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.
Articles in The New Yorker online by Masha Gessen and others on July 25 demonstrate with shocking clarity how the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was designed to become the strong arm of a police state. First, the very word “Homeland” evokes terror by describing our country as an endangered nation, beset by enemies from within and without.
This essay in The New York Times Magazine from April 10, 2016 explains that “The word points to a world of solidarity forged through blood ties, through ancient ritual and legend.” The “homeland” is not just our country– it is the white nationalist conception of a homogenous, race-limited nation that belongs to people who look like the Europeans who first colonized the Americas in the early 1500’s.
The DHS was designed to bring together all the agencies that defended the “homeland” from individuals who have bad intentions, infiltrators with designs to do harm. First, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was changed to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with “naturalization” (bringing in and adding members to our country) removed.
Masha Gessen’s article specifically compares the US today to the USSR of his birth and early life. The KGB is the closest parallel to DHS now. Born of fear, it attempts to engender fear in those it designates as “enemies”– in Portland, they are the demonstrators who attack the federal courthouse. When they are together, they are too strong to oppose. So the agents wait until the protestors are alone, dispersing to their cars.
Using unmarked, rented vehicles, dressed in anonymous “military” fatigues without identifying marks except for the word “Police”, they have kidnapped individual protestors and held them without charge. They are released when the agents realize that there is nothing that they can “pin” on them and they can’t be intimidated into snitching on their comrades.
The leaders of these agencies are “acting” political appointees who are unaccountable to anyone except the president. They are loyal and believe in what they are doing. They are, technically, illegal– because they have been serving too long under statute and are supposed to be confirmed by the Senate.
Yet the law that governs their appointments cannot be enforced. No-one will hold them to account. Masha Gessen concludes:
… we are watching the perfect and perhaps inevitable combination of a domestic-security superagency and a President who rejects all mechanisms of accountability, including the Senate confirmation process. What we are also seeing is a perfect storm of fear: the legacy of fear cultivated in the wake of 9/11, and the fear that Trump campaigned on in 2016 and continues to campaign on now.
The fear of that “other”– the nineteen hijackers who commandeered four airplanes and steered them into three buildings– permeated the atmosphere that led to President Bush creating the DHS. We must reject fear. We must stand up for the rights of individuals to band together and act fearlessly to stop the aggression that tries to destroy what we have built.
Just as the passengers of Flight 93 banded together to stop the four hijackers, we must band together and stop the hijacking of our country by fear that leads to police statism. I advocate for “defunding” DHS. We must reduce its funds and redirect most of them to a better purpose: building our country better. We must not give in to fear by letting the bullies take control.
Surely, the DHS could serve as a coordinating agency instead of a secret police force. There’s no reason to think that we need a superagency that takes over control of our most important functions and perverts them into a police state.
To take the example which was used when DHS was created, a ship that sailed into US waters could be stopped by the Coast Guard. But the people on board had to be dealt with by INS; the potentially dangerous cargo had to be inspected by the Agriculture Department or Customs and Border Protection. All DHS has to do is coordinate the activities of these agencies. There is no need to create an agency which replaces them all.
We don’t need a KGB that can be driven by politicians who want to make points with fearful voters by “othering” people who are simply trying to express dissent. That’s what we have right now in DHS, and [redacted] is using it to vilify dissenters. The US Marshal’s Service by itself can protect the federal courthouse from vandalism. The local police can control crowds without resorting to weaponry that is designed to maim or choke people.
We need to go in a different direction. We need to protect the rights of everyone in this country, natives and foreigners alike, to speak up and demand change. We can do it. Here are a few often-spoken words from leaders of the past: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” And (a paraphrase): “If we are willing to give up liberty for the sake of a little security, then we deserve neither.”
sars-cov-2 budding from apoptotic cells–EM by NIAID
Media Matters and CNN report (updated July 25) that local news stations owned by Sinclair Broadcasting intend to air a segment of “America This Week” hosted by Eric Bolling that will interview Judy Mikovits, a former virology researcher and discredited conspiracy theorist who is the brains behind the crazy video “Plandemic.”
Mikovits and her attorney, Larry Klayman, apparently plan to sue Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIAID (the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases) for… a RICO (Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) violation (seriously?)
