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The War on Ivermectin

The War on Ivermectin
The War on Ivermectin

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In this interview, return guest Dr. Pierre Kory discusses his new book, “The War on Ivermectin: The Medicine That Saved Millions and Could Have Ended the COVID Pandemic.” In it, he details the history of ivermectin and the how and why behind Big Pharma’s suppression of this drug when it was found to work against COVID-19.

Like Dr. Paul Marik and Dr. Peter McCullough, Kory has been threatened by the American Board of Internal Medicine, which is seeking to yank his medical license. While a family doctor in private practice can operate without board certification, most medical centers will not hire a doctor who isn’t board certified in his specialty, and insurance companies won’t put you on their panel.

Kory’s Response to the American Board of Internal Medicine

Kory, however, is not overly concerned about this threat — which is really little more than an intimidation tactic to shut him up — as he has no intention of ever going back to a hospital setting.

“I’m done,” he says. “There’s no way I could walk into a hospital. I’ve just learned too much. I’ve learned too much about pharmaceutical control of almost all of the medical evidence. There’s no way I can fit. Now I’m a square peg in a round hole.

So, to be honest, I don’t think [losing my board certification] would have an impact. I am now in private practice. I have a bustling telehealth practice and I’m very happy. I’m outside the system, I can do and say and care for the patients in a manner that I best see fit.

Anyway, our reply [to the American Board of Internal Medicine] was different than Peter’s. He presented all the evidence to support all the statements they accused him of as being misinformation; very data driven, evidence-based.

What we did is, our lawyer looked at their policy on misinformation and the process of ‘convicting’ someone of misinformation, and it required that they provide us the evidence showing that we are wrong and misinformed.

But the letter to us was bizarre. It was this hodgepodge of statements that I’d made or written on my Substack, and it was just implied that that’s misinformation …

So, we wrote back very simply, ‘Excuse us, but your letter does not follow your own misinformation policy. We ask that you kindly reissue the letter with the evidence showing that we’re wrong.’ And we’ve gotten radio silence ever since.”

Kory’s New Specialty

After spending his career as an internist and critical care physician, Kory has now turned his attention to long-haul COVID and post-jab injury syndromes — complex chronic illnesses. To that end, he’s collaborating with doctors who’ve spent decades treating other tricky conditions, such as chronic Lyme disease, fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome.

“So, not only do I have a new career and practice, but also a new intellectual focus and it’s much more satisfying. I’m literally returning people to levels of function that they weren’t at before.

These were oftentimes healthy people with full careers, children, they exercised, ate right and now they’re fully disabled with numerous organ system complaints.

And I’ll tell you, getting them from 20% [function] to 40% [function] is a big deal, when they can actually do just a little bit more than they were doing before, and when you get them to 80%, it’s transformative.

But it’s way more challenging. And I tell my patients, ‘Listen, I have to be humble here. I’m trying to figure this out. I’m collaborating, I’m reading, I’m learning from you.’ I’m learning from each patient, because we’re doing a lot of empiric therapies.

We’re trying things, and so I learn. Each patient serves as their own control and I’m finding different things work on different patients. But the real challenge that I’m finding is that I don’t have any biomarkers or tests that I find helpful to direct therapies.

A lot of the tests are normal, even inflammatory markers. Clotting markers are normal, and yet I know that they have inflammatory processes and they’re thrombogenic. So, I wish there was more research and guidance.”

Treating Long-Haul COVID

One of the primary complaints of those struggling with what we’re now calling “long-haul COVID” is fatigue, a lack of energy to do even the most basic things. Since mitochondria are responsible for 90% of the energy production in your body, it stands to reason that impaired energy production in the mitochondria, or more simply, mitochondrial dysfunction, is at play.

The challenge is how to recover that function. One fascinating drug that can help in this regard is methylene blue, which helps mitochondrial respiration and improves brain energy metabolism. Methylene blue is actually the parent molecule for hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, off-patent drugs commonly used to treat not only malaria but also COVID-19.

Best known as a fish tank antiseptic and textile dye for blue jeans, it was actually the first synthetic drug in modern history, developed in 1876. Since then, we’ve discovered it has many really important medicinal benefits. Importantly, it’s the only known antidote for metabolic poisons, i.e., any poison that interferes with oxygen transport or displaces oxygen, either from the blood or from the mitochondria.

Basically, as an electron cycler, methylene blue acts like a battery, but unlike other compounds that do the same thing, it doesn’t cause damaging oxidation in the process. You can review my interview with Dr. Francisco Gonzalez Lima here for more information.

If anything interferes with oxygenation or cellular respiration, such as cyanide, methylene blue is able to bypass that point of interference through electron cycling, thus allowing mitochondrial respiration, oxygen consumption and energy production to function as it normally would. And, the effect is typically felt within hours, as it increases, by about 30%, the ability of the mitochondria to produce ATP in the electron transport chain. Kory has also found it useful.

“My really sick patients use methylene blue,” he says. “Some of the really sick ones that aren’t responding to medicine, I send to a clinic where they do apheresis, ozone, methylene blue, infrared. One of them actually was discharged on oral methylene blue. And so, I want to figure out how to implement oral methylene blue.”

Trial and Error

Methylene blue is far from a cure-all, however. Any number of processes could be impacting your mitochondria, and they all need to be addressed. Adding to the complexity is that remedies that work really well in one long-hauler or COVID jab-injured patient often will not work for another, even though they present with very similar symptoms.

“We’ve [found] about six or seven different pathophysiologic mechanisms, and one of them is mitochondrial dysfunction, but I don’t know which is the predominant one in each patient,” Kory says. “I have no way of figuring that out. The only way I figure it out is by responses to therapy.

For instance, I had one young woman recently. I tried a number of therapies and what resurrected her, finally, was when I started to treat mast cell activation. I put her on antihistamine, famotidine [a heartburn medication], ketotifen [an asthma medication], and Boom.”

The Case for Sun Exposure

Daily sun exposure for about an hour around solar noon can also be important, as the near-infrared wavelengths will trigger melatonin production in your mitochondria, where you need it the most.

Melatonin is a potent antioxidant, so getting plenty of sunshine on bare skin is a simple way to reduce reactive oxygen species (ROS) that cause damage, and secondarily increase the efficiency of ATP production. Kory has been recommending this as well.

COVID Really Revealed the Level of Corruption in Science

During our conversation, the issue of medical journals came up, and their role in the corruption of science. Kory notes:

“That’s the other transformation that Paul [Marik] and I have undergone. We really looked to those journals thinking they were the most sophisticated and that was the top levels of science. But seeing what was published in those journals throughout COVID uncovered the absolute control by the pharmaceutical industry.

I mean, what appears in those journals is what they allow to appear in those journals. Period. I know of many positive studies of repurposed drugs rejected. We’ve seen them pull the following — JAMA and The New England Journal both — where instead of rejecting [the paper] they hold onto it as if they’re considering it, and then the rejection comes months later.

I’ve never heard of that in my career. Usually, when I’ve tried to submit manuscripts, they either say, ‘This is interesting. We’re sending it out for peer review,’ or they say, ‘This is not of sufficient interest to our readership at this time.’

They rejected positive trials of ivermectin. And then, probably the greatest and most saddening corruption that they pulled, is that they published the Together trial on ivermectin, which is so brazenly fraudulent and corrupt.

There are so many documented actions those investigators took in order to ensure they did not have a statistically significant benefit for ivermectin. Yet the New England Journal of Medicine published it. When you look at the design and the conduct of the trial, it should never be published. It was brazenly corrupt.

The investigators were all working for either their own companies or other companies whose sole job was to do research contracts for pharmaceutical companies. I mean, what would happen in their careers had they published a positive trial on ivermectin? That’s it. Bye. No more contracts.”

The War on Ivermectin

According to Kory, the idea for “The War on Ivermectin” was birthed after reading an article titled “The Disinformation Playbook,”1 published by the Union for Concerned Scientists. He explains:

“What happened is that after my ivermectin testimony2 [December 8, 2020, before Sen. Ron Johnson], which went viral and brought a lot of attention to the FLCCC … our protocols were looked in to. Doctors started prescribing ivermectin.

And I thought — this is how naive I was — I literally thought that we were providing a major intervention that would alter the trajectory of the pandemic, without question. It would reduce cases, hospitalizations and deaths, and now you have an effective early outpatient treatment. And I thought that news would be welcomed.

I thought the FLCCC would come out as heroes. It was really Paul who identified the data signal first. He said, ‘Wow. You got to see what these studies are starting to show.’ I jumped in right behind him. I was the first author of that comprehensive review paper.

I worked a lot and I got deeply expert on ivermectin. But what happened in the next few months is that everything started going sideways, and I could not figure it out. I saw hit pieces. To you, this is not news. You’re probably like, ‘Yep. I’ve seen that before.’

The thing is, I didn’t know. I didn’t know that what I was really doing — bringing forth data supporting the efficacy of a generic drug — that is poking the bear. And when I say poking the bear, what is anathema to the pharmaceutical industry and their whole business model is they cannot have generic off-patent drugs become standard of care. It obliterates the market for their pricing new pills.

I didn’t know I was stepping into a war. In the history of pharma, I don’t think any single medicine threatened as many [drug] markets and campaigns. The only other medicine that did that was hydroxychloroquine, but they already killed hydroxychloroquine in 2020.

I was coming out now with ivermectin, and it threatened hundreds of billions of dollars in perpetuity for these insanely lethal vaccines, monoclonal antibodies, remdesivir, paxlovid, molnupiravir — all of the markets for their novel new pills to enter. I mean, I don’t think any medicine has ever threatened that much of a market.

So, we were getting attacked. I did an interview with the Associated Press and the article that came out, I mean, I almost had a heart attack [reading it]. I saw unending attacks on ivermectin and it was coming in different directions. I saw academia getting all hot and bothered.

‘It’s a fringe medicine. It’s unproven. The trials are small.’ I saw all these narratives and I didn’t know they were narratives at the time. I thought people were being stupid … Now, I see everything. I see everything they do now, even before they do it, because they’re really predictable.”

The Disinformation Playbook

The turning point came when Kory received a two-line email from Dr. William B. Grant (who also co-wrote my review paper3 on vitamin D for COVID prevention). The email said, “Dr. Kory, what they’re doing to ivermectin is what they’ve done to vitamin D for decades.” Attached was a link to The Disinformation Playbook article.4

“It’s a short article. It’s very well-designed. They have little diagrams and then they have examples of disinformation campaigns. They describe the five plays, which they name after American football plays. And these are the tactics that pharma used. I read the article and I was like, ‘Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.’

Suddenly, the world made sense — and not in a good way. It was very ugly, because I was like, ‘That’s what’s going on. There’s a massive disinformation campaign directed at ivermectin.’ From that moment on, everything that happened, every day, it was almost like I got tied to a front row seat for a horror movie. I’ve had to watch a horror movie unfold ever since.

