CORONA Main Coronavirus thread

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
Joe Rogan discusses Geert!



Joe Rogan: Unvaccinated People Causing Variants Is Completely the Opposite of What the Science Shows

"He [Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche] is a vaccine expert. And he was talking about how the standard model is that you never vaccinate during a pandemic because you just encourage variants."
3 min 11 sec
 

naegling62

Veteran Member

Payback Russian style?



A Russian virologist who helped develop the country's COVID vaccine has been found dead after an altercation with an intruder in his Moscow apartment, according to reports in local media.

Andrey Botikov, one of 18 scientists who developed the Sputnik V vaccine at the Gamaleya National Research Center, was identified as the man who had been discovered strangled in his Rogova Street home on March 2, Regnum reported, citing official sources. It previously reported that he had survived the attack.

The Investigative Committee of Russia (ICR) has now opened a murder investigation, believing that a 29-year-old man strangled the scientist with a belt during a disagreement before fleeing the scene.

However, the country has faced vaccine hesitancy domestically, with just over 60 percent of the Russian population receiving at least one dose, according to data by Johns Hopkins University, while deaths due to the virus have approached 400,000 since the pandemic began.

The decision to take the vaccine to market before stage 3 trials—when it would be tested for efficacy and safety—and the researchers' sluggishness with sharing data with the international community also damaged its prospects in the global market, according to research by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Botikov's apparent death comes just over two weeks after that of Major General Vladimir Makarov, a high-ranking Russian military official who according to state investigators took his own life after being relieved of duty.

In late November, the Russian Embassy in Paris confirmed the death of Vyacheslav Taran, a Russian billionaire and founder of Forex Club, in a helicopter crash near his home in southeastern France.

The former head of the Moscow Aviation Institute, Anatoly Gerashchenko, died last year after falling down "several flights of stairs."
 
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naegling62

Veteran Member
Nevermind he was 1 of 18. The disclose headline made it sound he was the creator of the vax. We get 2 of 18 then we have a story.
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
MUST SEE VIDEO

If you're reading this thread, this is the video you want to watch. Make the time.

Seriously. Watch the video. ASAP because it's on youtube so it's in danger of being taken down.


This is the best evidence ever of the REAL creation of covid, with proof from documents (see next post substack with fuller description of this video).

Transparently Hiding...Again
David Martin World
Feb 27 2023
The Department of Energy and Republicans in Congress working so that you don't see what there is to see.
27 min 37 sec

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMSz209wV8g
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)


David Martin Uncovers The Continuing Coverups & Politicized Misdirects: "Transparently Hiding...Again"
2nd Smartest Guy in the World
Mar 2

Two days ago David Martin produced a YouTube video further establishing incontrovertible evidence that the entire COVID-19 operation was a criminal conspiracy years in the making.

His presentation is germane to today’s earlier article on the Republican COVID-19 declassification bill that is ultimately more of the same obfuscation blame game and further vilification of China; to wit:

…the Wuhan Institute of Virology was not merely funded by the CCP, but was for all intents and purposes created by the CIA, DoD, Pentagon, BigPharma and Fauci’s network of tax theft agencies and institutes. All of the Gain-of-Function technology that Wuhan was weaponizing came from Fauci’s bioweapons research point man Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina. In other words, this is not a China operation, and the intentional lab leak was not ordered by the CCP.
Of course, the virus was leaked so that the real bioweapon "vaccine" could be deployed.

Martin references a research paper published in early 2016 whereby the scientist team and their funders implicate themselves by their very own admissions. They confess to performing illegal Gain of Function (GoF) research during the GoF moratorium.

Fauci’s criminal research network consisting of the NIH, NIAD and GoF mastermind Ralph Baric elaborated on their Crimes Against Humanity research in plain sight. They knew full well at the time that no one would have dared prosecute their Intelligence-Military-Medical Industrial Complex conspiracies to commit global bioterrorism.



The research paper:

https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack.com%2Fimg%2Fattachment_icon.svg

Pnas
1.18MB ∙ PDF File
Download


Note above underlined citation 27, entitled “Release of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus nuclear import block enhances host transcription in human lung cells.”


Keyword “release” can only mean one thing: intentionality.

Keyword “mutant” refers to their illegal GoF in addition to their splicing “wild-type” viruses into human lung epithelial cells.
Basically, Fauci, Baric & Co. have across several research papers openly admitted to a variety of crimes that ultimately led to both the viral and “vaccine” components of their PSYOP-19 scamdemic program. Said program was the payload delivery system that the CIA and the likes of Bill Gates were concurrently developing across their various tabletop “exercises” like Dark Winter, SPARS, etc.

Here is moderna, a DoD and Pentagon front corporation that filed COVID-19 patents in 2015 on behalf of their handlers, admitting to a new round of royalty-bearing license agreements for 2023:



(Note that the year moderna filed their COVID patents occurred at the exact same time the above “human emergence” research was being conducted.)

Thus, we can be certain that another “pandemic” and associated royalty-bearing mRNA poison injections is ready to be deployed as part of the continued POLYPSYOP program.

As is now well known by many, Fauci would perjure himself multiple times in front of Congress, all while has was continuing to fund banned GoF research throughout 2022 and into 2023, and up until his peculiarly timed retirement last month. All of the usual suspects have not only been indicted, but have received additional tax theft monies to continue with their illegal “research.”

Essentially, the illegitimate Federal government is both directly and indirectly involved in this “pandemic” Crimes Against Humanity program. As such, the foreign nation of Washington, D.C. is wholly captured, and is actively working to depopulate We the People as they persist in socially engineering reality inversion narratives.



Active participation in the mass ritual biosuicide is thankfully waning, and few are now subjecting themselves to booster injections, but the carefully engineered damage has been done. And many more mass induced fear operations are on deck.

As per Martin, no Republican politician will dare go after the most blatant crimes as outlined above. Blaming China instead of the real enemies operating within the “attacked” nation itself is precisely the kind of deflection that will be used to justify ever more wars. Because war is the ultimate solution for discharging untenable debts, justifying global financial market collapse, and covering up the worst crime in the history of the world.
 
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Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
View: https://twitter.com/ichudov/status/1631762837289795585?cxt=HHwWgoC8pfbpl6UtAAAA

Igor Chudov@ichudov
4:05 PM · Mar 3, 2023

Covid is again starting to take a turn for the worse in the Netherlands and in the UK. In the UK, excess mortality is at its highest since over 2 years ago! Does anyone still believe that BS about how "we are building collective multilayered hybrid immunity"

tw1.jpg

Gomez Addams@tradsperger
17h

Here you can see RNA in sewage in the Netherlands, with data up until 28 of february. The Dutch government is about to declare the pandemic over. Please tell me, does this look like a pandemic nearing its end?

twt2.png
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)


VSS Scientific Updates During Pandemic Times #53
Geert Vanden Bossche

March 3, 2023

1. «No one really wants to talk about COVID anymore»​


From Geert: The WHO have no clue what’s going on. They still tend to make people believe that potential enhanced virulence of SARS-CoV-2 could only occur in case of recombination and that this could accidentally happen due to widespread infection (including mammals).

When are these Corona stars going to realize (or should I say ‘admit’?) that the fulminant spread of variants results from immune selection pressure caused by C-19 mass vaccination? Has humanity ever experienced an immune escape pandemic before? No! Have natural pandemics ever led to unrestrained breeding of immune escape variants? No!

Because they don’t understand why – despite the absence of functional (i.e., neutralizing Abs) - vaccinees are still protected against (severe) C-19 disease they have come up with T cell immunity (as their knowledge of immunology is restricted to conventional adaptive immunity consisting of B and T cells). In my book (‘The inescapable immune escape pandemic’), I extensively explain that T cells are NOT responsible for mitigating C-19 symptomatology in C-19 vaccinees.

WHO and their scientific advisers seem to realize that their ignorance has led to a dangerous situation. They have been urging world populations to get vaccinated and are now trying to figure out why this mass experiment didn’t fulfill their expectations. All they’re left with is “hope that the current pattern of relatively mild disease for many will hold”!

At least, they seem to be in agreement with opponents of their strategy, like me and others, in that they openly state that “humanity could be caught by surprise” (which is the subtitle of my upcoming book…) 'No one really wants to talk about COVID anymore,' the WHO's pandemic lead laments. But the 'worst case' possibility of a new coronavirus exists


2. How Two Conflicting Covid Stories Shattered Society​

The story went like this: There is a virus going around and it’s a bad one. It’s killing people indiscriminately and will kill many more. We must fight it with everything we’ve got. Closing businesses, closing schools, canceling all public events, staying home…whatever it takes, for as long as it takes. It’s a scientific problem with a scientific solution. We can do this!

There was another story simmering under the first one. It went like this: There is a virus going around. It’s nasty and unpredictable, but not a show stopper. We need to take action, but nothing so drastic as shutting down society or hiding out for years on end. Also: the virus is not going away. Let’s do our very best to protect those at higher risk. Sound good?”

How Two Conflicting Covid Stories Shattered Society ⋆ Brownstone Institute


3. Potential Health Risks of mRNA-Based Vaccine Therapy: A Hypothesis​

“It stands to reason that if our hypothesis is proven to be correct, any other mRNA vaccine should be fully investigated to understand the cytoplasmic and nuclear sensor, intrinsic factors, and signaling pathways activated by every single and combined synthetic 5′ Cap, GC content, polyA tails, and UTRs modifications made to the vaccine mRNA in order to fully elucidate the extent of their downstream signaling mechanisms of action and the potential impacts on health.”

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306987723000117?via=ihub


4. Bird Flu Outbreak is Spilling Over into Mammals​

“The U.S. Department of Agriculture said the avian influenza A virus has been detected in mammals such as skunks, bears, a raccoon and a red fox.”

The bird flu outbreak is spilling over into mammals

5. Florida Health Alert on mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine Safety​

“In Florida alone, there was a 1,700% increase in VAERS reports after the release of the COVID-19 vaccine, compared to an increase of 400% in overall vaccine administration for the same time period.”

Health Alert on mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine Safety | Florida Department of Health

640243da03118160721dc642_Afbeelding5.png
 
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psychgirl

Has No Life - Lives on TB
MUST SEE VIDEO

If you're reading this thread, this is the video you want to watch. Make the time.

Seriously. Watch the video. ASAP because it's on youtube so it's in danger of being taken down.


This is the best evidence ever of the REAL creation of covid, with proof from documents (see next post substack with fuller description of this video).

