A new facility has been constructed in the UK that will conduct vaccine research for an unknown pathogen dubbed by the World Economic Forum (WHO) as “Disease X.”
Bali Pulendran, a professor of microbiology, immunology, and pathology at Stanford University, has researched a mystery unique to COVID-19 for two years.
“For almost every infectious disease, the most vulnerable populations are at the extremes of age—the very young and the very old,” he once said. “But with COVID-19, the young are spared.”
The picture surrounding this enigma is still incomplete, but answers are forthcoming.
Children Are Different
Children are not mini-adults. Depending on their age, they can have similar or very different responses to infectious diseases.
In the case of COVID-19, children generally experience a milder form of the disease.
“It’s an interesting question that no one has fully answered,” said Dr. Cody Meissner, a professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth College’s Geisel School of Medicine, in an interview with The Epoch Times. “Several theories have been put forward to try and explain this.”
The primary reason is that children have a faster innate immune system, often referred to as the first line of defense, compared to adults. This enables them to mount a robust defense against respiratory infections more quickly.
Another explanation is that children are more susceptible to respiratory infections, and some of these prior infections may provide them with a degree of immune protection against COVID-19.
Anatomically speaking, children not fully grown are at a disadvantage when exposed to respiratory diseases. They have smaller airway diameters, meaning more severe symptoms when the airways get inflamed or have mucus build up.
They also have a smaller lung capacity, making them more prone to hypoxia with respiratory infection, professor of immunology Kenneth Rosenthal, PhD, told The Epoch Times.
However, compared to adults, children have been found to have higher levels of innate immune cells in the nose, which can help eliminate viruses early on.
“SARS-CoV-2 targets ACE-2 and TMPRSS, and these are expressed more in older adults,” Dr. Lael Yonker, pediatric pulmonologist and the co-director of Massachusetts General Hospital’s pulmonary genetics clinic, told The Epoch Times. Children, in comparison, have fewer of both receptors, which may reduce the number of viral invasions.
Strong Innate Immunity
While children tend to have a fast and robust innate immune response, studies have found that most adults who experience severe COVID-19 tend to have an impaired innate immune response.
The innate immune response is the immune system we inherit when born.
“[The immune response is] always there and ready to respond to microbes and triggers on the fly,” Mr. Rosenthal explained. In contrast, the adaptive immune system, which is more developed in adults, can generate more memorized, targeted immunity. However, it is slower to respond and can take days to activate.
This is not to say that children do not have an adaptive immune response. But since this type of immunity is built up by experiences with viruses and other pathogens, children tend to have accumulated less immunological memory than adults.
Vaccination is primarily used to bolster adaptive immunity while children are young.
The most common innate protection impairment researchers saw in adults with severe COVID-19 was a deficit in types 1 and 3 interferons. Studies have shown that children mount the strongest types 1 and 3 interferon responses to COVID-19, and this response diminishes as people age.
“A large proportion of adult men prone to more serious COVID have antibodies to interferon,” Mr. Rosenthal said. Consequently, they cannot mount the initial innate response, though scientists do not know why some adults form these antibodies.
The infection progresses unhindered while the immune system attempts to restrain the extensive infection, which could “lead to problematic outcomes,” he added.
This can cause full-blown inflammatory responses.
Natural killer cells, innate immune cells responsible for killing cancer and infected cells, are also more active in children, particularly pre-pubescent children. The cell “dissipates in teen years,” Mr. Rosenthal said.
Less Prone to Inflammatory Storm
A significant risk factor for severe COVID-19 is the inflammatory cytokine storm caused by excessive levels of cytokines in the body.
During an infection, immune cells release cytokines to help activate and coordinate other immune cells. There is always some presence of them in the body.
When the immune system fails to control the infection, and viruses replicate, immune cells dispatch more cytokines as a warning. These cytokines then activate more immune cells, causing intense inflammation, which can lead to tissue damage, organ failure, and eventually death.
Adults are more prone to cytokine storms because they tend to have more cytokines in the blood, meant to protect their bodies against daily assaults. These include smoke, toxic particles, toxic foods, and certain bacteria that live in our gut, on our skin, or elsewhere, Mr. Rosenthal said. The necessary protective responses produce inflammatory cytokines “on an everyday, routine basis.”
Children, however, have lower baseline cytokine levels due to fewer exposures to environmental and pathogenic assaults. Plus, they generally have healthier constitutions with fewer chronic diseases and unhealthy habits.
Even in the rare case of children developing severe COVID-19, which often presents as multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), most children quickly recover without any persistent symptoms.
“[Children] were easier to treat than adults. I did not lose a single [pediatric] case, whereas adults, we were losing quite a bit of them,” critical care pulmonologist Dr. Joseph Varon, professor of clinical medicine at the University of Houston, told The Epoch Times.
The Enigma of Mild COVID in Infants
While mild COVID-19 in children and adolescents can be explained away by their fast innate immune systems and generally healthier constitutions, this explanation fails concerning infants and toddlers.
“It’s one of the great mysteries of human immunology,” Mr. Pulendran told The Epoch Times.
Infants are typically born with immature innate and adaptive immune systems with weaker constitutions, making them more susceptible to infections. Premature infants are even more vulnerable.
Children under the age of 2 have a much higher chance of dying from respiratory diseases like respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and influenza than older children and adults under age 50.
In general, infants “do not have any prior immune history and, therefore, no antibodies or T-cell memory to rapidly respond to the challenge,” Mr. Rosenthal said. They also have very few innate immune cells at birth. By the second month of life, they should accumulate enough innate immune cells to overcome this vulnerability.
Full maturation of the immune system occurs in the first seven to eight years of life.
Dehydration is also a deadly factor in infected children and infants due to their higher metabolic rates and reduced water reserves compared to adults.
Yet to researchers’ amazement, infants were largely left unscathed during the COVID pandemic.
News has been spreading throughout the media about a “disease outbreak” in China.
For many, this brings back bad memories. The illness, described as a form of pneumonia, has reportedly gone widespread very quickly, triggering comparisons to how the Covid-19 pandemic emerged. As with the coronavirus, it was not long before there followed accusations of a government cover-up of the extent of the spread.
Cases of the same illness occurring outside of China have been the target of media attention, such as those in Denmark and the US, as has the World Health Organization’s request for more information and Beijing’s response.
In reality, there doesn’t appear to be that much to worry about this time around. The pathogen responsible has already been determined not to be a novel virus and therefore not posing a distinctive new threat to humans the way Covid did. Known as “white lung syndrome,” it is a form of pneumonia that is resistant to some antibiotics and usually causes mild flu-like symptoms. In fact, the aforementioned Denmark suffers nationwide outbreaks every few years.
So, rather than a mysterious political conspiracy wrapped in secrecy and malign intentions, this outbreak has a much simpler explanation: China is facing its first winter after having opened up from its zero-Covid policy and therefore old illnesses are reasserting themselves. But that won’t stop the scaremongering.
