The Covid-19 Whistleblowers

As we end this unusual year, I thought it would be worthwhile to give some attention and thanks to the whistleblowers.  Those people who stuck their necks out to deliver revelatory truths about the pandemic.  A whistleblower is a person who informs or makes disclosure on a person or organization engaged in an illicit activity.  In most cases, they just speak out about a wrongful practice that could result in personal attacks against themselves.  The following spoke out and even though they were ridiculed and humiliated by others, they did so with the interest of righting a wrong.  In my mind, these are some of the unsung heroes of this pandemic.

Dr. Li Wenliang

Last December while working as an eye doctor at a hospital in Wuhan, he sent a message to fellow doctors warning them of a virus he was seeing in the hospital that looked a lot like the SARS virus from 2003.  Soon after this, he was investigated by police for “spreading rumors” and told to “stop making false comments”.  He later died in early February from Covid-19 at the age of 34. When he died, hundreds of thousands of people turned his Weibo page (like Facebook), into a public outpouring of both sorrow for his fate and anger towards Chinese officials for their unfair portrayal of his actions.  ....

Masking the truth?

There is probably no subject that will incite a wellspring of emotional reaction during this pandemic than the one surrounding the importance of wearing a mask.  Of course, they work and if more people wore them, we would be done with this pandemic by now…right?  Before we rush to agree with what seems to be obvious, let us look at some interesting scientific facts. 

The SARS CoV 2 virus is .07 microns in size, but surgical masks and cotton masks allow the passage of material in size anywhere from 15 to 50 microns, respectively.  Therefore, the space between a surgical mask’s fibers is 150 times bigger than a SARS CoV 2 virus and about 450 times bigger in a cotton mask.  To further illustrate the size of a CoV 2 virus, you could line up 1000 SARS CoV 2 viruses along the width of a human hair.

Then there is the blockage of water droplets or aerosols.  Aerosols range in size from .7 microns to 10 microns.  Therefore, while most water droplets (10-15 microns) may be blocked initially from the front of the mask, water droplets and aerosols may easily pass through the sides of cotton masks into the ambient air. 

A surgical mask’s fibers fare a little better but the opening in the fibers is still 50 times bigger than the virus and 1.5 to 50 times bigger than water droplets.  In both cases, this is akin to using a chain-link fence to stop a gnat, a fly, or a golf ball from coming into your backyard.  N95 masks, are much more effective and can block 95% of particles as small as .3 microns. There is also an N99 mask which block 99% of all particles .3 microns or larger.  Both the N95 and N99 masks are really meant for health care workers who may be exposed to aerosol from patients with Covid-19 or other viruses.  Anyone who is serious about avoiding SARS CoV 2 would want to wear an N95 or N99 mask (it is really a low-level respirator) that is properly fitted for them.  However, be aware N95 masks ... keep reading

The W.H.O. (the World Health Organization) is a specialized agency of the United Nations.  Established after World War II, on April 7th 1948 on a date now celebrated as World Health Day, the organization grew out of the International Sanitary Conferences, which convened between 1851-1938 to combat disease such as cholera, yellow fever, and bubonic plague. Its self-proclaimed mission is the “attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health”.  It’s interests globally include advocating for universal healthcare, monitoring public health risks, setting health standards and guidelines, coordinating international responses to health emergencies, fighting infectious diseases like HIV and tuberculosis, and promoting better nutrition, housing and sanitation in the name of overall well-being.  Based in Geneva, Switzerland, it employs 7000 staff across six regional offices and 150 field offices.  At the head of it all is Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the former health minister of Ethiopia, who began his five-year term as

Director General in 2017. Tedros is not a medical doctor, he has a PhD in philosophy of community health and a Master of Science in Immunology and Diseases.

Historically the W.H.O. has undoubtedly achieved many monumental benefits in underdeveloped countries through improved sanitation, and some vaccinations.  However, there has been criticism arising from some sources about its more recent aggressive agenda in its vaccine policies and any potential conflict of interests it may have with its financial contributors. 

