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by Joanne Nova Maybe it’s an accident that every answer is “Vaccines”? Or maybe not.  … People are asking why early safe cheap treatments could have been suppressed, after all, people are dying. A better question is to ask how could any cheap alternative treatment ever be selected? The money-pot on offer is so stupendously, fantastically big, it can buy small nations. And the cheap drugs don’t just compete with it, they obliterate it. In the current system, legally, the FDA can’t give EUA (Emergency Use Authorization) for any vaccine if there is a safe useful alternative. The EUA approval is simply extinguished by any treatment that works. Therefore billions of dollars in profits depends on making sure there are no cheap safe alternatives. It’s not a question of whether Big Pharma are pulling levers to crush cheap drugs. With billions at stake, Pfizer and other companies would be crazy, nutso, bonkers, and doing their shareholders a disservice if they did not lobby, cajole, scare, smear and call in all their favours to make sure there would never be a cheap safe alternative. The EUA is all or nothingThe Covid vaccine was worth $24b to Pfizer this year alone:This year, the Covid vaccine has brought in revenue of $24.3 billion. And Pfizer said it expects a total of $36 billion from the vaccine for all of 2021 — nearly $12 billion more in revenue the final quarter of the year. And it said based on contracts it now has signed it expects revenue $29 billion from the Covid vaccine in 2022. And that’s not necessarily all it will bring in. It’s easy to screw up a study of unloved drugsThere are many ways to innocently mess up a study by starting treatment too late, using too little, too much, picking the wrong participants, and keeping the study small so it never reaches “significance”. And if a study gets published it can always be retracted. Editors like their careers too.
The big two vaccines generate $93 million dollars a day in profitsIt’s not just Pfizer with fingers in the medical swamp of course. All Big-Pharma sellers are happier if the people are vitamin deficient, and if all competing unpatentable alternatives “just don’t have enough evidence”: Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna making $1,000 profit every second while world’s poorest countries remain largely unvaccinated New figures from the Peoples Vaccine Alliance reveal that the companies behind two of the most successful COVID-19 vaccines —Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna— are making combined profits of $65,000 every minute. Despite receiving public funding of over $8 billion, the three corporations have refused calls to urgently transfer vaccine technology and know-how with capable producers in low- and middle-income countries via the World Health Organisation (WHO)… The left-leaning activists miss the point: Maaza Seyoum of the African Alliance and People’s Vaccine Alliance Africa said: “It is obscene that just a few companies are making millions of dollars in profit every single hour, while just two percent of people in low-income countries have been fully vaccinated against coronavirus.” This is what’s obsceneWhat’s obscene is not that barely tested, unnecessary, risky drugs were not foisted on Africans, it’s that millions of people have died in the West that could have been saved if our government run agencies were serving The People instead of Big-Pharma. Billions of dollars has been burnt in long lockdowns that ten dollars worth of Ivermectin, Vitamin D3, A, C, B6 and antihistamines, nasal sprays, and mouthwashes could have avoided. What’s obscene is that our spineless elected Representatives fail to represent The People (apart from the few brave souls like Rand Paul, Craig Kelly and Malcolm Roberts). What’s obscene is that the mass media journalists jumped to “Vax The Nation” and not report the obvious conflicts of interests, the alternative treatments, or give a voice to the few brave doctors who have been sacked. What’s obscene is that our Minister of Health, our Prime Minister, and Presidents everywhere unquestioningly obeyed the captured committees and incompetent Chief Health Officers who turned vaccines into a religion and signed secret contracts with multinational corporate giants that are well known to sacrifice lives for profits. The greatest scandal of our lifetimes is here, and it’s the deep dark Medical Swamp, hidden in plain view and killing people we love. It bans wonder drugs, pours scorn on vitamins, denies doctors the training and choice to use the best treatments they know of, and generates massive profits for companies that used government funds yet avoid any legal liability and transparency. They have suppressed many safe, useful treatments:People deficient in Vitamin D3 are 14 times more likely to get severe Covid. Why aren’t the Health Departments telling us all to get our D3 measured and why don’t they hand out free samples at every corner chemist? Vit D3 reduced hospital deaths in Turkey by 60%. Most of the sickest Covid patients in Spain were deficient in Vit A. And 42% were deficient in B6, which helps reduce cytokine storms. Think that’s an “accident”? Melatonin reduces deaths by maybe 90%, good old antihistamines saved nursing home patients, Iota-carageenan nasal sprays reduced infections by 80%, Mouthwashes reduce covid deaths by 80%. Asthma drug Budesonide reduces Covid hospitalization rate by 90%. Even cough syrup with Bromhexine might help. Indonesia cut Covid by 98% with Ivermectin while Australia grew cases 500% with Lock-n-Vax, Uttar Pradesh, India, wiped out Covid with ivermectin. In Peru, Ivermectin cut covid deaths by 75% in 6 weeks. The virus mysteriously disappeared in Japan. Can’t we copy them? Meanwhile countries that use hydroxychloroquine appear to have 80% lower Covid death rates. Maybe that matters? If the Health Dept cared about health, if hospitalization rates were important at all, they’d be acting differently. The legal fine print is there for all to see all along:Keep reading → January 5th, 2022 | Tags: Antiviral, Big-Pharma, Corruption, Corruption (Media), Corruption (Medicine), Corruption (science) | Category: Health |  Print This Post | | Something is going very wrong. Insurers are paying out on more long and short disability claims, which we might expect in a pandemic, but in the 18 – 64 age group in Indiana deaths are up by wildly exotic sigma deviations above the norm. Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64Margaret Menge (The Center Square) – The head of Indianapolis-based insurance company OneAmerica said the death rate is up a stunning 40% from pre-pandemic levels among working-age people. “We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business – not just at OneAmerica,” the company’s CEO Scott Davison said during an online news conference this week. “The data is consistent across every player in that business.” Davison said the increase in deaths represents “huge, huge numbers,” and that’s it’s not elderly people who are dying, but “primarily working-age people 18 to 64” who are the employees of companies that have group life insurance plans through OneAmerica. “And what we saw just in third quarter, we’re seeing it continue into fourth quarter, is that death rates are up 40% over what they were pre-pandemic,” he said. “Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic,” he said. “So 40% is just unheard of.” The President of the Indiana Hospital Association confirmed that hospitals across the state were full of patients with “many different conditions” and that what Davison was reporting fitted with what he was seeing too. About 37% of the ICU beds were filled with Covid patients, but 54% were other conditions. Evidence suggests it’s not untested Covid deathsThere will always be some who die of Covid who didn’t get tested. And in 2020 there were rises in unexplained deaths in different regions of the US at different times. But those peaks in unexplained deaths were always were during the same weeks as the peaks of the known Covid deaths or very close to them. That’s not what is happening here. Davison is talking about deaths in the third and fourth quarter of 2021. He compares the current wave to the peak in winter the year before. But official cases of Covid in Indiana were slightly higher in 2020 than most of 2021.  …. Official deaths were also lower in 2021, so unexplained deaths due to Covid should also be lower now than the year before, not higher.  … So imagine for some mysterious reason, that Indiana hospitals got very slack, and were testing less in 2021. If that were the case, and they were missing Covid infections we’d expect test positivity would be higher — but it wasn’t (at least until until Omicron blew it away in the last week).  … Which leaves one new medical intervention that peaked in 2021.  Vaccinations in Indiana were mostly rolled out from Feb to December. It would be interesting to know which weeks Covid vaccines were rolled out for particular age groups and if the extra deaths in each age group were linked, like they so obviously were in the UK as shown by Neil and Fenton: Many deaths in vaccinated people were recorded as “unvaccinated” in the UK. If the Indiana Health Department was really interested in the health of people in Indiana it would already have done that study. There is going to be hell to pay when people find out. h/t Analitik, William Astley, Don B, Clarence.t, OldOzzie, ColA, TedM. Commenter Analitik estimates it’s a Sigma 12 type event. REFERENCETest positivity, Covid, in Indiana: https://www.coronavirus.in.gov/indiana-covid-19-dashboard-and-map/ Neil, and Fenton et al (2021) Latest statistics on England mortality data suggest systematic mis-categorisation of vaccine status and uncertain effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccination
Plastics are a free dinner for life on Earth so it was just a matter of time before microbes evolved to eat it. A PET bottle normally takes 16 – 48 years to break down, but if it were lunch for microflora it would take weeks instead. Hydrocarbons are ultimately just different forms of C-H-O waiting to be liberated as carbon dioxide and water. The only question was “how long” it would take bacteria and fungi to break those unusual bonds. Sooner or later all plastic will be biodegradable.  Polyethylene-terephthalate (PET) The first bacteria known to chew through PET bottles was discovered at a Japanese rubbish dump in 2016. But we had no idea then just how advanced the microbial world of plastic processing was. Instead of hunting for single bacteria Zrimec et al mined through collected metagenomes of soil and ocean and found not just 5 or 10 new enzymes but 30,000. It appears that they could metabolize at least ten different types of plastic. And in places where there was more plastic pollution, there were more enzymes. All over the world a whole new ecosystem is rising out of the puddles and bubbles and grains of sand. Enzymes that degrade plastics are found all over the world  FIG 2 Plastic-degrading enzymes across the global microbiome. Depicted are 11,906 enzyme hits in the ocean and 18,119 in the soil data sets, obtained by constructing HMMs of known plastic-degrading enzymes and querying them across metagenomic sequencing data sets. The potential to degrade up to 10 and 9 different plastic types was observed in the respective ocean and soil fractions (Fig. S3A). Mother Nature has a big toolshed of genes to play with:With a library like this, is it any wonder life on Earth could find and amplify the right tools to process plastics? For example, global ocean sampling revealed over 40 million mostly novel nonredundant genes from 35,000 species (35), whereas over 99% of the ∼160 million genes identified in global topsoil cannot be found in any previous microbial gene catalogue (34) So there are 200 million genes to work with. Bugs across globe are evolving to eat plastic, study findsDamian Carrington, The Guardian, 15 Dec 2021 The explosion of plastic production in the past 70 years, from 2m tonnes to 380m tonnes a year, had given microbes time to evolve to deal with plastic, the researchers said. The study, published in the journal Microbial Ecology, started by compiling a dataset of 95 microbial enzymes already known to degrade plastic, often found in bacteria in rubbish dumps and similar places rife with plastic. About 12,000 of the new enzymes were found in ocean samples, taken at 67 locations and at three different depths. The results showed consistently higher levels of degrading enzymes at deeper levels, matching the higher levels of plastic pollution known to exist at lower depths. The soil samples were taken from 169 locations in 38 countries and 11 different habitats and contained 18,000 plastic-degrading enzymes. Soils are known to contain more plastics with phthalate additives than the oceans and the researchers found more enzymes that attack these chemicals in the land samples. Nearly 60% of the new enzymes did not fit into any known enzyme classes, the scientists said, suggesting these molecules degrade plastics in ways that were previously unknown. The not so apocalyptic plastic crisisThe new 250 page “Consensus” Study (their words) by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, is as out of date and useless as it sounds. While it is scoring headlines, scaring us about accumulating plastics, it largely writes off the idea that microbes will evolve to degrade plastic, saying “measurable biodegradation (complete carbon utilization by microbes) in the environment has not been observed.” Which is one of those true but useless statements. Some 40 year old theory says it won’t happen: Keep reading → January 4th, 2022 | Tags: Microbiology, Plastic, Pollution | Category: Microbiology | Print This Post | |