Throughout history, it has been a human trait to scapegoat a group of ‘others’ when a disease emerged to threaten the community. Humans are tribalistic creatures, and each social group usually bonds together through a commonly held sense of values and customs, which are deemed superior to those of outsider groups. Disease, however, as abundant as it always has been, contravenes the group’s collective sense of self-esteem, causes misery and consequentially demands accountability on a political level. Because of this, it becomes habitual of human thinking to deflect the origins of a disease outbreak on an outsider group and to frame it as an invasive force which challenges the values they hold, and therefore could not have come from themselves.
This mode of thinking is especially relevant in the East-West geopolitical dynamic, whereby Western countries hold themselves to be inherently superior and the ultimate standard of civilization in the world. In such thinking, most of the East, be it Asia or the Middle East, is deemed uncivilized, inferior and brutal. This mode of thinking is only confirmed by popular stereotypes, rather than introspecting material, economic and social realities. As a result, it has become commonplace to scapegoat the Eastern world, especially a large and powerful country like China – which happens to also a be a geopolitical adversary to the main Western power, the US – as being a source of disease outbreaks ‘inflicted’ upon the West.
This was the narrative which took hold during the Covid-19 pandemic, as Western media and governments scrambled to deflect attention from unpopular decisions and their dramatic consequences. They sought to blame the Chinese government’s negligence, malice or both, for Covid, and propping up that narrative was an astronomical amount of racism which sought to play on stereotypes about Chinese culinary habits and hygiene, perfectly in line with the West-East mentality of Oriental ‘inferiority’. Anti-communism, especially in the US, was conveniently layered on top of these prejudices, concealing them in a somewhat acceptable manner. Thus, the science of how Covid spreads was ignored in favor of a dramatic political blame game, which was aggressively amplified by the Trump administration.
This time around, there won’t be a new pandemic, but it’s easy to draw false comparisons. It’s a basic fact that for the past three years China has lived under a strict zero-Covid regime which often entailed extreme precautions to prevent the spread of the disease. Entire major cities such as Shanghai found themselves in lockdown, and these restrictions only became more tedious as Covid variants became more transmissive. Because of this, there was no space in the disease ecosystem for flu and other less sensational illnesses, as they were jammed between the rock and hard place of Covid and all these protection measures. Therefore, as soon as China abandoned these restrictions, with the coronavirus having swept through the population, the winter season meant the less severe viruses could spread their wings again.
Despite this, we are likely to see more media headlines about the scary new “Chinese disease,” because fear of disease, and especially fear of disease linked to a fear of China, sells well. Even though this development is a nothingburger, expect some close coverage, baseless speculations, even outright propaganda and hearsay about how things are worse than they seem, how the Communist Party is covering up deaths, how statistics are rigged, hospitals are full, etc. – we’ve heard it all before. The Covid pandemic has been a lesson in how diseases can be politically weaponized to suit an agenda, and in this case, it’s happening again at a smaller scale.
Some of the deadliest bacterial infections are tuberculosis, anthrax, tetanus, pneumonia, cholera, botulism, and pseudomonas infections. MRSA, or Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, is one of the most common infections that have become resistant to antibiotics and the symptoms generally begin as swollen, painful red bumps on the skin that look like pimples or spider bites. Many cases are mild, but some can cause more serious infections that can be life-threatening. Because MRSA is difficult to treat and resistant to antibiotics, it is often referred to as a “superbug.”
The term ‘superbug’ conjures images of bacteria with superpowers—able to evade the effects of the antibiotics given to destroy them. The prolific use of antibiotics is thought to be the cause, and bacteria, in a fight for their survival, have adapted—making an increasing number of antibiotics ineffective against a growing number of bacterial infections.
A new study published in PNAS on Jan. 23, 2023, has shown that antidepressants, some of the most widely prescribed medications in the world, cause antibiotic resistance, giving them the potential to become dangerous superbugs.
“Even after a few days exposure, bacteria develop drug resistance, not only against one but multiple antibiotics,” Jianhua Guo, one of the study’s authors and a professor at the University of Queensland’s Australian Centre for Water and Environmental Biotechnology, told Nature. “This is both interesting and scary.”
In the study, researchers exposed Escherichia coli or E.coli bacteria to five common antidepressants: sertraline (Zoloft), duloxetine (Cymbalta), bupropion (Wellbutrin), escitalopram (Lexapro), and agomelatine (Valdoxan), then over a two month exposure period, the team exposed the bacteria to thirteen antibiotics representing six different classes of drugs.
Every one of the antidepressants caused the E.coli to develop antibiotic resistance, but two in particular, sertraline (Zoloft) and duloxetine (Cymbalta), had the most pronounced effects, producing the largest number of resistant bacterial cells.
Guo’s interest in non-antibiotic drugs contributing to antibiotic resistance came in 2014 when his lab discovered that there were more antibiotic-resistant genes in domestic wastewater than in wastewater from hospitals—where they use more antibiotics.
This led to the discovery by his team and others that antidepressants were able to kill or slow the growth of certain bacteria, which Guo says provokes “an SOS response,” triggering defense mechanisms in the bacteria that help them survive and subsequently resist antibiotic treatments.
These findings led Gou and his team to conduct the present study to find out if antidepressants could cause bacteria to become resistant to antibiotics.
In addition to demonstrating that antidepressants cause antibiotic resistance, the study also found that the higher the dose of antidepressants, the faster the E. coli bacteria developed resistance and the more antibiotics they could resist within the two-month study window.
Interestingly, the bacteria in well-oxygenated environments developed resistance more quickly than those in low-oxygen laboratory conditions. This might be good news for humans as a low oxygen environment better represents the human intestine, where E. coli bacteria grows in the body.
The study also revealed that at least one of the antidepressants, sertraline, sold under the brand name Zoloft, encouraged the transmission of genes between bacterial cells, allowing the spread of resistance through a population. These transfers can happen between different types of bacterium, enabling resistance to jump between species, which can include going from harmless bacteria to infectious ones.
A comprehensive epidemiological study led by the University of Bristol and published in the British Journal of Psychiatry Open, analyzed data on over 200,000 people. Researchers set out to see if long-term antidepressant use (over five and ten years) was associated with the development of six health problems: diabetes, high blood pressure, coronary heart disease, stroke (and related syndromes) as well as two mortality outcomes—death from cardiovascular disease or from any cause.
Researchers found that long-term antidepressant use was associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease, and an increased risk of dying from cardiovascular disease and from any cause. The study notes that the risks were greater for those taking non-SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), which include mirtazapine, venlafaxine, duloxetine, and trazodone, and that their use was associated with a two-fold increased risk of coronary heart disease, cardiovascular mortality and all-cause mortality at the 10-year mark.
According to the Pharmaceutical Journal, antidepressant prescriptions in the U.K. have increased by 35 percent in the past six years, and those prescriptions rose by 5.1 percent in 2021/2022—the sixth consecutive annual increase. These numbers highlight not only an alarming rise in antidepressant use, but the implications of the potential antibiotic resistance of these drugs.
