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The Year in Review Printable PDF
What Our Investigative Team Learned Covering Covid for 300 Days
This is an archive of the September 2020 entries for the Covid19 news feed. You may return to the current page here.
The most polite rebuttal in medical history: PCR false positives | Added September 30
Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi discusses new book Corona False Alarm? dismantles PCR, Covid vax, flu vax | Added September 30
Note, while the book has been banned by Amazon, it is being carried by Barnes & Noble. The book is just 120 pages long and was written by two MDs in Germany. People who think that Covid truthers are “Trump supporters” remain clueless; this is a worldwide movement.
Flashback 1983: Resettling the Love Canal neighborhood, development in New York State which was built on top of a chemical and nuclear dump site | Added September 30
Author’s Note: This is my first article on scientific fraud, about the resettlement of the Love Canal neighborhood, written in 1983 when I was 19 years old. I learned skills reporting and writing this article that I still use today, mostly from my conversations with Lois Gibbs. It was Lois who figured out that there was a problem associated with the neighborhood being built around 21,800 tons of buried chemical waste — and radioactive remnants of the Manhattan Project. I had no idea at the time that writing this article would set the course of my journalistic career.
Read Whole Article on Planet Waves
Did you know? — 2009 Swine Flu vax caused outbreak of narcolepsy | Added September 30
The 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic left a troubling legacy in Europe: More than 1300 people who received a vaccine to prevent the flu developed narcolepsy, an incurable, debilitating condition that causes overpowering daytime sleepiness, sometimes accompanied by a sudden muscle weakness in response to strong emotions such as laughter or anger. The manufacturer, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), has acknowledged the link, and some patients and their families have already been awarded compensation. But how the vaccine might have triggered the condition has been unclear.
In a paper in Science Translational Medicine (STM) this week, researchers offer a possible explanation. They show that the vaccine, called Pandemrix, triggers antibodies that can also bind to a receptor in brain cells that help regulate sleepiness. The work strongly suggests that Pandemrix, which was given to more than 30 million Europeans, triggered an autoimmune re action that led to narcolepsy in some people who are genetically at risk.
Press conference at Harvard with Michael Mina from way back on August 8 challenges validity of PCR | Added September 30
This is a press conference from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health with Michael Mina, assistant professor of epidemiology and a faculty member in the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics. This call was recorded at 12:30 p.m. Eastern Time on Friday, August 7th.
Go Figure — Coronavirus Cases Plummet When PCR Tests Are Adjusted | September 29
On The Vaccine Reaction website
Via Celia Farber. The PCR “test” is the central lie that is holding this whole nightmare together. And that lie is starting to come unraveled. To my friends and readers: understand this issue, please. Keep the heat on this issue. Discuss it with your neighbors. It is the least controversial, easiest to understand and by far the most important issue in this whole mess. It is VERY well developed and many places are now admitting that they knew all along, or are catching on. Keep this one hot. It is our way out of the insanity.
Special Comment by Chenoa Johnston | Added September 29
I discovered that medicine is evil when I worked in dentistry. At the time I also thought war machine was evil, the oil industry, the banking industry, political power and the agricultural poisoning of food, over- logging and over- fishing. All evil.
So many things I thought equally evil.
911 was no surprise to me.
Wars abroad afterward, no surprise…
But now I see this possibility of such magnitude of evil that it overtakes the whole world, this medical tyranny is the one that takes the cake.
Can you imagine? 69 vaccine shots of a child all before age 18?
The evil behind this mandatory protocol for California displays such flagrant bravado! I can’t believe the politicians have bought into that? The stats of child health over the last 30 years stands bold and clear: human life will no longer be the same.
Next level: mandatory vaccination and nano chipping of all humans: next level evil.
We are at war and most people have no clue.
Humanity is at war for human life. And the only ones who can stop this are the humans. We have to take responsibility for what we know to be true.
In a way earth does not matter in my belief system, where we are spiritual beings having a human experience. Earth does not really matter because we will die and we will MoveOn and we will continue our life in the spiritual world. And when earth is ready again for life we will come back here at a new time. Or we could simply just incarnate on a different planet.
But what if each one of us is the AVATAR the earth is calling for? What if each one of us needs to take our voice and make it heard, and stand up en masse against the destruction of our species. These people are destroying our species — think of it.
If you were salmon living in the wild and then all of a sudden there are these GMO salmon living in fish farms and they are about to be let free and infiltrate and take over the oceans your species will be at risk of extinction. That is what is happening. This is an extinction event against what it is to be a natural human being on this planet. In harmony with nature.
The people doing this care nothing about the natural world, the nature of being human, the nature of living in harmony with our environment, the nature of our bodies. This will be a genetically modified world, and our true species will be extinct. What does that mean?
That means that there will be no bodies available on this planet Earth for souls incarnating onto the planet to have experiences in human bodies. It will be the end of the experience of soul in a human body, a fully natural earth born human being.
That is why I am a Planetary Guardian and a voice against GMOs and against vaccines.
I Quit Being a Progressive | Added September 29
Enforced vaccinations? Enforced quarantine? Surveillance over sick people? No thank you! If that’s what being a progressive stands for, then I quit. I want nothing to do with the “progressive” movement, not if it advocates turning the United States of America into China or the former Soviet Union. I watched Bernie Sanders betray his cause, and now I’m witnessing this second betrayal. I’m an American, dammit! This isn’t how we do things here in the USSA… Oops, bit of a typo over there. Should I edit it? Should I? Are you gonna force me to?! No thank you!
The core issue is the PCR — special comment by Eric | Added September 29
Here is the central issue back to the beginning. This whole mess — the shutdowns, the lockdowns, the social distancing, the masks, the economic collapse, the unemployment and the food lines and the seniors isolated from their families and no baseball and all of it — was based on ONE idea, just one idea: that this was a novel virus to which nobody was immune and would therefore have an extremely high IFR and kill 1 to 2 million HEALTHY Americans.
So we had to “flatten the curve” and “save the health care system” and so on (btw we never agreed to accept these measures till the virus was stopped; you cannot stop a virus, even with an effective vaccine).
Now we know that 94% of who is SAID to have died of covid are severely ill, therefore immune compromised people, and (comparatively speaking) a reported very small number of healthy people (currently, about 12,000 in the U.S. — Alzheimer’s kills 10x more than that). But we are still acting and thinking as of this is the 1 to 2 million fatality edition of the virus — a virus that does not even pass muster of virology’s own specific scientific method
I understand that each of these issues requires thought, and considering the data and all of the possibilities, though speaking as a journalist, it’s been Ground Hog Day for the past six months; we have seen the same data confirming this over and over again.
Former Chief Science Officer for Pfizer Says “Second Wave” Faked on False-Positive COVID Tests, “Pandemic is Over” | Added September 29
In a stunning development, a former Chief Science Officer for the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer says “there is no science to suggest a second wave should happen.” The “Big Pharma” insider asserts that false positive results from inherently unreliable COVID tests are being used to manufacture a “second wave” based on “new cases.”
Dr. Mike Yeadon, a former Vice President and Chief Science Officer for Pfizer for 16 years, says that half or even “almost all” of tests for COVID are false positives. Dr. Yeadon also argues that the threshold for herd immunity may be much lower than previously thought, and may have been reached in many countries already.
In an interview last week Dr. Yeadon was asked:
“We are basing a government policy, an economic policy, a civil liberties policy, in terms of limiting people to six people in a meeting…all based on, what may well be, completely fake data on this coronavirus?”
Dr. Yeadon answered with a simple “yes.”
Former prison colony of Australia continues to descend into psychosis | September 29
WESTERN AUSTRALIA, September 24, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — The state of Western Australia has legislated to allow police officers or other “authorised officers” to restrain individuals and, if deemed necessary, forcibly remove their underwear in order to administer a vaccine.
LifeSiteNews recently became aware of the legislation and is in communication with a number of residents of Western Australia who, until recently, were unaware of the extraordinary powers granted to the government in state law.
The so-called “reasonable force” includes the powers to:
(a) to apprehend and detain the person to whom the direction applies (the relevant person) and take the relevant person to a place where the person is required to undergo medical observation, medical examination or medical treatment or to be vaccinated in accordance with the direction; and
(b) to detain the relevant person at the place where he or she is required to undergo medical observation, medical examination or medical treatment or to be vaccinated in accordance with the direction; and so on.
Florida hospital system develops new treatment for Covid | Added September 29
OCALA, Fla. – A new COVID-19 treatment developed in Ocala, Florida is seeing measurable results with a near-perfect success rate.
AdventHealth Ocala officials reported groundbreaking results from a new drug therapy they developed called ICAM.
“The ICAM protocol has the potential to trigger the reopening of the country,” said Dr. Carlette Norwood-Williams, Director of Pharmacy at AdventHealth Ocala. “We will know the next step after our out-patient study.”
She said ICAM works by reinforcing the immune system and protecting the lungs from inflammation.
“We had no need for mechanical ventilation and the patients all survived the discharge regardless of age and regardless of past medical history,” Norwood-Williams said.
James Corbett with a friendly message to the new generation of ‘conspiracy theorists’ | Added September 29
Watch video here — cannot be embedded
If you’re new to documentation work, Corbett gives some great ideas — including saving web content, videos and podcasts to your personal device or local drive — not just the could. He talks about COINTELPRO in this video — a very important topic to know about. Here is a bit about that FBI program. Here is a Planet Waves FM that covers the COINTELPRO topic from our point of view.
Florida governor drops mask and restaurant mandates as fake ‘case’ count rises | Added September 29
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Gov. Ron DeSantis lifted all restrictions on restaurants and other businesses in Florida on Friday, and banned local fines against people who refuse to wear masks as he seeks to reopen the state’s economy despite the spread of the coronavirus.
The Republican governor’s order unleashed fresh debate in the politically divided state, where pandemic responses have become intertwined with the upcoming presidential election.