One of her most insane claims is that Dr. Anthony Fauci is responsible for manufacturing SARS-COV-2 in the US and that he transported it to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
As noted elsewhere, there is no evidence for the claim that the virus was somehow man-made. All responsible scientists with any expertise in the field agree that the virus is a natural development through random mutation and “survival of the fittest”– which makes it even more dangerous than if it were man-made.
I won’t go into all (or even any) of the other false statements that she makes and the misrepresentations of her credentials. I have discussed some of them on previous posts on this blog. I will say that this is one of the most insane and dangerous conspiracy theories out there, almost as bad as those behind QAnon (which is saying a lot.)
Mikovits and lawyer Klayman make many allegations which have been debunked, for example, by FactCheck.org here on May 8. Another post debunking many (if not all) of the allegations was this one by Science on their sciencemag.org website.
The host of the program, Eric Bolling, claims to be skeptical and doesn’t actually endorse the theories of this Judy Mikovits. He does give her airtime to make her claims and doesn’t come right out and say “you’re crazy.” Just having her on the air and interviewing her will spread her conspiracy theories.
No-one who understands the way this craziness spreads would invite her to speak and insert doubt into the minds of naive and gullible viewers, without a full-on denunciation of everything she says.
To avoid making this insane point of view more popular, we should avoid it and its adherents like the plague. The people who run “America This Week” want to draw more viewers by airing controversial viewpoints, but this is too dangerous to even mention on the air.
The very business model of these companies (Sinclair Broadcasting and Facebook, to take two examples) relies on the airing of extreme, controversial statements to draw attention and views. Apparently people like to be shocked, and some of them believe the crazy.
We might as well give airtime to people who say “the world is flat” and “the noise from windmills causes cancer”– oh, wait, we already do that. Isn’t this something like shouting “Fire” in a crowded theatre when there is no fire? The First Amendment doesn’t cover that.
My big question: who is bankrolling this? Who is paying the expenses for Ms. Mikovits and her lawyer? Who convinced Sinclair Broadcasting to air this interview? If they are Americans and not Russians, then they are traitors to this country because they are only making things worse for all of us.
photo by arek socha courtesy of pixabay.com
I have some bad news. It’s not about a virus. This comes from ProPublica, a web site devoted to bad news, and was published July 23. It is titled, “Where Will Everyone Go?” and it was developed by The New York Times Magazine with support from the Pulitzer Center. Basically, what it says (in a very long essay) is that, as the climate gets hotter, people who are forced out of Central America by drought will try to come here to the United States. People who are forced out of Texas will try to go to Minnesota, and so on.
There are two ways to respond to this. The first is to give development aid to the affected countries (especially places like El Salvador) to promote their resilience. The second is to build walls to try to keep them from coming here.
If you try to stop them from coming, many of them will die. The ones who don’t will be so desperate that they will eventually overwhelm the walls and come here anyway. The situation will get worse with time.
That’s the gist of it. To make this argument, the writers have developed mathematical models that show how people will respond to the climate change (global warming) by urbanizing as the land they live on becomes unable to support them. Urbanized people will become more desperate and start to move north. They have been doing it on a small scale for years, and the scale will gradually get larger. The only uncertainty is how long it will take and how many of them will come.
I can’t make this up, it’s the stuff of horror movies, the kind that involve zombies and apocalypses. Day of the Dead comes to mind. But unlike a horror movie, it’s real. It just unfolds over a long, slow period of time, which makes each horror more visceral, more painful, and less cinematic.
The only logical way to respond to this threat is to get a government in place that can deal with it. First, we have to allow a certain number of people to come to this country. After all, if we don’t allow immigration, our population will shrink– this is literally true, there are fewer native Americans being born every year than are dying. We have to provide for immigration on a measured basis to make up for population loss and create opportunities for economic growth.
Second, we have to send development aid– not just money, but experts who can help set up greenhouse growing facilities and dig wells. Don’t just send money, it will simply add to the corruption.
Third, we have to work on reversing our carbon dioxide problem. Solar power, wind power, even nuclear power (although that’s just too expensive, really), electric cars, electric everything. Phase out the internal combustion engine and replace it with the electric engine. This is sure to give our economy a chance to really grow through innovative development.
We have to do all these things, because if we don’t, it will become just another horror movie– only it will be real and it will be here.
