"I Don't Know Of A Bigger Story In The World" Right Now Than Ivermectin

 After the origin of Covid-19, this may be the second pillar of the covid narrative to fall: Does Ivermectin work?

The proof until recently was anecdotal but it is now on the verge of becoming statistical. And if it does, what exactly were the vaccine for?

The third pillar will be the usefulness of the lockdowns. 

 

Authored by Nick Corbishley via NakedCapitalism.com,

So why are journalists not covering it?

Michael Capuzzo, a New York Times best-selling author , has just published an article titled “The Drug That Cracked Covid”. The 15-page article chronicles the gargantuan struggle being waged by frontline doctors on all continents to get ivermectin approved as a Covid-19 treatment, as well as the tireless efforts by reporters, media outlets and social media companies to thwart them.

Because of ivermectin, Capuzzo says, there are “hundreds of thousands, actually millions, of people around the world, from Uttar Pradesh in India to Peru to Brazil, who are living and not dying.” Yet media outlets have done all they can to “debunk” the notion that ivermectin may serve as an effective, easily accessible and affordable treatment for Covid-19. They have parroted the arguments laid out by health regulators around the world that there just isn’t enough evidence to justify its use.

For his part, Capuzzo, as a reporter, “saw with [his] own eyes the other side [of the story]” that has gone unreported, of the many patients in the US whose lives have been saved by ivermectin and of five of the doctors that have led the battle to save lives around the world, Paul Marik, Umberto Meduri, José Iglesias, Pierre Kory and Joe Varon. These are all highly decorated doctors. Through their leadership of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care (FLCCC) Alliance, they have already enhanced our treatment of Covid-19 by discovering and promoting the use of Corticoid steroids against the virus. But their calls for ivermectin to also be used have met with a wall of resistance from healthcare regulators and a wall of silence from media outlets.

“I really wish the world could see both sides,” Capuzzo laments.

But unfortunately most reporters are not interested in telling the other side of the story. Even if they were, their publishers would probably refuse to publish it.

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

It’s also the reason why I decided to dedicate today’s post to Capuzzo’s article. Put simply, as many people as possible –particularly journalists — need to read his story.

As Capuzzo himself says, “I don’t know of a bigger story in the world.”

Total News Blackout

On December 8 2020, FLCCC member Dr Pierre Kory gave nine minutes of impassioned testimony to the US Homeland Security Committee Meeting on the potent anti-viral, anti-inflammatory benefits of ivermectin.

A total of 9 million people (myself included) saw the video on YouTube before it was taken down by YouTube’s owner, Google. As Capuzzo exhaustively lays out, both traditional and social media have gone to extraordinary lengths to keep people in the dark about ivermectin. So effective has this been that even in some of the countries that have benefited most from its use (such as Mexico and Argentina) many people are completely unaware of its existence. And this is no surprise given how little information is actually seeping out into the public arena.

A news blackout by the world’s leading media came down on Ivermectin like an iron curtain. Reporters who trumpeted the COVID-19 terror in India and Brazil didn’t report that Ivermectin was crushing the P-1 variant in the Brazilian rain forest and killing COVID-19 and all variants in India. That Ivermectin was saving tens of thousands of lives in South America wasn’t news, but mocking the continent’s peasants for taking horse paste was. Journalists denied the world knowledge of the most effective life-saving therapies in the pandemic, Kory said, especially among the elderly, people of color, and the poor, while wringing their hands at the tragedy of their disparate rates of death.

Three days after Kory’s testimony, an Associated Press “fact-check reporter” interviewed Kory “for twenty minutes in which I recounted all of the existing trials evidence (over fifteen randomized and multiple observational trials) all showing dramatic benefits of Ivermectin,” he said. Then she wrote: “AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. There’s no evidence Ivermectin has been proven a safe or effective treatment against COVID-19.” Like many critics, she didn’t explore the Ivermectin data or evidence in any detail, but merely dismissed its “insufficient evidence,” quoting instead the lack of a recommendation by the NIH or WHO. To describe the real evidence in any detail would put the AP and public health agencies in the difficult position of explaining how the lives of thousands of poor people in developing countries don’t count in these matters.

Not just in media but in social media, Ivermectin has inspired a strange new form of Western and pharmaceutical imperialism. On January 12, 2021, the Brazilian Ministry of Health tweeted to its 1.2 million followers not to wait with COVID-19 until it’s too late but “go to a Health Unit and request early treatment,” only to have Twitter take down the official public health pronouncement of the sovereign fifth largest nation in the world for “spreading misleading and potentially harmful information.” (Early treatment is code for Ivermectin.) On January 31, the Slovak Ministry of Health announced its decision on Facebook to allow use of Ivermectin, causing Facebook to take down that post and removed the entire page it was on, the Ivermectin for MDs Team, with 10,200 members from more than 100 countries.

In Argentina, Professor and doctor Hector Carvallo, whose prophylactic studies are renowned by other researchers, says all his scientific documentation for Ivermectin is quickly scrubbed from the Internet. “I am afraid,” he wrote to Marik and his colleagues, “we have affected the most sensitive organ on humans: the wallet…” As Kory’s testimony was climbing toward nine million views, YouTube, owned by Google, erased his official Senate testimony, saying it endangered the community. Kory’s biggest voice was silenced.

“The Most Powerful Entity on Earth”

Malcom X once called the media “the most powerful entity on the earth.” They have, he said, “the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of masses”. Today, that power is now infused with the power of the world’s biggest tech and social media companies. Together social and traditional media have the power to make a medicine that has saved possibly millions of lives during the current pandemic disappear from the conversation. When it is covered, it’s almost always in a negative light. Some media organizations, including the NY Times, have even prefaced mention of the word “ivermectin” — a medicine that has done so much good over its 40-year lifespan that its creators were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2015 — with the word “controversial.”

Undeterred, many front-line doctors have tried to persuade their respective health regulators of the unparalleled efficacy and safety of ivermectin as a covid treatment. They include Dr. Tess Lawrie, a prominent independent medical researcher who, as Capuzzo reports, evaluates the safety and efficacy of drugs for the WHO and the National Health Service to set international clinical practice guidelines:

“[She] read all twenty-seven of the Ivermectin studies Kory cited. The resulting evidence is consistent and unequivocal,” she announced, and sent a rapid meta-analysis, an epidemiolocal statistical multi-study review considered the highest form of medical evidence, to the director of the NHS, members of parliament, and a video to Prime Minister Boris Johnson with “the good news… that we now have solid evidence of an effective treatment for COVID-19…” and Ivermectin should immediately “be adopted globally and systematically for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19.”

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

“Most of all you can trust me because I am also a medical doctor, first and foremost,” Lawrie told the prime minster, “with a moral duty to help people, to do no harm, and to save lives. Please may we start saving lives now.” She heard nothing back.

Ivermectin’s benefits were also corroborated by Dr. Andrew Hill, a renowned University of Liverpool pharmacologist and independent medical researcher, and the senior World Health Organization/UNITAID investigator of potential treatments for COVID-19. Hill’s team of twenty-three researchers in twenty-three countries had reported that, after nine months of looking for a COVID-19 treatment and finding nothing but failures like Remdesivir— “we kissed a lot of frogs”— Ivermectin was the only thing that worked against COVID-19, and its safety and efficacy were astonishing—“blindingly positive,” Hill said, and “transformative.” Ivermectin, the WHO researcher concluded, reduced COVID-19 mortality by 81 percent.

Why All the Foot Dragging?

Yet most health regulators and governments continue to drag their feet. More evidence is needed, they say. All the while, doctors in most countries around the world have no early outpatient medicines to draw upon in their struggle against the worst pandemic in century. Drawing on his own experience, Capuzzo describes the absence of treatments for COVID-19 as a global crisis: 

When my daughter Grace, a vice president at a New York advertising agency, came down with COVID-19 recently, she was quarantined in a “COVID hotel” in Times Square with homeless people and quarantining travelers. The locks on her room door were removed. Nurses prowled the halls to keep her in her room and wake her up every night to check her vitals—not to treat her, because there is no approved treatment for COVID-19; only, if her oxygen plummeted, to move her to the hospital, where there is only a single eective approved treatment for COVID-19, steroids that may keep the lungs from failing. 