DeSantis, a major ally of President Donald Trump, acknowledged that the pandemic is far from over, but he said the threat has eased and the time has come to reopen for business.
“We’re not closing anything going forward,” DeSantis said, while insisting that the state is prepared if infections increase again.
BMJ letter urges against caution mandatory vaccine mandate stampede | Added September 29
When a clinically significant adverse effect of a drug or a vaccine is dismissed because it fails to reach “statistical significance” epidemiologists call the dismissal a Type 2 error. In a court of law it is equivalent to a “not guilty” verdict for a defendant who is actually guilty. This could happen with hastily approved Covid-19 vaccines, and has occurred time and again with influenza vaccines. News releases report “vaccine effectiveness/VE” but they never mention the increased risk of illness from non-influenza respiratory viruses (NIRVs) associated with influenza vaccines. Consider the following table listing studies of influenza vaccines and the risk of NIRVs.
We took a weekend off from publishing Sept 26.-28
Using fake PCR cases, Boulder, CO orders young adults to stay out of groups of any size | Added September 25
From The Boulder Channel
BOULDER COUNTY, Colo. — In an effort to slow the sharp rise of positive COVID-19 cases in Boulder, and transmission of those 18 to 22 years old, Boulder County Public Health issued a new public health order that prohibits all people in that age group ini the city from gatherings of any size.
This applies to all indoor, outdoor, on-campus and off-campus locations in the city of Boulder, according to the order.
In addition, the order identified 36 addresses where people have repeatedly violated the public health orders, and requires those individuals to stay at their residence at all times. The only exceptions to this part of the order are to seek medical care, exercise outside alone, and obtain necessary supplies such as food, pet food, medical supplies and products needed for safety and sanitation via curbside pickup or contact-less delivery.
Vaccine trials doomed to fail; statistics and redefining terms will create ‘success’ | Added September 25
Peter Doshi, associate editor of the medical journal BMJ, and Eric Topol, Scripps Research professor of molecular medicine, have written a devastating NY Times opinion piece about the ongoing COVID vaccine clinical trials.
They expose the fatal flaw in the large Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Moderna trials.
September 22, the NY Times: “These Coronavirus Trials Don’t Answer the One Question We Need to Know”:
“If you were to approve a coronavirus vaccine, would you approve one that you only knew protected people only from the most mild form of Covid-19, or one that would prevent its serious complications?”
“The answer is obvious. You would want to protect against the worst cases.”
“But that’s not how the companies testing three of the leading coronavirus vaccine candidates, Moderna, Pfizer and AstraZeneca, whose U.S. trial is on hold, are approaching the problem.”
Federal government created special vaccine court back in March | Added September 25
The simple truth is: the US government is anticipating many people will be filing claims for compensation, when their family members are harmed or killed by a new COVID vaccine.
Of course, the government isn’t coming right out and admitting that.
The press will tout the usual excuses for injury and death. “He died from COVID, not the vaccine.” “Well, there was just one bad batch of vaccines.” “Because COVID is such a dire situation, and we’re rushing to save lives, a few mistakes are inevitable.”
Anything but the truth: GUESS WHAT: THE VACCINE IS HIGHLY TOXIC.
This new federal vaccine court for COVID will operate exactly like the present system for paying out claims for vaccine injury to children. Citizens have to jump through many absurd hoops and navigate all sorts of red tape, to try to squeeze money out of the federal government. The system is set up that way. It’s your basic bureaucratic nightmare.
Common Dreams takes on Bill Gates ‘war on life’ | Added September 25
Health is about life and living systems. There is no ‘life’ in the paradigm of health that Bill Gates and his ilk are promoting and imposing on the entire world. Gates has created global alliances to impose top-down analysis and prescriptions for health problems. He gives money to define the problems, and then he uses his influence and money to impose the solutions. And in the process, he gets richer. His ‘funding’ results in an erasure of democracy and biodiversity, of nature and culture. His ‘philanthropy’ is not just philanthrocapitalism. It is philanthroimperialism.
Off-Guardian urges resistance to medical tyranny | Added September 25
We take this seriously. Via Off-Guardian — a website to follow
Every aspect of your life will be monitored and controlled, as we move towards the ultimate surveillance State. Your ability to work, to socialise, to travel, conduct business, access public services and to purchase essential goods and services will be dictated to you, and restricted, by the State, based upon your biosecurity or immunity status.
This transformation process is well underway. You are no longer a human being, you are a biosecurity risk. As such you may be removed to a military controlled quarantine camp as and when the State sees fit. Detention without trial will be the norm. All protest will be outlawed unless the protest suits the agenda of the parasite class.
Moderna admits that its gene-editing nanotech robots in your blood might make you sick | Added September 25
From Kennedy News and Views (Children’s Health Defense)
“[T]here can be no assurance that our LNPs will not have undesired effects. Our LNPs could contribute, in whole or in part, to one or more of the following: immune reactions, infusion reactions, complement reactions, opsonation reactions, antibody reactions . . . or reactions to the PEG from some lipids or PEG otherwise associated with the LNP. Certain aspects of our investigational medicines may induce immune reactions from either the mRNA or the lipid as well as adverse reactions within liver pathways or degradation of the mRNA or the LNP, any of which could lead to significant adverse events in one or more of our clinical trials.”
They add,
“PEG is widely used in drugs, personal care products, lubricants, gels (such as ultrasound gel), food additives and more. For example, PEG is a notorious ingredient of the controversial Bayer laxative MiraLAX, a medication used for constipation and to prep individuals for colonoscopy. Many parents of chronically constipated children have accused MiraLAX of provoking severe neuropsychiatric symptoms in their offspring, including mood swings, rage, phobias and paranoia.”
Volunteers quit Covid vax trial in Spain amid serious side effects reported in UK study | Added September 25
Some volunteers participating in a Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine trial in Spain have dropped out of the study, days after a serious side effect was reported by a participant of a vaccine trial in the U.K.
Spanish clinical pharmacologist Alberto Boronia, the study’s lead investigator, told Reuters that some participants “called to ask us some more detail about the risk of the vaccine, whether what happened with that vaccine had anything to do with the one we are studying, these types of questions.”
Last week, British pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca announced that trials for its COVID-19 vaccine — AZD1222 — had been halted, after a suspected adverse reaction was reported in one participant.
According to The Associated Press, around 18,000 people have received the AstraZeneca vaccine in the U.K., Brazil and South Africa. Some 30,000 volunteers are currently being recruited in the U.S.
Boris Johnson proposes lockdown England for six more months | Added September 25
This is via a DW News tweet. Additional information pending — if you know of any please send it to us. The allegedly spreading infections are no such thing. PCR positive is not evidence of infection or diagnosis of disease. The “case” count is the PCR. Note that antibody tests have no traction and an equally abysmal track record. But they are useless in this situation…for many reasons; if they hit they are indicative of past infection, for example. They cannot be used to pretend to argue for a current infection.
CDC publishes survival rates from Covid: for most ages, 99.5% or greater | Added September 25
The U.S. government updated its survival rates for the disease everyone in the world allegedly needs to be vaccinated against.
If “infected” with SARS-CoV-2, meaning PCR-positive, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports survival at: Ages 0-19, 99.997%. Ages 20-49, 99.98%. Ages 50-69 99.5%. Ages 70+ 94.6%. Thanks Adam Creighton for digging that out.
Fauci claims nobody can go to a theater without a mask until a year after a vaccine | Added September 25
From Business Insider
The man who in March said masks were not necessary in healthy people now says that they cannot go to a theater without them until a year after a vaccine. He’s the same person who said a vaccine would not be 100% effective and might not even prevent the “spread” of the virus. Coronaviruses burn out in about 18 months without intervention. We’re already most of the way there. Does he have stock in Roku and Amazon? Or is it Moderna?
Hey Guido! NBC report on Covid vaccine, for your entertainment | Added September 24
A little long but very exciting: Attorney explains the Ohio Stands Up lawsuit | Added September 23
This takes you through explanations of how the lockdowns were based on fraudulent statistics, why the PCR is a scam, and other fun things that the plaintiffs want to get in front of a jury.
From the Eew Files: In case you’re curious about those nanotechnology vaccines that rewrite your DNA that I keep mentioning | Added September 23
From Children’s Health Defense, sent by Jon Rappoport
A dozen Covid-19 vaccines are undergoing clinical trials, leading a crowded field that now numbers approximately 170 candidates. Several of the U.S. contenders—Moderna, Pfizer/BioNTech and Arcturus Therapeutics—are deploying never-before-approved messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, an experimental approach designed to turn the body’s cells into viral-protein-making factories.
A key technical challenge is to get the vaccines’ bulky RNA “payload” into the cells intact—without it breaking down prior to arriving at its destination. In other words, mRNA vaccines will not work without an in-built delivery mechanism that enables the mRNA to shove its way into a cell’s cytoplasm.
The chosen solution is to use trendy biotech “carrier systems” involving lipid nanoparticles (LNPs). LNPs “encapsulate the mRNA constructs to protect them from degradation and promote cellular uptake” and, additionally, rev up the immune system (a property that vaccine scientists tamely describe as LNPs’ “inherent adjuvant properties”).
The LNP formulations in the three Covid-19 vaccines are also “PEGylated,” meaning that the vaccine nanoparticles are coated with a synthetic, nondegradable and increasingly controversial polymer called polyethylene glycol (PEG).
Shocker! NY Times doing real journalism, asking if the Covid vax really works | Added September 23
If you were to approve a coronavirus vaccine, would you approve one that you only knew protected people only from the most mild form of Covid-19, or one that would prevent its serious complications?
The answer is obvious. You would want to protect against the worst cases.
But that’s not how the companies testing three of the leading coronavirus vaccine candidates, Moderna, Pfizer and AstraZeneca, whose U.S. trial is on hold, are approaching the problem.