Millions dying, hospitals overflowing. And there’s a drug that could prevent that. It could avert catastrophe. It would’ve definitely either put the brakes on or stopped the vaccine campaign obsession, which is in my mind, is one of history’s greatest humanitarian catastrophes.

It’s a holocaust out there with these vaccines. That’s easily proven from immense sources of data now, from life insurance data, disability data, excess mortality data. Now we’re even seeing birth rates dropping.

So, the theme of the book is centered around that. It’s my experiences and knowledge of what they do … It’s almost like a teacher’s manual, because I saw everything they pulled, how they did it and how successful they were — the fire plays, the blitz, harass the scientists that come out with inconvenient science, the diversion, inject doubt where there is none.”

Indeed, these disinformation tactics have a long history. They’re not new. It’s just that people in general have not been aware of these tactics, so they worked like a charm and could be used over and over again.

Disinformation Is an Old PR Tool Used by Toxic Industries

In the 1950s, the tobacco industry hired a PR agency called Hills and Knowlton, which established all the strategies Kory just listed and discuss at depth in his book. The tobacco industry used it so effectively, they were able to quash cancer concerns for another 50 years.

Their disinformation campaign didn’t end until attorneys general across the country finally decided to collaborate and bring massive lawsuits against the tobacco industry, winning not only settlements but also — and more importantly — limiting their ability to practice disinformation through media and advertising.

The telecommunications industry has used the same tactics since the ’90s. They actually hired the same PR firm to protect their business and hoodwink customers, and they’re still going strong. Unlike tobacco, which was finally understood to cause cancer, electromagnetic field (EMF) exposure from cell phones and Wi-Fi is still not recognized as a biological danger, despite massive amounts of evidence.

The drug industry, though, has perhaps used the disinformation playbook the longest, and it’s high time to break their magic spell. The way we do that is by educating ourselves and others about how they use disinformation to manipulate you. Once you know their playbook, it’s like being equipped with X-ray vision.

“I think ‘The War on Ivermectin’ is almost as important as Bobby Kennedy’s book, ‘The Real Anthony Fauci,’ where he, in a highly-referenced fashion, documents the control of medicine and the medical sciences and how it’s literally controlled by pharma and how depraved that control is,” Kory says.

“They do not care. The pharmaceutical industry is a documented criminal industry. They’ve released many, many products that have caused untold deaths and what do they do? They try to suppress that evidence for as long as possible. They get caught. They pay a fine. They do it again.”

Academic Freedom Is an Illusion

Kory also became wise to the fact that these kinds of medical disinformation campaigns have been routine for decades. Ivermectin was just the last in a long line of repurposed drugs that were being suppressed, lest it threaten Big Pharma profits. Cancer drugs, heart medications and psychiatric remedies have all been buried in the same way. He continues:

“So, I started to learn about how pharma practices disinformation, and I think the most terrible disinformation campaigns, which caused more deaths than any other, were the ones on hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin …

So, the book is about all of the tactics that I witnessed. It’s also about my personal journey. I’ve been through a lot. I’ve lost three jobs. One I left voluntarily. One was mutual. The third was a firing. Also, my proudest contribution to COVID [was writing what] I thought was the best paper of my life. It was a paper that argued that the pulmonary phase of COVID is actually an organizing pneumonia, or what they used to call BOOP.

I wrote a paper with one of the top chest radiologists in the world. I consulted pathologists. I looked at autopsy data, even just the CAT scans were in a pattern of organized pneumonia, which is a terrible descriptor for the disease, because it suggests that it’s an infection and it’s not.

Organizing pneumonia is an inflammatory response to a lung injury. The gold standard of care is corticosteroids. That’s the only thing that’s been shown to really reverse organized pneumonia.

I gave testimony in the Senate in May 2020, telling the world that it was critical to use corticosteroids in the hospital phase of disease. I got attacked by the University of Wisconsin. By the way, you know another thing that I learned? Academic freedom isn’t real. As soon as you’re a professor with an opinion that goes against orthodoxy or the system, oh, you’re going to feel the pressure …

I was vindicated on corticosteroids. It’s now the standard of care around the world. However, the standard of care dose is 6 milligrams of dexamethasone, which is too low, [and] methylprednisone is far superior in its effects on the lung.

It’s well-known that in fulminant cases, like whited out lungs on a ventilator, you need … 1,000 milligrams of methylprednisone for three days in a row. Six milligrams of Dex is equivalent to about 32 milligrams of methylprednisone.”

COVID Hospitalizations Eradicated With Ivermectin

While there are many individual success stories out there, one that Kory believes best illustrates the power of ivermectin against COVID is that of Itajai, Brazil, a city of 220,000 people. In June 2020, they implemented a prophylaxis program using ivermectin. The program was advertised throughout local media, and people were encouraged to participate and take ivermectin four times a month, on days 1, 2, 15 and 16.

On the appropriate days, they set up tents and centers where people could get the drug, and the entire program was carefully logged in an electronic database. In all, 159,000 Brazilians participated, of those 113,000 elected to take the ivermectin. Kory and eight coauthors published a paper5 on the results in March 2022.

“The 113,000 [who took the ivermectin] were older, sicker, fatter. Way more cardiovascular disease and diabetes. And, obviously, they were probably more worried about the impacts on their health.

So, when you look at that comparison, I mean, there are massive negative confounders. But despite those confounders, even when you didn’t propensity match, there were insanely positive benefits in the ivermectin group.

They died much less, I think it was 70% lower risk of dying, 68% lower risk of hospitalization and 50% lower risk of getting COVID. And that was in the sickest of the sick in that city. Then, when we did propensity matching, matching them for age and other things, it was even greater.

There’s a follow up study which is astounding, where … they were able through pharmacy records to split the ivermectin group into two. Regular ivermectin users, those who took all their pills, and irregular, those who missed doses.

And when you look at the regular users, the ones who were most adherent to the protocol, no one went to the hospital. There was a 100% reduction in hospitalization and a 90% lower risk of dying. It’s astounding … I’ve never seen a more proven therapy in any disease model, which they successfully got everyone to believe is a horse dewormer used by unvaccinated conspiracy theorists.”

Dosage Recommendations

Ivermectin recommendations have changed over time, as newer variants have acted differently, requiring updated approaches. At present, Kory still recommends ivermectin for prevention, if you really feel you need it. Current COVID variants are very mild, however, and rarely cause severe problems (unless you got the COVID jab).

For those struggling with long-haul COVID, ivermectin is a mainstay. “It’s the most frequently effective therapy,” Kory says. “I do have in my practice a minority who are ivermectin non-responders, but the majority respond in either small or large ways.” Importantly, ivermectin is the most effective drug available for binding to the spike protein.

So, if there’s circulating spike protein in your body, be it from natural infection or the jab, ivermectin will help bind to it, thereby preventing much of the spike’s negative impacts.

Ivermectin also repolarizes macrophages from the M1 to the M2 subtype. M1 is hyperinflammatory and M2 is hypo-inflammatory. So, it reduces inflammation. In addition to that, ivermectin has at least 18 other mechanisms of action and downstream effects that can be helpful.

For long-haulers and the COVID jab injured, Kory typically starts patients out at 0.3 mg per kilo of bodyweight once a day. For most, that dose works well. It’s still unclear how long people need to stay on this daily dose. Oftentimes, when they try to cut back, symptoms return, which suggests they still have spike protein in their bodies. Fortunately, the safety profile of ivermectin, even for long-term use, is very good.

Save the Date: Medical Conference in Orlando, October 2022

Hopefully, more doctors will get involved in the treatment of spike protein injuries. October 15 and 16, 2022, the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) will be holding a medical conference in Orlando, Florida, titled “Understanding and Treating Spike Protein Induced Diseases.” You can register for the conference on the FLCCC’s website.

“We have a lineup of speakers, deeply studied in treatment of complex chronic illnesses from different specialties. There are a lot of ways to approach this disease, so it’s really important. It really is directed at the treating providers. Because one of the many abject failures is they literally don’t recognize vaccine injury.

There’s no clinic for the vaccine injured. They’re abandoned, and I’m just going to be crude here — they’re pissing off the doctors because all of these patients are showing up that doctors have no idea what’s wrong with.

They have no knowledge of the mechanisms. They have no knowledge of what some effective therapies can be. So, they’re not treating these patients. They’re abandoned and gaslit.

Some doctors actually get angry when the patients relate their symptoms to the vaccine. They don’t want to hear it. They don’t want a vaccine injured in their practice. I have numbers of patients where the physician literally told them, ‘You don’t need to schedule a follow up.’

So, for those [doctors] who still have a shred of humanity, empathy and understanding that the spike protein is a toxin that causes immense amounts of disease, I hope they attend and/or watch the lectures that we’ll stream afterwards.

We’re coming at this very humble. I mean, there are very few trials on therapies in these two syndromes. So, it’s really about clinical knowledge, expertise and experiences from this disease and other diseases.

I am looking forward to it because I want to learn. I want to listen to those other speakers and hear about what they think and how they approach this. And I think it’s going to be a really tremendous conference. I think a lot of laypeople will show up too …

Laypeople who are much more deeply studied and knowledgeable on what’s really going on. They didn’t go to medical school, but they’re deeply studied and they read papers. They watch, read a lot of data sources.

So, I think it would be of interest to laypeople who want to learn how to either help themselves, or help their friends and colleagues, just like they did with COVID. You know how many laypeople passed around our protocols and tried to get their friends and relatives access to the medicines on our protocol? They saved lives. They saved lives by doing that.”

More Information

In the interview, Kory also reviews the clear and present danger the COVID jab poses to women, especially if they’re pregnant or want to get pregnant in the future. We also review the blatant fraud perpetrated by Pfizer to hide the massive number of miscarriages that occurred in its human trial.

In summary, the miscarriage rate is 87.5%, which is just astounding. No woman in her right mind would pull that trigger if she had that information.

We also discuss the worldwide drops in birth rates (which began after the rollout of these experimental jabs), the complete absence of any supporting data for the authorization of COVID shots for children (which is yet another medical fraud perpetrated on the American people), and the lie that COVID is a pandemic of the unvaccinated (it’s actually the complete opposite).

So, for more on those topics, please listen to the full interview, or read through the transcript. You can also find more of Kory’s work on PierreKory.substack.com. Last but not least, be sure to pick up a copy of “The War on Ivermectin: The Medicine That Saved Millions and Could Have Ended the COVID Pandemic” to learn all about how the biggest, most lethal medical disinformation play was perpetrated, right before your eyes.



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How To Do Squats Properly and Mistakes To Avoid

How To Do Squats Properly and Mistakes To Avoid
How To Do Squats Properly and Mistakes To Avoid

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Squats are a common lower body exercise that you’ll find in most workout programs. If done correctly, they can be super beneficial for your fitness – but many people don’t know how to do squats properly.