Definitive Healthcare, who collect and analyze healthcare data, compiled a list of the top 20 antidepressants by prescription volume in the United States. The top three prescribed antidepressants for 2021 were:
The 20 antidepressant medications on the list account for nearly 130.5 million prescriptions in the United States in 2021 alone.
How Dangerous is Antibiotic Resistance?
According to the World Health Organization, antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest threats to global health, food security and development. They cite that a growing list of infections including pneumonia, tuberculosis, blood poisoning, gonorrhea and foodborne diseases are becoming harder and sometimes impossible to treat as antibiotics become less effective.
The WHO warns that “without urgent action, we are heading for a post-antibiotic era, in which common infections and minor injuries can once again kill.”
Some of the deadliest bacterial infections are tuberculosis, anthrax, tetanus, pneumonia, cholera, botulism, and pseudomonas infections. MRSA, or Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, is one of the most common infections that have become resistant to antibiotics and the symptoms generally begin as swollen, painful red bumps on the skin that look like pimples or spider bites. Many cases are mild, but some can cause more serious infections that can be life-threatening. Because MRSA is difficult to treat and resistant to antibiotics, it is often referred to as a “superbug.”
The PNAS study states that the United States’ high consumption of antibiotics—16,850 kilograms annually in the United States alone—with the addition of their findings, highlights the need to re-evaluate the antibiotic-like side effects of antidepressants.
Implications for Humans
Considering these effects were only observed in petri dishes, more research is needed to know if antidepressants could fuel the rise of superbugs in human bodies or the environment.
The Centre on Thursday said that about 57,000 cattle have died so far due to lumpy skin disease across various parts of the country and asked affected States to boost the vaccination process to control the disease.
Rajasthan has turned into a giant cattle graveyard as the lumpy virus is wreaking havoc. Overall, over 57K cattle have died due to lumpy skin disease in India. 46K have died in Rajasthan alone.
Meanwhile, the Lumpy skin disease epidemic has spread in six-seven States, including Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh.
The following distressing video shows thousands of dead cows in the desert of Rajasthan due to lumpy skin disease (Lumpy Virus).
The Centre on Thursday said that about 57,000 cattle have died so far due to lumpy skin disease across various parts of the country and asked affected States to boost the vaccination process to control the disease.
Lumpy skin disease (LSD) is a contagious viral disease that affects cattle and causes fever, nodules on the skin, and can also lead to death. The disease gets spread by mosquitoes, flies, lice, wasps, and by direct contact among the cattle, and through contaminated food and water.
The main symptoms are fever in animals, discharge from the eyes and nose, salivation from the mouth, soft blisters like nodules all over the body, reduced milk production, and difficulty in eating, which sometimes lead to the animal’s death.
Why is this happening? Each week, it seems like there is another new outbreak somewhere in the world that the experts are deeply concerned about. Prior to 2020, it was never like this. In the old days, the vast majority of us never even thought about when the “next pandemic” might happen because such a scenario seemed so improbable. But here in 2022, a bird flu pandemic has killed tens of millions of our chickens and turkeys, a monkeypox outbreak has already spread to more than 90 countries all over the globe, confirmed cases of the Marburg virus have been reported in Africa, and very serious diseases that were once almost entirely eradicated are popping up even in the western world. What are we supposed to make of all of this?
The latest outbreak that is making headlines all over the globe has happened in China. According to a British news source, there have been 35 confirmed cases of a disease called “Langya henipavirus” so far…
Cases of a “deadly” virus on the rise in eastern China are not a cause for alarm, scientists have said amid comparisons with Covid-19.
So far, 35 cases of the disease known as Langya henipavirus (LayV), or Langya, have been confirmed among farmers in two eastern provinces of China, with no deaths reported.
We are being told that the Chinese were able to identify this outbreak very quickly thanks to “an early detection system”…
The virus, named Langya henipavirus or LayV, was found thanks to an early detection system for feverish people with a recent history of exposure to animals in eastern China. The patients — mainly farmers — also reported fatigue, cough, loss of appetite and aches, with several developing blood-cell abnormalities and signs of liver and kidney damage.
Hopefully, this will not turn into something big.
And the fact that none of the victims has died so far is good news.
Because the WHO says that the family of viruses that this comes from can have “a 40-75% fatality rate”…
While none of the patients have died or suffered serious illness, it’s a virus that hasn’t infected human beings prior to this outbreak … so there are a lot of unknowns.
Being under the Henipavirus umbrella, it has the potential to do some serious damage … WHO data classifies Henipavirus with a 40-75% fatality rate.
Meanwhile, polio has made a comeback in the United States.
This wasn’t supposed to happen.
Our country was declared polio-free in 1979, and there had not been a single case that had originated in the U.S. since that time.
But now there has been a case where an individual has been paralyzed by polio in New York, and we are being warned that there could be “hundreds” of other cases…
Hundreds could have polio after an adult in the New York City metro area caught the virus and suffered paralysis last month, the state’s top health official said this week.
New York state Health Commissioner Mary Bassett warned that the confirmed polio case in an unvaccinated adult, coupled with the detection of the virus in sewage outside the nation’s largest city, could indicate a bigger outbreak is underway.
Children living in London will be offered an extra dose of the polio vaccine following the discovery of poliovirus in sewage in the British capital, health authorities announced Wednesday.
The UK Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation said a targeted inactivated polio vaccine booster dose should be offered to all children between the ages of 1 and 9 in all London boroughs.
Polio is a truly horrifying disease.
Once you understand what it can do to someone, you would not wish it on your worst enemy.
According to the WHO, polio can lead to “irreversible paralysis” in some cases, and a certain percentage of those that get paralyzed will eventually die…
One in 200 infections leads to irreversible paralysis. Among those paralysed, 5–10% die when their breathing muscles become immobilized.
Of course, this article would not be complete without an update on the monkeypox pandemic.
The number of cases continues to rise at an exponential rate. It is being reported that the disease has now spread to 93 different countries, and the total number of confirmed cases has now risen to 32,824.
Authorities are telling us that so far it has been primarily spreading among men that have sex with other men.
Generally, the monkeypox virus transmits through direct touch, close-range respiratory droplets over a prolonged time, and through contact with highly contaminated materials, such as bed linens and clothes that have touched people’s skin lesions. Overall, the lesions are considered the primary concern, as they are teeming with virions.
The virus can also transmit from a pregnant person to a fetus. Infections during pregnancy can lead to complications, congenital defects, and stillbirths.
An increasing number of women and children are getting infected, and we are being told that there is a risk of spread in any settings where large numbers of people get together…
“It was only a matter of time” before monkeypox made it to congregate settings, a pediatric infectious disease specialist told Fortune, after Illinois state officials announced Friday that a day care worker had been diagnosed with the smallpox-related virus.