According to the protocols for their studies, which they released late last week, a vaccine could meet the companies’ benchmark for success if it lowered the risk of mild Covid-19, but was never shown to reduce moderate or severe forms of the disease, or the risk of hospitalization, admissions to the intensive care unit or death.
How CDC/WHO will fake the effects of the COVID vaccine to make it look like a success | Added September 23
It’s simple — just change the name of whatever it is the vaccine is supposed to prevent, so that it seems to go away. This just in from investigative journalist Jon Rappoport
Making a vaccine look like it’s a champion isn’t difficult for public health agencies. There are a number of strategies.
Of course, these fraudulent strategies would be serious crimes. But when has that stopped the CDC or the World Health Organization?
In no particular order—-
ONE: Rework the definition of a “COVID case.” Presently, the CDC absurdly allows doctors to diagnose a person with COVID who has a cough, or chills and fever, and lives in an area where cases are being claimed. No test necessary.
So change this practice, once the vaccine is approved. Demand testing for a diagnosis. State that cough alone is not enough. Chills and fever must also be present. Require fever to be above 100.
These and other changes would automatically shrink the number of cases. The drop in numbers would be attributed to the vaccine.
This “definitional shrinking” was, in fact, deployed in the 1950s, after the introduction of the polio vaccine.
Face the Chaos: The Equinox Chart and Transhumanism
When I say unprecedented, I mean it: never before have massive populations on all continents been subjected to one policy, notably, a stay-at-home order. This spanned from China through Russia, and then India, across nearly all of Europe, reaching across Canada and the United States, and into much of the Southern Hemisphere, particularly Australia and New Zealand.
Not only have populations of healthy people never been ordered to stay home before, there has never been one policy that spread around and across the world instantaneously, ever. It was presented as “the thing to do,” yet the mere fact that it happened points to the existence of some new ability for a global authority to spread policy locally, instantaneously: it happened in a matter of about a month.
This alone should be a source of marvel and wonder for any world-watcher or participant in the affairs of life. The notion that it happened due to a pandemic is a kind of lullaby. It does not matter why it is said to have happened. The fact is, it did.
Read More of This Article on Planet Waves
The WHO Has Endorsed Testing Traditional Herbal Medicines Against Coronavirus | Added September 21
And not only that, Chinese medicine might work, too | Added September 21
On April 11, as the coronavirus pandemic was in full swing, Sinong Lin received a package at her apartment in L.A.’s Chinatown. Sent by her family back in China, it contained 50 small boxes of Lianhua Qingwen capsules, a Chinese herb commonly used to relieve fever and other flu symptoms.
Lin soon got another shipment from her family; this time it was a Chinese herb called Qishen Gubiao Keli, which is mixed with hot water to supposedly prevent COVID-19. All of these herbal remedies had been recommended by the Jiangsu Province Medical Products Administration, a local agency equivalent to a state medical department in the U.S.
Having lived through SARS and MERS in China, the 30-year-old USC student knew how devastating COVID-19 could become. Like many Angelenos — including many Chinese people they know — Lin had stocked up on food, stayed home as much as possible, worn masks outdoors, and sanitized everything in the days leading up to the citywide stay-at-home order.
The only items that seemed to be missing from their pandemic survival regimen were over-the-counter Western medicines such as Tylenol and ibuprofen. The thought of buying them, she told me, never crossed her mind.
“If there is any symptom, the first thought is taking Qishen Gubiao Keli beverage for a day then observing the body’s condition,” Lin said in Mandarin. “I didn’t even think about taking American medicine.”
Speaking of China, here is a conspiracy theory for you | Added September 21
This is interesting | Added September 20
Interesting take on the numbers | Added September 20
I would do some things differently, though we end up in the same place. I don’t think it’s fair to say that it’s killed 200,000 because the false positive rate is so high, and there is no differential diagnosis; there are no grand rounds. Nobody is figuring out what is going on, what is actually killing people. Still he makes some excellent points, including noting how many people are sick in the United States due to lifestyle. Written articles added to YouTube.
Open letter from Belgian doctors | Added September 19
From A Sense of Place Magazine
‘A solution should not be worse than the disease’ is a proposition that is more topical than ever in the current situation. However, we note in the field that the collateral damage that is now being caused to the population will have more impact in all layers of the population in the short and long term than the number of corona victims that are now being protected.
The current corona measures and the strict penalties for non-compliance are, in our opinion, contrary to the values formulated by the Belgian Superior Health Council, which until recently as a health authority has always monitored quality medicine in our country: “Science – Expertise – Quality – Impartiality – Independence – Transparency. ”
Investigation into laboratory origins launched through The Lancet, but can we trust it? | Added September 19
The medical profession is responding to the persistent issue of the lab origins of the “covid virus.” This is obviously a response to public pressure and the fact that the issue is not going away. From The Telegraph
An international team of scientists will examine the possibility Sars-Cov-2 leaked from a laboratory as part of a comprehensive investigation into the origins of the virus.
The team is being set up as part of the Lancet COVID-19 Commission, a body established in July to “offer practical solutions” to the pandemic and make recommendations on how the next one can be avoided or better defended against.
The team looking at the origins of the virus will be led by Dr Peter Daszak, a British zoologist and leading authority on zoonotic spillover events.
The Lancet Commission releases first official statement | Added September 19
The Lancet COVID-19 Commission has released their first official statement, to mark the occasion of the opening of the 75th Session of the UN General Assembly on Sept 15, 2020.
The Statement highlights ten priority actions for the coming months:
1. Track down the origins of the virus in an open, scientific, and unbiased way not influenced by geopolitical agendas.
2. Suppress the epidemic through the proven package of non-pharmaceutical approaches (NPIs), as accomplished by several countries, with several in the Asia-Pacific region.
3. Base policy-making on objective scientific evidence, and stop politicians and others in positions of power from subverting clinical trials and other scientific protocols.
4. Collect and publish timely and internationally consistent data on the state of the pandemic, including humanitarian and economic consequences.
5. Ensure universal access to the tools to fight COVID-19, including test kits, therapeutics, and prospective vaccines.
6. Secure access of developing countries to financing from international sources, especially from the IMF and World Bank.
7. Direct urgent protection towards vulnerable groups, including the elderly, persons in poverty and hunger, vulnerable women, children, persons with chronic diseases and disabilities, the homeless, migrants, refugees, Indigenous Peoples, and ethnic and racial minorities.
8. Prepare for a deep restructuring of global finances, including debt relief, new forms of international financing, and reform of monetary arrangements.
9. Economic recovery will be based on public-investment-led growth in green, digital, and inclusive technologies, based on the SDGs.
10. Support UN institutions and the UN Charter, resisting any attempts at a new Cold War.
Introduction to Transhumanism: The Matrix Vaccine | Added September 19
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piolVkDWduQ
And if you don’t believe the nice lady above, here is Bill Gates explaining the concept | Added September 19
Sept. 18, 2020 | No New Normal
Mobile device | Download | Thank you for sponsoring Planet Waves FM
In tonight’s edition I will look at the recent Virgo New Moon and the Libra Equinox, as well as update Mars retrograde and look ahead to Jupiter and Saturn in Aquarius.
I will also focus on the decision of U.S. District Court Judge William Stickman, who struck down Pennsylvania’s lockdown as illegal. He wrote, “The Constitution cannot accept the concept of a ‘new normal’ where the basic liberties of the people can be subordinated to open-ended emergency mitigation measures.” I’ll also discuss this presentation on the efficacy of masks.
Here is stickman’s ruling. Decision is 66 pages in PDF format. Three videos are posed to the Planet Waves FM tab.
Pennsylvania County admits ‘questionable test results’ | Added September 19
A Pennsylvania county has acknowledged that tests it purchased from a local biotech start-up produced “potentially inaccurate” results for thousands of people.
Chester County vowed this week to reach out to those who received the “questionable test results” in late May and to appoint a consultant to review the purchase of the antibody tests, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
The news comes days after the newspaper reported that the county spent $13 million in federal pandemic aid on a no-bid contract to Malvern-based Advaite. The testing program was intended to identify essential workers who had developed disease-fighting antibodies, which show up in the blood after COVID-19 infection.
In the first few weeks after testing began May 7, the tests produced results that appeared to be accurate. But two weeks later, the percentage of people testing positive for coronavirus antibodies began spiking to levels far above what was plausible, based on the prevalence of the virus in the area. The county eventually shelved the program June 2.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says antibody tests should not be used to diagnose COVID-19. But Chester health officials and their lab partner decided to interpret certain results as signaling a current infection. Patients with those results received emails stating: “You may have COVID-19. You are likely contagious. You should isolate yourself at home.”
Dr. Li-Meng Yan takes her case to Fox News. She ain’t gonna get on MSNBC | September 16
Here is an article on the lab-theory of Dr Yan
Here is the federal court ruling in Pennsylvania | Added September 16
Decision is 66 pages in PDF format.
Evidence that the flu shot is connected to Covid death, and may be a potential vector | Added September 16
This article is via the Vaccine Education Network. We’ve heard a lot about correlation between vaccine for seasonal influenza and susceptibility to Covid and similar diseases.
We now have additional evidence that in all of the worst affected countries, half of the elderly were injected with the flu vax. Notably, in all of those countries, almost all of the deaths were among the elderly and infirm. I have proposed elsewhere that this goes beyond correlation; rather, that the flu vaccine is a potential vector for the whole pandemic, particularly in the worst affected places.
Here is the article, and a sample below.
What connects the countries of Belgium, Peru, the UK, Spain, Italy, Chile, Sweden, the US, Mexico, and France? These countries, the top ten in COVID-19 mortality (as of August 24, 2020, according to Johns Hopkins), all injected more than 49% of their elderly populations with the flu vaccine. This stands in stark contrast to the countries on the low end, with fatality rates/popuation up to four orders of magnitude smaller: Rwanda, Thailand, Mozambique, Sri Lanka, Papau New Guinea, Uganda, Tanzania, Taiwan, and Vietnam – with the exception of a 49% vaccination rate in Taiwan, the flu vaccination rates in these countries is extremely low.
