Views: 24
Thanks Tony the Fauch. Thanks to Fauci and those who supported them, people will continue to die needlessly.
Mask mandates, social distancing, lockdowns and forced vaccines are still fresh in so many peoples minds. And as we found out, most of those mandates were wasted on healthy people.
We now see that people are not trusting the FDA, CDC, WHO, and especially the NIH. Folks are ignoring all vaccines and if we have another Obama-Biden pandemic people will remember.
76
Views: 21
These excerpts are from Colin Wilson‘s A Criminal History Of Mankind (1984).
Here Wilson discusses the interesting psychological concept of the “Right Man”, which might in other uses also be called the “Dominant Male” or the “Alpha Male”, though we are, of course, speaking here about the negative extremes in behaviour of this human type, not just ordinary dominance or leadership.
The “Right Men” can be domestic household tyrants terrorizing their families but they can be found in all fields of life: in business, politics, art, culture. Everyone must have encountered one: a dominating boss, school headmaster or teacher, army officer, father, son, boyfriend, bully.
Essential here is that the “Right Man” must always have his way and is afraid of losing face above all (“How dare you talk to me this way?”): anything that might be an indication of his infallibility or erroneous ways, something that he can never admit.
And if things don’t exactly go his way, he may scare people into submission by breaking into outbursts of rage or downright violence. He may demand absolute faithfulness from his woman but “play around” himself, since as a God-like “Right Man” this is his divine prerogative (he thinks). Colin Wilson also points out that there are “Right Women” too, so this is not exclusively male behaviour.
“The notion of ‘losing face’ suggests an interesting alternative line of thought. It is obviously connected, for example, with the cruelty of Himmler and Stalin when their absolute authority was questioned. They were both men with a touchy sense of self-esteem, so that their response to any suspected insult was vindictive rage. (Sound familiar? — TPR) Another characteristic of both men was a conviction they they were always right, and a total inability to admit that they might ever be wrong.”
“Himmlers and Stalins are, fortunately, rare; but the type is surprisingly common. The credit for recognising this goes to A.E. Van Vogt who is also the author of a number of brilliant psychological studies. Van Vogt’s concept of the ‘Right Man’ or ‘violent man’ is so important to the understanding of criminality that it deserves to be considered at length…”
[…]
“In 1954, Van Vogt began work on a war novel called The Violent Man, which was set in a Chinese prison camp. The commandant of the camp is one of those savagely authoritarian figures who would instantly, and without hesitation, order the execution of anyone who challenges his authority. Van Vogt was creating the type from observation of men like Hitler and Stalin. And, as he thought about the murderous behaviour of the commandant, he found himself wondering: ‘What could motivate a man like that?’ Why is it that some men believe that anyone who contradicts them is either dishonest or downright wicked? Do they really believe, in their heart of hearts, that they are gods who are incapable of being fallible? If so are, are they in some sense insane, like a man who thinks he is Julius Caesar?”
“Looking around for examples, it struck Van Vogt that male authoritarian behaviour is far too commonplace to be regarded as insanity. […] [For example,] marriage seems to bring out the ‘authoritarian’ personality in many males, according to Van Vogt’s observation.”
[…]
“… ‘the violent man’ or the ‘Right Man’ […] is a man driven by a manic need for self-esteem — to feel he is a ‘somebody’. He is obsessed by the question of ‘losing face’, so will never, under any circumstances, admit that he might be in the wrong.”
[…]
“Equally interesting is the wild, insane jealousy. Most of us are subject to jealousy, since the notion that someone we care about prefers someone else is an assault on our amour propre. But the Right Man, whose self-esteem is like a constantly festering sore spot, fliers into a frenzy at the thought, and becomes capable of murder.”
“Van Vogt points out that the Right Man is an ‘idealist’ — that is, he lives in his own mental world and does his best to ignore aspects of reality that conflict with it. Like the Communists’ rewriting of history, reality can always be ‘adjusted’ later to fit his glorified picture of himself. In his mental world, women are delightful, adoring, faithful creatures who wait patiently for the right man — in both senses of the word — before they surrender their virginity. He is living in a world of adolescent fantasy. No doubt there was something gentle and submissive about the nurse that made her seem the ideal person to bolster his self-esteem, the permanent wife and mother who is waiting in a clean apron when he get back from a weekend with mistress…”
“Perhaps Van Vogt’s most intriguing insight into the Right Man was his discovery that he can be destroyed if ‘the worm turns’ — that is, if his wife or some dependant leaves him. Under such circumstances, he may beg and plead, promising to behave better in the future. If that fails, there may be alcoholism, drug addiction, even suicide. She has kicked out the foundations of his sandcastle. For when a Right Man finds a woman who seems submissive and admiring, it deepens his self-confidence, fills him with a sense of his own worth. (We can see the mechanism in operation with Ian Brady and Myra Hindley.) No matter how badly he treats her, he has to keep on believing that, in the last analysis, she recognises him as the most remarkable man she will ever meet. She is the guarantee of his ‘primacy’, his uniqueness; now it doesn’t matter what the rest of the world thinks. He may desert her and his children; that only proves how ‘strong’ he is, how indifferent to the usual sentimentality. But if she deserts him, he has been pushed back to square one: the helpless child in a hostile universe. ‘Most violent men are failures’, says Van Vogt; so to desert them is to hand them over to their own worst suspicions about themselves. It is this recognition that leads Van Vogt to write: ‘Realise that most Right Men deserve some sympathy, for they are struggling with an unbelievable inner horror; however, if they give way to the impulse to hit or choke, they are losing the battle, are on the the way to the ultimate disaster… of their subjective universe of self-justification.”
