When it came to Covid treatments, AFLDS promoted the internet flavor of the day, first jumping on the Hydroxychloroquine bandwagon and then adding Ivermectin to their shopping cart of Covid wonders. As long as people were unsure how to treat their Covid symptoms, AFLDS preyed on them, exploiting their fear and lack of knowledge. As soon as I saw Dr. Pierre’s involvement, it piqued my interest, and I decided to dig a little deeper.

Sure enough, there’s a shop!

You can visit the good doctor at his premises in Westlake Village in California if your Botox is flat-lining, or you can visit his website, which, of course, features a shop. Hand-picked products the good doctor assures you are essential to that glowing complexion. He is, as I mentioned, a dermatologist.

I knew his website would contain a shop. It’s a hallmark of the type of “medical” professionals that exploit their positions of trust with their patients to monetize their practices. No big surprise there and while Dr Pierre may in fact be an excellent dermatologist (I have no issue with him practicing his specialty), he is no virologist and definitely not a pharmacologist. In short, he has absolutely no business going around on the internet making ridiculous claims about using medicines off-label.

I cannot speak to the doctor’s motivation in risking his practice by joining AFLDS. His degree indicates a certain level of intelligence and therefore one can only assume his motives are purely financial as his background would be sufficient for him to be able to scientifically evaluate the claims he makes as being false. Ergo, there is financial motivation or grift in the advice he offers.

In the video above, he also employs a typical disinformation tactic of quoting the world Health Organization (WHO) and then attaching a statement as if to attribute it to the WHO. To be clear, the WHO does not endorse either Ivermectin or Suramin as medicines to treat or prevent Covid. Dr Pierre also has claimed that receiving the Covid 19 vaccine will void your life insurance citing a debunked court case in “France, and claims that the American Council of Life Insurers (ACLI) said that life insurance policies may deny payment for people who die from Covid-19 vaccines.” But, there is no ACLI and there was no French court case.

Either way, the good doctor talks out of his hat. Neither Ivermectin nor Suramin will protect you against developing Covid. Please don’t waste your hard-earned cash buying off-label medicines from AFLDS, spend that money on fresh food and get some exercise. Remember, if you are at risk from Covid, please do get vaccinated. If you are uncertain if you are in an at-risk category, you can read this advice which clearly lays out which diseases and conditions place you at risk.

For stepping out of his professional lane and offering medical advice based on opinion rather than proven medical fact, promoting disinformation surrounding the pandemic, and associating with known grifters, Dr. Pierre has the ignominy of joining our celebrated list of quacks. If it walks like a duck…

The post Another AFLDS Quack, Meet Dr. Peterson Pierre appeared first on Medika Life.

We attended the digital funeral today of an innocent victim, slaughtered in a horrific drive-by shooting. That victim was of course Ivermectin, a wonder drug that has over the last two decades saved countless lives. The vehicle involved was the pandemic and the vehicle’s occupants, none other than individuals from within the medical and wellness sectors.

To understand why people sworn to protect their patients at all costs would cross over to the dark side, we need to highlight facts that have surfaced over the last few months. Understanding motive will I hope also enable those who remain skeptical to accept the truth about Ivermectin.

It is not a treatment or prophylactic for Covid-19 or the SARS-CoV2 virus. It never was.

A small, as yet unvalidated possibility exists that it may offer some benefit to late-stage Covid-19 patients, but that remains inconclusive pending further research. Proving Ivermectin’s efficacy in early-stage Covid or as prophylactic poses very real, and some would argue, insurmountable methodological challenges.

All Ivermectin ever claimed to be, was an anti-parasitic drug. It is as much a victim of the intricate web of deceit and deception spun by certain individuals, as the intended targets, who consume it in the mistaken belief it offers salvation.

Let’s begin by examining how that web has begun to unravel and then we’ll take a closer look at those who engineered the deception and why.

The Preprint

Most of the scientific and medical community speaking up on behalf of Ivermectin used the following pre-print as validation for the efficacy of the drug as a Covid-19 treatment. The paper was called Efficacy and Safety of Ivermectin for Treatment and prophylaxis of COVID-19 Pandemic and the first of four versions was made available to the public on the 13th of November, 2020.

The preprint was published on researchsquare.com and if you click on the link above you will see that the preprint has been removed and an investigation initiated into the content and contributing authors. Why is explained below.

ReasearchSquare posts the following text in red font above the preprints it publishes as fair warning that the content is not peer-reviewed and should not be considered as anything more than an unverified opinion.

This is a preprint, a preliminary version of a manuscript that has not completed peer review at a journal. Research Square does not conduct peer review prior to posting preprints. The posting of a preprint on this server should not be interpreted as an endorsement of its validity or suitability for dissemination as established information or for guiding clinical practice.

Despite this, the preprint was seized upon, Google scholar showing 43 citations. In case you’re not familiar with publication terms, in scientific journals, a citation is a reference from a published article to a published paper (note, not a preprint) intended to provide confirmation or reference for content.

In short, 43 papers that have done exactly what the warning above suggests shouldn’t be done. Why this warning exists and preprints are broadly unreferenced in the scientific community became apparent as peer review set about validating the integrity of the data in the preprint and claims of plagiarism that had been leveled against the authors.

Examining the Data

Much like forensic auditors check for cooked books, forensic data analysts exist to sniff out anything fishy in sets of data. Nick Browne was tasked with examining the data used in the preprint to validate claims made relating to the efficacy of Ivermectin as a treatment for Covid-19. You can read a full breakdown of his analysis here if the summation below is insufficient.

The data file for the research was made available as a locked Excel spreadsheet, rather than an SPSS 21 file, the tool the preprint authors purported they had used for their analysis. Browne was forced to pay for access to the file and then had to manually guess at the password (1234) before gaining access to the Excel data. From there, things rapidly progressed from bad to worse.

Many of the patients who died appear to be duplicates. According to the original data, there were ‘four’ patients with the initials NME, NEM, and NES (twice), who were all males aged 51 years old, all suffered from diarrhoea(sic), had the same blood hemoglobin levels, were all diagnosed on the 22nd of May, and all died on the 29th of May 2020. They also all share identical values in at least four other data columns.

At least a further ten deceased patients also display evidence of being duplicated. Duplicates make up around half of the recorded deaths. Much of the patient data is identical, but minor changes exist, proving that a simple copy and paste error cannot be the cause of the duplicates.

In no particular order, and again, please refer to the linked report for specifics, Browne also identified issues with;

• Formatting
• Numbers containing non-numeric characters
• Confusion around date formats
• Repeated or cloned sequences of data
• Apparent failures of randomization
• Descriptive statistics that did not match the preprint
• Table results that do not match the preprint
• Other issues included age distribution, trailing digits of numerical variables, study entry and exit dates, and last, but not least, the lack of the SPSS file.

In summation, Browne arrived at the following conclusion;

In view of the problems described in the preceding sections, most notably the repeated sequences of identical numbers corresponding to apparently “cloned” patients, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Excel file provided by the authors does not faithfully represent the results of the study, and indeed has probably been extensively manipulated by hand.

We aren’t limited by Browne’s proclivity for professional restraint so we’ll call it as he saw it. The data provided for the preprint are a largely concocted fairy tale, an ambitious con designed to mislead. Manipulation of the data was not accidental but rather intentional, engineered to support very specific predetermined outcomes, for reasons we will examine below.

Plagiarism

Lead-authored by Dr. Ahmed Elgazzar, a Professor Emeritus at the University of Behna, the preprint claimed to represent the results of a multi-center, 600-patient study evaluating the use of ivermectin in preventing and treating COVID-19.

The author’s claims centered around the following;

• Ivermectin significantly reduced both the number of deaths and the length of patient’s hospital stay compared to standard Egyptian treatment protocols
• Ivermectin exhibited a substantial effect in preventing the onset of the disease in the first place, in other words, it acted as a prophylactic against the virus.

The article by Jack Lawrence we will reference with regards to the above can be read in full here, and again, we have provided a summation of his findings below. There are numerous instances in the preprint of text being lifted directly from an original source and not credited. In a schoolboy fashion, the authors have tried to obfuscate the plagiarism by changing a few words in each extract.

Plagiarized Elgazzar et al 2020

“This novel virus infection has incapacitated the world’s medical services framework as well as the political and financial relations [2. As another section in human life opens

up [3, the world is by all accounts divided into two sections pre-and post-COVID19 time.”

Original Heidary & Reza Gharebaghi 2020

“This novel virus has paralyzed not only the world’s health care system but also the political and economic relations [13]. As a new chapter in human life opens up [14], the world seems to be divided into two parts pre- and post-COVID19 era.”

Note: Elgazzar even used the same sources

https://www.nature.com/articles/s414290200336-z

A schoolboy could be chastised and excused for similar behavior, but there can be no excuse offered by the preprint author, Elgazzar, who would be intimately familiar with protocols surrounding scientific publications. The preprint is littered with further examples of plagiarism and Larence uncovered further unethical actions pertaining to the study.

While the disclosures above may shock some, they pale in comparison to what is to follow, namely acknowledging the extent of duplicity and malintent by members of the medical community across the globe. Doctors, scientists, pharmacists, alternate health practitioners, and individuals from the wellness sector have teamed up to exploit vulnerable patients for financial gain in the midst of a pandemic.

That is the only logical and unavoidable conclusion that can be drawn from the Ivermectin fiasco and avoiding confronting this unpleasant reality prevents us from protecting vulnerable patient populations.

Acknowledging the Grift

Medika first became aware of Ivermectin and its ability to kill the SARS-CoV2 virus in a paper in Nature, released in mid-2020. We published an article, highlighting the results, achieved in vitro, and suggested, like others, that immediate trials should be undertaken to see if the effects could be replicated in vivo.

The pandemic was gaining momentum and there would be no shortage of willing trial candidates. The problems though were obvious at the outset. Ivermectin had successfully killed the test tube sample in a laboratory, but achieving similar dosage levels in human subjects was highly inadvisable and patently unachievable without endangering the patient’s health.

Conducting broad-scale trials at tolerable dosages should have been a priority for either the FDA or a recognized European health authority. No one stepped up to conclusively prove or disprove the potential of Ivermectin as a Covid treatment. The lack of credible trials was potentially driven by an industry-wide skepticism of the drug’s ability to impact viruses (it is an anti-parasitic) and although this rationale made sense to scientific circles, the public was unable to make the connect.

A potential ‘treatment void’ had been unintentionally created for Ivermectin and it was into this void, as is so often their want, that the grifters stepped, seizing an opportunity to co-opt the pandemic for profit on a global scale.

Plumbing the dark depths of deception

India was one of the countries that fully embraced the grift. Provincial authorities distributed Ivermectin as a Covid treatment to residents and other countries, notably South American populations, followed suit.

Proving the efficacy of a treatment is often far simpler than disproving its efficacy and the grifters took full advantage, distributing their ‘Covid treatment’ via the global digital conspiracy network surrounding the pandemic. They assured the public that the drug was being intentionally withheld and the rest is history. Across the internet, both the public and many from within the medical community bought into the Ivermectin lie.

A lie that was cemented in many minds as fact by anecdotal evidence, falsified data and manipulated trials like the one conducted by Elgazzar and his colleagues. It is far easier to believe a convenient lie than face an unpleasant truth.

Doctors (the term is used loosely) have taken advantage of a vulnerable patient population to sell them drugs and in case you think this deplorable behavior was limited to non-western countries, the evidence suggests the west drove the trend. This is not simply supposition but fact.

In the US, rapidly formed organizations like America’s Frontline Doctors, a despicable congruence of dishonest doctors, pharmacists, and marketing individuals set about creating the ultimate pill mill for not only Ivermectin but the other darling of Covid conspiracies, hydroxychloroquine. You can read more on that here, including comments from exploited patients, shown below the article.

This pattern of profiting by deception from the sale of Ivermectin and other Covid cures continues unabated. We have unintentionally created the environment where large sums of money can be made from misleading the public in the midst of a pandemic. The fact the public’s health may be forfeit is irrelevant to the quacks and charlatans claiming to be healers.

These individuals are doctors, nurses, pharmacists, caregivers, and individuals of science. The lie could not exist without their duplicity and in many instances, the lie exists at their instigation. It is a hard truth to face and one we look away from. We need to openly acknowledge this and develop effective methods to prevent future occurrences.