Masks are political; Covid response is political | Added September 16
By Peter Hitchens from The Daily Mail
In the name of Covid, the State has already thrust itself into every corner of our existence.
It has come between husbands and wives at the ends of their lives. It has forbidden the old to embrace their grandchildren.
It has denied us funerals and weddings, locked the churches, silenced the ancient monastic music of cathedral choirs and prevented the free worship of God for the first time in 800 years, and banned us (unless we are Left-wing) from holding or attending public meetings.
It has ordered us to stay at home, scolded or fined us for sunbathing, going on country rambles or even entering our front gardens.
In case you missed it: controlled studies on masks in clinical settings suggest they increase infection transmission | Added September 16
When you look at controlled studies on masks in clinical settings, the evidence is all in the direction of 1. They do not prevent the spread of anything and 2.
Rather, they are correlated with increased infection. This is the reason why all the major health organizations were against them in the first place; there is no data to support their use and much to warn off their use. Then they were put under political pressure to change their position. That discussion starts on page of this PDF. This data is compiled by Arthur Firstenberg, author of The Invisible Rainbow.
Further, he did a study of state-by-state data and concluded: Mandating masks has not kept death rates down anywhere. The 20 U.S. states that have never ordered people to wear face masks indoors and out have dramatically lower COVID-19 death rates than the 30 states that have mandated masks.
“Most of the no-mask states have COVID-19 death rates below 20 per 100,000 population, and none have a death rate higher than 55. All 13 states that have death rates higher 55 are states that have required the wearing of masks in all public places. It has not protected them.”
Another presentation on PCR test abuse and mask follies, with documentation | Added September 16
Dr Edwards however quotes the twitter geek about 12 minutes in who estimates that half of all “cases” are false positive. That is a VERY high estimate. Even the New York Times says it could be up to 90% false positive, so you know that it’s lower. I was stunned to hear they were cycling the test at 37 to 40 cycles, which makes trillions of copies of whatever is in the sample. It is picking up not just past infection with CV-19 but also past viruses of any kind and also strands of normal human DNA. What Edwards does say is that the test should be stopped at 24 cycles and that is the appropriate threshold for positive. So you have to ask why they want all these false positives.
Here is more on the death data corruption scandal, and treatment of the elderly | Added September 15
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-fl580duqs&feature=youtu.be
Virologist Dr. Li-Meng Yan Claims Coronavirus Lab ‘Cover-Up’ Made Her Flee China | Added September 15
More from the lab-generated virus files.
Mask Redux | Added September 15
I am concerned about the continued mask orders, seemingly without end.
When you look at controlled studies on masks in clinical settings, the evidence is all in the direction of 1. They do not prevent the spread of anything and 2. Rather, they are correlated with increased infection. This is the reason why all the major health organizations were against them in the first place; there is no data to support their use and much to warn off their use. Then they were put under political pressure to change their position. That discussion starts on page 6 of this PDF
This data is compiled by Arthur Firstenberg, author of The Invisible Rainbow. Further, he did a study of state-by-state data and concluded:
Mandating masks has not kept death rates down anywhere. The 20 U.S. states that have never ordered people to wear face masks indoors and out have dramatically lower COVID-19 death rates than the 30 states that have mandated masks. Most of the no-mask states have COVID-19 death rates below 20 per 100,000 population, and none have a death rate higher than 55. All 13 states that have death rates higher 55 are states that have required the wearing of mask.s in all public places. It has not protected them.
There are no pro-mask arguments aside from the security blanket thesis. In March, Fauci said wearing a mask was a feel-good activity, and warns about hand-face contact that is known to spread disease, particularly in restaurants and hospitals. As chief of infectious diseases for the past 30 years, we can assume he is familiar with the studies that Firstenberg has cited above. Claiming mask mandates are scientifically supported may seem like a minor lie, but there is no such thing right now. One lie supports the others.
Federal judge rules Pennsylvania lockdown measures are unconstitutional | Added September 14
Golly gee, Jim Bob.
A federal judge in Pittsburgh says Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf and State Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine had good intentions to protect people from the coronavirus but their orders went too far. The judge ruled in a court order that Wolf’s closing of “non-life-sustaining” businesses and restrictions on gatherings during the COVID-19 pandemic were unconstitutional.
To wit:
“The Constitution cannot accept the concept of a ‘new normal’ where the basic liberties of the people can be subordinated to open-ended emergency mitigation measures,” the judge wrote.
“It’s really 100% in our favor. The court found in all respects that the orders issued by the governor and the secretary of health were unconstitutional. What it means is they can’t do it again, and they should not have done it in the past,” said an attorney representing the plaintiffs.
Article and video from WTAE TV
Article and video from WABC TV
And from The New York Times, jack squat. Well, maybe they will write something tomorrow attempting to spin it down and make it seem like the judge was a fruitcake for respecting the Constitution or admitting it exists. We shall see. Check for updates!
Excuse us while a little sanity intervenes — you will like this one and the presenter | Added September 14
Ohio government is insane | Added September 14
Ohio citizens and businesses bring lawsuit against the state. Via Jon Rappoport | Added September 14
This is via our colleague Jon Rappoport, author of No More Fake News.
“In recent months, entire states have been imprisoned without due process and with the clear threat to impose such lockdowns again, interstate travel has been severely restricted, privacy rights have been devastated, numerous business takings without compensation, and many regulations being implemented without statutory process requirements under the guise of a health emergency that is roughly as dangerous as a seasonal influenza outbreak. The plaintiffs in this case have all been injured in various capacities by these unconstitutional actions, and without action by the Court, will be left without redress. More terrifying, without action by the Court, the Court will be setting future precedent that will allow states to withhold fundamental Constitutional rights, in violation of US Supreme Court precedent, circumventing the various levels of scrutiny applied to such rights, and justify such actions under public health emergency orders without subjecting those orders to any real review—just trust the bureaucrats because they are the experts.”
Those who snore face greater risk of Covid death, another ridiculous study finds | Added September 14
People who snore could be three times more likely to die from coronavirus if they are admitted to hospital, a study has revealed.
University of Warwick scientists carried out a review of 18 studies into obstructive sleep apnoea and coronavirus.
They found those who suffer from the condition, which causes snoring and choking when the throat muscles relax and temporarily block the airway during sleep, are at greater risk of being hospitalised or dying from the virus.
The condition is most common in people suffering from diabetes, obesity or high blood pressure, which also increase their risk if they catch Covid-19.
As many as 1.5million people are thought to suffer from obstructive sleep apnoea in the UK, and 85 per cent of cases are said to be undiagnosed. In the US, 22million people are estimated to suffer from the condition
This is real. I read about a version of this technology in Wired 20 years ago or so. Please listen patiently. Note, YouTube was allergic to this video; here is the link on Bitchute.| Added Sept. 14
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoZohs37ZY4
Here’s a good one on the ‘flawed’ coronavirus test from The Express | Added Sept. 14
Word is starting to get around that the PCR is a work of fraud. They say it more kindly — in this case, describing it as a ‘major flaw’. But the problem was found in the 1990s during the AIDS crisis and then again in 2007 and then again a month ago. It keeps getting found. Maybe let’s not lose it again. From The Express in England. Note, The New York Times did this piece a month ago, and we did it two months ago. That’s fun, I haven’t scooped the Times in a while. Well, OK to be fair, the Times originally did the story in 2007. But to be fair, our friend Celia Farber wrote it over and over again in the 1990s and then she wrote it on the Covid angle earlier this year. Oh wait, so did our friend Jon Rappoport. This is what I mean: it keeps ending up in the Lost and Found. Let’s please get a grip.
This is not a laughing matter, but in case you want to prank your friends | Added Sept. 14
Here is my collection of satires associated with Covid. You can send them to people pretending they are real news. The problem is they are likely to believe them. I find that no matter how outrageous I make the article, someone believes it. Many people in fact. You’ve seen some of these here before. Here they are, on their own pages. My personal favorite is the ‘get an injection’ one. We will be hearing more from the vixen Nurse Molly.
CDC advises dead people to wear masks
CDC Officials Urge Americans to ‘Get an Injection, Any Injection’ to Prevent Covid
Breaking: meteorite hits California barbecue where everyone was social distancing and wearing masks
Biden promises that if elected all Americans will have to shove a mask up their ass
Trump promises Americans they will be peed on by three beautiful Russian girls if he is reelected
BREAKING — CDC issues emergency guidance against blowing kisses
Vax makers mum on safety details, maybe because there’s not much about safety | Added Sept. 14
Americans are skeptical about a rushed vaccine. The New York Times is reporting that vaccine makers are not being forthcoming about the details of their safety trials. From the article, published Sunday:
Public confidence in the drug companies’ findings and federal regulators’ rigor will be critical in persuading Americans to get vaccinated. A growing number of people are skeptical. A poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation this past week found that nearly two-thirds of Americans — 62 percent — are worried that the Food and Drug Administration will rush to approve a coronavirus vaccine without making sure it is safe and effective, under political pressure from Mr. Trump.
Planet Waves FM: Healing from the Sept 11 incident: Reconciliation Through Truth | Added Sept. 13
The new Planet Waves FM looks into reconciliation through truth associated with the Sept. 11 incident. This is the fertile ground on which the Covid crisis is being grown.
Victoria, Australia still fucking nuts | Added Sept. 13
Victoria, home of Melbourne, is tossing its residents a few inches of leeway. The curfew will be shortened by an an hour, you will be able to go out for two hours a day, and the government will give everyone a stale cookie.