Transparently Hiding...Again
David Martin World
Feb 27 2023
The Department of Energy and Republicans in Congress working so that you don't see what there is to see.
27 min 37 sec

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMSz209wV8g
I watched the entire video.
Ages ago, at the beginning phases of the pandemic ….and I cannot for the life of me begin to know where or in what thread/article…..DH and I BOTH read that Carolina Chapel Hill WAS responsible for creating the virus along with China.

It’s stuck in the back of my head ever since; I wish, I’d have saved that article!

And now, here we are.

Thank you for finding this one though! I’m going to try and save it before or if, they take it down.
 

Zoner

Veteran Member
(fair use applies)


David Martin Uncovers The Continuing Coverups & Politicized Misdirects: "Transparently Hiding...Again"
2nd Smartest Guy in the World
Mar 2

Two days ago David Martin produced a YouTube video further establishing incontrovertible evidence that the entire COVID-19 operation was a criminal conspiracy years in the making.

His presentation is germane to today’s earlier article on the Republican COVID-19 declassification bill that is ultimately more of the same obfuscation blame game and further vilification of China; to wit:

…the Wuhan Institute of Virology was not merely funded by the CCP, but was for all intents and purposes created by the CIA, DoD, Pentagon, BigPharma and Fauci’s network of tax theft agencies and institutes. All of the Gain-of-Function technology that Wuhan was weaponizing came from Fauci’s bioweapons research point man Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina. In other words, this is not a China operation, and the intentional lab leak was not ordered by the CCP.
Of course, the virus was leaked so that the real bioweapon "vaccine" could be deployed.

Martin references a research paper published in early 2016 whereby the scientist team and their funders implicate themselves by their very own admissions. They confess to performing illegal Gain of Function (GoF) research during the GoF moratorium.

Fauci’s criminal research network consisting of the NIH, NIAD and GoF mastermind Ralph Baric elaborated on their Crimes Against Humanity research in plain sight. They knew full well at the time that no one would have dared prosecute their Intelligence-Military-Medical Industrial Complex conspiracies to commit global bioterrorism.



The research paper:

https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack.com%2Fimg%2Fattachment_icon.svg

Pnas
1.18MB ∙ PDF File
Download


Note above underlined citation 27, entitled “Release of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus nuclear import block enhances host transcription in human lung cells.”


Keyword “release” can only mean one thing: intentionality.

Keyword “mutant” refers to their illegal GoF in addition to their splicing “wild-type” viruses into human lung epithelial cells.
Basically, Fauci, Baric & Co. have across several research papers openly admitted to a variety of crimes that ultimately led to both the viral and “vaccine” components of their PSYOP-19 scamdemic program. Said program was the payload delivery system that the CIA and the likes of Bill Gates were concurrently developing across their various tabletop “exercises” like Dark Winter, SPARS, etc.

Here is moderna, a DoD and Pentagon front corporation that filed COVID-19 patents in 2015 on behalf of their handlers, admitting to a new round of royalty-bearing license agreements for 2023:



(Note that the year moderna filed their COVID patents occurred at the exact same time the above “human emergence” research was being conducted.)

Thus, we can be certain that another “pandemic” and associated royalty-bearing mRNA poison injections is ready to be deployed as part of the continued POLYPSYOP program.

As is now well known by many, Fauci would perjure himself multiple times in front of Congress, all while has was continuing to fund banned GoF research throughout 2022 and into 2023, and up until his peculiarly timed retirement last month. All of the usual suspects have not only been indicted, but have received additional tax theft monies to continue with their illegal “research.”

Essentially, the illegitimate Federal government is both directly and indirectly involved in this “pandemic” Crimes Against Humanity program. As such, the foreign nation of Washington, D.C. is wholly captured, and is actively working to depopulate We the People as they persist in socially engineering reality inversion narratives.



Active participation in the mass ritual biosuicide is thankfully waning, and few are now subjecting themselves to booster injections, but the carefully engineered damage has been done. And many more mass induced fear operations are on deck.

As per Martin, no Republican politician will dare go after the most blatant crimes as outlined above. Blaming China instead of the real enemies operating within the “attacked” nation itself is precisely the kind of deflection that will be used to justify ever more wars. Because war is the ultimate solution for discharging untenable debts, justifying global financial market collapse, and covering up the worst crime in the history of the world.
Great find I’ll have to send this along and share it on Twitter
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
I watched the entire video.
Ages ago, at the beginning phases of the pandemic ….and I cannot for the life of me begin to know where or in what thread/article…..DH and I BOTH read that Carolina Chapel Hill WAS responsible for creating the virus along with China.

It’s stuck in the back of my head ever since; I wish, I’d have saved that article!

And now, here we are.

Thank you for finding this one though! I’m going to try and save it before or if, they take it down.

If the virus originated in the US, before being transfered to and further worked on in China, is it any wonder there has been no real investigation by US officials into the origins of the virus? They certainly wouldn't want that information getting out to the public. The papers Dr. Martin produces are irrefutable, this really is a must-see video.

HD
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)



'COVID rebound' is common, even in untreated patients, reports study
by The Scripps Research Institute
March 3, 2023

"COVID rebound," in which evidence of the illness disappears and then returns days or weeks later, is surprisingly common—whether or not patients are given the antiviral Paxlovid.

The results, reported on February 22 in Clinical Infectious Diseases by scientists at Scripps Research and the digital health company eMed, are a preliminary readout from an ongoing observational study of people who order SARS-CoV-2 antigen test kits online.

The researchers found that in an initial group of 170 eMed Test-to-Treat kit users, the disappearance and then return of evidence of the virus on antigen tests and in self-reported COVID-19 symptoms occurred in 9.3% and 7.0% of patients who opted not to take antiviral treatment, and in 14.2% and 18.9% of those who opted for Paxlovid.

Although a higher proportion of the Paxlovid-treated group reported COVID-19 rebound, the difference was not statistically significant in this early snapshot of the ongoing study, which is designed ultimately to enroll a total of 800 patients.

"These preliminary results suggest that rebound after clearance of SARS-CoV-2 test positivity or COVID-19 symptom resolution is more common than previously reported in both treated and untreated patients," says study lead author Jay Pandit, MD, an assistant professor and director of Digital Medicine at the Scripps Research Translational Institute. "We're going to need a larger set of participants and more extended follow-up to better understand this rebound phenomenon."

The study, conducted from August to November of last year, was a collaboration with eMed, including epidemiologist and Chief Science Officer Michael Mina, MD, Ph.D., previously professor at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and others at the Test-to-Treat company, which is also implementing the NIH Home Test to Treat COVID-19 program.

Reports of COVID-19 rebound started appearing in the medical literature in 2022. The cause of rebound has been unclear, although the suggestion in most of these reports has been that rebound occurs more often in patients treated with Paxlovid. The latter, a mix of two antiviral compounds (nirmatrelvir and ritonavir), received emergency use approval in late 2021 from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for treating patients who have mild-to-moderate COVID-19 and are at high risk of developing severe COVID-19.

To help illuminate the rebound phenomenon and any connection to Paxlovid, Pandit and his colleagues teamed up with eMed to drive a "real-world" study of outcomes among people using the company's COVID-19 Test-to-Treat antigen test kits with telehealth proctoring and telemedicine.

"As the COVID-19 landscape continues to evolve, the importance of making timely and effective treatments accessible and thereby helping reduce severe disease outcomes cannot be overstated," Mina says.

"Collaborations such as this with the Scripps Research Translation Institute are a key part of efforts to gather evidence-based data and answer critical questions associated with treatment outcomes. We are also proud that this study not only offers new data surrounding COVID-19 recovery and treatment outcomes, but also highlights the benefits of industry and academic partnerships to accelerate high-quality public health and translational research."

The researchers offered Test-to-Treat telehealth kit users participation in the study if they had a verified positive test. If users consented to participate, the researchers sent them more test kits, and asked each participant to take a test and fill out a symptom questionnaire every other day for 16 days. The team then compared the rates of rebound for those who did and didn't opt to take Paxlovid.

Rebound was measured in two ways: a positive test result after a negative test, or a reported recurrence of symptoms after symptom resolution. For this preliminary analysis, there were 127 people in the Paxlovid-treated group, and 43 in the non-Paxlovid group.

Either way rebounds were measured, the Paxlovid group experienced them at a higher rate: 14.2% vs. 9.3% for antigen test rebounds, and 18.9% vs. 7.0% for symptom rebounds. With the small participant numbers included in this preliminary analysis, these differences were not statistically significant.

Moreover, on other measures (such as the time from first positive antigen test to first negative antigen test, and time from symptom onset to first symptom resolution), the two groups had essentially identical outcomes. Age, gender and pre-existing conditions also did not appear to influence rebound.

Pandit emphasizes that the study is not currently powered to detect statistically significant results, and a final analysis should include up to 800 participants and thus should have much more power to generate conclusive findings. However, he adds, the preliminary findings already make clear that the rebound rates for both treated and untreated groups are higher than the rates reported in prior studies.

For example, an analysis of their clinical trial results by Pfizer, the maker of Paxlovid, found rebound rates of only about 2% in both Paxlovid and placebo groups over a two-week period.

In addition to increasing the number of participants in their ongoing study, Pandit and colleagues plan to start sequencing the virus found in participants and testing participants' blood samples for antibody levels and other immune markers.

"We're hoping to answer key questions about the rebound phenomenon, such as whether it's enhanced by Paxlovid, how much it depends on the viral variant and what is the role of the patient's immune system," Pandit says.

He and his team also plan to improve the balance of ethnic and racial representation between the treatment and control groups: In the initial group of 170, Whites were much more likely than Blacks and Latinos to opt for Paxlovid treatment.
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
WAS VACCINE STATUS CONSIDERED IN THIS STUDY? .... NOT MENTIONED SO I DOUBT IT. Are vaxx heart incidents going to be blamed on 'long covid'? looks like it. Remember a few months back these same people said long covid wasn't real and was all in the head of the mostly hysterical women? They're probably hoping everyone forgets they said that.


(fair use applies)

Long COVID Sufferers More Than Twice As Likely To Experience Heart Problems
By American College of Cardiology
March 5, 2023


Long COVID more than doubles the risk of developing new cardiac symptoms.

Experiencing lasting symptoms months after catching COVID-19, also known as long COVID, was found to more than double a person’s likelihood of developing cardiovascular issues. This is according to a study that will be presented at the American College of Cardiology’s Annual Scientific Session Together With the World Congress of Cardiology.

The study—a systematic literature review and meta-analysis of 11 major studies involving a total of 5.8 million people—represents the most comprehensive effort to date to examine cardiovascular complications from long COVID. Estimates of the number of people affected by long COVID vary substantially, but recent surveys suggest about 1 in 7 people in the U.S. have experienced long COVID.

Researchers found consistent evidence that individuals with long COVID were significantly more likely than those who never had COVID-19 to experience symptoms associated with heart problems such as chest pain, shortness of breath, palpitations, and fatigue, and more likely to show markers of heart disease or elevated cardiovascular risk in medical imaging and diagnostic tests.

“COVID-19 is more than a simple respiratory disease—it is a syndrome that can affect the heart,” said Joanna Lee, a medical student at David Tvildiani Medical University in Tbilisi, Georgia, scholar at the Global Remote Research Scholars Program (GRRSP) and the study’s lead author. “Clinicians should be aware that cardiac complications can exist and investigate further if a patient complains of these symptoms, even a long time after contracting COVID-19. For patients, if you had COVID-19 and you continue to have difficulty breathing or any kind of new heart problems, you should go to the doctor and get it checked out.”

GRRSP researchers systematically screened a total of 982 studies published between 2020-2022 and selected 74 studies for a thorough review. Of these, they identified 11 studies that included data on cardiovascular outcomes among people with long COVID as well as a control group of participants who never had COVID-19. Of more than 5.8 million participants included across the 11 studies, almost 450,000 experienced cardiac complications. Among those with long COVID, the rate of cardiac complications was 2.3-2.5 times higher compared with those in the control group.

“Coordinated efforts among primary care providers, emergency room staff, and cardiologists could help with early detection and mitigation of cardiac complications among long COVID patients,” Lee said.

There is no single definition for long COVID. For this study, researchers defined long COVID as symptoms persisting for at least four weeks and occurring at least two months after the initial COVID-19 infection. Patients with preexisting cardiovascular disease were included in the samples, but their symptoms were only counted as cardiovascular complications of long COVID if they emerged after the COVID-19 infection. For example, if someone with a history of ischemic heart disease was diagnosed with new onset atrial fibrillation post-COVID-19, they were counted.

Although the study did not investigate the possible biological mechanisms involved in the association between long COVID and heart complications, researchers said that chronic inflammation, which has been documented by persistently elevated inflammatory markers in people with long COVID, could be a factor. They added that a high level of variability between studies in terms of population and data collection methods also limited the ability to draw definitive conclusions—a common limitation with COVID-19-related studies, given the lack of long-term data.

Further analyses to determine whether people with preexisting cardiovascular disease may face different cardiovascular risks related to long COVID as compared with the general population are planned, researchers said.

Lee will present the study, “Cardiac Complications among Long Covid Patients: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” on Monday, March 6, at 11 a.m. CT / 17:00 UTC in Room 357.
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)


House committee says Fauci 'prompted' drafting of medical paper to 'disprove' COVID lab leak theory
Fauci cited 'Proximal Origin' paper from the White House podium allegedly in bid to 'put down' the 'lab leak hypothesis'

By Danielle Wallace | Fox News
Published March 5, 2023 2:12pm EST

GOP leadership on a House committee said Sunday it uncovered new email evidence suggesting Dr. Anthony Fauci "prompted" the drafting of "proximal origin" publication meant to "disprove" the COVID-19 lab leak theory.

In a new memo released Sunday, Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Majority Staff alerted the rest of the committee members to "New Evidence Resulting from the Select Subcommittee’s Investigation into the Origins of COVID-19 – ‘The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2’"

"New evidence released by the Select Subcommittee today suggests that Dr. Fauci ‘prompted’ the drafting of a publication that would ‘disprove’ the lab leak theory, the authors of this paper skewed available evidence to achieve that goal, and Dr. Jeremy Farrar went uncredited despite significant involvement," the memo says.

On Feb. 1, 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Francis Collins, and at least eleven other scientists convened a conference call to discuss COVID-19. On the call, Fauci and Collins were first warned that COVID-19 may have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, and, further, may have been intentionally genetically manipulated, the memo says.

Three days later, four participants of the conference call authored a paper entitled "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2" (Proximal Origin) and sent a draft to Fauci and Collins. Prior to final publication in Nature Medicine, the paper was sent to Fauci for editing and approval.

"On April 16, 2020, slightly more than two months after the original conference call, Dr. Collins emailed Dr. Fauci expressing dismay that Proximal Origin—which they saw prior to publication and were given the opportunity to edit—did not squash the lab leak hypothesis and asks if the NIH can do more to ‘put down’ the lab leak hypothesis," the memo says. "The next day—after Dr. Collins explicitly asked for more public pressure—Dr. Fauci cited Proximal Origin from the White House podium when asked if COVID-19 leaked from a lab."

The committee, chaired by Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, cited several emails GOP leadership says, "suggests that Dr. Anthony Fauci ‘prompted’ Dr. Kristian Andersen, Professor, Scripps Research (Scripps), to write Proximal Origin and that the goal was to ‘disprove’ any lab leak theory."

"On August 18, 2021, Scripps responded to then-Committee on Oversight and Reform Ranking Member, James Comer, and then-Committee on the Judiciary Ranking Member, Jim Jordan’s, July 29, 2021, letter to Dr. Andersen," the memo says. "In this letter, Scripps asserts that Dr. Andersen "objectively" investigated the origins, and that Dr. Anthony Fauci did not attempt to influence his work. Both statements do not appear to be supported by the available evidence."

In an excerpt from a Feb. 12, 2020, email included in the memo, for example, Anderson writes that he, Fauci, Farrah as well as colleagues Eddie Holmes, Andrew Rambaut, Bob Garry and Ian Lipkin "have been working through much of the (primarily) genetic data to provide agnostic and scientifically informed hypothesis around the origins of the virus."

In a July 14, 2021, interview with The New York Times, Andersen was asked about how his view changed from possible lab leak to definitely zoonotic. Anderson claimed that he and other researchers "looked at data from coronaviruses found in other species, such as bats and pangolins, which demonstrated that the features that first appeared unique to SARS-CoV-2 were in fact found in other, related viruses."

But as the committee majority notes, while Proximal Origin was going through peer review with Nature Medicine more than a year earlier, Andersen "actually did not find the pangolin data compelling."

"Privately, Dr. Andersen did not believe the pangolin data disproved a lab leak theory despite saying so publicly. It is still unclear what intervening event changed the minds of the authors of Proximal Origin in such a short period of time. Based on this new evidence, the pangolin data was not the compelling factor; to this day, the only known intervening event was the February 1 conference call with Dr. Fauci."

In another email during the paper’s drafting process, Lipkin asserted, "It does not eliminate the possibility of inadvertent release following adaptation through selection in culture at the institute in Wuhan. Given the scale of the bat CoV research pursued there and the site of emergence of the first human cases we have a nightmare of circumstantial evidence to assess."

In a Feb. 17, 2020, email, Lipkin thanked Farrar for "shepherding" the paper, noting "Rumors of bioweaponeering are now circulating in China." Farrar agreed to push Nature to publish it.
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)


One in four parents misled others about their children having COVID-19, survey finds
by University of Utah Health Sciences
March 6, 2023

More than 25% of parents surveyed report that they were less than truthful about their children's COVID-19 status or that they didn't follow the disease's preventive guidelines during the pandemic for their offspring, according to a nationwide study led in part by University of Utah scientists.

Among the most common reasons cited were an inability to stay home from work to care for their sick children and wanting to make decisions about their child's health care without input from outside authorities. In some cases, parents had a different motivation for lying. Some parents of younger children lied about their child's age so they could get vaccinated.

The study appears in the March 6, 2023, issue of JAMA Network Open.

The finding raises concerns that parental reluctance to disclose that their children had the disease or didn't adhere to COVID-19 prevention protocols could have contributed to the spread of the infection and exacerbated its high rates of hospitalization and death, according to Angela Fagerlin, Ph.D., senior author of the study and chair of the Department of Population Health Sciences at U of U Health.

"The pandemic created tremendous stress for all of us, particularly parents," says Andrea Gurmankin Levy, Ph.D., co-first author of the study and a professor of social sciences at Middlesex Community College in Connecticut. In addition to Levy, Fagerlin and her colleagues at U of U Health conducted the study in conjunction with researchers in Colorado, Iowa, and Great Britain.

"Like everyone else, parents worried about getting sick with COVID-19 or about losing their job, but parents also had to manage juggling job responsibilities while their children were home in quarantine," Levy says. "And it's quite possible that some parents misrepresented their child's COVID-19 status or didn't adhere to testing or quarantine rules in an attempt to ease some of this burden."

The new study follows up on earlier findings by the same research team that concluded four of 10 American adults misled others about whether they had COVID-19 or adhered to public health measures to help corral the disease.

A subset of 580 participants in the original study who reported being parents or guardians of children younger than 18 years old living with them during the pandemic were asked additional survey questions about COVID-19 choices they made on behalf of their offspring.

However, the researchers emphasize that comparing the results of the two studies is difficult because they asked the parents different questions, which were specifically about their children.

Parents had many motivations for lying

Overall, about 26% of parents misrepresented a child's COVID-19 status in some way. Of those:
  • About 60% reported that they deceived others about their child's vaccination status when they wanted their unvaccinated children to participate in an activity that required vaccination.
  • Among parents who reported misleading others about their child having COVID-19 or not following public health recommendations, more than 50% reported doing so because they wanted the freedom to do what they thought best for their family.
  • Nearly 43% of parents said they didn't tell others that their children had COVID-19 because they didn't want them to miss school.
  • About 35% of parents didn't disclose that their child had COVID-19 because, in part, they could not afford to miss work to care for them.
"Based on our study, it appears that many parents were concerned about their children missing school, and as a parent of three school-aged kids, I can understand that," Fagerlin says. "Yet, at the same time, they're potentially exposing other kids to a serious illness. So, it's tricky because what you might think is best for your child might not be best for other children in the classroom."

Some parents misled others but did so in ways that were unlikely to harm others, according to the researchers. For instance, some parents told health care workers that their child was older than they actually were so they could be vaccinated.

"Parents might have thought that fibbing about their child's age was a good thing because it would help them stay healthy and safe from the virus and potentially protect others around them," Fagerlin says. "But there was a cut-off age for a reason. The vaccine hadn't been tested in younger aged children and it wasn't clear that it would be safe or effective for them."

About 70% of the participants were women, indicating that the study doesn't fully represent the demographic makeup of the United States––an important consideration when interpreting the findings, according to Alistair Thorpe, Ph.D., co-first author of the study, a former post-doctoral student at U of U Health, and currently a post-doctoral research scientist at University College London. The researchers also suspect that some participants may have fudged some of their survey answers.

"Lying about lying is certainly a possibility," Fagerlin says. "If anything, 26% is probably the minimum number of parents who misrepresented their children's COVID-19 status during the pandemic."

In the future, the researchers conclude, health officials will need to develop policies and technologies that don't depend on the honor system or jeopardize privacy to protect public health.

"We need to do a better job of providing support mechanisms like paid sick leave for family illness so that parents don't feel like their only option is to engage in misrepresentation or non-adherence to public health guidelines during a future infectious disease outbreak that matches or exceeds the magnitude of COVID-19," Levy says.
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
Two over the counter remedies that helped so many when they had the milder versions of covid.


(fair use applies)


Could Benadryl and Sudafed be pulled from pharmacy shelves? FDA to review common over-the-counter cold meds due to concerns they're useless
By Cassidy Morrison Senior Health Reporter For Dailymail.Com
Updated: 14:17 EST, 7 March 2023

  • Scientists have long believed that key ingredient in decongestant is ineffective
  • An FDA panel will weigh whether the medication has any medical benefits
  • Phenylephrine is a common alternative to the ingredient in Sudafed that can make meth

Health officials are reevaluating the main ingredient in common stuffy nose and cold meds amid growing evidence it does not work.

The key ingredient in a wide variety of over-the-counter oral decongestants has been thought to be ineffective for years.

When metabolized in the gut, phenylephrine can’t reach the bloodstream in sufficient levels, denying its ability to provide relief.

The FDA’s decision to reconsider the ingredient’s designation as 'generally recognized as safe and effective' in April comes about eight years after a meta-analysis found it was no more effective than a placebo.

Phenylephrine - commonly found in medications like Vicks Sinex, Delsym for children, and certain types of Sudafed - became exceedingly popular in the mid-2000s when the federal government imposed new restrictions on purchasing pseudoephedrine, an ingredient that can be used in clandestine labs to make meth.

The FDA’s Nonprescription Drugs Advisory Committee will deliberate over whether to revoke oral phenylephrine’s ‘generally recognized as safe’ designation given the 'lack of efficacy.'

Oral phenylephrine is a key ingredient in Sudafed PE. The combination of oral phenylephrine with the antihistamine diphenhydramine is contained in several popular cold medicines and decongestants, such as Benadryl Allergy Plus Congestion, Robitussin Night Time Cough and Cold, and Delsym Children's Night Time Cough and Cold.

The medicine works by shrinking the dilated blood vessels in the nose, relieving nasal and sinus congestion.

The FDA’s plan to weigh the regulatory future of the medication comes on the back of years of evidence pointing to its uselessness as a decongestant.

Studies show that it works in nasal spray form. But when taken orally, only a miniscule amount reaches the bloodstream, rendering it ineffective.

In 2007, pharmacy professors at the University of Florida put forth a petition pressing the FDA to review whether a 10 milligram phenylephrine pill worked as a decongestant.

A series of studies pointing to its ineffectiveness have come out since then.

In 2015, a study sponsored in part by the New Jersey-based pharmaceutical company Merck & Co found that the the 10 milligram dose, as well as 20, 30, or 40 milligram doses were ‘not significantly better than placebo at relieving nasal congestion' in a sample of 539 adults.

The FDA recommends taking 10 milligrams of this non-prescription decongestant every four hours for temporary relief from nasal congestion.

A few months after that study was published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, University of Florida pharmacy experts launched a second petition demanding that the FDA remove the oral medication from the market entirely.

Dr Leslie Hendeles, a pharmacotherapy professor and co-author of the UF petition said in 2015: ‘Scientific evidence continues to show that the most popular products on the market containing phenylephrine are ineffective.

‘Patients who seek an over-the-counter remedy should get what they pay for: an effective and safe alternative to a prescription drug.’

Though the medication is widely believed to be without considerable benefit, there has not been strong evidence to suggest that it poses a safety threat.

Dr Randy Hatton, a pharmacy professor at UF and co-author of the petition said: ‘We think the evidence supports that phenylephrine’s status as a safe and effective over-the-counter product should be changed.’

‘We are looking out for the consumer, and he or she needs to know that science says that oral phenylephrine does not work for the majority of people.’

The petition received support from the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology, which said last May: ‘Keeping oral phenylephrine over-the -counter does a disservice to patients who might be prone to taking higher doses than recommended due to lack of effect and/or delay their visit to their primary care clinician or a specialist who could help resolve their symptoms.’
 

Heliobas Disciple

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America' COVID Response Was Based on Lies | Opinion
Scott W. Atlas , Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
3/6/23 at 6:00 AM EST

Almost all of America's leaders have gradually pulled back their COVID mandates, requirements, and closures—even in states like California, which had imposed the most stringent and longest-lasting restrictions on the public. At the same time, the media has been gradually acknowledging the ongoing release of studies that totally refute the purported reasons behind those restrictions. This overt reversal is falsely portrayed as "learned" or "new evidence." Little acknowledgement of error is to be found. We have seen no public apology for promulgating false information, or for the vilification and delegitimization of policy experts and medical scientists like myself who spoke out correctly about data, standard knowledge about viral infections and pandemics, and fundamental biology.

The historical record is critical. We have seen a macabre Orwellian attempt to rewrite history and to blame the failure of widespread lockdowns on the lockdowns' critics, alongside absurd denials of officials' own incessant demands for them. In the Trump administration, Dr. Deborah Birx was formally in charge of the medical side of the White House's coronavirus task force during the pandemic's first year. In that capacity, she authored all written federal policy recommendations to governors and states and personally advised each state's public health officials during official visits, often with Vice President Mike Pence, who oversaw the entire task force. Upon the inauguration of President Joe Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci became chief medical advisor and ran the Biden pandemic response.

We must acknowledge the abject failure of the Birx-Fauci policies. They were enacted, but they failed to stop the dying, failed to stop the infection from spreading, and inflicted massive damage and destruction particularly on lower-income families and on America's children.

More than 1 million American deaths have been attributed to that virus. Even after draconian measures, including school closures, stoppage of non-COVID medical care, business shutdowns, personal restrictions, and then the continuation of many restrictions and mandates in the presence of a vaccine, there was an undeniable failure—over two presidential administrations—to stop cases from rapidly escalating.

Numerous experts—including John Ioannidis, David Katz, and myself—called for targeted protection, a safer alternative to widespread lockdowns, in national media beginning in March of 2020. That proposal was rejected. History's biggest public health policy failure came at the hands of those who recommended the lockdowns and those who implemented them, not those who advised otherwise.

The tragic failure of reckless, unprecedented lockdowns that were contrary to established pandemic science, and the added massive harms of those policies on children, the elderly, and lower-income families, are indisputable and well-documented in numerous studies. This was the biggest, the most tragic, and the most unethical breakdown of public health leadership in modern history.

In a democracy, indeed in any ethical and free society, the truth is essential. The American people need to hear the truth—the facts, free from the political distortions, misrepresentations, and censorship. The first step is to clearly state the harsh truth in the starkest possible terms. Lies were told. Those lies harmed the public. Those lies were directly contrary to the evidence, to decades of knowledge on viral pandemics, and to long-established fundamental biology.

Here are the 10 biggest falsehoods—known for years to be false, not recently learned or proven to be so—promoted by America's public health leaders, elected and unelected officials, and now-discredited academics:

1. SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has a far higher fatality rate than the flu by several orders of magnitude.

2. Everyone is at significant risk to die from this virus.

3. No one has any immunological protection, because this virus is completely new.

4. Asymptomatic people are major drivers of the spread.

5. Locking down—closing schools and businesses, confining people to their homes, stopping non-COVID medical care, and eliminating travel—will stop or eliminate the virus.

6. Masks will protect everyone and stop the spread.

7. The virus is known to be naturally occurring, and claiming it originated in a lab is a conspiracy theory.

8. Teachers are at especially high risk.

9. COVID vaccines stop the spread of the infection.

10. Immune protection only comes from a vaccine.

None of us are so naïve as to expect a direct apology from critics at my employer, Stanford University, or in government, academic public health, and the media. But to ensure that this never happens again, government leaders, power-driven officials, and influential academics and advisors often harboring conflicts of interest must be held accountable. Personally, I remain highly skeptical that any government investigation or commission can avoid politicization. Regardless of their intention, all such government-run inquiries will at least be perceived as politically motivated and their conclusions will be rejected outright by many. Those investigations must proceed, though, if only to seek the truth, to teach our children that truth matters, and to remember G.K. Chesterton's critical lesson that "Right is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong about it."

Scott W. Atlas, MD is the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow in health policy at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, Co-Director of the Global Liberty Institute, Founding Fellow of Hillsdale's Academy for Science & Freedom, and author of A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America (Bombardier Press, 2022).

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
 

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NYC. First they mandated masks. Now they are saying make people take them off. Times are certainly changing...


(fair use applies)


Mayor Adams to New York City Shoppers: Drop That Mask
To prevent robberies, Mayor Eric Adams is telling shopkeepers to bar customers who refuse to lower their masks when they first enter stores.

By Liam Stack
March 6, 2023

Not long ago, New Yorkers were required to wear a face mask if they wanted to enter a store. But Mayor Eric Adams has now said the city’s shopkeepers should adopt the opposite approach: People who refuse to pull down their mask when they first come into a store should be barred, in case they plan to rob the place.

“We are putting out a clear call to all of our shops, do not allow people to enter the store without taking off their face mask,” the mayor said in a radio interview on 1010 WINS on Monday. “And then once they’re inside, they can continue to wear it if they so desire to do so.”

The mayor made the suggestion, which an aide to Mr. Adams said is not a legal requirement or even a new idea, at a time when crime appears to be declining. The city has seen reduced rates of crime across most categories, from murder to petit larceny, for the first two months of 2023 compared with the same period last year, Police Department data shows.

But theft has been a harder problem to address, and concerns over robberies and shoplifting persist. The problem was underscored over the weekend by the shooting death of a 67-year-old deli employee in Manhattan, who was killed on Friday night by a robber wearing a dark face mask and a white, full-body Tyvek suit.

The mayor referred to that killing in a second news media appearance on Monday.

“Let’s be clear, some of these characters going into stores that are wearing their mask, they’re not doing it because they’re afraid of the pandemic, they’re doing it because they’re afraid of the police,” the mayor said in a television interview with PIX 11. “We need to stop allowing them to exploit the safety of the pandemic by wearing masks, committing crimes.”

Mr. Adams’s suggestion is sure to draw the ire of those who remain committed to masking in public as Covid persists, as well as those with health conditions that put them at an elevated risk of severe illness if they were to be infected with the coronavirus.

Mr. Adams won election in 2021 in part by promising to crack down on rising crime, which afflicted the city during the height of the pandemic. But since taking office, he has continued to sound the alarm even as city data has indicated that New York has become safer.

Despite the wide-ranging recent decline in crime, the number of robberies fell by only 2 percent, city data shows. And the number of petit larcenies — the theft of items whose value is low, such as those typically taken in a shoplifting — increased by about 5 percent compared with the same period last year.

Requiring shoppers to briefly drop their face masks would allow security cameras to get a clear view of a shopper’s face, the mayor said. And if a shopper refused to comply, Mr. Adams said store employees would know to keep an eye on them because “if someone is violating the basic rules, they may be there to violate a substantial rule as to commit a crime.”

“That’s all we are trying to do — empower the store owners, the storekeepers, so they can play a role that we are going to do as police officers,” he said.

Jeffrey Maddrey, the Police Department’s chief of department, echoed the call for shoppers to drop their masks during a news conference outside Daona, the deli on the Upper East Side where the employee was killed on Friday. His name has not been released.

Chief Maddrey said New Yorkers should think of dropping their masks as “a peace offering” and “a sign of safety for store workers.”

“When we walk in, we should take down our masks,” the chief said. “We should let them know that they’re not in any danger, any harm, that we’re customers, we’re here to help them.”

But as a crime prevention strategy, he acknowledged it might have shortcomings.

A store that keeps its door locked and admits shoppers via a buzzer is better able to enforce a mask-off rule, he said, while a store that keeps its doors open has less control.

Nevertheless, the idea has been embraced by the United Bodegas of America Association, an umbrella group for the corner stores that are ubiquitous across the city.

Fernando Mateo, a representative of the association who attended the news conference at Daona, put on a hospital mask, a beanie and a hood so that only his eyes were visible.

“This is what we’re talking about,” he said. “This is what we don’t want.”

“We’re talking about all those people who hoodie up, that cover their entire face so that the Police Department cannot identify them when they commit a crime,” he added. “These criminals have gotten so comfortable that they’re doing it repeatedly, and things get out of hand and people are killed.”
 

psychgirl

Has No Life - Lives on TB


America' COVID Response Was Based on Lies | Opinion
Scott W. Atlas , Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
3/6/23 at 6:00 AM EST

Almost all of America's leaders have gradually pulled back their COVID mandates, requirements, and closures—even in states like California, which had imposed the most stringent and longest-lasting restrictions on the public. At the same time, the media has been gradually acknowledging the ongoing release of studies that totally refute the purported reasons behind those restrictions. This overt reversal is falsely portrayed as "learned" or "new evidence." Little acknowledgement of error is to be found. We have seen no public apology for promulgating false information, or for the vilification and delegitimization of policy experts and medical scientists like myself who spoke out correctly about data, standard knowledge about viral infections and pandemics, and fundamental biology.

The historical record is critical. We have seen a macabre Orwellian attempt to rewrite history and to blame the failure of widespread lockdowns on the lockdowns' critics, alongside absurd denials of officials' own incessant demands for them. In the Trump administration, Dr. Deborah Birx was formally in charge of the medical side of the White House's coronavirus task force during the pandemic's first year. In that capacity, she authored all written federal policy recommendations to governors and states and personally advised each state's public health officials during official visits, often with Vice President Mike Pence, who oversaw the entire task force. Upon the inauguration of President Joe Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci became chief medical advisor and ran the Biden pandemic response.

We must acknowledge the abject failure of the Birx-Fauci policies. They were enacted, but they failed to stop the dying, failed to stop the infection from spreading, and inflicted massive damage and destruction particularly on lower-income families and on America's children.

More than 1 million American deaths have been attributed to that virus. Even after draconian measures, including school closures, stoppage of non-COVID medical care, business shutdowns, personal restrictions, and then the continuation of many restrictions and mandates in the presence of a vaccine, there was an undeniable failure—over two presidential administrations—to stop cases from rapidly escalating.

Numerous experts—including John Ioannidis, David Katz, and myself—called for targeted protection, a safer alternative to widespread lockdowns, in national media beginning in March of 2020. That proposal was rejected. History's biggest public health policy failure came at the hands of those who recommended the lockdowns and those who implemented them, not those who advised otherwise.

The tragic failure of reckless, unprecedented lockdowns that were contrary to established pandemic science, and the added massive harms of those policies on children, the elderly, and lower-income families, are indisputable and well-documented in numerous studies. This was the biggest, the most tragic, and the most unethical breakdown of public health leadership in modern history.

In a democracy, indeed in any ethical and free society, the truth is essential. The American people need to hear the truth—the facts, free from the political distortions, misrepresentations, and censorship. The first step is to clearly state the harsh truth in the starkest possible terms. Lies were told. Those lies harmed the public. Those lies were directly contrary to the evidence, to decades of knowledge on viral pandemics, and to long-established fundamental biology.

Here are the 10 biggest falsehoods—known for years to be false, not recently learned or proven to be so—promoted by America's public health leaders, elected and unelected officials, and now-discredited academics:

1. SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has a far higher fatality rate than the flu by several orders of magnitude.

2. Everyone is at significant risk to die from this virus.

3. No one has any immunological protection, because this virus is completely new.

4. Asymptomatic people are major drivers of the spread.

5. Locking down—closing schools and businesses, confining people to their homes, stopping non-COVID medical care, and eliminating travel—will stop or eliminate the virus.

6. Masks will protect everyone and stop the spread.

7. The virus is known to be naturally occurring, and claiming it originated in a lab is a conspiracy theory.

8. Teachers are at especially high risk.

9. COVID vaccines stop the spread of the infection.

10. Immune protection only comes from a vaccine.

None of us are so naïve as to expect a direct apology from critics at my employer, Stanford University, or in government, academic public health, and the media. But to ensure that this never happens again, government leaders, power-driven officials, and influential academics and advisors often harboring conflicts of interest must be held accountable. Personally, I remain highly skeptical that any government investigation or commission can avoid politicization. Regardless of their intention, all such government-run inquiries will at least be perceived as politically motivated and their conclusions will be rejected outright by many. Those investigations must proceed, though, if only to seek the truth, to teach our children that truth matters, and to remember G.K. Chesterton's critical lesson that "Right is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong about it."

Scott W. Atlas, MD is the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow in health policy at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, Co-Director of the Global Liberty Institute, Founding Fellow of Hillsdale's Academy for Science & Freedom, and author of A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America (Bombardier Press, 2022).

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
In Newsweek, no less!!
Wow.
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)


Long COVID Means Increased Risk of Long-Term Gastrointestinal Problems

By Washington University in St. Louis
March 8, 2023

According to the researchers’ calculations, SARS-CoV-2 infections have resulted in over 6 million new cases of gastrointestinal disorders in the United States and 42 million new cases globally. Gastrointestinal conditions vary from minor stomach problems to severe ailments such as acute pancreatitis and liver failure that can be life-threatening.

Addressing lingering GI issues critical part of post-infection care.

People who have had COVID-19 are at increased risk of developing gastrointestinal (GI) disorders within a year after infection compared with people who haven’t been infected. This is according to an analysis of federal health data by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care system.


Such conditions include liver problems, acute pancreatitis, irritable bowel syndrome, acid reflux, and ulcers in the lining of the stomach or upper intestine. The post-COVID-19 GI tract also is associated with an increased likelihood of constipation, diarrhea, abdominal pain, bloating, and vomiting.

“Gastrointestinal problems were among the first that were reported by the patient community,” said senior author Ziyad Al-Aly, MD, a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University who has studied extensively the long-term effects of COVID-19 infection. “It is increasingly clear that the GI tract serves as a reservoir for the virus.”

The study was published on March 7 in the journal Nature Communications.

The new findings build upon Al-Aly’s prior research detailing COVID-19’s lingering effects on the brain, heart, kidneys and other organs. Since the pandemic, Al-Aly and his research team have published numerous, often-cited studies on SARS-CoV-2’s extended health risks, altogether noting about 80 adverse health outcomes associated with long COVID-19.

“At this point in our research, the findings on the GI tract and long COVID did not surprise us,” Al-Aly said. “The virus can be destructive, even among those considered healthy or who have had mild infections. We’re seeing COVID-19’s ability to attack any organ system in the body, sometimes with serious long-term consequences, including death.”

The gastrointestinal system includes the mouth, throat, esophagus, stomach, small and large intestines, rectum, and anus, as well as organs, such as the liver and pancreas, that produce enzymes to aid in the digestion of food and liquids.

GI conditions range from mild stomach issues to life-threatening conditions such as liver failure and acute pancreatitis.

The researchers estimate that, so far, infections caused by SARS-CoV-2 have contributed to more than 6 million new cases of GI disorders in the U.S. and 42 million new cases worldwide.

“This is no small number,” said Al-Aly, who treats patients within the VA St. Louis Health Care System and is its chief of research and development service. “It is crucial to include GI health as an integral part of post-acute COVID care.”

For the study, researchers analyzed about 14 million de-identified medical records in a database maintained by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the nation’s largest integrated healthcare system.

They created a controlled data set of 154,068 people who had tested positive for COVID-19 sometime from March 1, 2020, through January 15, 2021, and who had survived the first 30 days after infection. Statistical modeling was used to compare gastrointestinal outcomes in the COVID-19 data set with two other groups of people not infected with the virus: a control group of more than 5.6 million people who did not have COVID-19 during the same time frame; and a control group of more than 5.8 million people from March 1, 2018, to December 31, 2019, well before the virus had infected and killed millions across the globe.

Overall, GI disorders were 36% more likely in people with COVID-19 compared with those who had not been infected with the virus. This includes people who were and were not hospitalized because of the virus.

“A lot of people draw comparisons between COVID-19 and the flu,” Al-Aly said. “We compared health outcomes in those hospitalized with the flu versus those hospitalized with COVID, and we still saw an increased risk of GI disorders among people hospitalized with COVID-19. Even this far into the pandemic, COVID-19 remains more serious than the flu.”

People in the study were mostly older white men; however, the researchers also analyzed data that included more than 1.1 million women and adults of all ages and races. “Those who acquired long-term GI problems after infection included people of all ages, sexes, and racial backgrounds,” Al-Aly said.

Additionally, few people in the study had been vaccinated for COVID-19 because the vaccines were not yet widely available during the time span of the study, from March 2020 through early January 2021. The data also predates the delta, omicron, and other COVID-19 variants, and newer data indicate the COVID-19 vaccines provide at least some protection against long COVID-19.

“While the vaccines may help to reduce the risks of long COVID, they do not offer complete protection against long-term symptoms of COVID-19 that can affect the heart, lungs, brain, and now, we know, the GI tract,” Al-Aly said.

Compared with patients in the control groups, people who had had COVID-19 were at a 62% increased risk of developing ulcers in the lining of the stomach or small intestine; a 35% heightened risk of suffering from acid reflux disease; and a 46% increased risk of experiencing acute pancreatitis.

Also compared to control groups, patients who had had the virus were 54% more likely to suffer from irritable bowel syndrome, 47% more likely to experience inflammation of the stomach lining, and 36% more likely to have an upset stomach without an obvious cause.

Similarly, those who had had COVID-19 were 54% more likely to experience digestive symptoms such as constipation, diarrhea, bloating, vomiting, and abdominal pain.

“Taken with all the evidence that has accumulated thus far, the findings in this report call for the urgent need to double down and accelerate our effort to develop strategies to prevent and treat the long-term health effects after COVID-19 infection,” Al-Aly said.

Reference: “Long-term gastrointestinal outcomes of COVID-19” by Evan Xu, Yan Xie and Ziyad Al-Aly, 7 March 2023, Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-36223-7
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)



BOOM! Dr. Redfield FLIPS: This Virus WAS UNNATURAL – MOST LIKELY COME FROM THE LAB” (VIDEO)
by Jim Hoft
Mar. 8, 2023 12:15 pm


The Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic met this morning at 9 a.m. ET on Capitol Hill. The committee, chaired by Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH), focused today’s hearing on the origins of the COVID-19 Virus. A majority of Americans today know the virus was leaked, possibly on purpose, from the Wuhan biological lab in China in 2019.

Dr. Robert Redfield, the Trump-era director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Dr. Paul Auwaerter, a professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, were witnesses at today’s hearing.

For over a year now The Gateway Pundit has reported on Dr. Tony Fauci concealing evidence on the Wuhan lab leak theory from the American public.

Last week The Gateway Pundit reported on how Fauci bought off prominent doctors to keep the lab-leak theory hidden from the public.

But things are not working out so well for Dr. Fauci. His dirty man’s lies and secrets are being exposed.

On Tuesday Dr. Redfield dropped a bomb during the hearing. Dr. Redfield clearly informed Congress the coronavirus was created in a lab.

Dr. Robert Redfield: We weren’t doing gain of function research. I’m a clinical virologist. I tried to explain to Dr. Fauci, who’s an immunologist, that this virus, SARS and MERS, when they infected man from the intermediate host, Civit cat in the case of SARS, and a camel in the case of MERS, they never learned how to go human to human.​
So those original outbreaks were less than 1000 people and the epidemics died. And so when everyone thought this was SARS-like, well, it’s going to die too. But this virus was immediately the most infectious virus, not the most, I think probably right behind the measles virus that we’ve ever seen infect man.​
So I immediately said, wait a second, this isn’t natural. And then you go back and look at the literature and you find in 2014 this lab actually published a paper that they put the H2 receptor into humanized mice so it can infect human tissue.​
And then you learn that the new COVID, which came from bats, now can hardly replicate in bats. So how does that happen? So I said that my view as a virologist. Again, my hypothesis, and I never discredited them for their hypothesis, this spillover was that this was most likely come from the lab and we need to aggressively investigate both Hypotheses.​
 

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View: https://twitter.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/1633499775734788096


kanekoa.substack.com@KanekoaTheGreat
11:07 AM · Mar 8, 2023

Dr. Robert Redfield, the former CDC Director, talks about three suspicious events that took place at the Wuhan lab in September 2019:

"In Sept. 2019, three things happened in that lab. One is they deleted the sequences. Highly irregular, researchers don't like to do that. The second thing is they changed the command and control from civilian to military. Highly unusual. The third, which is very telling, is they let a contractor redo the ventilation system in that laboratory. Clearly, there was strong evidence that a significant event happened in that laboratory in September."


View: https://twitter.com/ichudov/status/1633655453652492289?cxt=HHwWgoCxhdm-9KstAAAA


Igor Chudov @ichudov
9:26 PM · Mar 8, 2023

The fourth event that happened in September 2019 was Bill Gates buying $55 million worth of stock in an obscure biotech startup called BioNTech. This purchase brought Bill Gates a 30 times return because surprisingly bioNTech became the main supplier of Covid vaccines.
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)


New WHO Chief Scientist Made Crucial Change To Paper Claiming COVID-19 Didn't Come From Lab
by Tyler Durden
Wednesday, Mar 08, 2023 - 12:05 AM

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The World Health Organization’s new chief scientist made a crucial change to an influential 2020 paper that claimed it was “improbable” that COVID-19 came from a laboratory, a newly disclosed email shows.

Jeremy Farrar, the chief scientist, was credited in one message with helping guide the paper about the origin of COVID-19, according to one email released by the U.S. House select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic on March 5.

“Thanks for shepherding this paper. Rumors of bioweaponeering are now circulating in China,” Dr. Ian Lipkin, a Columbia University professor, wrote to Farrar in the message.

“Yes I know and in US – why so keen to get out ASAP. I will push nature,” Farrar responded.

In the early 2020 paper, Lipkin and four co-authors claimed: “It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus.”

SARS-CoV-2 is the virus that causes COVID-19.

A draft of the manuscript, published by Nature, included a different word, the House panel found.

“Sorry to micro-manage/microedit! But would you be willing to change one sentence?” Farrar wrote to Kristian Andersen, who co-authored the paper, in an email just one day before publication.

Farrar asked to insert “improbable” in place of “unlikely,” the email showed.

“Sure,” Andersen responded.

The paper also stated that “SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct” and that the authors “do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

“This evidence suggests that Dr. Farrar was more involved in the drafting and publication of Proximal Origin than previously known and possibly should have been credited or acknowledged for this involvement,” the panel said.

Asked for a comment from Farrar, the World Health Organization (WHO) told The Epoch Times via email he hasn’t yet started in his new position.

The British scientist was, at the time of the messages, at the helm of the Wellcome Trust, which controls millions of dollars in funding for research in the UK.

The WHO announced on Dec. 13, 2022, that Farrar would be the next new chief scientist and that he would start in the second quarter of 2023. Wellcome, which didn’t respond to a request for comment, has stated that Farrar was due to leave in 2023.

Secret Teleconference

Farrar helped arrange a secret Feb. 1, 2020, teleconference with Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to discuss the origin of COVID-19, previously released emails show.

Some of the participants said details of SARS-CoV-2 indicated it didn’t originate from nature, though others favored the natural origin theory.

Read more here...
 

Heliobas Disciple

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View: https://twitter.com/VigilantFox/status/1633548023417413640?cxt=HHwWkICxtbfRw6stAAAA


The Vigilant Fox @VigilantFox
2:19 PM · Mar 8, 2023

Rep. @Jim_Jordan: There Are 9 Million Reasons Why Two Top Scientists Changed Their Stance on Lab Leak Theory

"So three days after they say it came from a lab, they changed their position, and the only intervening event was a conference call with Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins. Again, a call that Mr. Redfield (CDC Director at the time) was not allowed to be on ... And then three months later, Shazam! They get 9 million bucks from Dr. Fauci. Why, isn't that something?"

.
 

Heliobas Disciple

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View: https://twitter.com/EnemyInAState/status/1633610161372778496



Chris Turnbull @EnemyInAState
6:26 PM · Mar 8, 2023

New Zealand: once a beacon Covid zero sanity now a flaming shit fire of endless Covid deaths and outbreaks of common pathogens now spreading like wildfire in summer due to the Covid Aquirred Immune Deficiency stage now kicking in:

-Highest deaths since WW2 since ending zero.


DEATH JUMP Data from Statistics NZ today shows that the number of births in 2022 were there lowest since 2003. The same data shows that while we managed to keep deaths low in 2020 and 2021 with effective pandemic restrictions, when they were released, deaths zoomed higher in .2022 to 37,800, a surge out of the ordinary only exceeded by those recorded in the 20th century world wars.'

https://stats.govt.nz/information-re


The usual story of flu and other common, out of season and usually not very severe or deadly pathogens, also reported to be causing these summer death surges: NZ stil blaming their lockdowns: we expect that in a year or so they'll start to blame them...

stats.govt.nz/information-releases/new-zealand-cohort-life-tables-march-2023-update/

Holy shit! the MSM now admitting that the massive excess deaths are caused by Covid!! -Australia highest deaths for 80 years -UK highest excess deaths since the 1918 SPANISH FLU -10.4% increase in excess deaths from freedom day & the article actually says Covid is the cause!

FqppT8AWIAAC1fi.png

The headline contains the obligatory 'mystery' but strangely the rest of the article actually talks about Covid causing many deaths long after the acute phase: 'Karen Cutter, from the Institute’s Covid-19 mortality working group, said the levels are "not within normal levels of fluctuation in non-pandemic times". 'She said the Institute believed that the virus played a role in many of the excess deaths - even those that weren’t directly attributed to Covid. “Firstly, mortality risk is higher subsequent to an acute Covid infection, and most Australians have now had Covid-19,” she told http://news.com.au

'Previous research has found anyone who's had Covid is at risk of dying 18 months after infection. Scientists from China discovered all those who contract the virus have an increased risk of deadly heart issues including heart failure, stroke, atrial fibrillation myocardial infarction and heart disease.' Erm, not just China lol, it's been found in multiple studies across the world now: US, UK, we've published them all on here.... They say China to try and discredit it a bit, but still...

'Other studies have found the bug increases risk of developing venous thromboembolism (VTE), which is a condition when a blood clot forms in a vein.'

The next bit is the obligatory blaming lockdowns: though, there's remarkably little of that in here considering this is a Sun article:

'Many people couldn't get healthcare during the pandemic, as many services closed their doors or offered reduced services, which Karen said could have also contributed to the surge in excess deaths.'

'Lastly, some of these deaths could be undiagnosed Covid-19 deaths," she added.'

By far the most accurate reporting of the reasons for the massive death surge so far: though far from perfect: they're finally starting to let it slip out.

Next up they talk about the UK where excess deaths are now at Spanish flu levels: and went up by 10% from 2021: clearly indicating that the virus and 'learn to die with it' 'vaccine only' freedom day hell is the cause of this record high DEATH SURGE:

'The births and deaths figures, for the year ending December 2022, show there were 38,574 deaths in 2022, 10.4 per cent (3642) more than in 2021.

This increase - attributed to Covid-19 and an ageing population - is the biggest jump in excess deaths since the 1918 flu pandemic.'

Mild covid increases chances of an early by 10x:

Oct 25, 2022​
'Mild' Covid increases risk of of early death by 10x says new study that is amazingly published in the Times: also finally some mainstream recognition of Covid mild strokes..​

The article also says it's not vaccines causing the deaths.

So, all in all, are we getting somewhere now?

The problem is it's long after the fact and now they feel comfortable just slipping more and more truth out there.

This latest admission comes just days after the CDC quietly admitted the truth:


Mar 5​
EXPLOSIVE: CDC cover up artists quietly update Covid guidance on the sly warning of long term risk of massive organ damage and death:​
'Emerging evidence suggests that severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2),the virus that causes COVID-19​
h/t @GayFabFourFan​

As we know reinfections double chances of early death and triple the chances of being admitted to hospital for all causes years after the reinfection:

Jul 3, 2022​
Covid, Sars Cov 2: Study: reinfection doubles risk of death and triples it of hospitalisation if reinfected for the second time with in 6 months: now imagine the third, fourth, fifth etc:​

so, relative to 2021 the UK has seen a 10.4% increase in excess death: the numbers will continue to rise of course as more and more get reinfected and a figure in the millions is certainly not unexpected in a few years time at this rate.

Is very sad because Australia once was Covid zero and doing so well, but they gave up and now enjoy the fruits of unbridled Covid: welcome to our world.

Have they got to the stage where everybody is sick all the time and getting loads of strange new diseases?

What I call the Covid aquirred immune deficiency stage.

The aquirred immune deficiency stage usually shows up starting a few months after uncontrolled spread: it'll show up in stuff like deadly out of season 'RSV' 'flu' surges etc, 'strep a' whatever the oppournistic pathogen is this time.

India got that deadly 'adenovirus' thing going on right now: just another example of this effect.

Chile had that crazy 'rhinovirus' outbreak that landed all those fit and young army cadets in hospital...

Stage 2: Covid aquirred immune deficiency is everywhere

Actually flu season has already arrived much earlier than it's supposed in the land of the Kangaroo boxers! so yes, indeed, they're already well in the midst of the Covid aquirred immune deficiency phase.


When Chile said that outbreak was caused by rhinovirus I thought 'Turnbull, you're out of jokes now'

It's no longer me being satrical when I say these things: it's actually what's happening.

Common cold viruses like rhinovius are causing devastating outbreaks now.
 
Last edited:

Zoner

Veteran Member
View: https://twitter.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/1633499775734788096


kanekoa.substack.com@KanekoaTheGreat
11:07 AM · Mar 8, 2023

Dr. Robert Redfield, the former CDC Director, talks about three suspicious events that took place at the Wuhan lab in September 2019:

"In Sept. 2019, three things happened in that lab. One is they deleted the sequences. Highly irregular, researchers don't like to do that. The second thing is they changed the command and control from civilian to military. Highly unusual. The third, which is very telling, is they let a contractor redo the ventilation system in that laboratory. Clearly, there was strong evidence that a significant event happened in that laboratory in September."


View: https://twitter.com/ichudov/status/1633655453652492289?cxt=HHwWgoCxhdm-9KstAAAA


Igor Chudov @ichudov
9:26 PM · Mar 8, 2023

The fourth event that happened in September 2019 was Bill Gates buying $55 million worth of stock in an obscure biotech startup called BioNTech. This purchase brought Bill Gates a 30 times return because surprisingly bioNTech became the main supplier of Covid vaccines.
Damning evidence that our military had something to do with this gain of function research. Wow. Hard to wrap my head around that. But more and more it looks like our military was involved moreso that China and I have a hard time typing that.
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
Damning evidence that our military had something to do with this gain of function research. Wow. Hard to wrap my head around that. But more and more it looks like our military was involved moreso that China and I have a hard time typing that.

I agree. The media is now going to push the Chinese lab leak theory with no mention of US contribution and, while they're at it, they'll use it to get the ordinary citizens mad at China so that when war starts they are all in. Never let a crisis go to waste, etc. And they'll also continue to push how bad Tucker is for playing the J6 tapes. They don't even care if the truth of J6 comes out. Liz Cheney is out of office.... Anything to steer people away from the real truth of who invented covid in the first place . That's the truth they will bury at all costs.

HD
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)




‘No Doubt’ Fauci Funded Gain-of-Function Research That Likely Led to Pandemic, Former CDC Director Tells Lawmakers
Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on Wednesday said he has “no doubt” the National Institutes of Health and Dr. Anthony Fauci funded gain-of-function research that likely resulted in the creation of COVID-19 and its subsequent leak.

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D.
03/09/23

Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), on Wednesday said he has “no doubt” the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Dr. Anthony Fauci funded gain-of-function research that likely resulted in the creation of COVID-19 and its subsequent leak.

Redfield made the statement during the first formal hearing of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

Former CDC Director Dr. Redfield: “There’s no doubt that NIH funded gain-of-function research.”​
Malliotakis: “Is it likely that American tax dollars funded the gain-of-function research that created this virus?”​
Redfield: “I think it did — not only from NIH but from the State… https://t.co/gljqAdjMrM pic.twitter.com/KctyMd092K​
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) March 9, 2023​

The hearing included testimony related to the lab leak theory as a plausible explanation as the origin of COVID-19 and how the theory was shut down early in the pandemic in favor of narratives that COVID-19 had zoogenic — or natural — origins.

Committee members and witnesses also debated the future of gain-of-function research.

Other witnesses Wednesday included: Jamie Metzl, Ph.D., J.D., senior fellow at the Atlantic Council; Nicholas Wade, former New York Times science editor and former deputy editor of Nature; and Paul G. Auwaerter, M.D., MBA, clinical director in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

The hearing followed the subcommittee’s release of a memo revealing that key NIH figures, including Fauci, helped persuade virologists to write an influential article squelching the theory that COVID-19 may have leaked from a lab and asserting the virus evolved naturally.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) last month determined SARS CoV-2 most likely emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China — a theory later endorsed by FBI Director Christopher Wray. These developments helped lead to a Senate vote to declassify U.S. intelligence documents on the origins of COVID-19.

Gain-of-function research ‘caused the greatest pandemic our world has seen’

Some of the witnesses called for gain-of-function research to be slowed down, paused or stopped entirely.

Redfield testified that the “COVID-19 pandemic presents a case study on the potential dangers of such research,” and said, “we should call for a moratorium on gain-of-function research until we have a broader debate and we come to a consensus as a community about the value of [such] research.”

BREAKING: Former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield tells @RepMTG COVID-19 was likely created by gain-of-function research funded by Dr. Fauci and the NIAID.​
pic.twitter.com/AIuMPRw5Ew​
— ALX (@alx) March 8, 2023​

“I think the people that are advocates for gain-of-function research do believe that by doing this research, they somehow get ahead of the curve,” said Redfield. “I’m of the point of view that we don’t need to make pathogens more transmissible or more pathogenic in order to get ahead of the curve.

He told the subcommittee that as CDC director, he temporarily shut down the U.S. biological research facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland, even though this decision “wasn’t very popular.”

“Our inspection showed that they were cutting corners in their biosecurity requirements … and so I shut the lab down for four to six months until they corrected their biosecurity,” Redfield said.

When asked whether gain-of-function research had ever stopped a pandemic, Redfield said, “No. On the contrary, I think it probably caused the greatest pandemic our world has seen.”

He said he personally did not see any “tangible benefits” to gain-of-function research at this time.

Auwaerter disagreed, telling the committee that “a robust public health infrastructure and global coordination are essential for surveillance to identify, track and contain potential threats” and called for “research capacity improvements to biosafety” at “biosafety level-four [BSL4] facilities.”

He added that some types of gain-of-function research “can help understand possible human pathogen interactions, assess the likelihood of an emerging pandemic and inform preparedness efforts, including surveillance and medical countermeasure developments.”

Metzl said it would be “a grave error” if biological research facilities were shut down, but asked “what are the guardrails?”

In an October 2022 interview with The Defender, Dr. Francis Boyle, JD, Ph.D., argued that all BSL3 and BSL4 labs should be shut down “immediately and effectively,” and that “otherwise, there is going to be another leak.”

‘We don’t have a smoking gun’ — yet

Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), chair of the subcommittee, opened the proceedings by saying, “We are here today … to ask the fundamental question that this body failed to ask three years ago: Where did COVID-19 come from?”

Wenstrup said that question is “fundamental to helping us predict and prevent future pandemics, protecting our health and national security and preparing the United States for the future.”

He also said the question must be investigated “thoroughly, responsibly and honestly,” adding:

“We don’t have a smoking gun. In three years, there’s been no track found to prove that COVID-19 evolved naturally from an animal or a mammal or a tick to become highly infectious to humans.​
“The truth is we don’t know the origins of COVID-19 yet for sure.”​

Ranking member Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.), however, described the hearing as “a concerning step down the path of letting extremism get in the way of inquiry that should be led by science and facts,” stating that evidence regarding the origins of COVID-19 “remains inconclusive.”

“We must allow our scientists and intelligence communities to gather evidence without politicization, extreme partisan rhetoric or conspiratorial accusations that vilify our nation’s public health experts,” Ruiz said.

Metzl said that “getting to this point has required a great deal of effort by a small but tireless, self-motivated and highly capable community of experts from around the world who have refused to be bullied into silence.”

‘It looked like this virus was engineered’

Wenstrup, as part of his opening statement, lent support to theories that COVID-19 was engineered and subsequently leaked from a lab.

“The genome of COVID-19 is inconsistent with expectations and is unique for its group of viruses,” he said, adding that it has “unique characteristics” that are “optimized for human cells” and which “made it very infectious to humans.”

Wade, who has written extensively on the issue of COVID-19’s origins, told the committee that if the virus had emerged naturally, it should have left many telltale signs in the environment — but none have appeared yet, despite the Chinese government’s keen interest in finding them.

“Without such evidence, the natural origins idea has grown steadily weaker,” Wade said.

Redfield testified that since his “initial analysis of the data” early in the pandemic, “I came to believe, and I still believe today, that it indicates COVID-19 more likely was the result of an accidental lab leak than a result of a natural spillover event.”

He based his view on the biology of the virus, its “high infectivity for human-to-human transmission” and on “unusual actions in and around Wuhan in the fall of 2019.”

“It looked like this virus was engineered,” said Redfield. “We know the Wuhan Institute of Virology was conducting gain-of-function research on novel coronaviruses.”

According to Wade, this work was being conducted “under seriously inadequate safety conditions, and we know that viruses escaped from labs all the time. Clearly, lab leak has to be a strong possibility.”

Wenstrup noted that the Wuhan Institute has a poor track record when it comes to biosafety and was conducting this research at only a BSL2 lab — “described as the ‘Wild West’ by Dr. Jeremy Farrar, a virologist from the U.K. and now chief scientist for the World Health Organization.”

Records show the NIH allowed American entities to “conduct risky research on novel coronaviruses” at the Wuhan lab.

Metzl repeated Wenstrup’s statement that “there is no smoking gun” proving the lab leak theory, but added, “The growing body of circumstantial evidence suggests a gun that is, at the very least, warm to the touch.”

All four witnesses agreed the lab leak theory is not a conspiracy, with Auwaerter, the sole witness called in by the Democratic minority, adding that “It has been approached as such.”

The witnesses also uniformly agreed there was insufficient evidence available in early 2020 to dismiss the theory outright.

Redfield noted that not only was this theory nevertheless dismissed by many scientists and the media early in the pandemic but its proponents were also attacked.

“The most upsetting thing to me was the Baltimore Sun calling me a racist because I said this came from a Wuhan lab,” Redfield said.

‘Single narrative’ on COVID origins ‘antithetical to science’

Addressing the document memo released Sunday by the subcommittee, Wenstrup said it highlights “new evidence that suggests Fauci promoted the drafting of a publication that would disprove the lab leak theory,” and that evidence was “skewed” to achieve this goal.

The publication in question is a March 2020 article in Nature Medicine, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” which assured the public that the virus’ genome demonstrated an origin in wildlife.

Hundreds of news organizations cited the article to assert that the lab leak theory was a “conspiracy theory.”

“Why did Dr. Fauci work so hard for just one of those theories?” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) asked, referring to the natural origins theory.

Wade testified that “the campaign to discredit [the] lab leak began on the evening of Jan. 31, 2020, when Fauci received an email from four virologists” who concluded that COVID-19 “could not have been made in nature.”

Mr. Wade: “The Natural Origin Theory Did Not Prevail By Accident; It Was Promoted By Science Administrators”​
“Fauci was probably not too pleased to hear that the virus might have escaped from research that his agency has funded.”Select Subcommittee Hearing: Investigating the Origins of COVID-19 pic.twitter.com/MdQZvGXYSo​
— The Vigilant Fox (@VigilantFox) March 8, 2023​

“Fauci was probably not too pleased to hear that the virus might have escaped from research that his agency funded,” said Wade.

“A strange thing happened to the virologists’ conclusion within four days,” he added, noting that they suddenly changed their minds — even though no new evidence materialized during this time.

According to Jordan, “There’s 9 million reasons why they changed their mind,” pointing out that three months after their about-face, the four scientists received a $9 million grant from Fauci. Jordan said the subcommittee likely will call the authors of the paper to testify.
‍‍
Jim Jordan reveals, through the testimony of NICHOLAS WADE, that Anthony Fauci got both Doctors Andersen and Gary, to change their statement that the coronavirus came from a lab. In return, they received a $9 million grant… pic.twitter.com/n54t9oOw27​
— Andrew C 1776 ™️ (@Sheckyi) March 8, 2023​

Redfield noted that while he had been in communication with Fauci in January 2020, he was then “excluded” from further calls discussing the origins of COVID-19, even though he was CDC director at the time.

“I was quite upset as the CDC director that I was excluded [from] those discussions,” Redfield said. He said he believed he was excluded because he had “a different point of view.”
Breaking: Former CDC Director testifies that he was excluded and kept out of the loop by Fauci and the rest of the establishment because he had a different opinion about Covid origins, which he believes came from a lab.pic.twitter.com/LDkL2NskbL​
— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) March 9, 2023​
“I was told they made a decision that they would keep this confidential until they came up with a single narrative, which I will argue is antithetical to science,” said Redfield. “Science never selects a single narrative.”

“When you have a group of people that decide there could only be one point of view, that’s problematic,” Redfield said. “They squashed any debate.”

Addressing the “Proximal Origins” paper, Redfield described it as “an inaccurate paper that basically was part of [the] narrative they were creating.”

Rep. Malliotakis: “Do you think that “Proximal Origins” hides the truth?”​
Dr. Robert Redfield: “I think it’s an inaccurate paper that basically was part of a narrative that they were creating.” pic.twitter.com/Oom8qLezZz​
— Becker News (@NewsBecker) March 8, 2023​

Redfield also told the committee, “There’s no doubt that NIH was funding gain-of-function research,” and that the research also received funding from the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Wade testified that the media was then used “to establish the natural origin theory”:
“If the evidence for lab leak is so strong, why do so many people still believe the virus came from nature? The reason is that the natural origin camp got its story out first — always a big help. It very successfully painted ‘lab leak’ as a conspiracy theory before anyone had publicly proposed it.​
“The national media swallowed the natural origin story unskeptically, and once committed to it, failed to report important contrary evidence … Journalists in particular, it seems to me, failed on their job by failing to check out the virologists’ self-serving claims.”​

These pressures extended to the academic and scientific community, according to Metzl. He testified that “All of the members of that community were aggressively trying to place scientific papers with journals and had zero success. So, there was a wall that was extremely difficult to get over.”

Metzl added:

“When a small handful of us in the earliest days of the pandemic began raising the possibility of a possible lab origin, there [were] ferociously strong headwinds. There was this manufactured consensus.​
“I’m a lifelong Democrat, I consider myself a progressive person, but I kept digging. I couldn’t find the justification for these strong arguments, calling people like me, investigating, looking into pandemic origins in good faith, conspiracy theorists.”​

Auwaerter said, “There’s no consensus yet about the virus’ origins,” and that “many virologists believe compelling evidence points to an animal origin.” He added that it is “entirely possible” that the origins of COVID-19 will never be conclusively determined.

Committee may call Fauci to testify

Several of the witnesses criticized the delayed investigation into the pandemic’s origins and the lack of a bipartisan investigative committee.

“It is inconceivable that over three years after this deadly pandemic began, no comprehensive and unfettered investigation into pandemic origins has been carried out, nor is one currently planned,” Metzl said. “This injustice is an insult to every victim of this crisis and a clear threat to future generations.”

Metzl blamed obstruction by the Chinese government as the “primary reason there has been no comprehensive investigation into COVID-19,” saying that it “has destroyed samples, hidden records, imprisoned brave Chinese journalists, gagged Chinese scientists [and] actively spread misinformation.”

However, he added that it is also necessary to “carefully examine our own behavior and that of our friends and allies.”

Metzl called for “establishing a bipartisan U.S. national COVID-19 commission to examine the origins issue as well as other failings and shortcomings,” suggesting it could be modeled after the 9/11 Commission.

Auwaerter agreed that “an independent body would make the most sense,” while Redfield said the answer ultimately “will come from the intelligence community,” adding his view that “declassification is very important.”

Wenstrup said the subcommittee sent letters of inquiry to several government departments and key figures, including Fauci, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the White House, in addition to letters sent recently to the respective heads of the U.S. State Department, FBI and DOE.

“This is a national security issue. This is a national health issue,” said Wenstrup,” adding:

“Discovering the origins is vital. It matters for the future of the world, and we aren’t finished. We’re just beginning. There will be more hearings and more inquiries and more documents discovered, and we will follow every lead.”​
.
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)


Silicon, Gold, and Copper – Scientists Discover New Weapons Against COVID-19
By Curtin University
March 9, 2023

Protection Against COVID-19

Researchers have found that SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins, which caused the COVID-19 pandemic, become trapped when in contact with silicon, gold, and copper.

A recent study from Curtin University has discovered that the spike proteins of SARS-CoV-2, the strain of coronaviruses responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, can become trapped upon contact with silicon, gold, and copper. Additionally, the research suggests that applying electric fields can effectively destroy the spike proteins, which could kill the virus.

According to Dr. Nadim Darwish, the lead researcher from the School of Molecular and Life Sciences at Curtin University, the study found that the spike proteins of coronaviruses attach to and become stuck on specific types of surfaces.

“Coronaviruses have spike proteins on their periphery that allow them to penetrate host cells and cause infection and we have found these proteins becomes stuck to the surface of silicon, gold, and copper through a reaction that forms a strong chemical bond,” Dr. Darwish said.

“We believe these materials can be used to capture coronaviruses by being used in air filters, as a coating for benches, tables, and walls, or in the fabric of wipe cloths and face masks.

“By capturing coronaviruses in these ways we would be preventing them from reaching and infecting more people.”

Co-author Ph.D. candidate Essam Dief, also from the School of Molecular and Life Sciences at Curtin University said the study also found the coronavirus could be detected and destroyed using electrical pulses.

“We discovered that electric current can pass through the spike protein and because of this, the protein can be electrically detected. In the future, this finding can be translated to involve applying solution to a mouth or nose swab and testing it in a tiny electronic device able to electrically detect the proteins of the virus. This would provide instant, more sensitive, and accurate COVID testing,” Mr. Dief said.

“Even more exciting, by applying electrical pulses, we found the spike protein’s structure is changed and at certain magnitude of the pulses, the protein is destroyed. Therefore, electric fields can potentially deactivate coronaviruses.

“So, by incorporating materials such as copper or silicon in air filters, we can potentially capture and consequently stop the spread of the virus. Also importantly, by incorporating electric fields through air filters, for example, we also expect this to deactivate the virus.

“The study is exciting both fundamentally as it enables a better understanding of coronaviruses and from an applied perspective in helping to develop tools to fight the transmission of current and future coronaviruses.”

Reference: “SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins react with Au and Si, are electrically conductive and denature at 3 × 108 V m−1: a surface bonding and a single-protein circuit study” by Essam M. Diefa and Nadim Darwish, 17 February 2023, Chemical Science.

DOI: 10.1039/D2SC06492H
 
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