COVID-19 in Mexico: unreported suffering
Mexico has seen 408,449 COVID-19 cases confirmed, with 45,361 deaths– 11% of cases are deaths, according to Worldometer. There are reports that testing is extremely limited by government policy in Mexico. According to Wikipedia, a government agency estimated that there were actually over 2.8 million cases, although their methodology is unknown.
If the death rate were only 1%, which would be low, that would mean that there would be 28,000 deaths. If there were 45,000 deaths, at a death rate of 1%, there would be 4.5 million cases… so your guess about the true figures is as good as mine.
Searching in Google, I was unable to find much recent information about Mexico’s COVID-19 problems. This Vox article from May 13 states that the pandemic in Mexico is being deliberately undercounted.
This article in the Yucatan Times from July 29 details the financial toll that is exacted from patients trying to get treatment for the virus in Mexico. There is, theoretically, public health care there, but the public hospitals are overwhelmed. Private hospitals demand pre-payment of large fees before even accepting patients at all.
This article in the Washington Post from July 2 says that Mexico City’s death rate tripled from March through May. The article includes figures stating 27,394 people died in Mexico City during that period, although the government reported only 4,000 coronavirus deaths. This would suggest that they are reporting less than half of deaths due to coronavirus.
Actually, it is worse than that, because according to the article, it takes at least a year for the government to finish totalling up all deaths for any given period. Add a few thousand more, but at this point, the exact number matters less than the overall picture of devastation.
With the border closed, there is little chance of spillage of Mexican cases into the US. Untold suffering is going on there, and if you think the US has problems, I am sure Mexico’s problems are worse. Our government is not handling the pandemic well, but Mexico’s government is doing very poorly.
I’m not going to look at the numbers from Canada (I’m tired), but all reports are that they are doing far, far better than we are. Fortunately, that border is closed as well.
This editorial published in JAMANETWORK today, July 29, discusses a research article also published today that estimates a roughly 60% reduction in COVID-19 cases and deaths due to school closures in March.
The implications are that re-opening schools will lead to a dramatic increase in cases during an uncontrolled outbreak due to SARS-COV-2. We can’t afford to increase cases, despite the economic and scholastic impact of keeping them closed.
Here are the statistics quoted in the editorial:
Auger et al4 found that school closure was associated with a −62% (95% CI, −71% to −49%) relative change in COVID-19 incidence per week, corresponding to an estimated absolute difference of 423.9 (95% CI, 375.0 to 463.7) cases per 100 000. The authors also reported that school closure was associated with a −58% (95% CI, −68% to −46%) relative change in mortality per week, corresponding to an estimated absolute difference in mortality of 12.6 (95% CI, 11.8 to 13.6) deaths per 100 000. Extrapolating these results to the US population, the authors estimate that school closure may have been associated with 1.37 million fewer cases of COVID-19 over a 26-day period and 40 600 fewer deaths over a 16-day period during the spring of 2020. It is important to emphasize these are estimates.
JAMA. Published online July 29, 2020. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.13092
It is not yet time to re-open schools. I suggest that we wait until January, when it will become clear in what direction this country is heading. Either things will be worse or better. They can’t stay the same.
The reason “He who must not be named” needed to take the screening test for dementia is that His father died of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD.) This disease runs in families to a very large extent (see below for explainer.)
The reason He brags about it is that he misunderstands or chooses to misinterpret the reason he had the test. I think that fundamentally, he misunderstands for two reasons: he wasn’t told the truth about why he was given the test, and/or he doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to make the distinction between dementia and personality disorder.
He doesn’t admit that dementia has nothing to do with his mental “problems”– his problem is what we call personality disorder, meaning there’s something wrong with his personality. What’s wrong? He has sociopathy and malignant narcissism, which are the problems causing the decline of our country.
Not to mention the deep roots of sadism, misogyny, xenophobia, and racism, which go along with his identification with the Republican Party and its nativist wing. I’ll set those things aside today and concentrate on dementia and personality disorder.
Let us not forget Ronald Reagan, who had AD while he was president and died of it. His entire staff knew that he was losing it, but they covered it up because he pushed the right buttons when it came to policy.
What is sociopathy? In basic terms, it’s the lack of a conscience, that thing inside you that makes you do right when other people aren’t looking or don’t stand in your way.
What is malignant narcissism? It is the concentration of your entire being on yourself and the complete absence of interest in anything other than yourself. Other people are only of concern to the extent that they validate you by praising you and doing what you want.
Every subject is of interest only to the extent that it reflects on your glory and your complete mastery. Nothing can be allowed to get in the way.
To a malignant narcissist, anyone who questions or criticizes is automatically an enemy to be destroyed. There is never any sense that one might be wrong or imperfect, or if there is, it must be immediately negated by praise from another or complete destruction of the critic.
To diagnose sociopathy and narcissism, there is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, but He wouldn’t take it– it’s way too long. Instead, one can make these diagnoses on the basis of spontaneous statements and behavior outside of the exam room, as His niece Mary Trump has done.
The “Goldwater Rule” would normally prevent a professional from discussing diagnoses, especially mental, outside of the exam room and without the patient’s consent. There is another doctrine, the “duty to warn” if there is a danger to “self and others.” In this case, anyone who realizes how bad things are has a duty to tell everyone because this patient can be very dangerous.
G-d help this country if this man is re-elected.