Most of us find it hard to do squats without making at least one big mistake. This is mainly due to our sedentary lifestyle.

But it’s important to have good squat form, and research even shows that there’s a basic way of performing squats that decreases the risk of injury and supports fitness progress.(1)  Squats are “fundamental movements necessary to improve sport performance, to reduce injury risk and to support lifelong physical activity.”

So how do you know if you have proper squat form?

Proper squats…

  • Strengthen your legs, glutes, and many other muscles
  • Improve your lower body mobility and sport performance(2)
  • Keep your bones and joints healthy

“Bad” squats…

  • Don’t activate the right muscles at the proper intensity
  • Put additional stress on ligaments and joints
  • Increase risk of injury

By the end of this article you’ll know exactly how to do a squat properly and you’ll never skip leg day again. You’ll also learn tips that will help you avoid squat mistakes and correct your squat form.

Proper Squat Form

Squats are a lower body exercise where the movement itself is an essential part of daily activities like sitting and lifting.(3) You can do the bodyweight version, without added resistance (also called Bodyweight Squat or Air Squat), or with weights such as a barbell (Front Squat and Back Squat are variations of the Barbell Squat).

The squat exercise mainly targets the thighs (quadriceps & hamstrings) and the glutes. However, core strength & stability, ankle mobility, back muscles, calves, and other factors play an important role when you are doing this exercise.

Common reasons for squat exercise mistakes include muscle weakness or tightness and joint instability or immobility.(4) If you find yourself making mistakes, practice your squats by applying the following tips to correct your form and strengthen your lower body. 

Did you know?

A great way to build leg muscle strength is to design a workout with the Workout Creator in the adidas Training app. Target specific areas, and choose the level of difficulty and equipment.

Set up for good squat form:

  1. Find a foot stance that feels best for you. Pointing your toes slightly outwards helps some, but keeping them parallel is fine, too. If you’re not sure what’s best, start by putting your feet shoulder-width apart and pointing about 15 degrees outwards.
  2. Tense your abs like someone is about to punch you.
  3. Look straight ahead and stand tall!

Mistake #1 – Starting from the knees

Very often the first thing people do when they want to squat is bend their knees. Not only does that make a proper squat impossible, it also places a lot of unnecessary stress on the knees.

woman doing squat wrong by bending at the knees first

Correct:

woman doing a proper squat

Solution

  • When you start the squat, think “sit back” not “bend at the knees”.
  • Move your butt backward as you lower your hips towards the floor, and feel the weight shift to your heels.

Tip:

“Sit back” – before you start to lower yourself, think “sit back”. You can practice this with a chair (without sitting on it). Make a very controlled descent and touch the seat of the chair before getting up. Once you master this, you can do bodyweight or weighted squats without a chair. To view a correct squat form in action, follow along with this exercise routine on the adidas Training app.

Mistake #2 – Letting your knees go inward

You might notice your knees “caving in” the deeper you squat. This might help you get lower, but it puts too much stress on your knees.

knees going inward during a squat

Correct:

woman squatting with knees out

Solution

  • As you descend, try to “push” your knees slightly outward
  • Your kneecaps should be facing the same direction as your toes. Make sure your knees are not bending inward; they should be directly above your feet.

Want to activate your glutes more?

The “knees out” tip can also be useful if you are trying to activate your glutes more. Try using a band around your knees; it’s a great way to feel your glutes work harder in the squat.

However, if your knees trouble you even when you squat properly, check out this workout that is very easy on the knees.

Mistake #3 – Hunching your back

The more you focus on your lower body in squats, the greater the chance your form will suffer somewhere in the upper body. Many work environments cause tension in the upper back and shoulders. Becoming aware of your posture can help you change this.

woman hunching back during a squat

Correct:

woman doing a proper squat

Solution

  • Look straight ahead, don’t look down
  • Open your chest and relax your shoulders
  • Put your hands straight out in front of you. If they fall toward your knees as you squat down, that means that your back is rounded

Tip:

Holding a dumbbell or something similar against your chest might help. Try to squat keeping the object close to your chest. If you notice that the bottom of the dumbbell is moving away from your chest as you go down, you are probably leaning forward too much.

If none of the above helps, use assistance – hold onto a door frame and squat down while keeping your upper body as upright as it can be. Practice holding the correct position at various heights to get more stable and comfortable. Don’t give up – experiment and practice until you feel confident enough to try the same position without assistance.

Mistake #4 – Lifting your heels off the floor

Standing up from a squat should be “powered” by a heel drive. In other words, pressing your heels into the ground ensures the right muscle activation and balance for a proper squat.

woman lifting heels of the floor while doing a squat

Correct:

woman doing a proper squat

Solution

  • Keep your heels on the floor
  • “Push” from your heels as you rise back up to stand.
  • If you can’t do a squat without putting your weight on your toes, take the time to work on your mobility (especially in your ankles)

How deep should you squat?

Your hips should go lower than your knees, but a deep squat requires additional mobility. It’s great if you can do it with good form. If not, squat as low as you can while maintaining proper form. A good indicator is the arch of your lower back. If your lower back starts to arch excessively at a certain height, don’t go any lower.

Squats are the foundation of many workout programs. With these tips, you should feel much more confident about doing squats correctly now.

Don’t forget to switch it up, try some squat variations as well.

Squats are the foundation of many workout programs. Hopefully you feel much more confident about doing them now.

Don’t forget to switch it up, try some squat variations as well.

Takeaway

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_V-usNCyns

Check your form:

  • “Sit back” – make sure to move your butt backward, don’t just bend your knees
  • Be careful to keep your knees in line with your toes, don’t let them cave in
  • Don’t forget about your upper body – look straight ahead and don’t round your back

Most importantly – explore the movement…

  • Try to notice what feels different when you change something like your foot stance or the position of your knees…
  • Experiment with tips and don’t hesitate to use assistance (such as a door frame for upper body support) if you need it
  • It takes a lot of practice to become more aware of how you move, but it’s worth it

If you experience difficulties performing a proper squat – take your time to work on mobility and practice, practice… it will pay off. It may seem boring to focus on your weakness, but remember – weakness is where your biggest potential lies!

***

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Is the US Shutting Down Power to Europe?

The War on Ivermectin
The War on Ivermectin

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September 26, 2022, massive “leaks” were detected in two Russian pipelines, Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2, which deliver natural gas from Russia to Europe underneath the Baltic Sea.

Within a couple of days, several countries, including Russia, agreed the leaks were the result of intentional sabotage or, to quote Fox News host Tucker Carlson (above), “an act of industrial terrorism.” Obvious questions include who did it? Why? And why now?

Incidentally, just one day after the Nord Stream sabotage, a new Polish pipeline was inaugurated. As reported by the Pipeline Technology Journal, the Baltic Pipe will “help Poland and Europe reduce their longstanding dependency on Russian natural gas” by transporting gas from Norway via Denmark to Poland and neighboring nations.1

Military Readiness Escalates

According to Naval News, Nordic countries have heightened their military readiness in response to the sabotage:2

“The explosions took place in the Swedish and Danish exclusive economic zones, and the Danish Navy was quick to send both naval and airborne units to investigate, while on the Swedish side the Coast Guard is responsible with the Navy standing by to provide assistance if needed …

Closer to the other end of the pipeline, Finland has declined to comment on whether there is an increase in readiness following the Nordstream leaks in line with a longstanding policy of ambiguity …

A country that has been open with their heightened readiness is Norway. The European oil and gas powerhouse had already before the incidents reported on unidentified drone activity close to their energy infrastructure in the North Sea, and in the aftermath of the incident the Norwegian government has decided on heightened security at the Norwegian oil and gas infrastructure …

[Norwegian] Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre has accepted offers of help from Germany, France and the UK to increase the security surrounding the North Sea oil and gas infrastructure.”

Germany has announced it will partner with Denmark and Sweden to investigate the sabotage using navy, police and intelligence services from the three countries.3

Who’s Being Blamed?

Several countries have officially condemned the brazen attack on civilian infrastructure, including the U.K. Ministry of Defense4 and the NATO alliance as a whole. In a September 29, 2022, statement, NATO said attacks on allies’ critical infrastructure will be met with “a united and determined response.”5

Fatih Birol, head of the Paris-based International Energy Agency — which provides energy policy recommendations, analysis and data for 42 countries — said it was “very obvious” who was behind the sabotage, but didn’t specify who that might be.6

Western officials and media have by and large blamed Russia itself. The Washington Post suggested Russian President Vladimir Putin is “fully weaponizing the Nord Stream pipelines.” Bob Rae, Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, accused Russia of “using pollution as an act of war.”7

The Center for Strategic & International Studies admitted that Russia’s motives for attacking its own pipelines are unclear, but that it “may be warning and signaling to Europe and the West that it is willing to target civilian infrastructure.”8 Putin has dismissed such allegations as “stupid,” and is placing the blame on the West, the U.S. in particular.9 As reported by Yahoo News:10

“Russian officials have said Washington had a motive as it wants to sell more liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe. President Vladimir Putin said … the United States and its allies blew up Nord Stream. ‘The sanctions were not enough for the Anglo-Saxons: they moved onto sabotage,’ he said … [The] White House has dismissed the accusation that it was responsible …

[If] it was an act of sabotage, it has damaged pipelines that were built by Kremlin-controlled Gazprom and its European partners at a cost that ran into billions of dollars.

The damage also means Russia loses an element of leverage it still had over Europe, which has been racing to find other gas supplies for winter, even if the Nord Stream pipelines where not pumping gas when the leaks were discovered, analysts say.

Whoever or whatever is to blame, Ukraine may also be a beneficiary. Kyiv has long called for Europe to halt all purchases of Russian fuel — even though some gas still runs to Europe across its territory. Disrupting Nord Stream brings Kyiv’s call for a full Russian fuel embargo closer to reality.”

European security officials claim Russian navy support ships and submarines were observed in the vicinity of the leaks. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov rebutted saying “a much larger” NATO presence was also in the area.11 As mentioned earlier, Norwegian authorities have also reported “unidentified drone activity” near other energy infrastructure in the North Sea.

Tucker Carlson: ‘Did the US Do It?’

In his September 27, 2022, show, Carlson laid the blame at the feet of the Biden administration. As noted by Carlson, Russia has no reasonable motive for blowing up its own multibillion-dollar pipelines. Those pipelines are part of Russia’s power, wealth and leverage against Europe, which needs Russian energy to survive, both economically and physically.

To quote Carlson, Putin would have to be “a suicidal moron” to waste that leverage, for any reason. If he wanted to cripple Europe by shutting off the gas, he could do that without destroying the equipment. Indeed, he’d already done just that.

Other countries, however, may gain from the destruction of those pipelines, and at least two U.S. officials have openly called for it.

Carlson showed footage from a February 2022 White House press conference in which President Biden warns that if Russia invades Ukraine, the U.S. will “bring an end” to Nord Stream 2. When asked, “But how will you do that, exactly, since the project is within Germany’s control?” Biden replied, “I promise you, we will be able to do it.”