Ivermectin’s lasting legacy should not be as the drug that failed to treat Covid and fooled the world. It should be seen as the drug that taught the world about a bitter pill, one we need to swallow now, lest we repeat history.

The post Ivermectin is Dead and Buried Despite NIH Website Misstep and Twitter Buzz appeared first on Medika Life.

Like an annoying foot fungus that just refuses to die, these quacks, armchair experts, so-called health gurus, and, yes, even doctors (interject a sad sigh at this point) have continued to issue dire warnings about the end of humanity.

We aren’t going to all perish from Covid of course (they will all tell you it actually doesn’t exist) but from the vaccines and evil Orwellian plots hatched by mad scientists and power-hungry politicians hell-bent on re-ordering the world. It is mass genocide or at best genetic re-engineering of the species, according to their siren song.

Clearly pissed that their Netflix subscriptions have lapsed, these individuals have taken it on themselves to weave their own tales of fantasy and fiction. Each new ‘series’ has its own plotline, villains, and heroes, and of course, is set in their version of a dystopian world. The same place most of us currently consider home.

The pitfall of calling tomorrow

If you’re trying to establish yourself as a seer of the future, you’re best suited to picking your predictions for a time that postdates your demise. The turn of the century, remember the impending global meltdown, and 2012 with those pesky Mayans and their calenders, just two classics that spring to mind.

Unless you’re onto a sure thing, outliving your predictions generally tends to be awkward and it’s been no different for our intrepid group of Covid naysayers and end-of-world scriptwriters. One by one, their predictions have come to naught. Nada. Nothing. Their predictions have exposed them for the true fraudsters and charlatans they really are.

Hindsight really is a bitch and in this instance, a highly effective antifungal. Rember the foot fungus analogy?

So just how have these con artists been proven wanting by the passage of time? We investigated a few of our older friends that we fact-checked months ago. It’s interesting to note how in many instances the original claims (ain’t digital history a bitch) made by many of these individuals have been subtly refined over time to accommodate for that annoying little thing called being horribly wrong.

Geert Van Den Bossche

You can read our original article on Van den Bossche here. In a simplified nutshell, Van Den Bossche’s pitch was based on selling us his version of a vaccine (the grift) after convincing us that mainstream vaccines (the competition) were going to cause a mutated virus that would end humanity. So, nearly a year later, or eighteen months on, in the case of trial candidates, where are we?

Aside from racking up an impressive amount of internet traffic from gullible and trusting souls seeking an explanation for their pandemic-induced misery, Van Den Bossche’s theory has so far proven completely unfounded. Despite having half the human population (that’s how many are now vaccinated) as incubators, Van Den Bosch’s killer virus appears to have gone golfing.

Perhaps he’d be better placed if he joined it.

Reiner Fuellmich

The punchline to possibly the worst legal joke ever constructed, Fuellmich propelled himself into popular conspiracy culture in early 2021. His rise was meteoric and his fanbase legion. We called bullshit early and have paid the price ever since, receiving literally thousands of comments and emails wishing us well (not really).

Fuellmich wanted, and we assume still does until the next best thing comes along, to sue the world for the SARS-CoV2 virus, claiming it didn’t really exist, Covid, according to Fuellmich wasn’t dangerous and lockdowns and mask had somehow managed to elevate themselves from effective countermeasures against a viral pandemic to crimes against humanity.

Not even the unfortunate Geneva Convention could escape Fuellmichs manic ambitions as he invoked ludicrously inappropriate responses to what he claimed were atrocities against humanity. You can see, of course, how people would lap this stuff up and why he’s developed such a devout following. People want a scapegoat to pin their misery on and who better than the large faceless behemoth we call modern society and all its appendages.

Eight months later and our intrepid attorney has made zero forward progress, mired as he is in the conspiracy circuit, his followers proving that the worshippers really do define the cult. Associate yourself with the chaff and the swine will feed.

Time has already eroded this deluded German’s fairytale and the lasting legacy of Fuellmich will undoubtedly be as the world’s most audacious and ambitious legal fraudster of all time. He really has raised the bar (pun intended).

America’s Frontline Doctors

I’ve included these grifters as a simple example of training wheels. They are by no means in the class of Fuellmich or Van Den Bossche, as their motives and narrative are simplistic and as transparent as daylight, but it doesn’t make them any less dangerous and as doctors, sworn to uphold the best interest of their patients, their actions are reprehensible.

Essentially, the group is a collection of morally bankrupt doctors who have clubbed together to fleece the public during the pandemic by selling them unproven treatments.

They aren’t alone and there are other similar groups that operate, but this group is perhaps most prominent on social media, thanks to its more than dubious membership, which includes the January 6 revolutionary, Dr. Simone Gold, currently under FBI investigation.

Their claims are simplistic – Buy Hydroxychloroquine or Ivermectin from us online. It works to cure Covid and the government and the media don’t want you to know about it. They have partnered with an equally unethical pharmaceutical supplier called Ravkoo Pharmacy and the two parties grift their merry way through the pandemic, fleecing gullible and vulnerable patients online.

Sadly, many bought into their lies, but time has exposed just how dodgy their business model is, false claims aside. You can read the reviews here from dissatisfied customers who lose their money and never receive anything.

In terms of their actual claims about these drugs treating Covid we now know beyond a reasonable doubt, they don’t help. Here’s the latest on Ivermectin and how we’ve been fooled into thinking the drug has benefits against Covid.

How have vaccine fairy tales faired?

Elon Musk is advertising for vaccinated astronauts with cellphones to man his Mars mission. Apparently, the vaccines boost reception.

Complete nonsense of course, but believed by many. People have, over the course of the pandemic proven themselves more than capable of believing in pretty much anything, no matter how ‘out there’ it sounds, and much of what floats about in the conspiracy ecosphere really is ‘out there’. Way out. The fact that much of this nonsense has been amplified by seemingly sane medical professionals doesn’t help.

In no particular order, here are some of the insane theories that have proven to be completely unfounded over time. Keep in mind we’ve just vaccinated half the world’s population.

• the vaccines will magnetize your body (this actually sounds useful)
• the vaccines contain trackers that allow the government to monitor your movement
• The vaccines interact with 5G cell towers
• We are all going to turn into genetically modified lizards
• The vaccine will render all women sterile (arguably not a bad thing if you consider the stupidity above)

My most recent favorite comes from a doctor, Ben Marble, whose license to practice was revoked in one state in 2012 and he has now resumed his less than illustrious career in Florida (where else).

Where to start. Aside from the fact Twitter clearly isn’t policing anti-vax posts aggressively enough, a simple observation. “All Americans” would, I assume include almost every race-based classification of humanity that exists on the planet. Ergo, everyone will die. It’s this kind of stupidity that almost beggars belief. Who would set about wiping out the entire human species? Doesnt really leave you with anyone to exploit, does it?

Does Marble think the virus does a nationality check first, weighs its intended victim, and then checks for skin color? Do you hear that knocking at the door doctor? It’s the men with the white coats and they’ve got a cozy, padded 3 x 3 waiting just for you.

Not one, in other words, NONE of the ridiculous claims made over the vaccines have come to fruition, despite them being administered in billions, and yet, people still choose to believe they pose a risk to us. People still choose to believe the virus does not pose a threat.

I’ll leave you with a very succinct line I saw recently on a Twitter profile.

𝚈𝚘𝚞 𝚌𝚊𝚗’𝚝 𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚜𝚘𝚗 𝚜𝚘𝚖𝚎𝚘𝚗𝚎 𝚘𝚞𝚝 𝚘𝚏 𝚊 𝚙𝚘𝚜𝚒𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚢 𝚍𝚒𝚍𝚗’𝚝 𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚜𝚘𝚗 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚖𝚜𝚎𝚕𝚟𝚎𝚜 𝚒𝚗𝚝𝚘…

Apparently, hindsight is equally useless.

The post Calling Tomorrow. Has Time Proven Covid Quacks and Conspiracy Theorists Right or Wrong? appeared first on Medika Life.

In particular, organizations like America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS), known for spreading their unscientific rhetoric attacking both treatments for Covid and questioning the efficacy of Covid vaccines. Their unproven ‘Covid treatments’, focusing on Hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, and other drugs have undoubtedly led to people dying from Covid.

That’s all about to change as long overdue legislation is being rolled out across the medical industry. Legislation that is focused on holding medical professionals accountable for their views. It’s never been okay to offer advice that jeopardizes the lives of patients you’ve taken an oath to protect.

New legislation now means that medical boards can respond in a meaningful way to complaints, even stripping these questionable practitioners of their licenses to practice. It’s long overdue and the industry as a whole will welcome the steps taken to protect the public against misinformation.

The process however relies on the public being made aware of their rights and their recourse to filing complaints against practitioners who do not honor medicine’s primary directive.

primum non nocere — first do no harm

Equally important to this process is making the public aware of scientific evidence-based medical opinion that is both trustworthy and easily accessed. Part of this process involves educating patients against potential risks and AFLDS poses a potentially life-threatening risk to the patients it claims to help.

To be clear, there are no approved “treatments’ for Covid aside from the vaccines which massively reduce the risk of developing life-threatening Covid. To place your trust in any ‘treatment regimes’ is to place your life at risk.

Who is AFLDS?

Essentially set up by a group of doctors, including Dr. Stella Immanuelle and Simone Gold, who can only be described as quacks, the group rose to prominence in mid-2020, feeding off the fear of the Covid pandemic to “sell” their Covid treatments to trusting and unsuspecting members of the public.

Their founder, Dr. Simone Gold, who is currently under investigation for her role in the January 6 insurrection in the Capitol, where she was captured on film, is outspoken and controversial. She frequents popular conspiracy channels and has been instrumental in spreading false and misleading information about Covid vaccines.

To understand why this group of medical professionals would want to create distrust in the public mind, you need to understand how they profit from the disinformation they spread. AFLDS is nothing more than a glorified multi-channel direct selling scheme. The fact that their patients’ lives may be forfeit has not given them pause.

Patients are offered an online consultation for $90 and can then request prescriptions, for amongst others, Hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, and whatever other concoction of vitamins and drugs are available. These prescriptions are then filled by online pharmacies like Ravkoo, which partners with AFLDS to enable this ‘pill mill’.

Aside from the dangers posed to patients who follow AFLDS’s ‘Covid treatment regime’, AFLDS’ sales practices simply enable the irresponsible and unjustified prescription of many drugs that lead to addiction and pharmaceutical abuse.

AFLDS’ marketing campaign appeals to the conservative right-wing elements who have bought into the conspiracy theories surround both covid and the vaccines. It is the same group of unvaccinated people now stricken with the Delta variant, who currently occupy over 95% of the bed space in hospitals.

AFLDS has been selling them snake oil rather than vaccines. Many of these patients will die as a result.

Medika Life receives daily feedback from patients about the articles we’ve run on this group, many confirming the illegitimacy of AFLDS. The comment below is taken from a recent article we published highlighting AFLDS’ practices.

Quacks! I booked & paid for a doctor consultation on 08/03/2021. THEY NEVER CALLED ME, billed me $90.00 & have not returned my multiple emails to them. THEY ARE A SCAM!

Aside from the financial losses suffered by many of their patients, the health risk they pose to the general public is where the real concern lies. The welcome change in legislation will now ensure AFLDS’ future is short-lived and that participating professionals are sanctioned to the full extent of the law.

If you need to report a medical professional in your area, you need to contact the particular State licensing authority where the doctor involved practices. The link below will provide you with contact details for your particular state and you can also check the current status of the doctor you are reporting.

Most medical boards post validated complaints publically to allow other patients to respond. Boards will also make note of doctors under investigation. You can use the following link to check a doctor’s credentials and ensure you are reporting them to the correct medical board.

The post America’s Frontline Doctors Face Long Overdue Medical and Legal Censure appeared first on Medika Life.

I chose to discuss Why We Get Sick, a lecture Maté delivered in London because it puts Maté’s ideas on full display.

The complete video of the lecture was uploaded in August 2019 by How To Academy Mindset. The video is part of a series that includes Jordan Peterson and Bessel van der Kolk. On Google, the YouTube video is re-titled Dr. Gabor Maté on The Connection Between Stress and Disease.