Explainer: the causes of dementia, specifically Alzheimer’s Disease.
First, the symptoms: The most common early symptom is difficulty in remembering recent events. As the disease advances, symptoms can include problems with language, disorientation (including easily getting lost), mood swings, loss of motivation, not managing self-care, and behavioural issues.
(references for symptoms: British Medical Journal, 2009 Feb 5;338:b158. doi: 10.1136/bmj.b158. World Health Organization fact sheet.)
Second, the causes: the chance of inheriting (heritability) of AD is estimated between 49% and 79%. This means that AD is caused by problems with your metabolism that you are born with. Your chances of getting AD are less, even if you have metabolic problems, if you exercise (both body and mind) and eat a diet low in animal fat.
Most AD is called “sporadic” because it has not been identified in the patient’s relatives. If He were found to have AD, we would say it was inherited because His father has it.
In sporadic cases as well as inherited ones, the risks are higher with high cholesterol, fatty diet, inactivity, obesity, and lack of mental exercise. Sound familiar? All of these risk factors fit He-who-must-not-be-named.
Luckily for Him, risks are probably less with cholesterol-lowering drugs, which He is taking– but the risk is NOT eliminated just by taking a pill.
A small percentage (roughly 0.1%) of AD is caused by a dominant mutation on regular chromosomes (not X-linked.) These are interesting cases because they are traced to mutations in genes for amyloid precursor proteins (more on these below) or “presenilins” (proteins that sit in the cell membrane and control how calcium crosses into the cells– important in nerves that sit in the hippocampus, a brain region that controls memories.)
In most sporadic cases, like the inherited forms, there is an apolipoprotein called apo-E4 present. It is involved in cases of atherosclerotic heart disease as well as AD. This fat-binding protein is part of fat metabolism in the body and brain, but it may cause heart disease in different ways than it causes brain disease and AD.
In the brain, apolipoprotein E helps to break down amyloid deposits called plaques. When the E4 type malfunctions, especially when body cholesterol levels are high, these deposits can damage nerve cells. Over a lifetime, amyloid plaques that build up eventually kill nerve cells. This has a lot to do with AD, but it’s not the whole story.
Those amyloid precursor proteins mentioned above also play a role. These proteins, when broken down into amyloid beta, accumulate in sheets called amyloid plaques. These are metabolized and removed in the brain by apo-E. Certain types of amyloid beta are harder to break down than others– leading to more and bigger plaques and, eventually, brain damage… thus, AD.
There is actually a known mutation in amyloid precursor protein that protects against AD by reducing breakdown into amyloid beta. The “amyloid precursor proteins” play many physiological roles that are still being evaluated (see the Wikipedia article on these proteins.)
That’s enough science for one post. It all comes from Wikipedia, which is almost 20 years old and getting bigger by the day. I just gave them $5.35 because I was ashamed that they only asked for $1.75 …
This study, from JAMANETWORK on July 17, looked at blood antibody tests done in several large cities in late March of this year. The astounding finding: between 6 and 24 times more patients had antibodies than had been counted by nasopharyngeal swab testing for SARS-COV-2:
In this cross-sectional study of 16 025 residual clinical specimens, estimates of the proportion of persons with detectable SARS-CoV-2 antibodies ranged from 1.0% in the San Francisco Bay area (collected April 23-27) to 6.9% of persons in New York City (collected March 23-April 1). Six to 24 times more infections were estimated per site with seroprevalence than with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) case report data.
JAMA Intern Med. Published online July 21, 2020. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2020.4130
This study has been widely reported recently. Its finding, that an average of ten to twelve times more patients with antibodies were present in each city than had been counted by antigen testing, has not been accounted for.
The conclusion is that many people either had asymptomatic infection or never went to be tested when they had symptoms. This has implications for preventive measures: everyone should be trying to prevent catching this disease all the time, even when they are not around people known to have been infected.
This means that you should be wearing a mask whenever you are around people you don’t know intimately. Even those you know well are potential vectors of disease: every non-household member and even those in your own household.
Previous studies have found ten to twenty percent of household contacts of people with proven COVID-19 become infected within ten days after the virus has been detected. What happens after ten days is unknown.
There have been very few reports of infections among children under ten, but this population has not been well-studied. If schools open next month, we should soon find out how many children have it and how well they pass it on. I would be extremely cautious about contacts with small children.
Children over ten years of age are likely to be just as infectious as adults. This age group includes a large proportion of school children– everyone in fifth grade and above. The vast majority of them will not get sick, even when they are infected, but they will be efficient vectors of disease to their parents, grandparents, schoolteachers, and staff.
The risks of open schools in the USA, with its environment of rapidly expanding infections, are great. For the last week or so, every day has brought over 50,000 new cases, and every day over a thousand people die. The actual number of new cases each day, with a broken testing system, is completely unknown.
Only in a state like Vermont would opening schools for in person attendance be even minimally acceptable.
SARS-COV-2 infects the heart and leads to lasting heart damage in many patients: JAMANETWORK.
This study from JAMA Cardiology posted on JAMANETWORK on July 27 looked at cardiac MRI scans of 100 people who had recovered from COVID-19. Their median age was 49; a third of them had been hospitalized, and all had been diagnosed between two and three months before they were examined. Many of these patients had been infected during a ski vacation, so they were not sedentary prior to their disease onset.