“And what happens when the Right Man is not a failure, when his ‘uniqueness’ is acknowledged by the world? Oddly enough, it makes little or no difference. His problem is lack of emotional control and a deep-seated sense of inferiority; so success cannot reach the parts of the mind that are the root of the problem.”
[…]
“The Right Man hates losing face; if he suspects that his threats are not being taken seriously, he is capable of carrying them out, purely for the sake of appearances.”
“Van Vogt makes the basic observation that the central characteristic of the Right Man is the ‘decision to be out of control, in some particular area’. We all have to learn self-control to deal with the real world and other people. But with some particular person — a mother, a wife, a child — we may decide that this effort is not necessary and allow ourselves to explode. But — and here we come to the very heart of the matter — this decision creates, so to speak, a permanent weakpoint in the boiler, the point at which it always bursts.”
[…]
“He feels he [is] justified in exploding, like an angry god. […] he feels he is inflicting just punishment.”
“What is so interesting here is the way the Right Man’s violent emotion reinforces his sense of being justified, and his sense of justification increases his rage. He is locked into a kind of vicious spiral, and he cannot escape until he has spent his fury. […] The Right Man feels that his rage is a storm that has to be allowed to blow itself out, no matter what damage it causes. But this also means that he is the slave of an impulse he cannot control; his property, even the lives of those that he loves, are at the mercy of his emotions. This is part of the ‘unbelievable inner horror’ that Van Vogt talks about.”
[…]
“This is ‘magical thinking’ — allowing a desire or emotion to convince you of something your reason tells you to be untrue. […] Magical thinking provides a key to the Right Man.”
“What causes ‘right mannishness’? Van Vogt suggest that it is because the world has always been dominated by males.”
[…]
“But then, this explanation implies that there is no such thing as a Right Woman—in fact, Van Vogt says as much. This is untrue.” […] The central characteristic of the Right Woman is the same as that of the Right Man: that she is convinced that having her own way is a law of nature and that anyone who opposes this deserves the harshest possible treatment. It is the god (or goddess) syndrome.”
[…]
“… the one thing that becomes obvious in all cases of Right Men is that their attacks are not somehow inevitable’; some of their worst misdemeanours are carefully planned and calculated, and determinedly carried out. The Right Man does these things because he thinks they will help him to achieve his own way, which is what interests him.”
“And this in turn makes it plain that the Right Man problem is a problem of highly dominant people. Dominance is a subject of enormous interest to biologists and zoologists because the percentage of dominant animals — or human beings — seems to be amazingly constant. […] biological studies have confirmed [… that …] for some odd reason, precisely five per cent — one in twenty — of any animal group are dominant — have leadership qualities.”
[…]
“The ‘average’ member of the dominant five per cent sees no reason why he should not be rich and famous too. He experiences anger and frustration at his lack of ‘primacy’, and is willing to consider unorthodox methods of elbowing his way to the fore. This clearly explains a great deal about the rising levels of crime and violence in our society.”
[…]
“We can also see how large numbers of these dominant individuals develop into ‘Right Men’. In every school with five hundred pupils there are about twnety-five dominant ones struggling for primacy. Some of these have natural advantages: they are good athletes, good scholars, good debaters. (And there are, of course plenty of non-dominant pupils who are gifted enough to carry away some of the prizes.) Inevitably, a percentage of the dominant pupils have no particular talent or gift; some may be downright stupid. How is such a person to satisfy his urge to primacy? He will, inevitably, choose to express his dominance in any ways that are possible. If he has good looks or charm, he may be satisfied with the admiration of female pupils. If he has some specific talent which is not regarded as important by his schoolmasters — a good ear for music, a natural gift of observation, a vivid imagination — he may become a lonely ‘outsider’, living in his own private world. (Such individuals may develop into Schuberts, Darwins, Balzacs.) But it is just as likely that he will try to take short-cuts to prominence and become a bully, a cheat or a delinquent.”
“The main problem of these ungifted ‘outsiders’ is that they are bound to feel that the world has treated them unfairly. And the normal human reaction to a sense of unfairness is an upsurge of self-pity. Self-pity and the sense of injustice make them vulnerable and unstable. And we have only to observe such people to see that they are usually their own worst enemies. Their moods alternate between aggressiveness and sulkiness, both of which alienate those who might otherwise be glad to help them. If they possess some degree of charm or intelligence, they may succeed in making themselves acceptable to other people; but sooner or later the resentment and self-pity break through, and lead to mistrust and rejection.”