The top 20 contributors of the World Health Organization

In the diagram above, a list of the 20 largest financial contributors to the W.H.O. are listed.  As an off shoot of the United Nations you might expect that the largest contributors would be countries, but with a more careful look, countries are marked in dark blue, and voluntary contributions are marked in light blue.  Clearly there are more contributions coming from voluntary sources than from countries.  Voluntary contributions equal 75% of the financial support of the W.H.O.  The largest voluntary contributor and second only to the United States is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with over 500 million dollars.  The GAVI alliance is the fourth largest contributor.  GAVI is the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations.  Established in 2000 by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with an initial 750 million dollars, it has dispersed over 13 billion dollars in support of immunization efforts for poorer countries.  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation pledged has pledged another 1.6 billion for the next five years.  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the head of UNICEF, along with the head of the World Health Organization are all on the board of directors of GAVI. 

When the second swine flu or H1N1 flu hit in 2009 the W.H.O. predicted there would be 7 million deaths without the vaccine.  When the numbers showed that only 150,000 -575,000 deaths occurred, and when there were cases of disability and death resulting from the H1N1 vaccine, The Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) questioned the W.H.O.’s handling of the 2009 swine flu pandemic, saying its recommendation to stockpile antivirals and vaccines wasted public funds.  PACE also concluded there was “overwhelming evidence that the seriousness of the pandemic was vastly overrated by the W.H.O., and that the drug industry had influenced the organizations decision making”.  A joint investigation by the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) said that there were serious conflicts of interest between the W.H.O. who proposed heavy vaccinations, and the pharmaceutical companies which created them.   

Further evidence of the sordid relationship between the W.H.O. and a pharmaceutical company was a 2019 congressional report that concluded Purdue Pharma had influenced WHO’s opioid guidelines.  In case you missed it, Purdue Pharma is now bankrupt from lawsuits after promoting its opioid painkiller OxyContin so vigorously it helped ignite the opioid epidemic resulting in an average of 50,000 deaths each of the past few years from overdosing. 

On October 18^th, 2019, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation teamed with The John Hopkins Center for Health Security, The World Economic Forum and GAVI to host Event 201 which was a “fictional virtual pandemic event involving a coronavirus”.  While the W.H.O. did not participate in this, what an extraordinarily odd coincidence that this was done just a few months before the Covid-19 pandemic started. 

Final Thoughts

Assuming the best means that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation believes that working with various agencies such as the World Health Organization to propose mass vaccination programs will save millions of lives world-wide.  Assuming the worst acknowledges that monetary contributions buys influence and there may be a conflict of interest between the W.H.O. and their financial benefactors having investments in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies that would be used for vaccines.   Has the W.H.O.’s prime directive to become a facilitator for the pharmaceutical company’s vaccine industry?  What health initiatives would the W.H.O. be focusing on if not for the hundreds of millions of dollars contributed by those interests?  For reasons I could only speculate on, the news media relies heavily upon the recommendations of the W.H.O. as the ultimate arbiter for medical advice.  Facebook and YouTube have recently censored oppositional content from doctors and scientists because it was contrary to the recommendations of the W.H.O.  

There are seven pharmaceutical companies rushing to produce over a billion doses of a Covid-19 vaccine under Operation Warp Speed.  With that in mind, it behooves us to understand the risks to rush a vaccine. We only need to look at what happened in 1976 when a swine flu broke out at Fort Dix NJ, when David Lewis a healthy 19-year-old died within hours of collapsing from the virus. It led to a frenetic push to develop and administer a vaccine to all Americans.  The program was stopped at 45 million people.  It turned out that the virus that took the life of David Lewis killed about 30 people, but the resulting vaccine caused 450 people to develop Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare form of paralysis and the vaccine program was discontinued before more could be injured.  It later resulted in 3.5 billion dollars in damages to those injured. At the time, Dr. Martin Goldfield a pathologist, was the assistant commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Health and he pleaded with the federal agencies to restrain from mass inoculation and to take a wait and see approach. His recommendation was over-ruled and although the side effects from the vaccine ultimately vindicated his views, he suffered professionally because of a reluctance to follow the prevailing vaccination agenda.  To be fair to the vaccine debate, it seems that those who were vaccinated seemed to have better immunity to the more recent 2009 Swine flu.  Despite this, vaccine safety should be a rigorous process and in the coming months when the first vaccines become available, I would emphasize a cautious approach to anyone who is considering getting a vaccine despite any deflection of fear by the W.H.O., or any other health agency or official. 