“There is definitely potential for spread of monkeypox” in day cares, schools, college campuses, prisons, and other similar settings, said Dr. Alexandra Brugler Yonts, an infectious disease specialist at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C.
For now, nobody in the health community is suggesting any sort of lockdowns to help prevent the spread of this disease.
Let us hope that it stays that way.
Unfortunately, what we are witnessing right now is just the beginning.
As I write this article, mad scientists all over the globe are monkeying around with some of the most virulent pathogens that have ever existed.
In many of those cases, they are purposely trying to make those pathogens even more deadly.
It is way too easy for an “accident” to happen, and once a bug gets loose it can spread all over the planet very rapidly.
I know that a lot of people out there would really love to “return to normal”, but that isn’t going to happen.
Crazy scientists are going to continue to try to “play god” in their secret labs, and outbreaks of deadly diseases are only going to become even more common.
We live in a world that is increasingly going mad, and trying to pretend otherwise isn’t going to help anything.
I don’t know where the truth is right now but I will not stop questioning everything. I will especially question anything that comes from the media or the medical /Big Pharma establishment, as the narratives from both are constructed with fake ideologies and fake statistics. For example, what is the leading cause of death in North America? Wrong. Most will answer heart attacks and cancer. Medical error and overdose deaths from legal drugs are the number cause of death in North America. (See John Rappaport)
By the way, I hope these experts are right and that this is another false flag but I am following the rules of isolation like everyone else. The whole situation scares me. The unknown is the worse. Lou
Below is our list of twelve medical experts whose opinions on the coronavirus outbreak contradict the official narratives of the MSM, and the memes so prevalent on social media.
Dr Sucharit Bhakdi is a specialist in microbiology. He was a professor at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz and head of the Institute for Medical Microbiology and Hygiene and one of the most cited research scientists in German history.
What he says:
We are afraid that 1 million infections with the new virus will lead to 30 deaths per day over the next 100 days. But we do not realise that 20, 30, 40 or 100 patients positive for normal coronaviruses are already dying every day.
[The government’s anti-COVID19 measures] are grotesque, absurd and very dangerous […] The life expectancy of millions is being shortened. The horrifying impact on the world economy threatens the existence of countless people. The consequences on medical care are profound. Already services to patients in need are reduced, operations cancelled, practices empty, hospital personnel dwindling. All this will impact profoundly on our whole society.
All these measures are leading to self-destruction and collective suicide based on nothing but a spook.
*
Dr Wolfgang Wodarg is a German physician specialising in Pulmonology, politician and former chairman of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. In 2009 he called for an inquiry into alleged conflicts of interest surrounding the EU response to the Swine Flu pandemic.
What he says:
Politicians are being courted by scientists…scientists who want to be important to get money for their institutions. Scientists who just swim along in the mainstream and want their part of it […] And what is missing right now is a rational way of looking at things.
We should be asking questions like “How did you find out this virus was dangerous?”, “How was it before?”, “Didn’t we have the same thing last year?”, “Is it even something new?”
That’s missing.
*
Dr Joel Kettner s professor of Community Health Sciences and Surgery at Manitoba University, former Chief Public Health Officer for Manitoba province and Medical Director of the International Centre for Infectious Diseases.
I have never seen anything like this, anything anywhere near like this. I’m not talking about the pandemic, because I’ve seen 30 of them, one every year. It is called influenza. And other respiratory illness viruses, we don’t always know what they are. But I’ve never seen this reaction, and I’m trying to understand why.
[…]
I worry about the message to the public, about the fear of coming into contact with people, being in the same space as people, shaking their hands, having meetings with people. I worry about many, many consequences related to that.
[…]
In Hubei, in the province of Hubei, where there has been the most cases and deaths by far, the actual number of cases reported is 1 per 1000 people and the actual rate of deaths reported is 1 per 20,000. So maybe that would help to put things into perspective.
Dr John Ioannidis Professor of Medicine, of Health Research and Policy and of Biomedical Data Science, at Stanford University School of Medicine and a Professor of Statistics at Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences. He is director of the Stanford Prevention Research Center, and co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS).
He is also the editor-in-chief of the European Journal of Clinical Investigation. He was chairman at the Department of Hygiene and Epidemiology, University of Ioannina School of Medicine as well as adjunct professor at Tufts University School of Medicine.
As a physician, scientist and author he has made contributions to evidence-based medicine, epidemiology, data science and clinical research. In addition, he pioneered the field of meta-research. He has shown that much of the published research does not meet good scientific standards of evidence.
Patients who have been tested for SARS-CoV-2 are disproportionately those with severe symptoms and bad outcomes. As most health systems have limited testing capacity, selection bias may even worsen in the near future.
The one situation where an entire, closed population was tested was the Diamond Princess cruise ship and its quarantine passengers. The case fatality rate there was 1.0%, but this was a largely elderly population, in which the death rate from Covid-19 is much higher.
[…]
Could the Covid-19 case fatality rate be that low? No, some say, pointing to the high rate in elderly people. However, even some so-called mild or common-cold-type coronaviruses that have been known for decades can have case fatality rates as high as 8% when they infect elderly people in nursing homes.
[…]
If we had not known about a new virus out there, and had not checked individuals with PCR tests, the number of total deaths due to “influenza-like illness” would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average.
– “A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data”, Stat News, 17th March 2020
*
Dr Yoram Lass is an Israeli physician, politician and former Director General of the Health Ministry. He also worked as Associate Dean of the Tel Aviv University Medical School and during the 1980s presented the science-based television show Tatzpit.
Italy is known for its enormous morbidity in respiratory problems, more than three times any other European country. In the US about 40,000 people die in a regular flu season and so far 40-50 people have died of the coronavirus, most of them in a nursing home in Kirkland, Washington.
[…]
In every country, more people die from regular flu compared with those who die from the coronavirus.
[…]
…there is a very good example that we all forget: the swine flu in 2009. That was a virus that reached the world from Mexico and until today there is no vaccination against it. But what? At that time there was no Facebook or there maybe was but it was still in its infancy. The coronavirus, in contrast, is a virus with public relations.
Whoever thinks that governments end viruses is wrong.
– Interview in Globes, March 22nd 2020
*
Dr Pietro Vernazza is a Swiss physician specialising Infectious Diseases at the Cantonal Hospital St. Gallen and Professor of Health Policy.
What he says:
We have reliable figures from Italy and a work by epidemiologists, which has been published in the renowned science journal ‹Science›, which examined the spread in China. This makes it clear that around 85 percent of all infections have occurred without anyone noticing the infection. 90 percent of the deceased patients are verifiably over 70 years old, 50 percent over 80 years.
[…]
In Italy, one in ten people diagnosed die, according to the findings of the Science publication, that is statistically one of every 1,000 people infected. Each individual case is tragic, but often – similar to the flu season – it affects people who are at the end of their lives.
[…]
If we close the schools, we will prevent the children from quickly becoming immune.
[…]
We should better integrate the scientific facts into the political decisions.