Struggling to get through this video, my mind wandered to thoughts of how lucky I would have been to be in London, maybe at the same theatre, when a true Canadian gift to the world, Leonard Cohen performed the concert captured in the Live in London 2-CD set.

Like Maté, Cohen is a member of the Order of Canada, the highest honor the Crown gives to a civilian. Both must somehow exemplify the order’s Latin motto, desiderantes meliorem patriam, meaning “they desire a better country.

”Live in London (Leonard Cohen album) – WikipediaLive in London is a (double) live album

After a few minutes, I could not stand watching Gabor Maté piling bonkers claims on bonkers claims anymore. It was just too painful to endure the stream of nonsense he was spouting, but I felt it was my duty.

I had taken the challenge of exploring and explaining the hidden-trauma/polyvagal theory/psychedelic psychotherapy nexus of nonsense. . I needed to provide a report of an investigation in progress.

Taking a break, I sought relief in listening to The Future, my favorite song in Cohen’s 2-CD set.

My wife is grateful that I have noise-suppressing headphones that keep my noise out of her ears. She finds Leonard Cohen’s music depressing. She is not a music snob, having played a variety of instruments in rock and country-western bands. She is just more susceptible to the mood contagion from music and language than I am.

I can’t explain to her why I find Cohen’s apocalyptic, dystopic vision in The Future an antidote for Maté, who has a similar vision. I guess Cohen is entertaining and does not tempt me to argue with his “Truth” delivered in well-crafted songs with brilliant lyrics.

Maté offends me by preaching a “Truth” with a call to action.

Maté urges us to abandon what has evolved over time to be evidence-based solutions to health and social problems. We should get involved in long-term, perhaps interminable therapy to exorcise the demons of trauma hidden in our subconscious.

There is no evidence that this prescription would improve our health or extend our life, but Maté claims we would be living more authentically.

The large, well-dressed crowd packing the London theatre enthusiastically cheered as if Gabor Maté were a rock star when the emcee announced:

I am honored and thrilled to introduce you tonight to the renowned physician Dr. Gabor Maté, one of the world’s leading experts in trauma, child development, addiction, and the relationship between stress and disease, please give him a huge welcome.

I am not embarrassed to admit I did not know that Dr. Maté was an expert of such eminence. I looked up his name in the usual places where such eminence should be documented, like Google Scholar. I could find insufficient evidence that he deserves such accolades.

A lot of people are convinced otherwise. They listen intently and find validation in the wild things that he says. I thought it was worthwhile to probe a bit of stuff he said in this lecture.

Maté comes to the podium, looking distinguished, but a bit haggard and world-weary. At first, his eyes are nearly closed. He squints and discloses that he has 55 minutes to lecture. He announces the topic:

We’re looking at two questions, basically one is what is disease, number one, and number two, how do we understand the human beings’ relationship to illness, which really comes through the heart of what is humanity really now.

Whoa, drag me into shallow waters before I go too deep. I do not think you will lend me enough of your attention to answer these questions, nor do I feel up to it.

I admit I was tempted to pounce on this next statement:

Western medicine in which I was trained sees illness or the whole person is somehow a random victim of either genetics or external invaders such as bacteria or virus or toxins or possibly as even a culpable instigator of their own pathology by certain so-called lifestyle choices like eating too much drinking too much or smoking

I developed acute genre confusion. I could not decide whether Maté was making a falsifiable scientific claim, trying to practice philosophy with only a degree in medicine, or reciting bad poetry.

I regained my confidence in my ability to discuss Maté when he said soon thereafter:

Let me just give you three medical facts here and you’ll see immediately how inadequate and insufficient the Western medical perspective is in explaining these facts…

The first fact there is a study that was done in the United States last year that shows that the more episodes of racism an American black woman experiences, the greater the risk for asthma.

Let me give another fact. In the 1930s and 40s the gender ratio of multiple sclerosis — which is an inflammatory degenerative disease of the nervous system — was 1:1. In other words for every man, there was a woman diagnosed. You know what the ratio now is? it’s three and a half women to every man. That immediately tells us it can’t be genetic because the genes don’t change in a population over seven decades or even ten decades or longer.

Number two, it can’t be diet because that doesn’t change for a population. It didn’t change more for women than for men. Nor can it be the climate. There is something going on and whatever it is it can’t just be biological now.

What’s interesting is that when you look at how you treat asthma. If you give to open up the airways and to suppress inflammation that happens in the asthmatic airway you give inhalers or medications by mouth, which are copies of adrenalin and cortisol.

Adrenaline and cortisol are stress hormones of the body. I’ll talk about them later. They’re secreted by the adrenal gland in response to a threat so there’s a drone and cortisol. So, we’re treating asthma with stress hormones. How do we treat multiple sclerosis?

Where this is headed is Maté will explain that everything we don’t understand about health and disease, everything that is inadequate in Western medicine is a matter of ignoring the role of stress and hidden trauma in causing illness and death. Shortly into the lecture, we will un into an impenetrable fog of pseudoscience and nonsequiturs. I will get off the train before the inevitable wreck ahead.

I found the article to which Maté was referring to his comment about asthma in black women.

Coogan PF, Yu J, O’Connor GT, Brown TA, Cozier YC, Palmer JR, Rosenberg L. Experiences of racism and the incidence of adult-onset asthma in the Black Women’s Health Study. Chest. 2014 Mar 1;145(3):480–5.

Experiences of Racism and the Incidence of Adult-Onset Asthma in the Black Women’s Health StudyChronic stress resulting from experiences of racism may increase the incidence of adult-onset asthma through effects on…www.sciencedirect.com

The authors hypothesized

Chronic stress resulting from experiences of racism may increase the incidence of adult-onset asthma through effects on the immune system and the airways.

We conducted prospective analyses of the relation of experiences of racism with asthma incidence in the Black Women’s Health Study, a prospective cohort of black women in the United States followed since 1995 with mailed biennial questionnaires.

The authors used a large data set that had been collected without their specific hypothesis in mind. They had to improvise in reducing and analyzing the data.

An everyday racism score was created based on five questions asked in 1997 and 2009 about the frequency in daily life of experiences of racism (eg, poor service in stores), and a lifetime racism score was based on questions about racism on the job, in housing, and by police. We used Cox regression models to derive multivariable incidence rate ratios (IRRs) and 95% CIs for categories of each racism score in relation to incident asthma.

*The IRRs were 1.45 (95% CI, 1.19–1.78) for the highest compared with the lowest quartile of the 1997 everyday racism score (P for trend <.0001) and 1.44 (95% CI, 1.18–1.75) for the highest compared with the lowest category of 1997 lifetime racism. Among women who reported the same levels of racism in 1997 and 2009, the IRRs for the highest categories of everyday and lifetime racism were 2.12 (95% CI, 1.55–2.91) and 1.66 (95% CI, 1.20–2.30), respectively.\

*Given the high prevalence of experiences of racism and asthma in black women in the United States, a positive association between racism and asthma is of public health importance.

There is no surprise in these results. I do not think that anyone having the expertise to interpret these results would find cause to lose their faith in Western medicine.

The authors discarded the middle half of their sample, based on subjects’ scores on everyday racism. That is not a terrible decision, but the strategy inevitably exaggerates the size of the effect that will be reported. I prefer analyses that do not involve throwing away half the data.

If we are looking for determining effect sizes of noteworthy public health significance, I think a reasonable rule of thumb is IRR = 2.5. If we are going to ramp up and demand intervention, the consensus is IRR = 4.0. We can quibble about these somewhat arbitrary cutoffs, but I think experts would still agree that the effect size found in this study is not impressive.

These are correlational data, so we have to be careful about making causal interpretations. We have to acknowledge that we have a crappy self-report measure constructed after the authors obtained this data set. We have to contend with an incomplete specification of variables that need to be statistically controlled and crude measurement. These are standard critiques of such studies.

I would say at least as it is measured in this study “everyday racism” is not causal, but a risk marker related to other risk factors that might be suitable for intervention. I would say that modifiable risk factors were exposure to dust mites, asbestos, cigarette smoke, and poor air quality in cramped, inadequately ventilated living spaces. I would add poor access to quality medical care, specifically inadequately managed respiratory infections and lack of insurance.

I have some experience with this population. I collaborated with Dr. Jen Culane on the Philadelphia Preterm Birth Prevention Project and wasthe Principal Investigator in my own NIMH study of socially disadvantaged inner-city postpartum women in Philadelphia, mostly black.

As the authors of this study, I am convinced without ever seeing their results, that both racism and high rates of incidence (onset) of asthma are serious problems. Subtle and blatant racist acts against black women are highly prevalent and objective, not subjective. We do not have to go rooting in the subconscious of black women to find evidence of this racism.

However, I am not convinced that these particular findings add to what we already know.

Figuring out what to do about increasing rates of new cases of asthma among black women involves problem-solving that applies evidence accumulated using the diagnostic categories supplied by medicine.

The diagnostic categories have undergone considerable evolution over time, revision of what signs and symptoms, what lab test values to include or exclude, based on how they worked in predicting associations among variables and improving health outcomes. Biomedical research is involved but includes microbiology, immunology, and also epidemiology, including social determinants of health. The goal is to bridge these fields, to establish connections that make a difference in health outcomes.

To call this “Western Medicine’ is an act of cultural imperialism. If the rest of the world had survived to now without the influence of the West or Capitalism or whatever, it would be because similar methods had evolved and had produced similar knowledge.

Casually attaching such labels to phenomena his audiences do not understand scores points with them. It allows Maté to dismiss the knowledge and tools we need to prevent new cases of asthma among these women and reduce the toll of asthma among those women who have already developed this chronic, recurring condition.

Maté paints a cartoonish caricature of medicine locked in silos. He confuses the maps that specialist researchers and clinicians use with the territory they cover. There is so much complexity in methods and findings in immunology. While those who study immune function should be able to communicate with those who are experts on the sources of environmental exposures like mites or black mold, but they cannot reasonably be expected to be experts in those areas.

Overspecialization in research and clinical practice is an important issue, especially for the management of difficult-to-diagnosis, multiple comorbidities with multiple medications. Management must collaborative care between professionals and especially with active patient involvement.

There is no cause for lighting anyone’s hair on fire and putting it out with hammers or other cynical, nihilistic high drama of the kind that Maté acts out in front of audiences who come for the spectacle.

I have less to say about Mate’s claims about the changing gender ratio in multiple sclerosis. For a start, studies in different populations do not consistently support a dramatic trend.

Here is one relevant Canadian study in a top-quality journal.

Orton SM, Herrera BM, Yee IM, Valdar W, Ramagopalan SV, Sadovnick AD, Ebers GC, Canadian Collaborative Study Group. Sex ratio of multiple sclerosis in Canada: a longitudinal study. The Lancet Neurology. 2006 Nov 1;5(11):932–6.

Sex ratio of multiple sclerosis in Canada: a longitudinal studyIncidence of multiple sclerosis is thought to be increasing, but this notion has been difficult to substantiate. In a…www.sciencedirect.com

The article summarized the existing literature

Incidence of multiple sclerosis is thought to be increasing, but this notion has been difficult to substantiate. In a longitudinal population-based dataset of patients with multiple sclerosis obtained over more than three decades, we did not show a difference in time to diagnosis by sex. We reasoned that if a sex-specific change in incidence was occurring, the female to male sex ratio would serve as a surrogate of incidence change.

The study found:

The female to male sex ratio by year of birth has been increasing for at least 50 years and now exceeds 3·2:1 in Canada. Year of birth was a significant predictor for sex ratio (p<0·0001, χ2=124·4; rank correlation r=0·84).

The authors’ interpretation:

The substantial increase in the female to male sex ratio in Canada seems to result from a disproportional increase in incidence of multiple sclerosis in women. This rapid change must have environmental origins even if it is associated with a gene–environment interaction, and implies that a large proportion of multiple sclerosis cases may be preventable in situ. Although the reasons why incidence of the disease is increasing are unknown, there are major implications for health-care provision because lifetime costs of multiple sclerosis exceed £1 million per case in the UK.

This is solid, normal science, representing one step on the path to finding a solution, not at all revolutionary or cause for the fuss that Maté is making.

I’ll pass on commenting on Maté’s claims that we treat asthma or multiple sclerosis with stress hormones. Similarly, for his leap that these “facts” justify a deep dive into the subterranean world of subconscious hidden trauma accumulated in early life.