Victoria Nuland, under secretary for political affairs at the U.S. State Department, made similar promises in January 2022, when she stated that “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”

Jeffrey Sachs: ‘The US Probably Did It’

Another person who believes the U.S. is responsible is Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs,12 an economist, public policy analyst, director of the Center for Sustainable Development and chairman of the Lancet Commission, who, by the way, has also been outspoken about his suspicions that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a U.S.-backed research program in China.

In a recent Bloomberg interview, Sachs suggested the pipelines were struck by the U.S. as a means of damaging the Russian economy, something that sanctions have failed to accomplish. Bloomberg host Tom Keene quickly interjected saying, “Jeff, we’ve got to stop there … What evidence do you have of that?” Sachs responded:13

“Well, first, there is direct radar evidence that US military helicopters that are normally based in Gdansk were circling over this area. We also had the threat from … [Nuland] earlier this year that ‘one way or another we are going to end Nord Stream.’

We also had a remarkable statement from Secretary of State [Antony] Blinken last Friday in a press conference where he said ‘this is also a tremendous opportunity.’ It’s a strange way to talk if you’re worried about piracy on international infrastructure of vital significance.

I know it runs counter to our narrative; you’re not allowed to say these things in the West. But the fact of the matter is, all over the world, when I talk to people, they think the U.S. did it. Even reporters on our papers that are involved tell me ‘of course’ (the U.S. did it), but it doesn’t show up in our media.”

An Act of Environmental Terrorism

Carlson also highlighted the environmental impacts of this sabotage. Enormous amounts of natural gas are streaming into the Baltic Sea, which may have a dire effect on marine mammals in the area.

Natural gas is also comprised of 90% methane, a key driver, allegedly, of manmade global warming, which climate change activists insist poses an acute and lethal threat to all mankind.

“So, if you’re worried about climate change, what just happened to the Nord Stream pipelines is as close to the apocalypse as we have ever come,” Carlson says.

Biden has declared climate change the most pressing emergency in the history of the world. If his administration is responsible for blowing up these pipelines, then they’re also responsible for massively worsening climate change, as the methane emitted from these pipelines far outweigh the methane released from cows, for example, which the Green Agenda is so intent on eliminating in order to “save the planet.” As noted by Carlson:

“The people lecturing you about your SUV may have blown up a natural gas pipeline and created one of the great catastrophes of our time in its effect on the environment. If they did this, it would be the craziest, most destructive things any American administration has EVER done.

But it would also be totally consistent with what they do … They destroy. These people build nothing. Not one thing. Instead, they tear down and they desecrate — from historic statues, to the Constitution, to energy infrastructure.

And no one in Congress is trying to stop any of it. They’re just preparing for the inevitable fallout. Tonight, the Senate just prepared a spending bill with $35 million for the Department of Energy to ‘prepare for and respond to potential radiological incidences in Ukraine.'”

That bill brings U.S. expenditure on Ukraine, for its war effort and funding of its government and energy, to $67 billion. According to Carlson, that’s more than Russia’s entire military budget for 2021.

What Will Happen Next?

Another obvious question that remains to be answered is, what next? As Carlson points out, if the U.S. is responsible for blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines, we have basically entered into direct war with Russia, one of the greatest nuclear powers on the planet.

And, certainly, it’s reasonable to suspect that this kind of industrial terrorism, this intentional sabotage, will have consequences. Aside from a nuclear response, Russia could conceivably respond by severing underwater power and data cables, which would immediately cripple Western nations.

In his Bloomberg interview, Sachs discussed his deep concerns about where we’re headed. He correctly highlighted that the world is in a period of unprecedented instability, with the potential for nuclear war looming, at the same time as we’re suffering hyperinflation, energy shortages and more.

What’s worse, there are no efforts to address any of these issues. Instead, world leaders are acting in a manner that escalates and worsens the situation. “So many provocations in the midst of huge instability!” Sachs said.

Cui Bono?

So, who would actually benefit from the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines, one of which, by the way, had not even opened yet (Nord Stream 2). The U.S. certainly appears to have both motive and intention. U.S. officials have publicly stated that they would “one way or another” eliminate Nord Stream 2 if Russia decided to invade Ukraine, which, of course, it did.

By sabotaging the pipelines, the U.S. stands to gain financially by increasing its own natural gas exports, and it gains by weakening Russia’s income potential and leverage over Europe. The loss of the pipelines also benefits the U.S. by putting Europe in a situation where it cannot be tempted to leave America’s side against Russia. As noted by The American Conservative:14

“Winter is soon arriving in Europe. If European peoples get tired of being cold, and/or paying a fortune for heating, they may take to the streets to demand that their governments push for peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, so that the flow of Russian gas can start again. But now, with the Nord Stream pipelines badly damaged, that possibility has been foreclosed …”

Poland may also benefit, as it just opened its own pipeline, as might Israel,15,16 which entered into negotiations with the European Union to supply natural gas when Russia started cutting off supplies (see video above).

Russia, meanwhile, just lost a multibillion-dollar investment, long-term wealth potential and hence geopolitical power, and present-day leverage against NATO sanctions.

Aside from “sending a message” that it’s willing to destroy civilian infrastructure, it gains nothing from sabotaging its own pipelines, and such a message would have been far clearer and more rational had they attacked someone else’s infrastructure and not its own. 

For now, the answer to who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines remains elusive. It seems all we can do is wait for the results of the German-Nordic alliance’s investigation, and hope that cooler heads prevail.



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California’s Misinformation Epidemic Pt. 1

California’s Misinformation Epidemic Pt. 1
California’s Misinformation Epidemic Pt. 1

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californias misinformation epidemic

From The Forgotten Side of Medicine Substack, this essay brilliantly details the history, current state, and future of the criminal control of information, corruption of science, and coercion of the public in regards to vaccines. I consider it an honor to host this essay for my subscribers.

When I was younger, a friend who was a corporate executive told me about “tiger teams,” an approach industry would utilize to solve a complex problem facing them or to develop a plan for achieving a long-term strategic goal.

After he vividly described the tenacity with which they attacked their problem, I realized large corporations could be expected to conduct highly strategic and Machiavellian plans over long timelines that would be difficult for anyone but the most talented observer to spot.

Since that time, I’ve also come to appreciate how most businessmen and their industries will default to reusing tools that have previously proven themselves for addressing each new problem that emerges. As a result, once you learn what each of the tools are, it becomes possible to predict each of the sequential steps a tiger team will choose to accomplish its goals.

Since I have held a long-term interest in the politics of vaccination, I have been able to witness the sequential steps that played out first in California and then throughout the nation. What I still find remarkable about these events was how each one directly enabled the subsequent event, and that in many cases, what happened subsequently had previously been promised to never come to pass.

Given everything that I have observed, I am almost certain one or more tiger teams working for the vaccine industry chose to have California be the means through which to accomplish their goal of regular mandatory vaccinations for the entire American population.

At this moment, a highly unpopular law that prevents physicians from spreading “misinformation“ by questioning any orthodox perspective on COVID-19 is awaiting the governor’s signature, and if this law passes, it will likely be disastrous for the nation as additional jurisdictions adopt it.

The purpose of this article will be to discuss exactly what brought us to the point a law like that could be on the verge of passing and the important insights that can be taken from the entire process.

vax for the win

The “Truth”

Throughout human history, one of the most valuable commodities has always been ownership over the “truth,” as so much power and profit results from holding a truth that aligns with your vested interests. Once larger societies formed, determining “truth,“ was always a key societal need, and excluding a few enlightened societies, the method of determining truth normally evolved as follows:

  1. Might makes right.
  2. Judging the preponderance of evidence.
  3. A growing, and eventually unsustainable corruption of most “evidence.”
  4. Societal collapse or evolution.

Note: This trend roughly follows the 250 year life cycle of empires mapped out by a British general some suspect the U.S. is nearing the end of.

In many ways, forcing two opposing viewpoints to present their evidence and then having the appropriate parties determine which side presented the preponderance of evidence and thus “wins” is the best solution our species has developed for settling otherwise irreconcilable differences of opinion.

Unfortunately, as our times have shown, the natural response to having our society place a heavy weight on “evidence” is to have dishonest parties “win,” not by being on the side with the best evidence, but rather by buying out the entire evidence base and censoring the opposition — effectively creating a much more sophisticated form of “might makes right.”

In many ways, the anatomy of corruption within “science-based” medicine is quite simple and like many other things in business, continually reuses the same formulas. As a result, once you understand how corruption plays out in a few areas, it becomes feasible to understand how things will play out in many others.

I thus would argue many of the events we witnessed throughout COVID-19 (e.g. the sudden extreme censorship of scientific debate recently detailed by Pierre Kory), simply represents all of this longstanding corruption metastasizing to a degree which finally became visible to the general public.

Public Relations

Although Sigmund Freud is typically thought of as the most influential psychologist in history, his nephew Edward Bernays created an invisible industry that has had a far greater influence than Freud.

To create his mark on the world, Bernays argued that the principles of psychology should be utilized not for individual psychotherapy but rather to control the population so that the irrational impulses of the masses could not derail the progress of society, and not surprisingly, the power-hungry elite fully embraced his narrative.

When you study the organizational structure of modern society, you will continually come across hierarchal pyramids being utilized that allow the top of the pyramid to exert a massive influence over the rest of society.

This is for instance why in medicine, doctors are expected to follow “guidelines” created by unaccountable committees that are typically composed of individuals being paid off by the pharmaceutical industry, and why in most cases it is nearly impossible for a patient to have any type of care provided to them without the approval of a doctor. Thus, by buying out a few committees, it becomes possible to exert a massive influence on the general public.

Public relations is essentially the science of how to create a pyramidal hierarchy throughout the media and to leverage that control so the general public can be manipulated into serving the interests of the sponsor.

We recently witnessed what I believe to be the most aggressive PR campaign in history and the collective effort to pull out every possible stop to sell the COVID-19 vaccines to the American public (ironically one of the individuals I know who became disabled from these vaccines worked in the industry and worked with a passionate zeal for over a year beforehand on the PR campaign for Moderna).

Studying the PR industry is quite depressing because it shows how much of the news is “fake,” just how manipulative much of it is, and how many foundational beliefs we hold in the culture are simply the product of a corporation’s public relations campaign. For those interested in this subject, an excellent book can be found here, a youtube documentary here, and an article here.

One of the most common tactics utilized in public relations is to take a complex subject and distill it down to a simple phrase that reframes it in terms that are favorable to the sponsor and removes the critical nuances from a debate (frequently this process is equated to weaponizing language).

Because the entire PR process is based around creating a pyramidal hierarchy that defers to the top, you can frequently observe these messages or scripted phrases that were developed by a PR firm be simultaneously disseminated on countless networks, including the “independent” ones:

Note: This behavior exists on both sides of the political spectrum; I am citing this one because it is the best montage I have come across.