Only 5% of the patients had increased cardiac troponin T levels (a sign of heart damage often observed in myocardial infarction or “heart attack”) and none of them had active symptoms. This from the abstract:
Compared with healthy controls and risk factor–matched controls, patients recently recovered from COVID-19 had lower left ventricular ejection fraction, higher left ventricle volumes, higher left ventricle mass, and raised native T1 and T2. A total of 78 patients recently recovered from COVID-19 (78%) had abnormal CMR findings, including raised myocardial native T1 (n = 73), raised myocardial native T2 (n = 60), myocardial late gadolinium enhancement (n = 32), and pericardial enhancement (n = 22). … . Endomyocardial biopsy in patients with severe findings revealed active lymphocytic inflammation.
JAMA Cardiol. Published online July 27, 2020. doi:10.1001/jamacardio.2020.3557
In conclusion, the MRI findings showed: “cardiac involvement in 78 patients (78%) and ongoing myocardial inflammation in 60 patients (60%)…” This is astounding and indicates that most patients in this age group (roughly 50 year olds) had heart damage from COVID-19 that was not resolved 2-3 months after diagnosis.
The second heart study, of autopsies, was also from JAMANETWORK on July 27. 39 consecutive autopsies, with a median age of 85, were examined. The presence of SARS-COV-2 was documented in 24 patients, with elevated virus RNA in 16. From the results section:
SARS-CoV-2 could be documented in 24 of 39 patients (61.5%). Viral load above 1000 copies per μg RNA could be documented in 16 of 39 patients (41.0%). A cytokine response panel consisting of 6 proinflammatory genes was increased in those 16 patients compared with 15 patients without any SARS-CoV-2 in the heart. Comparison of 15 patients without cardiac infection with 16 patients with more than 1000 copies revealed no inflammatory cell infiltrates or differences in leukocyte numbers per high power field.
JAMA Cardiol. Published online July 27, 2020. doi:10.1001/jamacardio.2020.3551
This autopsy showed high levels of viral replication in heart tissue and definite signs that cells were “transformed” into virus factories, getting ready to die and release their viral loads. These results explain the frequent observations of acutely ill patients with elevated cardiac troponins and the 70% incidence of echocardiographic evidence of myocardial dysfunction (hearts not working right.)
One difference in the autopsy study was that they didn’t see an “inflammatory cell infiltrate” whereas the MRI study mentioned a finding of “active lymphocytic inflammation”– perhaps this is a late finding, and the older autopsied patients died before this could occur.
A clinical presentation compatible with myocarditis or heart inflammation (abnormal heart rhythm, palpitations, swelling in ankles, increased shortness of breath on lying down) as opposed to the usual cough, headache, chest pain, shortness of breath, weakness, and dizziness, is unusual. This suggests that infection of the heart is relatively silent compared to the obvious lung infection.
This does account for the devastating presentations of patients with severe COVID-19 if both the heart and lungs are affected.
This heart damage is shocking but not really surprising, given that a large proportion of patients with even mild disease have prolonged symptoms of fatigue or weakness and dizziness. Patients who have recovered from COVID-19 often complain of symptoms compatible with “mild heart failure” like exercise intolerance and shortness of breath.
Only time will tell how long these lingering symptoms will last and whether they will lead to a large population of chronic heart failure patients.
We learn something new about SARS-COV-2 almost every day.
A report of severe COVID-19 cases in four young men with mutations in their TLR7 genes came out a few days ago.
That is significant because TLR7 is part of the innate immune system. It recognizes the single-stranded RNA that SARS-COV-2 uses. When the virus injects itself into a cell, it is this RNA which hijacks the cell’s processes to reproduce itself.
TLR7 starts an immune cascade that results in the production of large amounts of type 1 interferons and other responses that have not yet been fully characterized (TLR proteins were only discovered recently and TLR7 specifically in 2004.)
You can find all the details in the Wikipedia articles about “toll-like receptors” and “TLR7”. There are also some scientific articles of interest, like this one: “Toll-like receptor signalling pathways” from 2014 in the journal “Frontiers in Medicine.”
The Wikipedia article on TLR7 mentions the study on the four young men with severe COVID-19, so they are up to date as well.
This article in today’s LA Times tells of the new movement in the investor community that is beginning to take account of the damage that climate change will cause. There’s an unmet need to develop new industry based on new technology that adapts to and counters climate change.
I don’t know how you’ll view that article (it looks pretty strange to me when I clicked on that link– but you can read it!) so take a look.
It seems to me that smart people with money are coming to realize that the climate is changing for the worse and their money is at risk. Big companies that sell oil could find the value of their holdings bottom out when people stop burning oil– if internal combustion engines are replaced by electric motors that use renewable energy, for example.
A good use for “all that oil” would be to synthesize plastics– not flimsy plastic bags but structural components, like replacements for concrete blocks, for example. Another use for oil is to synthesize chemicals like pharmaceuticals (and many other chemicals too numerous to name.)
Even ramping up synthetics production won’t use much of the oil left over if you stop burning it in engines. The demand could plummet and the value will follow, leaving oil companies bankrupt.
Companies that are exploring for new oil fields won’t be needed. Spending a lot of money to extract in harsh environments offshore or in the Arctic would make no sense if there’s no market for their product.
So that may be a good reason to disinvest.
