last week, as veteran China-watcher Katsuji Nakazawa of Nikkei Asia wrote:

The European Parliament has voted overwhelmingly to freeze the ratification process of an investment pact with China — a deal that Beijing six months ago considered a big strategic victory.

It has sent shock waves throughout China, with only one month and change before arguably the most important event in President Xi Jinping’s era, the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party’s establishment, on July 1.

It is not just the U.S. and the E.U. that China has alienated.  The entire world has been traumatized by the COVID pandemic that we now know (after over a year of media and tech complicity in pushing the cover story of wet market origins) came out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s lab.  And we know that when people got sick in Wuhan, China shut down travel to the rest of China while allowing Chinese to travel overseas, a near–smoking gun bit of evidence that China saw it as a bioweapon, whether or not it was deliberately engineered as such.

Australia has had the effrontery to demand a reckoning from China on COVID’s origins and has been mercilessly bullied by China for doing so.

Symbol China Map.Lifson points out that China has no experience in modern diplomacy, only in coercion:

I predict China will have grave difficulties in leading the world into a post-American new world order with itself at the top [because of] China’s own multiple millennia of history…

China had no experience at all of diplomacy as the relationship of sovereign states with equal standing as such — the so-called Westphalian state system.  China was the “central kingdom” to which all others paid tribute as vassals of a sort if they wished to engage in relations.

The 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party comes in one month.

We can only hope China matures into a modern free trading citizen of the world as fast as possible.

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Thursday Open Thread

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Russia bets big on coal, gas, fossil fuels, and not on renewables

National Guard of Russia

Росгвардия

The West is switching to trendy unreliable energy while Russia is ramping up coal and gas production. 

Russia is building a ten billion dollar railroad to sell coal to Asia, but Australia is building a ten billion dollar hydro bandaid “battery” just to make unreliable energy slightly less useless.

Russia is being left behind on renewables, and they’re probably delighted. The more the West cripples itself in a quest to make sparkly green-electrons that stop the storms, the richer the Russians will get.

With the second largest coal reserves in the world, they’re well positioned to meet the growing demand from India and China. Indeed, if Russia could just think of a way to stop the USA and Australia from producing coal, they could corner the market.

If Russian Intel isn’t paying climate activists and child-complainers a retainer, they must have rocks for brains. But since they are apparently paying French and German bloggers to discredit the Pfizer vaccine perhaps they already are some of the great minds behind Greenpeace?

And if they were funding climate disinformation campaigns, which media outlet would tell us?

h.t GWPF

Coal reserves, graph, EIA, countries, Australia, Russia, India, China, Germany, Poland, New Zealand, UK, USA.

Source EIA 2021

Give me one reason Russia wouldn’t want the west to believe in “Climate change”:

How to beat the West? Putin is betting that Asia will rely on cheap Russian coal for decades to come

Bloomberg

President Vladimir Putin’s government is spending more than $10 billion on railroad upgrades that will help boost exports of the commodity. Authorities will use prisoners to help speed the work, reviving a reviled Soviet-era tradition.

The project to modernize and expand railroads that run to Russia’s Far Eastern ports is part of a broader push to make the nation among the last standing in fossil fuel exports as other countries switch to greener alternatives. The government is betting that coal consumption will continue to rise in big Asian markets like China even as it dries up elsewhere.

The latest 720 billion ruble ($9.8 billion) project to expand Russia’s two longest railroads — the Tsarist-era Trans-Siberian and Soviet Baikal-Amur Mainline that link western Russia with the Pacific Ocean— will aim to boost cargo capacity for coal and other goods to 182 million tons a year by 2024. Capacity already more than doubled to 144 million tons under a 520 billion ruble modernization plan that began in 2013. Putin urged faster progress on the next leg at a meeting with coal miners in March.

“Russia is trying to monetize its coal reserves fast enough that coal will contribute to GDP rather than being stuck in the ground,” said Madina Khrustaleva, an analyst who specializes in the region for TS Lombard in London.

Russia is making more coal than ever. Soon it will overtake Australia.

Russian Coal Production, EIA, Graph, 2021

Russian Coal Production, EIA, Graph, 2021

Look at how fast the Russian gas share of the global market is increasing:

Russia’s Getting Left Behind in Global Dash for Clean Energy

In recent years, the Kremlin has bet the country’s economic and geopolitical future on natural gas, building new pipelines to China, Turkey and Germany, while aiming to take a quarter of the global LNG market, up from zero in 2008 and around 8% today.