“Misinformation”

During Obama’s presidency, the term “misinformation” started to come into vogue and was deployed to sink Trump’s presidential campaign (which failed as Trump managed to make the “fake news” meme every media platform was promoting stick to CNN instead of him). Before long, this steamrolled into “misinformation” being used as a justification to censor any viewpoint that challenged the status quo.

Initially, easy to disparage groups such as members of the far-right were targeted for censorship by Silicon Valley, before long liberal friends I knew who practiced holistic medical approaches (and had supported the initial censorship) were targeted, and by the time COVID-19 happened, this behavior had metastasized to the point it was nearly impossible to publicize any treatment for the disease or any potential harm from the vaccines.

Governments have continued their relentless push for censorship, best illustrated by the recent U.N. speech by New Zealand’s prime minister that declared free speech on the internet a weapon of war and called for the international community to work towards curating (censoring) all online information that questions government narratives.

Prior to Obama’s presidency, I had heard there was a push to establish a pyramidal hierarchy for all information on the internet, with a few major tech companies serving as the “gatekeepers” the public could access the information through, but until 2016, this always seemed like something that would happen in the far distant future. Recently, I learned that Sharyl Atkinson was able to identify when and where this all began:

“I first heard the term [curated] applied to controlling news and information in October 2016 when President Obama introduced the concept at an appearance at the private research university Carnegie Mellon. Obama claimed a “curating” function had become necessary.

The public at large had not been asking for any such thing. Instead, it was the invention of powerful interests that apparently felt the need to get a grip on public opinion — interests that were losing the information war online. But the concept is contrary to the nature of a free society and an open Internet. It would take some clever manipulation to convince the public to allow such “curating.”

“We’re going to have to rebuild, within this Wild, Wild West of information flow, some sort of curating function that people agree to,” said Obama. “… [T]here has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard because they just don’t have any basis in anything that’s actually happening in the world.”

As far as I know, that signaled the start of what would become a global media initiative to have third parties insert themselves as arbiters of facts, opinions, and truth in the news and online [prior to this they were viewed as a joke and fortunately still are by half of the electorate].”

Credible Sources

Most of our modern hierarchies operate on the basis of being “credible.” For example, in journalism, about a century ago during the era of Bernays, the concept of “professional journalism” was created and a standard was set that news could not be considered credible unless it was disseminated by someone who belonged to a corrupt credible news organization that served the bidding of those in power.

This article for example discusses the profound consequences of the monopolization of journalism, and how as the decades have gone by, the issue has only gotten worse and worse.

Sharyl Attkisson’s book (the source of the above quotation) describes how pervasive corruption gradually entered her industry, and how despite her clout in the network as a premier news anchor, more and more of her investigations were not permitted to air by her superiors.

For example, in 1997, Clinton legalized direct pharmaceutical advertising to consumers. As the networks become beholden to their new advertisers, anything critical of that industry, such as vaccine safety, was no longer permitted to air.

In the early 2000s, Atkinson was assigned to report on the controversial military anthrax and smallpox vaccinations, and not long after, the smallpox campaign was cancelled. Now, in contrast, no criticism whatsoever is permitted of the much more dangerous COVID-19 vaccines (and now even the government is paying to incentivize this censorship).

To see how much things have shifted consider this report that was aired on the nightly news after the 1976 swine flu vaccine debacle (this vaccine was not safe and I directly know people who developed permanent complications from it that persist to this day, but at the same time, it was much safer than the COVID-19 vaccines):

Something like this could never air today.

Evidence-Based Medicine

The pyramidal hierarchy of our society requires creating faith in authoritative sources and then having each institution work in unison to promote the sanctity of those (easy to control) sources. “Professional journalism” is one such example, another is the widespread societal adherence to the CDC’s arbitrary and ineffective guidelines (best illustrated by the absurd dictates they and other Western health authorities put forward in regards to social distancing during physical intimacy).

When evidence-based medicine (EBM) started, it was sorely needed by the medical profession because many disastrous practices were unchallengeable dogmas. However, in due time, as corruption entered the process, EBM became yet another means for “[financial] might to make right” as its authority was shifted into a pyramidal hierarchy. Presently, the “authority” in EBM rests in 5 areas.

  • The sanctity of all data.
  • Conducting large randomized clinical trials.
  • Peer-reviewed publications in high-impact scientific journals.
  • Authoritative committees reviewing the previous three to produce guidelines.
  • Other institutions (e.g. the media and the courts) upholding the sanctity of the data and evidenced-based guidelines.

There have been major issues in each of these areas for decades as industry has steadily worked to expand its influence over EBM, but as many observers noted, these issues spun completely out of control during COVID-19. Let’s review each of them:

1. The sanctity of all data — The major problem with “data” is that most of it is never made available for outside analysis, which allows those who “own” the data to only present data that casts the owner in a favorable light (which essentially makes the data worthless). The pharmaceutical industry nonetheless has been able to sustain this practice by arguing that disclosing their data would constitute a violation of proprietary trade secrets.

Thus excluding the occasional instance where they are forced to open their records as part of the discovery process (e.g. in the lawsuits against the antidepressant manufacturers) that research fraud and the concealment of critically important safety data never come to light (and never has for vaccines).

Previously, one of the most egregious offenders in this regard were the statin manufacturers who have deliberately withheld their data from the public for decades. A corrupt Oxford academic consortium, the Cholesterol Treatment Trialists’ (CTT) Collaboration has access to that data and has published numerous pro-industry analyses of it, but despite continual outside requests, has refused to ever make this data available for outside scrutiny.

This is concerning given the significant evidence that has emerged demonstrating statins are both ineffective and harmful, and has led to many more honest academics attempting to independently obtain this critical data from regulators.

Almost all of the COVID-19 vaccine data likewise was never made available to the public (although the companies have suggested it may be made available a few years from now); instead, we simply received highly curated publications in prestigious medical journals. Since the vaccines have entered the market, countless red flags on their safety and efficacy have emerged in large datasets.

However, in many cases, that data has only been available because it was leaked by whistleblowers or obtained by court order, and as the recent events in Israel showed (Israel agreed to be Pfizer’s laboratory to test their vaccines and many global vaccine policies were crafted from the Israeli data), much of the incriminating data against this program was deliberately concealed by governments around the world.

On one hand, I view all of this as an immensely positive development, as in the past critical data suppression like this typically remained hidden and forgotten. On the other hand, I consider it completely unacceptable the public is being forced to take a vaccination product on the basis of data they are not even permitted to review.

2. Conducting large randomized clinical trials — We are reflexively conditioned by the educational system to assume a clinical trial has no value unless it is randomized and controlled.

While it is true that controlling for the placebo effect through blinding somewhat improves the accuracy of a study, conducting a randomized controlled trial (RCT) is immensely expensive, and the biases introduced by those costs dwarf those obtained by controlling for the placebo effect.

A little known fact is that findings from study designs that do not rely on industry funding (i.e. retrospective observational controlled studies) reach the same conclusion, on average, to those of RCT’s. Yet the former are near systematically ignored by the high-impact journals and medical societies.

Further, a frequent narrative parroted by high-impact journals and science news writers is that findings from studies deemed to be of a “low quality design” cannot be trusted. Not true. In a comparison of conclusions between groups of high and low quality studies, no meaningful differences were found.

Put differently, RCT’s require industry funding, and industry funding has repeatedly been found to heavily bias trial data in favor of its sponsor. To highlight the absurdity of this, as the whistleblower Brooke Jackson showed, the RCT she supervised for the Pfizer vaccine was not even blinded because the trial site cut so many corners to produce a positive result for Pfizer.

For those who wish to know about how the industry games clinical trials, this bookthis book and this book are the three best resources I have found on the subject.

3. Peer reviewed publications in high-impact scientific journals — In the same way we are conditioned to reflexively dismiss anything that is not a large RCT, many people will not consider a scientific trial unless it is published in a high-impact peer-reviewed journal.

Not surprisingly, there is a lot of money in this area and most of it comes from Big Pharma (which either comes from advertisements within the journal or agreements to purchase thousands of printed copies of that issue of the journal).

This creates a setting where studies that support industry interests regardless of their deficiencies are published (e.g. pharmaceutical ghostwriting is a major source of fraud in the peer-reviewed literature), whereas articles that challenge their interests are never published. This has been a longstanding issue, and the earliest example I remember coming across was discussed in this 2001 book:

medical biases and politics
(I unfortunately was never able to track down the referenced news story; please let me know if you have)

The positions of the journal sponsors also gradually enter the medical culture, and the peer-review culture frequently censors or attacks publications that do not match industry findings.

One of the best examples was Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 study which ruffled so many feathers by suggesting a link between autism and vaccination that the study was retracted and a thorough example was made of him (e.g. he lost his license) to deter further research into vaccine injuries.

Many other examples also exist, such as the extreme hostility faced by researchers who publish data that is critical of other sacred cows like routine statin usage or psychiatric overmedication.

Because of the systemic biases that exist against publishing anything which challenges medical orthodoxies, it can often take years or decades for bad practices to be abandoned as no one is willing to on take the risk of publishing studies refuting them.

For example, a few of my Ph.D. friends who researched viral genomes knew within a day of the original SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequence being published that it came from a lab, yet not a single one was willing to expose themselves to the personal risk they would take from authoring a publication on that subject.

At this point, there seems to be an unwritten understanding that the introduction and conclusion of a scientific publication must match the prevailing biases of medicine. It is hence always fascinating to see just how often an article’s conclusion is not supported by the data within it (sadly few ever read those parts of the paper).

Throughout COVID-19, these problems also became much worse. To share a few memorable examples:

A large study was published in the Lancet which showed data from around the world indicated hydroxychloroquine killed COVID-19 patients who received it and was used by the WHO as justification to suspend clinical trials of hydroxychloroquine (along with governments forbidding its administration to patients).

Outside evaluators realized the data was nonsensical (leading to serious questions over how one of the best editorial boards in the world let it be published), the company that provided the data effectively admitted fraud had been conducted, and the study was retracted. Another one of the top 5 medical journals, the NEJM, also published a study utilizing Surgisphere’s fraudulent dataset.

Despite a tsunami of data showing severe harm from the COVID-19 vaccines, it has been virtually impossible for any publication on the topic to enter the peer-review literature.

As Pierre Kory has detailed throughout the last few years, numerous large clinical trials have been conducted that clearly show a benefit from ivermectin for COVID-19 and no risks associated with the therapy.

Despite the evidence for ivermectin being stronger than what can be found for almost any other drug on the market, as Kory’s recent series shows, it is nearly impossible to have a study supporting ivermectin be published (unless the conclusion says the opposite).

When they are instead published as preprints they often are retracted for political reasons (retracting a preprint is absurd), and not surprisingly, ivermectin is now widely viewed by the medical community as both unsafe and ineffective.