Most polls are only measuring the size of a cheer squad. 83% of Brits say they’re worried about climate change. But they’re so worried, yeah, they couldn’t even bring themselves to say “yes” to poll question. People know we need to fly less to “Save the World”, but they have no intention of riding the e-bike to the tofu factory instead of holidaying in Majorca. Somehow 45% of people are dreadfully worried about climate change but if it means catching a bus, the Planet can wait, eh? How worried is this?Climate change: UK public more worried than ever about global warming, but still doesn’t want to pay to fix itThe survey also finds that while people are in favour of drastic measures to help the country become net zero by 2050 in theory – when they realise the cost and potential inconvenience it could give them personally support drops off rapidly. Wow. Watch those numbers fall… In principle, frequent flier levies receive the highest levels of support at 68 per cent – but this falls to just 32 per cent once the personal implications of such a move have been contemplated. Meanwhile, 62 per cent support phasing out the sale of gas and coal boilers, in principle – falling to just 17 per cent when the personal implications are factored in. Increased vegetarian and vegan options on menus is supported by 56 per cent – falling to 26 per cent, on the prospect of less meat and dairy choice – while creating low traffic neighbourhoods fell from 53 to 18 per cent, when costs and inconvenience are factored in. The survey was done by Ipsos MORI and the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST). Though, after searching, I can’t find the questions, the answers, or what kind of “personal implications” were on offer for a survey of 5,665 people. If readers find them, please post the links. I’d love to see those details. The most dangerous Big-Government Qango of all may well be the Central Banks (not the NIH). Money drives all the incentives across national economies, but one small unelected group decides the price of money, and all corruption flows downstream from there. Ponder how they set the temperature that drives the global currents of goods, resources and opportunity. They feed Big Government, Big Pharma and Big Tech. Saddle Up: There is no hiding inflation. Despite the global economy grinding to a halt in a pandemic, house prices set surging records and paradoxically the Dow hit all times highs. It is just supply and demand. As more dollars are printed, a bigger supply of money competes for the same number of goods. And boy, have they been printing money. It’s a temporary spike they say:This is the money base of USD, a rough measure of “how many dollars there are”.  US St Louis Federal Reserve, Money Base graph 1918-2008 | Source For perspective, below is the history of the growth in US Dollars since 1918 up until the GFC. The US left the Gold Standard in stages between 1913 and 1971, and the growth in money supply since then is obvious. But as fast as this appeared to grow in ninety years, it was nothing compared to what would come in the 14 years since.  US St Louis Federal Reserve, Money Base graph 1918-2008. Source All the market-rattling crashes of history shrank when compared to the GFC and the Pandemic, which change the whole scale of the graph. The Occupy Crowd, and the Tea Party both recognized something was very wrong with the bail-out of 2009. But the Occupy Crowd have no understanding of what drives the inequality they hate and oppose. The corruption of the dollar feeds all the other corruptionThe people that benefit are the ones that borrow the money and spend it first. The people who lose are those holding their money in cash. Did your wage grow sixfold from 2008 to 2021? Printing money-for-nothing is always the politically easy way to win votes. Voters like to vote themselves the treasury, so what Treasurer wants to promise austerity? But inflation eats away at the strength of the economy. The incentives during inflation favor high risk speculation and punish the hourly wage earner and the savers. Inflation makes possible and rewards the mergers and hostile takeovers, thus conglomerating power and reducing competition. It feeds the predators like Amazon, Facebook and Google. Like acid, it destroys the benefits of competition as the big fish swallow up the little fish. It feeds inequality, and of course, it feeds Big-Government. Worse than World War IIThe graphs above are not log graphs, so they don’t show the proportionate shift. But the percentage change in money base shows the “seismic” surges in money supply. The GFC and the Pandemic have clearly shaken the value of the American Dollar more than The Great Depression and World War II.  Percentage Monthly Money base change, USD, St Louis Federal Reserve.* Is it the end of an empire? We hope not. But We The People need to plan accordingly. The Chinese Communist Party is. China is buying gold. The Treasury officials are doing their best to hide inflation. Just as with climate change, the bureaucrats keep adjusting their inflation indicators so they can keep getting away with the game of silent theft. Big Government lives off silent inflation. Gold or any other real and timeless asset is an anti-cheating device. If currencies were pegged to something real, it’s much harder for governments to grow. REFERENCE and DATASt Louis Federal Reserve: AMBSL and BOGMBASE Keep reading → January 2nd, 2022 | Tags: Fiat Currency, Inflation | Category: Big-Government, Economics, Monetary History, Science of Money, USA | Print This Post | | Data from several countries now shows that, per capita, after a short honeymoon, the vaccinated are more likely to catch Omicron than the unvaccinated. No one can pretend any more that we need to get vaccinated to protect our friends. As if to confirm the bad news, Twitter suspended an inventor of the mRNA vaccine, Dr Robert Malone. They’re trying to cut him off from his half a million followers so it’s my duty and yours to sign up to his site instead. Who needs Twitter? In other omens, last week, Joe Biden even started to give Donald Trump credit for vaccines. We can see where that might lead… Iceland is one of the most boosted nations on Earth Iceland is 80% triple boosted yet cases are going through the roof. And the fastest growing group of infections is in the fully vaccinated (dark blue). Imagine a mass vaccination program against the wrong molecular shape. Imagine a government insisted that every single health-worker took the same vaccine and sacked those who didn’t. Time to give them their jobs back. Efficacy is falling in DenmarkIn Denmark, against Omicron, both Pfizer and Moderna only protect a third to a half of the vacinees for a month. After 3 months the “efficacy” against infection is negative. 90 days after vaccination with Pfizer, vaccinees are 76% more likely to catch Covid (Omicron) than if they were not vaccinated. (Hansen et al)  Vaccine effectiveness against Omicron in Denmark.