I have collaborated in the successful writing of major grant applications for these diseases. I am sure the grateful principal investigators would answer any questions I forwarded them, but I think they would think I was smoking medical cannabis if I asked them to comment on choice direct quotes from Maté’s talk.

Leonard Cohen engaged in banter with his audience expressing thanks for the ‘geographical and economic inconvenience’ they had suffered to come to hear his concert in London. Of course, he did not have time set aside for questions and answers at the end. Maybe he did an encore.

Members of Maté’s audience competed at the end of his lecture to get his opinion on a variety of health and social issues.

I guess they thought they had enjoyed a scientific lecture from a rock star celebrity, not a rock concert. I cannot fathom why and I will have to do some more investigation but I will have to prepare if this means I have to watch any more Maté lectures.

Perhaps I can find a lecture that is mercifully short. I will keep some Leonard Cohen music handy, like an epi-pen that I can use if I find myself experiencing an adverse reaction.

Postscript

I was expecting to upload this article last night, but an intense storm rushed through my village, uprooting trees, and cutting off power and internet. I refuse to think that was some divine sign that I should post it.

Sitting in the dark, I reflected on these presumably intelligent English people sitting through Maté’s lecture without leaving, and then some of them asking questions with no challenge to the outrageous things he had said.

The next time they went to a GP or medical specialist, would they chastise her if she did not start by asking them about their hidden trauma? If their parents had cancer, would they rush them into trauma-informed treatment or would they seek the best oncologist available and maybe even get a second opinion.

I think not. The audience knew they had not been to a Leonard Cohen concert or a lecture that should change their patterns of health care.

The audience knew they had been to church and had heard an eminent preacher from Canada, Gabor Maté’s who did his best to whip up an old-time sermon with terrifying hellfire and damnation. Some of the audience talked about his religion with him but they knew they did not have to do anything different in their lives. They were familiar with this genre. They would continue to seek the best health care available, even outside the National Health Service if they had to.

You don’t go to sermons like this and then go home and do anything differently. No intelligent person does that.

My worry is that many people who are respectful of the authority reflected in membership in the Order of Canada, might take Gabor Maté’s words literally and seriously.

I worry about my Canadian neighbors who are not so savvy or cynical. I worry about Americans who are already heeding what Prince Charles and Prince Harry say. Their lives are put at risk by the serious nonsense that Gabor Maté is spreading about cancer and other illnesses and his contempt for medicine and science more generally.

The post Gabor Maté’s Bizarre Ideas on Connections Between Stress and Disease appeared first on Medika Life.

A few weeks ago a former journalist Nicholas Wade penned a long conspiracy “theory” pointing fingers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology for a possible lab leak causing the COVID-19 pandemic.

Wade quoted the Nobel-prize-winning virologist Baltimore in his piece:

“When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus,” said David Baltimore, an eminent virologist and former president of CalTech. “These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2,” he said.

Let’s reholster that smoking gun…

Kristian Andersen is a Ph.D. virologist who early in 2020 wrote an important Nature Letters paper showing that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was most likely a naturally derived virus and not engineered in a lab. Andersen responded to Baltimore’s smoking gun comment with some very specific tweets firmly debunking the smoke from any guns:

The furin cleavage site (FCS) / polybasic cleavage site is present in SARS-CoV-2 at the S1/S2 junction of the spike protein where it mediates the cutting (by the host protease furin, among others) of the spike, which is required for infection of cells.

This introductory tweet basically says that the FCS is like a flag within the virus’ spike protein for a human protein scissors called a furin to come and cut the spike. Cutting the spike at the location makes it much easier for the virus to then get into our cells.

Andersen provided a detailed map of that flag, shown below:

Andersen continued his scientific tweetise by explaining how the virus’ flag was made and what it does:

The FCS was created by an out-of-frame insertion of “CTCCTCGGCGGG” creating the “(P)RRAR” amino acid sequence, which constitutes a suboptimal polybasic cleavage site that is important for expanding SARS-CoV-2 host range, it’s transmission and pathogenesis, etc.

There’s a lot in that short sentence to let’s unpack that a bit.

Out-of-frame insertion…

Andersen’s comment about an out-of-frame insertion means that the DNA code CTCCTCGGCGGG is not read in the normal in-frame triplets CTC-CTC-GGC-GGG. If we consult a codon table we see that those codons translate into an amino acid sequence: L-L-G-G (or leucine-leucine-glycine-glycine). However, this short sequence was inserted into the virus genome out-of-frame so it was actually read nCT-CCT-CGG-CGG-Gnn. The first and last triplets are part of an existing codon with the letters nnn. So the middle three codons translate to: x-P-R-R-x. We have only a part of the FCS Andersen mentioned which is (P)RRAR — so where does the rest come from?

This dozen letters of genetic code was inserted within a previously existing codon, not between codons the way a scientist would engineer an insertion.

The previous amino acid was a serine. The codons for serine include: TCT, TCC, TCA, and TCG.

Since the first out-of-frame codon is nCT, we know that the original codon was TCT. The insertion happened between the first T of the serine codon, and the last two CT.

If our out-of-frame insert happens within this serine codon, we end up with the following: TCT-CCT-CGG-CGG-GCT.

Now if we translate that, we end up with the following: S-P-R-R-A.

The original amino acid next to the serine is an arginine, R. Therefore the full sequence including the original S-R becomes: S-P-R-R-A-R.

Sub-optimal cleavage site…

Next, after explaining how the FCS was encoded by an out-of-frame insertion of a dozen nucleotides (genetic letters), Andersen then calls the result a “suboptimal polybasic cleavage site”. What does he mean by this?

A furin is a protein which is evolutionarily designed to cut other proteins. Enzymes like proteases, protein scissors that cut other proteins, typically recognize very specific targets. In our case, furins recognize short amino acid sequences and cut near those targets. The sequence furins recognize are: R-X-[K/R]-R↓. We know R = arginine, K = lysine, and X = any amino acid. The arrow designates where furin cuts the target protein.

The FCS in the SARS-CoV-2 virus is R-R-A-R and differs from that simple R-X-[K/R]-R motif. Furthermore, efficient cleavage requires more than four amino acids. Optimal furin cleavage sites actually requires about 20 amino acids. The following illustrates what is known as optimal furin cleavage sites:

For example, the viral sequence contains two isoleucines in the P3′ and P4′ region which calls for small hydrophillic amino acids, whereas isoleucines are aliphatic amino acids.

It is clear that the SARS-CoV-2 site works as a furin target, but is far from optimal.

Transmission and pathogenesis…

Finally, Andersen concludes his second tweet in this series by saying: “…polybasic cleavage site …is important for expanding SARS-CoV-2 host range, it’s transmission and pathogenesis…”.

Studies of coronaviruses without the furin cleavage site showed that this short insertion is essential for infection into human cells and is key to the transmission (ability to infect new hosts) and pathogenicity (ability to grow in the host cells) of this virus.

Importantly, the furin cleavage site may have been the key in the spread of this virus from the original bat host to humans, possibly through an intermediate species.

Where did FCS come from…

Andersen then beautifully addressed the question of where the FCS came from. I’ll just extensively quote from most of his thread here. He tweeted:

FCSs are abundant, including being highly prevalent in coronaviruses. While SARS-CoV-2 is the first example of a SARSr virus with an FCS, other betacoronaviruses (the genus for SARS-CoV-2) have FCSs, including MERS and HKU1.

He’s saying that evolution solved the “problem” of putting FCS into viral genomes many times. This is not unusual or difficult for viruses.

There is nothing mysterious about having a “first example” of a virus with an FCS. Viruses sampled to date only give us a teeny-tiny fraction of all the viruses circulating in the wild. Fragments — such as the CTCCTCGGCGGG — come and go all the time.

How did SARS-CoV-2 acquire the FCS? We don’t know, however, we know four main mechanisms often lead to insertions: (1) mutation (2) polymerase slippage (3) template switching (4) recombination All of which play key roles in coronavirus (incl. SARS-CoV-2) evolution.

While we don’t know for sure how SARS-CoV-2 acquired the FCS, template switching is a very likely explanation with a plausible mechanism: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00705-020-04750-z … We also find insertions — albeit not FCSs (yet) — in highly related viruses, e.g., RmYN02:

Template switching likely also play an important role during the ongoing evolution of SARS-CoV-2: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.23.441209v1 …. We need to see this in the context of the decades of evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 ancestor and related viruses in bats. It’s safe to say indels come and go.

The FCS itself, (P)RRAR, is not an optimal site (for cleavage) and has never previously been used in CoV experiments to the best of my knowledge — unlike more optimal sites, which have been inserted into SARSr CoVs for basic research:

The exact same (P)RRAR FCS found in SARS-CoV-2 can be found in different viruses, including Feline coronavirus (FCoV), which is an alphacoronavirus. Note, site not present in all closely related viruses and plenty of indels around the site — like SARS-CoV-2 vs SARSr CoVs.

If we zoom in on the (P)RRAR site in SARS-CoV-2 and compare it to the one found in (some) FCoV sequences, we can see there’s a fair bit of homology outside the FCS too — including likely O-linked glycans being conserved.

The (P)RRAR FCS isn’t optimal and while it’s ‘sufficient’ for SARS-CoV-2s ‘success’ as a pandemic virus, it’s not an ideal site as defined by the canonical R‐X‐K/R‐R FCS seen in many proteins (viral and otherwise).

The “P” from the (P)RRAR insert isn’t directly part of the cleavage site itself, but, intriguingly, may regulate it via the nearby O-linked glycans. This is seen in host proteins: https://www.jbc.org/article/S0021-9258(20)32890-8/fulltext …, but also in SARS-CoV-2:

Importantly, however, in recent month we have started seeing the “P” mutating towards residues creating more optimal furin sites — P681H and, especially, P681R, which can be found in B.1.1.7 and B.1.617.x, suggesting the virus may evolve towards more efficient usage of the site.

So Baltimore’s first point — that the FCS found in SARS-CoV-2 is somehow unusual — is simply incorrect. FCSs are found in a multitude of different coronaviruses, indels come and go frequently, and the exact (P)RRAR can be found in other coronaviruses.

Now, the codons. Here, Baltimore is talking about the two codons coding for the first two arginines (R) following the P — CGG. The CGG codon is rare in viruses because it’s an example of an unmethylated “CpG” site that can be bound by TLR9, leading to immune cell activation.

Despite being rare, however, CGG codons *are* found in all coronaviruses, albeit at low frequency. Specifically, of all arginine codons, CGG is used at these frequencies in these viruses: SARS: 5% SARS2: 3% SARSr: 2% ccCoVs: 4% HKU9: 7% FCoV: 2% Nothing unusual here.

Furthermore, if we go back to the FCoV sequences and compare them to SARS-CoV-2 at the nucleotide level you’ll see that FCoV also uses CGG to code for R immediately following the P. The next R is CGA (non-CpG) in FCoV, while it’s CGG in SARS-CoV-2 — one nucleotide difference.

We see CGG multiple times in different ways — here’s an example comparing another “PR” stretch between SARS-CoV-2, RaTG13, and SARS-CoV in the N gene. Note how SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 both use CGG, while SARS-CoV-2 uses CGC for the first R, while later R’s are coded by CGT or AGA.

One final point about the CGG codons in the FCS — if they were somehow “unnatural”, we’d see SARS-CoV-2 evolve away from “CGG” during the ongoing pandemic. We have more than a million genomes to analyze, so what do we find if we look at synonymous mutations at the “CGG_CGG” site?

Remarkably stable. Specifically, CGG is 99.87% conserved in the first codon and 99.84% conserved in the second. This is *very* strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 ‘prefers’ CGG in these positions.

R is coded by six different codons, yet the simple single transition “CGA” is only observed in ~0.02% of sequences. The second most ‘popular’ codon at these sites is “CGT” (a transversion) at 0.11% frequency. In other words — there is nothing unusual about the codons either.

So Baltimore’s second point is also false, invalidating his hypothesis that the “FCS […] with its arginine codons […] was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus”. Baltimore does not provide any evidence to support his hypothesis and the data support a natural origin.

Does this disprove a lab leak? No. However, it disproves there being a “smoking gun” in the FCS and lends further evidence to natural emergence — but it also does not *prove* that scenario. To this day, we have yet to see any scientific evidence supporting a lab leak.