Currently I believe that of the top five medical journals, the BMJ is the only “prestigious” medical journal still conducting itself in a manner deserving of its reputation.

4. Authoritative committees reviewing the previous three to produce guidelines — A common complaint from conservatives is that unelected bureaucrats are allowed to control our lives with impunity. One area where this is particularly true can be found within the committee model where “experts” are nominated to assess existing evidence and produce a consensus on what should be done.

Even though those guidelines which bypassed the legislative process should not be treated as law (as was ruled by a federal judge), in most cases they are. As you might expect, the people who make it onto these committees tend to have heavy financial conflicts of interest that inevitably result in their voting for their sponsors. Consider this paraphrased example that was shared in chapter 7 of Doctoring Data:

The National Cholesterol Education Programme (NCEP) has been tasked by the NIH to develop [legally enforceable] guidelines for treating cholesterol levels. Excluding the chair (who was by law prohibited from having financial conflicts of interest), the other 8 members on average were on the payroll of 6 statin manufacturers.

In 2004, NCEP reviewed 5 large statin trials and recommended: “Aggressive LDL lowering for high-risk patients [primary prevention] with lifestyle changes and statins.” [these recommendations in turn were adopted around the world].

In 2005 a Canadian division of the Cochrane Collaboration reviewed 5 large statin trials (3 were the same as NCEP’s, while the other 2 had also reached a positive conclusion for statin therapy). That assessment instead concluded: “Statins have not been shown to provide an overall health benefit in primary prevention trials.”

Note: The Cochrane Collaboration (prior to 2012-2016 when they began taking industry money from groups like the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation and switched to defending their interests such as the HPV vaccine), was the group that best objectively evaluated existing clinical evidence.

Many committees that directed the pandemic response have engaged in egregious misconduct. Consider for example the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the CDC committee that rubber stamps each new vaccine that enters the market (the only exception I know of was overruled by the current CDC director).

The ACIP is the committee responsible for many of the vaccine mandates we have faced, and its rulings in favor of vaccination often bordered on the absurd. Similarly, Steve Kirsch was recently able to prove that the chair of the committee is willfully choosing to disregard Israeli data that undermines the justification for the entire vaccination campaign.

I believe that the most corrupt committee during the pandemic response was the NIH one responsible for determining the appropriate therapies for COVID-19. Some (and possibly all) of its members were appointed by Anthony Fauci, many had personal ties to Fauci and almost all of them held significant financial conflicts of interest with Gilead, remdesivir’s manufacturer.

Not surprisingly, that committee has consistently recommended against every therapy that effectively treats COVID-19 but is off-patent (and hence not profitable). Conversely, their recommendation for remdesivir is why it was the required treatment throughout the US hospital system despite the evidence for the drug being atrocious (a more detailed and referenced summary of this corruption can be found here).

In many ways, the remdesivir story is eerily similar to the early days of HIV. There, Fauci used his influence to keep a variety of effective therapies away from dying AIDS patients so that he could win approval for AZT, a dangerous drug many believe significantly worsened the prognosis of those who received it.

5. Other institutions (e.g. the media and the courts) upholding the sanctity of the data and evidenced-based guidelines — Many people I know used a variety of integrative therapies (e.g. intravenous vitamin C) to treat COVID-19 during the early days of the pandemic, and successfully saved many lives at the same time countless Americans were being sent to the hospitals to die (as they had no treatment for COVID-19 besides often lethal ventilators).

Yet, it was those who treated COVID-19 successfully (including a few of my friends) who were targeted by the government and either served with a cease and desist or prosecuted for “endangering” the public by utilizing unproven therapies not supported by the COVID-19 treatment guidelines.

The mass media was also fully complicit in this and never once mentioned any option for COVID-19 (other than needing to get more ventilators or vaccines), except when attacking the doctors who were providing life-saving outpatient therapies. However, while the new’s conduct was egregious, by far the biggest offender was Big Tech.

Curating Information

As I think through all the things that had to come together to enable the pandemic profiteers to destroy our economy, withhold life-saving treatments from the American public, and mandate a disastrous vaccination on the populace, I believe Obama’s push for the Silicon Valley to become the arbiter of what we were allowed to see online was by far the most consequential.

Since that time, I have observed a remarkable decline in the quality of discourse on many social media websites (as many worthwhile topics are now censored or flooded with bots — Substack is a rare exception) and it has become much more difficult to find the information I am looking for online (to the point I sometimes need to use Russia’s search engine to find it).

Throughout history, freedom of speech has always been a hotly contested subject as people tend to support it, except for viewpoints they disagree with, and frequently lack the insight to recognize why those positions are at odds with each other. Societies likewise follow cyclical trends towards and away from totalitarianism and fascist censorship.

The earliest example I know of was shared with me by a scholar who had reviewed the plays of ancient Greece and had found that as censorship (e.g. political correctness) entered the plays, it immediately preceded the fall of Greek democracy and an authoritarian government taking over. From studying countless iterations of this cycle, I now believe the following:

  • It must be acknowledged that any position you hold could be wrong or based on erroneous information.
  • It is important to defend the right of those you disagree with to speak and not hate them because they hold viewpoints you adamantly oppose.
  • If you refuse to defend your position in an open and fair debate, you are probably wrong.
  • Very strict stipulations must exist on what speech can be outlawed, and those stipulations must be agreed upon by (nearly) the entire society. Some things such as shouting “fire” in a movie theater as a prank everyone can agree on. Anything everyone cannot agree on I would argue does not meet the standard that must be met for censorship.
  • The government may incentivize speech it agrees with, but it cannot restrict speech it disagrees with.
  • Any attempt you make to censor a viewpoint you disagree with is not worth it because the censorship you helped create will inevitably be turned on you in the future.

During Obama’s presidency, two major changes emerged in Silicon Valley. The first many are aware of was an obsession (by these otherwise evil companies) with saving the world through social justice that I would argue was analogous to the well known practice of Greenwashing, where an egregious polluter conducts a token environmental initiative and through doing so successfully recasts themselves as protectors of the environment.

This social justice focus was particularly problematic as it was used to justify the censorship of anything that was not politically correct and I would argue that many of the tech employees who helped spearhead the movement are now directly experiencing the consequences of the climate they created.

Note: This focus on censorship in lieu of debating opposing (“unsafe”) viewpoints also creeped into the university system and then the culture during Obama’s presidency and I believe was a direct consequence of policies enacted by his Department of Education.

The second, much more important one was that Big Tech became a key financial supporter of the Democrat party, and to varying degrees merged with the pharmaceutical industry and biotech. Because of this, there was a seismic realignment in the priorities of the Democrat party and it began ardently supporting those industries.

It is important to recognize how these two trends dovetailed. Big Tech was able to use their “altruistic” focus on social justice to distract the public from the more sinister direction their industry was moving in by using the standard for censorship they had established in the name of creating a “safe” (politically correct) environment; while at the same time targeting threats to their partners in the pharmaceutical and biotech industry by censoring any voices suggesting dangers were associated with those products.

From watching each piece of the plan that has been rolled out throughout my career, I suspect the vision of these three industries is to transform medicine into an algorithmic practice where most medical “decisions” in patient care are made by an AI system and the human body is treated as a genomic software code that can be “solved” by programmers.

Although this approach will have the ability to overcome certain issues we presently face in medicine, it is also fundamentally incapable of addressing many of the needs of each human being who goes through the healthcare system and will likely prove disastrous to our species.

Antitrust Activity

At the time Bill Gates founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation he was one of the most disliked individuals in America. This was because he had leveraged the power of his operating system Windows, which was on almost every computer in America, to also monopolize the software market and prevent competitors like Netscape (an early internet browser) from being used by consumers.

Since this monopolistic behavior was illegal, Microsoft was sued for antitrust violations, and throughout the court process, Bill Gates was revealed to be a nasty individual who was doing everything he could to bury his competitors. To address the negative public perception of him, Gates founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to recast himself as a philanthropist and through this PR stunt was able to successfully remediate his public image.

From the foundation’s inception, Gates repeated the same antitrust behavior he had leveraged in the past but instead directed it toward the field of global public health. I first became aware of this behavior after I learned of the disastrous vaccination campaigns he conducted in India. For example to quote The Real Anthony Fauci:

“India’s Federal Ministry of Health suspended the [HPV vaccine] trials and appointed an expert parliamentary committee to investigate the scandal. Indian government investigators found that Gates-funded researchers at PATH committed pervasive ethical violations: pressuring vulnerable village girls into the trial, bullying illiterate parents, and forging consent forms.

Gates provided health insurance for his PATH staff but not to any participants in the trials, and refused medical care to the hundreds of injured girls.”

Gates also diverted a large portion of the global health budget towards eradicating the last few remaining cases of polio by giving large numbers of the (live) oral vaccine to third world countries, in some instances 50 doses by the age of five. This was disastrous around the world, for example paralyzing approximately 491,000 children over two decades in India.

In addition to vaccine fanaticism, Gates engaged in other “public health” measures that are more accurately described as colonialist practices.

These included forcing poor women around the world to receive Depo-Provera (this is a long-acting injectable birth control that can permanently impair fertility) and pushing communities to abandon their traditional forms of farming and switch to genetically modified industrial agriculture (which places them at risk of starvation anytime a commodity price goes up).

One of my friends who has worked for the WHO for decades told me that the WHO has implemented a lot of good public health measures that saved lives. Unfortunately, ever since Gates got involved, those measured have fallen to the wayside and the focus has been on monopolistic public health practices that ultimately serve to enrich a few select industries at the expense of the third-world citizens the measures are alleged to help.

Similarly, many in the global health community have stated that since Gates has so much influence over the global health budget (and the WHO), it is nearly impossible to criticize or question any policy he promotes.

To further entrench this monopoly, his foundation has prioritized buying out the press (be it groups like the Cochrane Collaboration or putting over 300 million into countless media outlets around the world), so that anything that challenges his vision of public health is “misinformation.”

Much more could be said about Gates (and is aptly summarized within The Real Anthony Fauci). However, we will focus on the two most important correlates to the misinformation epidemic:

Gates made a lot of money from the pandemic. For example, on 9/4/2019, two months before COVID-19 emerged in China, he invested 55 million in the company that produced Pfizer’s vaccine. Last year that investment was worth 550 million.

It has now been admitted by the mainstream media that Gates (and the Wellcome Trust) directed the pandemic response that failed disastrously from a public health perspective (but not in money-making). One quote from that article is particularly telling:

“Leaders of three of the four organizations maintained that lifting intellectual property protections [which would prevent everyone from making money] was not needed to increase vaccine supplies – which activists believed would have helped save lives.”

In the second half of this series, we will show how this antitrust behavior and militant censorship metastasized within Silicon Valley and how increasingly draconian laws enforcing vaccine mandates for the pharmaceutical industry have been implemented by the California legislature.



