Dear Friend and Reader:
Virgo is the sign of healing. We could weave many yarns around how it evolved that way from a primary association with agriculture and food storage, though it has. Virgo, a cousin of the 6th house, represents practitioners, treatment spaces, and is worth studying for all matters of health and wellness.
Virgo’s association with food is a reminder to “let food be thy medicine.” In my experience, the food we eat is the single most significant determiner of wellness.
The expression has a second part, though these days, it’s not safe to “let medicine be thy food,” since it was probably made in a lab in China, and you don’t know the safety or cross-reaction data. (My guest on Friday’s Planet Waves FM, Rebecca Culshaw, will be talking about off-label use of pharmaceuticals.)
Chiron is Associated with Virgo and Sagittarius
When Chiron was discovered in 1977, and named for the first surgeon and teacher of medicine in Greek mythology, it became associated with Virgo. For more than 46 years, this association has gradually strengthened.
Though I prefer not to use the term “planetary ruler” with modern discoveries, Chiron has a strong affinity to Virgo — one of its two most important facets.
The other is the questing aspect of Chiron, which has a strong affinity to Sagittarius. These two primary and equally important expressions of Chiron are the topic of another article.
Speaking of Chiron, Mars in Libra is about to make an opposition to it. This happens once every two years, and is the full expression of both planets. It makes available a kind of spiritual warrior quality that we need dearly today.
Current Events in Virgo — New Moon and Mercury Direct
For Thursday and Friday we have back-to-back events in Virgo: one is the New Moon and the other is Mercury stationing direct. These are fleeting events, describing immediate developments and relationship situations. But they gain extra emphasis for happening close to one another; they are part of the same idea.
As this happens, we are witnessing a national PR push for both “a new variant of covid” and also a new “vaccine” that to me describes the further corruption of medicine. Before I look at the facts involved, let’s check out an ultra-simplified version of the New Moon chart.
The diagram shows three objects in Virgo, and three in Pisces. In Virgo are Mercury (Virgo’s traditional planet) stationing direct, plus the Moon and the Sun at the New Moon.
Events in Virgo seem ordinary enough — a New Moon, which happens there once a year; and Mercury direct in one of its own signs, which happens occasionally. However, Mercury retrograde represents a question rather than a statement. If the question is not addressed, there’s likely to be a misunderstanding.
Retrograde Mercury is also an essential time for reflection and self-inquiry. In Virgo, the message is to stick to the details, and get them right. One essential quality of Mercury moving to direct motion is that it can come with a perk of information.
At its best, Virgo is inspired by knowledge and curiosity. It’s one of the most important signs representing reasoning and curiosity.
Slow-Movers Aligned in Pisces
Developments in Virgo have counterparts in Pisces. There are three slow-moving objects moving through the last sign. Across the dial in Pisces are Saturn, Nessus and Neptune. You can see the oppositions drawn in the purple lines that cross the Solar System. The Earth is in the middle of the diagram, not shown.
The most recent arrival of the three to Pisces is Saturn, which changed signs from Aquarius in March. Despite its unfriendly reputation, Saturn is the saving grace here; the boundary; the reality principle asking to be invoked.
Next is Nessus, which arrived in Pisces in 2014. Nessus is a centaur cousin of Chiron, with a distinct dark side. This is related to revenge, transgressions, the danger of “gray-areas,” and the consequences of a long chain of events.
The story of Nessus involves the conveyance of poison both as the coating on an arrow, and its transmission in the form of a “sexual fidelity potion.” With Nessus, the karma returns to its source, though this can take a while. Unremembered events set things in motion, though the boomerang — or the poison — eventually comes home.
Then there is Neptune, which entered Pisces in 2011. Neptune in Pisces is the invisible whale in the room of society. It represents the current obsessions with fantasy, virtual reality, and points to both anesthesia and denial. Cannabis, the ultimate Neptune in Pisces state of mind, is now part of mainstream American society.
Neptune is the most sublime essence in astrology, and it’s also the easiest to corrupt. The same quality that inspires poetry also describes pernicious liars. What inspires musicians to compose also can lead them to use heroin.
When Planets Oppose Neptune or Nessus
When planets oppose Neptune, that’s a warning that the floor is slippery, and the search for truth (such as it exists) is libel to slip. In this setup, the Moon and the Sun are opposing Neptune. They are also opposing Nessus — the New Moon is opposite the midpoint of the two N planets in Pisces.
By the way — the definition of a centaur is that it crosses one or more orbits of other planets. Nessus crosses the orbit of Neptune and is similar to it. Both have associations with toxins and deception. And while you may not think of Nessus as inspiring music, actually, most of the sagas you hear about on popular radio have roots in the Nessus myth: jealousy, deceit and “he/she done me wrong.”
Relating this to the Virgo New Moon, the chart is vibrating with caution to meticulously evaluate all claims, particularly related to food and medicine. The Moon and the Sun are soaked in Neptune/Nessus, and Mercury is still retrograde (and has yet to tip its hand).
As this opposition is at full strength, we are witnessing the attempted rollout of Covid 2.0. Here in the Northeast, everywhere you go, people are “masking up.” Now we are told we have to wear an N-95 to walk down the block. The image below gives an example of the PR campaign pushing the gullible into this.
A headline across the full-width of a daily newspaper is usually reserved for something like the president getting shot.
By the way, there are 15,000,000 claimed “variants” of the claimed SARS-CoV-2 (“covid” is not a virus, it’s a claimed disease with no defined set of symptoms). The article does not say that. There is also no original “copy” of the claimed virus to match against. So this is like someone claiming to be your 38th cousin from Ethiopia showing up for Thanksgiving and asking to move in.
By the way — the “health officials” referenced in the sub-header means the New York State Department of Health. I have covered these devoted public servants on and off since 1983. They are the ones who let people live next to a hazardous waste dump, and put young students in dioxin-contaminated dormitories. And when people get sick, as a result, they blame a virus.
Just two weeks later, The New York Times was leading the way announcing the new shot. The author is someone known personally to me — previously, she was a shill for the wholly flawed, never once validated “covid test.” I know her well enough to know that she writes exactly what she is told to write.
CDC recommends the shot for everyone aged six months or older? Really? No qualifications, warnings, or contra-indications? No mention of holding off if siblings have died of vaccine reactions? There are few things in this world that I deem more outrageous than injecting a six-month old with anything at all.
None of these outlets even meekly suggest that there is a safety problem. No mention that throughout 2020 it was reported hundreds of times that “covid” has nothing whatsoever to do with children.
The next day, MIT’s Technology Review clarifies: this is the seasonal shot — “this autumn’s covid vaccines.” Who didn’t see that one coming?
If these were reliable sources of information serving the public good, they would mention the table below, which contains reports of disease and death to the CDC following “vaccination” from 1990 through 2023. The CDC releases this data and it’s re-published in human form on a website called Open VAERS.
Media are Concealing Vast Numbers of Vaccine Deaths
No corporate media outlet is reporting that as of today, the CDC knows about 36,135 covid vaccine-related deaths. But we sure do know about George Floyd. (CDC’s own formulas say the real number may be 100 times higher.)
You have an absolute right to know about this — and to have an explanation as to why the facts above are not in every single article that references the covid shot.
Yet this is all happening in a chaotic, confused world where people are grasping for any modicum of certainty. Often what is not true seems the better option, because it is simpler.
Most people living in our time are also driven out of their ability to think or reason due to overexposure to digital conditions. Our bodies are now the targets of a terrorist campaign. Two-thirds of American adults are already taking one or more prescription meds. So to take a little more seems like a normal thing to do.
Digital technology invades and corrupts the mind, and it takes a lot of creativity and will to avoid being driven insane by our current environment.
So taking a shot of mystery juice, said to contain genetic instructions that program your body to manufacture an inflammatory toxin, can seem like a wholesome thing to do. We forget about the fact that “breakthrough cases” are the norm, and the only people who seem to “get covid” also got the shot.
You may not know that in 2019, there was a conference at the Milken Institute that centered on rebranding “the flu” and introducing an mRNA shot that would get better than the presumably dismal 23% market saturation that the flu shots of the time were getting. If you are curious, one of the best-ever Planet Waves FM programs is devoted to the issue. You don’t need to listen to more than the first 30 seconds to get the point. Both audio and video are included.
We Are On Notice to Take Care of Ourselves
I would rather not have to write about this, but I feel a moral obligation to tell you what I know; based on what I have spent nearly four years learning. Not everyone wants to read this; for those who take them, vaccines are on the level of holy communion and social responsibility.
We are in a time when you have a deep responsibility to yourself to find out what is happening in the world as it may affect you. And when you need a reasoning process, consider the precautionary principle: What do you assume in the face of missing information? Have you considered the worst-case scenario, and is the best case worth taking that risk? Do you evaluate the credibility of those offering you “information”?
What else are you doing to take care of yourself?
We all know it’s difficult to make life changes, though it helps if you have a positive motivation. Yes, it’s difficult, and there seem to be endless factors stacked against making progress. This seems to be one of the basic facts of life on our planet.
The New Moon in Virgo, paired with Mercury stationing direct, is a good time to commit to being whole and well. More than anything, Virgo is about integration, which is another way to say integrity: of mind and body, of our bodies and the Earth, and the environments in which we live.
With love,
Covid as a Digital Phenomenon – Eric on the Patrick Henningsen Show, TNT Radio (substack.com)
Excess deaths due to the COVID-19 pandemic reach 26 million
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/09/19/covi-s19.html
Evan Blake@evanblake17
17 minutes ago
On Sunday, the Economist’s tracker of excess deaths attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic reached a staggering 26 million globally, nearly four times the official COVID death toll of 6.9 million. According to this tracker, an average of 7,000 people continue to die each day above the pre-pandemic baseline, with the overwhelming majority either directly from COVID-19 or due to the myriad negative long-term health impacts caused by the virus.
The 26 million excess death milestone was reached exactly one year after US President Joe Biden falsely declared that “the pandemic is over” during an interview with CNN at the Detroit auto show on September 18, 2022.
While Biden’s claim was widely denounced by scientists and public health advocates at the time, it set the stage for the complete unwinding of all official pandemic response in the US and globally. It is worthwhile to examine what has actually happened with the pandemic over the past year, as well as the present situation as we head into the fourth fall and winter seasons of the pandemic.
According to official figures tallied on Worldometer, known to be vast undercounts, there have been 92,883 deaths from COVID-19 in the US and 360,852 globally in the year since Biden’s statement. According to the Economist, there have been 161,741 excess deaths in the US and 4.5 million globally over the past year.
Just three months after Biden’s comments, after an unrelenting campaign that included threats by major corporations such as Nike to move production elsewhere, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) lifted its Zero COVID elimination policy. This unleashed a catastrophic wave of mass infection and death, which multiple scientific studies have since estimated caused at least 1–2 million deaths in China from COVID-19 as virtually the entire population of 1.4 billion people were infected.
At the same time, Biden’s lie was seized upon by the corporate media and virtually every world government to deepen their propaganda campaign aimed at forcing the population to accept unending waves of mass infection, death and debilitation from COVID-19. This culminated in the unscientific ending of the COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE) declarations by the World Health Organization (WHO) on May 5, 2023, and the Biden administration on May 11, 2023.
Just six weeks later, in late June, the latest wave of the pandemic began to sweep across the United States. Due to the complete ending of testing, case reporting and other surveillance by the Centers for Disease Control and Transmission (CDC), it has only been detectable through wastewater sampling, which shows that viral transmission has rapidly increased more than four-fold in the past three months.
Extrapolating from the wastewater data, infectious disease modeler JP Weiland estimates that 10–12 percent of the US population has been infected or reinfected with COVID-19 during the present surge, a staggering 33–40 million people. He projects that in the next six weeks another 23–33 million people will be infected, meaning that in total this wave will likely have infected 56–73 million Americans, or 17–22 percent of the US population.
At the same time, COVID-19 hospitalizations have more than tripled across the US, with 20,538 hospitalized from COVID during the week ending September 9, the most recent data available. As this is a lagging indicator, it will continue to rise in the weeks ahead.
According to Weiland, the average American has now been infected with COVID at least twice, and by this winter likely three times. Similar rates exist in virtually every country except China, where the majority of the population has only been infected once since the lifting of Zero COVID.
There is nothing like this scale of infection with any virus or pathogen in human history, in which a population of 8 billion people is being subjected to repeated waves of global mass infection in such a concentrated time frame.
The current global wave is being fueled by multiple Omicron variants, including the immune-evasive EG.5 (nicknamed “Eris”), and a number of variants referred to as “FLip” because they contain a combination of mutations that flip the positions of two amino acids, labeled F and L.
The highly-mutated Omicron BA.2.86 subvariant (nicknamed “Pirola”) continues to concern scientists globally. Initial studies have produced contradictory results on Pirola’s level of immune escape and infectiousness, but it continues to spread globally at an alarming rate.
Noted variant tracker and molecular biologist Marc Johnson tweeted Sunday, “BA.2.86 has remained the fastest growing lineage in the world since it emerged, with sequence numbers doubling about every week. If the advantage is not coming from immune evasion, it must have something else going for it.”
Most leading variant trackers have warned that the descendants of Pirola could pick up mutations which make it more transmissible, potentially causing an Omicron-type event of global mass infection in the weeks or months ahead.
The very evolution of this variant is a sign of the continued fitness of SARS-CoV-2 (its ability to reproduce efficiently) and thus its ability to mutate further. It highlights the ongoing danger that a variant could evolve that combines greater immune escape, infectivity and lethality, rendering existing vaccines totally ineffective and causing far greater levels of death. This very real danger is completely ignored by every world government and corporate media outlet.
Furthermore, SARS-CoV-2 is evolving under conditions in which genomic surveillance has collapsed alongside aspects of pandemic surveillance, particularly since the ending of the PHE declarations in May.
Contrary to the lies and propaganda of Biden and the corporate media, the pandemic is not going away. All principled scientists understand that we remain in the beginning stages of the pandemic and that under existing policies COVID-19 will remain a dangerous pathogen for the foreseeable future.
Trevor Bedford, one of the world’s top evolutionary biologists, recently told the Seattle Times, “I’m generally very concerned about the overall rate of evolution for SARS-CoV-2. No single [Omicron] variant has been that impactful, but the overall accumulation of these mutations is having significant impact.”
At the American Society of Virology conference in June, Bedford said that SARS-CoV-2 is “evolving just as fast as it was in 2021, evolving about two-and-a-half times faster than influenza H3N2 … and is not really showing signs of slowing down.”
Biologist Arijit Chakravarty, who heads a research team that has made some of the most prescient analyses throughout the pandemic, made similar statements in a July interview with the World Socialist Web Site. He stressed that the very policies now in place only accelerate the process of viral evolution, creating a high likelihood that at a certain point a variant will evolve that causes existing vaccines to be unable to protect against severe disease and death, essentially putting mankind back at square one or even worse.
Arijit Chakravarty [Photo: Arijit Chakravarty]
In the interview, Chakravarty said,
I can’t predict the outcome of the next wave. I can’t predict the outcome of the next five waves. But, at the rate that we are going, a prediction can be made with a high degree of certainty that something bad will happen sooner than later along these lines. Keep this pandemic running for another five years and you’ll face a debacle on a scale that you haven’t yet seen. That’s a given.
Characterizing the ending the PHE declarations as “Orwellian Newspeak” which leave society with nothing in place to protect against a more dangerous variant, he commented,
In that kind of reactive strategy what will happen is billions will be infected before we realize something is wrong. And that’s too late to do anything about it. So not only is the pandemic very much not over, but by creating the impression that the pandemic is over in the face of rampant viral spread and continuing rapid viral evolution, we are essentially sticking our chin out and asking the virus to do its worst.
Finally, Chakravarty stressed that this is only the beginning of the pandemic, saying,
The path that we are on with respect to the pandemic is unsustainable, meaning neither is it inevitable, nor is it something that can continue indefinitely… This is Act One of a three-act play, and in Act Two things could really get ugly, to be honest. Things look dark now because what we have done from a public health standpoint is we’ve declared the war over unilaterally.
Alongside the dangers of viral evolution, the breadth of Long COVID continues to expand into what is now undeniably a “mass disabling event” throughout the world.
Multiple comprehensive studies indicate that at least 10 percent of people infected with COVID-19 go on to develop Long COVID. This risk is only slightly reduced by vaccination and is compounded with each reinfection. Recent studies have indicated that even asymptomatic cases can lead to SARS-CoV-2 persisting in the body, potentially causing long-term damage without the patient even being aware of it.
Due to the criminal response of world capitalism, no treatments for Long COVID are yet available and it is unclear when such treatments will be available. Multiple scientists have predicted that in the years ahead potentially billions of people could be suffering from one or multiple Long COVID symptoms, placing ever greater strains on healthcare systems and the basic functioning of society.
In a recent report published in Nature, the authors wrote,
The oncoming burden of long COVID faced by patients, health-care providers, governments and economies is so large as to be unfathomable, which is possibly why minimal high-level planning is currently allocated to it. If 10% of acute infections lead to persistent symptoms, it could be predicted that ~400 million individuals globally are in need of support for long COVID.
Again, this scale of mass debilitation is unprecedented in human history. The horrific reality now confronting hundreds of millions of people, many of whom suffer debilitating symptoms such as extreme fatigue, evidently does not factor into the calculations of Biden or any other politician who pretend that the pandemic is over.
The only political party in the world which has opposed all propaganda surrounding the pandemic is the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), which publishes the World Socialist Web Site. While reporting on the daily spread of the pandemic, we have fought to arm workers with a scientific understanding of the global elimination strategy that must be implemented to stop the pandemic once and for all.
At the same time, through the Global Workers’ Inquest into the COVID-19 Pandemic, we have continued to document and uncover the lies, misinformation and criminal policies responsible for the death and debilitation of millions.
We urge all workers, scientists and anti-COVID advocates to participate in the Inquest by sharing your experiences during the pandemic, and to join in the fight to build a mass movement to force a change in pandemic policy throughout the world.