(You can look up ProPublica yourself and read the article on their website. I read it on my cellphone and I don’t have the time right now to build a link for you. Maybe tomorrow.)
(image courtesy of pixabay.com and Gerd Altmann)
This paragraph from a New York Times article stuck out at me:
Public health experts say detailed local data on where people are hospitalized — a real-time measure that does not depend on levels of testing — is crucial to understanding the epidemic, but federal officials have not made this data public. The New York Times gathered data for nearly 50 metropolitan areas, including 15 of the 20 largest cities in the country, from state and local health departments to provide the first detailed national look at where people are falling seriously ill.
According to the article, the data “show a far-reaching crisis” extending into Tulsa, OK, Las Vegas, NV, and Nashville, TN. Places like the Rio Grande Valley and San Antonio, both in Texas, have seen big jumps in cases in the last week. But hospitalizations in Galveston, Corpus Christi, and Galveston TX have also increased dramatically even though cases are not rising so much. St. Petersburg and Tampa, Florida hospital cases are also going up fast, whereas other cities in Florida like Orlando and Jacksonville are not so bad. There are details in the article for fifty large cities across the US.
Information like this could be very useful for the general public, especially those who are not convinced that there is a problem out there. Why is this not being made public? This is just another example of the fragmented federal response which has no overall coordination and no sense of urgency. It’s not all due to a desire for secrecy. Some of it is incompetence, some is lack of direction from the top, and some of it is political. All of it is making us as a country look like fools to the rest of the civilized world.
Contrast this with the crackdown on “anarchy” that is going on in Portland and soon coming to other large cities. The president, desperate to find an issue that will build political support for his re-election has seized upon “law and order” (meaning suppression of demonstrations) as a wedge issue. There is no more polarizing position than one that claims that everyone who protests against police brutality is a traitor.
The president is a racist, authoritarian, sociopathic, narcissistic man who has no concern for the poor and downtrodden people of this country and is only interested in concentrating power in his own hands. The book by his niece reveals that he was brought up this way by a racist, authoritarian, sociopathic, mean old man who destroyed the president’s older brother because he wouldn’t go along.
I can only hope that enough people will be aware of his true nature to get out and vote against him and provoke a landslide defeat in November. Anything less will tempt him to fight dirty in an attempt to overturn the majority and retain power. We are going to be in very bad trouble if there is not an overwhelming majority vote against him.
George Floyd photo by CNN
According to a paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) dated “June 2020” (assembled after June 20, the end date of the collected data) the nationwide street protests/demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd did not result in an increase in COVID-19 cases. The results of this study directly contradict the assertions of right-wing media, political figures, and a certain president whose name will not be used.
According to the abstract:
Event-study analyses provide strong evidence that net stay-at-home behavior increased following protest onset, consistent with the hypothesis that nonprotesters’ behavior was substantially affected by urban protests.
…we find no evidence that urban protests reignited COVID-19 case growth during the more than three weeks following protest onset.
Whether the protests themselves caused an increase in SARS-COV-2 transmission but they were counterbalanced by “stay at home” behavior, or there simply was no increase, is not clear. The paper describes a complex analysis of behavior informed by cell-phone data and county-by-county daily COVID case counts.
The net result, however, was that cases did not increase in the worst-affected state, Minnesota, but cases did increase in the least-affected state, Florida. This is shown by the daily case-count graphs for Minnesota in the New York Times, in which the date of the murder, May 25, was followed by a sustained decrease in case counts which did not pick up again until June 17-19 and did not exceed the case count on May 24 until July 11.
In Florida, new cases started to increase on June 3 and continued without let-up until a peak on July 12. Since that date, there has been a relative plateau in new cases. Texas, which had few protests, showed an increase in daily cases in late May, which accelerated in June. In Tennessee, which saw early protests in Memphis, new case daily rates did not increase until late June.
In any case, as shown by the figures in the paper, protests occurred in every state with a large population, so statewide data are insensitive (except perhaps for Minnesota, which has almost all of its population concentrated in a few cities.)