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Why Is Fauci Continuing to Fund EcoHealth Alliance?

Why Is Fauci Continuing to Fund EcoHealth Alliance?
Why Is Fauci Continuing to Fund EcoHealth Alliance?

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EcoHealth Alliance has received quite a bit of notoriety over the past three years as a key participant in risky gain of function research on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan, China, funded by Dr. Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak was one of the 15 coauthors of the 2015 paper, “SARS-Like Cluster of Circulating Bat Coronavirus Pose Threat for Human Emergence,”1 which biowarfare expert Francis Boyle2 claims is “the smoking gun” that reveals the culprits responsible for the COVID pandemic.

EcoHealth is also linked to U.S.-funded biolabs in Ukraine by way of Nathan Wolfe, a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader graduate, who has been on EcoHealth’s editorial board since 2004. Wolf is the founder of Metabiota, now implicated in the operation of biolabs in Ukraine that Russia claims have been conducting secret bioweapons research.3

Many articles have been written detailing EcoHealth’s suspected role in the COVID pandemic, as well as the National Institutes of Health’s funding of its risky gain of function research, yet despite that, Fauci, before leaving office, is now giving EcoHealth another $3.3 million in additional funding.4,5 To understand just how outrageous this is,6,7 let’s review some of what we know about EcoHealth and its research history.

EcoHealth Has a Long History of Risky Research

In a March 31, 2022, investigative report,8 Vanity Fair contributor Katherine Eban reviewed the contents of more than 100,000 EcoHealth Alliance documents, including meeting minutes and internal emails and reports, most of which predate the COVID-19 pandemic, showing a disturbing reality of “murky grant agreements, flimsy NIH oversight and pursuit of government grants by pitching increasingly risky global research.”9

Records show EcoHealth received a $3.7 million NIAID grant in 2014 to study the risk of bat coronavirus emergence and the potential for outbreaks in human populations. Nearly $600,000 of that went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which was a key collaborator.

Warning bells started ringing in 2016, when EcoHealth failed to submit its annual progress report. NIAID threatened to withhold funds until the report was filed, and when Daszak finally submitted it, grant specialists found cause for concern.

According to the report, Daszak and his collaborators were seeking to create an infectious clone of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), a novel coronavirus with a 35% mortality rate. To that end, they constructed two chimeric coronaviruses that were similar to SARS, the virus responsible for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.

The report prompted National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant specialists to ask whether the work should be subject to the federal moratorium on gain of function research on influenza, SARS and MERS viruses, which had been in place since October 2014.10

NIH and EcoHealth Circumvented Moratorium Rules

The moratorium had some loopholes, however, which Daszak exploited to continue his research. In a June 2016 response to the grant specialists, Daszak claimed the SARS-like chimeras they’d constructed were exempt from the moratorium because the viral strains used were not known to infect humans.

In his letter to the NIH, Daszak also referenced a 2015 paper written by Shi Zhengli and Ralph Baric, Ph.D., which detailed an experiment in which they mixed components of SARS-like viruses of different species to create a novel chimera capable of directly infecting human cells.

Incidentally, this research was funded by both the NIH and EcoHealth. According to Daszak, the chimera produced was less lethal than the original SARS, so his chimera would probably be less lethal as well.

However, the NIH grant specialists were far from reassured that his MERS chimera wouldn’t be dangerous, as Shi and Baric in that 2015 paper had noted the danger of such experiments, stressing that “scientific review panels may deem similar studies … too risky to pursue.”

Daszak then proposed a compromise. If any of the chimeric strains showed 10 times greater growth than a natural virus, he would immediately cease experiments, inform the NIAID program officer and the Institutional Biosafety Committee of the results, and participate in decision-making trees to decide how to move forward.

A Clear Case of Regulatory Failure

Considering the rationale for the research was that these pathogens could potentially cause a pandemic, Daszak’s claim that the research posed no such risk is rather contradictory. Daszak’s argument also had another hole in it.

Three months before Daszak suggested the virus they were going to use as the backbone for the chimeras, dubbed WIV1, had “never been demonstrated to infect humans or cause human disease,” his collaborator, Baric, had published a paper11 showing WIV1 did indeed have the ability to infect humans.12

Baric, who works at UNC Chapel Hill, had found the WIV1 virus “readily replicated efficiently in human airway cultures and in vivo,” and posed an “ongoing threat” to the human population. This completely contradicts Daszak’s statement, and it’s doubtful that Daszak would not be aware of the paper published by Baric three months earlier. It’s doubtful the NIH would be ignorant of Baric’s finding as well.

Despite all of that, the NIH agreed to Daszak’s proposal. Shi — a Chinese operative with ties to the Chinese military — would be responsible for informing Daszak if any of the chimeras had 10 times the growth rate of a natural virus, and Daszak would inform the agency of the results, so they could decide the fate of the experiment.

It appears none of that actually happened. When EcoHealth’s scientists performed the experiment, one of the chimeric viruses did in fact grow much faster than the others, producing a viral load that was four logs greater than the parent virus.

This should have triggered the chain of oversight proposed by Daszak, but according to NIH principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak, Ph.D.,13,14,15 EcoHealth didn’t inform the NIH program officer about this gain of function.

EcoHealth, meanwhile, claims it did, and was permitted by default to continue, as no one at the NIH objected. Whatever the truth of that might be, what’s clear is that the NIH accepted EcoHealth’s proposal to circumvent gain of function rules.16

And, while everyone involved has tried to deny that this research had anything to do with gain of function, Daszak explicitly admitted it in a July 2016 email to the NIH. “This is terrific!” he wrote. “We are very happy to hear that our Gain of Function research funding pause has been lifted.”17,18
It doesn’t get much clearer than that.

Why Is Fauci Now Funding EcoHealth Again?

With that backstory in mind — and that’s just one story raising questions about EcoHealth’s research ethics and role in the COVID pandemic — why is Fauci now flooding EcoHealth with fresh funds? As reported by Unherd.com October 3, 2022:19

“The NGO run by Peter Daszak has been granted another $600,000 by Anthony Fauci’s agency, NIAID.20 This, to say the least, has raised eyebrows. It’s hard to overstate the role Daszak has played in pandemic-related issues.

His EcoHealth Alliance is the organization responsible for funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars, sourced from US government grants to the now infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology, considered by many to be the likely source of the pandemic.

As I previously reported, he was the go-to source for the American media as they sought to ‘prove’ that the lab leak theory was little more than a Right-wing conspiracy. He also surreptitiously organized a letter21 in The Lancet, attempting to shut down the debate by labelling this potential origin as a ‘conspiracy theory.’

Most alarmingly, it was Daszak who submitted a 2018 proposal22 to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA] that called for scientists to insert a furin cleavage site — a key distinguishing and extremely rare feature of SARS-Cov-2 — into SARS-like viruses. In other words: a blueprint for making SARS-2 in a lab.

Daszak’s government funding was shut off in 2020, a move that spooked the EcoHealth Alliance chief, who urged staff and partners to refrain from making key genetic data public by uploading it to NIH’s genetic database, GenBank. Daszak told his colleagues that the genetic information could bring ‘unwelcome attention’ (he was right).

Numerous experts … have called on Congress to subpoena Daszak. Instead, the government has supercharged his funding. While recent headlines about a fresh $600,000 grant are accurate, the reality is that Daszak’s organization was awarded about five times that, $3.3 million,23,24 by the NIH to hunt viruses in south-east Asia.”

The $653,392 grant25 to analyze “the potential for future bat coronavirus emergence in Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam,” issued September 21, 2022, is for the first year of a five-year project, which is how the funding comes out to a total of about $3.3 million.26,27,28

Predictive Pandemic Planning Is a Fantasy

The rationale behind the hunt for novel zoonotic viruses is that it will help researchers prepare against future pandemic threats. But looking at the volumes of papers published on coronaviruses, including chimeric coronaviruses suspected of being precursors to SARS-CoV-2, it’s clear that none of it helped prevent a global pandemic.

On the contrary, the evidence seems to point to the COVID pandemic being the result of such research. So, why is the NIH still funding the very organization that gave money to and worked with the very lab the whole world now suspects might be the source of the COVID pandemic?

As specified in the grant abstract,29 EcoHealth will also “rapidly supply viral sequences and isolates for use in vaccine and therapeutic development, including ‘prototype pathogen’ vaccines, via an existing MOU [memorandum of understanding] with the NIAID-CREID [NIAID’s Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases] network.”

Bill Introduced to Prevent EcoHealth Alliance Funding

Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst has now introduced a bill30 to put a permanent end to the government’s funding of the EcoHealth Alliance. “Giving taxpayer money to EcoHealth to study pandemic prevention is like paying a suspected arsonist to conduct fire safety inspections,” she told the Daily Caller,31,32 adding:

“NIH got it right when it canceled the funding for the experiments EcoHealth Alliance was conducting with China’s state-run Wuhan Institute. In addition to violating multiple federal laws, EcoHealth has still not turned over documents about these dangerous studies that NIH has requested on multiple occasions that could offer vital clues to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I have introduced legislation to guarantee EcoHealth doesn’t receive another penny from any federal agency and to launch an investigation to determine once and for all how much U.S. taxpayer money was funneled into labs in China by EcoHealth.”

The bill, dubbed the “Defund EcoHealth Alliance Act,” specifies that “No funds authorized or appropriated by Federal law may be made available for any purpose to EcoHealth Alliance, Inc, including any subsidiaries and related organizations that are directly controlled by EcoHealth Alliance, Inc.”

‘Stop the Money, Stop the Madness’

Justin Goodman, senior vice president of advocacy and public policy at White Coat Waste Project, spoke out in support of the bill, telling the Daily Caller:33

“EcoHealth Alliance’s animal experiments should be de-funded, not re-funded. As we first exposed, this shady group funneled US tax dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for dangerous animal experiments that likely caused the pandemic, skirted a federal ban on gain-of-function research, repeatedly violated transparency law and obstructed investigations into COVID’s origins.

Yet, records show that EHA [EcoHealth Alliance] has continued to receive millions of taxpayer dollars just since the pandemic began. We applaud Sen. Ernst for working to ensure that taxpayers are not forced to fund this reckless rogue lab contractor any longer. Stop the money, stop the madness.”

We Really Need to Ban all Gain of Function Research

As detailed in “The COVID Rabbit Hole: An Inside Look at the Virus’ Origin,”  evidence points to SARS-CoV-2 being the result of a lab leak, and that Fauci, Daszak and other researchers, China, the mainstream media, the World Health Organization and tech companies have all worked together to cover it up.

COVID-19 would not be the first infectious outbreak caused by a lab leak, and it surely won’t be the last — if we continue to allow mad scientists to continue this kind of work, that is. It’s important to realize that all so-called biodefense research is biowarfare research. There’s no hard line separating the two.