Thoughts like these are going through the minds of the people with money who don’t want to lose it and have some smarts. That’s what this article seems to be saying between the lines.
PS this new wordpress editor is not ready for prime time. It’s just not stable. What happened to the total word count, to mention one glaring omission? Why does the size of the part I’ve marked out with my mouse keep changing whenever I try to change the type size or italicization? Does anybody at wordpress read my blog?
This article in JAMANET released July 24 caught my eye because it ties in with something we’ve seen in this pandemic: men are more severely affected than women, and young people are less affected.
The article is a “case series”, an examination of 4 patients, young men with an average age of 26, who got severe COVID-19 and were on ventilators for an average of ten days; one died. Here’s what they found:
Rapid clinical whole-exome sequencing of the patients and segregation in available family members identified loss-of-function variants of the X-chromosomal TLR7. In members of family 1, a maternally inherited 4-nucleotide deletion was identified (c.2129_2132del; p.[Gln710Argfs*18]); the affected members of family 2 carried a missense variant (c.2383G>T; p.[Val795Phe]).
What does this mean? These men had two different mutations in the gene for the TLR7 (toll-like receptor 7) protein, which controls an important part of the immune system– one that is rarely needed. They had been perfectly healthy for an average of 26 years, until they came down with COVID-19.
This could have some implications for resistance to SARS-COV-2 infections: first, TLR7 seems to be vital for an innate resistance pathway to the virus. There could be other mutations that weaken this gene, which is on the X chromosome– meaning that men are more likely to be affected.
Since men only have one X chromosome, any defective gene on that chromosome will be automatically expressed throughout their bodies. Women who have a defect on one X chromosome could be less affected because that one is only expressed in half their body’s (bodies’?) cells.
In women, one of the two X chromosomes is inactivated in each cell early in development, apparently randomly. This creates a “chimera” (an organism that has a mixture of cells and DNA of two different individuals, like tortoiseshell cats) although not the kind of chimera you usually think of. This is only significant if one X has different genes from the other, say with mutations, that cause problems.
This may partially explain why men are over-represented among victims of severe COVID-19.
The second significance is that TLR7 is important, so boosting this pathway may lead to some form of treatment. People with deficiencies could receive something that makes up for it…
Finally, the TLR7 pathway may weaken with age, partially explaining why older people get sicker.
Look for more developments in this area in the (hopefully near) future.
One more point: I first read about this in “Scienmag”– and then lost it. It was on my iPhone news feed, along with a lot of other content from the same people. I didn’t pay much attention to the source until I looked up the reference on Google and got this hit (along with the journal paper I wanted, described above):
“Why I unfollowed Scienmag” from July 26, 2017, and lo and behold, it’s a wordpress blog!
It says that they got tired of looking at its articles (and twitters) because they never linked to their original source– the scientific paper they were based on. The reason? Greed for eyeballs. Unless you go to a sponsored link they lose you, and scientific journals don’t sponsor/be sponsored by scienmag.
Finally, the very name is an attempt to feed off of “Science” magazine, an already trusted source, which posted this article way back in 2015:
“Who’s in your tribe?” which is about being very selective about who and what you follow…
There’s a word for the falsehoods/lies/confusion in “Plandemic”– what it is, it involves throwing up so many different things, under different headings, making implications, direct statements, negations, mentioning two things and implying there’s a connection between them, etc. that you just can’t keep up.
There was a lady (sorry, it was a guy) who used to do this, and her (his) name stuck to the technique. It’s called “the Gish Gallop.” From the RationalWiki, which I’ve never used before:
The Gish Gallop is the fallacious debate tactic of drowning your opponent in a flood of individually-weak arguments in order to prevent rebuttal of the whole argument collection without great effort. The Gish Gallop is a conveyor belt-fed version of the on the spot fallacy, as it’s unreasonable for anyone to have a well-composed answer immediately available to every argument present in the Gallop. The Gish Gallop is named after creationist Duane Gish, who often abused it.
Anyway, in all the excitement of finding the many, many fallacious arguments, specious statements, outright falsehoods, and so on in “Plandemic”, I forgot to mention that Judy Mikovits pushes hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) !
Now, right there, you know there’s a problem, because everybody who claims to have “the answer” to this pandemic pushes HCQ.
I won’t get into it with references and all right now, but there’s no accepted, good study of HCQ that shows any benefit to it. The latest popularized study had a major problem: many of the people who got HCQ also got a steroid, which we already know helps a lot in coronavirus (when it’s severe, anyway) and saves lives in ventilator cases.
So anyone who says it’s great right now isn’t listening to Tony Fauci and/or isn’t carefully reading the studies that are coming out/have recently come out.
So I call BS on Judy Mikovits (again!)
Here is a re-post of my reply to a comment made on my story about “Plandemic”– with embellishments thanks (not much) to the new WordPress editor (the original comment is in red; my additions for this formal post are mainly in blue; some things have been struck out; headings have been added as I thought appropriate):
The original comment:
What are they afraid of. The MSM lies on a day basis.Their lies about Trump, BLM, riots became so conflicting I did my own research. I just don’t watch the liars and the ones who have an agenda. if you believe you have the truth on your side you should welcome debate to disprove the one you disagree with. Its called honest debate. True journalism. I will debunk your article. She didn’t produce Plandemic. She never said it was a man made virus. You can look online for yourself ( I assume you already did this) UNC at Chapel Hill published a study in 2015 in collaboration with Wuhan Lab from China on a chimera virus made of SARS COV 2 and backbone of mice. It behaved the same way as covid and they could never treat It or vaccinate it. She is a brilliant research scientist who is upheld by many world renown scientists. One being a Nobel peace prize recipient. Unfortunately they are labeled conspiracy theorists also and are thrown off the proproganda machines of YouTube, MSM.I found her books plaque and plaque by corruption very credible and confirmed by many.