“The very essence of their problem is the question of self-discipline. Dominant human beings are more impatient than others, because they have more vital energy. Impatience leads them to look for short-cuts. […] Civilisation, as Freud pointed out, demands self-discipline on the part of its members. No one can be licenced to threaten people with carving knives.”
[…]
“When the Right Man explodes into violence, all the energy is wasted. Worse still, it destroys the banks of the canal. So in permitting himself free expression of his negative emotions he is indulging in a process of slow but sure self-erosion — the emotional counterpart of physical incontinence. Without proper ‘drainage’, his inner being turns into a kind of swamp or sewage farm. This is why most of the violent men of history, from Alexander the Great to Stalin, have ended up as psychotics. Without the power to control their negative emotions, they become incapable of any state of sustained well-being.”
See also:
Colin Wilson interview, August 2005
104
Views: 15
Four Medications the Government Tried to Restrict During COVID and How to Legally Get Them
The following content was sponsored by The Wellness Company on the original site, BREITBART.
Just a few years ago, it would have been unthinkable that our government would ever try to restrict access to certain drugs. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, opened our eyes to just how far our government would go to line the pockets of Big Pharma.
Here are four critical medications that might have been hard to get during the pandemic due to pressure from the government and big medicine:
Nobel-prize winning medicine demonized as “horse medicine” by the mainstream media and the FDA, Ivermectin is on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines.
Depositphotos
An antiviral that has been used for 50 years for the treatment of various diseases, Hydroxychloroquine was smeared by the left and medical establishment after President Donald Trump advocated for it.
Depositphotos
One of the most commonly prescribed antibiotics in history, Z-Pak is also a key component in early treatment protocols and thus came under fire by some in our crooked medical establishment.
Depositphotos
Budesonide is an inhaled corticosteroid breathing treatment used to reduce inflammation in the airways and lungs.
Depositphotos
Access to all of these critical prescription medications were limited or restricted, making them difficult for suffering Americans to get.
We know what the globalists did in 2020, and we know they will do whatever they can to maintain power, which makes 2024 a potentially very dangerous year for Americans.
Warning: The following is their advertisement if not interested, stop here.
Unlike 2020, you don’t have to be caught unprepared, and that’s where the Wellness Company comes in.
The Wellness Company and its great doctors – like Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Drew, Dr. Harvey Risch, and Dr. Jim Thorp – are regularly in the media fighting against the broken medical establishment.
Dr. Thorp, one of the nation’s leading critics of corrupt Big Pharma, believes that now – more than ever – people should be prepared for the next pandemic:
I’ve strongly recommended “stockpiling” critical medications including antibiotics since the turn of the century. This has been an incredible investment as many friends, family, and patients have benefited. Now, in the winter of 2024, this recommendation is even more crucial.
Be ready for the next crisis. This Contagion Kit contains an assortment of life-saving medications – including ivermectin, and hydroxychloroquine. The Contagion Kit also includes a guidebook to aid in the safe use of these life-saving medications.
This kit is prescription-only – you can’t find it in any store or pharmacy. Simply fill out a short questionnaire after purchase and a trusted Wellness Company doctor will confirm your suitability and issue your prescription, Contagion Kit.
The Wellness Company Contagion Kit contains:
What people are saying about the Contagion Kit:
This is the perfect emergency kit at the perfect price. Every home should have this for peace of mind. – Rebecca B.
This is absolutely great! I encourage everyone to buy one of these for emergencies!! – Melody H.
Peace of mind. It is an amazing peace of mind to have this kit in case of emergencies and shortages. The Wellness Company did an excellent job of getting this to me in a timely manner and I and thankful to have it. – Phyllis T.
Don’t be caught unprepared for whatever 2024 sends your way!
Order the Wellness Company’s Contagion Kit today!
122
Views: 23
WASHINGTON — Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) issued the following statement after day one of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s two-day, 14-hour transcribed interview:
“Dr. Fauci’s testimony today uncovered drastic and systemic failures in America’s public health systems. While leading the nation’s COVID-19 response and influencing public narratives, he simultaneously had no idea what was happening under his own jurisdiction at NIAID. Dr. Fauci signed off on all domestic and foreign research grants without reviewing the proposals and admitted that he was unaware if NIAID conducted oversight of the laboratories they fund. Clearly, the American people and the United States government are operating with completely different expectations about the responsibilities of our public health leaders and the accountability of our public health agencies.
It is also concerning that the face of our nation’s response to the world’s worst public health crisis ‘does not recall’ key details about COVID-19 origins and pandemic-era policies. Nearly 1.2 million Americans lost their lives to a potentially preventable pandemic. I look forward to asking Dr. Fauci further questions about mandates, his role in prompting the ‘Proximal Origin’ publication, and his policy positions related to masks and lockdowns. Tomorrow’s testimony will continue the Select Subcommittee’s effort to deliver the answers Americans demand and deserve.”