Russia, China and India know coal is the future. That’s nearly 120 people for every single Australian that won’t cutting back coal use.

 

9.8 out of 10 based on 74 ratings

Big Government unravelling: Swiss ward off the EU, US counties want to abandon Blue States

We all need some good news and who doesn’t like seeing overbearing-undemocratic-parasites lose? In terms of the cycle of civilizations, perhaps we are past the peak of Big Government, and headed for decentralization. As state entities grow too big and get too disconnected from the voters, they inevitably became overconfident, and overplay their hand — micromanaging hair dryers and droughts at the same time. But  “the mood has changed”…

Nigel Farage predicts the EU will collapse within a decade.UK Flag

Speaking to Fox Business, the former Brexit Party leader said that Brexit’s success will become a model for other European countries “impressed” by Britain’s life outside of the EU. He said that many in Europe were looking on in jealousy after much of the EU scaremongering about Brexit failed to materialise. “There is now a 70 percent approval rating for Brexit now. “

After seven years of trying to get Switzerland under tighter EU control, the Swiss have abandoned the talks.

The Swiss talks with Brussels collapse after seven long years

Damian Wilson, RT

Switzerland shocked Brussels by walking away from a closer relationship and into an uncertain future, but MP Thomas Aeschi says the Swiss will not be a cash cow eternally milked to keep the EU alive, preferring Swissexit instead.

Switzerland today is celebrating its breakaway status from the European Union, having finally tired of the bullying and rhetoric from Brussels and walked away from a proposed framework arrangement after seven years of negotiations, preferring to go it alone in Swissexit.

Never a full member of the EU, that decision leaves its relationship with Brussels facing an uncertain future. The two are bound together by a collection of 120 bilateral agreements that, one-by-one, will lapse over time. However, choosing to walk away from deadlocked negotiations was, it seems, not so hard after all.

With clear echoes of Britain’s divorce from the bloc, an imperious Brussels once again massively overplayed its hand and the Swiss eventually tired of the bullying, the rhetoric and the threats. They laid their cards on the table, stood up and walked away. That’s seven years of talks that amounted to nothing. Nichts. Rien. Niente.

In recent polls nearly half of the EU said they hadn’t benefited from free movement and would be better off without it. And British buyers are buying up more goods from the rest of the world. Their purchases from the EU have fallen 30%.

US Flag, Flying.Meanwhile some counties in the US are so fed up with their woke State governments they voted to try to leave the state. Officials in the counties are now obliged to formally look into the idea.

Oregone?  7 Oregon Counties Vote To Back Seceding, So Citizens Can Vote GOP In Idaho

Bill Chappell, NPR

Greater Idaho Map

,,,

In rural Oregon, voters in several counties want their state to go from Democratic blue to Republican red — and to do that, they hope to leave Oregon altogether and join neighboring Idaho. Five counties approved ballot measures this week, joining two others that had already voted in favor of the idea.

“This election proves that rural Oregon wants out of Oregon,” said Mike McCarter, president of the advocacy group Citizens for Greater Idaho.

He added, “If we’re allowed to vote for which government officials we want, we should be allowed to vote for which government we want as well.”

Ultimately a change in state lines has to be approved by Congress. And unless the Democrats see some electoral advantage, or are feeling suicidal, that seems unlikely. Will fed-up Oregonians march in the streets to make it happen?

There are many ways for repressed people to fight back.

h/t Bill in AZ

Red Fist: by Rafaelgr

*Dang Oops. Got the Red Blue thing wrong in the headline. Sorry. The US conservatives should never had let the Democrats steal the color Blue!

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Tuesday Open Thread

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It’s the biggest medical scandal since 1850 — there are even claims the US President was treated in secret

History books will be written and some professors, academics, and bureaucrats will have no excuse. 

The Red Cross serves humanity

Which organisations can serve now?

It took two court hearings and major complaints and assertive activism to save eighty year old Judy Smentkiewicz. But how many others died because their sons or daughters didn’t see Pierre Kory on TV? Or they didn’t have the wherewithal to go to court? Or their friends trying to share the message were censored on Facebook? It shouldn’t have to be this way.

This is Judy’s story below, but so much more. Read the whole thing. It’s very well written by Michael Capuzzo. Surely, this is a story that needs an answer. Where are the Forth Estate, the Opposition, The AMA, or the publicly funded professors at our universities?

I am but a cog passing on points of view that should be part of our national conversation. Some things matter: like antivirals and closed borders.