There are three possible explanations for health regulators’ refusal to allow the use of a highly promising, well-tolerated off-label medicine such as ivermectin:

• As a generic, ivermectin is cheap and widely available, which means there would be a lot less money to be made by Big Pharma if it became the go-to early-stage treatment against covid.

• Other pharmaceutical companies are developing their own novel treatments for Covid-19 which would have to compete directly with ivermectin. They include ivermectin’s original manufacturer, Merck, which has an antiviral compound, molnupiravir, in Phase 3 clinical trials for COVID-19. That might explain the company’s recent statement claiming that there is “no scientific basis whatsoever for a potential therapeutic effect of ivermectin against COVID-19. 

• If approved as a covid-19 treatment, ivermectin could even threaten the emergency use authorisation granted to covid-19 vaccines. One of the basic conditions for the emergency use authorisation granted to the vaccines currently being used against covid is that there are no alternative treatments available for the disease. As such, if ivermectin or some other promising medicine such as fluvoxamine were approved as an effective early treatment for Covid-19, the vaccines could be stripped of authorisation.

This may explain why affordable, readily available and minimally toxic drugs are not repurposed for use against Covid despite the growing mountains of evidence supporting their efficacy. 

Ivermectin has already been approved as a covid-19 treatment in more than 20 countries. They include Mexico where the mayor of Mexico City, Claudia Scheinbaum, recently said that the medicine had reduced hospitalisations by as much as 76%. As of last week, 135,000 of the city’s residents had been treated with the medicine. The government of India — the world’s second most populous country and one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of medicines — has also recommended the use of ivermectin as an early outpatient treatment against covid-19, in direct contravention of WHO’s own advice.

Dr Vikas P. Sukhatme, the dean of Emory School of Medicine, recently wrote in a column for the Times of India that deploying drugs such as ivermectin and fluvoxamine in India is likely to “rapidly reduce the number of COVID-19 patients, reduce the number requiring hospitalization, supplemental oxygen and intensive care and improve outcomes in hospitalized patients.” 

Four weeks after the government included ivermectin and budesonide among its early treatment guidelines, the country has recorded its lowest case count in 40 days.

In many of India’s regions the case numbers are plunging in almost vertical fashion. In the capital Delhi, as in Mexico City, hospitalisations have plummeted. In the space of 10 days ICU occupancy fell from 99% to 70%. Deaths are also falling. The test positivity ratio slumped from 35% to 5% in just one month.

One of the outliers of this trend is the state of Tamil Nadu, where cases are still rising steeply. This may have something to do with the fact that the state’s newly elected governor, MK Stalin, decided to exclude ivermectin from the region’s treatment protocol in favor of Remdesivir. The result? Soaring cases. Late last week, Stalin reversed course once again and readopted ivermectin. 

For the moment deaths in India remain extremely high. And there are concerns that the numbers are being under-reported. Yet they may also begin to fall in the coming days. In all of the countries that have used ivermectin widely, fatalities are the last thing to fall, after case numbers and hospitalizations. Of course, there’s no way of definitively proving that these rapid falloffs are due to the use of ivermectin. Correlation, even as consistent as this, is not causation. Other factors such as strict lockdowns and travel restrictions no doubt also play a part.

But a clear pattern across nations and territories has formed that strongly supports ivermectin’s purported efficacy. And that efficacy has been amply demonstrated in three meta-analyses.

India’s decision to adopt ivermectin, including as a prophylaxis in some states, is already a potential game-changer. As I wrote three weeks ago, if case numbers, hospitalizations and fatalities fall in India as precipitously as they have in other countries that have adopted ivermectin, it could even become a watershed moment. But for that to happen, the news must reach enough eyes and ears. And for that to happen, reporters must, as Capuzzo says, begin to do their job and report both sides of this vital story.

Covid-19: Inside India's "Hunger Games"

 The example of India shows that Covid-19 more than a mere virus is a catalyst of what's wrong with modern or sometimes not-so-modern societies. Read on...

Authored by Jayant Bhandari via Acting-Man.com,

Scavengers Out in Full Force

I have just returned from a visit to my family in India. It was hard to escape. To get to the US from India, I needed a COVID test. The Indian government has seriously restricted who can provide COVID testing, treatment, and vaccination. Private doctors and hospitals that are not approved face brutal legal consequences if they provide COVID treatment.

India’s experience with the COVID pandemic was particularly unpleasant… [PT]

Emergency powers were centralized early last year in the hands of the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. He gave himself direct control over the bureaucrats of the states, making local governments largely impotent and dependent on him.

In their supreme wisdom, government bureaucrats concluded that because the prefix “COVID-” exists in treatment, vaccination, and testing, they must all be performed at the same place. For my test, I sat in a petri dish of COVID, with those coming out positive sitting right next to me. Desperate, vulnerable old people, who merely wanted to get their jabs, sat among us. Those who were sick for reasons other than COVID were among us too, for the government has required everyone who is sick to be tested for COVID first .

A microcosm of how everything is done in India, the tests were given haphazardly, with samples getting mixed up, nurses spending most of their time fighting among themselves, and — lacking a lineup system — people crowded together, pushing and breathing into the mouths of one another.

A few days earlier, the government had given notice of the rate of tests and further restricted where they could be performed. A bribe-taking system would have been my preference to bypass government restrictions, but no such system has evolved yet. Nevertheless, corruption has exploded, and self-centeredness, apathy, a dog-eat-dog environment has come to the surface. You see this everywhere; the scavengers are out in full force.

I went to a private COVID hospital. The situation in government hospitals is far worse, beyond my capacity to cope with it.

The World’s Worst Lockdown

Yet the story of COVID in India is hardly about COVID as such, which is nothing more than a trigger. More than twice as many people died of fairly easily treatable tuberculosis in 2020 than of COVID. Instead, this is a story of foolish rulers, completely hollowed out institutions, and a pathetically irrational and tribal society.

The lockdown that India declared in March 2020 was the world’s most atrocious. It was a nationwide curfew, with no-one allowed to leave home, not even to shop for groceries. The police destroyed grocery shops that dared to open. It took the government a couple of days to realize that people needed to buy food — the original decision had been a shot from the hip, completely bereft of any effort to think things through. During the four-month curfew, the police ruthlessly beat up people, particularly those who looked poor. Trains, flights, and all transportation had come to a complete, grinding halt.

Many people relished to no end that they were allowed to restrict and abuse others, doing so by masquerading as do-gooders with the support of the law, inflicting pain on those who did not resist and taking the appalling results in stride. They then experienced elevated, sadistic, perhaps even sexual pleasure. As always, the exploiters and the exploited were two sides of the same coin, though forever interchangeable — the reason why India never finds an escape from its drudgery.

When people were allowed to go out grocery shopping, the government required shops to open for limited hours each day, as if the virus were more dangerous at other hours. This led to overcrowding — so the opening hours were restricted further! Soon shops were instructed to open only for a limited number of days each week. After a year of this policy, the government is still unsure why crowding has continued to worsen.

The country has actually been barricaded, making it look like a war zone, with many roads and highways entirely closed off. The remaining streets have only one side open for two-way traffic, leading to numerous head-on collisions. The barricades are not fluorescent, a technology that Indian safety experts have yet to appreciate.

Train services are minimal, and only a very limited number of security lineups is open at airports. The government believes this promotes social distancing. Wherever one is permitted to go, one is facing neck-to-neck over-crowding.

With the city barricaded, it took me forever to get to the airport. To protect politicians (from COVID and increasingly from irate citizens), large areas where they live have been completely closed off. Sick people cannot find a way to get to the hospital, although only those keen on dying should actually go there.

Shortages Everywhere

No hospital that is allowed to dispense COVID treatment has the beds, oxygen, or medicine available. Not one. A single dose of critical medicine, otherwise sold for $10, is selling for as much as $1,000. I even heard a price of $7,000. Oxygen cylinders, usually priced at around $10, today go for as much as $1,000, if you can find them. It is worth remembering that more than 80% of Indians live on less than $2 a day.

While people are desperately looking for oxygen cylinders, those savvy enough have stockpiled them and medicines at home. What would have been a slight shortage has snowballed into a complete disappearance from the market. So bad is the situation that people in top political positions are pleading for them on social media. One person I know had to get the governor of his state to let his relative be given priority in cremation.