DR. FAUCI DAY 1 TAKEAWAYS
The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic questioned Dr. Anthony Fauci for seven hours yesterday (Jan 8, 2024) about his role during the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Fauci’s testimony uncovered drastic and systemic failures in America’s public health systems.
Key highlights by the Select Subcommittee from Dr. Fauci’s testimony:
128
Views: 26
The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) annual confab in Davos, Switzerland is set to kick off next week, and the program is rife with all of the usual suspects. Our aspiring global rulers are set to have a grand time once more calling for our collective enslavement, which of course is necessary for the “greater good.”
The 2024 program is one for the ages. Attendees will watch Pfizer’s Albert Bourla and Open AI’s Sam Altman talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI). They’ll see depopulation advocate Bill “Bugman” Gates advancing the climate hoax. John Kerry will appear on four different stages to discuss the “energy transition.” We will also see Klaus Schwab sit down for a 1 on 1 with the second highest ranking Chinese government official.
The description for the discussion reads: “With fresh warnings from the World Health Organization that an unknown ‘Disease X’ could result in 20 times more fatalities than the coronavirus pandemic, what novel efforts are needed to prepare healthcare systems for the multiple challenges ahead?”
The panel will feature a high-profile lineup that includes WHO director “Dr” Tedros and the chairman of AstraZeneca.
The concept of a Disease X was adopted by the World Health Organization in 2018. Tedros, Dr Anthony Fauci, Jeremy Farrar of the eugenicist Wellcome Trust, and many high profile individuals on the forefront of Covid hysteria policy have been involved in advancing the Disease X hypothesis over the years.
Now, it’s easy for normal people to dismiss this lunacy. But given the powerful, maniacal minds populating the Davos gathering, it’s worth maintaining a level of situational awareness surrounding these events, as they can often offer some insight into the unguarded mindset of these technocratic tyrants.
On this topic, it’s worth recalling that another infamous predictive panel was announced at the 2019 WEF Davos conference. That panel concluded with the launch announcement of Event 201.
Event 201 was an amazingly predictive “war game” simulation in which a fictional coronavirus passed from an animal reservoir to humans.
Just weeks before the onset of COVID Mania, some of the most maniacal, power-hungry forces on the planet got together to war-game a “fictional” coronavirus with “no possibility of a vaccine being available in the first year,” warning of a “similar pandemic in the future.”
Sounds a bit familiar, huh?
Event 201 became known for its impeccable timing. Just weeks after the simulation occurred, full-blown pandemic hysteria broke out.
The 15 participants in the Event 201 simulation included an interesting bunch:
Of those 15 players, 13 worked in the upper echelons of private organizations or government agencies that would almost immediately witness an exponential monetary benefit or the tremendous absorption of political power.
156
Views: 17
For time reasons, I had to cut my actual address a bit short Thursday. This statement, which began with a nod to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, is what was entered into the congressional record:
November 30, 2023
Chairman Jordan, ranking member Plaskett, members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to speak.
Exactly one year ago today I had my first look at the documents that came to be known as the Twitter Files. One of the first things Michael, Bari Weiss and I found was this image, showing that Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya had been placed on a “trends blacklist”:
This was not because he was suspected of terrorism or incitement or of being a Russian spy or a bad citizen in any way. Dr. Bhattacharya’s crime was doing a peer-reviewed study that became the 55th-most read scientific paper of all time, which showed the WHO initially overstated Covid-19 infection fatality rates by a factor of 17. This was legitimate scientific opinion and should have been an important part of the public debate, but Bhattacharya and several of his colleagues instead became some of the most suppressed people in America in 2020 and 2021.
That’s because by then, even true speech that undermined confidence in government policies had begun to be considered a form of disinformation, precisely the situation the First Amendment was designed to avoid.
When Michael and I testified before the good people of this Committee in March we mentioned this classically Orwellian concept of “malinformation” — material that is somehow both true and wrong — as one of many reasons everyone should be concerned about these digital censorship programs.
But there’s a more subtle reason people across the spectrum should care about this issue.
Former Executive Director of the ACLU Ira Glasser once explained to a group of students why he didn’t support hate speech codes on campuses. The problem, he said, was “who gets to decide what’s hateful… who gets to decide what to ban,” because “most of the time, it ain’t you.”
The story that came out in the Twitter Files, and for which more evidence surfaced in both the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit and this Committee’s Facebook Files releases, speaks directly to Glasser’s concerns.
There’s been a dramatic shift in attitudes about speech, and many politicians now clearly believe the bulk of Americans can’t be trusted to digest information. This mindset imagines that if we see one clip from RT we’ll stop being patriots, that once exposed to hate speech we’ll become bigots ourselves, that if we read even one Donald Trump tweet we’ll become insurrectionists.