Nick Corbishley says “I don’t know of a bigger story in the world”

Michael Capuzzo, a New York Times best-selling author , has just published an article titled “The Drug That Cracked Covid”. … But unfortunately most reporters are not interested in telling the other side of the story. Even if they were, their publishers would probably refuse to publish it.

That may explain why Capuzzo, a six-time Pulitzer-nominated journalist best known for his New York Times-bestselling nonfiction books Close to Shore and Murder Room, ended up publishing his article on ivermectin in Mountain Home, a monthly local magazine for the people of the Pennsylvania mountains and New York Finger Lakes region, of which Capuzzo’s wife is the editor.

But if you want to share the story on the Anti-social Media, perhaps avoid spelling out the I word, lest the censors strike.

Jo


These doctors are heroes.

The Drug that Cracked COVID

By Michael Capuzzo, Mountain Home

Marik was accustomed to beating the odds. The legendary professor, a 6-foot, 230-pound, balding, barrel-chested, bear of a man with a crisp native South African accent touched with the South after thirty years, is the second most published critical care doctor in the history of medicine, with more than 500 peer-reviewed papers and books, 43,000 scholarly citations of his work, and a research “H” rating higher than many Nobel Prize winners. Marik is world famous as creator of the “Marik Cocktail,” a revolutionary cocktail of cheap, safe, generic, FDA-approved drugs that dramatically reduces death rates from sepsis by 20 to 50 percent anywhere in the world—whether you’re in a hospital in Zurich or Zimbabwe, Chicago or Chengdu—down to near zero, when given soon after presentation to hospitals. Since he published what he calls the “HAT Therapy” (Hydrocortisone, Ascorbic Acid [intravenous Vitamin C] and Thiamine) in 2016 in the most prestigious peer-reviewed journal in the field, Marik has received worldwide publicity, is celebrated in James Bond Internet memes with the “Marik Cocktail” shaken, not stirred, and is seen in ICUs around the globe as a historic figure in medicine for improving care of sepsis, which last year passed cancer and heart disease as the world’s number one killer, according to Lancet. Marik, known as a quirky genius and an exceptionally kind-hearted doctor (his most published peer in the annals of medicine doesn’t see patients), has been searching for an effective treatment for COVID-19 since it began.

The deadly time is week two, paradoxically, as Covid is dying off:

They made their first major breakthrough in March 2020, by the third week of the pandemic when only 3,800 Americans had died. It was based on the idea that COVID-19 has one great weakness: the coronavirus doesn’t kill anybody. In a mechanism so diabolical Marik believes “human beings aren’t smart enough to have figured it out,” the trillions upon trillions of coronaviruses that overwhelm and sicken the host don’t kill it. But in the second week of the disease, all the coronaviruses die, and like suicide bombers flooding out of a Trojan Horse swamp the body with a “vast viral graveyard” that triggers a friendly-fire hyper-immune response that in turn unleashes monstrous multi-organ inflammation and clotting like doctors have never seen. A body dying of COVID-19 is a complex, terrifying sight. But its weakness is simple: “As pulmonary critical care doctors we know how to treat inflammation and clotting, with corticosteroids and anticoagulants,” Marik says. “It’s first-grade science.”

It was even allegedly used to help President Trump. Could it be true that this widely used Nobel Prize winning drug threatens so many bank accounts, it was done in secret:

In addition, Kory, Marik, et. al published the first comprehensive COVID-19 prevention and early treatment protocol (which they would eventually call I-MASK). It is centered around the drug Ivermectin, which President Trump used at Walter Reed hospital, unreported by the press, though it may well have saved the president’s life while he was instead touting new big pharma drugs.

*There is no documentary proof offered for this remarkable claim. It depends upon the reputation of the author (read his reasons here), and indirectly on all the doctors named as heroes. Would Trump himself have said nothing? With only weeks til an election would he have wanted to set that bonfire alight, knowing the media would want to brand him as reckless. I seem to recollect Trump recommending these doctors or their group prior to this, in which case it would seem odd for him not to have conferred with them or them with him. He’d already taken HCQ earlier showing a willingness to try “unapproved” medicines. It’s all hard to search for in this day of “filtered” search results to confirm.

  • The MATH+, protocol:  methylprednisolone, ascorbic acid, thiamine, and heparin, plus a statin, zinc, vitamin D, famotidine, melatonin, and magnesium.
  • I-MASK+ protocol, which focuses on ivermectin, but also includes vitamins C and D, quercetin, zinc, and melatonin for prophylaxis, and adding aspirin;

It’s all listed in detail at the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance website (www.flccc.net).