So, while Daszak, Fauci and the rest insist that gain of function research on human pathogens is necessary for defensive purposes, be it to prepare for zoonotic spillover or a terrorist biowarfare attack, the very same research also constitutes the creation of illegal bioweapons. Hence, the term “dual use” research. As noted in the journal of Science and Engineering Ethics back in 2007:34

“The dual-use dilemma arises in the context of research in the biological and other sciences as a consequence of the fact that one and the same piece of scientific research sometimes has the potential to be used for bad as well as good purposes.

It is an ethical dilemma since it is about promoting good in the context of the potential for also causing harm, e.g., the promotion of health in the context of providing the wherewithal for the killing of innocents.

It is an ethical dilemma for the researcher because of the potential actions of others, e.g., malevolent non-researchers who might steal dangerous biological agents, or make use of the original researcher’s work. And it is a dilemma for governments concerned with the security of their citizens, as well as their health.”

While Sen. Ernst’s Defund EcoHealth Alliance Act would end the government’s funding of one reckless research entity, there are many others that would simply take its place. So, in that regard, it would accomplish very little.

What we really need is a ban on dual use gain of function research, i.e., research in which a pathogen is equipped with new functions that makes it more dangerous, which could be used for good or ill. We simply do not need this kind of research. It’s all offensive, as it hasn’t prevented a single epidemic or pandemic to date.



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A Teen Girl’s Diet Could Impact Her Odds for Menstrual Pain

A Teen Girl’s Diet Could Impact Her Odds for Menstrual Pain
A Teen Girl’s Diet Could Impact Her Odds for Menstrual Pain

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By Cara Murez 

HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, Oct. 12, 2022 (HealthDay News) — While working on a senior research project as part of her undergraduate degree from Rutgers University, Serah Sannoh decided to analyze peer-reviewed studies on diet and menstrual period pain, partly because of her own struggles with the issue.
 

What did she find? Sannoh reported in her new study that her research showed foods high in omega-6 fatty acids promoted inflammation, a key culprit in menstrual pain, whereas a diet high in foods with omega-3 fatty acids reduced inflammation.

Menstrual pain, also known as dysmenorrhea, happens when muscles in the uterus contract. Prostaglandins, chemicals involved in inflammatory responses, make matters worse.

“I would just suggest that young women take a look at your lifestyle and the diet that you have, dietary behaviors, and see if there are any changes that could help improve the pain that they experience,” said Sannoh, now a medical student at Temple University in Philadelphia.

While 90% of adolescent girls report menstrual pain, many don’t seek treatment. It is a leading cause of school absences for young women, according to the study.

Those foods that Sannoh’s research pinpointed as being problematic are also popular, including red meat, sugar, salt, dairy, coffee and oils.

“The American diet is very high in omega-6 fatty acids,” Sannoh said.

People on a vegan diet had the lowest rates of inflammation, the research showed.

“Diet does have an effect on your health, and I feel that this is often overlooked,” Sannoh said. “Sometimes people would just want to see if there’s a medication that they could take. And that’s fine, but if there’s a way to holistically stop a beginning step in this painful cascade, I feel like that would be better for some people to adopt and it will also help them improve their health overall.”

Still, more research is needed, Sannoh said.
 

“I believe that this could be applied to all ages, but that’s another reason why I would like more research done on this subject so that we could see the actual effects of these diets long-term,” she added.

Sannoh was scheduled to present her findings Wednesday at the North American Menopause Society annual meeting, in Atlanta. Such research is considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Dr. Monica Christmas, director of the University of Chicago’s Center for Women’s Integrated Health, further explained the impact of prostaglandins. High levels may increase constriction of the blood vessels that supply blood to the uterus. When restricting that blood flow, it can cause cramping.

“That’s why ibuprofen or Midol or Aleve — all of the non-steroidals — work is because you’re taking something that blocks that prostaglandin release and you minimize that vasoconstriction process,” Christmas said. “With this study, they’re saying, ‘Hey, look, can we have people just adhere to an anti-inflammatory diet and is that enough to block the prostaglandin release so that you don’t get that vasoconstriction?’ And it seems to be.”

In her own life, Christmas follows a mostly plant-based diet because of the health benefits, with some exceptions for occasional dairy and sushi.

While Christmas often works with patients in menopause, sometimes they arrive in her office with significant symptoms, including rapid weight gain, mood swings and arthritis. But an earlier transition to a less inflammatory diet could help.

“If you’ve got adolescents that are really honing in on adhering to an anti-inflammatory diet, which is also really just a healthy way to eat at an early age, do we really offset some of the things that they may experience later on?” Christmas asked.

Eating foods that are inflammatory can also increase risk for diabetes, arthritis and heart disease, Christmas noted.

Christmas recommends eating a Mediterranean diet, full of colorful fruits, green leafy vegetables, brown rice or whole grains, oatmeal, and fresh herbs and spices.

“Having people nourish their bodies with foods that are going to have them have their most optimal health, longevity, think better, function better and live an overall healthy life, and minimize their risk of co-morbidities that increase as we get older, I think is just the best way to eat,” Christmas said.

More information
 

The U.S. National Library of Medicine has more on period pain.
 

 

 

SOURCES:Serah Sannoh, BS, graduate, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J.; Monica Christmas, MD, associate professor, obstetrics and gynecology, director, Center for Women’s Integrated Health, University of Chicago, and board member, North American Menopause Society, Chicago; North American Menopause Society annual meeting, Atlanta, Oct. 12-15, 2022

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For Many, Long COVID’s Impacts Go On And On, Major Study Says

For Many, Long COVID’s Impacts Go On And On, Major Study Says
For Many, Long COVID’s Impacts Go On And On, Major Study Says

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Oct. 12, 2022 – About 1 in 20 people with long COVID continue to live with symptoms at 18 months, and another 42% reported only some improvement in their health and wellbeing in the same time frame, a large study out of Scotland found.

Multiple studies are evaluating people with long COVID in the hopes of figuring out why some people experience debilitating symptoms long after their primary infection ends and others either do not or recover more quickly. 

This current study is notable for its large size – 96,238 people. Researchers checked in with participants at 6, 12 and 18 months, and included a group of people never infected with the coronavirus to help investigators make a stronger case.

“A lot of the symptoms of long COVID are non-specific and therefore can occur in people never infected,” says senior study author Jill P. Pell, head of the School of Health and Wellbeing at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. 

Ruling Out Coincidence

This study shows that people experienced a a wide range of symptoms after becoming infected with COVID-19 at a significantly higher rate than those who were never infected, “thereby confirming that they were genuinely associated with COVID and not merely a coincidence,” she says. 

Among 21,525 people who had COVID-19 and had symptoms, tiredness, headache and muscle aches or muscle weakness were the most common ongoing symptoms. 

Loss of smell was almost 9 times more likely in this group compared to the never infected group in one analysis where researchers controlled for other possible factors. The risk for loss of taste was almost 6 times greater, followed by risk of breathlessness at 3 times higher. 

Long COVID risk was highest after a severe original infection and among older people, women, Black and South Asian populations, people with socioeconomic disadvantages and those with more than one underlying health condition.

Adding up the 6% with no recovery after 18 months and 42% with partial recovery means that between 6 and 18 months following symptomatic coronavirus infection, almost half of those infected still experience persistent symptoms.

Vaccination Validated

On the plus side, people vaccinated against COVID-19 before getting infected had a lower risk for some persistent symptoms. In addition, Pell and colleagues found no evidence that people who experienced asymptomatic infection were likely to experience long COVID symptoms or challenges with activities of daily living. 

The findings of the Long-COVID in Scotland Study (Long-CISS) were published Wednesday in the journal Nature Communications.

 ‘More Long COVID Than Ever Before’

“Unfortunately, these long COVID symptoms are not getting better as the cases of COVID get milder,” says Thomas Gut, DO, Medical Director for the Post COVID recovery program at Staten Island University Hospital in New York City. “Quite the opposite – this infection has become so common in a community because it’s so mild and spreading so rapidly that we’re seeing more long COVID symptoms than ever before.” 

Although most patients he sees with long COVID resolve their symptoms within 3 to 6 months, “We do see some patients who require short-term disability because their symptoms continue past 6 months and out to 2 years,” says Gut, who is also , hospitalist at Staten Island University Hospital / Northwell Health.

Patients with fatigue and neurocognitive symptoms “have a very tough time going back to work. Short-term disability gives them the time and finances to pursue specialty care with cardiology, pulmonary and neurocognitive testing,” he says.

Support the Whole Person

The burden of living with long COVID goes beyond the persistent symptoms. “Long COVID can have wide-ranging impacts — not only on health but also quality of life and activities of daily living [including] work, mobility, self-care and more,” Pell says. “So, people with long-COVID need support relevant to their individual needs and this may extend beyond the health care sector, for example including social services, school or workplace.”

Still,  Lisa Penziner, RN, Founder of the COVID Long Haulers Support Group in Westchester and Long Island, NY, says while people with the most severe cases of COVID-19 tended to have the worst long-COVID symptoms, they’re not the only ones. 

“We saw many post-COVID members who had mild cases and their long-haul symptoms were worse weeks later than the virus itself,” says Penziner. 

Penziner estimates that 80% to 90% of her support group members recover within 6 months. “However, there are others who were experiencing symptoms for much longer.”

Respiratory treatment, physical therapy and other follow-up doctor visits are common after 6 months, for example. 

“Additionally, there is a mental health component to recovery as well, meaning that the patient must learn to live while experiencing lingering, long-haul COVID symptoms in work and daily life,” says Penziner, who is also director of special projects at North Westchester Restorative Therapy & Nursing. 

In addition to ongoing medical care, people with long COVID need understanding, Penziner says. 

“While long-haul symptoms do not happen to everyone, it is proven that many do experience long-haul symptoms, and the support of the community in understanding is important.”

Limitations of the Study

Pell and colleagues note some strengths and weaknesses to their study. For example, “as a general population study, our findings provide a better indication of the overall risk and burden of long-COVID than hospitalized cohorts,” they note. 

Also, the Scottish population is 96% white, so other long-COVID studies with more diverse participants are warranted. 

Another potential weakness is the response rate of 16% among those invited to participate in the study, which Pell and colleagues addressed: “Our cohort included a large sample (33,281) of people previously infected and the response rate of 16% overall and 20% among people who had symptomatic infection was consistent with previous studies that have used SMS text invitations as the sole method of recruitment.”

“We tell patients this should last 3 to 6 months, but some patients have longer recovery periods,” Gut says. “We’re here for them. We have a lot of services available to help get them through the recovery process, and we have a lot of options to help support them.”

“What we found most helpful is when there is peer-to-peer support, reaffirming to the member that they are not alone in the long-haul battle, which has been a major benefit of the support group,” Penziner says.

If you or someone you know is experiencing long COVID and could benefit from peer support, Penziner can be contacted at [email protected]

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