Introducing the Corbett Report — this gives a wide and far-reaching perspective on this new thing we are living with, the biosecurity state | Added Sept. 13
This video and the post below look more closely at the early history of SARS-CoV-2 | Added Sept. 13
Going deeper into the true origins of SARS-CoV-2 (this is nothing new) | Added Sept. 13
Simplest way to say this is that there’s a coronavirus industry, which is a public-private partnership. Covid-19 seems to be an analogue of or identical to RaBtCoV/4991, discovered 2012-2013 and then vanished from the literature, including from the original research into the sequence of SARS-CoV-2 in December and publication in January. It is not in the group of viruses listed as the closest relatives, though it is THE closest (if not identical) one known — and has been known for at least seven years. It is associated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. We are not just depending on this one article; this one article is representative of the fact pattern.
This is from an Asian website called WION News.
Fauci claims U.S. shouldn’t expect a return to normal until ‘maybe even towards the end of 2021’ | September 12
In an MSNBC interview yesterday, Dr. Anthony Fauci shared that life in the U.S. might not return to normal until towards the end of 2021. That is, according to Fauci, once a vaccine — even one produced this year — is fully distributed and a majority of the population is vaccinated against the coronavirus. Please see this for what it is. Fauci is chief of the largest vaccine company in existence, the NIAID.
The United States should not expect a return to normal until “well into 2021, maybe even towards the end of 2021,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, said on Friday.
In an interview with “Andrea Mitchell Reports” on MSNBC, Dr. Fauci addressed when people would most likely be able to do things again that they had done before the pandemic, such as going to an indoor movie theater “with impunity.” While a vaccine may be available by the end of the year, he said, “by the time you mobilize the distribution of the vaccinations, and you get the majority or more of the population vaccinated and protected, that’s likely not going to happen till the mid or end of 2021.”
Dr. Fauci was also asked about comments he had made on Thursday in a panel discussion at Harvard Medical School, where he said “we need to hunker down and get through this fall and winter because it’s not going to be easy.” Ms. Mitchell pointed out that this conflicted with what President Trump had said at the White House on the same day, that the country had “rounded the final turn” on the virus.
Protest against coronavirus lockdown in New Zealand | Added September 12
Auckland, New Zealand faced a protest of a few thousand people today in response to the country’s reimposed social distancing restrictions.
Large crowds of people rallied in Auckland on Saturday against the government’s social distancing restrictions imposed on the country’s largest city after an outbreak of the novel coronavirus last month.
Local television footage showed tightly packed crowds, with many people not wearing masks, with estimates of the attendance varying in reports between a thousand and a few thousand people.
“We are all here today because we believe we need to stand up for our rights,” the public Television New Zealand cited Jami-Lee Ross, the leader of the Advance New Zealand party, one of the organisers of the protest, as saying.
COVID-19 an Early Warning for Vaccine Mandates | Added September 11
Here is an excerpt from a Tenth Amendment Center article titled “COVID-19 an Early Warning for Vaccine Mandates”. It may be read in full at the link provided.
From the article:
The history of totalitarian regimes has shown that those who voice dissent early on are often viewed as loons or trouble makers and that, generally, it’s not until the regimes are at their worst that those early dissenters enjoy some restoration of their reputations. It’s ironic, of course, that it takes “things getting bad” for the mocking and loathing of those early dissenters to stop—with increased oppression serving as a silver lining of sorts for them.
A scenario along these lines is unfolding for those in the informed consent movement, who oppose vaccine mandates. For years, they’ve endured their share of mocking and loathing. However, recently, their concerns are receiving greater consideration by the public. This is happening because “things are getting bad” with regard to rights being stripped under the pretext of protecting us from infectious disease. Meanwhile, the path society has been on with regard to childhood vaccine mandates has taken a wider and deeper turn.
That turn was the arrival of COVID-19 along with the scientific shenanigans and repression of rights that have accompanied it. Below are three ways that the informed consent movement’s warnings are being validated by the manner in which “the powers that be” are responding to COVID-19.
1. The risks from COVID-19 are being exaggerated, like those of other infectious diseases.
Opponents of vaccine mandates have argued for years that the risks posed by many infectious diseases have been exaggerated in order to garner support for mandates. This argument has fallen on mostly disinterested ears.
This is because, for the most part, people can’t be reasoned out of beliefs they weren’t reasoned into. The beliefs held by most Americans about the risks posed by infectious diseases, and the track record of vaccines, were not reached through reason or research. They were drilled into them as purported historical fact while school children and the beliefs are deeply ingrained. The narrative is that the diseases the U.S. vaccinates against pose grave danger to us and that they were only controlled through the use of vaccines. (Contrary to popular belief, death rates from infectious diseases plummeted in the U.S. before the widespread use of vaccines.) The public has had very little interest in learning information that conflicts with this narrative.
CEO of London Heathrow calls for coronavirus test to be fast-tracked | Added September 11
John Holland Kaye, the CEO of London Heathrow airport, has called for the fast-tracking of a new testing system that utilizes AI. It is called the Virolens system and is being developed by British start-up iAbra.
A new screening device which can deliver COVID-19 test results in 20 seconds has launched.
The CEO of Heathrow Airport has called for the Virolens system, which has undergone a successful three-week trial at the leading air transport hub, to be fast-tracked around the UK.
The speed of tests conducted using the screening device, combined with its portability, could provide a major boost to transport hubs, offices and sporting and cultural events venues reopening after lockdown.
Virolens has been developed by British start–up iAbra, with design and manufacturing expertise from TT Electronics and technology powered by Intel.
Based on microscopic holographic imaging and artificial intelligence, the screening device uses a digital camera attached to a microscope to analyse saliva samples, with the data run through a computer which is trained to identify the virus from other cells, delivering an end result in just 20 seconds.
Timeline of what Trump has said and done about the coronavirus | Added September 11
NPR has developed a timeline of what President Trump has said and done over the past nine months regarding the coronavirus. The actual graphic is rather large and may be found at the link provided.
President Trump has delivered an ever-evolving message to the American public about the coronavirus pandemic.
The constant is the inconsistency. At times he has been in sync with the public health experts advising him on the response and with actions initiated by his administration. But often he has undercut or even contradicted his experts or White House policy.
Trump has gone from downplaying the risk early on, to overselling the availability of test kits, to encouraging strict social distancing measures, to questioning whether those measures were causing too much economic and emotional pain. He has claimed “total” authority and then insisted it’s really up to the states to manage the response.
As the message from public health experts became increasingly dire, Trump often accentuated the positive, saying he was trying to give Americans hope.
Anti-mask group sues the city of Tulsa | Added September 11
A group of business owners in Tulsa have filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Tulsa on the grounds that masks cause oxygen deprivation.
A Tulsa optometrist and some area business owners have filed a federal lawsuit to challenge the city of Tulsa’s mask mandate.
The group, led by Robert Zoellner and ThriveTime radio show host Clay Clark, named Mayor G.T. Bynum, Tulsa Health Department Executive Director Bruce Dart and the Tulsa City Council as defendants in the 33-page federal filing alleging masks cause oxygen deprivation.
The duo and others met in Jenks to announce the lawsuit that claims Tulsa’s mask ordinance creates an “oxygen deficient atmosphere” under Department of Labor guidelines. Occupational Safety and Health Administration guidelines define oxygen-deficient atmospheres as having below 19.5% oxygen content, according to the filing.
According to Zuckerburg Facebook will not remove anti-vaccine posts | Added September 10
While speaking on the issue of whether Facebook is driving partisanship and “hastening the destruction of society,” Mark Zuckerburg told Axios in a recent interview that Facebook will not remove anti-vaccine posts from the platform.
“It’s true that partisan content often has kind of a higher percent of people … engaging with it, commenting on it, liking it,” Zuckerberg said. “But I think it’s important to differentiate that from, broadly, what people are seeing and reading and learning about on our service.”
Also in the Axios interview, the Facebook chief said he would not remove anti-vaxxer posts, even as the leading virus experts express cautious optimism that a Covid-19 vaccination may become available late this year or early next year.
“If someone is pointing out a case where a vaccine caused harm or that they’re worried about it – you know, that’s a difficult thing to say from my perspective that you shouldn’t be allowed to express at all,” Zuckerberg said.
Long Island Rail Road commuters to face $50 fines for not wearing masks | Added September 10
This coming Monday, September 14, passengers riding Long Island Rail Road trains, subways and buses will be fined $50 if they refuse to wear a mask.
First it was a matter of respect, now it is a matter of enforcement.
Those riding on Long Island Rail Road trains, subways and buses, where bare faces are currently banned as it is, will now face a $50 fine if they further refuse to wear a mask, according to transit agency officials and Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
But those experiencing enforcement from this policy change will be far and few between, New York City Transit President Sarah Feinberg says, as surveys show that mask compliance is high and those who do not have a mask accept one when offered.
“Transit is key to people coming back to work and coming back to the city, so even if it’s just one or two people in the system, they do not have the right to endanger the lives of anyone else and frankly they don’t have the right to scare anyone away from the system,” Feinberg said. “This is really a last resort for the very few people who refuse to wear a mask when offered and it will be enforced by the MTA police and we’ll be dependent on NYPD for enforcement as well.”
Researchers ‘puzzled’ over lack of coronavirus outbreaks throughout Africa | Added September 10
One of the major concerns early on with the coronavirus was how countries throughout Africa would fare. According to BGR, who in turn refers to a BBC report, Africa is “doing better than every other continent, both when it comes to the number of cases and the number of deaths.” Still in someplaces things have not returned to normal. For example in Kenya classrooms are still closed and are not expected to open again until sometime in January due to a rise in cases in August.
From BGR:
The novel coronavirus has infected more than 26.35 million people, with just four countries accounting for over 15 million cases. They are the United States, Brazil, India and Russia — the same four that have been at the top for months. The US surprised the world when it rose to the top spot in multiple COVID-19 statistics, both for the total number of confirmed cases and the number of deaths. Since then, no other country has surpassed America.