– Interview in St. Galler Tagblatt, 22nd March 2020
*
Frank Ulrich Montgomery is German radiologist, former President of the German Medical Association and Deputy Chairman of the World Medical Association.
I’m not a fan of lockdown. Anyone who imposes something like this must also say when and how to pick it up again. Since we have to assume that the virus will be with us for a long time, I wonder when we will return to normal? You can’t keep schools and daycare centers closed until the end of the year. Because it will take at least that long until we have a vaccine. Italy has imposed a lockdown and has the opposite effect. They quickly reached their capacity limits, but did not slow down the virus spread within the lockdown.
– Interview in General Anzeiger, 18th March 2020
*
Prof. Hendrik Streeck is a German HIV researcher, epidemiologist and clinical trialist. He is professor of virology, and the director of the Institute of Virology and HIV Research, at Bonn University.
The new pathogen is not that dangerous, it is even less dangerous than Sars-1. The special thing is that Sars-CoV-2 replicates in the upper throat area and is therefore much more infectious because the virus jumps from throat to throat, so to speak. But that is also an advantage: Because Sars-1 replicates in the deep lungs, it is not so infectious, but it definitely gets on the lungs, which makes it more dangerous.
[…]
You also have to take into account that the Sars-CoV-2 deaths in Germany were exclusively old people. In Heinsberg, for example, a 78-year-old man with previous illnesses died of heart failure, and that without Sars-2 lung involvement. Since he was infected, he naturally appears in the Covid 19 statistics. But the question is whether he would not have died anyway, even without Sars-2.
– Interview in Frankfurter Allgemeine, 16th March 2020
*
Dr Yanis Roussel et. al. – A team of researchers from the Institut Hospitalo-universitaire Méditerranée Infection, Marseille and the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Marseille, conducting a peer-reviewed study on Coronavirus mortality for the government of France under the ‘Investments for the Future’ programme.
The problem of SARS-CoV-2 is probably overestimated, as 2.6 million people die of respiratory infections each year compared with less than 4000 deaths for SARS-CoV-2 at the time of writing.
[…]
This study compared the mortality rate of SARS-CoV-2 in OECD countries (1.3%) with the mortality rate of common coronaviruses identified in AP-HM patients (0.8%) from 1 January 2013 to 2 March 2020. Chi-squared test was performed, and the P-value was 0.11 (not significant).
[…]
…it should be noted that systematic studies of other coronaviruses (but not yet for SARS-CoV-2) have found that the percentage of asymptomatic carriers is equal to or even higher than the percentage of symptomatic patients. The same data for SARS-CoV-2 may soon be available, which will further reduce the relative risk associated with this specific pathology.
– “SARS-CoV-2: fear versus data”, International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, 19th March 2020
*
Dr. David Katz is an American physician and founding director of the Yale University Prevention Research Center
I am deeply concerned that the social, economic and public health consequences of this near-total meltdown of normal life — schools and businesses closed, gatherings banned — will be long-lasting and calamitous, possibly graver than the direct toll of the virus itself. The stock market will bounce back in time, but many businesses never will. The unemployment, impoverishment and despair likely to result will be public health scourges of the first order.
– “Is Our Fight Against Coronavirus Worse Than the Disease?”, New York Times 20th March 2020
*
Michael T. Osterholm is regents professor and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
Consider the effect of shutting down offices, schools, transportation systems, restaurants, hotels, stores, theaters, concert halls, sporting events and other venues indefinitely and leaving all of their workers unemployed and on the public dole. The likely result would be not just a depression but a complete economic breakdown, with countless permanently lost jobs, long before a vaccine is ready or natural immunity takes hold.
[…]
[T]he best alternative will probably entail letting those at low risk for serious disease continue to work, keep business and manufacturing operating, and “run” society, while at the same time advising higher-risk individuals to protect themselves through physical distancing and ramping up our health-care capacity as aggressively as possible. With this battle plan, we could gradually build up immunity without destroying the financial structure on which our lives are based.
– “Facing covid-19 reality: A national lockdown is no cure”, Washington Post 21st March 2020
*
Dr Peter Goetzsche is Professor of Clinical Research Design and Analysis at the University of Copenhagen and founder of the Cochrane Medical Collaboration. He has written several books on corruption in the field of medicine and the power of big pharmaceutical companies.
Our main problem is that no one will ever get in trouble for measures that are too draconian. They will only get in trouble if they do too little. So, our politicians and those working with public health do much more than they should do.
No such draconian measures were applied during the 2009 influenza pandemic, and they obviously cannot be applied every winter, which is all year round, as it is always winter somewhere. We cannot close down the whole world permanently.
Should it turn out that the epidemic wanes before long, there will be a queue of people wanting to take credit for this. And we can be damned sure draconian measures will be applied again next time. But remember the joke about tigers. “Why do you blow the horn?” “To keep the tigers away.” “But there are no tigers here.” “There you see!”
– “Corona: an epidemic of mass panic”, blog post on Deadly Medicines 21st March 2020
*
If you can find any other examples of noteworthy experts deviating from the mainstream narrative, please post them below. As always, this list have been impossible to build without Swiss Propaganda Research. Follow their work and share widely. An indispensable resource.
Authorities say a 69-year-old man from Wuhan died on Wednesday as Thailand reports second case of the virus.
A second person has died in China from a mystery virus that has stricken dozens and appeared in two other Asian countries, officials said late on Thursday.
The news comes as Thailand reported on Friday that a second Chinese national has been found to be infected of the mystery virus.
In China, local authorities said a 69-year-old man died on Wednesday in Wuhan, the central Chinese city believed to be the epicentre of the outbreak of the virus traced from the same family as the deadly SARS pathogen.
The outbreak has caused alarm because of the link with SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), which killed 349 people in mainland China and another 299 in Hong Kong in 2002-2003.
At least 41 people have been hit with pneumonia linked to the new virus in China.
The Wuhan health commission said 12 people have recovered and were discharged from hospital while five people were in serious condition.
The man who died had become sick on December 31 and his condition worsened five days later, with pulmonary tuberculosis and multiple organ functions damaged, the commission said.
Three other cases were detected in Thailand and Japan with authorities in both countries saying the patients had visited Wuhan prior to their hospitalisations.
The second Chinese patient who was reported to be infected is a 74-year-old woman. She has been quarantined since her arrival in Thailand on Monday, Thailand’s Public Health Ministry said on Friday.
Authorities in Wuhan said a seafood market was the centre of the outbreak. It was closed on January 1.
No human-to-human transmission of the virus behind the Wuhan outbreak has been confirmed so far, but the health commission has said the possibility “cannot be excluded”.
A World Health Organization (WHO) doctor also has said it would not be surprising if there was “some limited human-to-human transmission, especially among families who have close contact with one another”.
The Wuhan health commission said on Wednesday that a man who had been diagnosed worked at Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, but his wife had been diagnosed with the same illness despite reporting “no history of exposure” at the facility.