Getting an ambulance (which is no more than a broken taxi with a metallic stretcher) for a short ride, can cost many hundreds of dollars, in some cases running into thousands. Those who haven’t lived in India may find it hard to imagine, but this is not unique to these COVID days. India has never had a functioning ambulance system. That is why hundreds of thousands lacking help to get to the hospital die in the streets every year.

But this is not a compassionate country. I was brought up in India, but I learned the meaning of “compassion” only when I left the country. During the past year, the police have brutalized many people in India, but not one Indian court has taken a suo motu interest in charging the police. Justice is merely some words scribbled on parchment.

Early this year, when Indian COVID cases were falling rapidly, there were talks about how the use of turmeric in Indian food, cow urine and dung in “treatment,” the “goodness of Indian genes,” and India’s “ancient, spiritual civilization” were behind the success. India was advertising itself as the savior of the world.

In fact – if facts mean anything –  the Indian diet is among the worst in the world, full of carbohydrates, sugar and oil, and poor in nutrients and proteins. It is the kind of diet that makes one susceptible to chronic diseases such as diabetes and hypertension. And a year of lockdown has seriously reduced the health of everyone. Those who could afford to sit at home gained weight, lost general immunity, and did not exercise. Poor people became much poorer, victims of massive unemployment and relatively high inflation. The beggars on the street remind one of the impoverished 1980s.

Hospitals Are For Dying

India has 0.5 hospital beds per 1,000 people, a fraction of what is required — only 5% of hospital beds are in ICUs. Even before COVID hit, Indian hospitals were overflowing with patients. They occupied every single bed, often with more than one person in every bed, and the space in corridors and between the gate and the buildings. I have never seen this any other way.

Doctors and nurses are very ill-trained, lack competence, and are arrogant and heavy-handed. It is natural selection; the better ones tend to leave for the West. I have never been to a hospital — not even a private one — where work flowed correctly. My earliest memory of visiting a hospital is of two nurses giggling when one had given a wrong injection to a patient.

Many years ago, someone I was helping out ended up in a government hospital. The doctor wanted to amputate his hand, for it was the easiest thing to do. We had to smuggle him out by bribing the policeman to a private hospital where his bones, with some work, could be set in place. Also, many years back, my granddad died, struggling for oxygen. He had gone to a private hospital, in his scooter, for a minor checkup. They ended up doing a few operations on him. While he struggled, the two doctors argued about how the pressure difference provided oxygen and drained urine.

The Indian medical system is one big orgy of doctors exchanging commissions for cross-referring to each other and getting laboratory tests done, making it the most corrupt sector of Indian society, worse than the government itself. Organ harvesting is not unknown. You go to an Indian hospital to die — and absolutely every Indian has stories to tell about this.

Lacking a functioning legal system, killer hospitals and doctors face no consequences. Today, given the new rules, COVID patients are removed from the sight of their families, ensuring that apathetic medical workers can do whatever they want.

Oxygen is very easy and cheap to produce, but even that has been in shortage forever. The sight of patients sitting outside hospitals with their oxygen cylinders is common and always has been. One must have government approvals to run, operate, and supply oxygen. Indian hospitals — even the big ones — do not have oxygen-producing plants.

Merchants of Death and Grotesquely Stupid Rulers

India, of course, doesn’t have a clue what crisis management is about, which is the primary reason behind today’s crisis. COVID is merely the straw that broke the camel’s back. Lacking a crisis management unit or reflective thought, “managers” miss the fact that a slight shortage of critically needed items can create massive deficits as people start hoarding these essentials. Indians who are sane are ensuring that they keep their sick relatives outside the hospital system and are setting up improvised ICUs at home.

A few years ago there was a lot of talk about India providing medical tourism. Then it disappeared from the map, for those who did go to India for treatment realized that they were taking huge risks with their lives. Indian government hospitals exist only in name; Indian private hospitals are cesspits of corruption, incompetence, and utter apathy. I know no Indian who does not have a close relative who died because of the mess Indian hospitals are in. But they still cost a fortune to use, bankrupting millions of Indians every year. The COVID crisis is minting money for the merchants of death, leaving millions in desperate financial situations.

Let us do some simple math. India has approximately 700,000 hospital beds, very few of which are in ICUs, and a large number of which are reserved for politically connected people. For beds that are available, oxygen supply and doctor availability have always been a problem. With 400,000 new COVID cases happening every day, the system had to fall apart, regardless of the fact that only a tiny proportion of the population required hospitalization.

The problem isn’t the number of cases, which is negligible as a proportion of the population, but the shiver of fear that the nonexistent medical infrastructure has sent down the spine of society. The country is drowning in fear and mourning, and this crisis can hardly be blamed on COVID. It must be blamed on the grotesque — almost incomprehensible — stupidity of its rulers. The government has no plans. Worse, it is doing the exact opposite of what should be done.

Modi centralized everything in precisely the opposite way from what he should have done. After a year, he still has no clue that limiting opening hours of grocery stores does not decrease crowding but increases it. Similarly, he doesn’t know that it makes no sense to send those looking for vaccination and testing to places where COVID patients are. Yet, over a month ago, he declared a win over COVID. He organized massive gatherings for election canvassing — just the thing to celebrate vanquishing an epidemic, right?

Merely a Symptom

About 28,000 Indians die every day. These days, 3,000 people extra people die of COVID, a slight increase in overall deaths. The blame doesn’t go as much to COVID for filling up India’s crematoria as it goes to a lack of excess capacity. People have always waited in line for cremation. While the international media shows how packed crematoria are, this is nothing unusual, except that a 10% increase in cremations has clogged the system.

But COVID is real, and there are cases everywhere. Entire families are affected. Many people my family knows have died. The death rate is guaranteed to increase as time goes by. India has stopped treating people for anything other than COVID. People are dying of kidney failures, heart attacks, lack of trauma care, etc. And COVID patients cannot get oxygen.

Those who get into the hospitals are getting overdosed for COVID by the clueless medical staff. Those who should get expensive medicine get something else instead, while what they paid for gets smuggled out by nurses — when the patients are removed from the sight of their relatives, there is no one to check on what is happening.

Those lucky enough to find a bed in a private hospital are spending at American rates. But this isn’t just the problem in COVID days. This has always been a problem.

India’s prime minister,  Narendra “Teflon” Modi – despite his numerous blunders, he has yet to suffer a backlash from voters. In fact, his popularity appears to be perfectly intact so far, which is quite astonishing. [PT]

Over the last year, Modi spent a lot of time making noise, patting himself on his back, and destroying the economy, sending at least 75 million new people into desperate poverty. But he and his yes-men failed to organize such simple things as oxygen, new beds, and logistics for essential medicine. It would have made a lot more sense to quadruple beds in Indian hospitals rather than destroy at least 10% of the economy, as Modi did in 2020. He should have set up a system to make the medical profession accountable. Had he done these things, the recent COVID spike would not have been much of an event.

After years of a love affair with Modi, the international media have left him as rats leave a sinking ship. All fingers are now pointing at him, as if India, the biggest democracy in the world, would change course if only he were to be removed. Alas, all this pain and suffering is nothing unusual for India. The West is simply overreacting to the visible aspects of COVID.

The Indian government is merely a symptom of India’s tribal culture. Indians vote along the lines of their caste, their religion, a politician’s offer of freebies, etc. They lack moral and social consciousness, thus it is hard to believe that they would elect a government in possession of same — Modi is just a symptom.

India does not have a COVID crisis. India has a government crisis. More fundamentally, it has a crisis of irrationality. There is never any planning and forward-thinking, neither at the individual nor at the institutional level. The nation is always at the precipice of disaster. Over the past 73 years of so-called independence, Indians have hollowed out the institutions the British left behind. These fragile institutions are now collapsing.

India’s population is ten times larger than it was before the British arrived. With all benefits bestowed on India by the British slowly getting neutralized, it does not take great mathematical skills to realize that eventually the Indian population will, without continual help from the West, revert to its former equilibrium, 10% of what it is today. COVID or whatever else will merely be the catalyst.