Having come to this conclusion, the kind of people who do “anti-disinformation” work have taken upon themselves the paternalistic responsibility to sort out for us what is and is not safe. While they see great danger in allowing anyone else to read controversial material, it’s taken for granted that they’ll be immune to the dangers of speech.
This leads to the one inescapable question about new “anti-disinformation” programs that is never discussed, but must be: who does this work? Stanford’s Election Integrity Project helpfully made a graphic showing the “external stakeholders” in their content review operation. It showed four columns: government, civil society, platforms, media:
One group is conspicuously absent from that list: people. Ordinary people! Whether America continues the informal sub rosa censorship system seen in the Twitter Files or formally adopts something like Europe’s draconian new Digital Services Act, it’s already clear who won’t be involved. There’ll be no dockworkers doing content flagging, no poor people from inner city neighborhoods, no single moms pulling multiple waitressing jobs, no immigrant store owners or Uber drivers, etc. These programs will always feature a tiny, rarefied sliver of affluent professional-class America censoring a huge and ever-expanding pool of everyone else.
Take away the high-fallutin’ talk about “countering hate” and “reducing harm” and “anti-disinformation” is just a bluntly elitist gatekeeping exercise. If you prefer to think in progressive terms, it’s class war. The math is simple. If one small demographic over here has broad control over the speech landscape, and a great big one over there does not, it follows that one group will end up with more political power than the other. Which one is the winner? To paraphrase Glasser, it probably ain’t you.
It isn’t just one side or the other that will lose if these programs are allowed to continue. It’s pretty much everyone, which is why these programs must be defunded before it’s too late.
138
Views: 85
A mystery outbreak of pneumonia has hit several parts of China, and now Ohio is the first American location to report an outbreak of the illness, with an ‘extremely high’ number of children being hospitalized.
The strain of pneumonia, now dubbed ‘white lung syndrome,’ has spawned 142 pediatric cases in Warren County since August.
Warren County Health Department said that not only is the number of cases above average, but it also meets the Ohio Department of Health’s definition of an outbreak.
Meanwhile, in western Massachusetts, physicians are seeing ‘a whole lot’ of walking pneumonia, a milder form of the lung condition, which is caused by a mixture of bacterial and viral infections.
Neither outbreak is being caused by a novel pathogen and not all of the pneumonia cases are being caused by the same infection. Experts say a mixture of several seasonal bacterial and viral bugs are hitting at once, putting pressure on hospitals.
It has raised fears that the outbreak that has overwhelmed hospitals China could hit the US this winter. Several European countries are battling similar crises.
And, of course, it’s in the name of public safety.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that nationally, cases are not out of the ordinary, but the spread of cases has raised fears that an outbreak can overwhelm American hospitals.
Dr Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease expert from Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, said: ‘I would caution against extrapolating one Ohio county to a country of 330million people.’
But he would not be entirely surprised if ‘some places in the US are above baseline’ this year, as it appears several bacterial and viral infections are rebounding post-Covid.
Officials in Ohio say that an investigation is ‘ongoing,’ but the illness does not look like a new disease, but rather several common infections hitting all at once.
According to the news outlet, so far, patients have tested positive for mycoplasma pneumonia, a bacterial lung infection that is mostly resistant to antibiotics, strep, and normally benign infection, adenovirus.
The ages of the patients range from 8 to 3, and there are several theories as to why children are more susceptible to the illness. Some suggest it is caused by lockdowns that have weakened the immune system or mask-wearing and school closures leaving children vulnerable during seasonal illnesses.
It is reported that bacterial respiratory infections usually flare up every few years, normally as people recover from waves of flu or other viral illnesses.
The Warren County Health District officials said that they believe the pneumonia cases are a large uptick of cases normally seen at one time rather than a new respiratory disease.
Officials also want to remind the public to take necessary precautions to protect their health, as many of us will be gathering with friends and family during the holiday season.
Doctors say the most common symptoms are fever, cough, and fatigue. Hand washing, covering your mouth when you cough, and staying up-to-date on vaccines will help decrease your chance of illness.
According to the news report, the county was first alerted to the increase in illnesses after schools were recording more children off sick than normal.
Ohio is not the only area outside of China to report an outbreak. The Netherlands and Denmark are also reported to have mysterious spikes in ‘walking pneumonia’ cases, most common in younger children.
It is unclear if any deaths have resulted from the illness and officials have not responded to requests for more information.
In Massachusetts, doctors say the main issue is RSV, a respiratory virus that kills more than 10,000 Americans each year, mostly young children and the elderly.
Dr Adalja believes the pneumonia outbreaks cropping up around the world could be due to the ‘cyclical’ nature of mycoplasma.
Mycoplasma goes through epidemic cycles every few years and that may be what’s occurring globally at the moment.’
He said China may be getting hit by a double-whammy of viral and bacterial infections. China is entering its first winter without pandemic restrictions and is reporting surges in Covid, flu, and RSV as well as mycoplasma.
