Lose Them Pounds

Every year, 1.6 million to 3.8 million cases of mild traumatic brain injury (MTBI) related to sports are estimated to occur in the U.S.1 Concussions are one example of an MTBI. They occur when a bump, blow or jolt to the head or body causes the head and brain to move back and forth rapidly. The jarring movement can stretch and damage brain cells while also leading to chemical changes in the brain.2

The National Football League is well-acquainted with concussions, as it’s estimated that 0.41 of them occur during every NFL game.3 For those not involved in competitive sports, concussions may occur due to falls,4 car accidents or other injuries.

As the dangers of concussions, especially repeated ones, have become well-known, research into their causes and effects has increased, with one study showing that most concussions and repetitive head impact exposures among college football players occur not during games but during preseason training and football practices.5

This has prompted calls for prevention strategies and education, as concussions have serious implications for long-term neurological health. Jay Cutler, a former quarterback who played in the NFL for 12 seasons with the Bears, Broncos and Dolphins, is now facing the repercussions of repeated concussions; he’s sharing the natural options he’s turning to for hope of recovery.6

Repeated Concussions Can Lead to Brain Disease

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a progressive brain disease that was once believed to affect primarily boxers but is now known to occur in all types of contact sports and the military7 — any activity that leads to repeated concussions puts you at risk. According to the Concussion Legacy Foundation:8

“In CTE, a protein called tau misfolds and malfunctions, causes other proteins to misfold, and sets off a chain reaction where this malfunctioning tau slowly spreads throughout the brain, killing brain cells. CTE has been seen in people as young as 17, but symptoms do not generally begin appearing until years after the onset of head impacts.”

Early symptoms, which may begin as early as the patient’s 20s, include mood and behavior changes, progressing to:9

Problems with impulse control
Aggression
Mood swings

Depression
Paranoia
Anxiety

Problems with sleep
Short-term memory loss
Confusion

Impaired judgment
Dementia

CTE doesn’t typically occur after one or two concussions. Most individuals affected have had hundreds or thousands of blows to the head, including not only concussions but also many lesser impacts that don’t cause “full-blown” concussions, but which often are the biggest factor.10 Cutler fits the description of those most at risk of CTE and has stated, “CTE, it’s coming at some point.”11

“I’ve damaged enough things and brain parts and heart and everything in my life, if I make it to 80, or anything after that, I’ll be happy,” he said … “I would say definitely my memory isn’t the same as it was five years ago.

The amount of concussions I’ve had are probably in the double digits. It’s gonna catch up to me at some point. I’m just trying to delay it as much as possible.”

Omega-3s and Low Sugar for Brain Health

Knowing his risk of brain disease is high, Cutler is being proactive in doing all he can to protect his brain health. “Trying to cut sugar. Heavy amounts of fish oil have been tied to health in the brain,” Cutler said.12 Indeed, daily sugar consumption impairs spatial memory and inhibits neurogenesis in the hippocampus, a brain area involved in learning and memory processes.13

Animal studies have also shown that a high-sugar diet tends to alter inhibitory neurons in the prefrontal cortex,14 where decision-making and impulse control are centered. Aside from impaired impulse control and the inability to delay gratification, this alteration may also increase the risk of mental health problems.15

So, cutting down on sugar is a wise move on Cutler’s part. Even if you’re otherwise healthy, without Type 2 diabetes or glucose tolerance, consuming too much sugar, and the related higher blood sugar levels it causes, has a negative effect on cognition, possibly by causing structural changes in areas of the brain associated with learning.16

Adding in omega-3 fats is also wise, as omega-3 fats are vital to your brain. A study in the journal Neurology found “older women with the highest levels of omega-3 fats … had better preservation of their brain as they aged than those with the lowest levels, which might mean they would maintain better brain function for an extra year or two.”17

In addition, older adults with memory complaints who consumed docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), alone or in combination with eicosatetraenoic acid (EPA), had improved memory.18 EPA and DHA are two types of omega-3 fatty acids. Low DHA levels have been linked to memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease, and some studies suggest degenerative brain diseases may potentially be reversible with sufficient DHA.19,20

In terms of brain trauma, specifically, DHA may help the brain resist oxidative stress while preserving membrane homeostasis and function after injury. University of California at Los Angeles researchers suggested that dietary DHA may “counteract broad and fundamental aspects of TBI [traumatic brain injury] pathology that may translate into preserved cognitive capacity.”21 In addition, omega-3 fats may be beneficial for concussions by:22

Reducing biological markers of brain injury and cellular apoptosis
Protecting against reduced plasticity of neurons and impaired learning when used prior to a concussion
Maintaining genomic stability and cellular homeostasis

While Cutler mentioned fish oil, the ideal sources for EPA and DHA include cold-water fatty fish, like wild-caught Alaskan salmon, sardines, herring and anchovies. If you do not eat these fish on a regular basis, consider taking a krill oil supplement. You can learn more about why krill oil is preferable to fish oil in the infographic below.