My reply, part one:
She didn’t produce Plandemic.
First, I did not say that Mikovits “produced” Plandemic— I said she was “the brains behind” it. The difference is that “producer” is a person who shows up in the credits as the producer. Mikovits is the person whose claims started the whole thing off. Constitute the substance of the video as she plays the interviewee. What I wrote:
Judy Mikovits, a former virology researcher and discredited conspiracy theorist who is the brains behind the crazy video “Plandemic.”
She says (in the video) that, their Washington Post‘s paraphrase: “wealthy people intentionally spread the virus to increase vaccination rates and that wearing face masks is harmful.” She also, years before this after being fired, “doubled down on debunked theories linking retroviruses that originated in mice to medical conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome and autism.”
She never said it was a man made virus.
Now, maybe she didn’t personally say that Fauci built the virus and transferred it to China, but there was this in the Media Matters post I linked to: “Bolling gave Mikovits and Klayman — who has peddled various conspiracy theories of his own in past decades — free rein to make baseless accusations against Fauci, such as that he “manufactured the coronaviruses and shipped them to Wuhan, China.”I don’t have a transcipt of the “Plandemic” video (oh, wait, yes I do have a transcript– on “Medium”) and look what she says about Ebola (which is arguably worse than SARS-COV-2): “In 1999, I was working in Fort Detrick in USAMRIID there. And my job was to teach Ebola how to infect human cells without killing them. Ebola couldn’t infect human cells until we took it in the laboratories and taught them.” She implied that the Army rebuilt Ebola to infect humans– which is false— unless you have another interpretation of that statement?
She never said it was a man made virus.
I apologize for saying that she said that particular falsehood– I couldn’t find it in the transcripts available to me. But someone else in the video said it, and she said something even worse– implying that she was somehow responsible for weaponizing Ebola.
It goes downhill. She claimed that facemasks are detrimental. That’s news to people who have been wearing them for many years without noticing any problems. One person even posted a video showing that her O2 levels didn’t go down when she wore a mask– anyone can replicate that test with a pulse oximeter (widely available without a prescription) if they’re worried about it. “Activating your own virus” makes no sense. The virus was already active when you exhaled it (it came that way out of your own cells), and it’s not going to be any more active when you re-inhale it.
Now, wealthy people are contributing to the spread of the virus but not intentionally and not the way you think– they’re making it worse by keeping all the money and letting everyone else go down the tubes. Worse, it’s not increasing vaccination rates and it’s not going to be mandatory when the coronavirus vaccine comes out (it oughta be but who knows?). Vaccination rates have gone down precipitously, the places that were giving them– private pediatrician’s offices– are going out of business and getting bankrupted, and kids are going to be more susceptible to measles (a far worse disease than coronavirus) and influenza if/when they go back to school.(Continued in part 2)
Here’s some more things from the transcript that I object to:
Debunk Plandemic’s first paragraph
Dr. Judy Mikovits has been called one of the most accomplished scientists of her generation. Her 1991 doctoral thesis revolutionized the treatment of HIV/AIDS.
Mikovits is NOT “one of the most accomplished scientists” unless you say “one of” means including those who have had their reputations trashed by publishing research that is retracted for “one of” the worst possible reasons: contaminated samples that you didn’t check for.
Now these things you say about her, that she is upheld by many renowned scientists including a Nobel laureate, may or may not be true (and are beside the point if you want to just debate based on facts, not based on “so and so says”), but I haven’t seen anybody publishing agreement with her who has any credentials to speak of.
By the way, her motive for publishing that was so she could do what Whittemore wanted: 1) say that a virus caused CFS/ME; 2) make a test for it that they could charge an arm and a leg for. That’s what they did: make a test that supposedly detected XMRV in blood samples, market it to families of affected patients, and charge big bucks (I forget how much but you can look it up if you’re such a good literature searcher. (sorry, that was rude.))
Here’s a link to Science magazine’s “detailed deconstruction” of the XMRV fiasco from 2011: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/333/6050/1694.full.pdf … read it and weep. It doesn’t sound like she’s “one of the most accomplished scientists” does it?
Here’s a reddit page from the debunker camp: https://www.reddit.com/r/CovIdiots/comments/gezery/plandemic_documentary_debunked/ … unfortunately, I could only read the first paragraph because my screen was “inexplicably” grayed out after fifteen seconds or so. I tried again. It looks as if they didn’t like her.
I was trying to find an abstract for her PhD thesis that they claimed “revolutionized the treatment of AIDS”… but I found something better: another blog on WordPress called “667-per-cm.net” which has a post really breaking down “Plandemic” sentence by sentence.
It says her PhD thesis “had no discernible impact” on the treatment of AIDS. https://667-per-cm.net/2020/05/10/dissection-of-the-dr-judy-mikovits-claims-in-aaas-science/
Retroviruses didn’t do it.
At the height of her career, Dr. Mikovits published a blockbuster article in the journal Science. The controversial article sent shock waves through the scientific community as it revealed that the common use of animal and human fetal tissues were unleashing devastating plagues of chronic diseases.
The “blockbuster article” she published in Science “at the height of her career”? Well, it didn’t show what they said it showed. It only claimed that there was a link between CFS/ME and a mouse retrovirus. The use of fetal and animal tissues is not “unleashing devastating plagues of chronic diseases.”
If it is, name them and describe how they work: which virus are you talking about and where does it come from? A lot of people have been looking for these viruses and so far, even XMRV didn’t pan out. It turns out that retroviruses are mostly harmless (our DNA is literally loaded with them) and even the one associated with prostate cancer doesn’t do much.
The known pathogenic human retroviruses are: HIV-1 (descended from a virus in chimpanzees), HIV-2 (from sooty mangabeys, another primate), HTLV (which has been in humans for probably 30,000 years, possibly from primates), and hepatitis B (which is at least 4,500 and more likely 33,000 years resident in humans.) None of these come from playing around with animal tissues in labs in the last 150 years.
There are many other known retroviruses, especially those that cause diseases in animals, but also many more that do nothing to any human or animal. This is an expanding field, and if you have any information about transfers of retroviruses to humans from animals due to use of animal tissue to produce vaccines or any other use (other than eating them, which is the worst) you must let me know– a lot of scientists would like to know.
Mikovits: It started really when I was 25 years old, and I was part of the team that isolated HIV from the saliva and blood of the patients from France where [virologist Luc] Montagnier had originally isolated the virus. … Fauci holds up the publication of the paper for several months while Robert Gallo writes his own paper and takes all the credit, and of course patents are involved. This delay of the confirmation, you know, literally led to spreading the virus around, you know, killing millions.
She was a lab technician in Francis Ruscetti’s lab at National Cancer Institute (NCI.) She tries to bring in the problems between Gallo and the French researchers, and there were some problems all right, but that’s unrelated to this story and she wasn’t involved in it except as a technician in another lab down the hall, so to speak. 667 says:
Her first published paper, co-authored with Ruscetti, was on HIV and published in May 1986, 2 years after Science published four landmark papers that linked HIV (then called HTLV-III by Gallo’s lab) to AIDS. Ruscetti’s first paper on HIV appeared in August 1985. There is no evidence that Fauci held up either paper or that this led to the death of millions.
Here’s more from 667-per-cm:
Mikovits: And they’ll kill millions, as they already have with their vaccines. There is no vaccine currently on the schedule for any RNA virus that works.
Vaccines have not killed millions; they have saved millions of lives. Many vaccines that work against RNA viruses are on the market, including for influenza, measles, mumps, rubella, rabies, yellow fever, and Ebola.
No. Vaccines have saved millions; the number they have killed is small, and even if it was a thousand, that’s a tiny percentage of the number they have saved.
She never said it was a man made virus.
Here’s the closest I’ve gotten (so far) to what I wrote in the blog post:
“Interviewer: Do you believe that this virus [SARS-CoV-2] was created in the laboratory?
Mikovits: I wouldn’t use the word created. But you can’t say naturally occurring if it was by way of the laboratory. So it’s very clear this virus was manipulated. “… (a few sentences, look it up if you’re curious; I’m eliding for brevity, not to hide anything)
“Interviewer: And do you have any ideas of where this occurred?
Mikovits: Oh yeah, I’m sure it occurred between the North Carolina laboratories, Fort Detrick, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, and the Wuhan laboratory.”
She didn’t blame Fauci for creating SARS-COV-2. But she blamed him for a lot of other things.
She didn’t blame Fauci in those two question/responses, but she did say the coronavirus was somehow manipulated in a US Army lab… and somewhere between there and the Wuhan lab… and you can fill in the blanks. Fauci comes in before, where he supposedly suppressed HIV research that “led to the deaths of millions”, and after, where he … oh, there’s so much in between, I’m getting distracted. This is where she says:
I get distracted.
“Wearing the mask literally activates your own virus.” (This is so absurd that I am at a loss to even explain it, much less debunk it.)
some new stuff in blue.
How do you “activate” a virus with a mask? What does “activating” mean for a virus? This is confusing to a guy who sees a whole virus inside a little particle of saliva floating in the air, hitting a mask, bouncing back, and going back down into my lungs, being “activated” by the mask? It was active when it came out, and it’s the same when it went back in, unless you got to it and broke up its lipid envelope with some detergent or… so I’m really confused about this ‘activation’ business.
It reminds me of another story I read yesterday about the history of seat belts. You probably don’t remember this unless you’re over fifty, at least, but before 1968, cars weren’t required to come with seatbelts. It wasn’t until 1995 that “click it or ticket” laws came into force everywhere except New Hampshire (their state motto: “Live free or die”.)
Conservatives, it seems, thought seatbelts were somehow an infringement on personal liberty, especially if they were required. But since a Supreme Court decision in 1905 that confirmed the constitutionality of required smallpox vaccinations, such laws have been deemed not infringing on personal liberties to an Unconstitutional degree.
Why not? Because “individual liberty is not absolute and is subject to the police power of the state.” According to the Court, “Real liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own [liberties], whether in respect of his person or his property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others.” (found in Wikipedia)
The law: that 1902 law was a local one in Massachusetts that gave the local board of health of individual cities and towns the right to enforce any vaccination they thought necessary– and the fine was $5 ($148 in today’s money.)
