Strange things are afoot. Dystopia and Utopia are about to produce their Hegelian offspring, in the name of the New Normal Conquest. Each global citizen watches from the confines of their own lives as a synthesis comes into shape from chaos. It matters not if we perceive the chaos as being orchestrated or as being inevitable. The synthetic, hermaphroditic, congenitally inchoate new human model, has strawberry and plum hair, self-polices and exists on Welfare and generic medications. Watching Amanpour discuss politics and America’s post Covid-19 road to recovery with a millionaire denizen of the Shark Tank, on an iPhone while chewing cannabis gummy bears, is the new de rigueur.
It is poignant and ironic that, at this very moment in history, many people have willingly approached the frontiers of their own personal understanding, if for no other reason than to see what all the fuss is about. Poignant for many, as it is their first glimpse of the ocean outside of their personal experiential knowledge across the blinding sea of reality. This disruption of their routines and the destruction of their livelihoods has created a rare window of opportunity for reading and research, albeit, via the tamper-prone provided Internet. Much of the irony lies in the fact that individuals who choose to cross that expanse without relying on only the official filters, will perceive that they have always made do with varying degrees of perceptual disadvantages.
You may remember Plato’s famous cave analogy. If not, put simply, it describes a situation where a group of people are reared deep inside a cave and are told what reality is by their handlers. Some are brought near the mouth of the cave and shown shadows of what is occurring outside in the sunlight. Those shadows are interpreted by each individual in different ways. The handlers can explain each shadow in an official version which then becomes the firm belief of the other cave dwellers. They will all mentally police each other after that indoctrination.
If one cave dweller walks out and has a good look around and then returns to the cave, he or she will discover that they cannot make the others understand what they are talking about when they describe the things they saw. That person will be shouted down, ignored and shunned. The cave is a top-down, need-to-know world of smoke, mirrors and shadows. It is theoretically simple to keep the cave dwellers frightened of ever venturing outside. A democratic showing of hands would likely choose the confines of the cave rather than risk the unknown perils of an unknown outside world.
I feel that many humans are, to different degrees at different locals, at the juncture of confronting truths outside of their respective cultural, political and spiritual caves. A simple transition is about to occur, but a transition of the utmost importance due to its ramifications. That transition is one in which we the species make official our acquiescence to and habituated dependence on government by choosing to stay in our caves and letting a very small number of officials be our reality brokers and impose their unrestrained will on this small, rare planet which houses us all.
It can be correctly argued, in my observation, that this scenario has already been repeated for millennia. One difference now is that of scale. Scale made possible by the window of technological opportunity. Even after cataloguing many individual historical examples of people paying to build their own prisons, we may be closer to a total global capitulation than ever before. Precisely at a time when the option for a successful return to the risks and rewards of being more natural humans before our more complex systems collapse is melting in our palms like snowflakes.
I can suggest a few movies to watch in your isolation. Idiocracy is an excellent film and merits watching twice. Vice is another. The most important thing about this film is what it intentionally leaves out while giving a good condemnation of its main character, Dick Cheney. His role in the CFR, to be precise, is not even mentioned, if I recall correctly. The Big Short is another good film. That film will refresh your memory as to how the financial fraud of 2008 was orchestrated and demonstrate to you how some people enriched themselves, while not being actual authors of the scam. This goes far to support C. Wright Mill’s disbelief in conspiracies.
Over the next few decades, dragons will fight and we will get glimpses of those contests. Big fish will eat smaller fish and many worker bees will be sacrificed to angry portions of society to quell their growing rage. Willing workers for the coming New Normal Conquest will be pensioned off, rewarded with cash, privileges, biographies, decorations, awards, interviews, fellowships, honorary degrees, knighthoods and documentaries. Their replacements are being trained, educated and groomed as I write.
During the months of Covid-19 quarantining and lock-downs, we have all been introduced to many new buzzwords. One such is the word, comorbidity. This is usually used by a coroner or doctor when describing the official cause of death of a patient. In other words, if you had kidney disease, diabetes and high blood pressure and then contracted the flu just before passing away, those underlying conditions would be comorbidities.
In some interviews of doctors that I have heard from several different locations during the Covid-19 outbreak, it has been said and been shown that they were instructed to list the cause of death as Covid-19 in all Covid-19 positive patients, regardless of other comorbidities. I must add here that I also see reports on mainstream media that this or that Covid-19 test either produces false positives or false negatives, depending on the source of the test and the day in question. This medical accounting method was admittedly done to generate alarming statistics. In the case of Covid-19, alarm must have been deemed necessary in order to get the compliance of the public and to contain the situation more swiftly.
For decades in the past, if a deceased person smoked or a member of their family smoked, the attending doctor was encouraged to list smoking or second hand smoke as the cause of death or as a heavily contributing factor. Whether or not it was true was entirely beside the point. The agenda was to vilify smoking. The effect was to raise the taxes on tobacco to unimaginable heights. This is not hearsay, I discovered this material in two well documented, well written books, one of which was authored by a medical doctor.
We also have behind us, the example of the sensationalized Swine Flu Epidemic of the 1970s and the subsequent vaccine which resulted in some deaths and paralysis. The tested vaccine was replaced at the last moment with an unapproved and untested version, unbeknownst to the unlucky ones who trusted in the system. I have this information from watching a video of the Sixty Minutes Show from that era of mainstream investigative reporting in America.
I have noticed some interesting comorbidity instances over the past few weeks. People who died in some way due to the outbreak. It would be good to mention their names here before they are forgotten. Along the way, I will present you with a few articles of interest that bear upon the topics discussed.
On April 24, 2020 Natalya Lebedeva, a forty-eight year-old Chief of the Ambulance Centre in Zvyozdny near Moscow, died “as a result of an accident,” according to a Moscow hospital statement. She had been hospitalized with Covid-19. News outlets Moskovsky Komsomolets and REN TV, citing Lebedeva’s colleagues, said she had fallen from a high window and that she may have killed herself after accusations from her superiors that she had infected several of her colleagues with the Corona virus. Police have not confirmed those reports.