THIS WAS A TEST, AND WE FAILED

 Mostly, on this blog, I try to stick to data. At least that was the purpose originally. Data doesn't lie so if people are exposed to "data", they eventually may see the light or so I thought. Then the Covid crisis arrived early last year, and almost everything I believed in was suddenly proven false. Within the right context, data can say whatever you want it to say. Repeat a lie long enough and suddenly the word "truth" loses its meaning. Isn't everything relative? This is of course one of the basic tenets of propaganda. We have made much progress since the early writings of Edward Bernays and later application of the theory by Josef Goebbels. The last 20 years especially have seen a quantum leap with the advent of the Internet opening the floodgates of social data and emergence of powerful statistical tools to give insight and control to the likes of Google and Facebook. You didn't think their trillion dollar plus valuation was related to the large to truly insignificant advertising market, right? Now, of course, we know. The incantations succeeded and a true devil popped out of the now discarded "do no evil" box. I do not share all the ideas bellow, but these are nuances. We are barreling down the wrong road at a truly frightening speed and nobody seems to care or even notice as if 300 years of wisdom and enlightenment were all for nothing, forgotten as if they never existed. Was the cynical George Carlin right all along, then?

 This was a test...

“The Truth, when you finally chase it down, is almost always far worse than your darkest visions and fears.” ~ Hunter S. Thompson

I think Hunter S. Thompson is being proven right by revelations becoming obvious daily. I’m a natural skeptic, so I rarely believe anything I’m told without verifying facts, analyzing data and understanding the motivation of those making declarations and assertions. For most of my life I thought I generally understood how the world worked.

Doubts about my understanding began to creep into my mind between 2000 and 2008, as I watched my government cover-up the truth about 9-11, use it to institute an Orwellian surveillance state through the Patriot Act, invade Iraq based upon a false narrative of WMD and links to 9/11, and watching those controlling the Federal Reserve create the dot.com bubble and follow it up with a housing bubble – all done to benefit Wall Street banks, billionaires, connected politicians, and Deep State apparatchiks.

The national debt was $5.6 trillion in 2000, the budget was as close to balanced as it had been in decades, the defense budget ($300 billion) was at decades low as there was no major conflicts in the world, and term limits were still a legitimately discussed election issue. If someone was told on January 1, 2000 that in 2021 the national debt was going to hit $30 trillion, with annual deficits of $3 to $4 trillion, a defense budget of $750 billion as war looms on the near-term horizon, and all semblance of governing through legislation to benefit the citizenry had dissipated, they would have laughed, accused you of being a conspiracy nutjob, and said the nation would be a hyperinflationary banana republic with 50% interest rates if any of that came to pass. The truth is always far worse than your darkest visions and fears.

What has occurred in the last year has befuddled me, as the level of treachery, deception, disinformation, and false narratives has reached excessive elevations, indicating a sense of urgency and desperation by those wielding power over society. It has been depressing and frustrating to witness the level of obedient compliance by the majority of frightened sheep in this country, with complete subservience to authoritarian dictates of their overlords.

The extremeness of the response to a bad annual flu virus leads me to believe the truth behind what has happened and is happening is far worse than most can conceive or comprehend. The level of pure malevolence and disregard for humanity exhibited by the despots wielding power over our political, economic, medical, and social structures has pushed the country to the edge of civil chaos, calculated political pandemonium, global conflict, and unavoidable debt manufactured financial collapse.

Sometimes I find myself wondering whether I’m the crazy one for not believing a piece of cloth will protect me from catching a flu virus with a 99.8% survival rate, or not voluntarily allowing a Big Pharma corporation, with no liability for the consequences of its experimental gene therapy, to treat me as their animal test subject to increase my survival chances to 99.85%, or questioning why I need to wear a face diaper because I can catch the virus while walking to my restaurant table but not once I sit down, or why six foot distancing is safe but 5 foot distancing is dangerous. Why are the predictions of doom by “experts”, which never come true, overlooked and disregarded by the corporate fake news media?

Why did Dementia Joe call the governors of Texas, Florida, and Mississippi Neanderthals six weeks ago for ending mask mandates and this week he ended the mask mandate for the entire country? I thought he followed the science. But it appears raging inflation, a terrible jobs report due to his policy of paying people not to work, a hemorrhaging border crisis, gas pipelines proving to be somewhat important, the Middle East exploding, and his woke executive order agenda being ridiculed on a daily basis, convinced Joe’s handlers to distract from his 100 days of disaster by reversing the ridiculous Covid restrictions and sending the Covid cult into convulsions of fury.

Their pathetic lives of mask virtue signaling, twitter haranguing, and vaccination shaming are about to be invalidated, as a return to normalcy will relegate the Biden brigade to their previous status of inconsequential drones on Facebook posting pictures of their nine cats.

What little faith I had in humanity after this past year of cowardly compliant obedience to totalitarian governmental dictates and proclamations, was fully extinguished this weekend while making an early morning stop at Wal-Mart. The Biden administration’s sudden reversal on masks, after fear mongering and preaching doom for months, immediately led to Trader Joe’s, Costco and Wal-Mart announcing no more masks required to enter their stores, with an unenforceable caveat about being vaccinated. After a year of mask mandates, I pondered whether I should enter the Wal-Mart like this fine gentleman.

But I just sauntered in like everyone else, expecting to see dozens of other unmasked Americans breathing fresh air, thankful to be free of those disgusting face diapers which have done ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to reduce the spread of this over-hyped annual flu with a scary name and largest marketing campaign in history. Instead, I witnessed dozens of masked sheep still following orders even after those orders had been rescinded by their self-appointed science shepherds.

An overwhelming feeling of disgust swept over me, as I only witnessed two other sensible human beings out of the hundred or so roaming the aisles. My disappointment with the vast majority of citizens in this country has now reached all-time lows. I am chalking it up to a new version of PTSD, in the era of covid hysteria, PMSD (Post-Mask Stress Disorder). A large portion of the populace have developed a mental illness, purposely provoked by their own lying government and authoritarian politicians. This entire scam has been a lesson in abuse, fear propaganda, lies, false appeals to science, and censorship of the truth.

There are now millions of sheep who do not know how to readjust to reality and lose the masks, which convinced them they were brave, noble and “in this together”. Trying to use facts and reason to convince these people masks never worked and their chances of dying from this flu were no higher than the annual flu is a useless endeavor. The Covid Cult cannot let go of their mask virtue signaling because they will lose that feeling of superiority and arrogance towards the unmasked masses.

The loss of this covid cudgel is being rapidly substituted with these Big Pharma multi-billion-dollar profit generating experimental gene therapies, disguised as vaccines. They desperately want to condescendingly force the jab upon everyone and force vaccine passports upon the masses as their new virtue signaling badge of compliant obedience. After spending tens of billions of your tax dollars on a vaccine marketing campaign, employing famous athletes, Hollywood influencers, medical “experts”, and non-stop TV commercials, only 37% of the American population is fully vaccinated. It has been a gigantic FAIL.

Everyone who wanted to be vaccinated, is vaccinated. They have resorted to cash payments, million-dollar lottery prizes, free donuts, free burgers & fries, and a multitude of other bribes to get the jab. Now they are falling back on the totalitarian methods used during the lockdown. Get the jab or wear a mask forever threatens Dementia Joe. Colluding with corporations and schools to force employees and children to get the jab. Threatening to impose vaccine passports to travel, enter sports and concert arenas, and to generally cancel the non-vaccinated. It is failing.

With only 37% of the public sheeplike enough to get the jab, any “woke” business that continues to invoke mask mandates or require proof of vaccination will find their profits dissipate faster than Trump’s lead in swing states at 3:00 am. If you were to believe the fake news media and government drones, you would believe the majority have been vaccinated and the “anti-vaxxers” were a crazy conspiracy theorist minority. As with most things being fed to you daily, this is a big fat lie. The rational, resistant (not hesitant), critical thinking MAJORITY are done with this scamdemic. Biden and his handlers are being forced to throw in the towel, for now.

The propaganda press polluters of the truth are still selling a completely false narrative about the vaccines being the reason cases, hospitalizations and deaths have plummeted since January 1 of this year. The excess mortality rate in the country is now back below the averages from 2015 – 2019. The crash in death rates occurred while less than 15% of the population had been vaccinated. The bloviating about needing 70% of the population vaccinated to stop the pandemic is complete and utter bullshit.

Masks never protected anyone from infection and the vaccine is unnecessary to resume normal life. This flu follows the same infection pattern as the annual flu (which mysteriously disappeared from the globe in 2020-21) and has run its course. Vaccine rates per state are showing ZERO impact on the downward trend of cases and deaths. They are falling and have been falling with or without the vaccine.