Or to graph that another way — noting that zero is what we get with no vaccine:  Note how fast the decline is? Boostees would need to take vaccines every two months to stay in the honeymoon zone. It may save lives from Covid but cost lives from other conditions. What if inflammatory markers were raised for months after vaccination as some Cardiologists think. That would put people at a higher risk of heart attacks? Covid vaccines may not improve our chances of staying alive at all even in a pandemic. (Click that link to read the extraordinary UK study showing how many deaths of newly vaccinated people were classified as “unvaccinated”). Bear in mind, this is just about cases, not about hospitalization or ICU. But even if vaccines reduce hospitalization, so does Ivermectin and it can stop the spread of Covid as well. Just ask Uttar Pradesh, or Indonesia, or Japan. OntarioLikewise in Ontario the per capita rate of infections in the fully vaccinated has risen much faster than the rate in the unvaccinated. Keep reading →
Leil Leibovitz lived within the bubble, and writes about The Turn — the moments he realized that he was afraid to ask, to speak his mind. I sense a phase change coming as more and more people reach The Turn. The TurnBy Leil Leibovitz You might be living through The Turn if you ever found yourself feeling like free speech should stay free even if it offended some group or individual but now can’t admit it at dinner with friends because you are afraid of being thought a bigot. You are living through The Turn if you have questions about public health policies—including the effects of lockdowns and school closures on the poor and most vulnerable in our society—but can’t ask them out loud because you know you’ll be labeled an anti-vaxxer. You are living through The Turn if you think that burning down towns and looting stores isn’t the best way to promote social justice, but feel you can’t say so because you know you’ll be called a white supremacist. If you’ve felt yourself unable to speak your mind, if you have a queasy feeling that your friends might disown you if you shared your most intimately held concerns.. The Turn brings with it the sort of pain most of us don’t feel as adults; you’d have to go all the way back to junior high, maybe, to recall a stabbing sensation quite as deep and confounding as watching your friends all turn on you and decide that you’re not worthy of their affection any more. It’s the kind of primal rejection … And what a perfect, epic, Turn he has had:
But, having been there before, I have one important thing to tell you: If the left is going to make it “right wing” to simply be decent, then it’s OK to be right. Why? Because, after 225 long and fruitful years of this terminology, “right” and “left” are now empty categories, meaning little more than “the blue team” and “the green team” in your summer camp’s color war. You don’t get to be “against the rich” if the richest people in the country fund your party in order to preserve their government-sponsored monopolies. You are not “a supporter of free speech” if you oppose free speech for people who disagree with you. You are not “for the people” if you pit most of them against each other based on the color of their skin, or force them out of their jobs because of personal choices related to their bodies. You are not “serious about economic inequality” when you happily order from Amazon without caring much for the devastating impact your purchases have on the small businesses that increasingly are either subjugated by Jeff Bezos’ behemoth or crushed by it altogether. You are not “for science” if you refuse to consider hypotheses that don’t conform to your political convictions and then try to ban critical thought and inquiry from the internet. You are not an “anti-racist” if you label—and sort!—people by race. You are not “against conformism” when you scare people out of voicing dissenting opinions. If you glimpse someone close to that point, welcome them. We’ve been watching it slowly for years in the climate debate. Someone asked a reasonable question and was shouted down. Bitten, they come to us seeking answers, or just a friendly ear. They want the Red Pill then.. Read it all at The Tablet, there’s a lot more.
December 30th, 2021 | Tags: Psychology | Category: AGW socio-political, Big-Government, Fashion, Global Warming, Psychology | Print This Post | | For anyone who is “vitamined-out” — ponder that the most important theme is not just about personally avoiding hospitalization, it’s Where the hell are our publicly funded universities? Does the Minister for Health serve the People, or Pfizer… ————————————– Vitamin A was allegedly once called “ “the anti-infective vitamin” — a snappy title which didn’t stick with any biochem student beyond the end of the sentence. But it’s needed for your immune system to function normally, so it seems sort of obvious to ask “what if” we don’t have enough. Could taking more prevent people catching Covid or ending up in hospital, or dead? As always, research in prevention and prophylaxis is a wasteland in the the Modern West. No one can profit from it and indeed if everyone got enough it could harm the prospects of shareholders of Pharmaceutical firms and Hospitals. But it appears we definitely don’t want to be short of it. About three quarters of people who end up in the severe ward of Covid hospitals were deficient. Imagine a Minister of Health who embarked on a program to raise awareness, test and give out free supplements? Lordy! It might reduce hospital loads in a week?