The NBER study used anonymous cell-phone tracking data to examine people’s movements and ” we demonstrate that cities which had protests saw an increase in social distancing behavior for the overall population relative to cities that did not…”
They evaluated the rate of new cases identified by testing in 315 cities larger than 100,000 population, of which 284 had protests and 31 did not. The first large cities that experienced demonstrations were Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Memphis, Tennessee. Cities that did not have protests included Aurora, Colorado, Hialeah, Florida, and Irving, Texas.
Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder was arrested on Tuesday morning, hours ahead of a planned announcement of a $60 million bribe investigation by federal prosecutors. Householder is seen here in March 2019. Associated Press
The NPR (National Public Radio) website published an article July 21 about this man, who was arrested along with four others by the FBI this morning “in connection with a $60 million bribery scheme allegedly involving state officials and associates.”
The scheme involved Generation Now, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit secretly controlled by Mr. Householder, which obtained nearly $2 million from a company described in the indictment as “Company A”, which in fact is “Energy Harbor” (previously FirstEnergy Solutions) to support his and the others’ candidacies for State House seats.
The money flowed between March 2017 and March 2020. Some of it was also spent on personal expenses by the alleged offenders. An opponent of the bill estimated the actual cost to have been $15 million.
After obtaining the Speakership, Mr. Householder pushed through a law that provided “bailout” money to the company, which operated nuclear power plants, and gutted subsidies to renewable energy projects:
Last year’s nuclear bailout law tacked on a charge to residents’ power bills, sending $150 million a year to the nuclear power plants. They are owned by the company Energy Harbor, which was previously known as FirstEnergy Solutions. The law also included an additional subsidy for two coal plants.
By the way, Mr. Householder is a Republican. Company A is expected to be indicted in the near future.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. Lobbyists for numerous companies operate hand-in-glove with government regulators. For example, Polaris, a company which makes off-road vehicles, engaged in a scheme with lobbyists that involved federal officeholders (elected by the people) who made personal appeals to regulators who eventually provided them with exemptions from tariffs for parts such as aluminum wheels (which could have been made in the US) imported from China.
The scheme by Polaris is apparently perfectly legal, but involves people like Democratic Minnesota Rep. Collin Peterson, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, who personally contacted the office of the US Trade Representative to obtain special treatment for Polaris. Others, like Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, who opposes tariffs, wrote numerous letters on behalf of other companies seeking relief.
The reason for this activity? Campaign donations from the companies involved. A quid pro quo cannot directly be established, so laws do not appear to have been broken. This is the process of lobbying for one’s constituents that is a large part of Congress-people’s work. People who make large monetary contributions to political campaigns receive special favors, while those who cannot afford to pay get little or no attention.
This is a perversion of the process of representation which is so common that it is impossible to control by investigating individual cases. There is a cost to this form of government: the people elected to high office, whether state or federal, do nothing for people who cannot afford to contribute to their campaigns. As a result, the voters receive nothing but good wishes from the people they elect, and the rich people and companies who bankroll their campaigns get special treatment, including relief from taxes and “burdensome” regulations.
This is why poor people and minorities still suffer at the hands of those who are supposed to take care of them. One possible answer? Public financing of election campaigns, free airtime for people who qualify in low-level contests like primaries, and prohibiting contacts between regulators and Congress-people. We will soon discover what laws, regulations, and taxes really do when they are applied equally across the board to all citizens and companies. Perhaps equal treatment would induce Congress to pass laws that equally affect everyone.
photo by William Iven via pixabay.com
There does seem to be a reduction in the increase lately, although that sounds stupid. An increase is an increase, but if there’s an exponential increase rather than a linear increase, that’s not as bad. Look at this chart from “Our world in data” that shows the biweekly trend of daily positive cases. Back in June, between June 13 and June 17, the daily case count remained the same for several days (this was after a drop in the daily case count in May.) Then, until July 6, the daily case count increased and peaked on that day at 80% more than before. After that, the increase gradually dropped to today, where the daily new case count is “only” up by 42%.
This makes it appear that the increase is decreasing. Not good news, but not as bad as two weeks ago.
Here are the state numbers for the worst-affected states:
Now look at the new case rate in Arizona. After a peak on June 30 of 4,797 new cases, the number has dropped and yesterday was only 1,676 new cases. The 7 day average has shown this drop since peaking on July 6. So that’s a thing. The new deaths peaked on July 18 at 138 and has been less the last couple of days. You’d expect the deaths to peak a couple of weeks after the peak in new cases, so that looks reasonable.