The US, Canada and Europe — where Covid restrictions were lifted earlier — were hit by massive upswings in those viruses last year.
‘So what’s happening in China makes sense’, Dr Adalja said, adding: ‘Last year we were dominated by so much Covid, flu and RSV when we opened up.’
He said he thinks this year’s winter outbreak will be ‘less severe’ that last year’s, when thousands of children were hospitalized with RSV and flu.
But Dr Adalja admitted that lockdowns have contributed to the emerging global phenomenon.
“When children are born they haven’t experienced any infectious diseases so more of them you have in population so lower threshold for outbreak to start.
“That group of children born provide new people for illnesses. The pandemic allowed the number of these susceptible people to build up over the years.”
Mycoplasma pneumonia normally causes a mild flu-like illness, sometimes called ‘walking pneumonia’. Cases are most common in younger children.
Some antibiotics, such as penicillin, have no effect.
Strep also normally causes a mild illness and tends to leave patients with sore throats. It’s more common among those aged five to 15 years old.
And adenovirus, which has also been detected in patients in Ohio, causes symptoms similar to the common cold.
Dr Scott Roberts, an infectious diseases expert at Yale School of Medicine, Connecticut, said the uptick in cases was likely still being driven by weakened immunity in children.
“This is probably a recurrence of known pathogens that are hitting us a bit harder because of low immunity to them.”
He suggested children’s immune systems could still be suffering from the effects of Covid restrictions which blocked their exposure to ‘good germs’ for building immunity. He also pointed out that immunity wanes over time.
It comes after the Netherlands and Denmark also said they were recording mysterious spikes in pneumonia cases, many of which are being attributed in part to mycoplasma.
175
Views: 11
Winning. Only 14% of Americans get the latest jab. If you want or did get the latest jab, that’s fine. But don’t come crying when you get side effects, hospitalization, and of course death (of course it’s too late then).
The loons over at VOX call it a miracle drug. But what they and the CDC leave out is that since the so called miracle drugs arrived, more Vaccinated folks are getting COVID, Hospitalized, and dying.
157
Views: 10
In late October 2017, a US health official from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) arrived at the Wuhan Institute of Virology for a glimpse of an eagerly anticipated work in progress. The WIV, a leading research institute, was putting the finishing touches on China’s first biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory. Operating with the highest safeguards, the lab would enable scientists to study some of the world’s most lethal pathogens.
The project had support from Western governments seeking a more robust partnership with China’s top scientists. France had helped design the facility. Canada, before long, would send virus samples. And in the US, NIAID was channeling grant dollars through an American organization called EcoHealth Alliance, a controversial research group at the center of the Covid lab leak theory, to help fund the WIV’s cutting-edge coronavirus research.
That funding allowed the NIAID official, who worked out of the US embassy in Beijing, to become one of the first Americans to tour the lab. Her goal was to facilitate cooperation between American and Chinese scientists. Nevertheless, says Asha M. George, executive director of the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense, a nonprofit that advises the US government on biodefense policy, “If you want to know what’s going on in a closed country, one of the things the US has done is give them grant money.”
The lab — where the FBI believes Covid leaked from — was found to have a ‘serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate’.
The official — who is unnamed due to concerns for her safety — from the NIAID, run by Anthony Fauci at the time, was instructed to erase the safety failures in her report to avoid angering China.
And this wasn’t the first time concerns over engineered viruses were dismissed. A year prior, US officials at the DOE warned the NIAID of the dangers of genetically engineered and altered pathogens. However, longtime head of the NIH, Francis Collins, called the claims ‘science fiction.’
The NIAID official told her superiors what she’d gleaned from the technician who’d served as her guide. The lab, which was not yet fully operational, was struggling to develop enough expertise among its staff—a concern in a setting that had no tolerance for errors. “According to [the technician], being the first P4 [or BSL-4] lab in the country, they have to learn everything from zero,” she wrote. “They rely on those scientists who have worked in P4 labs outside China to train the other scientists how to operate.”
She’d also learned something else “alarming” from the technician, she wrote. Researchers at the WIV intended to study Ebola, but Chinese government restrictions prevented them from importing samples. As a result, they were considering using a technique called reverse genetics to engineer Ebola in the lab.
Anticipating that this information would set off alarm bells in the US, the official cautioned, “I was shocked to hear what he said [about reverse engineering Ebola]. I also worry the reaction of people in Washington when they read this. I don’t want the information particularly using reverse genetics to create viruses to get out, which would affect the ability for our future information gain,” meaning it would impair the collaboration between NIAID and the WIV. “I don’t feel comfortable for the broader audience within the government circle [to hear this]. It could be very sensitive.”
There was good reason to fear that such a revelation could derail the fledgling partnership. One year earlier, the US Department of Energy had warned other agencies, including NIAID’s parent entity, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), that advanced genetic engineering techniques could be misused for malign ends. The Energy Department had developed a classified proposal, reported on here for the first time, to ramp up safeguards against that possibility and develop tools to better detect evidence of genetic engineering. The proposal, which was not implemented in its suggested form, prompted a heated interagency battle.
F. Gray Handley, then NIAID’s associate director for international research affairs, responded to the email agreeing with the official. His response included: “As we discussed. Delete that comment.”
On January 19, 2018, the US embassy in Beijing issued a sensitive but unclassified cable that included details from the NIAID official’s tour. It said that WIV scientists themselves had noted the “serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate” the lab, according to an unredacted copy obtained by Vanity Fair. But the cable did not include the information that her NIAID colleagues apparently found most worrying.
For synthetic biologists, the idea of engineering Ebola isn’t seen as particularly unusual. Reverse genetics, using the CRISPR gene editing technology developed roughly a decade ago, is now a widely used laboratory technique. The WIV’s BSL-4 laboratory was designed to safely research Ebola, be it natural or man-made. Some scientists argue that, for research purposes, it can be safer to make a deadly pathogen in-house than to risk transporting it.
However, according to Stanford microbiologist David Relman, the risks of the WIV producing something new or unknown may have driven the government’s concern. “When you are reverse engineering Ebola, you have now established a platform from which you can do [a] million different things with Ebola, or something that you call Ebola,” he says. “It means you can now make any variant or construct that is Ebola-like at will.”
Any effort to shield the technician’s Ebola remarks from wider scrutiny within the federal government would be “a dereliction of responsibility,” says Gerald Parker, former commander of the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID).
Some view ongoing questions about biosafety at the WIV as part of a Republican campaign to discredit Anthony Fauci, who led NIAID for 38 years. But US government warnings about scientific collaborations in autocratic countries predate the pandemic and cut across partisan lines. Concerns flagged in the Obama administration persisted through the Trump administration and are being examined today.
“There’s a dark side” to certain research, says Jason Paragas. “Just because you’re doing it to publish a paper doesn’t mean no one is going to do anything bad.”
Operating out of a sprawling 300-acre campus in Bethesda, Maryland, the National Institutes of Health describes itself as “the federal focal point for health research.” Each year it makes more than 50,000 grants, distributing the majority of its $48 billion budget to researchers in the US and around the world. Among its 27 institutes and centers is NIAID, which distributed $5.3 billion in the 2023 fiscal year alone.
For the NIH and its grantees, global collaboration and transparent data sharing are synonymous with scientific progress. Even a trickle of grant money to a foreign lab can pay dividends. It can give US researchers access to new environments and viruses and help build trust that may elude bickering governments. “It is almost always beneficial to exchange ideas and samples with other countries, particularly those with different climates than our own,” says Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “I don’t see why science funding should be reserved for friendly countries.”
But within the federal government, there is a different world of scientists: those tasked with anticipating threats to national security. In the open exchange of cutting-edge research with scientists in autocratic countries, they see the risk that science that serves the public good could be misappropriated to cause harm—a phenomenon known as dual-use research of concern. Worries about dual-use research have only grown with the easy accessibility of DNA-editing tools. Those technologies have opened the door to miraculous treatments, such as using gene editing to reduce cholesterol and protect against heart disease. But “there’s a dark side” to certain research, says Jason Paragas, former director of innovation at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. “Just because you’re doing it to publish a paper doesn’t mean no one is going to do anything bad.”
Lawrence Livermore is one of 17 national laboratories overseen by the Department of Energy, a science and technology agency with strong intelligence capabilities, a number of whose scientists regularly review classified threats. “They spend their time in a dark world, faced with the nastiness of what could go on,” says Diane DiEuliis, a distinguished research fellow at the National Defense University. Sometimes they flag concerns for scientists who, given their focus on open research, are “not willing to even contemplate what they’re talking about.”
DOE officials issued their most specific warning in mid-2019, just months before the pandemic began. Deputy Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette alerted a top Fauci adviser that the coronavirus research the US was helping to fund at the WIV risked being misappropriated for military purposes. Based on classified threat assessments, and concerns raised by DOE scientists, Brouillette urged NIAID to use caution in its collaborations with Chinese government scientists. His warning should have served as a red flag for any research the agency was conducting with China, according to two sources with knowledge of the exchange.
A spokesperson for NIAID said, “We are not aware of this interaction.” A spokesperson for Fauci, who has advised seven presidents on infectious disease policy and [supposedly] championed expanded treatment options for HIV and AIDS, said he was unavailable to respond to questions.
Though the DOE and the NIH have partnered on historic endeavors, from the Human Genome Project to the Cancer Moonshot, they’ve also battled over what restrictions, if any, should be placed on technologies that allow scientists to synthesize and edit DNA. “We came at it from the point of view, ‘There are serious security concerns,’” says Ernest Moniz, who served as DOE secretary under Obama. “Our view was always, ‘We have to address them in ways that do not unduly restrict basic science.’ But what is the meaning of ‘unduly’? There lies the entire matter.” In meetings during the final months of the Obama administration, the longtime head of the NIH, Francis Collins, dismissed such risks as “science fiction,” according to several people present.
This June, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) issued a declassified report that provided a snapshot of perspectives on the COVID-19 origins question across America’s intelligence agencies. According to the report, the DOE and the FBI believe the pandemic is most likely to have originated with a lab leak. The National Intelligence Council and four other agencies say the virus most likely spilled over from a natural host, and two others, including the CIA, say there isn’t enough evidence to support one conclusion over the other.
All the intelligence agencies agree that SARS-CoV-2 was not developed as a bioweapon, the report said, and “almost all” agree it “was not genetically engineered.” Three sources said that DOE scientists, using an array of advanced tools and working out of several different labs, including Lawrence Livermore, Argonne, and Oak Ridge, could not rule out the possibility that the virus’s sequence had been engineered.
The ODNI report also found that People’s Liberation Army scientists sometimes worked out of WIV labs and collaborated with its civilian scientists on biosecurity projects and coronavirus research to address public health needs.
The Chinese government encourages such intermingling with a policy called military-civil fusion, which aims to harness civilian scientific innovation to advance military goals.
In 2011, a Dutch virologist named Ron Fouchier announced at a scientific conference that he’d genetically engineered what he’d later describe as “probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make.” He had altered the H5N1 avian influenza strain to make it transmissible among ferrets, which are genetically closer to humans than mice are. The experiment had been funded, in part, by the NIH.
Fouchier’s announcement triggered an uproar over what’s known today as gain-of-function research of concern—lab work that enhances the virulence or transmissibility of pathogens to help assess their threat to humans and develop countermeasures. Though the NIH has advocated for such research, others in the scientific community organized against it, arguing that creating pathogens that don’t exist in nature runs the risk of unleashing them.
Amid the controversy, the NIH assembled a high-level group, nicknamed the “ferrets committee,” to advise it on the risks of funding such research. As one member of the advisory group recalled, “We were worried we could be in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention.”
From 2009 to 2021, the NIH was led by Francis Collins, whose achievements include discovering the gene that causes cystic fibrosis. In March 2012, Collins wrote an email to members of the ferrets committee in which he acknowledged, “I am not familiar with the Biologic and Toxic Weapons Convention. Can our crack legal staff offer any opinions on this question?”
The Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, enforced since 1975, is the most significant treaty that governs the development and use of biological agents.
In response, a staffer emailed her supervisor: “I can’t believe he doesn’t know what the BWC is???!!! yikes.” The supervisor replied, “It shows you how different our worlds are.”
150
Views: 13
Nearly two years before coronavirus became a household word, a National Institute of Health lab in Montana was conducting experiments with bats that focused on the spread of the virus.
The 2018 research was funded by the “Intramural Research Program of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and a research grant from NIH AID,” according to a report on the study available through the National Library of Medicine.
At the time, Dr. Anthony Fauci was the director of NIAID, a post he held from 1984 until his retirement in 2022.
The research was conducted at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana, which NIAID calls a “premier NIH facility for biomedical research.”
The experiment sought to determine whether the WIV1-coronavirus could infect and replicate in a group of 12 Egyptian fruit bats.
“They performed exams on the animals daily and measured things like body weight and temperature,” the Daily Mail reported. “Scientists also took samples from the bats’ noses and throats.
“On days three, seven and 28, four of the bats were euthanized and their heart, liver, kidney, spleen, bladder, reproductive organs, eyes and brain were collected for analysis. Scientists also analyzed white blood cell count and antibodies.”
The report on the experiment said that the virus was “unable to cause a robust infection” in the bats, later concluding that the spread of the virus could be specific to some bat species but not others.
The report also noted that existing research “suggests that a substantial portion of the SARS-like viruses circulating in bats cannot infect humans directly.”
COVID-19 was first reported in China in late 2019. Extensive debate has since raged whether the virus spread to humans through some as-yet-undiscovered animal pathway or was leaked from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, where the outbreak was first noticed.
Fauci has scoffed at the lab-leak theory. He has also insisted that no “gain of function” research was approved on his watch. Such research is designed to increase the power of a virus to do harm to its host.
The bats for the 2018 project were obtained from the Catoctin Wildlife Preserve and Zoo in Thurmont, Maryland, the report said. The zoo is not far from the presidential retreat at Camp David.
The activist group White Coat Waste said the site has a history of animal care violations and called it a “crummy roadside zoo.”
Anthony Bellotti, the president and founder of White Coat Waste, denounced the project in a statement.
“Our investigation has uncovered the real-life horror story of how a shady roadside zoo whose curator was an NIH animal experimenter shipped off bats to a deadly government virus lab overseen by Dr. Fauci to be infected with a coronavirus obtained directly from the Wuhan lab that experts believe caused Covid,” he said, according to the Post Millennial.
210