Vitamin A makes our bones stronger, reduces wrinkles, may prevent cancer and stops us going blind. But it’s possible to eat too much — especially if we dine out on polar bear livers or sled dogs. Seriously, overdosing for pregnant women causes birth defects and trouble for anyone who really overdoes it. Sighs of Vitamin A deficiency include dry skin, excsma, dry eyes, night blindness, infertility, chest infections, poor would healing, and acne. Though all of these can be caused by other things too. People who are anaemic and people with inflammatory bowel disease, fibrosis, liver trouble or pancreatitis are more likely to be deficient. Our immune systems can’t work without itOur white blood cells that catch some booty (like body-parts of germs) will turn up to show it off, and when they do they’ll ooze versions of Vitamin A which induces other immune cells to respond to their prize and mature and proliferate. Vitamin A also manages to mobilize iron stocks to fill up the haemoglobulin molecules in baby red blood cells, something that makes them both red, and useful. It’s easy to imagine how extra red blood cells, and thus oxygen carrying capacity might be handy when dealing with a disease notorious for inducing low blood oxygen.
Vitamin A comes in meat, eggs and milk, but precursors (the carotenes) are found in leafy and colorful vegetables like spinach and carrots, so even vegetarians, in theory, ought to be getting enough of the building blocks so their livers can finish the job. But a study in Spain showed that the sickest people with Covid were often the ones that were deficient. Three quarters of those admitted to hospital were deficient in zinc and Vitamin D, but nearly as many, 72%, were deficient in Vitamin A. And 42% were low in B6 (see Tomasa-Irriguible). The problem with that kind of study is that we can’t be sure that the disease didn’t create the deficiency, and that the sickest people drained away their A and zinc in the process of getting sick. But from other studies we already know that Vitamin A is anti-inflammatory, as well as helping promote immunity. (Li et al) And that backing up a truck and giving super massive doses of 200,000IU to Covid patients appeared to save about two thirds of them from ending up with a severe disease. (see ). Naturally, there aren’t many big good definitive studies in the West. We throw billions at patentable experiments, and our public universities, but no one is that interested in the ten-cent-nutrients that might reduce deaths by half. Though one large prospective study in the UK followed 15,000 people and found people taking Vitamin A and selenium supplements were quite a lot less likely to get a positive Covid result — odds were reduced by about 60% and 80%. (Holt et al). One small Iranian study gave a mixed bag of vitamins to 30 patients and estimates the risk of hospitalization was 40% less, and the risk of death was 90% less compared with 30 “controls”. (It says something that we keep coming back to small Iranian studies, doesn’t it?) That’s quite a bunch of vitamins used. 5,000 IU vitamin A daily, 600,000 IU vitamin D once, 300 IU of vitamin E twice a day, 500 mg vitamin C four times a day, and one ampule daily of B vitamins [thiamine nitrate [B1] 3.1 mg, sodium riboflavin phosphate 4.9 mg (corresponding to vitamin B2 3.6 mg), nicotinamide [B3] 40 mg, pyridoxine hydrochloride [B5] 4.9 mg (corresponding to vitamin B6 4.0 mg), sodium pantothenate [B6] 16.5 mg (corresponding to pantothenic acid 15 mg), sodium ascorbate 113 mg (corresponding to vitamin C 100 mg), biotin 60 μg, folic acid 400 μg, and cyanocobalamin [B12] 5 μg]. IRCT20200319046819N [1]. UPDATE: common vitamin names added [by me]. How useful is Vitamin A?Keep reading → December 29th, 2021 | Tags: Coronavirus, Nutrition, Vitamins | Category: Health | Print This Post | | If there was a sign of a major problem with energy policy it might look just like this: In the EU for most of the last ten years gas prices were €20. Last week they spiked to €180. Prices have come down in the last few days as a flotilla of 15 US tankers crosses the Atlantic to rescue the EU and some Russian troops departed from the border near Ukraine.  Who needs gas? Everyone apparently… | Source: Trading Economics It’s heartwarming to see the US tankers on the way:  US Tankers headed for EU No sign the EU governments get the message:What will it take? The Netherlands announced that they will limit coal stations and pay them not to produce electricity most of the time in the hope of stopping floods and droughts: Dutch Government will limit coal-fired power stations to just 35% capacity from January 1. Dutch coal-fired power stations may not operate at more than 35% of their maximum capacity in the coming years. “In the short term, this will lead to a significant reduction in CO2 emissions at coal-fired power stations of approximately 6-7 megatons,” the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate (EZK) reported on Wednesday. The owners of the coal-fired power stations are financially compensated by the government for the lost income from the reduced electricity production up to and including 2024. In Germany, the sabotage continues: 11 nuclear reactors have been shut, three are about to. The last three will go next year: Germany’s Energy SurrenderWall Street Journal Rarely has a country worked so hard to make itself vulnerable. Ten years ago 17 nuclear reactors produced about a quarter of Germany’s electricity, but the 2011 Fukushima accident prompted former Chancellor Angela Merkel to phase out nuclear. Six reactors remain: Three will close this month, with the remaining three ceasing operations next year. It’s hard to think of a more self-defeating policy on economic, climate and geopolitical grounds. German one-year forward electricity prices have hit €300 per megawatt hour. For comparison, the 2010 to 2020 average was under €50 per megawatt hour. Coal was Germany’s top energy source in the first half of 2021. How big is this crisis? Even in France, where nuclear power is running, the energy price spikes are causing major industries to shut down: With energy costs spiking to fresh records day after day, financial strain is mounting for industries including metals and fertilizers. Aluminium Dunkerque Industries France, Europe’s top smelter of the metal, curbed output in the past two weeks. Trafigura’s Nyrstar will pause zinc production in France in early January and Romanian fertilizer maker Azomures temporarily halted activity. “We’re seeing an existential crisis of the European aluminum industry and other metals-smelting industries that are power intensive,” Mark Hansen, head of metals trader Concord Resources, said. “It’s not always so easy to get these businesses back in operation” — From Javier Blas about a Bloomberg story that seems to have disappeared. Meanwhile, spare a thought for the people in Kosovo who were suffering through 2 hour rolling blackouts in the lead up to Christmas. Lest we forget who is responsible: Javier Blas: Dec 24 As Kosovo homes go dark with rolling blackouts from today, just before Christmas, let’s remember that in 2018 the World Bank pulled the plug on a project to build a new coal-fired power plant in the country. The same coal Germany and the US burns today. It takes a really Big Government to do Really Stupid Things. December 28th, 2021 | Tags: Energy Crisis, Europe, Fossil Fuel | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Absolutely no one who writes for newspapers has any idea of why Covid may have almost completely disappeared from Japan since the sudden Delta wave in August. The trajectory collapsed on August 25th and vaccines don’t explain it. “While Omicron explodes around the world, COVID cases in Japan plummet and no one knows why” Sydney Morning Herald, Dec 23 Call it the hunt for a potential “X factor,” such as genetics, that may explain the trend and inform how Japan could deal with the next wave. While the new highly transmissible Omicron variant has appeared in the country and experts suspect there is already some community spread, the overall transmission rate of the virus and coronavirus-related deaths in Japan have remained low. “ ” “Honestly, we do not know the exact reason behind the sudden drop in COVID deaths in Japan,” said Taro Yamamoto, professor of global health at Nagasaki University’s Institute of Tropical Medicine. “ There is no mention of the-drug-that-shall-not-be-named — Voldermectin. But on August 13th as the third major wave was running out of control, a high ranking doctor in Tokyo recommended doctors use ivermectin. Dr. Haruo Ozaki, the Chairman of the Tokyo Medical Association said it was time for doctors to give patients information on ivermectin “and get permission to use it”. Around the same time, possibly on August 10, another doctor, Dr. Kazuhiro Nagao was seen on a Japanese television show calling ivermectin “a silver bullet” and describing how he’d treated 500 patients with ivermectin and they “all felt better the next day”. (See below). The peak of daily cases in Japan was two weeks later on August 25th, 2021. In Japan, the third major peak was more than four times larger than previous peaks. Things were looking pretty bleak in August during the post Olympic spike of cases for a while there were more than 20,000 new cases every day. Then, “a miracle” occurred, and now in a population of 126 million the current daily cases across the whole of Japan amount to a very small, 200 per day.  Japanese cases of Covid plummet as people search for ivermectin. So the extraordinary turning point in cases starts 2 weeks after two Japanese doctors recommended ivermectin and searches for the word “ivermectin” in Japan became more popular than ever. The peak search week for “ivermectin” in Japan was the following week.  Searches for the word “ivermectin” peaked in Japan on August 29th – September 4th. | Source But also watch the Japanese Doctor Kazuhiro Nagao director of the Nagao clinic on TV in August talking about how we “give Ivermectin to everyone who wants it”, on the “same day” they test positive. “They feel better the next day”. Watch the expression on the interviewer in the last second where he asks Dr Nagao how many of his 500 patients got worse afterwards, and Dr Nagao says “None.” (If you can’t see the video below try another browser!)
That interview possibly occurred on August 10th, and was written up here. Google translate is struggling. But the good doctor said with “the silver bullet” ivermectin Covid should be reclassified to just a seasonal flu. Dr. Nagao recommends that corona, which is currently classified as Class 2, be treated as Class 5, which is the same as seasonal influenza. By lowering the price, “early diagnosis and immediate treatment by a practitioner is possible = prevention of aggravation” “Practitioners directly request for those who need immediate hospitalization = no time lag” “Health observation of close contacts, no need to allocate hospitalization destinations” “= Eliminate the collapse of the health center” and three merits are mentioned. That’s important. ” He also said, “There is a silver bullet called ivermectin that anyone can use. It is a drug that is usually used for the treatment of scabies. It will be distributed to all people.” He also proposed a “suganomectin” system that is comparable to “abenomask.” On top of that, Dr. Nagao said, “If I make a mistake, I will take responsibility and quit the doctor.” It only looks like it’s waiting for it to change. If you treat it early, it’s over. No one I’m seeing is dead. All of these quotes are extremely hard to find now, so thanks to readers who sent in these links (see the hat tips at the end). I keep all those emails. Explaining miracles with magical thinkingA search for “Ivermectin in Japan” now though will turn up 50 news stories categorically saying that “No, Ivermectin Did Not Help Japan Bring Down Covid-19 Coronavirus Delta Surge”. Apparently the fall is a complete mystery, but was absolutely, definitely not due to ivermectin. It might be because Japanese people wear masks, though they did that through all the other peaks too and it didn’t stop the rise, nor cause a sharp fall. It might be because Japanese people have a rare gene called APOBEC3A, though they probably had that gene in waves 1 and 2 as well and there were no miracles then. It might be because the Delta virus in Japan mutated itself out of existence. That creative theory centres on the A394V mutation, which occurs on nsp14 – a viral gene that checks for errors. The idea is that if nsp14 is faulty the virus might just make such bad baby viruses that they stop infecting people. It doesn’t really sit well with natural selection. Somehow the virus was incredibly fertile til August 25th, then the superspreading dominant Delta variant was somehow outcompeted by a baby that couldn’t make good copies of itself. Which sort of begs the question of why one of the other offspring-of-delta didn’t just take over and outcompete the dud baby. And as John Campbell points out, that same gene occurred in the virus in 24 other countries. It can be found in strains AY.1 AY.3 AY.4 AY.5 AY.6 AY.7 and AY.12 strains. No miracles. Vaccinations don’t explain itAt the point when the caseload peaked and suddenly flipped, only 44% of Japanese people were fully vaccinated. It’s hard to believe that reaching the number 45% the next day somehow triggered the miracle. Not to mention that many other countries vaccinated a similar number of people but they didn’t crush Covid.  