But scientists who are studying the pandemic have also identified another surprise of the pandemic. Some expected the African continent to be affected most heavily by the virus, but that wasn’t the case. South Africa stands out when it comes to the number of total cases, with nearly 631,000 infections. But fewer than 15,000 people have died of COVID-19. These figures are puzzling scientists looking to understand how the virus behaves and how it can be beaten.
The hypothesis that poverty should have a significant impact on the spread of the virus doesn’t stand when it comes to the entire African continent. Developing countries like Brazil and India showed that the virus couldn’t be contained once it reached densely populated, but poor, neighborhoods.
Experts expected the same thing to happen in Africa, but it didn’t. If anything, Africa is doing better than any other continent, both when it comes to cases and casualties. As BBC News explains, even if those numbers are significantly underreported, Africa still has it much better than other continents right now.
New details on AstraZeneca vaccine trial participant’s suspected adverse reaction | Added September 9
Further information has been released regarding the adverse reaction a U.K. participant of AstraZeneca’s vaccine trial is suspected to have experienced. The participant reportedly has experienced symptoms consistent with transverse myletis: inflammation of the spinal cord.
An independet board of experts will work to determine whether “the participant’s condition was linked to the vaccine or merely coincidental.”
Mentioned further on in the article below, “there has been some past speculation that vaccines might be able to cause transverse myelitis” but according to Dr. Felicia Chow, a neurologist at the University of California, “there’s never been really any clear-cut, definitive proof.”
“Should other participants in the AstraZeneca trials develop symptoms consistent with transverse myelitis, ‘that would raise these questions again,’ Dr. Chow said.”
AstraZeneca, a front-runner company in the race to develop a coronavirus vaccine, on Tuesday announced a global pause in late-stage trials for its product because of a suspected adverse event.
Several individuals familiar with the event, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that an individual in Britain who was enrolled in a Phase 2/3 trial had experienced symptoms consistent with a condition called transverse myelitis, or inflammation of the spinal cord.
The trial’s suspension will allow an independent board of experts to determine whether the participant’s condition was linked to the vaccine or merely coincidental, said Saad Omer, a vaccine expert at Yale University.
‘Billionaires won corona’ by Anand Giridharadas | Added September 9
Anand Giridharadas writing for The.Ink has penned a piece on a yet to be published Oxfam report that investigated “plutocratic profiteering from the [coronavirus] pandemic.” Snippets of the forthcoming report may be found in the article.
Imagine you’re just finishing your shift as a picker at an Amazon warehouse.
All day long you’ve been carting items for other people, under giant letters on the wall that spell “work hard. have fun. make history.” The pandemic has been hard on you. You can tell from what people are buying that it’s been hard on just about everybody. But as you come off shift, you get life-changing news.
Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon, has decided to give you a bonus. In fact, he has decided to give every single employee of Amazon — some 876,000 people — a one-time pandemic bonus. A $105,000 bonus. Serious money. The kind of money that, if invested over a couple of decades, would give you a real retirement nest egg.
The crazy thing? The money he is giving you — it’s merely the extra wealth he gained during the pandemic, wealth that you built. After he has paid out those $92 billion in bonuses, he will still be comfortably off. In fact, as rich as he was before coronatime.
Of course, Bezos isn’t going to do this. But the fact that he could is one of the striking findings of a new report from Oxfam on plutocratic profiteering from the pandemic.
Donald Trump admitted to downplaying the threat of the coronavirus | Added September 9
In a series of interviews with journalist Bob Woodward, Donald Trump admitted to intentionally playing down the threat of the coronavirus. Further details are set to be featured in Woodward’s upcoming book.
President Trump acknowledged to the journalist Bob Woodward that he had knowingly played down the coronavirus earlier this year even though he was aware it was “deadly” and vastly more serious than the seasonal flu.
“This is deadly stuff,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Woodward on Feb. 7 in one of a series of interviews he conducted with the president for his upcoming book, “Rage.” The Washington Post and CNN were given advance copies of the book and published details on Wednesday.
“You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” Trump said. “And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flu.”
That was a vastly different story than Mr. Trump was telling the public.
“I wanted to always play it down,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Woodward on March 19. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”
Astrazeneca coronavirus vaccine study put on hold after a suspected adverse reaction in a U.K. participant | Added September 8
In another story from Stat News Astrazeneca has put their coronavirus vaccine trial on hold after a participant in the U.K. was suspected to have suffered an adverse reaction. It is currently unclear how long the hold will last.
From the article:
A large, Phase 3 study testing a Covid-19 vaccine being developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford at dozens of sites across the U.S. has been put on hold due to a suspected serious adverse reaction in a participant in the United Kingdom.
A spokesperson for AstraZeneca, a front-runner in the race for a Covid-19 vaccine, said in a statement that the company’s “standard review process triggered a pause to vaccination to allow review of safety data.”
It was not immediately clear who placed the hold on the trial, though it is possible it was placed voluntarily by AstraZeneca and not ordered by any regulatory agency. The nature of the adverse reaction and when it happened were also not immediately known, though the participant is expected to recover, according to an individual familiar with the matter.
Coronavirus vaccine developers pledge to ‘make the safety and well-being of vaccinated individuals’ their top priority | Added September 8
On September 6 we shared a story on how the major coronavirus vaccine develpers in the U.S. announced plans to reassure the public that they would not be pressured by the Trump administration into releasing an unsafe vaccine. Today those companies released their statement.
A group of nine leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies pledged on Tuesday to only seek approval for Covid-19 vaccines demonstrated to be safe and effective, an apparent attempt to provide public reassurance despite the widely held view that the Covid-19 vaccine development process is politically tainted.
In a statement, the companies pledged to “make the safety and well-being of vaccinated individuals our top priority.” The vaccine developers said they would continue to impose high ethical and scientific standards on the vaccine-testing process, and apply for government authorizations only “after demonstrating safety and efficacy through a Phase 3 clinical study.”
The group of nine companies includes Moderna, AstraZeneca, and the ongoing collaboration between Pfizer and BioNTech — three of the Covid-19 vaccine efforts that have advanced into late-stage clinical trials, and whose vaccine candidates are likely to be considered for emergency approvals in the coming months. Top executives at Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Sanofi, and Novavax also signed the pledge.
Researchers propose theory that masks might work as a ‘crude’ vaccine | Added September 8
The New York Times published an article today highlighting a theory about masks that is making rounds in the research community. The idea is that masks “expose the wearer to just enough of the [coronavirus] to spark a protective immune response,] and thus would work similarly to a vaccine. The article notes that this is unproven and would be difficult to prove.
More from the article:
As the world awaits the arrival of a safe and effective coronavirus vaccine, a team of researchers has come forward with a provocative new theory: that masks might help to crudely immunize some people against the virus.
The unproven idea, described in a commentary published Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, is inspired by the age-old concept of variolation, the deliberate exposure to a pathogen to generate a protective immune response. First tried against smallpox, the risky practice eventually fell out of favor, but paved the way for the rise of modern vaccines.
Masked exposures are no substitute for a bona fide vaccine. But data from animals infected with the coronavirus, as well as insights gleaned from other diseases, suggest that masks, by cutting down on the number of viruses that encounter a person’s airway, might reduce the wearer’s chances of getting sick. And if a small number of pathogens still slip through, the researchers argue, these might prompt the body to produce immune cells that can remember the virus and stick around to fight it off again.
Mass. stops Boston lab from coronavirus testing after 383 false positives found | Added September 8
The state has stopped coronavirus testing at a Boston laboratory after investigators found more than 300 positive tests there were actually negative.
The Massachusetts Department of Public Health said Tuesday it started looking at Orig3n’s lab in the Seaport in early August because of “an unusually high positivity rate of tests” there.
Testing was then stopped at Orig3n on August 8.
Investigators re-tested samples at an independent lab and found at least 383 in Massachusetts were “erroneously positive.”
“We also retested the affected samples both internally and at an external reference lab, and communicated those results to our clients. We then put a plan in place to prevent future incidents,” Orig3n CEO Robin Smith said in a statement Tuesday. “We’re currently working with the state of MA to finalize steps that will enable us to resume testing in our Boston lab.”
Orig3n, which is federally certified and licensed by the state of Massachusetts, now has until Monday, September 14 to submit a plan to fix the problems that led to the false results or face sanctions.
According to DPH, approximately 60 nursing and rest homes are or have been clients of Orig3n.
Smith said their clients also include schools and private and public employers.
U.S. facing a shortage of monkeys for vaccine testing | Added September 8
The United States is currently a shortage of monkeys to be used in challenge trials for testing a coronavirus vaccine. Challenge trials are when a subject is deliberately infected with a disease in order to test a vaccine against it. As the article mentions further on, challenge trials in humans (and animals for that matter) are controversial. As we have previously covered, the idea for a human challenge trial in the development of a coronvirus vaccine has been floated by a number of developers.
In the past seven months, more than 100 COVID-19 vaccines, therapies, and drugs have been pushed into development. But for any of these treatments to make it to humans, they usually have to face another animal first: a monkey. And here, scientists in the United States say they are facing a bottleneck. There just aren’t enough monkeys to go around.
“Nationally, there is basically a big shortage,” says Koen Van Rompay, an infectious-disease scientist at the California National Primate Research Center. Primate research in the U.S. is expensive and often controversial, making it challenging even in normal circumstances. The pandemic has made acquiring monkeys even harder. “We can’t find any rhesus any longer. They’ve completely disappeared,” says Mark Lewis, the CEO of Bioqual, a contract research organization that specializes in animal testing. Scientists in academia and industry alike are all competing for a limited pool of monkeys.
The reasons for the shortage are threefold. First, COVID-19 has created extraordinary demand for monkeys. Second, this coincided with a massive drop in supply from China, which provided 60 percent of the nearly 35,000 monkeys imported to the U.S. last year and which shut off exports after COVID-19 hit. And third, these pandemic-related events are exacerbating preexisting monkey shortfalls. A 2018 National Institutes of Health report had found that NIH-funded national primate centers would be unable to meet future demand and specifically discussed a “strategic monkey reserve” to provide “surge capability for unpredictable disease outbreaks.” A disease outbreak is upon us; the strategic monkey reserve was never created.