Many prominent doctors and scientists around the world believe that Marik, Kory, Meduri, Varon, and Iglesias deserve the Nobel Prize in medicine.

…by October Marik’s concerns were answered. The studies were well-designed university trials that showed amazing anti-COVID-19 activity at the normal doses used to treat parasites. Though small and endlessly diverse by large, Western big pharma “one-size-fits all” random control trials, the Ivermectin studies were a mosaic of hundreds of scientists and many thousands of patients in trials all over the world, all showing the same remarkable efficacy against all phases of COVID-19 no matter what dose or age or severity of the patient. “Penicillin never was randomized,” Marik says. “It just obviously worked. Ivermectin obviously works.”

The conflict of interest that almost no media outlet will report:

Remdesivir costs $3,000 a dose. It is the only anti-viral treatment for hospitalized COVID-19 patients approved by the NIH COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel, and as a result is a standard of COVID-19 care in many hospitals, even though many doctors say it doesn’t work, and the WHO recommends against it. It has been shown in studies to have no mortality benefit for COVID-19 patients. (Coincidentally, seven members of the NIH COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel acknowledge in financial disclosures that they have received research support or consultant payments from Gilead, or sit on the advisory board of the $60 billion company). As The Washington Post reported, “Remdesivir may not cure coronovirus, but it’s on track to make billions for Gilead.”

Ivermectin has even been used to save Doctors  (but not in the West):

Six prevention studies showed Ivermectin reduced the risk of getting COVID-19 by 92.5 percent, superior to many vaccines. Dr. Hector Carvallo, a professor of medicine at the University of Buenos Aires, gave 788 doctors and other health care workers in three medical centers weekly Ivermectin prophylaxis, with a control group of 407 doctors and others who didn’t get the drug. In the control group 236 people, or 58 percent, “had become ill with COVID.” Among the 788 who got Ivermectin, “no infections were recorded.”

Doctors in the West are both guilty of not doing more, but are also victims of the system. How many doctors could have been saved? How many young doctors feel they can say anything?

Kory nearly broke down pleading with the NIH to review the “immense amounts of data that shows that Ivermectin must be implemented and implemented now,” and reverse its negative recommendation of August 27, when no data was available.

“We have 100,000 patients in the hospital right now dying,” he cried out to the committee. “I’m a lung specialist, I’m an ICU specialist. I’ve cared for more dying COVID patients than anyone can imagine. They’re dying because they can’t breathe. They can’t breathe…and I watch them every day, they die….I can’t keep doing this.

Kory’s testimony, titled “I can’t do this anymore” on YouTube, went viral and reached eight million views and counting before being censored by YouTube for “misinformation;”

This was that speech:  Thank goodness for Bitchute.

This is a global battle:

In South Africa, where use of Ivermectin was criminalized, civil rights activists hung posters with Kory’s data urging revolt, and a group of physicians won permission from the Ministry of Health in Zimbabwe on January 27, 2021 to treat COVID-19 with Ivermectin; case fatalities dropped in one month from seventy a day to two a day, “and our hospitals are virtually empty,” said Dr. Jackie Stone, who was subsequently taken in for questioning for her use of a controversial drug. In Phnom Penh, Cambodia, a doctor trained in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was using Kory’s data to persuade the Ministry of Health of Ivermectin’s efficacy and was making a personal appeal to the king. “Thank you for your amazing courage and love for humanity,” he wrote. “You’re a real doctor who is living up to the Hippocratic oath. All doctors need to follow your example!!”

And in the UK too:

Belgian Red Cross

Angels are few…

In Bath, England, Dr. Tess Lawrie, a prominent independent medical researcher who evaluates the safety and efficacy of drugs for the WHO and the National Health Service to set international clinical practice guidelines, read all twenty-seven of the Ivermectin studies Kory cited. “The resulting evidence is consistent and unequivocal,” she announced, and sent a rapid meta-analysis, an epidemiolocal statistical multi-study review considered the highest form of medical evidence, to the director of the NHS, members of parliament, and a video to Prime Minister Boris Johnson with “the good news…that we now have solid evidence of an effective treatment for COVID-19…” and Ivermectin should immediately “be adopted globally and systematically for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19.”