South Korean quarantine officials use thermal cameras to measure the temperatures of passengers from China at Incheon International Airport [File: Yonhap via EPA]
The woman diagnosed in Thailand had also not reported visiting the seafood market, the WHO said on Tuesday. She was reported to be in stable condition earlier this week.
The patient in Japan, who was released from hospital, had also not visited the market. Japanese officials said it was possible that the man had been in contact with a person infected with the virus while in Wuhan.
Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that can lead to infections ranging from the common cold to SARS.
Some of the virus types cause less serious disease, while some like the one that causes MERS, are far more severe.
SARS originated in southern China in 2002 and infected more than 8,000 people in 37 countries before it was brought under control. Nearly 800 people died worldwide.
The latest outbreak comes ahead of the Lunar New Year holidays, when many of China’s 1.4 billion people will be travelling to their home towns or abroad.
The Chinese government expects passengers to make 440 million trips via rail and another 79 million trips via aeroplanes.
Food prices are climbing fast in the world’s biggest emerging markets, posing a possible inflation threat after months of dormant pressures.
Asia’s two largest developing economies face a price surge for staple products — pork in China and onions in India — that are central to consumers’ diets. In Turkey and Nigeria, supply problems are driving up costs, while United Nations data show global food prices rose at the fastest pace in October in more than two years.
While the spike is painful for poorer consumers, it hasn’t reached a level to convince central banks to pull the brake on policy easing, as they remain focused on boosting economic growth amid a global slowdown. Average inflation across emerging markets is still at an all-time low, according to a Bloomberg gauge of consumer price indexes.
“We think it’s likely they would look through food inflation that is concentrated on a handful of products and driven by idiosyncratic factors,” said Taimur Baig, managing director and chief economist at DBS Bank Ltd. in Singapore. “Bias toward further monetary and fiscal easing will remain in 2020, in our view.”
Price Shock
Nevertheless, the threat of a price shock is real. Nomura Holdings Inc. economists recently warned of three potential triggers of higher food costs — weather-related shocks, higher oil prices and a sharp depreciation in the dollar — saying emerging and frontier markets are most at risk since food costs make up a larger portion of their consumers’ income.
The key will be whether the increases begin to feed into consumers’ longer-term inflation expectations, which could drive up wages and core inflation in a spiral, said Sonal Varma, Nomura’s chief economist for India and Asia ex-Japan.
“This is a big policy dilemma for central banks, to have supply-side driven higher food inflation while growth is weakening,” Varma said. “The question is: Do central banks believe that this is durable or that it’s transitory?”
Here’s how the phenomenon is playing out in key emerging markets:
China
Pork prices doubled in October following massive livestock culls to protect against swine fever, pushing up consumer inflation to 3.8%, the highest level since January 2012. Though pork prices have since come off their recent highs, economists expect inflation to peak at 5% or 6% in January. Inflation at that level could impede central bank efforts to ease monetary policy and boost an economy amid an ongoing trade war and weak domestic demand.
In the meantime, swine fever is jumping borders, with neighboring Vietnam culling almost 6 million pigs to prevent the spread of the disease. It hasn’t showed up yet in Vietnam’s CPI — partly because high food prices a year ago have skewed the statistical base — but the impact likely will be reflected in coming months, said Alex Holmes, an Asia economist at Capital Economics Ltd. in Singapore. Live pig prices in November are up almost 30% from a year earlier, according to an industry group.
India
In India, where spikes in the cost of onions have sparked social unrest in years past, a 26% year-on-year rise in vegetable prices pushed October headline inflation above the Reserve Bank’s threshold of 4% for the first time in 15 months.
That runs up against a central bank intent on easing policy to spur growth. Data due Friday is likely to show India’s gross domestic product grew 4.5% in the July-September quarter, its slowest pace since early 2013, according to a Bloomberg survey of economists.
The latest Bloomberg survey shows consumer price inflation expected to peak at 4.8% in the October-December period, before tapering off.
Turkey
Food inflation hovered near 30% in the first quarter and has remained above 15% for much of the year, due to a currency crisis in August 2018 coupled with supply-chain issues and a heavy reliance on natural irrigation. The government has taken to buying produce directly from farmers and selling it in cities, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan denouncing alleged price-gougers as traitors and terrorists. Recent droughts in grain-producing provinces raise concerns about possible supply constraints next year, with the central bank expecting food inflation at 11% by the end of 2020.
Africa
A regional drought has curbed food output in some southern African countries. Driven by increases in the cost of corn products, food-price growth has pushed Zambian inflation to a three-year high, and monthly food inflation in Zimbabwe has reached almost 50% as supplies dwindle. In Nigeria, the price of imported rice has surged 7.3% since August after President Muhammadu Buhari ordered border closures, partly to counter widespread food smuggling.
For the fifth time in recorded history, the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared a global health emergency, this time in response to an Ebola outbreak that continues to ravage the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
According to official data, some 2,500 people have already been infected this time around – and some of these infected individuals may have entered the United States, as the government has been importing Congolese “refugees” through San Antonio, Texas, and distributing them across the country.
A known testing ground for bioweapons experimentation, Africa is where Ebola outbreaks often start. But they usually stay contained within Africa, which is why health officials are now starting to panic over the prospect that a global pandemic could be in the works.
Despite declaring this Ebola outbreak as a global emergency, WHO’s general director Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stopped short of classifying it as an “international” emergency – the implication being that the disease is still contained within the Congo, despite still being a threat to the rest of the world.
Where Ebola is spreading is still anyone’s guess, however, as Congolese migrants continue to make their way into the United States via Texas, threatening the lives and liberty of American citizens who never voted to allow such an invasion in the first place.
What we do know is that at least 1,700 people have died thus far as a result of this latest Ebola outbreak, which was recently detected in the city of Goma, which has a population of roughly two million people.
“This is still a regional emergency and by no way a global threat,” insists WHO’s emergency committee chairman from the University of Zurich in Switzerland.
Don’t be fooled: disease outbreaks in Africa are practice efforts for a real global pandemic
The other four global health emergencies declared by WHO include one in 2016 for the Zika virus epidemic; another in 2014 for Ebola in West Africa; another that same year for polio resurgence in a handful of countries; and the infamous one in 2009 for influenza.
This latest declaration comes roughly a year after Ebola first struck the Congo and began to spread rapidly, despite efforts to stop it. Ghebreyesus says it’s the worst possible disease to impact one of the world’s most dangerous areas, and that it could continue well into 2020.
It’s currently the second-largest Ebola outbreak in history next to the one from 2014-2015, which is said to have infected nearly 29,000 people, resulting in more than 11,000 deaths.
What’s interesting about these outbreaks is that they often appear in conjunction with calls by the “elite” for better “population control,” which is exactly what happened a few years back when a plague outbreak started not long after Prince William publicly stated that “urgent depopulation efforts” were necessary to save the world.
As Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, warned at the time, deep state globalists are actually creating, and then weaponizing, these deadly diseases as an act of medical genocide against the world’s “useless eaters,” which apparently include black people in Africa.