Mass. health officials recommend mandatory student vaccinations be extended to teachers | Added September 8
A little over two weeks ago public health officials in Massachusetts announced that flu vaccinations would be mandatory for students by December 31. Now health officials have suggested that the mandate should apply to teachers as well who so far have not been required to be vaccinated for the flu.
As Massachusetts health officials mandate that students get the flu vaccine by the end of the year, their teachers at the front of the classroom are not required to receive the shot, an exception health experts say leaves a gap in the effort to protect the school population.
The state Department of Public Health should extend this mandate for educators as well, medical experts tell the Herald.
“If you are going to mandate a vaccine for children, it should be mandated for teachers as well in order to most adequately protect the population at the school,” said Mount Sinai School of Medicine’s Nicole Avena.
Coronavirus vaccine espionage continues to escalate | Added September 6
We’ve previously covered stories regarding spying and hacking in relation to coronavirus vaccine research. Now it seems that everybody is spying on everybody — not that that wasn’t the case before — and China and Russia have stepped up their efforts to steal research from U.S. institutions.
Chinese intelligence hackers were intent on stealing coronavirus vaccine data, so they looked for what they believed would be an easy target. Instead of simply going after pharmaceutical companies, they conducted digital reconnaissance on the University of North Carolina and other schools doing cutting-edge research.
They were not the only spies at work. Russia’s premier intelligence service, the S.V.R., targeted vaccine research networks in the United States, Canada and Britain, espionage efforts that were first detected by a British spy agency monitoring international fiber optic cables.
Iran, too, has drastically stepped up its attempts to steal information about vaccine research, and the United States has increased its own efforts to track the espionage of its adversaries and shore up its defenses.
In short, every major spy service around the globe is trying to find out what everyone else is up to.
Coronavirus vaccine developers plan to make joint pledge on vaccine safety | Added September 6
The major coronavirus vaccine developers in the U.S. have announced that they plan to issue a statement and intend to reassure the public that they, the companies, will not approve a vaccine prematurely at the behest of the Trump administration.
A group of drug companies competing with one another to be among the first to develop coronavirus vaccines are planning to pledge early next week that they will not release any vaccines that do not follow rigorous efficacy and safety standards, according to representatives of three of the companies.
The statement, which has not yet been finalized, is meant to reassure the public that the companies will not seek a premature approval of vaccines under political pressure from the Trump administration. President Trump has pushed for a vaccine to be available by October — just before the presidential election — and a growing number of scientists, regulators and public health experts have expressed concern over what they see as a pattern of political arm-twisting by the Trump administration in its efforts to combat the virus.
The companies’ joint statement was planned for early next week, but it may be released before then after its existence was made public on Friday by The Wall Street Journal. The manufacturers that are said to have signed the letter include Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi
New data suggest that social distancing and reopening haven’t determined the spread.
Photo: kamil krzaczynski/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
From The Wall Street Journal: The Failed Experiment of Covid Lockdowns | Added September 5
By Donald L. Luskin | Link to original
Six months into the Covid-19 pandemic, the U.S. has now carried out two large-scale experiments in public health—first, in March and April, the lockdown of the economy to arrest the spread of the virus, and second, since mid-April, the reopening of the economy. The results are in. Counterintuitive though it may be, statistical analysis shows that locking down the economy didn’t contain the disease’s spread and reopening it didn’t unleash a second wave of infections.
Considering that lockdowns are economically costly and create well-documented long-term public-health consequences beyond Covid, imposing them appears to have been a large policy error. At the beginning, when little was known, officials acted in ways they thought prudent. But now evidence proves that lockdowns were an expensive treatment with serious side effects and no benefit to society.
TrendMacro, my analytics firm, tallied the cumulative number of reported cases of Covid-19 in each state and the District of Columbia as a percentage of population, based on data from state and local health departments aggregated by the Covid Tracking Project. We then compared that with the timing and intensity of the lockdown in each jurisdiction. That is measured not by the mandates put in place by government officials, but rather by observing what people in each jurisdiction actually did, along with their baseline behavior before the lockdowns. This is captured in highly detailed anonymized cellphone tracking data provided by Google and others and tabulated by the University of Maryland’s Transportation Institute into a “Social Distancing Index.”
Measuring from the start of the year to each state’s point of maximum lockdown—which range from April 5 to April 18—it turns out that lockdowns correlated with a greater spread of the virus. States with longer, stricter lockdowns also had larger Covid outbreaks. The five places with the harshest lockdowns—the District of Columbia, New York, Michigan, New Jersey and Massachusetts—had the heaviest caseloads.
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Elderly Hong Kong man arrested after using Covid-19 test samples as umbrella | Added September 5
Over in Hong Kong an 82-year-old man was arrested after he took a box of coronavirus test samples to use as an umbrella — he didn’t want to get wet. The box ended up missing for several hours and the people who submitted those samples ended up having to retest.
More from South China Morning Post:
An 82-year-old Hongkonger stole a box of coronavirus test samples from a collection point to use as an umbrella, before dumping it in a nearby car park.
The man took the deep-throat saliva specimens from a general outpatient clinic on Po Ning Road, in Tseung Kwan O, on Thursday afternoon, but the box was not located for several hours and people who submitted samples will have to be retested.
Police finally found it at Hau Tak Estate at 7.45pm, and subsequently arrested the man on suspicion of theft.
The clinic, which acts as a collection point for respiratory samples under the government’s enhanced laboratory surveillance scheme, discovered they were missing around 1pm, when it was raining heavily.
‘King’ Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania sued over coronavirus mandates | Added September 4
Meanwhile in Pennsylvania, Governor Tom Wolf and other state officials are being sued by two couples over the state’s face mask mandate and contact tracing program. Here’s a sample from the court documents containing the couples’ complaint about His Majesty’s abuse of power; the full document is provided in the linked article:
“Defendant Wolf has assumed the power to lord over the lives of Pennsylvanians like a king, mandating restrictions that deprive citizens, including Plaintiffs, of their fundamental liberties. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has ratified this “monarchial innovation.” The citizens of Pennsylvania have no recourse but to seek relief from this tyranny through the United States Constitution and this Court, the guardian of the freedoms guaranteed by that historically important document.”
Two Pennsylvania couples have filed a federal lawsuit against Gov. Tom Wolf and other top state officials, claiming the state’s face mask mandate and contact tracing program are signs of “tyranny” that strip them of their Constitutional rights.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. Middle District Court of Pennsylvania by Chad Parker, Rebecca Kenwick-Parker and Mark and Donna Redman. Pennsylvania Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine and Attorney General Josh Shapiro also are named as defendants.
“For many individuals, including plaintiffs, a face mask is a symbol of oppression and an attempt by the government to control the citizenry,” the suit claims.
Health officials in U.S. feel unprepared to distribute a coronavirus vaccine | Added September 4
Amid calls from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for state’s to prepare to distribute a coronavirus vaccine by the end of this year, health officials are concerned that a lack of funding and the growing mistrust in a coronavirus vaccine will make such an effort difficult.
The CDC’s director, Dr. Robert Redfield, also wrote to governors last week about the urgent need to have vaccine distribution sites up and running by Nov. 1. Redfield asked governors to expedite the process for setting up these facilities, McClatchy first reported.
But health departments that have been underfunded for decades say they currently lack the staff, money and tools to educate people about COVID-19 vaccines and then to distribute, administer and track doses to some 330 million people. Nor do they know when — or if — they’ll get federal aid to help them do that.
“There is a tremendous amount of work to be done to be prepared for this vaccination program and it will not be complete by Nov. 1,” said Dr. Kelly Moore of the Immunization Action Coalition, a national vaccine education and advocacy organization based in St. Paul, Minn. “States will need more financial resources than they have now.”
Mercola article on potential for virus to be a manmade chimera | Added September 4
This is about an Italian book on the chimera, including data about lab accidents. It brings in the Pasteur and North Carolina connections. Remember Judith says North Carolina and Montagnier says that genetically, the virus has the look of something engineered.
I’ve been reading Mercola for 15 years and I’ve never found a problem with one of his articles. I also know his GF and therefore know the legal review that goes into these pieces. A lot of money is at stake (his business) and shareholders demand the highest standards to protect their investment.
We are tracking the ‘chimera’ issue and I see no contradictions to anything we have read previously, only enhancements in detail.
Corporate Crime Reporter, a newsletter for attorneys and prosecutors, is also tracking the issue.
Swiss Policy Research update | Added September 4
Covid 19 News tracks the work of Swiss Policy Research, which does a good job of summing up worldwide data. They issue a monthly report that covers many angles of the “pandemic.” Here is the newest one, for September 2020.
Video from GreenMedInfo.com on Covid-19 death recording manipulation | Added September 3
Video description: In this video, a former death recording clerk offers her thoughts on the manipulative COVID-19 death recording directive from the National Vital Statistics System. This directive coaches physicians and vital record registrars to emphasise COVID-19 death records by ignoring previous standardised practices in coding deaths towards the long term underlying health condition in those patients that do have a significant underlying condition that would normally be listed as the underlying cause of death.
CDC Director Robert Redfield on drug overdoses and suicides | Added September 3
In a July 17 Buck Institute webinar Robert Redfield, the director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, made statements that seemed to suggest that suicides and drug overdoses (particularly among high school students) were higher than deaths from Covid-19.
Here is the statement from CNN’s coverage of the webinar:
The CDC is especially concerned about the well-being of high school students, Redfield said.
“We’re seeing, sadly, far greater suicides now than we are deaths from Covid,” he said. “We’re seeing far greater deaths from drug overdose, that are above excess, than we had as background, than we are seeing deaths from Covid.”