Ignored by British leaders and media, Lawrie convened the day-long streaming BIRD conference—British Ivermectin Recommendation Development—with more than sixty researchers and doctors from the U.S., Canada, Mexico, England, Ireland, Belgium, Argentina, South Africa, Botswana, Nigeria, Australia, and Japan. They evaluated the drug using the full “evidence-to-decision framework” that is “the gold standard tool for developing clinical practice guidelines” used by the WHO, and reached the conclusion that Ivermectin should blanket the world.

Suddenly only randomized controlled trials were good enough. It was another Gatekeeping exercise:

Everywhere the problem was the same, Kory said. The WHO, NIH, and other public health agencies were suddenly recommending only COVID-19 therapies proven by the “gold standard” of large randomized controlled trials of treatment and placebo groups, which were powerful but had several limiting flaws, including the fact that they took months to complete and cost ten to twenty million dollars that only big pharmaceutical companies could afford. They had thrown out all the other time-tested forms of clinical and scientific medical investigation still taught in all the medical schools, such as observational trials (which had eliminated widespread crib death), case histories, and anecdotes. They also restricted the use of essential off-label and generic drugs with blatant disinformation campaigns that reminded Kory of big tobacco’s efforts to hide the dangers of smoking.

For Merck (and all the other Pharmaceutical giants) the conflict of interest is obvious. It makes perfect business sense to talk down their own old out-of-patent drug. The thing that would slow that would be bad press, mass protests, government action:

Ivermectin is the generic name for Merck’s Stromectol, which they developed in 1981. Though the drug went off patent in 1996, Merck still distributes millions of doses each year in Africa for free, with a statue honoring the drug and the great humanitarian eradication effort in its headquarters and one at the WHO in Geneva. But recently Merck issued a stern warning that seemed written by marketing, Kory says, “as it had no scientific data to support the conclusion,” that Ivermectin was suddenly dangerous. Another pharmaceutical company’s CEO privately noted that “People must think Merck knows what they’re talking about because it’s their drug,” but Merck has “tremendous disincentives” to say nice things about the generic pill, as it has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing an oral anti-viral COVID-19 treatment, rival to Ivermectin, that may be priced at $3,000 a dose.

Brazil too:

Not just in media but in social media, Ivermectin has inspired a strange new form of Western and pharmaceutical imperialism. On January 12, 2021, the Brazilian Ministry of Health tweeted to its 1.2 million followers not to wait with COVID-19 until it’s too late but “go to a Health Unit and request early treatment,” only to have Twitter take down the official public health pronouncement of the sovereign fifth largest nation in the world for “spreading misleading and potentially harmful information.” (Early treatment is code for Ivermectin.)

Facebook, Twitter and all of the Pharmaceutical Giants are telegraphing exactly how much they care about their customers.

Picking the right hospital or doctor is a matter of life and death, and one wife even hired a helicopter to rescue her dying husband from the wrong hospital:

Dr. Manny Espinoza was dying of COVID-19 in his Texas hospital when his wife, Dr. Erica Espinoza, asked the doctors to try Ivermectin as a last resort, and was refused. Erica hired a life-flight helicopter to take Manny to the Houston hospital of FLCCC co-founder Joseph Varon for the cheap little pill that in four days had her husband sitting up smiling and telling their children about the “miracle” that saved his life. “We see this every day,” Dr. Varon says. “They say it’s a miracle, I say it’s the science, but it’s the truth.”

For what it’s worth, I was impressed with Paul Marik’s revolutionary ICU treatment which used cheap vitamins (C and B1) with a steroid — long before Covid arrived and seemingly has such an excellent rate of success.

More information:

  • See also, The Story of The Cover Story, where Capuzzo explains why he wrote this article.
  • MEDPAGE today discusses the drawbacks of some of the Ivermectin trials. But why haven’t there been larger better studies? They also comment that Paul Marik was vaccinated in January and does not see Ivermectin as a threat to that, though nor does he see vaccinations being the solution on their own. He just wants the politics out of medicine.
  • The FDA warned against using veterinary ivermectin in humans.
  • FLCCC site: Frontline doctors Critical Care Alliance.
  • The MATH+, protocol:  methylprednisolone, ascorbic acid, thiamine, and heparin, plus a statin, zinc, vitamin D, famotidine, melatonin, and magnesium.
  • I-MASK+ protocol, which focuses on ivermectin, but also includes vitamins C and D, quercetin, zinc, and melatonin for prophylaxis, and adding aspirin;

h/t Old Ozzie, via David from Cooyal

Images: Red Cross (Wikimedia) and Belgian Red Cross. Image by Buchel, Charles A.

 

9.6 out of 10 based on 134 ratings