In Florida, new cases peaked at 15,300 on July 12. The 7 day average peaked on July 16. There has been a slight downward movement since then. New deaths peaked at 156 on July 16. New deaths have dropped, but the 7 day average is still high– until July 23, we won’t be past the peak on July 16 so don’t expect much improvement yet.
In California, new cases peaked at 10,387 on July 14, only slightly higher than the rate on July 7: 9,897. The daily death rate has plateaued since July 11.
In Texas, the new cases peaked at 15,038 on July 16 and dropped every day, to 7,636 on July 20 (about half that of four days earlier.) New deaths peaked at 154 on July 16 but were high again yesterday at 127.
Louisiana is getting worse, with two big numbers of new cases in the last two days (I’ll leave off the details– too depressing.) I think you can expect Louisiana’s deaths to be much higher in about two weeks– as high as they were after the peak of new cases on April 2 (which was not as high as the peaks now.) (Mardi Gras was February 25 this year– how that relates to the peak of cases in Louisiana is problematic, since that was over a month later…)
Mississippi is also getting worse; they didn’t have a peak in April.
Georgia peaked at 4,904 on July 10 and again on July 18 at 4,074. The last couple of days have been much less: 2,453 on July 19 and 1,994 yesterday. It’s impossible to say if they’re getting better or not after only two days.
(All the above state level numbers are from the New York Times interactive web pages.)
I’ll leave the other states to you to explore if you’re interested. The bottom line: most of these states, except California, have only required masks for the last week or so; Georgia still doesn’t require masks except for Atlanta (and that’s being fought in court.)
What does this mean? Will there be a reprieve this summer?
What will lead to a reduction in new cases? I don’t know, but I’m guessing whatever it is, it started two weeks ago and is beginning to take effect in most places where the virus has been spreading out of control since the middle of June. Maybe it’s the mask mandate, maybe it’s fear of the virus finally taking hold in the South. We will know in a couple of weeks.
Then when school starts, if it starts with all the kids congregating in schoolhouses the way it normally does, the virus will spread again rapidly. That’s how it normally works every year: as soon as school starts, the colds and flu start spreading. Kids are highly susceptible to coronaviruses and influenza viruses and every other infectious organism (they don’t get very sick, but they are highly contagious.)
When kids get it, they take it home and everyone in the household gets it– not right away, but soon enough. So I’m saying we should not let kids go back to school this year. I know it’s bad for their education, but we should put our money into improving online school with better web access and better laptops for the poor kids. If we make them go back to school, this whole nightmare will just get worse.
EM of coronavirus by NIAID
JAMA on July 10 reported a study done at St. George’s University Hospital, London, that found an increase in stillbirths during the pandemic (none of the mothers with stillbirths had symptoms of COVID-19):
We compared pregnancy outcomes at St George’s University Hospital, London in 2 epochs: from October 1, 2019, to January 31, 2020 (preceding the first reported UK cases of COVID-19), and from February 1, 2020, to June 14, 2020.
…
There were 1681 births (1631 singleton, 22 twin, and 2 triplet pregnancies) in the prepandemic period and 1718 births (1666 singleton and 26 twin pregnancies) in the pandemic period. There were fewer nulliparous women in the pandemic period than in the prepandemic period (45.6% vs 52.2%; P < .001) and fewer women with hypertension (3.7% vs 5.7%; P = .005) in the pandemic period than the prepandemic period, and there were no significant differences in other maternal characteristics (Table 1).
The incidence of stillbirth was significantly higher during the pandemic period (n = 16 [9.31 per 1000 births]; none associated with COVID-19) than during the prepandemic period (n = 4 [2.38 per 1000 births]) (difference, 6.93 per 1000 births [95% CI, 1.83-12.0]; P = .01)
The study reported a total of 19 mothers with COVID-19 in the delivery ward during the pandemic.
This might, at least partially, account for the decrease in preterm deliveries that I posted about yesterday– although the number of stillbirths was small (16 during the pandemic) in comparison to the potential number of premature babies. As I noted yesterday, there is as yet no obvious explanation for the observed decrease in prematurity. However, this just adds another layer of uncertainty because there is no obvious explanation for an increase in stillbirths either.