More information on the CDC’s vaccine preparations | Added September 3
Provided below is a New York Times article that takes a closer look at planning documents from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The planning documents relate to the two unnamed vaccines (expected to be from Moderna and Pfizer) that the CDC prompted states to prepare for distribution in October or November.
In planning documents sent last week to public health agencies around the country, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention described preparations for two coronavirus vaccines they refer to simply as Vaccine A and Vaccine B. The technical details of the vaccines, including the time between doses and their storage temperatures, match well with the two vaccines furthest along in clinical tests in the United States, made by Moderna and Pfizer.
Here’s what you need to know about how the vaccines work, how they’re being tested and how they might be rolled out to the public — if, and it’s still a big if, they are proven to work.
How do these vaccines work?
Vaccines can take many different forms. The most common in use today contain inactivated viruses, weakened live viruses, or pieces of proteins. Moderna and Pfizer are testing a new kind of vaccine that has never before been approved for use by people. It contains genetic molecules called messenger RNA. The messenger RNA is injected into muscle cells, which treat it like instructions for building a protein — a protein found on the surface of the coronavirus. If all goes well, the proteins stimulate the immune system and result in long-lasting protection against the virus.
CDC tells states to prepare to distribute coronavirus vaccine by November | Added September 2
Following talk of a vaccine release around the U.S. election, the Center’s for Disease Control and Prevention have told state health officials to prepare to distribute a vaccine in November.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has notified public health officials in all 50 states and five large cities to prepare to distribute a coronavirus vaccine to health care workers and other high-risk groups as soon as late October or early November.
The new C.D.C. guidance is the latest sign of an accelerating race for a vaccine against a disease that has killed more than 184,000 Americans. The documents were sent out last week, the same day that President Trump said in his speech to the Republican National Convention that a vaccine might arrive before the end of the year.
Over the past week, both Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert, and Dr. Stephen Hahn, who heads the Food and Drug Administration, have said in interviews with news organizations that a vaccine could be available for certain groups before clinical trials have been completed, if the data were overwhelmingly positive.
U.S. government declines to participate in global effort to develop a coronavirus vaccine | Added September 2
Trump Administration has refused to join an international effort co-led by the World Health Organization to develop a coronavirus vaccine despite warnings against “vaccine nationalism.”
The White House has chosen to focus on Operation Warp Speed with the intention of developing and manufacturing 300 million doses of a vaccine by January of next year; there has also been talk of plans to approve a vaccine before the U.S. election.
The US government has said that it will not participate in a global initiative to develop, manufacture and equitably distribute a vaccine for Covid-19 because the effort is co-led by the World Health Organization.
The Covid-19 Vaccines Global Access Facility (Covax) is a plan developed by the WHO, along with the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and is meant to accelerate the development and testing of a vaccine and work toward distributing it equally. The WHO announced last month that more than 170 countries were in talks to participate in Covax.
Asked to confirm a report in the Washington Post that the US will not be joining Covax, a White House spokesman, Judd Deere, said in a statement: “Under President Trump’s leadership, vaccine and therapeutic research, development, and trials have advanced at unprecedented speed to deliver groundbreaking, effective medicines driven by data and safety and not held back by government red tape.
New studies published on efficacy of steroid treatments for Covid-19 | Added September 2
A collection of studies have been published that explored the efficacy of three inexpensive steroids in treating Covid-19. One of those steroids was dexamethasone which initially received coverage in June.
Some physicians immediately took to using dexamethasone in treating Covid-19, while others were leery of the initial trial results and concerned with whether it was safe to administer to patients with mild symptoms.
Following release of the new data, the World Health Organization on Wednesday strongly recommended steroids for treatment of patients with severe or critical Covid-19 worldwide. But the agency recommended against giving the drugs to patients with mild disease.
The new studies include an analysis that pooled data from seven randomized clinical trials evaluating three steroids in over 1,700 patients. The study concluded that each of the three drugs reduced the risk of death.
That paper and three related studies were published in the journal JAMA, along with an editorial describing the research as an “important step forward in the treatment of patients with Covid-19.”
FDA planning to use outside experts to review coronavirus vaccines | Added September 2
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is plans to meet with independent groups of experts to review the progress of current vaccine candidates.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration will organize meetings with independent group of experts to review data of coronavirus vaccine candidates and advice the agency, FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn said on Wednesday.
“The meetings will reinforce the transparency of the process as FDA reviews data from trials now underway,” Hahn said in a post on Twitter.
The statement comes after U.S. President Donald Trump last month accused members, without evidence, of a so-called “deep state” working within the FDA of complicating efforts to test COVID-19 vaccines in order to delay results until after the Nov. 3 presidential election.
Biohacking collective attempting to produce DIY coronavirus vaccine | Added September 1
Mentioned further along in the New York Times article posted below is the story of a group of biohackers who proposed to develop a DIY coronavirus vaccine back in March. Here is the story the Time’s linked to regarding that group’s efforts.
A collective of biohackers has begun circulating a document proposing a plan to create, test, and distribute a vaccine to battle SARS-CoV-2. To get started, they say they need “between $10-25k.”
Reason’s Zach Weissmueller sat down with the lead biologist on the project, who requested anonymity due to fear of retribution from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Reason has verified his identity, as well as that of his business partner and a Silicon Valley investor who has confirmed his interest in the project.
The anonymous biologist has worked in the commercial biotech sector and has long been involved in the “biohacker” community, a grassroots movement of professional and amateur scientists who experiment with genetic engineering in their homes and community labs. People like Josiah Zayner, founder of The Odin, which distributes kits allowing anyone to experiment with the gene-editing tool CRISPR.
Member of this community have created glowing yeast by inserting jellyfish genes, injected themselves with homemade vaccines, attempted to reverse-engineer patented pharmaceuticals, and tried to genetically engineer dogs—all without seeking FDA approval.
NYT: ‘Some scientists are working on, and giving themselves, D.I.Y. vaccines’ | Added September 1
In April, more than three months before any coronavirus vaccine would enter large clinical trials, the mayor of Friday Harbor, a picturesque island town in Washington State, invited a microbiologist friend to vaccinate him.
The exchange, between Mayor Farhad Ghatan and Johnny Stine, who runs North Coast Biologics, a Seattle biotech company, occurred on the mayor’s Facebook page, to the horror of several town residents following it.
Mr. Stine is far from the only scientist creating experimental coronavirus vaccines, which may be for themselves, family, friends and other interested parties. Dozens of scientists around the world have done it, with wildly varying methods, affiliations and claims.
The most impressively credentialed effort is the Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative, or RaDVaC, which boasts the famous Harvard geneticist George Church among its 23 listed collaborators. (The research, however, is not happening on Harvard’s campus.)
BREAKING — CDC issues emergency guidance against blowing kisses | Added September 1
ATLANTA (CNN) — Infectious disease experts have issued an advisory against blowing kisses, saying they have discovered a new means of transmission for the novel coronavirus.
Tuesday morning, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a Level 1 Advisory — their highest — urging all Americans, especially young women, to stop blowing kisses. Technically known as “remote osculation,” CDC said this is a particularly dangerous practice because the gesture is aimed directly at another person.
“It’s very dangerous,” said Dr. Deborah Birx, who is on the President’s Task Force for the Prevention of Covid-19 Disease. “You think it’s just sweet and innocent, but it’s not. It’s like killing people. You may as well just stab them and get it over with.”
CDC said that remote osculation may be safe at distances beyond 25 feet, though even that is risky, as the love gets all over the place. Men have been known to respond to a blown kiss at a distance of more than half a mile, according to experts.
This is because the virus particles attach to the love particles, which can carry a great distance and are extremely persistent, according to the experts.
It is believed that plexiglass obstacles would help prevent the spread of covid by kiss-blowing. Large sheets of the transparent plastic are being installed on every street in New York City.
According to Franz Geilermann, who sits on CDC’s elite Affection Disease Prevention Panel, remote osculation spreads a cloud of love and other material, which is believed to cause Covid and which can be detected in molecular quantities by the polymerase chain reaction (PCR).
Anthony Fauci, who is Italian, said that the ban on kiss-blowing was probably taking things too far. “I haven’t said anything till now, but really? I’m all for safety but this is probably a low risk activity”
Florida severs ties with Quest Diagnostics after lab dumped unusable testing data on them | Added September 1
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has ordered that the state’s Department of Health and the Florida Division of Emergency Management sever ties with Quest Diagnostics — one of the labs responsible for the state’s coronavirus testing — after the lab uploaded 75,000 backlogged test results in a single day.
Some results of the results were as old as five months. As a result of the lag in data, Florida’s reported positivity rate jumped from 5.9% to 6.8%.
From the International Business Times:
The Florida Department of Health and the Florida Division of Emergency Management announced that they are severing all ties with Quest Diagnostics, the lab that performs its coronavirus testing, after it reported a backlog of nearly 75,000 test results dating back as far as five months.
The decision to stop working with Quest came under the direction of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The reporting backlog caused nearly 75,000 test results to be uploaded in a single day, significantly affecting the state’s coronavirus reporting numbers.
The Florida Department of Health said the reporting lag would have “historical significance” but “little impact on the status of the pandemic today.”
The alleged failure by Quest is a violation of Florida law, which requires COVID-19 reporting in a timely manner. Quest said all individuals that have been tested were notified of their results, but a dump of test result data would affect reporting results.
NYC to delay start of school | Added September 1
The opening of schools in New York City’s public school system will be delayed until Sept. 21.
New York City’s public school system, the country’s largest, will delay the opening of classes by 11 days to Sept. 21 under an agreement with unions that pressed for stronger coronavirus safety measures, Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Tuesday.
The agreement, which comes as school systems across the country wrestle with the pandemic and pressure from the Trump administration to reopen school buildings, would maintain the city’s plan for a mix of in-class and remote learning.
“What we’ve agreed to is to make sure that the health measures are in place, to make sure there is time for the appropriate preparation for our educators,” de Blasio said at a briefing.