Update

Last week, AstraZeneca stalled their Covid-19 vaccine program because one of the participants developed a severe reaction called transverse myelitis, which can resemble Multiple Sclerosis and can cause paralysis.  The 37-year old healthy woman from England experienced weakness, diminished motor function and pain in her arms.  And yesterday Johnson and Johnson stalled their Covid-19 vaccine because one of their participants came down with an unexplained illness. 

Are you positive you are positive?

The news abounds with reports of new cases of Covid-19 throughout the world based on RT-PCR testing.  Just this past Sunday September 12^th, the U.S. and Brazil both reported approximately 45,000 cases and about 1000 deaths from Covid-19, indicating about a 2% fatality rate.  Israel has stiffened its lockdown with 150,000 case positives and approximately 1000 deaths as well for a fatality rate of less than 1%. 

Kary Mullis PhD in biochemistry won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1993 for inventing the RT-PCR testing that is being used to detect Covid-19 “cases” today.  The technique finds a fragment of genetic material (DNA) and doubles it through repeated cycles amplifying the material to see if there is an appreciable amount of a fragment of the DNA of the virus. However, Covid-19 is an RNA virus. How does an RNA virus get converted to DNA for validation through RT-PCR testing and what potential problems could arise from this testing?   

When a nasal or saliva swab is used for testing it will contain hundreds if not thousands of bacteria and viruses all of which contain RNA and DNA including corona viruses from the common cold that could sabotage the accuracy of the test.  It will also have DNA of the person being tested...

Pasteur vs Bechamp

In the 1800’s there were two contemporary French scientists whose research contributed mightily to our views of how medicine and the public approach an infection or a health crisis like the pandemic we are seeing today. 

Our airwaves are filled with talk about immunology, viral shedding, PCR testing, and protocols such as social distancing and mask wearing requirements as a result from the emergence of the Covid-19 virus.  In large measure we have Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) to credit for this.  Pasteur is credited with the germ theory of disease.  This theory says that there are fixed, external germs (or microbes) which invade the body and cause a variety of separate, definable diseases.  To get well, you need to identify and then kill whatever made you sick.  Pasteur’s “monomorphic” germ theory required drugs, surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy as well as vaccines to keep germs at bay.

Claude Bernard (1813-1878), along with a more brilliant contemporary Antoine Bechamp (1816-1908) who built upon Bernard’s work developed his own theory of health and disease which revolved around “pleomorphism” which in contrast to Pasteur, contended that there were small particles in every plant and animal cell (microzymas) that could change form, function and create toxicity when the terrain of the body was in an unhealthy state.  Bechamp’s Biological Terrain theory also naturally becomes vulnerable to external harmful microzyma or germs, but he saw germs as opportunistic to a weakened terrain.  Bechamp’s biological terrain theory sees our bodies as mini-ecosystems, or biological terrains in which nutritional status, level of toxicity and pH or acid/alkaline balance, exercise, and fresh air play key roles in health.  Not surprisingly, Bechamp argued strenuously against vaccines asserting that “the most serious disorders may be provoked by the injection of living organisms into the blood”.  However, Pasteur and his like-minded contemporary Robert Koch won the propaganda war favoring the germ theory and what eventually became the foundation of medical thought including the widespread use of patented medications and vaccines.  

However, even though Pasteur and Bechamp were adversaries throughout their lives, it is known that Pasteur on his death bed said, “Le microbe n’est rien, le terrain est tout.” (The microbe is nothing, the terrain is everything). 

Breathe Deep

When taking a deep breath in, it is a common mistake that people lift their shoulders and expand their chest to do so. This method is not efficient and if done repeatedly would result in feelings of anxiousness especially if you were in a situation where you were finding it difficult to breathe such as with asthma or if you had a lung infection.  The more natural and efficient breathing technique would result in the expansion of your abdomen on inhalation.  This would indicate the diaphragm is lowering to help the expansion of the lungs downward to fill with air. Conversely, the stomach would move back inward when exhaling, and no movement of the shoulders or chest would occur. 