Baltimore backs down…

In an interview with Nature and the Los Angeles Times, David Baltimore conceded that he went too far with his smoking gun comment. In an email to the LAT, Baltimore said that he

“should have softened the phrase ‘smoking gun’ because I don’t believe that it proves the origin of the furin cleavage site but it does sound that way. I believe that the question of whether the sequence was put in naturally or by molecular manipulation is very hard to determine but I wouldn’t rule out either origin.”

Where does that leave us…

Let’s get back to quoting Andersen who has been the most reliable and expert voice so far in all of these back-and-forth comments. Andersen emailed the LAT:

“We cannot prove that SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin and we cannot prove that its emergence was not the result of a lab leak.

However, while both scenarios are possible, they are not equally likely,” Andersen wrote. “Precedence, data and other evidence strongly favor natural emergence as a highly likely scientific theory for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, while the lab leak remains a speculative incomplete hypothesis with no credible evidence.”

The post Nobel-Winning Virologist David Baltimore Eats Wuhan Crow appeared first on Medika Life.

The actual truth of their “frontline” engagement with Covid is a far cry from what they’d have you believe, most never having come remotely close to a Covid patient. Smoke, mirrors, and misdirection.

No good scam is replete without the monetization of the con and as time passes Americas Frontline Doctors (AFLDS) seem to have found the niche they’ve been looking for. Welcome to the “New Republics” medical branch. AFD will provide reasonably priced consultations and loosely regulated access to medication for all the extremists, QAnon members, and Republican radicals out there.

All from the comfort of your telehealth consultation.

This screenshot below, taken from the comments on a Children’s Health Defense article, the website run by anti-vaxxer, Robert F. Kennedy, Jnr, 

So there you have it. Simple quick, easy access to medicines that could potentially prove fatal (HCQ) to you. Just hop online and pay your $90. 

In case you’re wondering why people are still so concerned about contracting the SARS-CoV2 virus in a largely vaccinated American public, the answer is simple. This group and its advocates refuse to vaccinate themselves or their children.

For the unvaccinated, Covid still poses a huge risk and many of these individuals will end up in ICU facilities across the country over the next few months, placing yet further demands on America’s depleted public health resources. There is also no conclusive evidence to suggest hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin are effective prophylaxis or treatments for Covid-19, so the AFLDS is potentially exposing thousands of Americans to real harm.

Actions you’d be hard-pressed to explain away as being supportive of the Hippocratic oath.

Buy the Lie

On the surface, AFLDS sells a hugely believable front, supported in no small part by their abundance of medical degrees and qualifications. Any layman looking at the site can be easily forgiven for being sucked into the con. The AFLDS’s main mouthpiece is none other than January 6 insurrection debutante, Dr. Simone Gold, currently awaiting trial for her part in storming the Capitol.

Now whilst most Americans would immediately do a double-take on this news, for the New Republicans, hell-bent on destroying America’s democracy, Gold’s presence in AFLDS serves more as a recommendation than a discouragement. Anti-vaccine propaganda (AFDLDS are anti-vaccine) litters their site and in their latest publicity stunt, they have turned to the courts to create more media furor.

On the 20th of May 2021, they filed a petition in the US District Court of Alabama, requesting a temporary injunction on covid vaccines being administered to children. Gold’s name is noticeably absent from the list of plaintiffs, for obvious reasons.

AMERICA’S FRONTLINE DOCTORS, ETC.; and DR. SCOTT JENSEN, MD, Individually; and ELLEN MILLER, Individually and as Guardian of 3 Minor Siblings; and JODY SOBCZAK, Individually and as Father of 2 Minor Children; and DEBORAH SOBCZAK, Individually and as Mother of 2 Minor Children; and LYLE BLOOM, Individually and as Father of 2 Minor Children; and, JULIE BLOOM, Individually and as Mother of 2 Minor Children; and ANDREA MCFARLANE, RN Individually and as Mother of 4 Minor Children; and JENNIFER GREENSLADE, Individually and as Mother of 2 Minor Children; and ….

In their claim, they state the following. Sections in parenthesis added by the author;

the injections (Covid Vaccines) are dangerous biological agents that have the potential to cause substantially greater harm than the COVID-19 disease itself, and numerous laws have been broken in the process of granting these EUAs and pushing these injections on the American people.

Like many other radical, conspiracy-based groups AFLDS has turned to alternate closed social media groups like Telegram to avoid censure on more traditional platforms.

And they’re not sitting about idly either. Gold and her entourage of Covid Vaccine doubters have taken their carnival show on the road, exploiting every Republican-based organization they can reach on their meandering path across the US.

The irony of a group of doctors running about across America bad-mouthing another group of doctors, and then expecting people to believe them because, well, “they’re doctors” cannot be lost on many.

If you’re in the market for accurate and evidence-based health advice we strongly recommend avoiding the AFLDS. If you come across one of their many shill’s advertising their services online, ignore them. Should you happen to see one of the shows advertised, save yourself some time and sanity. Go and watch a movie instead. It’s also fiction, but it isn’t going to harm your health.

That step too far

By associating with QAnon, radical elements, and anti-vaccine campaigners these doctors lend legitimacy to the causes they seek to exploit for financial gain. To many Americans, the goal of a “New Republic” isn’t merely a pipe dream but something they want to see realized.

A new regressive version of America, filled with racism, sexism, outdated religious doctrine, and free of reason and the rule of law. AFLDS would like to offer its services to this vision of America. All you need to access healthcare is your $90 and an internet connection. If they get their way, there’s going to be an awfully long hold before that telehealth call is connected.

They are playing a dangerous game and one that time itself will unravel as all their wild allegations about vaccine experimentation fall by the wayside. The concern now is how many innocent patients they lead astray in the interim, how many people have their health compromised by a group of individuals who swore an oath to protect them.

If you have a need to report any of the doctors engaged with AFLDS you can make use of the links provided below. We recommend lodging complaints with individual state boards where the doctors are licensed to practice.

The post America’s Frontline Doctors Want to Become the New Republic’s NIH appeared first on Medika Life.

Nicholas Wade is wrong

The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, has been busy pushing an “undisclosed U.S. intelligence report” suggesting that three Chinese researchers at the now-famous Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized in November 2019. These workers had “symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illness”.

Conspiracy theories of the COVID-19 virus SARS-CoV-2 originating in an accidental lab release being peddled by Trump’s former FDA commissioner and the WSJ are not surprising. Supporters of Trump clearly have no love of truth as witnessed by how the GOP is treating long-time uber-conservative party leader Liz Cheney.

The most recent salvo of dubious theories comes from Nicholas Wade, a former science writer for Nature and Science and the New York Times. Despite Wade’s journalistic pedigree, close reading of his latest essay on the origins of COVID-19 reveals a poor adherence to reporting standards, investigatory lapses and major biases, and insistent mis-representation or outright falsehoods, leading to erroneous and unsupportable conclusions.

Unfortunately, Wade’s conspiracy theory has already gotten significant press, and is notable mostly for his highly personal attacks on those with divergent views: Drs. Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins and Kristian Anderson and Peter Daszak are among his most prominent targets.

Wade promises to guide you through the molecular biology of viruses, but his promise is shallow. Wade’s essay shows that his biology knowledge is ankle-deep and packed with major and minor errors and misrepresentations. He has a bachelor’s degree in biology so he is not completely uneducated.

However, Wade proves the classic trope that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. His essay is exactly that — a dangerous thing.

Let’s see why.

More personal than molecular biology…

Wade spends much of his essay doling out personal takedowns of some key coronavirus researchers who have communicated scientific observations contrary to his opinions. The first of many victims is Dr. Peter Daszak, and the second is Dr. Kristian Anderson, followed by others.

Let’s focus on Wade’s attacks on Dr. Anderson since Wade presses several buttons here. First, Dr. Anderson and his team published a Nature letters article early during the pandemic explaining why an engineered origin of the virus was unlikely.

In the first step of Wade’s assault, he characterizes Anderson’s Nature letter as “…an opinion piece, not a scientific article…”. Wade’s Wikipedia page says that he was an editor at prestigious scientific journals Nature and Science, and therefore clearly knows better. Wade’s claim that a Nature letter like Anderson’s is only opinion and not a scientific article is not a small error, but an intentional assault on facts and truth.

A blog by Nature lays out the difference between these two formats quite clearly:

Articles are original reports whose conclusions represent a substantial advance in understanding of an important problem and have immediate, far-reaching implications.

Letters are short reports of original research focused on an outstanding finding whose importance means that it will be of interest to scientists in other fields.

Nature letters are NOT merely opinions. This has been a long-standing feature of Nature. As a prime example, the biggest biological discovery in the 20th century may be Watson and Crick’s discovery of the double-helical and complementary nature of DNA’s structure — published in a Nature letter. Clearly not just an opinion piece.

Any science writer knows that a couple of the most important science journals are called Physics Letters A and Physics Letters B.

These Nature letters represent important scientific reports. Clearly Wade found it necessary to jettison his editorial knowledge from working at that very journal in order to diminish and dismiss Anderson’s data, discussions, and conclusions.

Furthermore, when Wade tries to tackle Anderson’s data, he remains firmly in personal attack mode with comments like:

…Unfortunately this [Anderson’s article] was another case of poor science…

Wade liberally sprinkles much more of these snide and passive aggressive attacks throughout his essay. A journalist passing judgement on a scientist’s science, suggesting himself as more knowledgeable than the scientist, and co-opting a position as a science educator while peddling obvious errors and alternative facts as science.

A poor attempt at molecular biology…

When Wade finally argued Anderson’s data and discussions, we immediately saw how out of his depth and off target he was — and therefore why he spent so much time trying to damage those with opposing views. Wade clearly found that damaging reputations was much easier than arguing the points of a field in which he was unqualified.

The first argument Wade made with Anderson was about seamless methods of cloning or DNA manipulation. Wade referred to early methods of molecular cloning that left easily detected remnants or scars in the DNA sequence. The trouble with this is that Anderson never invoked genomic scars in his paper.

Perhaps Wade was familiar with seamless cloning technology — if your only tool is a hammer, everything is a nail. One such technology was called “No see’m” and was developed and used by coronavirus researchers. Aside from Wade’s error in calling it “No-see-um” which is a type of incredibly irritating biting gnat, his bigger error is that his argument was irrelevant.

Anderson’s article said nothing about seamless technology, and instead said the following:

…Furthermore, if genetic manipulation had been performed, one of the several reverse-genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used19. However, the genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone20.…

Anderson was referring to a characteristic set of restriction sites, natural or engineered, necessary to work with each of the reverse genetic systems — nothing to do with seamless cloning.

Reverse genetics covers a broad range of scientific methods, but common among all is the idea of changing the DNA sequence (what biologists call the genotype) and then looking for changes in the organism (its features, behaviors, chemistry, etc., all lumped under a typically obtuse scientific term, phenotype). When applied to viruses, often the goal is to see when a non-human virus becomes capable of infecting human cells.

Then Wade tried to falsely characterize one of Anderson’s arguments:

…they [Anderson et al] say that the spike protein of SARS2 binds very well to its target, the human ACE2 receptor, but does so in a different way from that which physical calculations suggest would be the best fit. Therefore the virus must have arisen by natural selection, not manipulation…

This is a major misrepresentation and oversimplification of Anderson’s argument. The S protein shows strong binding affinity for the human ACE2 protein, but ALSO to ACE2 proteins from other species. The viral S protein evolved in a way that bound well, but not optimally to human ACE2. Any synthetic S protein would have been engineered specific to human ACE2, and the binding would have been much more “tailored”.

What Anderson actually said was:

…SARS-CoV-2 …binds with high affinity to ACE2 from humans, ferrets, cats and other species with high receptor homology… SARS-CoV-2 may bind human ACE2 with high affinity, computational analyses predict that the interaction is not ideal7 and that the RBD sequence is different from those shown in SARS-CoV to be optimal for receptor binding7,11. Thus, the high-affinity binding of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to human ACE2 is most likely the result of natural selection on a human or human-like ACE2 that permits another optimal binding solution to arise. This is strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation…

What Anderson meant was that computational calculations show that the binding between the viral S (spike) protein and the human ACE2 protein are not “ideal” — ideal being what we expect from an engineered S protein. An engineered SARS virus might have used one of two routes:

• Insert into the viral genome a known S protein with strong binding to human ACE2 protein.
• Passage through cells and use only human ACE2 as the target.

Either route would have resulted in a much better, more customized fit of S protein to human ACE2.

Anderson argued that there were multiple ACE2 protein targets including those from human and other animals, which strongly suggests a natural origin.

The fact that Wade did not understand this basic biological concept shows how lacking his technical background is, and emphasizes his lack of qualification to pass judgement on the scientists or science being discussed.

The irony is that Wade tried hard to imply that it was Anderson, the Ph.D. virologist, who lacked technical understanding of virology. Wade says of Anderson:

…The authors’ basic assumption, not spelt out, is that anyone trying to make a bat virus bind to human cells could do so in only one way. First they would calculate the strongest possible fit between the human ACE2 receptor and the spike protein with which the virus latches onto it. They would then design the spike protein accordingly (by selecting the right string of amino acid units that compose it). But since the SARS2 spike protein is not of this calculated best design, the Andersen paper says, therefore it can’t have been manipulated…

Note how Wade tries to tell us what Anderson’s assumption is? He tells us that the “authors’ basic assumption, not spelt out, is that anyone trying to make a bat virus bind to human cells could do so in only one way.” That is emphatically NOT Anderson’s basic assumption.

Anderson et al are virologists and they know (far better than Wade) how scientists design viral proteins. Wade packed false assumptions into Anderson’s head and article, concepts which are clearly wrong.

Wade worked hard to tell us that a Nature-published virologist made incorrect assumptions about how virologists design and make viral proteins — and then wants to tell us how virologists really do this work?

Read what Wade goes on to say:

…But this ignores the way that virologists do in fact get spike proteins to bind to chosen targets, which is not by calculation but by splicing in spike protein genes from other viruses or by serial passage…

Anderson’s comment on computation had nothing to do with engineering the virus — Wade mischaracterized and twisted Anderson’s intent. Anderson only discussed the after-the-fact computation of protein binding.

By the way, Wade also erred by saying that virologists don’t use calculations to design protein binding. Here is only one example of many articles showing how virologists DO indeed use computation to design protein-protein binding interactions.

Wade was wrong TWICE in one argument — Wade was wrong because virologists do indeed use calculations and computation to design protein-binding interactions — and Wade was also wrong because Anderson’s article never discussed that kind of computation.

Wade then tried to argue further:

…the Andersen group writes, and since SARS2 is not derived from any of them, therefore it was not manipulated. But the argument is conspicuously inconclusive. DNA backbones are quite easy to make, so it’s obviously possible that SARS2 was manipulated using an unpublished DNA backbone…

Wade clearly doesn’t understand the field and assumes that any DNA backbone will work. That is not true and is why the few backbones developed took so long, and are still used. They work.

Development of mouse hepatitis virus and SARS-CoV infectious cDNA constructs – PubMed: The genomes of transmissible gastroenteritis virus (TGEV) and mouse hepatitis virus (MHV) have been generated with a…pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Here are some comments from a real virologist that directly refute what Wade says is “quite easy to make”:

… To reiterate, most of SARS-CoV-2 comes from a bat coronavirus closely related to RaTG13. This virus is not known to cause disease in humans. If we were virus engineers (and this actually happens to be my job in the Benhur Lee Lab) we would need to:

Make a virus backbone from a never-before-seen virus that looks like, but isn’t, RaTG13 without having any reason to believe it would be a better starting place than a previously characterized virus (like the original SARS-CoV)

Spend months to years building a system that is easy to engineer (reverse-genetics system) when there are other virus backbones readily available.

Choose the RBD region from an unknown pangolin coronavirus even though all computer models show it should be suboptimal at binding ACE2, and show that it binds well in spite of the models (paper 1, paper 2, paper 3, paper 4)

All of these steps sound like bad ideas from a scientist’s perspective: there were easier ways to engineer a coronavirus, and no one would have rationally chosen either the bat virus backbone or the pangolin portion of the spike protein. Therefore, SARS-CoV-2 is unlikely to be man-made from pieces of other viruses — we have zero evidence that any person or lab has attempted even one part of this process.…

Then Wade minimized Anderson’s paper as follows:

…And that’s it. These are the two arguments made by the Andersen group in support of their declaration that the SARS2 virus was clearly not manipulated. And this conclusion, grounded in nothing but two inconclusive speculations, convinced the world’s press that SARS2 could not have escaped from a lab. A technical critique of the Andersen letter takes it down in harsher words…

Wade clearly didn’t understand that Anderson discussed several other important points including something called a polybasic cleavage site. This is a short sequence of amino acids which is a target for protein scissors called proteases. Proteases clip proteins at specific cleavage sites defined by a short amino acid sequence. Anderson et al discuss how a cleavage site can be acquired by the influenza hemagglutinin protein by repeated passage in cell culture or animals. Anderson also talks about its absence in most viruses closest to SARS2, that the RaTG13 is 96% identical but differs significantly in the RBD, but the pangolin CoV are similar to SARS2 especially the 6 key resides in the RBD. Anderson also says:

…a hypothetical generation of SARS-CoV-2 by cell culture or animal passage would have required prior isolation of a progenitor virus with very high genetic similarity, which has not been described. Subsequent generation of a polybasic cleavage site would have then required repeated passage in cell culture or animals with ACE2 receptors similar to those of humans, but such work has also not previously been described. Finally, the generation of the predicted O-linked glycans is also unlikely to have occurred due to cell-culture passage, as such features suggest the involvement of an immune system18…

Now that we are aware of how shallow Wade’s understanding of biology is, it is no surprise that he completely missed the point about O-linked glycans, and that they only form when the virus is exposed to an immune system.O-linked glycans on viruses are thought to shield them from their host’s immune system. Therefore, the presence of these sugars (and the amino acids which host them), strongly point to the virus’s evolution in an adaptive immune system such as ours.

Trying to cast doubts on natural emergence of SARS-CoV-2…

Wade next tried to cast doubts on natural emergence of SARS-CoV-2. He pointed to the WHO’s visit to China and that “the Chinese had no evidence to offer the commission in support of the natural emergence theory”. What Wade failed to mention is that the US harangued China during the Trump administration, and the Chinese probably and understandably felt no inclination to openly share data with the US or the rest of the world. We would do the same even though that is not responsible or the right thing to do. But most of us are unlikely to do the responsible and right thing when we have just been admonished and insulted on the world stage.

We clearly need China to be a good global citizen and to be open and honest about what they have found, to share their data as well as processes and procedures within their research institutes that may have in any way contributed to the pandemic (or not). In order for China to act like a good global citizen, we need to treat them as such, the way we would want to be treated.

Lacking China’s data, we are missing valuable information needed to refute or prove the lab escape thesis. We don’t know what we don’t know. Nonetheless, the existing biological data rests strongly on the side of natural emergence.

Wade claimed that the lack of evidence from China supports a lab-release of SARS-CoV-2 and against natural emergence. When in fact it merely emphasizes the Chinese government’s troublesome policy of secrecy.

Wade says, “… Natural emergence remained a conjecture which, however plausible to begin with, had gained not a shred of supporting evidence in over a year”. In fact, the evidence more powerfully supports natural emergence as Anderson’s Nature paper indicated.

Wade further showed his confusion about science by making it seem fast and easy to track down viral hosts and the evolution of previous coronavirus pandemics, saying:

…This was surprising because both the SARS1 and MERS viruses had left copious traces in the environment. The intermediary host species of SARS1 was identified within four months of the epidemic’s outbreak, and the host of MERS within nine months. Yet some 15 months after the SARS2 pandemic began, and a presumably intensive search, Chinese researchers had failed to find either the original bat population, or the intermediate species to which SARS2 might have jumped, or any serological evidence that any Chinese population, including that of Wuhan, had ever been exposed to the virus prior to December 2019…

When in fact, tracing down these viruses is a huge amount of work and actually took over a decade, not months. The finds virologists made for SARS1 and MERS were a combination of massive epidemiological efforts and huge luck.

It took 15 years after SARS1 to identify the animal origin of that pandemic. Finding the civet intermediary for SARS1 was a lucky strike which was not replicated for the original source of the virus.

Wade repeatedly pushed this idea that we should have found evidence already:

…Natural emergence remained a conjecture which, however plausible to begin with, had gained not a shred of supporting evidence in over a year…

And we see why he is so anxious for this exploration to have yielded conclusive results, because he says:

…as long as that remains the case, it’s logical to pay serious attention to the alternative conjecture, that SARS2 escaped from a lab…

The logic is quite the reverse. The evolutionary pedigree of the virus is an important part but only part of the tapestry of data which builds the case for natural emergence. The lack of host species is merely that — a lack that will eventually be filled in. The lack of this data does not automatically make lab escape a more plausible hypothesis. The genomic and genetic data that Anderson and others have established continue to be best explained by natural emergence.

The pot calling the Chinese kettle black…

Wade also tried to set the stage of the Chinese virus research and show how terrible their efforts were. He quoted from two research grants:

RePORTER: Grant Link

Federal RePORTER: Grant Link

Wade then selectively quoted two technical aims of the proposal and then interpreted them in a way to give them a most sinister mad scientist purpose:

… What this means, in non-technical language, is that Dr. Shi set out to create novel coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity for human cells. …

No. That is not the correct way to interpret those aims. First, let’s provide the overall goal of this project to establish context — always an important journalistic principle:

…This project seeks to understand what factors allow animal Coronaviruses to evolve and jump into the human population by studying virus diversity in a critical group of animals (bats), a sites of high risk for emergence (wildlife markets) in an emerging disease hotspot (China)…

And one of the specific aims to meet that goal was to:

… to test the hypothesis that % divergence thresholds in S protein sequences predict spillover potential…

Threshold is the key term. You cannot make a predictive model of infection by creating something that has, as Wade says, “the highest possible infectivity for human cells”.

Instead, the goal is to sneak up on the smallest amount of genetic change, the threshold, at which a non-human virus becomes a human virus. Making the virus maximally infective tells you nothing other than it makes people sick, that it can infect humans.

Scientists are more subtle than what Wade communicated or understood. Finding the threshold, or minimum genetic change to trigger human infections, gives scientists tremendous predictive power. Finding a maximally infective virus does nothing other than bestow dubious bragging rights.

Again, when Wade offered to explain to you the reader what the technical meaning of something in a scientific document, I hope you have learned not to trust his claim or promise.

Wade also spent considerable effort discussing laboratory safety levels such as here:

… There are four degrees of safety, designated BSL1 to BSL4, with BSL4 being the most restrictive and designed for deadly pathogens like the Ebola virus.…

And then he made sure to take a quote out of context, trying to maximize the impression that the Chinese work was substandard by saying:

…Much of Dr. Shi’s work on gain-of-function in coronaviruses was performed at the BSL2 safety level, as is stated in her publications and other documents. She has said in an interview with Science magazine that “The coronavirus research in our laboratory is conducted in BSL-2 or BSL-3 laboratories.” …

Although Wade provided the link to the Science interview, he knows that most people do not take the effort to click the link and read. It is worth your time if you have read that far in his (and my) article.

Again, let’s provide a little context. The question by Science Magazine was as follows:

…Given that coronavirus research in most places is done in BSL-2 or BSL-3 labs — and indeed, you WIV didn’t even have an operational BSL-4 until recently — why would you do any coronavirus experiments under BSL-4 conditions? …

Notice that? Most places do coronavirus research in BSL-2 or BSL-3 labs, so there is nothing unusual in Chinese labs doing the same.

Dr. Shi’s response was:

… The coronavirus research in our laboratory is conducted in BSL-2 or BSL-3 laboratories.

After the BSL-4 laboratory in our institute has been put into operation, in accordance with the management regulations of BSL-4 laboratory, we have trained the scientific researchers in the BSL-4 laboratory using the low- pathogenic coronaviruses as model viruses, which aims to prepare for conducting the experimental activities of highly pathogenic microorganisms.

After the COVID-19 outbreak, our country has stipulated that the cultivation and the animal infection experiments of SARS-CoV-2 should be carried out in BSL-3 laboratory or above. Since the BSL-3 laboratories in our institute do not have the hardware conditions to conduct experiments on non- human primates, and in order to carry out the mentioned research, our institute had applied to the governmental authorities and obtained the qualification to conduct experiments on SARS-CoV-2 for Wuhan P4 laboratory, in which the rhesus monkey animal model, etc. have been carried out.

The experimental activities are supervised by our institute’s biosafety committee and complied with the biosafety regulations.…

Going batty…

Wade then tried to teach us about bat biology:

…The two closest known relatives of the SARS2 virus were collected from bats living in caves in Yunnan, a province of southern China. If the SARS2 virus had first infected people living around the Yunnan caves, that would strongly support the idea that the virus had spilled over to people naturally. But this isn’t what happened. The pandemic broke out 1,500 kilometers away, in Wuhan…

Spillover of the virus from bats to people directly is only one possible way SARS-CoV-2 evolved. However, even if that happened, spillover probably did not happen near the first discovery site of the virus. We should ask what is the range of the carrier (NOT to put a pin in a map where the virus was first discovered and limit our assumptions about where spillover happened).

Wade then continued:

…Beta-coronaviruses, the family of bat viruses to which SARS2 belongs, infect the horseshoe bat Rhinolophus affinis, which ranges across southern China. The bats’ range is 50 kilometers, so it’s unlikely that any made it to Wuhan. In any case, the first cases of the Covid-19 pandemic probably occurred in September, when temperatures in Hubei province are already cold enough to send bats into hibernation…

An individual animal’s range is not a hard limit like a car’s. Animals often far exceed the normal range, so a journalist claiming “so it’s unlikely” is far from the reality. Furthermore, hibernation is not a period of complete inactivity in bats. Bats show significant activity during hibernation even in the depths of winter when torpor is highest. September in Hubei, the temperature ranges from 4–15C, so hibernation is neither required nor absolute during such a mild month.

Wade then tries to make the chain of virus infections seem like an exercise in improbabilities by saying certain conditions “must” occur on his say-so:

…What if the bat viruses infected some intermediate host first? You would need a longstanding population of bats in frequent proximity with an intermediate host, which in turn must often cross paths with people. All these exchanges of virus must take place somewhere outside Wuhan, a busy metropolis which so far as is known is not a natural habitat of Rhinolophusbat colonies. The infected person (or animal) carrying this highly transmissible virus must have traveled to Wuhan without infecting anyone else. No one in his or her family got sick. If the person jumped on a train to Wuhan, no fellow passengers fell ill…

Wade concocted a story of false improbabilities — he arbitrarily states conditions: “What if the bat viruses infected some intermediate host first? You would need a longstanding population of bats in frequent proximity with an intermediate host…”. No. Are there well-established conditions for spillover of virus from bats into other species? Where does Wade get the condition that a longstanding population of bats must be in frequent proximity with the host? Is that a known requirement? Says who? Must there be frequent proximity? Must the infected intermediate host often cross paths with humans? Who says? Wade?

Why MUST these virus exchanges in an intermediate host be outside Wuhan? The first SARS began in a city — Foshan in Guangdong province, originated in bats, and through a civet intermediate before spreading in humans with high mortality (10%).

It took 15 years after SARS1 to identify the animal origin of that pandemic. The lack of clear evidence of a natural origin for SARS2 is NOT a strike against that hypothesis — lack of data is only that — a lack of data.

The SARS1 pandemic was in 2002–3, and Shi was unable to identify the bats from which it originated, and passed through civets to humans, until 2013. And it wasn’t until 2017 that scientists identified the single population of bats from which the first SARS virus originated.

So, pointing to the knowledge of SARS1 now, and the lack of similar knowledge for SARS2 is highly deceptive and misleading.

Furin cleavage site…

Wade continues his assault on facts and biology on an important part of the SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein:

…The furin cleavage site is a minute part of the virus’s anatomy but one that exerts great influence on its infectivity. It sits in the middle of the SARS2 spike protein. It also lies at the heart of the puzzle of where the virus came from… of all known SARS-related beta-coronaviruses, only SARS2 possesses a furin cleavage site. All the other viruses have their S2 unit cleaved at a different site and by a different mechanism…

Wade purposely exaggerates the rareness of SARS-CoV-2 possessing a furin cleavage site. There are only four SARS-related betacoronaviruses — SARS-CoV-1 and -2, RaTG13, ad SL-CoV-WIV1. And indeed SARS-CoV-2 is the only betacoronavirus with a furin cleavage site. ONLY one of four!

What Wade conveniently neglects is that Furin cleavage sites are common in coronaviruses, and is present in a virus which is evolutionarily close to SARS-CoV-1 and -2. A Hibecovirus, close relative to the sarbecovirus (the family to which SARS-CoV-1 and -2 belong) and which infects the Hipposideros bat, has a furin cleavage site at the same location in the S protein. Wade is not correct to wave away the lack of furin cleavage sites in this virus family.

Again, Wade fails in his promise to teach you some molecular biology of viruses when he claims:

…How then did SARS2 acquire its furin cleavage site? …Two ways viruses evolve are by mutation and by recombination… Beta-coronaviruses will only combine with other beta-coronaviruses but can acquire, by recombination, almost any genetic element present in the collective genomic pool. What they cannot acquire is an element the pool does not possess. And no known SARS-related beta-coronavirus, the class to which SARS2 belongs, possesses a furin cleavage site…

There are more than two ways for RNA viruses to obtain mutations. A very important mechanism which Wade is ignorant of is something called copy-choice recombination or template switching, where the RNA-dependent RNA-polymerase changes template in the middle of making copies of the viral RNA.

More broadly, template switching allows RNA viruses to recombine with unrelated viruses:

Wade insists that this acquisition of a furin cleavage site is a rare or impossible event, and it is not.

Wade further confuses the molecular biology of viruses by claiming that human codons, the three-letter code which translates the genetic code into amino acids, were used in the furin cleavage site, and that is highly suscpicious evidence of human interference in virus evolution, of tampering with the genetic code. No.

These viruses evolved to replicate and use the human host’s machinery — which included the human host’s codon usage. There is absolutely nothing unusual in seeing a mix of codon usage especially in a virus which has recently switched hosts from one species to another (with possibly some intermediates in between).

Wade goes on to use the creationist language of improbability to argue against very natural evolutionary steps:

…a chain of events has to happen, each of which is quite unlikely for the reasons given above. A long chain with several improbable steps is unlikely to ever be completed….

This is exactly the argument creationists use to say why the eye could not have been evolved, or a human for that matter… nonsense. The POWER of evolution is exactly that — despite your fear that the argument can go too far… we have evolved using such rare sets of events.

Wade further argued that scientists are ignorant of codon usage frequencies:

…For the lab escape scenario, the double CGG codon is no surprise. The human-preferred codon is routinely used in labs. So anyone who wanted to insert a furin cleavage site into the virus’s genome would synthesize the PRRA-making sequence in the lab and would be likely to use CGG codons to do so….

If it was important for a particular codon to be used, virologists are very cognizant of which set, human or viral, should be used. Human-preferred codons are NOT blindly used, nor are they just routinely used in all labs. Codon usage is a conscious and important matter in molecular biology. Indeed, it may very well be that bacterial codon usage is actually the single most widely used preferred codon-set.

Then Wade tries to use a quote from a virologist to support his claims:

…“When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus,” said David Baltimore, an eminent virologist and former president of CalTech. “These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2,” he said….

NO — Baltimore is incorrect — there is no smoking gun!

If you’d like to read my thoughts on Biden’s newly announced 90-day investigation into the Origin of Covid in China, please click here.

Nicholas Wade, images are all used in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, commonly known as “fair use law”. This material is distributed without profit with the intent to provide commentary, review, education, and increase public health knowledge.

The post Debunking Nicholas Wade’s Origin of COVID Conspiracy Theory appeared first on Medika Life.

It’s hard to explain exactly why these individuals, people like Christiane Northrup and Michael Yeadon, choose to cast away careers of reasonable repute for the world of conspiracy and anti-establishment propaganda. There are distinct financial gains for many to be made from engaging with this fringe, popularity, notoriety, and an opportunity to finger your nose at the establishment.

Perhaps Cahill feels she was worked over by the system, ignored, passed over for promotion, or simply sidelined. Perhaps her ambitions could not be matched by the environment she found herself in? Whatever the reason, she didn’t just jump off the sane scientist ledge, she literally leaped and has spiraled downwards ever since in a free fall of alternate health mumbo jumbo, pseudoscience, and pure fabrication. 

This article will examine the collapse of her career and her statements that led to it. We’ll provide proper context and expose the complete fabrications she has engineered in her efforts to discredit the pandemic and expose the public to heightened risk.

Who is Dolores Cahill?

According to a yet to be updated webpage on Researchgate Cahill is a Professor of Translational Science, School of Medicine & Principal Investigator at the Conway Institute, University College of Dublin. On March the 18th of this year, the Irish Times published an article confirming that Cahill had been relieved of her teaching position. 

Another article, shortly on the heels of the 1st one announced a few days later that Cahill had also resigned as leader of the Irish Freedom Party, no doubt ousted by party loyalists to the party with no taste for Cahill’s conspiracy theories and medical misinformation.

In June of 2020, Cahill was asked to resign from a high-profile EU scientific committee. In an hour-long interview with a popular alt-right activist on May 10th in the same year, which has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times, she promised to “debunk the narrative” of the pandemic. The European Commission said the claims made by Cahill, a professor of translational medicine in UCD, could cause “significant harm” if taken literally.

Her credentials are impeccable. She was widely recognized as a renowned expert in high-throughput proteomics technology development and automation, high content protein arrays, and their biomedical applications, including in biomarker discovery and diagnostics. Cahill pioneered this research area at the Max-Planck Institute of Molecular Genetics in Berlin, Germany, and she holds several international patents in this field with research, biomedicine, and diagnostic applications.

So where did it all go so horribly wrong?

The beginning of the end for Dolores Cahill

In 2017 there was already evidence that Dolores Cahill was having problems. A scientific journal retracted a study in which she was listed as a co-author. The 2016 paper was retracted after receiving criticism from outside researchers who raised concerns about its methodology and data.

The paper shares multiple authors with another paper that linked the vaccine for human papillomavirus (HPV) to behavioral problems in mice. Last year, a journal removed the study; later that year, the authors published a revised version in another journal. The retracted paper focused on the antibodies present in a form of lupus. The can read more on the topic here.

A statement made by Cahill in February of 2020 starts to give one a clearer indication of why her research may have been deemed, suspect. She has an agenda. She has an anti-vaccine agenda. In here own words, she claimed;

I Entered Politics Because The Schools Mandated Vaccines For Children — 3 Feb 2021

Dolores Cahill

It’s all been a pretty steep downhill ride for the professor, since she chose to go public with a number of misleading Covid revelations she continued to repeat in 2020, including that the vaccines were going make everyone ill and that there was no pandemic. We had all been lied to and simple treatment like hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) was going to save us if only the government would allow us access. Sorry Ms. Cahill, but on all scores, wrong. Fantastically wrong. 

On HCQ more than enough research exists to show it may only assist a small fraction of people, and then only marginally. It’s no miracle cure and it sure as hell isn’t a prophylactic. On the question of no pandemic, I’d recommend dropping Ms. Cahill in the middle of New Dehli and then watch her try and peddle her bullshit to hundreds of thousands of infected Indians. On the vaccine score, according to Cahill, millions should have died by now from these “dangerous vaccines” yet, strangely this hasn’t happened.

The truth is, for whatever the reasons, that Dolores Cahill is deluded. She may very well believe the untruths she is sprouting and may not even be motivated by grift, but her associations with anti-vaxxers across the globe and her rapid adoption into their ranks as one of their own, clearly shows where her loyalties lie. Loyalties that are most certainly no longer with evidence-based science. 

Evidence Cahill’s use of Del Bigtree, the conspiracy king of Youtube, to get her message out. This is a pattern we see repeated across the anti-vaxx clan hood, where individuals like Bigtree and Robert F. Kennedy, Jnr. offer up their platforms to promote views that resonate and reinforce their own warped views of medicine and health, 

Cahill is clearly willing to go to any lengths to endorse her own views on vaccines and is not averse to exposing the public to risk. She should be considered untrustworthy, a danger to public health and we strongly advise anyone against listening to her advice. History tends to be far more forgiving, than the scientific community. a fact Ms. Cahill would do well to remember.

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I’ve linked to the video below as we are going to address his fairy tale piece by piece, so you’ll need to refer to the video from time to time for context. It’s an interview conducted with Fuellmich by Marta Gameiro Branco on the 11th of April 2021. The actual interview is in English.

Fact-Checking Reiner Fuellmich for profit

Fuellmich claims that people are out to discredit him for profit, that it’s all a glorious hatchet job, orchestrated by Davos members and big business. For an attorney, his apparent inability to grasp just how messed up we are from an organizational stance, as evidenced by our haphazard pandemic responses, is concerning. We’re just disorganized Reiner, get over yourself, no one is really that bothered with you.

Contrary to what you and your supporters would like the world to believe, not everyone seeking to call out your fairy tale is actually in the employ of, or financially incentivized by big pharma and/or other nameless corporations. Medika Life and its authors/owners/publishers and related associates can assure you we are not expecting Ferrari’s parked in our driveways in the morning. Pfizer, if you’re listening, I’m leaning towards black, rather than red.

Our services are provided for free for the simple purpose of protecting the public against misinformation. It’s called providing a community service without the expectation of remuneration, it’s altruistic and it’s liberating, you should try it. What this means, in effect, Mr. Fuellmich is that we call out your bullshit for free, How annoying is that!

Reiner Fuellmich Fails in Canada

The Canadians arent having any of it either. Despite claims on social media by Fuellmich supporters to the contrary, Canada’s top court is not hearing the case about Covid-19 ‘crimes’. 

“Canadian Supreme Court has accepted the case for Crimes Against Humanity presented by Dr. Reiner Fuellmich, R.F. Kennedy Jnr, & Dalores Cahill,” reads the title of a May 5, 2021 article published on a website called Philosophers Stone. It was shared more than 1,500 times on Facebook, according to the social media monitoring tool CrowdTangle.

According to the AFP Fact-Checking article, this statement of claim clearly indicates that it was filed in Ontario’s Superior Court, a provincial judicial body, which is not Canada’s Supreme Court. Contacted by the AFP, the Supreme Court of Canada confirmed there is no such case before it.

“ After conducting some verifications, I can confirm that this file does not exist at the Supreme Court of Canada and that the Court has not issued any decision in this regard,” a spokesperson for the Ottawa-based judicial body told AFP.

The Ontario Superior Court confirmed to AFP that the case had been dismissed under Rule 2.1 of the Rules of Civil Procedure, which states that “the court may, on its own initiative, stay or dismiss a proceeding if the proceeding appears on its face to be frivolous or vexatious or otherwise an abuse of the process of the court.” Lies, misinformation, and more lies.

Score: Common Sense 1 — Reiner Fuellmich 0

PCR Tests. Really? Again?

At the risk of putting everyone to sleep with this very tired part of Fuellich’s pandemic conspiracy, we have to address it as Fuellmich states publicly in the video that their whole argument is based on the PCR tests not working. It is, in his own words, the foundation stone in the precariously balanced pile of nonsense he’s built up. Proving PCR doesn’t work, proves his argument. 

By the same logic, showing PCR does work will make him go away, as his whole argument, as acknowledged by him, pivots on the efficacy of the PCR test. So let’s make him disappear as magically as he appeared. I’ll examine the statements made in the video, one at a time. The figure in brackets preceding each transcript is a time reference for the segment to save you having to endure the whole video. 

Fuellmich has constructed his own logic chain and constructed an event sequence from an unconnected series of facts and misrepresentations. It’s devious and ingenious at the same time. You cannot disprove his story because it doesn’t conform to established scientific facts, rather it subsists on the legal glue he’s used to cobble together nonrelational information, so we aren’t going to play his game. 

We will simply point out his lack of understanding of some key and basic issues and the flaws in his individual statements.

[4:15] It (the PCR test) cannot be relied upon as it cannot distinguish between live and dead matter, meaning whatever tests positive to could very well be the fragments or remnants of your bodies own immune systems fight against the common flu or the cold and it cannot tell whether a virus, and you need a whole virus, not just a fragment, whether a virus has entered your cells and is replicating because that’s the only way for you to become contagious. 

There’s a whole lot going on here. Fuellmich isn’t a doctor or virologist or epidemiologist and it shows. The first and most obvious flaw in his statement above is this. You can spread the virus till the cows come home simply by having it in your nostrils. You don’t, Mr. Fuellmich, require active replication in your cells to be a vector for spreading a virus. 

Whether the matter detected by the PCR tests is either alive or dead has no relevance to the test’s ability to detect the material in the first place. In fact, this statement would seem counterintuitive on his behalf. If he’s suggesting the tests don’t work, why is he then complaining about the condition of the material they identify? You cant have it both ways Mr. Fuellmich.

Another key issue here is that the purpose of widespread testing was not to determine how infectious everyone was, but rather to ascertain the prevalence of the virus among general populations. It’s the only way we have to actively gauge how many people are or were infected and gives us a reasonable indicator of the virus’s spread and capability for transmission, particularly where patients are asymptomatic.

It may also be worth mentioning at this point that every single laboratory that does work on coronavirus strains — the so-called gain of function experimentation, where shrews or ferrets are given the human ACE2 receptor and then exposed to the coronavirus — do tests on the animals to see if they have been infected. Anyone care to hazard a guess as to which test they use? PCR. Why would they use this test if it’s so useless, Mr. Fuellmich? 

You’re welcome to leave a reply in the comments or are you going to plead the 5th. 

[5:38]…you have to put this into a machine and then magnify it. This is called cycles of amplification, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and everyone agrees in the meantime that anything beyond 24 is unscientific. Apart from the fact, these tests cannot tell you anything about infection because they can’t distinguish between live and dead matter, but, if, if you go beyond 24 cycles, if you go for example to 34 cycles of application then you end up with at least 97% false positives, that’s what Mike Yeadon, former vice president of Pfizer told us.

Let’s deal with Mike first, should we? Mike Yeadon is exactly the sort of person you’d be expecting Fuellmich to quote and his representation of Yeadon is horribly misleading. Yeadon did work for Pfizer. He was vice president and chief scientific officer for Pfizer’s United Kingdom-based allergy and respiratory unit until that unit shut down in 2011, not Pfizer’s actual VP as Fuellmich insinuates. 

The very fact that Fuellmich is consorting with Yeadon and regards his opinion as valuable is in my honest opinion enough reason to immediately discredit anything else Fuellmich has to say, but we’ll persist, should we?

For a more detailed dissection of the life and decline of Mike Yeadon, I highly recommend this enlightening piece from Kelly Hawes in the Herald Bulletin.

On to the cycling issue. Yet more conspiracy and misinformation. Amplification cycles vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, a fact Fuellmich conveniently omits to mention. He assures us he’s read the packaging insert, so he must have stopped short of the actual instructions. Depending on the sensitivity of the test and what is being tested, laboratory technicians need to adhere to the relevant test manufactures instructions. 

There is no such thing as a standard number of cycles as each test differs. Yes, it is true that if you don’t adhere to the prescribed number of cycles, you’ll ruin a particular test, but that’s human error and not a conspiracy. I would assume, given the assurances he continuously offers on the depth of his knowledge regarding PCR testing that he is all too well aware of this fact and has chosen to omit it as it doesn’t play to his storyline. The following explanation will help you understand the process in simpler terms.

The cycle threshold (Ct) value is the actual number of cycles it takes for the PCR test to detect the virus. It indicates an estimate of how much virus was likely in the sample to start with — not the actual amount. If the virus is found in a low number of cycles (Ct value under 30), it means that the virus was easier to find in the sample and that the sample started out with a large amount of the virus. 

Think about it like the zoom button on your computer, if you only have to zoom in a little (zoom at 110% — fewer cycles), it means that item was big to start with. If you have to zoom a lot (zoom at 180% — more cycles), it means that the item was small to start with.

Public Health Ontario has this to offer on the PCR test they use. You’ll note Mr. Fuellmich that your golden number of 24 is never mentioned here.

We have developed a PCR test in our lab, with positive and negative cutoff points. The cutoff point for a positive result for PHO’s developed lab test is 38 cycles. This means that if the virus is found at or before 38 cycles are completed, then the test is considered positive. The cutoff point for a negative result is 40 cycles. If the virus is detected between 38 and 40 cycles, we call this an indeterminate or inconclusive result. 

We’ll move on now, but if you prefer a more scientific explanation of the points raised above, we’ve provided one right here

Vienna and Fuellmich’s big game-changer

Following a complaint lodged by the FPÖ (Austrian populist party), the administrative tribunal of Vienna ruled on 24 March that PCR tests could not be considered as a reliable way of diagnosing an illness or the level of contagiousness of an individual. Our response. Way to go for stating the obvious.

PCR tests are simply an aid to doctors, enabling them to confirm or dismiss a possible diagnosis in conjunction with visible symptoms and other factors. In other words, as all doctors are aware, you treat the patient, not the test. Fuellmich obviously isn’t aware of this annoying medical habit of clinicians using diagnostic tools to assist them in confirming a diagnosis, leading him to claim rather brashly that the court decision in Vienna is a game-changer.

Sorry, Reiner, that’s a silly own goal and not your first.

Conspiracies r us

From around the 7th minute onwards in the video Fuellmich simply abandons any appearances of sane discourse and invokes almost every known conspiracy theory circulating on the internet. Davos is out to get him, there is a “great reset” underway, covid vaccines are compared to genetic bio-experiments, mass sterilization experiments (you can almost see Mike Yeadon typing Fuellmich’s script in the background). Even the Jews are dragged into and he has the audacity to compare the pandemic response to the holocaust.

It’s at this point that any credibility the man may have built up, based on his questionable earlier pseudo-science-based statements, flies out the window, and I feel comfortable closing with the following. Reiner Fuellmich is simply another one-trick pony and not a very impressive one. A con artist with delusions of grandeur and ambitions way above his station. 

If you can seriously entertain either the man or the sham he presents as actual fact, then you can consider your indoctrination into the ethereal world of conspiracies complete. You haven’t been flummoxed, you’ve been Fuellmiched. 

Hmm, think I may get T-Shirts printed. Pfizer, where’s my cheque?

Where is the Grift?

It’s there, we can assure you. Contibutions pouring in to support this world class “liberation” con. It’s the Normandy beach landing, except this time the beach is empt and no one’s home. Fuellmich has convinced the more gullible among us, and there are many, that the beach is crawling with enemies. I can see how he arrived here and the holes in his narrative provide a road map of sorts. If you’ll indulge me my fairy tale, you’ve listened to Fuellmich’s, so you can spare me five minutes.

He, or his office, began examining Covid or the lockdowns or masks or PCR tests, possibly for a client or simply out of his own financial interests. What he found overwhelmed him, both in terms of scale and sheer possibility. It was a lawyers wet dream, people falling over themselves to present evidence against the accused, one theory crazier than the next, but the list was as endless. 

The world was pissed off, at Covid, at being confined and just generally pissed off. Its our default setting of late, just hang out on social media for a while. 

There has to be a scape goat, a guilty party and a reason for our misery. Reiner Fuellmich understands this mindset or need all to well. He’s used to dealing with crime and the legal constructs dividing the world into the guilty and the innocent. Fuellich continued interviewing and continued collecting evidence. In the back of his mind, a plan was formulating. An ambitious one. Who better to blame than “the man”, the system and all its corrupt appendages. Who better as a client than the all the innocents. Fuellmich protects the world.

All he then needed was to formulate a construct, a backstory or plan that showed clear intent to harm his client (you and I, the innocents), a complex web that would prove sufficiently difficult to comprehend and equally differ to decipher. The chaos of the pandemic and the mixed messages presented the perfect fertile soil to plant his seed of doubt and the scientific materials he was about to twist out of shape to conform to his narrative abounded. And so, his “legal document” was created.

Nothing fits as it should in his convoluted tale. Bits poke out awkwardly everywhere, pushed into spaces they weren’t designed for. In places, as we’ve noted, he’s had to resort out of desperation to blaming things like Davos and completely ridiculous conspiracies. Yes, the worlds out to screw you, but so what. It didn’t need the pandemic for that. If you’re honest with yourself, his story just doesn’t feel right, does it. It feels forced.

What these conspiracy fans all typically tend to forget is that the overlords they complain about rely on their subjects for their existence. Without the one, the other ceases to exist. Its the same relationship flaw Fuellmich suffers. Without you, without your support, he ceases to exist. 

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