The India variant and “surge” fear mongering has fallen on deaf ears as their death rate per 100,000 is only a fraction of the U.S. and U.K. These propaganda tactics have worn out their welcome. Very few are believing the feckless mainstream media miscreants. Their ratings are lower than whale shit.

No matter how hard they try to reinstall the fear, enough people are tired of this farce to derail further attempts at lockdowns, mask mandates and vaccine passport requirements. Every day with declining cases, vaccination rates, and deaths makes it harder for the Covidian cult medical tyrants to pretend there is a national emergency. Their sense of desperation is palpable. This sense of desperation is seen in their attempt to force this experimental therapy on children and their complete lack of concern or acknowledgement of the hundreds of thousands of adverse reactions and thousands of deaths attributed to their gene therapy experiments on human guinea pigs.

These medical experts and doctors seem to have forgotten the first rule of their Hippocratic Oath – DO NO HARM. More likely, they sold their souls to Big Pharma for big bucks. The science says 1 in 300,000 of children under 18 will die from Covid but based on actual data 3 in 300,000 will die from the vaccine. They are pushing these vaccines on children for profits, not for health reasons. Always follow the money.

I believe Solzhenitsyn’s famous quote about “how we burned in the camps later” regarding what would have happened if they resisted and killed their oppressors when they had the chance will be restated years from now when the long-term consequences of these experimental gene concoctions are felt by the children forced to participate in this evil experiment. If we had only resisted.

This is communism in a new repackaged marketing campaign, where Bernays’ propaganda techniques have been perfected through technological mind manipulation by Big Government conspiring with Big Tech and Big Business. The tripe of political correctness, wokeism, anti-racism, cancel culture, and fear of the annual flu has been taken to a level never seen before. Theodore Dalrymple captures the essence of this new communism.

“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.” ― Theodore Dalrymple

Dalrymple is correct in pointing out how these modern communists use humiliation and shaming to ram their false narratives and authoritarian agendas down our throats through the power of fake news media and the Silicon Valley social media censorship tyrants. They blatantly flog provably false narratives through their media mouthpieces, disguised as impartial journalists, medical experts, university professors, and anyone the masses might look up to. Those who knowingly assent to these obvious lies have become just as evil as those telling the lies.

The lies have been piled high in the last year as the annual flu was weaponized to cover-up the disintegration of our financial system and as a means to fraudulently conduct a coup against a president; the deaths of two black law breakers were utilized to usher in the colossal lie of systematic racism bought into by woke corporations and college campuses across the world; a clearly stolen election was declared honest by those controlling the narrative; lockdowns and masks were pronounced to be the only way to slow the spread even though all data refutes those assertions; an armed insurrection (with no arms) lie on January 6 has been used to wall off Washington DC and sell the big lie of white supremacy being a threat to the republic; the Federal Reserve creating trillions out of thin air and pumping it into the pockets of billionaires and Wall Street fat cats has not created raging inflation and an all-time high in wealth inequality according to the talking heads on CNBC and the rest of the fake news media complex; emergency use authorized vaccines were the only solution to a flu that doesn’t kill 99.8% of those infected, even though ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine have proven to be effective and safe in combating covid; and lastly these vaccines have been declared safe even though they are killing and maiming thousands and no one knows the long term effects on those who have chosen to be their lab rats.

We have become a society of emasculated liars, purposely deceiving ourselves because we are too cowardly to admit we have been had by those ruling over us with an iron fist. As a society we have decided resistance is futile and if we go along to get along, we will still be allowed to subsist, play with our techno-gadgets, and be sent stimmy checks, welfare payments, and be granted the ability to pay for stuff we cannot afford on credit. The willfully ignorant have chosen to become debt slaves and obey their masters, rather than resist tyranny and demand their independence from this dystopian nightmare we are currently living under.

We continue to elect corrupt politicians and willingly follow the orders of traitors, crooks, and despots, so we have become collaborators, rather than casualties. As a society we do not want the responsibility of freedom and have gladly exchanged our liberties for the illusory chimera of security. Those controlling the levers of power have taken advantage of this cowardly trait to abscond with the nation’s wealth and keep the masses in constant fear of new bogeymen (terrorists, white supremacists, flu viruses, and now aliens).

As I observe what is happening over the last week or so, I fall back on the words of the patron saint of sanity in a world gone mad.

Everything our government tells us every day is a lie. Biden’s sudden reversal on masks, supposedly based on science, is a lie. The story about the DarkSide Russian hackers shutting down the Colonial pipeline is a lie. It is just as likely it was done by the CIA. If a pipeline can be hacked then voting machines can be hacked, but they continue to lie about that. Anyone with critical thinking skills knows this virus came from a Wuhan bio-lab, which was funded by Fauci to develop these gain of function viruses. Fauci lied to Congress and has lied to the American public since February 2020 about masks, lockdowns, risks, and vaccines. They are lying about vaccine effectiveness and risks.

Every time Jerome Powell or one of his Fed cronies opens their mouth, they are lying. Anyone with any financial acumen knows stock, bond, crypto, housing, and virtually all markets are experiencing the biggest bubble in world history, but the financial “experts” tell you to buy before it is too late. They are lying because they are paid handsomely to do so. Lies about the selfie insurrection in the Capitol continue unabated. Biden and his handlers have been lying about their man made purposeful border crisis. Lies about Dominion voting machines and rigged election results are perpetrated by the paid hacks on CNN, MSNBC and even Fox, every day. The lies will continue until morale improves, or the ruling class can abscond with another trillion or so.

This pandemic is over. It has served its purpose to those in power. Biden is now playing the part of President Snow in Hunger Games by giving the plebs a little hope. Dangling the return to relative normalcy in exchange for being jabbed with their DNA altering cocktail is the latest narrative being peddled to the sheep. Many have or will make that trade. But, as of now, the majority are not falling for it. My hope is the spark is not contained and that good men and women do not stand idly by while evil continues to flourish. It is time for decent human beings to stand up and be counted and not allow a darkness to settle upon this nation, ushered in by the likes of Gates, Schwab, Soros, Obama, Biden, Bloomberg and their ilk.

The ruling class would prefer a Hunger Games plot where they continue to pit groups against each other: blacks versus whites, masked versus un-masked, vaxxed versus unvaxxed, liberal versus conservative, men versus women, modestly rich versus poor, taxed versus untaxed, and neighbor against neighbor. They want us fighting each other so we do not realize they are the true enemy.

This entire plandemic was a test to see how far they could push us before we pushed back. As a nation, we failed the test miserably. They are loosening the reins for now, but they now know they can force the masses to cower and beg for safety and security. They are supremely confident they can easily manipulate the masses, based once again on using the Big Lie method.

Recent developments make me suspicious something big is happening and the narrative is going to take a dramatic turn. First the take down of Cuomo by a previously fawning press and now the man who bankrolled the pandemic, creepy Bill Gates, is in the process of being taken down over his relationship with the king of pedophilia – Jeffrey Epstein (who didn’t kill himself). Fauci is about to be thrown to the wolves over his funding of the Wuhan bio-weapon lab. All the pandemic superstars are being cast aside.

Why now? Crucial infrastructure is supposedly being hacked. War is breaking out in the Middle East. Saber rattling between China – Taiwan and Russia – Ukraine is provoking worries of global conflict. Raging commodity inflation, labor shortages, and financial markets giving signs of an imminent crash could be the trigger for the next leg down in this shitshow portion of the Fourth Turning. Something big is coming and I expect it will happen before the 2022 elections. If you thought the last year was bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet. But don’t worry, the planet will be fine.

“We’re so self-important. So arrogant. Everybody’s going to save something now. Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save the snails. And the supreme arrogance? Save the planet! Are these people kidding? Save the planet? We don’t even know how to take care of ourselves; we haven’t learned how to care for one another. We’re gonna save the fuckin’ planet? . . . And, by the way, there’s nothing wrong with the planet in the first place. The planet is fine. The people are fucked! Compared with the people, the planet is doin’ great. It’s been here over four billion years . . . The planet isn’t goin’ anywhere, folks. We are! We’re goin’ away. Pack your shit, we’re goin’ away. And we won’t leave much of a trace. Thank God for that. Nothing left. Maybe a little Styrofoam. The planet will be here, and we’ll be gone. Another failed mutation; another closed-end biological mistake.” ― George Carlin

Our moment of liberty is coming to an end (Video)

 There are still bright people out there but their voices are lost in the blethering of the pandemic. 

 

 

 

 

 

COVID Deaths Plummet As Excess Mortality Falls To Pre-Pandemic Levels

Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

In any given year during the past decade in the United States, more than 2.5 million Americans have died – from all causes.

The number has grown in recent years, climbing from 2.59 million in 2013 to 2.85 million in 2019. This has been due partially to the US’s aging population, and also due to rising obesity levels and drug overdoses. In fact, since 2010, growth rates in total deaths has exceeded population growth in every year.

In 2020, preliminary numbers suggest a jump of more than 17 percent in all-cause total deaths, rising from 2.85 million in 2019 to 3.35 million in 2020.

The increase was not all due to covid. At least one-quarter to one-third appear to be from other causes. In some cases, more than half of “excess deaths” were attributed to “underlying causes” other than covid. But whether due to untreated medical conditions (thanks to covid lockdowns), or drug overdoses, or homicides, total death increased in 2020. In other words, total excess mortality is a partial proxy for covid deaths. Whatever proportion of total deaths covid cases may comprise, it stands to reason that if total deaths decline, then covid deaths are declining also. Moreover, looking at total deaths helps cut through any controversies over whether or not deaths are properly attributed to covid.

What has been the trend with these “excess deaths” in recent months?

Well, according to data through mid-March reported by Our World in Data and by the Human Mortality Database, excess mortality began to plummet in early January and is now back to levels below the 2015-2019 average:

Excess mortality peaked the week of January 3 and then it began to collapse, dropping back to summer 2020 levels by mid February. By March 14, excess mortality was at 1 percent above the 2015-2019 average. All this occurred even as very few Americans were vaccinated. When excess deaths began to drop, less than one percent of Americans had been fully vaccinated. At the end of January, less than two percent of Americans had been fully vaccinated. By the end of March, when excess mortality returned to 2019 levels, 15 percent of the population had been fully vaccinated.

As of May 11, only one-third of Americans had been fully vaccinated, although “experts” insist 60 to 70 percent of the population must be vaccinated before we can expect to see a drop-off in deaths like that which occurred earlier this year.

Yet, as of the week of March 22—excess mortality was below both the 2015-2019 average and below the total for the last year before the official beginning of the covid pandemic (2019).

It’s likely these facts won’t stop “public health” bureaucrats from continuing to insist that another “wave” of covid deaths and cases is right around the corner. These activists have many strategies for pushing vaccine passports, mask mandates, and even continual precautionary business closures. They’ll tell us that new covid variants are sweeping the globe. This is what they were saying in January, for instance, when Vox was telling us it was too dangerous to even visit the grocery store. At least one expert in late January warned us that the coming weeks would be “the darkest weeks of the pandemic.”

It’s now clear such predictions were spectacularly wrong. By late January, totals deaths were already in precipitous decline. 

But what about the lag in data? We’re only looking at data up to mid-March because it tends to take several weeks for estimates of total deaths to become reasonably reliable. Yes, that data shows a big drop off. But what about the numbers for April and May? Should we expect those death totals to surge again with a promised “fourth wave” of new covid death?

If we consider the more recent case and death totals attributed to covid, we see few signs of a new surge.

Although Anthony Fauci and other government employed technocrats have been unable to provide any explanation at all for it, the fact remains that months after Texas and Florida and Georgia have either abolished or greatly scaled back all social-distancing and mask mandates, cases and deaths are generally declining, and total deaths per million (attributed to covid) remain below what we’ve seen in states with severe lockdowns.

The trend in the United States overall is similar.  Indeed, it appears that nearly all states have seen sizable drops in both cases and deaths, regardless of the mask or social-distancing policies in place. 

Notably, it’s only in recent weeks that “CDC guidelines” are beginning to admit the reality. It wasn’t until April 26 that the CDC declared that fully vaccinated Americans are allowed to venture outside without masks on. The CDC states these “recommendations” unironically as if it weren’t the case that most Americans—outside of true-believer hotspots like San Francisco and Chicago—stopped wearing masks outside a long time ago. The hermetically sealed world of government employees and corporate journalists appears unaware that at least half the country pretty much went back to normal last fall.

So now what?

The technocrats know that they need to keep pressing hard for more de facto vaccine mandates—pushed mostly by corporate America for low-risk younger populations.  Most Americans can already see that covid numbers are already in decline in spite of months of Americans flouting mask mandates and social distancing guidelines. People can see that children—an increasing number of whom are returning to schools—aren’t a significant factor in the spread of disease. So it will be important for the regime to push vaccines for children more aggressively before people stop listening to the “experts” completely.

Don’t expect the regime to admit it has been wrong about anything. If anything, it will double down on the usual narrative. It’s worked pretty well so far.

I agree with those 10 points. Although I would say that the first 9 are just confirmation of facts, some known since the Romans.  

The last one to which I now agree comes as a terrible disillusion. If true, then some of the principles on which our Western civilization is based are wrong including the notion of "progress".

 

10 Things We Have Learned During The COVID Coup

Authored by 'Winter Oak' via Off-Guardian.org,

One potential positive from the whole Covid-19 debacle is that we have learned an incredible amount about the society in which we live. This will be crucial if we manage to stave off a descent into a nightmare future of techno-fascist slavery.

We will have a new understanding of what our world has become and what we would like it to be in the decades and centuries to come. And “we” means we. While the majority have, apparently, learnt nothing at all from what has happened, they will eventually catch up.

There is no way that knowledge gained by a wide-awake 15% or 20% of the population will not end up being shared by almost everyone. Once the truth is out, it tends to stay out. As H.R. Haldeman so wisely put it, “you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube”.

Here are Ten Things We Have Learned During the Covid Coup.

1. Our political system is hopelessly corrupt.

Virtually all politicians are hopelessly corrupt. No political party can be trusted. They all can be, and have been, bought.

2. Democracy is a sham.

It has been a sham for a very long time. There will never be any real democracy when money and power amount to the same thing.

3. The system will stop at nothing to hold on to its power and, if possible, increase its levels of control and exploitation.

It has no scruples. No lie is too outrageous, no hypocrisy too nauseating, no human sacrifice too great.

4. So-called radical movements are usually nothing of the sort.

From whatever direction they claim to attack the system, they are just pretending to do so, and serve to channel discontent in directions which are harmless to the power clique and even useful to its agendas.

5. Any “dissident” voice you have ever heard of through corporate media is probably a fake.

The system does not hand out free publicity to its actual enemies.

6. Most people in our society are cowards.

They will jettison all the fine values and principles which they have been loudly boasting about all their lives merely to avoid the slightest chance of public criticism, inconvenience or even minor financial loss.

7. The mainstream media is nothing but a propaganda machine for the system...

...and those journalists who work for it have sold their sorry souls, placing their (often minimal) writing skills entirely at the disposition of Power.

8. Police are not servants of the public...

...but servants of a powerful and extremely wealthy minority which seeks to control and exploit the public for its own narrow and greedy interests.

9. Scientists cannot be trusted.

They will use the hypnotic power of their white coats and authoritative status for the benefit of whoever funds their work and lifestyle. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

10. Progress is a misleading illusion.

The “progress” of increasing automation and industrialisation does not go hand in hand with a progress in the quality of human life, but in fact will “progressively” reduce it to the point of complete extinction.

Doug Casey on How COVID Lockdowns Will Become Climate Lockdown

 Without context, data has no meaning. And so it is for the virus. What you hear in the media day after day is creating a context... but the one, some people want us to believe. 

Notice how little food for thought is on display. How doubt is never an option, even from day one when answers are still murky. How diverging views are not offered, even from reputable sources. 

We used to make fun of the Pravda and its predictable articles. But from the inside, it felt rather comfortable, for a while...

Via International Man

International Man: It’s been over a year since the COVID lockdowns started, and they have established a terrible precedent.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has issued what they call a “dire warning.” They say there will be a 5% increase in carbon emissions as global economies reopen after the COVID shutdowns this year and that it will be “anything but sustainable” for the environment. This implies that the shutdowns have been good for the environment and that returning to normal is bad.