You see, the “elite” don’t actually think that black lives matter, at least beyond their votes. And since black people in Africa can’t vote in elections where the “elite” hold power, they’re easy targets for elimination.
“These vaccines, notably, contain chemicals that are administered without the informed consent of the women being injected. In fact, the women are deliberately lied to and told the injections are meant to ‘protect your health.’ But the real reason for the shots is to exterminate blacks in the name of ‘science’ and ‘medicine.’”
“Public Health England attributes the 249 percent increase in gonorrhea cases between 2009 and 2018 to “increases among gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (referred to collectively as ‘MSM’).”
(Natural News) Asked to visualize what an apocalyptic end of the world might look like, few people would picture death by superbug, and yet uncontrollable, antibiotic-resistant bacteria are one of the greatest threats facing mankind.
The World Health Organization warns that antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has the potential to be more deadly than cancer, with the ability to kill as many as 10 million people a year. In addition to costing the world economy upwards of $100 trillion annually, left unchecked, AMR threatens to reverse all the health gains and longer lifespans that antibiotics made possible in the 20th century.
STDs are on the increase across the globe. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned late last year that close to 2.3 million new cases of gonorrhea, chlamydia and syphilis were diagnosed in the United States in 2017. This was the fourth consecutive year in which the number of diagnosed STDs rose dramatically.
Although chlamydia remained the most common STD overall, gonorrhea cases increased by a staggering 67 percent.
Interestingly, a health protection report published by Public Health England last year reflected a similar trend in the United Kingdom. The Independent reported:
Gonorrhoea diagnoses in England have risen to their highest level for 40 years and jumped 26 per cent since 2017, sparking warnings from health chiefs about the threat from drug resistant strains. …
The biggest increase was in gonorrhoea where there were 56,259 cases diagnosed, 14,000 more than in 2017. [ Emphasis added]
Gonorrhea – also known as “the clap” – is one of the most common STDs. It can cause a white, yellow or green inflammatory discharge from the penis or vagina, along with painful urination and, in some cases, painful, swollen testicles.
After the discovery of penicillin, this disease became little more than an inconvenience, but that gradually changed over the years.
Penicillin remained a reliable clap killer until 1976, when the mutating microbe finally gained the upper hand over that go-to antibiotic.
Over the following decades, gonorrhea quickly overpowered each new antibiotic that doctors threw at it.
In 2007, the afflicted could rely on only one class of drugs, called cephalo-sporins.
By 2012 … the CDC recommended switching from an oral form of cephalosporin to an injectable version that would pump higher concentrations into the patient’s bloodstream.
Now, gonorrhea has mutated to become resistant even to cephalosporin. Cases of super-gonorrhea have been reported in several countries, and experts like infectious disease specialist Dr. Peter Leone believe that gonorrhea will soon conquer the last few remaining drugs that still have some effect on it. (Related: Men who take Viagra have 200 percent increased risk of sexually transmitted disease.)
Why the increase?
Public Health England attributes the 249 percent increase in gonorrhea cases between 2009 and 2018 to “increases among gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (referred to collectively as ‘MSM’).”
In addition, a British YouGov survey revealed that about half (47 percent) of all youngsters between the ages of 16 and 24 admitted to having sex with total strangers without using a condom, while one in 10 said that they had never used a condom.
Clearly, promiscuity and lack of sexual safety precautions are causing the dramatic increase in the number of STD cases. With STD superbugs on the rise, this type of irresponsibility will likely have grave consequences in the future.
Learn more about the dangers of antimicrobial resistance at Superbugs.news.
More than 1,400 people have died and more than 2,000 have been infected in latest outbreak of Ebola in central Africa, the World Health Organization has said.
The international health body has declared it “very much an emergency” in the region, but says it is not a global threat.
The outbreak is the second-largest in the history of the virus. It follows the 2013-16 epidemic in West Africa that killed more than 11,300 people.
1. Ebola cases are on the rise
So far, more than 1,400 people have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo and two in neighbouring Uganda in the latest outbreak, which began in August last year.
A 50-year-old woman died in western Uganda on Thursday, a day after the virus killed her five-year-old grandson. They are the first two cases reported outside DR Congo.
Doctors have confirmed another relative – a three-year-old child who was repatriated to DR Congo from Uganda – has also died.
The current 10-month epidemic began in the eastern region of Kivu in the DR Congo and cases have recently been reported across the border in Uganda.
The two victims who died in Uganda had travelled across the border from DR Congo after caring for an elderly male relative before his death from Ebola. They sought medical attention after falling ill themselves.
Members of their family have been placed in isolation.
Although the current outbreak has not yet spread to Uganda, thousands of people cross the border to and from DR Congo every day and health officials are screening travellers to check their temperature and disinfect their hands.
Uganda’s Health Minister, Jane Ruth Aceng, said the challenge was to stop people crossing at “unofficial entry points” between the two countries.
There are normally fewer than 500 cases reported each year, and no cases were reported at all between 1979 and 1994.
The current outbreak is the worst on record after an epidemic that struck Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone between 2013-16, leaving more than 11,300 people dead.
It killed five times more than all other known Ebola outbreaks combined.
Ebola infects humans through close contact with infected animals, including chimpanzees, fruit bats and forest antelope.
It can then spread rapidly, through contact with even small amounts of bodily fluid of those infected – or indirectly through contact with contaminated environments.
Even funerals of Ebola victims can be a risk, if mourners have direct contact with the body of the deceased.
We have never seen an animal disease outbreak like this before, and it is rapidly getting worse. African Swine Fever, also referred to as “pig Ebola”, has already wiped out millions upon millions of pigs and it continues to spread to even more countries. There is no vaccine and there is no cure, and so essentially we don’t have any way to stop this disease. At this point, the only solution is to kill all the pigs wherever the virus is found and desperately hope that it doesn’t spread anywhere else. But that approach clearly hasn’t been working, and according to a recent Fox News report this epidemic has now become the “biggest animal disease outbreak we’ve ever had on the planet”…
“This is the biggest animal disease outbreak we’ve ever had on the planet,” Dirk Pfeiffer, a veterinary epidemiologist at City University of Hong Kong and swine fever expert, said. “It makes the foot and mouth disease and [mad cow disease] outbreaks pale in comparison to the damage that is being done. And we have no way to stop it from spreading.”
China is the epicenter for this outbreak, and it is also home to half of all the pigs in the world.
Actually, to be more accurate, I should say that it used to be home to half of all the pigs in the world.
In a normal year, China slaughters approximately 700 million pigs. But according to Rabobank, that number will be down 30 percent this year due to this outbreak…
Researchers at Rabobank are estimating that this year China will suffer a 30% loss in pork production as a result of ASF. To put that into perspective, that 30% loss in production is equivalent to Europe’s entire annual pork supply, and almost 30% larger than U.S. annual pork production.
So let’s do some quick math.