Which brings me to another digression: smallpox. That disease was very serious, according to CDC. It was very contagious though not quite as contagious as measles. It had a 30% death rate. Survivors were often left with scars all over, especially deep pits on their cheeks, like acne scars, only worse. Some people went blind. The last natural smallpox in the US was in 1949, and the last in the world was in 1977 in Africa. Smallpox virus, live, is still kept in ultra high-security labs in three or four places in the world.
It was wiped out shortly after I got into medical school, although I was vaccinated against it at my pre med school physical in 1974 (although it wasn’t mandatory, as far as I know, anymore by then.) How was it wiped out? By mandatory vaccinations, contact tracing, isolation, by the World Health Organization (WHO.) And, by G-d, that’s what we’re going to have to do with SARS-COV-2 to wipe it out.
I go off the deep end.
But wait, I left out the part where she says, ” They got at the beginning of 2019 an untested new form of influenza vaccine”, that Italians were given an influenza vaccine made with dog cells “and dogs have lots of coronaviruses.”
To which 667’s narrator says: “There is no evidence that links any influenza vaccine, or a dog coronavirus, to Italy’s COVID-19 epidemic.” And I says, “Untested? What do you mean, ‘untested’– how can the Italian scientists give an ‘untested’ vaccine to their population? It makes no sense. They had to do at least SOME tests. Does she mean it was a new vaccine, not given to general populations before? That happens every year. But I guarantee they tested it in a lot of clinical research subjects before they went and gave it to a bunch of random people off the street.”
It goes on and on like this. Practically everything she says that reflects poorly on Fauci, not to mention the scientific establishment in regards to her research, is either false or misleading. I get tired after reading the misrepresentation of her reputation as “one of the leading scientists of her generation”… I was there (in spirit) back in 2011 when she got fired and then was arrested for stealing notebooks from her former lab. I was reading about her when she fought back by getting the Whittemores in trouble for, I think it was illegal political contributions, or was it tax evasion? I forget but it was a good ploy.
She’s no fool, and she’s latched on to a good thing here: the antiscience community and their fight against vaccines. There’s a lot of money floating around if you talk the talk they’re looking for. What they want is a good propagandist, preferably a white woman (white men are so old-hat and black women are too scary; Asian women out of the question for being too closely associated with Wuhan) who talks well and has a PhD. I don’t know who the rich people are who are against vaccines (I don’t follow the subject as closely as I should) but they are out there and they have been working hard. They even got a white guy from England (Wakefield, it was) who tried to pin autism on vaccines but failed and lost his medical license for it– he’s still a good talker, and people who don’t know his history can be easily fooled.
I could go on, and maybe I should, but there’s “little fires everywhere” and every time I see another one, I feel obligated to use more of my precious anti-flame substances on it.
You got me really started here because you gave me something to fight against. Your problem, first, is that you are in possession of certain truths, but not the whole truth.
I have some advice for the commenter.
Your truths are: first, a lot of science, mainly medical science, is weak. Very weak when we talk about medical science. It’s hard to do medical science; it takes an entire career just to run a study because you have to follow your clinical subjects from birth to death, and you’re inevitably one of your own subjects. It’s like navel-gazing in that it takes up all of your time for the rest of your life.
Second, people in power want to stay in power, and they will use every means they have at hand and can get away with just to stay in power. They don’t care who gets hurt, as long as it’s not them.
Third, Journalism is being starved, especially since the pandemic cut off advertising revenue for local papers. The European model of state support for journalism doesn’t work if the government gets involved to the point of dictating what stories are investigated and published. See Hungary and Poland for examples of the disastrous effect of state support for journalism. (The only source of hope is what is happening in Russia: there, the state runs the TV, but people are turning away from TV for their news and to the internet. The state in Russia isn’t strong enough to control the internet like the state does in China, so people can get at least some news from volunteers on the net. Maybe it will bring democracy without censorship back in Russia. It’s hopeless in China because there never was a model where the state didn’t control everything.)
Finally, your failure of truth is this: you don’t know enough to be skeptical of claims made by people with ulterior motives and/or hidden agendas.(Continued in Part 3 below.)
My coda: you have misinterpreted an important study that I hadn’t seen before.
(from here on in, I have completely abandoned the strikethrough convention and just freely erased and retyped wherever I needed to change something from the raw reply.)
Here’s the final example I’m going to bring up, I promise: you said “You can look online for yourself ( I assume you already did this) UNC at Chapel Hill published a study in 2015 in collaboration with Wuhan Lab from China on a chimera virus made of SARS COV 2 and backbone of mice. It behaved the same way as covid and they could never treat It or vaccinate it.” I didn’t look up that particular article because I’ve been concentrating on SARS-COV-2, and this research that you referenced is about SARS (or SARS-COV-1, if you will)– there never was a SARS-COV-2 back in 2015.
What they said in their abstract was, “we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.” Not surprisingly, treatments for SARS didn’t work so well: “Evaluation of available SARS-based immune-therapeutic and prophylactic modalities revealed poor efficacy; both monoclonal antibody and vaccine approaches failed to neutralize and protect from infection with CoVs using the novel spike protein…” Because both treatments they tried were based on antibodies raised against the SARS spike protein, which is different from the SHC014 spike protein. The abstract finishes thusly: “On the basis of these findings, we synthetically re-derived an infectious full-length SHC014 recombinant virus and demonstrate robust viral replication both in vitro and in vivo. Our work suggests a potential risk of SARS-CoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat populations.”
