“Just Like There Were No WMDs, There’s No ‘Virus Of Mass Destruction’…”

"Just Like There Were No WMDs, There’s No ‘Virus Of Mass Destruction’…"

Authored (satirically) by C.J.Hopkins via ConsentFactory.,org,

There comes a point in the introduction of every new official narrative when people no longer remember how it started. Or, rather, they remember how it started, but not the propaganda that started it. Or, rather, they remember all that (or are able to, if you press them on it), but it doesn’t make any difference anymore, because the official narrative has supplanted reality.

You’ll remember this point from the War on Terror, and specifically the occupation of Iraq. By the latter half of 2004, most Westerners had completely forgotten the propaganda that launched the invasion, and thus regarded the Iraqi resistance as “terrorists,” despite the fact that the United States had invaded and was occupying their country for no legitimate reason whatsoever. By that time, it was abundantly clear that there were no “weapons of mass destruction,” and that the U.S.A. had invaded a nation that had not attacked it, and posed no threat to it, and so was perpetrating a textbook war of aggression.

These facts did not matter, not in the slightest. By that time, Westerners were totally immersed in the official War on Terror narrative, which had superseded objective reality. Herd mentality had taken over. It’s difficult to describe how this works; it’s a state of functional dissociation. It wasn’t that people didn’t know the facts, or that they didn’t understand the facts. They knew the Iraqis weren’t “terrorists.” At the same time, they knew they were definitely “terrorists,” despite the fact that they knew that they weren’t. They knew there were no WMDs, that there had never been any WMDs, and still they were certain there were WMDs, which would be found, although they clearly did not exist.

The same thing happened in Nazi Germany. The majority of the German people were never fanatical anti-Semites like the hardcore N.S.D.A.P. members. If they had been, there would have been no need for Goebbels and his monstrous propaganda machine. No, the Germans during the Nazi period, like the Americans during the War on Terror, knew that their victims posed no threat to them, and at the same time they believed exactly the opposite, and thus did not protest as their neighbors were hauled out of their homes and sent off to death camps, camps which, in their dissociative state, simultaneously did and did not exist.

What I’m describing probably sounds like psychosis, but, technically speaking, it isn’t … not quite. It is not an absolute break from reality. People functioning in this state know that what they believe is not real. Nonetheless, they are forced to believe it (and do, actually, literally, believe it, as impossible as I know that sounds), because the consequences of not believing it are even more frightening than the cognitive dissonance of believing a narrative they know is a fiction. Disbelieving the official narrative means excommunication from “normality,” the loss of friends, income, status, and in many cases far worse punishments.

Herd animals, in a state of panic, instinctively run towards the center of the herd. Separation from the herd makes them easy prey for pursuing predators. It is the same primal instinct operating here.

It is the goal of every official narrative to generate this type of herd mentality, not in order to deceive or dupe the public, but, rather, to confuse and terrorize them to the point where they revert to their primal instincts, and are being driven purely by existential fear, and facts and truth no longer matter. Once an official narrative reaches this point, it is unassailable by facts and reason. It no longer needs facts to justify it. It justifies itself with its own existence. Reason cannot penetrate it. Arguing with its adherents is pointless. They know it is irrational. They simply do not care.

We are reaching this point with the coronavirus narrative. It is possible that we have already reached it. Despite the fact that what we are dealing with is a virus that, yes, is clearly deadly to the old and those with medical conditions, but that is just as clearly not a deadly threat to the majority of the human species, people are cowering inside their homes as if the Zombie Apocalpyse had finally begun. Many appear to believe that this virus is some sort of Alien-Terrorist Death Flu (or weaponized Virus of Mass Destruction) that will kill you the second you breathe it in.

This is not surprising at all, because, according to the official narrative, its destructive powers are nearly unlimited. Not only will it obliterate your lungs, and liquidate all your other major organs, and kill you with blood clots, and intestinal damage, now it causes “sudden strokes in young adults,” and possibly spontaneous prostate cancer, and God knows what other medical horrors!

According to all the “scientists” and “medical experts” (i.e., those that conform to the official narrative, not all the other scientists and medical experts), it is unlike any other virus that has ever existed in the history of viruses.

It certainly doesn’t follow the typical pattern of spreading extensively for a limited period, and then rapidly dying down on its own, regardless of what measures are taken to thwart it, as this Israeli study would seem to indicate.

Also, “we have no immunity against it,” which is why we all have to remain “locked down” like unruly inmates in a penitentiary until a vaccine can be concocted and forced onto every living person on earth.

Apparently, this mandatory wonder vaccine will magically render us immune to this virus against which we have no immunity (and are totally unable to develop immunity), which immunity will be certified on our mandatory “immunity papers,” which we will need to travel, get a job, send our kids to school, and, you know, to show the police when they stop us on the street because we look like maybe we might be “infected.”

Germany (where I live) is way out in front of this. According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the federal government plans to introduce a coronavirus “immunity card” as part of its “Infection Protection Law,” which will grant the authorities the power to round up anyone “suspected to be contagious” and force them into … uh … “quarantine,” and “forbid them from entering certain public places.” The Malaysian authorities have dispensed with such niceties, and are arresting migrant workers and refugees in so-called “Covid-19 red zones” and marching them off to God knows where.

Oh, yeah, and I almost forgot … the germ and chemical warfare researchers at DARPA (i.e., the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) have developed some new type of fancy blood test that will identify “asymptomatic carriers” (i.e., people who display no symptoms whatsoever).

So that will probably come in handy … especially if the “white supremacists,” “Red-Brown extremists,” and “conspiracy theorists” keep protesting the lockdown with their wives and kids!

And these are just the latest additions to a list of rather dystopian examples of the “brave new normal” official narrative that GloboCap is rolling out, right before our very eyes (which the OffGuardian editors have streamlined here and here, and which continues on Twitter). It’s all right there in black and white. They aren’t hiding the totalitarianism … they don’t have to. Because people are begging for it. They are demanding to be “locked down” inside their homes, forced to wear masks, and stand two meters apart, for reasons that most of them no longer remember.

Plastic barriers are going up everywhere. Arrows on the floor show you which way to walk. Boxes show you where to stand. Paranoid Blockwarts are putting up signs threatening anyone not wearing a mask. Hysterical little fascist creeps are reporting their neighbors to the police for letting their children play with other children. Millions of people are voluntarily downloading “contact tracing applications” so that governments and global corporations can monitor their every movement. In Spain, they bleached an entire beach, killing everything, down to the insects, in order to protect the public from “infection.” The Internet has become an Orwellian chorus of shrieking, sanctimonious voices bullying everyone into conformity with charts, graphs, and desperate guilt-trips, few of which have much connection to reality.

Corporations and governments are censoring dissent. We’re approaching a level of manufactured mass hysteria and herd mentality that not even Goebbels could have imagined.

Meanwhile, they’re striking the mostly empty “field hospitals,” and the theatrical “hospital ship” is now gone, and despite their attempts to inflate the Covid-19 death count as much as humanly possible, the projected hundreds of millions of deaths have not materialized (not even close), and Sweden is fine, as is most of humanity, and … just like there were no WMDs, there is no Virus of Mass Destruction.

What there is, is a new official narrative, the brave new, paranoid, pathologized “normal.” Like the War on Terror, it’s a global narrative. A global, post-ideological narrative. It’s just getting started, so it isn’t yet clear how totalitarian this show will get, but, given the nature of the pilot episode, I am kind of dreading the rest of the series.

*  *  *

C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. His dystopian novel, Zone 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. Volume I of his Consent Factory Essays is published by Consent Factory Publishing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amalgamated Content, Inc. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org.


Tyler Durden

Tue, 05/05/2020 – 20:25

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Most Americans Have Serious Doubts About The Official COVID Death Count: Axios-Ipsos Poll

Most Americans Have Serious Doubts About The Official COVID Death Count: Axios-Ipsos Poll

Since the start of state-wide lockdowns after the coronavirus pandemic hit the United States, poll after poll has demonstrated that Americans remain by and large deeply distrustful of both politicians and mainstream media reporting on the virus.

Getty Images

And naturally, given the extent of unemployment, economic devastation across various industries, and also simply the radical change in the way people conduct their daily lives, Americans are right to question whether lockdown and social distancing protocols have gone ‘too far’. 

This all hinged on the following question from the start: is the virus as dangerous and deadly as alarming early health reports indicated? A number of studies from the heart of the scientific establishment suggest that no, it’s not as deadly as most believed early on, but still may be more pervasive across society in terms of asymptomatic carriers. 

And yet current deaths from the disease could still be significantly higher than what’s being reported, given a general shortage testing which has been reported by hospitals, clinics, and even institutions of vast means like the US military. As of Tuesday COVID-19 deaths in the United States are nearing 70,000.

From the start, health officials have warned there’s a likelihood of under-reporting of deaths, given that many have died of complications that sprung from the disease. In these cases deaths would then be listed as complications other than COVID-19, unless an autopsy were performed. 

A new Axios-Ipsos poll reflects the growing anxiety among the public of uncounted COVID-19 deaths.

44% of those polled believe people dying from the disease in the US is actually higher than has been officially reported.

Via Axios

Below are the poll results, released Tuesday, in summary break down:

  • Only 24 percent of Republicans say the number of coronavirus deaths are more than what has been reported. 36% say it is about the same, while 40% say it is less.
  • 63% of Democrats believe the number of deaths is more. 29% say it is about the same, compared to just 7% who say it is less.
  • 45% of independents say it is more, compared to 31% who say it is about the same. 24% say it is less.
  • 26% say they visited friends or relatives in the last week – up from 19% in a mid-April poll.
  • 47% say they’ve canceled summer plans, such as camp or vacation rentals.
  • 63% say they’re concerned that the next month could bring food shortages.
  • 58% say they are concerned that schools are not going to reopen in the fall.

And yet, even if more Americans believe death numbers could be higher than what’s officially reported, they are still ready and willing to take increased steps to return to normal life and daily routines.

As Axios observes: "At the same time, there’s some softening around how much risk Americans are attaching to various activities and how much risk they’re willing to take."


Tyler Durden

Tue, 05/05/2020 – 20:45

via ZeroHedge News

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UPDATED: Dr. Fauci Likely Broke US Regulations and US Law When He Funded Wuhan Lab to Continue Coronavirus Projects That Were Banned in US in 2014

A month ago we reported that Chinese Doctor Shi Zhengli was part of a team working on a coronavirus project jointly with US doctors in 2014 before it was shut down by the DHS for being too risky.
After the US research project was shut down, Dr. Shi continued her coronavirus research in Wuhan, China.

Doctor Shi Zhengli from China was part of a team, including Doctor Ralph S. Baric from North Carolina, that published an article in a 2015 edition of Nature Medicine.

In the article they discussed bat coronaviruses that showed potential for human emergence. The article was published in 2015.

This report was published shortly after their project was defunded by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

The HHS in 2014 sent a letter to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where they announced they were going to defund the program.

Dr. Ralph S. Baric was identified in the letter.

After the work stopped in the US, the Chinese moved forward with the project and ran research and development in Wuhan at the Wuhan Virology Center. From Shi Zhengli’s papers and resume, it is clear that they successfully isolated the coronavirus in the lab and were actively experimenting with species to species transmission.

It’s also important to note that back in 2017 we had solid intelligence about a viral leak in a high security Chinese virology R&D center that resulted in the SARS virus getting out and killing people.

This information provides a basis that contradicts the theory that COVID-19 is a variant that just magically mutated in a bat in the wild and then jumped to a human when they ate a delicious bowl of bat soup.

We then reported that the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, Hubei Province in China was hiring individuals for an ecological study of bat migration and virus transmission in November of 2019.

We now know from Dr. Shi’s resume and papers that she was still working on the coronavirus at that time.
Via Yaacov Apelbaum.

Hat tip Yaacov Apelbaum

Now we can report that the leader of the US task force overseeing the country’s response to the China coronavirus, Dr. Tony Fauci, was the one who funded the Wuhan bat virus work and kept it going.

If these research projects were banned in the US was it legal and appropriate for Dr. Fauci and NIAID to use taxpayer dollars to continue to fund the research in Wuhan, China?

Was Dr. Fauci ever going to explain his conflict of interest?

Did Dr. Fauci skirt US law to fund these dangerous projects in China?

Should the man in charge of the flawed US policy to treat and contain the China virus be trusted when he has not been upfront with his connections to the Wuhan research projects?

The Times of Israel reported:

Back in October 2014, the US government had placed a federal moratorium on gain-of-function (GOF) research—altering natural pathogens to make them more deadly and infectious–as a result of rising fears about a possible pandemic caused by accidental or deliberate release of these genetically engineered monster germs.

This was in part due to lab accidents at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in July 2014 that raised questions about biosafety at US high-containment labs…

…A CDC internal report described how scientists failed to follow proper procedures to ensure samples were inactivated before they left the lab, and also found “multiple other problems” with operating procedures in the anthrax lab.

As such in October 2014, due to public health concerns the US government banned all federal funding on efforts to weaponize three viruses—influenza, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).

In the face of a moratorium in the US, Dr. Anthony Fauci–director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) and currently the leading doctor in the US Coronavirus Task Force–outsourced in 2015 the GOF research to China’s Wuhan lab and licensed the lab to continue receiving federal funding.

The Wuhan lab is now at the center of scrutiny for possibly releasing theSARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and causing the global Covid-19 pandemic.

What more does Dr. Fauci have in his past that he has not revealed to the American public?

The post UPDATED: Dr. Fauci Likely Broke US Regulations and US Law When He Funded Wuhan Lab to Continue Coronavirus Projects That Were Banned in US in 2014 appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

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Scientist Whose Doomsday Models Sparked Global Lockdown Resigns After Breaking Quarantine To Bang Married Lover

Scientist Whose Doomsday Models Sparked Global Lockdown Resigns After Breaking Quarantine To Bang Married Lover

Professor Neil Ferguson – whose dire coronavirus predictions prompted worldwide lockdown measures still in place – broke his own advice on the need for strict social distancing to hook up with his married lover, according to the Telegraph.

Neil Ferguson and Antonia Staats

On at least two occasions, Antonia Staats, 38, travelled across London from her home in the south of the capital to spend time with the Government scientist, nicknamed Professor Lockdown.

The 51-year-old had only just finished a two-week spell self-isolating after testing positive for coronavirus.

Prof Ferguson told the Telegraph: "I accept I made an error of judgment and took the wrong course of action. I have therefore stepped back from my involvement in Sage [the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies]. –Telegraph

"I acted in the belief that I was immune, having tested positive for coronavirus, and completely isolated myself for almost two weeks after developing symptoms," he said, adding "I deeply regret any undermining of the clear messages around the continued need for social distancing to control this devastating epidemic. The Government guidance is unequivocal, and is there to protect all of us."

Ferguson, who resigned from his Government advisory position on Tuesday, predicted that up to 500,000 Britons and 2.2 million in the US would die without measures. Somehow, Sweden – which enacted virtually no measures to mitigate the virus. has a lower per-capita mortality rate than the UK, Italy, Spain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands – all of which enacted lockdown measures.

And while his computer models were flat-wrong, Ferguson – who leads the team at Imperial College London, has frequently appeared on media to support the lockdown and "very intensive social distancing" measures.

Of note, Ferguson and Staats hooked up on March 30 – the same day he gave a public warning that the one-week-old lockdown measures would need to remain in place until June.

Staats – a left-wing campaigner, visited again on April 8, despite telling friends that she thought her husband might have come down with coronavirus.

She and her husband live together with their two children in a £1.9 million home, but are understood to be in an open marriage. She has told friends about her relationship with Prof Ferguson, but does not believe their actions to be hypocritical because she considers the households to be one.

But one week before the first tryst, Dr Jenny Harries, the deputy chief medical officer, and Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, clarified during the daily Downing Street press conference that couples not living together must stay apart during lockdown. –Telegraph

"He has peculiarly breached his own guidelines, and for an intelligent man I find that very hard to believe. It risks undermining the Government’s lockdown message," said Sir. Iain Duncan Smith.

Meanwhile, over 9,000 fines have been issued to quarantine violators in England and Wales during the lockdown – while Scotland’s chief medical officer, Dr. Catherine Calderwood, made two trips to her second home during the lockdown, resulting in her resignation.


Tyler Durden

Tue, 05/05/2020 – 16:45

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Is Big Pharma behind the great war on hydroxychloroquine?

When President Trump brought up hydroxychloroquine as a promising potential treatment for COVID-19, a huge upsurge of negative political publicity followed from it. It was strange stuff, because up until then, the treatment, which had been safely used to treat malaria, lupus and athritis, had been seeing promising results for COVID-19, too. Yet the condemnations from all sides poured for weeks. It wasn’t just the political establishment blasting it, it seemed to be the medical establishment, too. And that raises questions as to whether financial interests might be involved here.

It started with the press engaging in its customary contrarianism against Trump when he called the treatment ‘promising.’ The logic was simple: If Trump liked it, then it had to be bad.

How’s this for a slanted headline and report from NPR, which ran on April 10?

COVID-19 Patients Given Unproven Drug In Texas Nursing Home In ‘Disconcerting’ Move

This evening, the real story was obtained by Fox News host Laura Ingraham, and it’s quite a different picture. It isn’t out on YouTube yet, so I will describe it:

A Galveston-area doctor, Dr. Robin Armstrong, who was in charge of a nursing home found himself in the middle of the worst health care nightmare anyone can imagine: A COVID-19 outbreak, on a home full of elderly people, and he was in charge. Odds were big they were going to die. We already know what the coronavirus did to a nursing home in Washington state and we have subsequently learned what inserting COVID-19 patients into unwilling nursing homes in New York City did to those populations. Coronavirus + Nursing Home = Death Sentence. That was what he was looking at. In desperation, the Texas doctor decided to treat his threatened patients with hydroxychloroquine in a last-ditch effort to save them… and he called it right. Unlike those other places, his patients got well.  His informed judgment saved the lives of a building full of nursing home patients and he reported no bad side effects such as heart problems brought on by the treatment, either. He would have been justified to take such risks because his treatment was triage, and the alternative was the death sentence. But there wasn’t even that. His patients lived, they regained their fragile health, and there were no stacked bodies nor chaotic medical scenes in his part of Texas on his watch. 

That’s frankly a story of heroism and the brilliant medical man should be celebrated for the huge number of lives he saved.

Instead, all he got were trashy stories with scare headlines like NPR’s, painting him as some kind of evildoer. Bad medicine, unproven treatment, everybody get scared.

No good deed goes unpunished.

The anti-HCQ hysteria spread much further than the reflexively anti-Trump press – it went deep into the Trump-hating Democratic Party, which also condemned Trump’s favorable mention of HCQ. A young black Democratic state legislator from Michigan, who said the treatment most certainly helped save her life, was vilified by her own party for giving President Trump credit for mentioning it. She said thanks, and they threatened to expel her from their party. This, despite the ugly fact that the black community was getting hit harder by the coronavirus than others and therefore stood to gain the most from the cheap and plentiful HCQ and HCQ-antibiotic treatments. For Democrats, hating Trump was a bigger priority so if Trump liked the treatment, then it would be important to not just scream about it but keep it away from patients. Even if they had to intimidate them. 

The political picture was strange as hell. Who the heck should care if Trump likes a treatment or not: If you’re sick, what matters is whether a treatment is going to work and whether it’s going to be safe. That’s all a COVID-19 patient, struggling to breathe on a ventilator, cares about, and while there were no big extended conclusive studies proving hydroxychroquine a panacea for treating the illness, there were many smaller studies out there and experiences that pointed to the drug’s safety and effectiveness, with one showing a 91% effectiveness rate.

After all, how could a drug that had been on the market for years for the treatment of lupus, rhematoid arthritis, and malaria, suddenly be bad stuff, particularly since it had been used so successfully to treat COVID-19 abroad?

Yet the negative waves kept coming – at one point the New York Times argued that Trump had a stake through a mutual fund portfolio in a company that manufactured the drug — worth all of $1,300 at best, which for him is money he tips the waiters. Even Snopes called that ‘mostly false.’ It’s also worth noting that many pharmaceuticals make the drug – Teva, Sanolfi, and Novartis – are the ones that turned up in a quick Google search, there are many generic versions, so it’s a pretty cheap thing with less money to be made.

They might have been barking up the wrong tree. 

ZeroHedge wondered if Gilead, which had been developing a rival treatment, Remdesivir, might have had a hand in this negative campaign against HCQ, following a reading of an extensive report from the respected climate-skeptic blog WattsUpWithThat, which featured this post by Leo Goldstein:

I reviewed the scientific literature on hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), azithromycin (AZ), and their use for COVID-19. My conclusions:

  • HCQ-based treatments are effective in treating COVID-19, unless started too late.
  • Studies, cited in opposition, have been misinterpreted, invalid, or worse.
  • HCQ and AZ are some of the most tested and safest prescription drugs.
  • Severe COVID-19 frequently causes cardiac effects, including heart arrhythmia. QTc prolonging drugs might amplify this tendency. Millions of people regularly take drugs having strong QTc prolongation effect, and neither FDA nor CDC bother to warn them. HCQ+AZ combination, probably has a mild QTc prolongation effect. Concerns over its negative effects, however minor, can be addressed by respecting contra-indications.
  • Effectiveness of HCQ-based treatment for COVID-19 is hampered by conditions that are presented as precautions, delaying the onset of treatment. For examples, some states require that COVID-19 patients be treated with HCQ exclusively in hospital settings.
  • The COVID-19 Treatment Panel of NIH evaded disclosure of the massive financial links of its members to Gilead Sciences, the manufacturer of a competing drug remdesivir. Among those who failed to disclose such links are 2 out of 3 of its co-chairs.
  • Despite all the attempts by certain authorities to prevent COVID-19 treatment with HCQ and HCQ+AZ, both components are approved by FDA, and doctors can prescribe them for COVID-19.

 By the time the National Institutes of Health issued its non-recommendation of HCQ, questions were being raised as to whether this was really about just hating Trump. I wrote about that here.

Because along with the NIH’s non-recommendation for HCQ (which wasn’t as bad as the press touted, but enough for a round of negative media stories), there also was an enthusiastic NIH recommendation in late April for Gilead’s Remdesivir, same company the NIH directors had a lot of conflicts of interest in. 

Take that, Trump! Except that Trump issued high praise for that drug too, and that didn’t set off a barrage of negative press stories the way HCQ did.

Maybe there was something to the NIH conflicts of interest which just happened to coincide with NIH praise for Gilead:

For one thing, NPR reported that Gilead had ramped up its big lobbying operations to “hit a new high” to promote that drug

Gilead Sciences, the drugmaker behind the experimental COVID-19 treatment remdesivir, spent more on lobbying Congress and the administration in the first quarter of 2020 than it ever has before, according to federal filings.

The pharmaceutical company spent $2.45 million on lobbying in the first three months of the year, a 32% increase over the $1.86 million it spent in the first quarter of 2019.

Meanwhile, one Harvard medical professor, Dr. William Haseltine, wrote in a column in Forbes that he found reason for skepticism about that effusive praise for Gilead’s newly developed treatment.

Enthusiasm for remsdesivir as a treatment for COVID-19 has escalated since the NIH announcement of results. But as I wrote yesterday, the data for the NIH study has not been publicly released or peer reviewed, meaning that we should continue to exercise extreme caution when considering its use against COVID-19.

Which if he’s right, would make NIH look pretty conflicted of interest indeed.

Does that stuff go on? One company strives to badmouth one medically developed treatment so that its own expensively developed own treatment might be used instead? 

I know that when I wrote a story about vaping in 2016 which ran in the New York Observer, I was surprised to learn that Big Pharma more than anyone was seeking to put small kitchen-table vaping operations, which helped smokers quit smoking, out of business, calling them irresponsible and dangerous. The preponderance of evidence, though, suggested their real reason was to promote their own smoking cessation drugs, and petty vaping companies needed to be stomped out because they were cutting into market share. Significantly, these lobbies worked with Democrats who know how to politicize a cause.

There’s no smoking gun at this point, but there are a lot of circumstantials that might just point to a big campaign to stomp out an inexpensive and de-centralized rival. If so, it’s another manifestation of the swamp going against the interests of the little guy. It’s why Trump is always a lightning rod for establishment fury and if that’s not an endorsement for the little guy’s voting choice, what is?

When President Trump brought up hydroxychloroquine as a promising potential treatment for COVID-19, a huge upsurge of negative political publicity followed from it. It was strange stuff, because up until then, the treatment, which had been safely used to treat malaria, lupus and athritis, had been seeing promising results for COVID-19, too. Yet the condemnations from all sides poured for weeks. It wasn’t just the political establishment blasting it, it seemed to be the medical establishment, too. And that raises questions as to whether financial interests might be involved here.

It started with the press engaging in its customary contrarianism against Trump when he called the treatment ‘promising.’ The logic was simple: If Trump liked it, then it had to be bad.

How’s this for a slanted headline and report from NPR, which ran on April 10?

COVID-19 Patients Given Unproven Drug In Texas Nursing Home In ‘Disconcerting’ Move

This evening, the real story was obtained by Fox News host Laura Ingraham, and it’s quite a different picture. It isn’t out on YouTube yet, so I will describe it:

A Galveston-area doctor, Dr. Robin Armstrong, who was in charge of a nursing home found himself in the middle of the worst health care nightmare anyone can imagine: A COVID-19 outbreak, on a home full of elderly people, and he was in charge. Odds were big they were going to die. We already know what the coronavirus did to a nursing home in Washington state and we have subsequently learned what inserting COVID-19 patients into unwilling nursing homes in New York City did to those populations. Coronavirus + Nursing Home = Death Sentence. That was what he was looking at. In desperation, the Texas doctor decided to treat his threatened patients with hydroxychloroquine in a last-ditch effort to save them… and he called it right. Unlike those other places, his patients got well.  His informed judgment saved the lives of a building full of nursing home patients and he reported no bad side effects such as heart problems brought on by the treatment, either. He would have been justified to take such risks because his treatment was triage, and the alternative was the death sentence. But there wasn’t even that. His patients lived, they regained their fragile health, and there were no stacked bodies nor chaotic medical scenes in his part of Texas on his watch. 

That’s frankly a story of heroism and the brilliant medical man should be celebrated for the huge number of lives he saved.

Instead, all he got were trashy stories with scare headlines like NPR’s, painting him as some kind of evildoer. Bad medicine, unproven treatment, everybody get scared.

No good deed goes unpunished.

The anti-HCQ hysteria spread much further than the reflexively anti-Trump press – it went deep into the Trump-hating Democratic Party, which also condemned Trump’s favorable mention of HCQ. A young black Democratic state legislator from Michigan, who said the treatment most certainly helped save her life, was vilified by her own party for giving President Trump credit for mentioning it. She said thanks, and they threatened to expel her from their party. This, despite the ugly fact that the black community was getting hit harder by the coronavirus than others and therefore stood to gain the most from the cheap and plentiful HCQ and HCQ-antibiotic treatments. For Democrats, hating Trump was a bigger priority so if Trump liked the treatment, then it would be important to not just scream about it but keep it away from patients. Even if they had to intimidate them. 

The political picture was strange as hell. Who the heck should care if Trump likes a treatment or not: If you’re sick, what matters is whether a treatment is going to work and whether it’s going to be safe. That’s all a COVID-19 patient, struggling to breathe on a ventilator, cares about, and while there were no big extended conclusive studies proving hydroxychroquine a panacea for treating the illness, there were many smaller studies out there and experiences that pointed to the drug’s safety and effectiveness, with one showing a 91% effectiveness rate.

After all, how could a drug that had been on the market for years for the treatment of lupus, rhematoid arthritis, and malaria, suddenly be bad stuff, particularly since it had been used so successfully to treat COVID-19 abroad?

Yet the negative waves kept coming – at one point the New York Times argued that Trump had a stake through a mutual fund portfolio in a company that manufactured the drug — worth all of $1,300 at best, which for him is money he tips the waiters. Even Snopes called that ‘mostly false.’ It’s also worth noting that many pharmaceuticals make the drug – Teva, Sanolfi, and Novartis – are the ones that turned up in a quick Google search, there are many generic versions, so it’s a pretty cheap thing with less money to be made.

They might have been barking up the wrong tree. 

ZeroHedge wondered if Gilead, which had been developing a rival treatment, Remdesivir, might have had a hand in this negative campaign against HCQ, following a reading of an extensive report from the respected climate-skeptic blog WattsUpWithThat, which featured this post by Leo Goldstein:

I reviewed the scientific literature on hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), azithromycin (AZ), and their use for COVID-19. My conclusions:

  • HCQ-based treatments are effective in treating COVID-19, unless started too late.
  • Studies, cited in opposition, have been misinterpreted, invalid, or worse.
  • HCQ and AZ are some of the most tested and safest prescription drugs.
  • Severe COVID-19 frequently causes cardiac effects, including heart arrhythmia. QTc prolonging drugs might amplify this tendency. Millions of people regularly take drugs having strong QTc prolongation effect, and neither FDA nor CDC bother to warn them. HCQ+AZ combination, probably has a mild QTc prolongation effect. Concerns over its negative effects, however minor, can be addressed by respecting contra-indications.
  • Effectiveness of HCQ-based treatment for COVID-19 is hampered by conditions that are presented as precautions, delaying the onset of treatment. For examples, some states require that COVID-19 patients be treated with HCQ exclusively in hospital settings.
  • The COVID-19 Treatment Panel of NIH evaded disclosure of the massive financial links of its members to Gilead Sciences, the manufacturer of a competing drug remdesivir. Among those who failed to disclose such links are 2 out of 3 of its co-chairs.
  • Despite all the attempts by certain authorities to prevent COVID-19 treatment with HCQ and HCQ+AZ, both components are approved by FDA, and doctors can prescribe them for COVID-19.

 By the time the National Institutes of Health issued its non-recommendation of HCQ, questions were being raised as to whether this was really about just hating Trump. I wrote about that here.

Because along with the NIH’s non-recommendation for HCQ (which wasn’t as bad as the press touted, but enough for a round of negative media stories), there also was an enthusiastic NIH recommendation in late April for Gilead’s Remdesivir, same company the NIH directors had a lot of conflicts of interest in. 

Take that, Trump! Except that Trump issued high praise for that drug too, and that didn’t set off a barrage of negative press stories the way HCQ did.

Maybe there was something to the NIH conflicts of interest which just happened to coincide with NIH praise for Gilead:

For one thing, NPR reported that Gilead had ramped up its big lobbying operations to “hit a new high” to promote that drug

Gilead Sciences, the drugmaker behind the experimental COVID-19 treatment remdesivir, spent more on lobbying Congress and the administration in the first quarter of 2020 than it ever has before, according to federal filings.

The pharmaceutical company spent $2.45 million on lobbying in the first three months of the year, a 32% increase over the $1.86 million it spent in the first quarter of 2019.

Meanwhile, one Harvard medical professor, Dr. William Haseltine, wrote in a column in Forbes that he found reason for skepticism about that effusive praise for Gilead’s newly developed treatment.

Enthusiasm for remsdesivir as a treatment for COVID-19 has escalated since the NIH announcement of results. But as I wrote yesterday, the data for the NIH study has not been publicly released or peer reviewed, meaning that we should continue to exercise extreme caution when considering its use against COVID-19.

Which if he’s right, would make NIH look pretty conflicted of interest indeed.

Does that stuff go on? One company strives to badmouth one medically developed treatment so that its own expensively developed own treatment might be used instead? 

I know that when I wrote a story about vaping in 2016 which ran in the New York Observer, I was surprised to learn that Big Pharma more than anyone was seeking to put small kitchen-table vaping operations, which helped smokers quit smoking, out of business, calling them irresponsible and dangerous. The preponderance of evidence, though, suggested their real reason was to promote their own smoking cessation drugs, and petty vaping companies needed to be stomped out because they were cutting into market share. Significantly, these lobbies worked with Democrats who know how to politicize a cause.

There’s no smoking gun at this point, but there are a lot of circumstantials that might just point to a big campaign to stomp out an inexpensive and de-centralized rival. If so, it’s another manifestation of the swamp going against the interests of the little guy. It’s why Trump is always a lightning rod for establishment fury and if that’s not an endorsement for the little guy’s voting choice, what is?

via American Thinker Blog

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Elvis Was King, Ike Was President, & 116,000 Americans Died In A Pandemic

Elvis Was King, Ike Was President, & 116,000 Americans Died In A Pandemic

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The American Institute for Economic Research,

The year was 1957. 

Elvis’s new movie “Jailhouse Rock” was packing the theaters. The last episode of “I Love Lucy” aired on television. The show “West Side Story” held tryouts in Washington, D.C., and opened on Broadway in September. Ford’s new car the Edsel rolled off the assembly line. The Cold War with Russia was on and “In God We Trust” appeared on U.S. currency. The first Toys R Us store opened. 

Also that year, the so-called Asian Flu killed 116,000 Americans. Here is the full summary from the Centers for Disease Control:

In February 1957, a new influenza A (H2N2) virus emerged in East Asia, triggering a pandemic (“Asian Flu”). This H2N2 virus was comprised of three different genes from an H2N2 virus that originated from an avian influenza A virus, including the H2 hemagglutinin and the N2 neuraminidase genes. It was first reported in Singapore in February 1957, Hong Kong in April 1957, and in coastal cities in the United States in summer 1957. The estimated number of deaths was 1.1 million worldwide and 116,000 in the United States.

Like the current pandemic, there was a demographic pattern to the deaths. It hit the elderly population with heart and lung disease. In a frightening twist, the virus could also be fatal for pregnant women. The infection rate was probably even higher than the Spanish flu of 1918 (675,000 Americans died from this), but this lowered the overall case fatality rate to 0.67%. A vaccine became available in late 1957 but was not widely distributed. 

The population of the U.S. at the time was 172 million, which is a little more than half of the current population. Life expectancy was 69 as versus 78 today. Even with shorter lives, it was a healthier population with lower rates of obesity. To extrapolate the data to a counterfactual, we can conclude that this virus was more wicked than COVID-19 thus far. 

What’s remarkable when we look back at this year, nothing was shut down. Restaurants, schools, theaters, sporting events, travel – everything continued without interruption. Without a 24-hour news cycle with thousands of news agencies and a billion websites hungry for traffic, mostly people paid no attention other than to keep basic hygiene. It was covered in the press as a medical problem. The notion that there was a political solution never occurred to anyone. 

Again, this was a very serious flu, and it persisted for 10 years until it mutated to become the Hong Kong flu of 1968. The New York Times had some but not much coverage.

On September 18, 1957, an editorial counseled:

Let us all keep a cool head about Asian influenza as the statistics on the spread and the virulence of the disease begin to accumulate. For one thing, let us be sure that the 1957 type of A influenza virus is innocuous, as early returns show, and that antibiotics can indeed control the complications that may develop.”

The mystery of why today vast numbers of governments around the world (but not all) have crushed economies, locked people under house arrest, wrecked business, spread despair, disregarded basic freedoms and rights will require years if not decades to sort out.

Is it the news cycle that is creating mass hysteria? Political ambition and arrogance? A decline in philosophical regard for freedom as the best system for dealing with crises? Most likely, the ultimate answer will look roughly like what historians say about the Great War (WWI): it was a perfect storm that created a calamity that no one intended at the outset. 

For staying calm and treating the terrible Asian flu of 1957 as a medical problem to address with medical intelligence, rather than as an excuse to unleash Medieval-style brutality, this first postwar generation deserves our respect and admiration. 


Tyler Durden

Tue, 05/05/2020 – 10:55

via ZeroHedge News

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REPORT: Texas Hair Salon Owner Gets Jail Sentence for Violating Coronavirus Lockdown Order

A Dallas hair salon owner who defied a Coronavirus lockdown order will spend seven days in jail, according to a local news report. The salon owner refused to keep her business closed and defied a direct cease and desist order from Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins in April.

“Shelley Luther, a Dallas hair salon owner who opened in violation of the governor’s executive order, sentenced to 7 days in jail for civil / criminal contempt of court and fined $7,000,” CBSDFW reported Andrea Lucia tweeted on Tuesday.

The move to fine and incarcerate Luther comes on the same day that Governor Greg Abbott announced that hair salons will be able to re-open on Friday, May 8.

In April, Salon Á la Mode owner Shelley Luther re-opened her hair salon in defiance of orders by the county that she remained closed, Breitbart Texas reported on April 25. “Every owner of every salon should use their own best judgement when to reopen,” the Texas governor said during a press conference that occurred at the same time the fine and jail sentence were announced in Dallas.

At this time, it is not clear what judge issued the contempt order that includes the seven-day jail sentence and the fine of $7,000.

Luther told WFAA ABC8 she is “prepared to take on whatever it is that comes with” re-opening her business. She said she had to choose between paying her lease or her mortgage this month because of the stay-at-home order.

“I don’t want to cause any problems, but when you’re out of money someone has to stand up and say that they’re not helping us by not letting us work,” she explained. Luther is unable to perform any of her three jobs — musician, makeup artist, and hairstylist — because of the lockdown of the county.

Now, according to the local CBS affiliate’s reporter, “whatever it is that comes with” is a seven-day jail term for contempt and a fine of $7,000.”

“I’m behind on my mortgage,” she explained at the time. “I know a lot of my stylists haven’t paid their mortgage. It’s either come in and make money to be able to feed your family or stay home and freak out.”

“Obviously I don’t want anyone to get sick and I don’t want the virus to spread,” Luther continued. “It will be one of the safer places for people to go rather than going to Walmart or Home Depot.”

“I will not pay the fine,” the defiant salon owner told reporters in April.

Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior news contributor for the Breitbart Texas-Border team. He is an original member of the Breitbart Texas team. Price is a regular panelist on Fox 26 Houston’s What’s Your Point? Sunday-morning talk show. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX and Facebook.

via Breitbart News

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James Comey must be prosecuted

Andrew McCarthy, writing in the National Review, outlined the case that the FBI, under the direction of James Comey, working through Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Andrew McCabe, and others, set up General Michael Flynn for a perjury trap. Comey sent Strzok and another agent to entrap General Flynn on January 24, 2017. The reason was to remove General Flynn as Trump’s national security adviser because General Flynn, an experienced military and intelligence officer, would have discovered the FBI’s investigation of President Trump, titled “Crossfire Hurricane” but otherwise known as the Russia Hoax.

McCarthy answers the question of why to entrap General Flynn to remove him. But the next question is, did Comey act on his own or on orders, explicit or implicit, from his superiors to entrap General Flynn to remove him? In an interview with Nicolle Wallace, Comey bragged that he had sent two FBI agents to question General Flynn.

There are several possibilities.One is that Comey views himself as outside the law, unrestrained by the Constitution and Justice Department protocol, to act in what he believes is the best interest of the USA, including who should be president.

In support of this argument, note that Comey took it upon himself to hold a news conference to absolve Hillary Clinton of any criminal liability for her email scandal. He should have referred his factual findings to the Justice Department for it to decide whether to file criminal charges.Comey was assisted by the ever present Strzok to describe Hillary’s conduct as “extremely careless,” avoiding the “gross negligence” standard in the statutes applicable.

Next, Comey re-opened the investigation of Hillary on October 27, 2016 because of emails found in Anthony Weiner’s computer but dismissed concerns from his staff that the re-opening would help Trump in the election because he had assumed that Hillary would win.

Would he have re-opened the investigation if he hadn’t believed that Hillary would win?

Next, after he was fired by President Trump, Comey leaked memos of his conversations with President Trump to prompt the appointment of his friend, Robert Mueller, as special counsel.

In absolving Hillary, entrapping Flynn, and leaking the memo to get Mueller appointed, Comey acted to prevent Trump from winning the election and then to damage Trump’s presidency.

Did Comey act on his own as the self-appointed guardian angel of the USA, or did he have direction from superiors in the Obama administration?It is difficult to believe that Comey acted on his own in absolving Hillary, entrapping Flynn, and getting Mueller appointed.Remember the September 2, 2016 text between Stzrok and Page that

Regardless of whether Comey acted independently or at the direction of Obama, directly or implied, to entrap Flynn, Comey must be prosecuted.He violated the constitutional rights of General Flynn and tried to remove a duly elected U.S. president. He prosecuted and persecuted an innocent man, General Flynn, for political purposes because he believes he knows better than the American voters who elected President Trump.

A prosecution is necessary to get to the truth of whether Comey acted independently or was following explicit or implicit orders.

Moreover, a prosecution is necessary to make it clear that the CIA or the FBI, or any other agency, cannot get involved in the election of the U.S. president or try to remove a U.S. president.

Andrew McCarthy, writing in the National Review, outlined the case that the FBI, under the direction of James Comey, working through Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Andrew McCabe, and others, set up General Michael Flynn for a perjury trap. Comey sent Strzok and another agent to entrap General Flynn on January 24, 2017. The reason was to remove General Flynn as Trump’s national security adviser because General Flynn, an experienced military and intelligence officer, would have discovered the FBI’s investigation of President Trump, titled “Crossfire Hurricane” but otherwise known as the Russia Hoax.

McCarthy answers the question of why to entrap General Flynn to remove him. But the next question is, did Comey act on his own or on orders, explicit or implicit, from his superiors to entrap General Flynn to remove him? In an interview with Nicolle Wallace, Comey bragged that he had sent two FBI agents to question General Flynn.

There are several possibilities.One is that Comey views himself as outside the law, unrestrained by the Constitution and Justice Department protocol, to act in what he believes is the best interest of the USA, including who should be president.

In support of this argument, note that Comey took it upon himself to hold a news conference to absolve Hillary Clinton of any criminal liability for her email scandal. He should have referred his factual findings to the Justice Department for it to decide whether to file criminal charges.Comey was assisted by the ever present Strzok to describe Hillary’s conduct as “extremely careless,” avoiding the “gross negligence” standard in the statutes applicable.

Next, Comey re-opened the investigation of Hillary on October 27, 2016 because of emails found in Anthony Weiner’s computer but dismissed concerns from his staff that the re-opening would help Trump in the election because he had assumed that Hillary would win.

Would he have re-opened the investigation if he hadn’t believed that Hillary would win?

Next, after he was fired by President Trump, Comey leaked memos of his conversations with President Trump to prompt the appointment of his friend, Robert Mueller, as special counsel.

In absolving Hillary, entrapping Flynn, and leaking the memo to get Mueller appointed, Comey acted to prevent Trump from winning the election and then to damage Trump’s presidency.

Did Comey act on his own as the self-appointed guardian angel of the USA, or did he have direction from superiors in the Obama administration?It is difficult to believe that Comey acted on his own in absolving Hillary, entrapping Flynn, and getting Mueller appointed.Remember the September 2, 2016 text between Stzrok and Page that

Regardless of whether Comey acted independently or at the direction of Obama, directly or implied, to entrap Flynn, Comey must be prosecuted.He violated the constitutional rights of General Flynn and tried to remove a duly elected U.S. president. He prosecuted and persecuted an innocent man, General Flynn, for political purposes because he believes he knows better than the American voters who elected President Trump.

A prosecution is necessary to get to the truth of whether Comey acted independently or was following explicit or implicit orders.

Moreover, a prosecution is necessary to make it clear that the CIA or the FBI, or any other agency, cannot get involved in the election of the U.S. president or try to remove a U.S. president.

via American Thinker Blog

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Democrat Harley Rouda Spotted on Private Beach; Backed Public Beach Closures in Orange County

First-term Democrat Rep. Harley Rouda of California was spotted on a private beach in Orange County — even as he supported Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) criticism of communities that kept their beaches open to the public.

Last Thursday, Gov. Newsom ordered a “hard close” of beaches in Orange County, having scolded communities in the county for keeping beaches open to large numbers of people during a heat wave the previous weekend. Local communities argued that most beachgoers had maintained “social distancing,” and resolved to add more law enforcement to beaches while keeping beaches open. That was not good enough for Newsom — or Rouda.

In a statement last Thursday, Rep. Rouda criticized communities that had kept their beaches open: “Opening beaches to thousands of Southern Californians during a weekend heat-wave without adequate social-distancing protocols was a reckless action that put the families of California’s 48th district in harm’s way.”

However, Rouda himself was seen on a private beach with his family in Orange County last weekend.

CBS News 2020 campaign reporter Musadiq Bidar broke the story (original emphasis):

Photos obtained first by CBS News show Democratic Congressman Harley Rouda spending time at a private beach in Southern California despite orders from Governor Gavin Newsom to close some public beaches in the area, CBS News campaign reporter Musadiq Bidar reports. Rouda, a first-term Congressman who beat Dana Rohrabacher, represents the 48th district, which encompasses Orange County. Last week Newsom specifically ordered a “hard close” on Orange County beaches after photos showing people not respecting social distancing went viral on social media. Rouda’s campaign manager said in a statement that Rouda and his family “were actively moving and adequately socially distancing on a residential beach, which has explicitly outlined beach access requirements in accordance with Governor Newsom’s beach order.”

Rouda defeated veteran Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) in the 48th congressional district in 2018, basing his campaign in part on accusations that the incumbent was too favorable toward U.S.-Russia relations.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller reported in 2019 that there was no evidence of “collusion” between the Russian government and any American citizen.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, is available for pre-order. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

via Breitbart News

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Oops? Warren Buffett Gives Trump Ammo on Economic Comeback: ‘Nothing Can Basically Stop America’

Liberal billionaire Warren Buffett apparently doesn’t believe that the coronavirus will cripple the might of the U.S. economy in the long-run. A prominent liberal business figure like Buffett voicing such sentiments provides ammunition to President Donald Trump, who also predicted that the economy is “going to make a very strong comeback.” Buffett stated during a virtual shareholder meeting that “‘Nothing can basically stop America,’” according to CNBC. “‘The American miracle, the American magic has always prevailed and it will do so again…

via NewsBusters – Exposing Liberal Media Bias

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