30 percent of 700 million is 210 million.
Let that sink in for a moment. 210 million pigs will be lost in China alone in 2019, and when you throw in the rest of the world we are talking about cataclysmic losses already and the outbreak is still getting worse.
One of the primary reasons why this virus is so fearsome is because it survives just about anywhere and it is incredibly hard to kill…
The germ is hardy, capable of remaining active in water for a month, in meat and blood at room temperature for several months and for six years in cold, dark conditions. It’s resistant to temperature extremes, and can survive a day in vinegar-strength acids.
Even if we had an effective treatment, attempting to eradicate this disease would be a complete and utter nightmare.
But as I stated earlier, there is no vaccine and there is no cure.
All we can do is keep killing pigs.
But of course global demand for pork just continues to grow as the global population increases.
So with increasing demand and rapidly falling supply, it was inevitable that pork prices would begin to rise substantially…
The implications of the outbreak are already being felt beyond Asia. Global pork prices have risen by almost 40%, and long term it is likely to lead to more pork imports from Europe and America to meet demand, which will also push up global meat prices.
And what we have seen so far is just the beginning. In fact, China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs is now telling us that the price of pork is likely to rise 70 percent by the end of 2019.
Of course if this disease continues to spread, we could be talking about an epidemic that could literally end the global pork industry as we know it today.
But the virus has been in Chinese pork products that were confiscated by customs officials in Japan, South Korea and Australia, suggesting that the virus has permeated the food chain in China.
And could it be possible that pork products tainted with the disease were able to slip through the inspection process in various countries?
We don’t know.
But what we do know is that African Swine Fever has been spreading all over Asia.
Rabobank is projecting that Vietnam, which in May mobilized its military in the fight against the disease, will lose 10% of its pork production.
Today, pork accounts for three-quarters of all meat consumption in the nation of Vietnam. This disease is already a major national crisis in that country, and we are still in the very early stages of this outbreak.
Meanwhile, this virus is starting to pop up in Europe as well. According to one report, the disease was just identified at a major pig farm in Poland…
A farm with more than 8,000 pigs in Poland has broke with African swine fever. According to the World Organization for Animal Health, the farm is located in Bielsk Podlaskie near the border with Belarus.
And in Denmark, they have actually constructed a 43-mile border fence in order to keep out wild boar.
It is a good thing that they are taking this threat so seriously, because African Swine Fever is incredibly deadly. Up to 90 percent of the pigs that catch the virus end up dead, and once it starts spreading on a pig farm it is inevitable that all of the survivors will have to be killed as well in order to help prevent the spread of the disease.
Unfortunately, most people in the western world still don’t seem to understand the seriousness of what we are facing. Essentially, what we are dealing with is an existential threat to the entire global pork industry.
And considering the fact that we really struggle to produce enough food for the entire planet in a good year, this should be a major wake up call for all of us.
Last week I spent about 200 dollars on groceries, and my shopping cart wasn’t even full. The price of food is already ridiculously high, but it looks like things are going to get much worse in the months ahead.
As the homeless population in Los Angeles grows, so does the unfortunate revival of many third world diseases…
Despite hundreds of millions of dollars flowing through Los Angeles to stem the rising tide of homelessness, a resurgence of medieval diseases has the city – and neighboring states – on edge. Typhoid fever and typhus, borne by fleas, body lice, and feces, are turning the once glitzy and glamorous city into a third-world worthy environment.
Yes, Typhoid Mary is back, in a sense, living on the streets and wreaking havoc on unsuspecting people in the Golden State.
These diseases, along with an uptick in tuberculosis, hepatitis A, and staph, are easily and rapidly spread and have wide-reaching consequences. They’re highly contagious and can infect anyone through casual contact.
Typhoid fever
An LAPD officer was recently diagnosed with typhoid, and several other city employees are exhibiting the classic symptoms of high fever, muscle pain, and weakness. Left untreated, the disease can be fatal – and let’s face it: The malady wiped out entire populations during the Dark Ages and took a heavy toll on American Civil War soldiers and early American settlers. Some historians blame the malaise for obliterating the Jamestown settlement.
Where The Heck Did They Come From?
Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority recently released a report showing 59,000 people living on the streets in Los Angeles County – a 12% increase since 2018 – with 36,300 of them within the city limits of Los Angeles. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), reports that “California accounted for 30% of all people experiencing homelessness as individuals” throughout the United States.
The progress of these once eradicated and near eradicated diseases is so alarming that the politicians who once spent copious amounts of time covering up the warts and putrid pustules in their liberally run cities and state are now showing disbelief and disgust.
California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) broke his silence during his state of the state speech in February: “Our homeless crisis is increasingly becoming a public-health crisis. Typhus, a medieval disease. In California. In 2019.”
Los Angeles Mayor Gil Garcetti (D), who many believed would be a 2020 presidential contender, calls the crisis, “the biggest heartbreak for me and my city.” Garcetti campaigned extensively for the initiative known as Proposition HHH, which designated $1.2 billion over the next ten years to build homeless housing. But now residents are howling about the pricey plan’s abject failure. One local L.A. news outlet polled residents and found that “Forty-five percent said it’s failing, with 18 percent saying it’s a complete failure.”
Voters passed Propositions 47 (2014) and 57 (2016), downgrading theft and drug offenses to misdemeanors and redefining many felonies from violent to nonviolent to release a horde of inmates – some addicted to drugs and suffering from now untreated mental illness.
And they wonder why there are so many people on the streets living, sleeping, and breathing surrounded by urine-soaked sidewalks and piles of human feces? And, of course, they don’t have to show symptoms to carry and transfer these diseases – simple casual contact from a carrier will do just fine.
Asymptomatic Mary Mallon was presumed to have infected over 50 people between 1907 and 1915, yet never experienced a day of sickness. She died under quarantine – from complications of a stroke, not typhoid. Her body was cremated and her ashes interred, but her legacy as Typhoid Mary lives on.
What’s The Plan?
Garcetti is doubling down on his homeless housing project, but his highest hurdle is his choice for building sites. It seems no Angeleno wants drugs, typhus, and hepatitis bubbling and festering on their own block. A short story made long, aside from Proposition HHH, there is no solid plan to curb the worsening rotting of Los Angeles.
There is a long-held belief that two American presidents succumbed to Typhoid. The ninth Commander in Chief, William Henry Harrison, is remembered to have died of pneumonia after only 31 days in office, but recent studies suggest he likely died from typhoid. Number 12, President Zachary Taylor, was most likely felled from the disease as well – due to the unsanitary conditions in the Swamp in the mid-19th century.
Ironically, the only thing that seems to have changed in Washington D.C. is that the deadly infections are in the heart and soul and not the body of the toadies on the Hill.
Here we are in the throes of the 21st century with running water, inoculations for just about every known malady of the last millennia, and welfare programs to heal the poorest of our citizens. Yet Los Angeles remains a hot, malodorous, infectious mess – and it could be spreading toward a city near you.
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone