Category Archives: Media
Retracted HCQ Study Muddled Ventilator & HCQ Use
Apart from the unverifiability of the data used, Dr. Steven Quay has pointed out a high-school-level error in the HCQ study co-authored by Dr. Sapan Desai (India’s answer to Neil Ferguson). The lead author is Mandeep Mehra, a Harvard professor.
The Mehra study has two variable inputs in it: Hydroxychloroquine and intubation with a ventilator.
The fact is buried in the paper and was likely missed by most readers.
What this means is that the increase in patient deaths could have been caused just as well by ventilator use. Actually, that has been the clinical experience of many physicians, given the nature of the hypoxia in Covid19, which seems to be a result of clotting in the lung. Ventilators are counter-productive.
Controlling for that mistake, HCQ, even in this unreliable study, is somewhat helpful.
Here, I should add something of which Dr. Quay is apparently not aware: HCQ is a zinc ionophore and should be used with zinc to get the excellent results that have been reported from all over the world.
No zinc was given in the Lancet study.
Lancet, NEJM Retract Covid-19 Papers Over Data Source Concerns
Update (June 5, 2020, 12.45 PM IST):
The Lancet editor-in-chief Richard Horton won the 2015 Friendship award given by the Chinese Government
and here’s more about him from the Lancet website:
“He now works to develop the idea of planetary health – the health of human civilizations and the ecosystems on which they depend.”
The Spectator points out that Horton has been an unrelenting critic of the British government, blaming it for not doing enough, but has attacked any criticism of the Chinese government.
ORIGINAL POST:
This house of cards is tumbling down fast:
From Statnews.com:
“The Lancet, one of the world’s top medical journals, on Thursday retracted an influential study that raised alarms about the safety of the experimental Covid-19 treatments chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine amid scrutiny of the data underlying the paper.
Just over an hour later, the New England Journal of Medicine retracted a separate study, focused on blood pressure medications in Covid-19, that relied on data from the same company.
The retractions came at the request of the authors of the studies, published last month, who were not directly involved with the data collection and sources, the journals said.
“We can no longer vouch for the veracity of the primary data sources,” Mandeep Mehra of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Frank Ruschitzka of University Hospital Zurich, and Amit Patel of University of Utah said in a statement issued by the Lancet. “Due to this unfortunate development, the authors request that the paper be retracted.”
A company called Surgisphere was responsible for the primary data on which the papers were based:
“As scrutiny grew, the authors on the paper not affiliated with Surgisphere called for an independent audit. In their Lancet statement Thursday, they said that Surgisphere was not cooperating with the independent reviewers and would not provide the data.
“As such, our reviewers were not able to conduct an independent and private peer review and therefore notified us of their withdrawal from the peer-review process,” the researchers wrote.”
Who is Surgisphere?
The Guardian on June 3 had this report:
“Data it [Surgisphere] claims to have legitimately obtained from more than a thousand hospitals worldwide formed the basis of scientific articles that have led to changes in Covid-19 treatment policies in Latin American countries. It was also behind a decision by the WHO and research institutes around the world to halt trials of the controversial drug hydroxychloroquine. On Wednesday, the WHO announced those trials would now resume.
Two of the world’s leading medical journals – the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine – published studies based on Surgisphere data. The studies were co-authored by the firm’s chief executive, Sapan Desai……
…A search of publicly available material suggests several of Surgisphere’s employees have little or no data or scientific background. An employee listed as a science editor appears to be a science fiction author and fantasy artist whose professional profile suggests writing is her fulltime job. Another employee listed as a marketing executive is an adult model and events hostess, who also acts in videos for organisations…..Until Monday, the “get in touch” link on Surgisphere’s homepage redirected to a WordPress template for a cryptocurrency website, raising questions about how hospitals could easily contact the company to join its database….
..Desai has been named in three medical malpractice suits, unrelated to the Surgisphere database. In an interview with the Scientist, Desai previously described the allegations as “unfounded”..
…In 2008, Desai launched a crowdfunding campaign on the website Indiegogo promoting a wearable “next generation human augmentation device that can help you achieve what you never thought was possible”. The device never came to fruition…
…Desai’s Wikipedia page has been deleted following questions about Surgisphere and his history, first raised in 2010…..
…The Guardian has since contacted five hospitals in Melbourne and two in Sydney, whose cooperation would have been essential for the Australian patient numbers in the database to be reached. All denied any role in such a database, and said they had never heard of Surgisphere. Desai did not respond to requests to comment on their statements.
…Another study using the Surgisphere database, again co-authored by Desai, found the anti-parasite drug ivermectin reduced death rates in severely ill Covid-19 patients. It was published online in the Social Science Research Network e-library, before peer-review or publication in a medical journal, and prompted the Peruvian government to add ivermectin to its national Covid-19 therapeutic strategy…
…The New England Journal of Medicine also published a peer-reviewed Desai study based on Surgisphere data, which included data from Covid-19 patients from 169 hospitals in 11 countries in Asia, Europe and North America. It found common heart medications known as angiotensin-converting–enzyme inhibitors and angiotensin-receptor blockers were not associated with a higher risk of harm in Covid-19 patients.”
The Guardian report picked up the analysis from James Todaro at Medicine Uncensored.
Todaro shows that Surgisphere does not appear anywhere in Internet Archive records, and its portfolio of past cases is thin to non-existent, made up mostly testimonials and PR releases.
Errors in Surgisphere’s database that Todaro points out include:
Reporting 73 deaths from in Australia, when Australia had only a total of 67 deaths by April 21.
Claiming to have detailed patient records for 63,315 patients in the USA, when the total number of Covd-19 patients in the USA was 66,000.
Providing specific African data that would mean that over 40% of all patient deaths in Africa took place in Surgisphere-related hospitals with the sophisticated cardiac monitoring technology needed to collect such data.
What is amazing is not how this Desai shyster conned the world, but how these supposedly top-notch science journals and brilliant research scientists never bothered to check their sources for research that would have such a monumental impact.
We had the fraud Neil Ferguson. Now this.
On second thoughts, Desai almost deserves a medal for showing up how flimsy and pretentious the whole academic publishing industry is.
Added (June 5, 12.36 PM):
I have added an excerpt from Surgisphere’s response below:
“Our studies, including that published in The Lancet, use a registry, with data obtained from electronic health records (EHR). In our hydroxychloroquine analysis, we studied a very specific group of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 and have clearly stated that the results of our analyses should not be over-interpreted to those that have yet to develop such disease or those that have not been hospitalized. We also clearly outlined the limitations of an observational study that cannot fully control for unobservable confounding measures, and we concluded that off-label use of the drug regimens outside of the context of a clinical trial should not be recommended.
In so doing, we join agencies including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, as well as several other observational studies reported in the NEJM, JAMA and the BMJ, each of which have pointed to either no benefit of the drug regimens using hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine or even a signal of potential harm (also see this paper). The Brazilian CloroCovid-19 Study on chloroquine diphosphate was recently stopped in Brazil due to the noted safety hazards associated with this drug.
Our COVID-19 research was not funded by any drug company, private or public donor, or political organization. Our research collaborators on the piece for The Lancet devoted their time through personal funds and resources because they saw the urgent humanitarian need and opportunity to inform rapidly-evolving pandemic responses.”
Unlock 1.0: “You Can Keep Walking”
Ruchir Sharma in The Times of India:
“After three weeks the government began replacing lockdown 1.0 with looser versions, but rather than relax many upper class Indians were learning to love life under lockdown. They posted odes to recipe sharing, Netflix, Zoom cocktail parties, the clear view of the sky and moon as the smog lifted over an idle nation. They gasped over images of leopards venturing into shuttered cities like Chandigarh, 250 kilometres from Delhi. Ah, nature!
When I looked out of my living room window, I saw dorms for the community staff, and had to wonder how sublime this life could be for them. Does social distancing have any meaning for labourers packed six to a 200 sq ft room? Does a lockdown make any sense in such crowded living conditions?
Meanwhile the crisis was liberating for Indian bureaucrats and the police, self-important in normal times, “essential” during this crisis. Videos posted on WhatsApp showed police beating people caught on the streets without a satisfactory excuse, or forcing them to perform squats while holding their ears – a punishment common in government schools. The commentary was often less horrified than humorous, including one mash-up that went viral with cricket style play-by-play.
By mid-April many rich countries had started to debate reopening their economies. Protests were breaking out against lockdowns in the United States. In India, there was little public debate, much less protest.
[Lila: This is not true. There was plenty of debate, but it doesn’t get into the major English media, which is largely leftist, favor of an expansion of government, and inclined to criticize Modi reflexively from that angle. While, Modi appears to have followed the dictates of the globalists at every turn, he is commonly derided as being too insular. ]
The hardest hit, the poor and unemployed, seem to accept their misery as fate, likely unaware of evidence that the most stringent lockdowns are generating the most severe economic damage.
While the pandemic quickly became the leading cause of deaths in many countries, in India many more still die each week, mostly in rural areas, from diseases like tuberculosis or diarrhea. Still, the urban elite has the political influence and most continued to support a tough lockdown
“If the government lifts restrictions millions of illiterate Indians will pour into the streets and super-spread the disease,” says a friend.
Of estimates showing that each week the lockdown is pushing tens of millions of Indians below the poverty line, the elite’s standard answer is “The government should take care of them, just look how much the United States is spending on displaced workers.” Never mind that India has one-twentieth the average income of the United States, or that no bureaucracy, including those of much wealthier nations, is equipped to handle a sudden exodus of tens of millions of workers.
The irony now is that with India headed for what could be its worst post-Independence recession, economic pressure is forcing a retreat to lockdown lite, even as the virus case count surges.
Lockdown fatigue has set in. Confronted on the street by a police patrol after Delhi’s 7pm curfew last week, a friend pleaded that it was insufferable to go out earlier, with daytime temperatures around 45 degrees. “It is my job to make these announcements,” said the weary officer. “You can keep walking.”
Wuhan Denialism
From Tablet:
“Media sources that claim to refute the lab source hypothesis often refer to the public comments of zoologist Peter Daszak, the flawed correspondence of Andersen et al., or the emotional Lancet letter in which some scientists basically expressed their support and compassion with their Chinese peers. While there are some virus hunters like Peter Daszak who assert zoonotic transfer and discount the possibility of a lab leak, there are also leading microbiologists like professor Richard Ebright who assert that a lab or lab-related accident is a possible cause of the outbreak.
Notably, virus ecologists like Peter Daszak and Jonna Mazet have an inherent conflict of interest as they are involved in similar bat and wildlife sampling activity—and, in Daszak and Mazet’s case, in research with the Wuhan labs. As an example of such activity, Daszak and collaborators sampled 12,333 bats for viruses in a big wildlife surveillance project. A lab-related accident in China involving similar research would likely affect the funding for their work as it would demonstrate the risks involved. As it happens, the NIH recently cut the funding to Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance after realizing the risks involved in that research.
Daszak’s relentless and heavily amplified public assertions that the outbreak must have originated due to a zoonotic jump, and his denial of the possibility of a lab accident involving a natural virus, even long before the SARS-CoV-2 genome was published, would appear to be motivated by the apparent conflict of interest that he has denied. Daszak’s denial of his conflict of interest raised concerns of many scientists and experts, with many explicitly describing that denial as a bold lie. Daszak has presented no direct evidence that the outbreak started as a result of a zoonotic jump outside of a laboratory. In case the outbreak is a result of a natural zoonotic jump, that would underscore the importance of Daszak’s risky wildlife sampling and “early outbreak warning” work and increase their research funding. It is important to consider conflicts of interest when assessing anyone’s claims.”
Genetic-Manipulation Origin For SARS-CoV-2?
Is considering a genetic-manipulation origin for SARS-CoV-2 a conspiracy theory that must be censored?
Here is a new research paper that considers the lab-origin of the virus the most likely explanation and suggests that it is being censored by scientific journals. The paper includes this telling paragraph on funding:
“In recent years, the field of corona-virology had been focused on pan-coronavirus therapies and vaccines, as evident from research conducted in the past five years,as well as from media reports. Synthetically generating diverse panels of potential pre-emergent coronaviruses was declared as a goal of active grants for EcoHealth Alliance which funded some of such research at WIV.”
Unfortunately, various intelligence/ex-intelligence operatives, some of them China hawks, have ignored the multiple ties the WIV has to Western public health bodies, private foundations, and agencies, and have tried to shift the blame solely to the Chinese government/lab.
Thus, the ex-chief of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove has raised the possibility of demanding reparations from China. But Dearlove’s support for the invasion of Iraq and his involvement in the Steele dossier (in the Russiagate hoax) diminish his credibility.
Very likely, some of these public statements are either limited hang-outs or red herrings.
The truth is Zhengli Shi the “Bat Woman” at WIV was not working in isolation. She was a French-trained scientist with research experience in the US; she was at the center of a web of scientific partnerships and networks extending to leading labs in France and the USA. Her research has ties to the entire scientific community and its funders, and to the climate-change-public-health nexus that drives projects like OneHealth and the EcoHealth Alliance.
If this network was not fully implicated in what happened, we would not be seeing the kind of coverage…and coverup…from the global media. This level of media subterfuge suggests a transnational crime, originating from the highest levels of money and power. At that level, it is not China, or America, or Russia.
It is the transnational power-elite, driven by the dangerously utopian environmental ideology with which they mask their lust for power.
Floyd Tested Positive for Covid-19 & Other Oddities
It always pays to wait a little before pouncing on highly charged “racial” stories. There’s inevitably a back-story. And here it is:
According to news reports, the newly released full autopsy report of George Floyd shows he tested positive for Covid-19 on April 3. So the “I can’t breathe” T-shirts work every way.
See the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office Autopsy Report.
The report claims that Covid-19 had nothing to do with Floyd’s death, since he was asymptomatic.
Hmm. He did have trouble breathing, even before the cops knelt on his neck and pressed down on his back, didn’t he?
According to an additional earlier (Monday) report released by the Medical Examiner’s office,
He also had arteriosclerotic and hypertensive heart disease.
He had multiple blunt force injuries to the head and upper body, none life-threatening.
He was intoxicated on Fentanyl.
And had recently used methamphetamines and cannabis.
The manner of death is listed as “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint and neck compression.” It’s dubbed a homicide.
There are just too many coincidences and oddities for me to accept that this was a random case of police brutality.
The perpetrator cop, accused of racism, is surnamed Chauvin.…as in chauvin-ist.
Chauvin has a long history of complaints over his hair-trigger temper and shoot-first temperament.
Floyd has a long history of petty and serious crime.
The cop and Floyd are former colleagues from working security at the Nuevo Rodeo Club at the same period of time.
The “racist” cop is married to a “model minority” Asian (Laotian) woman.
Two out of the four cops involved in the death are of Asian origin.
Chauvin’s wife is a former Mrs. Minnesota. Floyd is a former high-school foot-ball star.
She once wrote a bad check. Just like George Floyd.
In May, only 3 days after Floyd’s death, another black man was pinned down by the neck by police in an incident that got widespread attention in France. In May in Hongkong, a man was killed after being immobilized face down by the police. There is a universal use of dangerous choke-holds by the police and it is a universal problem that lawmakers want to address.
Floyd has a criminal history from Houston, involving home invasion and violent threats to a single woman (conviction in 2009 and then 5 years in jail). He was arrested before that for drug possession and theft with a firearm.
[Note: Floyd’s criminal history, not known to the arresting officers, does not justify in any form their treatment of him. However, it most certainly helps to explain why he resisted arrest, which is what made them act more aggressively to him. They were not racially but situationally motivated.]
Home invasion is the crime most feared by the middle-class, because it destroys the English common-law notion of security and full entitlement in one’s own house. An Englishman’s home is his castle….as they say.
Houston was the site of massive gentrification after the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina.
The post-Floyd looting and arson by anarchists belonging to antifa (and possibly other groups) has been described as a kind of violent gentrification, by anti-BLM observers..
Masks were worn by the anarchists, who also sported T-shirts with the slogan “I can’t breathe.”
This was a slogan that became popular after the police killing of another “gentle giant” black man, Eric Garner, a few years back.
“I can’t breathe,” is what a lot of Covid-19 patients say as the disease creates hypoxia.
Governments have either urged or mandated mask-wearing to the general population, along with so-called social distancing.
While the anarchists wore masks, they did not “social distance.”
In the media or among various social justice warriors and Covid snitches no one objected to this violation of social distancing.
But when peaceful lockdown sceptics stepped out, even alone, on beaches, without a soul around, or in pursuit of their livelihood, police threatened them with fines and jail time and in some cases arrested them. They shot them in the Philippines, confiscated their cars and autorickshaws in India, shuttered their shops, and shamed them on social media in the West.
The KuKluxKlan used to set fires on the lawns of black people, to threaten them. This was vehemently condemned by all decent human beings.
Now supposedly pro-black groups, like antifa, burn property in black neighborhoods supposedly to threaten the white middle-class.
But it still terrorizes blacks.
And the media and the left approve.
There’s a lot more.
But this should be enough to show that the whole wretched story is yet another consciousness-raising exercise intended to mold us into the “New Man” required by the the new global order.
The global elites use these dreadful rampages to analyze our reactions and our networks, test our limits, and evaluate our ability to resist bait.
Proof That Wuhan Virus Was A Bioweapon
A fascinating, very technical article at Nerd Has Power that explains why SARS-Co-V-2 has to have been engineered in a lab, and, given the nature and history of communist rule, was most likely a biological weapon.
Here’s the gist:
- In structure the Wuhan virus is 95% like 2 bat viruses (ZC45 and ZXC21), except that it has the proteins that allow it to bind to human ACE-2 proteins. The other two don’t and so cannot infect human beings. The binding proteins occur in the front half (S1) of the spike proteins that stud the surface of the coronavirus like a crown and give it its name. This kind of strong dissimilarity from other coronaviruses in only one part of the viral structure is very unusual, because it would normally take a long time for such a mutation, whereas the similarity of the rest of the structure can only occur if the viruses aren’t far apart in time. This contradiction rules out natural development and suggests that the Wuhan virus is a chimera created in the lab. Furthermore, the sequence of proteins in S1 is exactly the same as the one which occurs in the SARS virus, which is infectious to human beings. Still odder, there is a piece in the spike protein that allows the protein to be cleaved by a host’s protease (protein-cleaving) enzyme, furin. This addition makes the Wuhan virus much more infectious, as the furin helps the virus divide faster.
- The only evolutionary event that could create such a striking mutation in only one part of the genome is something called recombination. But it would need a sequence of several highly unlikely-impossible events to occur. And there is not enough time for that to have happened, given that the Wuhan virus cannot have been around for very long, or it would be more markedly different than the other bat viruses (point 1).
- The evidence supporting a natural origin of the virus was most likely fabricated by Dr. Zhengli Shi of the WIV, in response to questions like that raised in point 1. What was this evidence? Nothing physical, but simply the sequence – a string of letters – of a bat virus she claims to have come across years ago – RaTG13. But if she had indeed found such a virus with 95% similarity with the Wuhan virus, even to the spike protein, would she not have published something about it then, given the dangers it posed for human beings? But she didn’t. She didn’t even retain the physical evidence. That fact, as well as the fact that it is very easy to fabricate a sequence, and the fact that she, of all people, has a motivation to fabricate, suggests that indeed, RaTG13 is a fabrication.
- If we admit that the virus is a chimera, then it had to have been made by the CCP, because the 2 bat corona viruses ZC45 and ZXC 21 were both found by a military research lab of the Chinese Communist Party which published its findings in 2018. The CCP owns these viruses and no one else.
- Zhengli Shi co-authored a paper at the University of North Carolina in 2015 showing that replacing the spike protein so it could bind to ACE2 made coronaviruses infectious to humans. In 2006, there were experiments adding a furin-cleaving site to spike protein since such sites in influenza viruses make for greater infectiousness.
Independent Experts: Wuhan Virus Probably Came From Lab
In a long, well-sourced article at Independent Science News Jonathan Latham and Alison Wilson, both PhD’s, demonstrate that the Wuhan virus most likely came from a lab and that the vociferous denunciations of the lab theory come from experts at institutions tied by funding, collaboration, or partnership to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, including the W.H.O., the CDC, the NIH, the EcoHealth Alliance, and the Chinese Government.
Debunking the debunkers of the Gates Corona “conspiracy”
According to Politifact (May 28), Facebook has the following post on the Covid 19 Testing, Reaching, And Contacting Everyone (TRACE) Act:
“This is what Bill Gates and George Soros want to do – secretly stick you with a chip while testing you for the coronavirus… the Dems have a bill on the House floor ready to vote on it to require this …. House Bill 6666…. no bull…. look it up and WAKE UP!!!!”
Most people would regard this as harmless venting against two of the most powerful and wealthy men on the planet, both of whom influence/dominate health policies in nearly every country in the world. But because it does not carry a book-length appendix of footnotes backing its assertions, it earned the ire of the credentialed Brahmins running the media. They went after it as conspiracy mongering and fake news.
But Politifact’s so-called ‘rebuttal’ is nothing of the sort.
It uses technicalities and minor errors to gloss over the fact that the substance of the Facebook post is quite accurate.
Analysis of just one paragraph of the “rebuttal” will be enough to demonstrate how amiss it is:
“The resolution isn’t on the “House floor” as the Facebook post claims. No action has been taken on the so-called TRACE Act since Rep. Bobby Rush,D.-Ill., introduced it nearly a month ago. Bill Gates also was not involved in crafting the act (and USA Today has more on that in its fact-check).”
Only the first line of this rebuttal is really true:
Yes, this particular resolution isn’t on the House floor.
But another one exactly like it is.
So the claim that no action has been taken on the bill is technically true but deeply misleading.
This particular bill has not reached the floor, but its substance – contact tracing legislation – was snuck covertly into the fine print of a lengthy piece of legislation, Nancy Pelosi’s $3 trillion Covid relief package..
Dubbed the Heroes Act, the massive stimulus bill passed the House on June 1 and is now before the Senate. And it provides $75 billion for Coronavirus testing and contact tracing.
. “The bill would provide a total of $75 billion for the CONTACT Initiative. [Subtitle D—COVID-19 National Testing and Contact Tracing (CONTACT) Initiative].”
That’s just $25 billion less than what the TRACE Act proposed.
From “trace” to “contact,” the Democrats have nailed the PR value of a catchy acronym to get legislation they want.
As for Bill Gates not being involved in crafting the TRACE Act, that too is disingenuous. While Gates may not have sat down and dictated the terms (and that isn’t how it usually works, is it?), there is ample evidence of his signature all over contact tracing legislation in the US and elsewhere.
Corey’s Digs has demonstrated that Gates subsidizes major players involved in contact tracing legislation everywhere.
As usual, USA Today, Politifact, Poynter’s, and the rest of the major media are engaging in misleading journalism in decrying criticism of Bill Gates’ domination of global health policy as conspiratorial:
“Bobby Rush has a long history of pay to play and disregarding paying taxes of any kind. Just last August, he traveled to Africa for an Aspen Institute congressional conference of approximately 45 individuals and spent time with Obama and Clinton award winners, Dr. Paul Farmer from Partners in Health who is currently running the contact tracing program in Massachusetts while his partner Jim Yong Kim is rounding up other states, Dr. Jonathan Epstein from EcoHealth Alliance who just had their NIH funding cut due to connections with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and two representatives from the Gates Foundation, while the Gates, Rockefellers, Democracy Fund, and others paid toward the $19,000 dollar expense Rush incurred for this sponsored event. Nine months later, he introduced a bill to dispense $100 billion dollars to NGOs and other organizations to carry out home-to-home contact tracing throughout the country.”