All four nations followed similarish vaccination trends but had very different outcomes. source: OWID One eighth of the death rate?The third big peak in Japan was really quite remarkable. Despite having four times the caseload of all previous peaks, the deaths per day were half as high as the first and second peaks, even though the biggest peak was almost solely due to the deadlier Delta variant. The second peak was 90% Alpha variant (the UK variant). Mortality in the UK, Scotland and Canada was worse for Delta. So some of the reduction in death rates is due to the vaccination program, but when half the nation wasn’t vaccinated, it doesn’t make sense that the death rates would fall by a factor of eight.  Despite the third major peak being the highest case load in Japan, and due to the Delta variant Covid deaths per day in Japan were half the previous peak. And if vaccinations produced miracles it would work in other nations too. However, Australia has one fifth the population but six times the deaths. The UK has half the population of Japan but on a daily basis, this week, 100 times the deaths. According to OWID, currently 71% in Australia are fully vaccinated, 69% of the UK, and 78% of Japan. Clearly the vaccination rate doesn’t explain the massive discrepancies in death rates.  The UK has half the population of Japan but 100 times the deaths. | Source: OWID … Apparently, Ivermectin is still being used in Japan and people are not happyIvermectin for COVID? Unproven treatment stokes concern in JapanBY OSAMU TSUKIMORI , Dec 21, 2021, Japan Times “I just received the package and, to prevent (coronavirus) infection, I’m going to take it from today,” a 52-year-old man wrote in a message posted in September. There are agents in Japan that order in ivermectin? So the bottom line is that officially in Japan, the vaccines are being rolled out and boosted, like everywhere else in the modern world. But unofficially, doctors in Japan are speaking out publicly saying that ivermectin works, and people are ordering it in from India. The government of Japan doesn’t need to mandate or approve ivermectin use. Word of mouth will do it, especially when lives are on the line. h/t Richard Kleenman, David B, Panda, David Archibald, Scott of the Pacific. David E. December 27th, 2021 | Tags: Coronavirus, Ivermectin, Japan | Category: Health, Microbiology | Print This Post | | What makes this map so apt, especially today, is because these are the countries that don’t celebrate Christmas (in brown). It’s a testament to how far the spirit of Christmas has spread.  … Lighter brown countries (China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia) don’t have a public holiday but are described as “giving observance”. It’s a day a lot of the world shares. Albeit “some jurisdictions of the Eastern Orthodox Church, including those of Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Jerusalem, mark feasts using the older Julian calendar”. Those nations celebrate on January 7th. Wishing you warm smiles. Map by Nanib , Skriplerio, Moyogo Did someone say there’s a hospitalization crisis? … There is a crisis. People are getting stuck for days extra in hospitals and even dying because of nutrient deficiencies that we could easily solve. A new study from Istanbul shows that even if we negligently fail to correct Vitamin D deficiencies before people get sick, we can still save half of the ones who might die with a cheap vitamin, pumped in hospital for about 1/5000th of the daily cost of an ICU bed. The mortality rate in the unsupplemented group from 2020 was 11%, but in the supplemented group in 2021 it was 5.5%. Imagine what the mortality rate might be if these people weren’t deficient in the first place? The study shows us that there is a causal connection between low Vitamin D and more severe Covid. It also shows what a train wreck our medical systems are. For the price of a few dollars we can free up a lot of hospital beds and stop a lot of deaths, and we’ve known this might be the case since the beginning, and we’re still not doing it? The incentives are so screwed in our healthcare systems that we’re waiting for doctors in Turkey to do the trials we should have done in February 2020? Don’t wait til you catch Covid to get your D3 levels tested. Sort it out now, and supplement if you need it. And aim for the higher end of the normal spectrum. (And take Vitamin K2 as well, though NOT without doc approval if you are on anticoagulants like warfarin, see comments below). This new study enrolled 163 people admitted to hospital with Covid who had low to moderate Vitamin D levels (less than 30 ng/ml.) About two thirds of them were then given some whopper combinations of Vitamin D which started with 100,000 IU on Day One, and then continued for up to 7 days with lower doses that ranged from 2,000IU a day up to 100,000IU. So all these patients were given supersized cumulative Vitamin D doses over the next week of between 224,000IU up to 500,000IU. Staff did blood tests on Day 7 and 14 to make sure they weren’t overdoing it. They compared the new supplemented patients with the survival rates of 867 people admitted to the hospital a year before, whose Vitamin D status was known and who didn’t have comorbidities. It’s not ideal that the earlier group probably were sick with a different variant — the original WuFlu. But random controlled trials seem so cruel when we already have a pretty good idea of what works. Medico’s will find the study interesting because it assesses a lot of blood markers. Vitamin D levels were a better predictor of hospitalization than things like diabetes and high blood pressure. We hear all about the “co-morbidity risks” in the media, but Vitamin D appears to be more important. People who had no comorbidities, who should have been better off, were twice as likely to need a long hospital stay as people with comorbidities who also got Vitamin D treatment in hospital. That applies to people who had Vitamin D in the moderate category — lower than 30 ng/mL. Keep reading → December 24th, 2021 | Tags: Coronavirus, Inflammation, Vitamin D | Category: Big-Government, Health | Print This Post | | UPDATE: This is a sticky post. New posts are appearing below. Send supplies through Paypal, or through direct deposit, or by snail-mail. As always, due to legal froufrou, donors can buy however many “units of emergency chocolate” they can spare in AUD, CAD, EUR, GBP, NZD or USD.