There are two techniques that can help you get the air you need without working so hard.  Pursed lips breathing and diaphragmatic (also called belly or abdominal) breathing.  Pursed lips breathing helps you focus, slow your breathing down and stay calm. 

Pursed lips breathing should be used during and after....                    

We are in mid-June, the lockdown restrictions in N.J. are easing, and businesses will be opening with certain modifications to protect against further spreading of Covid-19 in a second wave of infections. 

Amid these positive changes, some troubling facts have come to light in the past few weeks about 1. The statistical analysis used to justify the lockdown, 2. The sudden disparaging attack on the drug Hydroxychloroquine and 3. Operation Warp Speed - the rush for a Covid-19 vaccine.

1. Neil Ferguson

You may not know his name but he is the lead scientist at the Imperial College London and it was his team and his computer epidemiological modeling coding that sparked the prediction of millions of deaths that would occur from Covid-19 if a complete lockdown by governments across the globe didn’t occur.  Specifically, he predicted 500,000 deaths in the U.K. and 2.2 million deaths in the U.S.  His coding analysis was withheld for six weeks...

Glutathione. A treatment for Coronavirus?

On March 22^nd, a 48-year old Brooklyn woman Josephine Bruzzese woke up with a fever, body aches, dry cough and trouble breathing.  She had lost her ability to smell and taste.  Her family rushed her to NYU Langone Hospital-Brooklyn in Sunset Park.  At the time there were no coronavirus tests available and the hospital sent her home as a suspected case of Covid-19 with an antibiotic azithromycin, and the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine both of which helped, but she still had difficulty breathing.  Luckily, her son James who was in his second year of a 7-year program to get a medical degree thought to call a well-known complementary physician Dr. Richard Horowitz who had treated his sister and asked him for advice.  The advice was for his mother to take a large dose of 2000 milligrams of glutathione.  Josephine said that within an hour she felt relief and after five days of this treatment she was better.  Dr. Horowitz has written up this case and another similar case with a man in his 50’s in the journal “Respiratory Medicine Case Reports”.  This story was reported in the New York Post on May 9^th, 2020. 

Why Glutathione?

In response to an infection, our bodies produce inflammatory cytokines that could potentially escalate and overwhelm us and even kill us if not for the antioxidant capabilities of quenching this reaction.  Probably the most important antidote for this is glutathione.  Made up of three amino acids, (cysteine, glycine and glutamine) our bodies assemble these three amino acids into glutathione which can

Coronavirus. Testing 1-2-3 

It was barely six weeks ago on March 1^st, that the CDC claimed that only 15 Americans were sick with the coronavirus.  Clearly this was an illusion and the virus was already everywhere.  Some estimates say that there were already 10,000 Americans that had been infected.  Now here in mid-April and we just passed 600,000 cases of infection and close to 24,000 deaths here in the U.S.  In these confusing times important questions about testing and statistical analysis should be paramount in understanding what is going on. New York seems to be the epicenter for infections in the U.S., but New York has also tested 13x more people on a per capita basis than any other state.  California, with its large population base has completed fewer tests per capita than the country’s next five largest states. We can’t be getting clear data if smaller states such as Massachusetts and Washington are showing high outbreaks due to wider testing, and more populous states such as Texas and California show less of an outbreak with less testing.  Clearly, testing is the heart of the problem regarding an analysis of what exactly our country has been dealing with and how we can move forward without fear. 

The standard recommended testing utilizes a long nasal turbinate swab test to the nasopharyngeal area (the back of the nasal cavity) which is then tested for the virus’s RNA by a method called PCR (polymerase chain reaction) that can pick up genetic material of the virus. In most circumstances results come back within 8-24 hours. Abbott labs has a device that has a much quicker turnaround time.  In as little as 5 minutes a positive can be determined and within 13 minutes a negative.  No test is 100% accurate, the nasal turbinate test even when performed correctly by a medical professional has an accuracy rate like the Rapid Influenza Diagnostic Tests (RIDTs) which run about 50%-70% accurate.  More than 70 companies have signed up to sell serology tests or “at home antibody tests” which typically use a finger-prick of blood on a test strip to identify people who either have the virus or have developed immunity to it. Rutgers University just got FDA approval for a simple saliva test they developed that can be done to see if you are infected or over your infection.