A local Krasnoyarsk television station reported on April 25, 2020 that Yelena Nepomnyashchaya, the forty-seven year old Acting Chief Physician at a hospital for war veterans in the Siberian city, had just finished a conference call with the Regional Health Minister about turning one of her hospital buildings into a Corona virus ward when she fell from her fifth-floor office window. Nepomnyashchaya was reported to be strongly against the proposed idea. Reports also said she had complained to her superiors about the shortage of personal protective equipment. Her obituary said she was a twenty year veteran of the Regional Health Care System. She died from her injuries.
Thirty-seven year old professor Bing Liu, who was working on Corona virus research at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Liu was "on the verge of making very significant findings" related to the novel Corona virus. He was found shot dead inside his home in Pittsburgh, Pa. on May 2, 2020, with wounds to his head, neck, torso and extremities. A second body, belonging to forty-six-year-old Hao Gu was found an hour later in a car about 1.6 km from the home where Liu was found. The men are believed to have known each other and investigators believe Gu killed Liu before returning to his car and dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Why not just shoot himself in Liu’s living room?
Half a world away, in Russia’s western Voronezh region, Alexander Shulepov, a thirty-seven year old doctor at an ambulance unit, was hospitalized on April 22, 2020 after testing positive for Covid-19 but was set to be released after subsequent tests came back negative. On the day he was admitted, Shulepov and his colleague, ambulance paramedic Alexander Kosyakin published a video in which they complained about their boss forcing Shulepov and his colleagues to continue working together even after the positive test result.
“The Chief Doctor is forcing us to work. What do we do in this situation?” Shulepov asks.
Shulepov retracted his statement three days later and said in another video post that he was in “an emotional state” when he made his initial claim.
On May 2, 2020, he fell from a second-floor hospital window at the Novousmansky district hospital where he worked in the town of Novaya Usman, making him the third Russian doctor treating Corona virus patients to suffer a similar fate in the previous ten days. Shulepov sustained a fractured skull and is now in serious condition.
Elsewhere in mother Russia, Vladimir Putin's Spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, Construction and Housing Minister Vladimir Yakushev and Culture Minister Olga Lyubimova have all tested positive for Corona virus. A fire at St. George Hospital in St. Petersburg killed five patients on ventilators. Another blaze at the Spasokukotsky Hospital in Moscow killed one patient. Both hospitals were treating Corona virus patients. Russian-made ventilators were reported to have started the fires.
Doctors in hospitals outside of the big cities have been complaining about not enough ventilators or of their poor quality, as well as about sweeping shortages of personal protective equipment. Putin claims that only "a small fraction" of Russia's ventilator stockpile is being used. Because of Covid-19, Putin had to postpone a nationwide vote on changes to the Russian Constitution that will pave the way for him to stay in office until 2036, if he desires.
In China five people have disappeared, gotten arrested or been silenced after speaking out about the Corona virus. One of these people was a Chinese law professor at Beijing's Tsinghua University named Xu Zhangrun, who recently posted a critical essay of the way president Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party have handled the Corona virus outbreak.
"They all blithely stood by as the crucial window of opportunity to deal with the outbreak of the infection snapped shut in their faces. The cause of all of this lies with The Axlerod [that is, Xi Jinping] and the cabal that surrounds him," he wrote.
His essay, Viral Alarm: When Fury Overcomes Fear was published online February 10, 2020 and was immediately pulled. Xu was placed under house arrest after returning to Beijing following the Lunar New Year celebration, cut off from the Internet and scrubbed from all social media sites. Guards patrolled outside his home for a time. Xu remains incommunicado. Many of Xu's friends have been unable to get in touch with him for days.
His essay ended with an ominous acknowledgement: "I can now all too easily predict that I will be subjected to new punishments; indeed, this may well even be the last piece I write."
According to his latest essay, Xu had been previously punished for Speech Crimes in 2018, when he was placed under investigation by Tsinghua University after publishing another essay criticizing Xi Jinping.
"I was suspended from my job as a University Lecturer and cashiered as a Professor, reduced to a minor academic rank," he wrote, adding, "my freedoms have been curtailed ever since."
A civil-rights lawyer and public intellectual, named Xu Zhiyong, also published an article on social media urging Xi Jinping to step down for his "inability to handle major crises.” Xu had previously served four years in prison for his legal activism. He was arrested again on February 15, 2020 after being on the run for two months following a police crackdown on a meeting of Human Rights lawyers and activists that he had attended in Xiamen.
A Wuhan doctor named Li Wenliang sent a message on December 30, 2019 to his medical school alumni, warning them about a mysterious new illness and told them about seven patients who had all worked at or visited the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. That same day, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission published a notice warning that some people had contracted a type of pneumonia, possibly at that market. The Commission said "organizations or individuals are not allowed to release treatment information to the public without authorization.” Screenshots of Li's message had already gone viral, though.
"When I saw them circulating online, I realized that it was out of my control and I would probably be punished," Li told CNN.
Four days after sharing his message, Li was summoned to a police station. Authorities told him that his warning was illegal and had "severely disturbed the social order." He was given a letter to sign which read: "We solemnly warn you: If you keep being stubborn, with such impertinence, and continue this illegal activity, you will be brought to justice — is that understood?"
Li wrote, "Yes, I do."
Li returned to work and unknowingly treated a woman infected with the Corona virus. Two days later, he checked himself into the hospital after showing symptoms. He died less than a month later. While sick in the intensive care unit, Li continued to post on social media.
"I was wondering why official notices were still saying there was no human-to-human transmission and there were no healthcare workers infected," Li wrote on January 31, 2020 from his hospital bed.