There has also been a flood of articles in the mainstream media advocating for the use of lockdowns to address so-called climate change.

Do you think that the COVID lockdowns could become climate change lockdowns?

Doug Casey: Without exception, almost everything they say in the above article is either an overt and intentional lie or just factually incorrect. Things that are controversial at best are presented as incontrovertible facts.

Let me first reiterate a few facts about COVID.

It’s hard to be sure because everything about it has become highly politicized, but COVID itself seems no more serious than the Asian Flu, Hong Kong Flu, Bird Flu, or Swine Flu that have come and gone in recent decades and is not even remotely comparable to the Spanish Flu of 1918.

The numbers show that COVID is a risk for people over 70, the obese, and the sick—but a medical non-problem for everyone else. That’s why the average age of decedents is 80, even though it appears that everyone who dies with the virus in their system is reported as a statistic—even if they die of an auto accident or a heart attack. People with zero symptoms are, nonetheless, listed as “cases” if they fail the overly sensitive and very expensive PCR test.

We might ask: “What’s behind this insane flu hysteria—which is radically restructuring the world’s political and economic landscapes? And why now?” It seems very oddly coincidental with a few other phenomena.

One is that the world is on the cusp of a fantastically devastating depression due to the insane creation of currency units all over the world by central banks. Is the phony COVID hysteria—and, yes, I believe it’s 80% phony—being used as an excuse for the coming collapse, a way to recuse those responsible for the insane economic policies causing the depression? In other words, is the COVID hysteria an artificially constructed force majeure used to distract from the real cause of the Greater Depression?

Another phenomenon is that the COVID hysteria has proved an excellent way to scare the hell out of the public everywhere. Terrified people demand “strong” leaders and strict controls. It’s a godsend for the kind of people who go into government, anxious for any excuse to self-aggrandize and take more power. “Never let a serious crisis go to waste” has been an operating principle of powermongers since Day One. And war is the most serious kind of crisis. Don’t forget what Randolf Bourne said in 1914: “War is the health of the State.” But a real war with a real enemy is always risky and may not always be feasible. So powermongers create phony wars. In order to fight a war—any kind of war—you need a State to organize and legitimize it.

The first major phony war in living memory was Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty—the poor lost. Then came Richard Nixon’s war on drugs. Then, Baby Bush declared war on terror. They’re all still ongoing, but it seems time for a two-front war. A war on global warming combined with a war on COVID will be ultra-effective for breeding fear in Boobus americanus. They say global warming can destroy the planet and COVID can kill everyone. A sure-fire combination. They’re certain to get widespread support from the usual suspects.

As a bonus, there’s a very high correlation between those who support the COVID hysteria and those supporting the climate change agenda. And both of them claim to have a new ally, “the science,” to sell the wars to scared chimpanzees. Not just in the US, but everywhere in the world. These two new wars will bring out the worst in everyone, everywhere.

Once you wash away their social veneer, the patina of civilization, you find that humans are tribal. Put them in groups and they revert to the lowest common denominator—they act like our anthropoid ancestors and relatives. Get people excited, hooting and panting like chimps, and they’re anxious to wage war on one thing after another. Imagine them as the anthropoids contesting the watering hole in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Conflict gives them a sense of solidarity and gives their lives meaning.

That’s especially true of humans with collectivist views, which is to say, Leftists and busybodies. In today’s world, they include the “woke,” social justice warriors, progressives, BLM supporters, Antifa, and, of course, socialists, communists, Marxists, and all their fellow travelers. They’re all Puritans motivated to control other humans. The Left has always been that way, although it occasionally disguises itself as pro-freedom to seduce the naive.

For instance, during the ’60s, the Left was pro-drugs. But that’s not because they were for personal freedom or because they believed you have the right to do what you want with your own body. They were pro-drugs because widespread and irresponsible drug use can destroy civilization.

Even when the Left seems to have good intentions, it’s not the case. For instance, the Left was against the Vietnam War. It wasn’t because they were anti-war, but because the war was against their fellow communists. It was clever, in both cases showing up the Republicans as dim-witted, unethical, and hypocritical.

Today the Left, in its various incarnations, is all for the COVID lockdowns. Those will mutate into climate change lockdowns. Both will act to compromise human freedom—even more than previous phony wars. It’s ironic that the word “lockdown” used to be used mainly in prisons—it’s rather indicative of where the world in general and the US, in particular, are headed.

International Man: What are the chances climate lockdowns will work if and when governments try them?

Doug Casey: Climate change lockdowns will work. Why shouldn’t they? COVID lockdowns worked wonderfully. They’ll work even better because they’re not just about saving a few old, sick people but the planet itself. People have been brainwashed into being green eco-warriors for decades. The kids especially treat climate change and Greenism as a new religion and take it much more seriously than what’s left of Christianity. Yahweh is being replaced by Gaia.

People who can see that the wars on poverty, drugs, and terror were really just stupid scams are totally on board with new scams, the wars on the virus and climate change. They’re the same people making the same phony do-gooder arguments. The popularity of Greta Thunberg is indicative. She’s become an icon for the people who support this whole syndrome. It’s disturbing because she’s so pathologically angry. People don’t care that she’s mildly psychotic, highly indoctrinated, and irrational. It’s a sign of how degraded society has become that an autistic and deranged teenager can be an international hero.

I think it’s a natural segue to go from COVID lockdowns to climate change lockdowns. Although the eco-warriors will eventually see COVID as a good thing because they actually hate humans and would like to see Gaia cleansed of them.

As I’ve said many times before, I see both COVID and Global Warming as vastly overblown manias. Viruses go viral; everybody gets them and becomes immune. That’s the end of the story unless the virus is artificial and intended to cull the population. Anything is possible in a world where technology is advancing exponentially while ethics are going in reverse. Barring that, COVID will go away. Of course, they may come up with a COVID 2.0, COVID 3.0, etc., as needed.

As for Global Warming, nobody knows its degree of reality for sure—it’s all conjecture. But the danger of another ice age is at least as great as continued global warming. The only thing for certain is that the public, propagandized by the elite, can’t keep anything in context.

The last ice age only came to an end 12,000 years ago. And the globe has been warming, more or less, ever since. The public is unaware that there have been dozens of ice ages, lasting 50 to 100,000 years, throughout the Pleistocene period. There’s no reason to believe that the one that ended 12,000 years ago was the last one; we’re currently in an interglacial. Past ice ages have lasted many millions of years.

International Man: The Guardian recently ran a piece titled “Why Genghis Khan was Good for the Planet.”

The article states:

“His murderous Mongol armies were responsible for the massacre of as many as 40 million people. Even today, his name remains a byword for brutality and terror. But boy, was Genghis green.”

It seems to imply that population reduction through mass murder was good for the planet. What are your thoughts on this?

Doug Casey: That’s a great quote from the article.

The abhorrent psychology of its writer borders on the criminal. He goes on to say, “It’s an intriguing notion, certainly”— meaning that he actually thinks it might not be a bad idea to wipe out a meaningful percentage of the population.

I hope he sacrifices himself for the climate, although that’s unlikely since he likely considers himself one of the elite who should be preserved because he’s ideologically pure and politically reliable.

These people have Pol Pot’s psychological makeup. In Cambodia during the ’70s, anybody who wasn’t a manual laborer with callused hands was liquidated—that’s what they did with roughly a quarter of the population.

Pol Pot, Stalin, and Mao, as well as Genghis Kahn, are idols for these people because they all think the same way. They actually hate the human race. And people are so stupid that they laud their destroyers. I’ve got news for them: Life is already nasty, brutish, and short enough. We don’t need political criminals making it worse.

International Man: The COVID hysteria has changed the way governments react to a real or manufactured global crisis. Now that this precedent has been established, what do you see happening next?

Doug Casey: It’s shaping up like the 1930s in Germany, when they led the way with a disastrous form of statism called National Socialism. It was almost as bad as Communism under Stalin—and it seems like the Germans might be doing it again. They’ve just passed a law the “Infection Protection Act” instituting nightly restrictions, school closures, and stricter regulations for businesses. COVID provides an excellent cover and excellent justification for the imposition of a police state. Remember that once these governments pass a law, they rarely ever repeal them. Those laws have to be financed with new taxes and enforced by new agencies. The negative effect is cumulative and compounding.