So you missed a couple of important things about this research, in particular. First, it wasn’t with SARS-COV-2; second, it was entirely in mice.
Helen Lane and the chimera
Further research, summarized in Wikipedia, showed that they could infect the human HeLa cell line (this line is derived from a cervical cancer sample taken from Helen Lane, who died of the disease many years ago; the important thing about this line is that it was the first, and I think so far the only, truly immortal cell line that is recognizably human. It is not the same as human cells for many reasons, not least of which is that it is adapted to grow in the lab, not in the human body; it doesn’t have the same immune characteristics, for example, and it has no immune system at all, since it is one type of cell only, no T or B cells, no macrophages, no lymph nodes, etc. etc.) with the chimera.
Wikipedia goes on: “The SL-SHC014-MA15 version of the virus, primarily engineered to infect mice, has been shown to differ 7% (over 5,000 nucleotides) from SARS-CoV-2, the cause of a human pandemic in 2019–2020.[4] However, more studies must be completed to source credible data considering, in 2013, a study was published with accompanying data, which reports over 99% genomic sequence identities between SHC014-CoV and 3367-CoV and four random human coronaviruses.”
What this means is that, the chimera was engineered to infect mice; the fact that it can infect HeLa cells is a bonus but doesn’t mean it’s capable of infecting actual whole human beings– in fact, it’s very unlikely. Also, it is very different from SARS-COV-2, so different that they couldn’t have engineered it further… read reference four:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7054935/ which is titled: “No credible evidence supporting claims of the laboratory engineering of SARS-CoV-2”
Among other things, they treated it with a few things, not remdesivir, that didn’t work, no surprise because the things they tried were based on antibodies to the spike protein that they had taken off and replaced with the spike protein to a circulating bat virus called SHC014. What they were trying to do, which has subsequently been banned, was to create something that didn’t exist in nature as a way of showing that it could develop in nature– as a warning that we could be faced with something that we are actually faced with now.
What are they afraid of. The MSM lies on a day basis.Their lies about Trump, BLM, riots became so conflicting I did my own research.
You are being systematically misled by people with ulterior motives who want you to believe in things that aren’t true so that you won’t believe people who ARE telling you the truth. Their name is Trump, no wait, I mean, Trump is enabling them with his support because he has been faced with a crisis that with which he has no experience or training, nor any competent advisors that he will listen to, to overcome.
You see, Trump was going to cruise to re-election based on the stock market and the economy, which was doing real well before the pandemic hit. He paid no attention to warnings from scientific advisors or even from non-scientific people who listened to the scientific people (I’m thinking Navarro here, who actually did warn him, one of the few places where Navarro got something right.) If he had listened to those people and had activated the emergency plans which were already available, we wouldn’t be in this spot.
Trump is the one who is lying.
But he didn’t. So, as he has almost instinctively done based on his father’s training, he lied about it. Lying about it means he has to contradict a lot of people. He has already laid the groundwork for it by repeatedly saying things to discredit the main-stream media. Remember that, before the election in 2016, a reporter asked him why he was running down the media, and he told her that he was doing it so that when they reported negative things about him (which happened to be true) that people wouldn’t believe them (or at least doubt.) He has been doing that all along, with his “enemy of the people” talk, and not just for the media, but for serious people like scientists, fact-checkers, and the like. So now, he has an easier time getting his lies across.
But dead people don’t lie. They stink up the place so that no-one can ignore the fact that people are dying at a much higher rate than normal. Trump and his minions can’t lie away those facts, no matter how much they try to claim things such as the attribution of deaths to COVID-19 is exaggerated. It’s not. If anything, it’s under-reported. If you look at total death rates from this time last year, you’ll see that a lot more people are dying this year. The CDC even has a graph of total death rates by state going back to 2018 that shows increased deaths in December 2018 (from influenza epidemic) and greatly increased deaths in April 2020 (from COVID-19). It’s pretty obvious.
Trump has weaponized the lie.
What are they afraid of. The MSM lies on a day basis.Their lies about Trump, BLM, riots became so conflicting I did my own research.
My point is that your first statement, (I’m paraphrasing) “The media lies”, is something that Trump implanted in the “conservative” media ecosystem way back in 2015 in order to make it easier for him to be elected. He needed to cover up his failures: his four (or six?) bankruptcies; his two failed casinos (how does a casino lose money? It’s mathematically impossible for a casino to lose money– unless someone’s skimming the profits); his three marriages and his cheating on all three wives (very unpresidential, even if you don’t think it’s serious); the fact that his father gave him the equivalent of $400 million in today’s money tax-free, after putting him on a salary of $215,000 a year at age three, as opposed to his claim that he only got a million dollars from his dad and that was a loan that he had to pay back with interest; his 3,500 lawsuits, many of them against people that he stiffed for work done on his buildings; his claim that his big building was ten stories taller than it really was; and so on and on and on (and on.)
Trump took the adage that “politicians lie” (which they do, sometimes) and ran with it so that he figured he could just make things up and people would believe him if he slanted it the right way.
So what I’m saying is, you’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid and it’s made you sick.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 