Keep reading → December 23rd, 2021 | Tags: Blogging | Category: Big-Government, Free Speech, Global Warming, Politics, Uncategorized | Print This Post | |
In more news you can use before Christmas, here’s another cheap easy way to put the brakes on Covid — this time with the antiseptic Povidone-Iodine (PVP). While Carrageenan can clog up the virus in the passages behind your nose, it doesn’t necessarily do much to stop the virus replicating in your mouth and throat. But a regular swish or a sniff with Povidone-iodine can reduce the viral load to nothing in a matter of 15 to 30 seconds. Note, you’re supposed to spit it out again, not drink it and make sure to use a very dilute solution. Saliva can contain as many as 100 million infectious copies of Covid per ml, so the aim here is to reduce the number drastically every four hours. It’ll reduce the risk of you infecting people around you, and probably help buy yourself time to fight back against the virus.  Patrick J. Lynch, medical illustrator Between February and August last year et al enrolled 600 people in Bangladesh. Half were asked to use a 1% povidone iodine solution to gargle, use in nasal drops and eye drops. They were asked to do this every 4 hours for 4 weeks, which sounds like a chore, but is nicer than going to hospital. The other half did the same thing but only with lukewarm water. Since nasal rinsing is sometimes claimed to be useful, even the placebo arm may have got some benefit. But the difference was still impressive. Only 3.3% of the group that used Povidone-Iodine ended up in hospital, while nearly 21% of the plain “water washers” did. Only 2 people died in the treatment group, but 17 people did in the control group. Randomised controlled trials are useful, but brutal. Perhaps 15 people might not be dead now if they had been randomly assigned to the other group.  The bottom row is the total male plus female. This is good for everyone except Pharmaceutical companies selling vaccines and treatments. So the patients those who used 1% PVP I have minimum mortality, morbidity and occupying minimum number of hospital bed causing less burden to health and financial sector of Bangladesh in COVID-19 pandemic situation. Why can’t Australia do studies like this? Perhaps because we’re rich enough to be a market-worth-capturing? Chopra et al reviews the situation from a dentists point of view. Dentists are at high risk of catching covid, especially for some procedures, so Dental associations are keen to give patients a mouthwash and rinse before treatment so people don’t infect their dentist. The CDC recommends preprocedural rinsing with antimicrobial rinses such as chlorhexidine gluconate, essential oils, PVP-I, or cetylpyridinium chloride. PVP-I is safe for use in the oral and nasal cavities at concentrations up to 1.25% [21]. In the absence of any commercially available preparations for routine dental use during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is advised to dilute 10% PVP-I by 1:20 and mix 0.5cc of the diluted PVP-I solution with 9.5cc of sterile saline or sterile water for routine clinical use Chopra tested four products of PVP-I for a contact time of 30 s for virucidal activity, a. Antiseptic solution (PVP-I 10%) They concluded: “All products of PVP-I inactivated the virus by ≥99.99% which corresponded to ≥4log10 reduction of virus titre, within 30 s of contact” So even the half-a-percent solution still killed 9,999 viruses out of 10,000 and with only 30 seconds of swishing. Not bad. For the record some Doctors Warn Against Using Betadine in Nasal Spray or Mouthwash to Prevent COVID-19. Read it and decide for yourself. Seems to me there is a lot of “nothing to see here” and no good evidence yet type arguments. So where is the call to do the trails? Obviously, it wouldn’t be good to drink antiseptic and it is possible to overdo it. Again, the aim with mouthwashes or nasal sprays and eye drops is to whack the viral replication in the early days, and thwart the virus. An antiseptic won’t kill every germ — especially not the ones hiding inside your cells, but it will buy your B and T cells time to figure out the best plan of attack, and stop you infecting everyone around you. If only the vaccines worked this well? ht to Vicki, redress, OldOzzie, Dipole, Nabrid Obcsje REFERENCESChopra, (2021) Can povidone iodine gargle/mouthrinse inactivate SARS-CoV-2 and decrease the risk of nosocomial and community transmission during the COVID-19 pandemic? An evidence-based update, Japanese Dental Science Review, Volume 57, November 2021, Pages 39-45. et al., Bioresearch Communications, Volume 7, Issue 1, January 2021 (Peer Reviewed) December 22nd, 2021 | Tags: Antiviral, Coronavirus | Category: Health, Microbiology | Print This Post | | |
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Rarely do we see how meaningless the fear and worry is. One UK polling group asked people about phasing out coal boilers, adding vegan foods on menus and taxing frequent flyers. But the team followed up to find out whether people were willing to make the sacrifices themselves and support suddenly fell off a cliff. Fifty to seventy percent of so-called supporters were suddenly skeptical.
One side of politics maintains its support through fear, but it’s an invisible wall until you touch it. Most people within the bubble think they got there through persuasion and reason. They think they are free to leave, they “just don’t want to”. But once an errant thought occurs, or they ask an unpermitted question, the wall of fear appears — it’s the unexpected poison barb, the mockery a reasonable question provokes. It quickly escalates to full blown “primal rejection”.
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