Some days before his death, Li told the New York Times that officials could have done better at sharing information about the Corona virus at the beginning of the outbreak.
"I think it would have been a lot better. There should be more openness and transparency," he said.
A Chinese lawyer and citizen journalist named Chen Qiushi went missing after Li died. He reported on the Corona virus and travelled to Wuhan in late January. He uploaded more than 100 posts from Wuhan to his Twitter and YouTube accounts over two weeks. His videos showed overwhelmed hospitals and medical wards. On January 30, 2020 Chen uploaded a video to his YouTube channel in which he said police had called him wanting to know where he was and had questioned his parents. Chen has been incognito since February 6, 2020. Family and friends say he was forcibly quarantined by Wuhan police. Chen's Weibo account, which had more than 740,000 followers, was shut down on the day of his disappearance. The Wuhan and Qingdao city police say they have no information about Chen's whereabouts. This isn't the first time Chen has been silenced by Chinese officials. Chen went to Hong Kong last August to report on the protests there. After that trip, all of his social media accounts were deleted. One of Chen's friends, Xu Xiaodong, posted an update on YouTube February 9, 2020 saying Chen had been "detained in the name of quarantine" for two weeks, despite showing no symptoms of the virus.
A blogger named Fang Bin also got a call from the police in Wuhan. Authorities confiscated his laptop on February 1, 2020 and brought him in for questioning. Fang filmed this encounter. Fang told The Los Angeles Times that authorities ordered him to stop posting "rumours" that would "spread panic" online. The police released him the next morning. Fang had posted a video on February 1, 2020 showing a hospital in Wuhan where eight body bags were being loaded onto the back of a truck. The viral video also showed an overwhelmed medical clinic.
"This pneumonia we see today, this Wuhan flu, it's both a natural disaster and a man-made problem," he said in one of his videos. "That's because they've covered up the facts. They muffled Li Wenliang for telling the truth."
The last video Fang posted to his YouTube channel was on February 9, 2020. In it, he repeated again and again: "All citizens resist, hand power back to the people!" Fang was arrested on February 10, 2020. After refusing to leave his home, firefighters broke down his door and police surrounded his apartment.
Around two months later and many long miles away, in Maryland, on April 6, 2020, police found the body of Maeve Kennedy Townsend McKean, granddaughter of assassinated presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy. The Medical Examiner's Office determined the cause of death was accidental drowning. The forty year old and her eight year old son were last seen on the evening of April 2, 2020 riding in a canoe off Chesapeake Bay. After an extensive search, police said that her body had been found in water about 4 km South of where they had set off.
Mrs. McKean was the daughter of Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the former Maryland Lieutenant Governor, CFR member and former chair of the Global Virus Network. Maeve worked as a Public Health and Human Rights lawyer and was the Executive Director of Georgetown University's Global Health Initiative. She also taught Bioethics and Human Rights as an adjunct professor. The McKean family lives in Washington, but were self-isolating due to the Corona virus pandemic at her mother's house in Shady Side, Maryland.
The mother and son were reported missing after they launched a canoe to retrieve a missing kick ball. Police believe strong winds and heavy seas prevented the pair from paddling back to shore. The overturned canoe was found a day later a few miles from where they were last seen. It is odd to me that such a wealthy person with a long family tradition of boating would risk canoeing after a cheap toy in a choppy, shallow bay familiar to her.
On April 8, 2020, police found the body of Gideon McKean after a five-day search of Chesapeake Bay. He died of drowning complicated by hypothermia, according to the Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. It was determined to be accidental by the Maryland Department of Health, which oversees the Medical Examiner's Office. His body was found in twenty-five feet of water about 4 km South of his grandmother's Maryland residence, where the canoe was launched and about 2,000 feet from where his mother's body had been recovered two days earlier.
Here is an article from Politico Magazine dated May 08, 2019 that was written by three members of the Kennedy clan about yet another Kennedy.
“RFK Jr. Is Our Brother and Uncle. He’s Tragically Wrong About Vaccines.”
“We love Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but he is part of a misinformation campaign that’s having heartbreaking—and deadly—consequences.”
“By Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Joseph P. Kennedy II and Maeve Kennedy McKean -May 08, 2019”
“Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is the former Lieutenant Governor of Maryland and the former chair of the Global Virus Network.”
“Joseph P. Kennedy II, a former member of Congress from Massachusetts, is the chairman and president of Citizens Energy Corporation.”
“Maeve Kennedy McKean is the executive director of Georgetown University’s Global Health Initiatives.”
“The WHO, the health arm of the United Nations, has listed vaccine hesitancy as one of the top 10 threats to global health in 2019. Most cases of preventable diseases occur among unvaccinated children, because parents have chosen not to vaccinate, have delayed vaccination, have difficulty accessing vaccines, or the children were too young to receive the vaccines.”
“These tragic numbers are caused by the growing fear and mistrust of vaccines—amplified by internet doomsayers. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—Joe and Kathleen’s brother and Maeve’s uncle—is part of this campaign to attack the institutions committed to reducing the tragedy of preventable infectious diseases. He has helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media and is complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines.”
“It is understandable that parents may have questions about vaccines and health care procedures concerning their children. We need to be able to have conversations that address skepticism about the safety and efficacy of vaccines without demonizing doubters. The reality is that vaccines can have side effects. However, the public health benefits of vaccines to every citizen far outweigh any potential side effects, which, when they do occur, are overwhelmingly minor, rarely serious, and more than justified by the overall benefit to vulnerable populations.”
“As parents and concerned citizens, we stand behind the hard work of scientists and public health professionals at organizations like the WHO and the Department of Health and Human Services, whether in the National Institutes of Health, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention or the Food and Drug Administration. Their tireless efforts guide the development, testing and distribution of safe and effective vaccines against 16 diseases, including measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis, polio, diphtheria, tetanus, influenza and HPV. The necessity and safety of vaccines are backed up by every major medical organization, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Public Health Association and scores of others.”
“Everyone must communicate the benefits and safety of vaccines, and advocate for the respect and confidence of the institutions which make them possible. To do otherwise risks even further erosion of one of public health’s greatest achievements.”
Kennedy versus Kennedy and a Kennedy death in the state of Maryland, the home of the military germ lab at Fort Detrick. Here now is an article about that lab by Denise Grady posted on August 5, 2019 by The New York Times.
“Deadly Germ Research Is Shut Down at Army Lab Over Safety Concerns”
“Problems with disposal of dangerous materials led the government to suspend research at the military’s leading bio-defence centre.”
“Safety concerns at a prominent military germ lab have led the government to shut down research involving dangerous microbes like the Ebola virus.”
“Research is currently on hold,” the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, in Fort Detrick, Md., said in a statement on Friday. The shutdown is likely to last months, Caree Vander Linden, a spokeswoman, said in an interview.”
“The statement said the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention decided to issue a “cease and desist order” last month to halt the research at Fort Detrick because the centre did not have “sufficient systems in place to decontaminate wastewater” from its highest-security labs.”
“But there has been no threat to public health, no injuries to employees and no leaks of dangerous material outside the laboratory, Ms. Vander Linden said.”
“In the statement, the CDC cited “national security reasons” as the rationale for not releasing information about its decision.”
“The institute is a bio-defence” centre that studies germs and toxins that could be used to threaten the military or public health, and also investigates disease outbreaks. It carries out research projects for government agencies, universities and drug companies, which pay for the work. It has about 900 employees. The shutdown affects a significant portion of the research normally conducted there, Ms. Vander Linden said.”
“The suspended research involves certain toxins, along with germs called select agents, which the government has determined have “the potential to pose a severe threat to public, animal or plant health or to animal or plant products.” There are 67 select agents and toxins; examples include the organisms that cause Ebola, smallpox, anthrax and plague, and the poison ricin. In theory, terrorists could use select agents as weapons, so the government requires any organization that wants to handle them to pass a background check, register, follow safety and security procedures, and undergo inspections through a program run by the CDC and the United States Department of Agriculture. As of 2017, 263 laboratories — government, academic, commercial or private — had registered with the program. The institute at Fort Detrick was part of the select agent program until its registration was suspended last month, after the CDC ordered it to stop conducting the research. The shutdown was first reported on Friday by the Frederick News-Post.”
“The problems date back to May 2018, when storms flooded and ruined a decades-old steam sterilization plant that the institute had been using to treat wastewater from its labs, Ms. Vander Linden said. The damage halted research for months, until the institute developed a new decontamination system using chemicals. The new system required changes in certain procedures in the laboratories. During an inspection in June, the CDC found that the new procedures were not being followed consistently. Inspectors also found mechanical problems with the chemical-based decontamination system, as well as leaks, Ms. Vander Linden said, though she added that the leaks were within the lab and not to the outside world. A combination of things” led to the cease and desist order, and the loss of registration, she said. ‘
“Dr. Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist and bio-weapons expert at Rutgers University, said in an email that problems with the institute’s new chemical-based decontamination process might mean it would have to go back to a heat-based system “which, if it requires constructing a new steam sterilization plant, could entail very long delays and very high costs.”
“Although many projects are on hold, Ms. Vander Linden said scientists and other employees are continuing to work, just not on select agents. She said many were worried about not being able meet deadlines for their projects. Missteps have occurred at other government laboratories, including those at the Centres for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. And in 2009, research at the institute in Fort Detrick was suspended because it was storing pathogens not listed in its database. The army institute also employed Bruce E. Ivins, a microbiologist who was a leading suspect — but who was never charged — in the anthrax mailings in 2001 that killed five people. Dr. Ivins died in 2008, apparently by suicide.”
On the website of Georgetown University where Maeve was the director of their Global Health Initiative and an adjunct professor, we read that, “Georgetown University has a rich history of dialogue and engagement with China. A leading global university located in Washington, D. C., Georgetown has educated generations of young people for service to the nation and the world. As the United States emerged as a world power during the late nineteenth century, Georgetown graduates reached out to China through commerce, diplomacy, and cultural exchange. Now, in the twenty-first century, Georgetown continues to deepen its ties with China through research, teaching, and dialogue around pressing issues in US -China relations and world affairs. As a Jesuit institution, Georgetown also carries forward the legacy of Matteo Ricci, S. J. (1552-1610), an early missionary whose deep appreciation of Chinese language, philosophy, and customs forged a model for productive intercultural encounter.”
The Jesuits that Mr. Ricci belonged to, were formed by Íñigo López de Loyola, a Basque, later known as Ignatius, in 1541 in a secret ceremony by a crypt in Montmartre. Jesuits take vows of chastity, poverty and loyalty to Catholicism and absolute obedience to the Pope. They also cover the globe in a quest to achieve their goals, that is now entering its fifth Century
They are armed with top-notch scholarship and adamant discipline. From Wikipedia we learn that “the Shield of Oñaz-Loyola is a symbol of Ignatius’ family's Oñaz lineage and is used by many Jesuit institutions around the world. The official colours of the Loyola family are maroon and gold. The Oñaz shield consists of seven maroon bars going diagonally from the upper left to the lower right on a gold field. The bands were granted by the King of Spain to each of the Oñaz brothers in recognition of their bravery in battle. The Loyola shield features a pair of rampant grey wolves flanking each side of a cooking pot. The wolf was a symbol of nobility, while the entire design represented the family's generosity towards their military followers. According to legend, the wolves always had enough to feast on even after the soldiers had eaten. Both shields were combined as a result of the intermarriage of the two families in 1261.”
Wikipedia has it that “The Global Virus Network (GVN) is an international coalition of medical virologists whose goal is to help the international medical community by improving the detection and management of viral diseases. The network was founded in 2011 by Robert Gallo in collaboration with William Hall and Reinhard Kurth, and 24 countries were members of the network as of 2015. The GVN fosters research into viruses that cause human disease to promote the development of diagnostics, antiviral drugs and vaccines, and its mission includes strengthening scientific training and response mechanisms to viral outbreaks. The GVN has organized task forces for chikungunya, human T-lymphotropic virus, and Zika. The network is headquartered at the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, and Gallo serves as its scientific director.”
We will recall that Maeve’s mother was a former chair of the GVN.
According to Wikipedia “the GVN uses small grants to provide training fellowships so virologists can address current viral challenges. Global partnerships and mutual cooperation allows the GVN to span globally and to research viruses as they manifest and spread.”
“The GVN is also a source of credible information about viruses, vaccines, and breakthroughs in both fields, which they spread through digital and public speaking platforms. The GVN promotes educational and valuable programs for future generations of scientists and biologists, and is a stable resource for both large governments and small organizations attempting to prepare themselves for viral threats.”
“The final part of the GVN's mission is ensuring that funding persists, and that the network is able to provide up to date information through partnerships with governments and agencies across the world. The GVN also advocates for further virology research to be performed and for more virology training opportunities worldwide.”
“All scientists and their research under the GVN are supported through various continuous small grants. The GVN works with governments as well as research companies to ensure that funding for both virology training and research are kept high enough to meet the demands of global health. The GVN also receives funding from its partners, the Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA), the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), and the Medical Technology Enterprise Consortium (MTEC).”
“The GVN has 34 centres across 17 nations, each of which has a medical virologist as its director who is willing to commit to GVN's mission. Each centre also specializes in at least two areas of viral science.”
About Robert Gallo, one of the founders of GVN, Wikipedia has it that, “Assignment of priority for the discovery of HIV has been controversial and was a subplot in the 1993 American television film docudrama (and earlier book about the early history of AIDS) And the Band Played On.”
“Montagnier's group in France isolated HIV almost one and a half years before Gallo, while Gallo's group demonstrated that the virus causes AIDS and generated much of the science that made the discovery possible, including a technique previously developed by Gallo's lab for growing T cells in the laboratory. When Montagnier's group first published their discovery, they said HIV's role in causing AIDS "remains to be determined."
“In 1989, the investigative journalist John Crewdson suggested that Gallo's lab might have misappropriated a sample of HIV isolated at the Pasteur Institute by Montagnier's group. Investigations by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the HHS ultimately cleared Gallo's group of any wrongdoing and demonstrated that they had numerous isolates of HIV of their own. As part of these investigations, the United States Office of Research Integrity at the National Institutes of Health commissioned Hoffmann–La Roche scientists to analyze archival samples established at the Pasteur Institute and the Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology (LTCB) of the National Cancer Institute between 1983 and 1985. They concluded that the virus used in Gallo's lab had come from Montagnier's lab; it was a virus from a patient that had contaminated a virus sample from another patient.”
“On request, Montagnier's group had sent a sample of this culture to Gallo, not knowing it contained two viruses. The sample then contaminated the pooled culture on which Gallo was working. On 12 December 1985 the Institut Pasteur filed suit to challenge a patent for an HIV test that had been granted on 28 May 1985 to the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). In 1987, the two governments agreed to split equally the proceeds from the patent, naming Montagnier and Gallo co-discoverers. Montagnier and Gallo resumed collaborating with each other again for a chronology that appeared in Nature in 1987.”
“In July 2007, Gallo and his team were awarded a $15 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for research into a preventive vaccine for HIV/AIDS. Additionally, in 2011 Gallo and his team received $23.4 million from a consortium of funding sources to support the next phase of research into the Institute of Human Virology's (IHV) promising HIV/AIDS preventive vaccine candidate. The IHV vaccine program grants included $16.8 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, $2.2 million from the US Army's Military HIV Research Program (MHRP), and other research funding from a variety of sources including the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).”
“In 2005, Gallo co-founded Profectus BioSciences, Inc., a biotechnology company. Profectus develops and commercializes technologies to reduce the morbidity and mortality caused by human viral diseases, including HIV.”
“In March 2011, Gallo founded the Global Virus Network in conjunction with William Hall of University College Dublin and Reinhard Kurth of the Robert Koch Institute. The network's goals include increasing collaboration among virus scholars, expanding virologist training programs, and overcoming gaps in research, especially during the early stages of viral epidemics.”
One of the member organizations of GVN is the The Robert Koch Institute in Germany. Wikipedia has it that, “The Robert Koch Institute monitors public health. Its core tasks include the detection, prevention and combating of infectious diseases and non-communicable diseases in Germany. The institute advises the specialist public and government, e. g. on preventing and tackling infectious disease outbreaks such as the Covid-19 pandemic, the swine flu pandemic in 2009 and the EHEC O104:H4 outbreak in 2011. The institute is also in charge of health monitoring and health reporting in Germany, covering non-communicable diseases: in large monitoring studies, RKI monitors the health status of adults and children in Germany.”
“RKI scientists regularly publish their results in scientific journals and in their own reports, e. g. the Infectious Disease Epidemiology Annual Report, special reports on different diseases in Germany (influenza, tuberculosis, cancer), Health in Germany. Apart from that, the Institute publishes several scientific periodicals, such as the monthly Journal of Health Monitoring, Epidemiological Bulletin and the Bundesgesundheitsblatt (co-publisher). The institute is also home to various National Reference Centres and Consultant Laboratories. Around 15 scientific committees, such as the Standing Committee on Vaccination (STIKO) and the Commission for Hospital Hygiene and Infection Prevention (KRINKO), are also based at the Robert Koch Institute.”
“RKI staff are involved in various international research projects and programmes, helping to tackle urgent public health problems such as the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2011. RKI also cooperates closely with international partners like the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the World Health Organization. The institute hosts two WHO reference laboratories (polio and measles/rubella) and has been the WHO Collaborating Centre for Emerging Infections and Biological Threats since 2016. RKI is the only federal institute in Germany in the field of human medicine with a BSL-4 laboratory which was opened in 2015 and has become fully operational in summer 2018.”
The first Director of the tropical medicine division of RKI was an interesting fellow. I’ll tell you about him. According to Wikipedia, “Claus Karl Schilling was born on 5 July 1871 in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. Schilling was a German tropical medicine specialist who participated in the Nazi human experiments at the Dachau concentration camp during World War II.”
“Though never a member of the Nazi Party and a recognized researcher before the war, Schilling became notorious as a consequence of his unethical and inhumane participation in human research under both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. From 1942 to 1945, Schilling's research of malaria and attempts at fighting it using synthetic drugs resulted in over a thousand cases of human experimentation on camp prisoners. Sentenced to death by hanging after the fall of Hitler's Germany, he was executed for his crimes against the Dachau prisoners on the 28th of May 1946 in Landsberg am Lech, Bavaria, West Germany.”
“Schilling studied medicine in his native city, receiving a doctor's degree there in 1895. He was a professor of parasitology at the University of Berlin and a member of Malaria Commission of the League of Nations. Within a few years, Schilling was practising in the German colonial possessions in Africa. Recognized for his contributions in the field of tropical medicine, he was appointed the first-ever director of the tropical medicine division of the Robert Koch Institute in 1905, where he would remain for the subsequent three decades.”
“Upon retirement from the Robert Koch Institute in 1936, Schilling moved to Benito Mussolini's Fascist Italy, where he was given the opportunity to conduct immunization experiments on inmates of the psychiatric asylums of Volterra and San Niccolò di Siena. The Italian authorities were concerned that troops faced malaria outbreaks in the course of the Italo-Ethiopian War. As Schilling stressed the significance of the research for German interests, the Nazi government of Germany also supported him with a financial grant for his Italian experimentation.”
“Schilling returned to Germany after a meeting with Leonardo Conti, the Nazis' Health Chief, in 1941, and by early 1942 he was provided with a special malaria research station at Dachau's concentration camp by Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS. Despite negative assessments from colleagues, Schilling would remain in charge of the malaria station for the duration of the war.”
“Although in the 1930s Schilling had stressed the point that malaria research on human subjects could be performed in an entirely harmless fashion, the Dachau subjects included prisoners who were injected with synthetic drugs at doses ranging from high to lethal. They had been exposed to malaria mosquitoes in cages strapped to their hands or arms so as to ensure infection with the parasite. Of the more than 1,000 prisoners used in the malaria experiments at Dachau during the war, between 300 and 400 died as a result; among survivors, a substantial number remained permanently injured. A number of priests imprisoned by the Nazis were killed during the experiments.”
“In the course of the Dachau Trials following the liberation of the camp at the close of the war, Schilling was tried by a US General Military Court, appointed at 2 November 1945, in the case of The United States versus Martin Gottfried Weiss, Wilhelm Rupert, et al. The defendants, 40 doctors and staff, were charged and convicted of offences of the violations of laws and usages of war in that they acted in pursuance of a common design, did encourage, aid, abet, and participate in the subjection of Allied nationals and prisoners of war to cruelties and mistreatment at Dachau Concentration Camp and its sub-camps.
According to the August H. Vieweg testimony, the patients used in the malaria experiments were Poles, Russians and Yugoslavs. At that time there was no formal code of ethics in medical research to which the judges could hold the accused Nazi doctors accountable. The "scientific experiments" exposed during the trials lead to the Nuremberg Code, developed in 1949 as a ten-point code of human experimentation ethics.”
When it comes to investigating the credibility and effectiveness of organizations such as the FDA, you may educate yourself, if you wish, by reading two wonderful books by investigative reporter Katherine Eban. The books are Dangerous Doses -A True Story of Cops, Counterfeiters, and the Contamination of America’s Drug Supply and Bottle of Lies -The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom.
As was shown by the French and American laboratory mix-up detailed in the report dealing with Dr. Gallo and the AIDS virus; where there are humans there are accidents, misunderstandings and rivalries. Ms. Eban’s books will show you that where there is money to be made, not only the white collar crooks are attracted. The bottom feeders also swarm over the scraps. Awareness of this is critical, especially now, as we are asked to trust many things we are ignorant of. To further educate ourselves, I will read you an article from Newsweek about the now familiar Jesuit educated, Dr. Fauci.
“DR. FAUCI BACKED CONTROVERSIAL WUHAN LAB WITH US DOLLARS FOR RISKY Corona VIRUS RESEARCH by Fred Guterl on 4/28/20 AT 2:57 PM EDT -Newsweek”
“Dr. Anthony Fauci is an adviser to President Donald Trump and something of an American folk hero for his steady, calm leadership during the pandemic crisis. At least one poll shows that Americans trust Fauci more than Trump on the Corona virus pandemic—and few scientists are portrayed on TV by Brad Pitt.”
“But just last year, the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the organization led by Dr. Fauci, funded scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other institutions for work on gain-of-function research on bat Corona viruses.”
“In 2019, with the backing of NIAID, the National Institutes of Health committed $3.7 million over six years for research that included some gain-of-function work. The program followed another $3.7 million, 5-year project for collecting and studying bat Corona viruses, which ended in 2019, bringing the total to $7.4 million.”
“Many scientists have criticized gain of function research, which involves manipulating viruses in the lab to explore their potential for infecting humans, because it creates a risk of starting a pandemic from accidental release.”
“SARS-CoV-2, the virus now causing a global pandemic, is believed to have originated in bats. US intelligence, after originally asserting that the Corona virus had occurred naturally, conceded last month that the pandemic may have originated in a leak from the Wuhan lab. At this point most scientists say it's possible—but not likely—that the pandemic virus was engineered or manipulated.”
“Dr. Fauci did not respond to Newsweek's requests for comment. NIH responded with a statement that said in part: "Most emerging human viruses come from wildlife, and these represent a significant threat to public health and biosecurity in the US and globally, as demonstrated by the SARS epidemic of 2002-03, and the current Covid-19 pandemic.... scientific research indicates that there is no evidence that suggests the virus was created in a laboratory."
“The NIH research consisted of two parts. The first part began in 2014 and involved surveillance of bat Corona viruses, and had a budget of $3.7 million. The program funded Shi Zheng-Li, a virologist at the Wuhan lab, and other researchers to investigate and catalogue bat Corona viruses in the wild. This part of the project was completed in 2019.”
“A second phase of the project, beginning that year, included additional surveillance work but also gain-of-function research for the purpose of understanding how bat Corona viruses could mutate to attack humans. The project was run by EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit research group, under the direction of President Peter Daszak, an expert on disease ecology. NIH cancelled the project just this past Friday, April 24th, Politico reported. Daszak did not immediately respond to Newsweek requests for comment.”
“The project proposal states: "We will use S protein sequence data, infectious clone technology, in vitro and in vivo infection experiments and analysis of receptor binding to test the hypothesis that % divergence thresholds in S protein sequences predict spillover potential."
“In layman's terms, "spillover potential" refers to the ability of a virus to jump from animals to humans, which requires that the virus be able to attach to receptors in the cells of humans. SARS-CoV-2, for instance, is adept at binding to the ACE2 receptor in human lungs and other organs.”
“According to Richard Ebright, an infectious disease expert at Rutgers University, the project description refers to experiments that would enhance the ability of bat Corona virus to infect human cells and laboratory animals using techniques of genetic engineering. In the wake of the pandemic, that is a noteworthy detail.”
“Ebright, along with many other scientists, has been a vocal opponent of gain-of-function research because of the risk it presents of creating a pandemic through accidental release from a lab.”
“Dr. Fauci is renowned for his work on the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1990s. Born in Brooklyn, he graduated first in his class from Cornell University Medical College in 1966. As head of NIAID since 1984, he has served as an adviser to every US president since Ronald Reagan.”
“A decade ago, during a controversy over gain-of-function research on bird-flu viruses, Dr. Fauci played an important role in promoting the work. He argued that the research was worth the risk it entailed because it enables scientists to make preparations, such as investigating possible anti-viral medications, that could be useful if and when a pandemic occurred.”
“The work in question was a type of gain-of-function research that involved taking wild viruses and passing them through live animals until they mutate into a form that could pose a pandemic threat. Scientists used it to take a virus that was poorly transmitted among humans and make it into one that was highly transmissible—a hallmark of a pandemic virus. This work was done by infecting a series of ferrets, allowing the virus to mutate until a ferret that hadn't been deliberately infected contracted the disease.”
“The work entailed risks that worried even seasoned researchers. More than 200 scientists called for the work to be halted. The problem, they said, is that it increased the likelihood that a pandemic would occur through a laboratory accident.”
“Dr. Fauci defended the work. "Determining the molecular Achilles' heel of these viruses can allow scientists to identify novel antiviral drug targets that could be used to prevent infection in those at risk or to better treat those who become infected," wrote Fauci and two co-authors in the Washington Post on December 30, 2011. “Decades of experience tells us that disseminating information gained through biomedical research to legitimate scientists and health officials provides a critical foundation for generating appropriate countermeasures and, ultimately, protecting the public health."
“Nevertheless, in 2014, under pressure from the Obama administration, the National of Institutes of Health instituted a moratorium on the work, suspending 21 studies.”
“Three years later, though—in December 2017—the NIH ended the moratorium and the second phase of the NIAID project, which included the gain-of-function research, began. The NIH established a framework for determining how the research would go forward: scientists have to get approval from a panel of experts, who would decide whether the risks were justified.”
“The reviews were indeed conducted—but in secret, for which the NIH has drawn criticism. In early 2019, after a reporter for Science magazine discovered that the NIH had approved two influenza research projects that used gain of function methods, scientists who oppose this kind of research excoriated the NIH in an editorial in the Washington Post.”
"We have serious doubts about whether these experiments should be conducted at all," wrote Tom Inglesby of Johns Hopkins University and Marc Lipsitch of Harvard. "With deliberations kept behind closed doors, none of us will have the opportunity to understand how the government arrived at these decisions or to judge the rigor and integrity of that process."
I concur with the learned doubts of Marc and Tom. Especially after reading a publication entitled, TRANSFORMATION OF AN ICON -ATCC and the New Business Model for Science. It was published by ATCC, the American Type Culture Collection. This is a nonprofit organization founded in 1925 which collects, stores, and distributes standard reference microorganisms, cell lines and other materials for research and development. ATCC's collections include a wide range of biological materials for research, including cell lines, microorganisms and bioproducts. The organization holds a collection of more than 3,000 human and animal cell lines and an additional 1,200 hybridomas. A hybridoma is a cell used as the basis for the production of antibodies in large amounts for diagnostic or therapeutic use. Hybridomas are produced by injecting a specific antigen into a mouse, collecting an antibody-producing cell from the mouse's spleen, and fusing it with a tumor cell called a myeloma cell. It’s just that easy.
ATCC's microorganism collection includes a collection of more than 18,000 strains of bacteria, 3,000 different types of animal viruses and 1,000 plant viruses. In addition, ATCC maintains collections of over 7,500 yeast and fungus species and 1,000 strains of protists. They moved their facilities from Maryland to Manassas, Virginia on Friday the 13th, 1998 in a convoy of Office Movers trucks loaded with liquid nitrogen vats holding 85,000 strains in roughly two million vials.
Just as it takes a tectonic plates a relatively long time to build pressure but sometimes only an instant to release it, many large scale forces and movements that have been in play for a very long time, appear to me to be nearing several of their cataclysmic conclusions. The Jesuit Matteo Ricci who was mentioned in the information on Georgetown University has an interesting biography that proves Chinese-Western relations began over four hundred years ago and were conducted outside of the awareness of the bulk of both populations. He was born in the same year that the Jesuit Francis Xavier died while on a journey to China. Ricci is buried in China and it would be interesting to tour the graveyards of the Middle Kingdom to see which other foreign scholars and statesmen and women were also afforded that distinction and to learn why.
For now, we seem to be acquiescing towards an immediate future of having created a digital Domesday Book, that we may be further catalogued, taxed and controlled. There is an increasing need for givers of shots, takers of temperatures, trackers of people, undertakers and quarantine enforcers. The BioSciences and Biomedical industries are expected to flourish.
Some of the more mundane perils we might face going forward could be malfunctioning robot cars, faulty food delivery bots, hi-jacked Amazon delivery drones, mystery meats and Windows Update interrupts to our online educational Zoom sessions. It is clearly time to learn more of what we don’t know, to discuss what we learn and to practice general scrutiny. We might also want to use this pause in activity to examine our individual pasts, presents and futures, as humans, as nations and as humanity.
Since this essay was first written, there has been a massive burnout in the ranks of the medical professions and there is an acute need for common sense, unselfish government actions to secure a healthy, adequately paid medical work force able to provide better, quicker care in Canada.
Also since this essay was first written, a short two years ago, a new major European land war has begun, inflation has waxed rampant, the Pope has apologized on Canadian soil to indigenous Residential School survivors and Salman Rushdie has been stabbed by a fatwa enforcer. An eighty-something American man selflessly ran to his aid and was wounded in doing so. That soft-spoken man’s comment on a Canadian news interview when asked by the reporter why he was brave enough to imperil himself was that he did what he did because of his belief in the importance of free thought and speech; something that to him, Salman was brave enough to exemplify.
If you have read this essay through to the end here, I will add this editor/author’s note. I also believe in the free flow of thought and of words. I myself don’t hold that quoting Wikipedia, newspapers, magazines, blogs and books is a strict, authoritative academic practice. On the other hand, the most scholarly books I have read are full of citations of other recognized, lettered scholars. Scholars with whom the author is often openly refuting the ideas of and disagreeing with. This is the gentle person’s style of repartee and from these contests we all improve our understanding of the world.
News, like written ideas, demands of the consumer, to exercise responsibility in determining what of value to take away from it, what portion is true, what portion is skewed and what portion is in error. News, written history and all academic disciplines are The Satanic Verses, in the sense that, as in the premise of that book, they may contain errors. Whether or not the errors are intentional doesn’t alter their effects. Heeding the emotional triggers and acting on the propaganda and error-ridden pseudo-philosophy of hate speeches is irresponsible, both spiritually and intellectually, as well as an indicator of a weak or lazy humanity.
A Canadian electrical engineer once wrote a book pointing out errors in Newton’s mathematical understanding of gravity, as well as other famous equations, even some by Einstein. He wasn’t punished for it. Myself and a physicist that I loaned the book to, both found it immensely stimulating and exciting to ponder. The math was simple, able to be proven and thus, there was no leap of faith required by the reader.
So, I leave you with my essay, a snapshot of news and information gathered during the opening days of the Covid-19 outbreak. Draw your own conclusions. I had no desire to lead your thoughts to any destination. Rather, I presented many threads of one story, while it was still “hot” for each reader to make their own sense of.
For the record, I am quadropoly vaccinated against Covi9-19 and as the caregiver of an elderly wife recovering from leukemia via a stem cell transplant, I am very thankful to have access to them. I was definitely “on the fence” about vaccines prior to my wife’s illness, precisely from reading books by scientists and by doctors, that contradicted each other. In the end, as is the way it should be, I was faced with making up my own mind and happily opted for a slim chance of a side effect with a high chance of avoiding a serious illness that would impact my ability to look after my wife.
The ordeal of her expensive out of town treatment and residence, changed my perspective in a beneficial way. I have fully adopted a non-conspiracy model of the world, after years of leaning the other way. I am gifted with glimpses of many of the gossamer threads that are woven into daily reality. The connectivity of everything on earth is a fact which can be illustrated and shared in writing, art, poetry or film, without the necessity of being containerized within the black hole of a conspiracy. Friend, the physical world is the dynamic sum of the actions of each of us individuals. It is that simple. Lying behind is the mental world of thought and emotion. Behind that is the spiritual world of potential. We would all do well to simply start there and begin to clean our paths.
fin
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/
https://www.businessinsider.com/china-Coronavirus-whistleblowers-speak-out-vanish-2020-2#when-i-saw-them-circulating-online-i-realized-that-it-was-out-of-my-control-and-i-would-probably-be-punished-li-told-cnn-6
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjXR4o2EFYI China: Truth in a Pandemic
http://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/viewpoint/viral-alarm-when-fury-overcomes-fear …
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/christopherm51/russia-doctors-Coronavirus
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/russian-doctors-fall-from-windows-Coronavirus-2-had-complained-official-Covid-19-response-2020-05-05/
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/04/europe/russia-medical-workers-windows-intl/index.html
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/russia-st-petersburg-hospital-fire-1.5565674
https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2020/04/14/kennedy-mother-child-accidentally-drowned-after-canoe-mishap/2986826001/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/health/germs-fort-detrick-biohazard.html
https://uschinadialogue.georgetown.edu/topics/global-health
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/05/08/robert-kennedy-jr-measles-vaccines-226798
https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan-lab-millions-us-dollars-risky-Coronavirus-research-1500741
Komentáre