There were limitations in the study, most notably that the mothers with stillbirths were not specifically evaluated for presence of SARS-COV-2 RNA by nasopharyngeal swabs; the study noted that as many as 90% of mothers in another study were asymptomatic despite having positive tests. They did note that there was no pathological evidence of viral infection in the placentas or fetal tissue, although it doesn’t appear that virus RNA was specifically looked for.
The authors speculated that mothers with warning signs, such as cessation of fetal movement, may have hesitated to come to hospital emergently because of the pandemic and fear of being infected. Reduced attendance at prenatal clinics or reduced use of ultrasounds might also have played a role. None of these things was specifically evaluated.
In addition, the number of premature deliveries at this hospital was not evaluated. This information could have been valuable.
We are left with more questions than before. Why more stillbirths at this one hospital? Was it chance or the pandemic? Why fewer premature births at other hospitals?
Coronavirus studies by Engin Akyurt via pixabay.com
The New York Times (NYT) published an article on July 10 about a study published in MedRxiv on July 8 that showed that a much higher proportion of pregnant women who identified as Black or Hispanic were SARS-COV-2 antibody positive than of women who identified as White. The study was performed on de-identified blood samples taken from 1,293 pregnant women who presented for delivery at two Philadelphia hospitals between April 4 and June 3. The hospitals together deliver about 50% of all women in the Philadelphia area.
The results show that there were significant race/ethnicity differences in seroprevalence rates with higher rates in Black/non-Hispanic (9.7%) and Hispanic/Latino (10.4%) women and lower rates in White/non-Hispanic (2.0%) and Asian (0.9%) women. The number of Asian women in the sample was probably too small to allow conclusions about the significance of their low positivity rates. Overall, 80/1293 (6.2%) of samples were positive for IgG or IgM antibody (or both.)
In addition, nasopharyngeal swab specimens were obtained from 1,109 (85.8%) women who were also tested for antibodies; however, these were obtained at various times before delivery so they could not be directly compared with the antibody tests. “We found that 46 of 72 seropositive women (at the time of delivery) who were NP tested had a SARS-CoV-2 positive PCR result (at some point during their pregnancies), whereas only 18 of 1,037 seronegative women (at the time of delivery) who were NP tested had a SARS-CoV-2 positive PCR result” (at some point.) Thus, the 18 positive PCR tests were in some sense discordant with the antibody tests.
What was striking, however, was the difference in seropositivity between Black or Hispanic women and the White women– about five times as many of the Black or Hispanic women had positive antibody tests. It seems that there is much greater exposure to the virus among these ethnic groups.
The data should be compared to information in another NYT article published July 5 based on a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The CDC data revealed by the lawsuit provides “detailed characteristics of 640,000 infections detected in nearly 1,000 U.S. counties.” That data says that three times as many Black or Hispanic people per 10,000 population were infected with the virus as White people and that twice as many died. “For people who are Asian, the disparities were generally not as large, though they were 1.3 times as likely as their white neighbors to become infected.”
In Missouri, for example, “40 percent of those infected are Black or Latino even though those groups make up just 16 percent of the state’s population.” Native Americans were far more likely to be infected as well. Another example: “In Kent County, which includes Grand Rapids and its suburbs, Black and Latino residents account for 63 percent of infections, though they make up just 20 percent of the county’s population.”
The test results revealed by the CDC are incomplete; of 1.5 million positive antigen tests, only 640,000 had information as to the subject’s ethnicity.
For age-specific test results, the disparities in death rates were even greater:
Latino people between the ages of 40 and 59 have been infected at five times the rate of white people in the same age group, the new C.D.C. data shows. The differences are even more stark when it comes to deaths: Of Latino people who died, more than a quarter were younger than 60. Among white people who died, only 6 percent were that young.
Whether people in these ethnic groups were infected because they were among “essential” workers who were exposed on the job or because they were in households that had greater exposure (or both) is unknown. Either way, Black or Hispanic people are being infected at about three to five times the rate of White people. They are also more likely to get sick or die because so many of them have “co-morbid” medical conditions. Does this have anything to do with the widespread denial of the impact of the virus among Republicans?
It is no wonder that public anger over the murder of George Floyd has become so prevalent in the last two months. Black people are being struck down by the virus and are being brutalized by the police at the same time. They have a right to be angry.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 