International Man: While the US and other Western countries are committing economic and cultural suicide, what do you think will happen to countries like China, Russia, Brazil, and others? Will they follow the West or go their own ways?

Doug Casey: It’s hard to say what’s actually happening in a lot of countries because the quality of news reporting is so abysmal. But the trend is worldwide.

When it comes to climate change, these countries laugh at Westerners for their naivete, stupidity, and self-destructive tendencies. They don’t take it seriously. It’s another reason why the next century belongs to China.

The same is true of Russia, which, for all of its faults, is basically an anti-woke country. It’s been said—correctly—that there are more communists in American universities than there are in all of Russia.

Regarding investment advice, I’m much more interested in Chinese and East Asian stock markets than in Western stock markets. The same is true of Russian and East European stock markets because they haven’t been infected by the virus of wokeism. They had a serious bout of it from the ’30s through the ’90s, and it’s given them some immunity. Plus, their markets aren’t in a bubble, like those in the US especially. The countries that have hooked their car to the US choo-choo train are going to go over the cliff with the US.

It’s not as if China and Russia are models of intelligence and probity, but they’re acting far more intelligently than the US.

Editor’s Note: We’ve seen governments institute the strictest controls on people and businesses in history. It’s been a swift elimination of individual freedoms.

But this is just the beginning…

 

Halt Covid Vaccine, Prominent Scientist Tells CDC

 Based on this article, I do not know if we should halt the vaccine campaign, (the CDC has decided against halting) but at the very least, it should be restricted to the most vulnerable people so that we are certain that the benefits out-weight the risks.

 This originally appeared on JenniferMargulis.net.

In a public comment to the CDC, molecular biologist and toxicologist Dr. Janci Chunn Lindsay, Ph.D., called to immediately halt Covid vaccine production and distribution. Citing fertility, blood-clotting concerns (coagulopathy), and immune escape, Dr. Lindsay explained to the committee the scientific evidence showing that the coronavirus vaccines are not safe.

On April 23, 2021, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices held a meeting in Atlanta, Georgia. The focus of this ACIP meeting was blood clotting disorders following Covid vaccines. Dr. Janci Chunn Lindsay spoke to the CDC during the time set aside for public comment.

The censorship on social media in particular and the internet in general is relentless. Here is a slightly edited, annotated censorship-proof transcript of Dr. Janci Chunn Lindsay’s 3-minute comment.

You can listen to her testimony on YouTube here (for now, anyway. If this link goes viral, YouTube will likely censor it).

Molecular Biologist and Toxicologist Calls to Halt Covid Vaccine

Hi, my name is Dr. Janci Chunn Lindsay. I hold a doctorate in biochemistry and molecular biology from the University of Texas, and have over 30 years of scientific experience, primarily in toxicology and mechanistic biology.

In the mid-1990s, I aided the development of a temporary human contraceptive vaccine which ended up causing unintended autoimmune ovarian destruction and sterility in animal test models. Despite efforts against this and sequence analyses that did not predict this.

I strongly feel that all the gene therapy vaccines must be halted immediately due to safety concerns on several fronts.

Janci Chunn Lindsay: Covid vaccines could induce cross-reactive antibodies to syncytin, and impair fertility as well as pregnancy outcomes

First, there is a credible reason to believe that the Covid vaccines will cross-react with the syncytin and reproductive proteins in sperm, ova, and placenta, leading to impaired fertility and impaired reproductive and gestational outcomes. 

Respected virologist Dr. Bill Gallaher, Ph.D., made excellent arguments as to why you would expect cross reaction. Due to beta sheet conformation similarities between spike proteins and syncytin-1 and syncytin-2.

I have yet to see a single immunological study which disproves this. Despite the fact that it would literally take the manufacturers a single day to do these syncytin studies to ascertain this [once they had serum from vaccinated individuals]. It’s been over a year since the assertions were first made that this [the body attacking its own syncytin proteins due to similarity in spike protein structure] could occur.

Pregnancy losses reported to VAERS lead to demand to halt Covid vaccine

We have seen 100 pregnancy losses reported in VAERS as of April 9th. And there have [also] been reports of impaired spermatogenesis and placental findings from both the natural infection, vaccinated, and syncytin knockout animal models that have similar placental pathology, implicating a syncytin-mediated role in these outcomes.

Additionally, we have heard of multiple reports of menses irregularities in those vaccinated. These must be investigated.

We simply cannot put these [vaccines] in our children who are at .002% risk for Covid mortality, if infected, or any more of the child-bearing age population without thoroughly investigating this matter.

[If we do], we could potentially sterilize an entire generation. Speculation that this will not occur and a few anecdotal reports of pregnancies within the trial are not sufficient proof that this is not impacting on a population-wide scale.

Covid vaccine causes blood disorders

Secondly, all of the gene therapies [Covid vaccines] are causing coagulopathy. [Coagulopathy when the body’s blood clotting system is impaired.] This is not isolated to one manufacturer. And this is not isolated to one age group. 

As we are seeing coagulopathy deaths in healthy young adults with no secondary comorbidities.

There have been 795 reports related to blood clotting disorders as of April 9th in the VAERS reporting system, 338 of these being due to thrombocytopenia.

There are forward and backward mechanistic principles for why this is happening. The natural infection is known to cause coagulopathy due to the spike protein. All gene therapy vaccines direct the body to make the spike protein. Zhang et al in [a scientific paper published in the Journal of Hematology & Oncology] in September 2020 showed that if you infuse spike protein into mice that have humanized ACE-2 receptors on blood platelets that you also get disseminated thrombosis.

Spike protein incubated with human blood in vitro also caused blood clot development which was resistant to fibrinolysis. [Fibrinolysis is the body’s process of breaking down blood clots]. The spike protein is causing thrombocytic events, which cannot be resolved through natural means. And all vaccines must be halted in the hope that they can be reformulated to guard against this adverse effect. 

Third, there is strong evidence for immune escape—

At this point in her oral testimony, Dr. Janci Chunn Lindsay was interrupted by a man’s voice: “Thank you for your comment, your time has expired.”

I reached out to Dr. Janci Chunn Lindsay to find out what else she had wanted to share with ACIP, in addition to her concerns over fertility and blood-clotting disorders. She sent me back her third point, which she submitted as written testimony.

Third, there is strong evidence for immune escape, and that inoculation under pandemic pressure with these leaky vaccines is driving the creation of more lethal mutants that are both newly infecting a younger age demographic, and causing more Covid-related deaths across the population than would have occurred without intervention. That is, there is evidence that the vaccines are making the pandemic worse.

It is clear that we are seeing a temporal immune depression immediately following the inoculations [see World Meter Global Covid deaths counts following inoculation dates] and there are immunosuppressive regions on spike proteins, as well as Syn-2, that could be likely causing this, through a T-cell mediated mechanism. If we do not stop this vaccine campaign until these issues can be investigated, we may see a phenomenon such as we see in chickens with Marek’s disease.

We have enough evidence now to see a clear correlation with increased Covid deaths and the vaccine campaigns. This is not a coincidence. It is an unfortunate unintended effect of the vaccines. We simply must not turn a blind eye and pretend this is not occurring. We must halt all Covid vaccine administration immediately, before we create a true pandemic that we cannot reign in.

MIT scientist also concerned about blood-clotting, fertility issues

Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., an expert in protein synthesis, believes that Dr. Lindsay’s hypothesis is correct. “I absolutely share these concerns,” Dr. Seneff, who is a senior research scientist at MIT, wrote to me in a sobering email.

“The potential for blood clotting disorders and the potential for sterilization are only part of the story. There are other potential long-term effects of these vaccines as well, such as autoimmune disease and immune escape, whereby the vaccines administered to immune-compromised people accelerate the mutation rate of the virus so as to render both naturally acquired and vaccine-induced antibodies no longer effective.”

Like Dr. Lindsay, Dr. Seneff believes we need to immediately halt Covid vaccine campaigns. “This massive clinical trial on the general population could have devastating and irreversible effects on a huge number of people,” Seneff explains.

Despite these fertility and blood disorder concerns, the CDC panel voted last Friday to resume the use of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. They did, however, suggest an FDA warning label be added. Their argument against halting Covid vaccination? The CDC believes the benefits outweigh the risks.