>>>>> Click Here <<<<< Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide (NAD) for Brain Injury Cutler is also using nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) to help preserve his brain health — another solid option. NAD is a vital signaling molecule23 that’s also believed to play an important role in longevity. This is partly due to its role as an essential substrate for sirtuins,24 which are enzymes related to healthy aging, as well as its role in DNA repair. NAD modulates energy production and many enzymes and in so doing controls hundreds of processes in your body including the survival of cells and energy metabolism. NAD is influenced on a daily basis by what you eat, exercise levels and more, and also declines with age, leading to changes in metabolism and an increased risk of disease.25 NAD depletion is common in cases of neurodegeneration and concussions.26 In a mouse study, intracortical administration of nicotinamide riboside (NR), a precursor to NAD, helped protect against central brain injury.27 Cutler said:28 “I’m doing nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) therapy. I’m doing it through IVs now. NAD is in all the cells in your body, the mitochondria, the energy that pushes each cell to function. As you get older, you lose NAD. So I’m doing NAD therapy, which, at a core level, helps everything in your body. I’ve noticed that that’s definitely helped me. Anything I can do these days, I’m trying to get involved in.” A study is underway in college football players to determine if NR supplementation (750 milligrams a day for 12 weeks) affects the levels of NAD in the brain.29 If the results are favorable, it could pave the way for NR to be used as a preventive tool for managing sports-related concussion and TBI.30 Concussions Shouldn’t Be Ignored Even if you’re not a professional athlete, the repercussions of a concussion can be significant. Many people do not seek medical attention after falls or other blows to the head, but it’s important to be on the lookout for concussion symptoms, which can last for days to months:31 Unable to recall events prior to or after a hit or fall Appears dazed or stunned Forgets an instruction, is confused about an assignment or position, or is unsure of the game, score, or opponent Moves clumsily Answers questions slowly Loses consciousness (even briefly) Shows mood, behavior, or personality changes Headache or “pressure” in head Nausea or vomiting Balance problems or dizziness, or double or blurry vision Bothered by light or noise Feeling sluggish, hazy, foggy, or groggy Confusion, or concentration or memory problem Feeling off or “not right” Since additional head injuries after a concussion can lead to significant injury, avoid activities that may further injure your brain. Children and teens, for instance, should not return to sports until the concussion is fully healed. Be sure to get adequate sleep in the aftermath and avoid strenuous physical or mental activity. You may need to take more frequent breaks during work or schooling.32 More Natural Strategies for Concussions If you’ve had a concussion or know someone who does, “The Concussion Repair Manual: A Practical Guide to Recovering From Traumatic Brain Injuries” by Dr. Dan Engle, board-certified in psychiatry and neurology, may help. Among his top strategies for repairing neurological function in case of injury like a concussion are: Flotation therapy, which induces sensory deprivation; without environmental stimuli, your brain has more energy to put toward recuperation Omega-3 fats Vitamin D Melatonin, particularly if you’re having issues with sleep Photobiomodulation Pulsed electromagnetic field therapy Transcranial direct current stimulation Neurofeedback Hyperbaric oxygen treatment (HBOT), which involves exposure to high-pressure oxygen at different concentrations inside a pressure chamber, has also shown promise for improving brain injury33 and other neurological conditions.34 Traumatic brain injury is one of only 15 conditions for which U.S. insurance companies will pay for HBOT.35 If your concussion symptoms are severe or persistent, you should seek medical assistance, and keep in mind that your brain may still be recovering for months or even years following a concussion.36 Because of this, strategies to optimize your brain health in both the short and long term will be beneficial.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/07/22/jay-cutler-concussion-recovery.aspx

In the video above, German attorney and co-founder of the German Corona Extra-Parliamentary Inquiry Committee (Außerparlamentarischer Corona Untersuchungsausschuss1),2,3 Dr. Reiner Fuellmich,4 interviews Whitney Webb, an independent investigative reporter, about who’s really behind YouTube’s censorship of medical researchers and their published works.

He recounts how a medical doctor who after a great deal of trouble managed to get a risk-benefit analysis of mask mandates published in the Journal of Pediatrics. He created a short video about his findings, and within minutes of posting it to YouTube, the video was removed. What is actually going on here? Who is behind the censoring of peer-reviewed science? Who is trying to influence what?

Google Is Invested in the COVID ‘Vaccine’

As noted by Webb, YouTube’s parent company, Google, is directly invested in the AstraZeneca/Oxford COVID “vaccine.” While the AstraZeneca jab has been framed as a not-for-profit product, this is far from true. The developers of this gene modification tool are Adrian Hill and Sarah Gilbert with the Jenner Institute for Vaccine Research.

While the Jenner Institute is the official developer of the shot, the actual patents and royalty rights for the AstraZeneca shot are held by a private company called Vaccitech, which was founded by Hill and Gilbert. Vaccitech’s investors include:5,6,7,8

Google Ventures
The Wellcome Trust, which has longstanding links to the eugenics movement
The British government
BRAAVOS, a capital investment company set up by a Deutsche Bank executive. BRAAVO’s investment is partially hidden, as BRAAVO is the main shareholder of Oxford Science Innovation, which in turn is invested in Vaccitech
Chinese interests, including a Chinese bank branch and a drug company called Fosun Pharma

All of these investors stand to profit from this “vaccine” at some point in the near future, and Vaccitech has been quite open about the future profit potential with its shareholders, noting that the COVID-19 shot will most likely become an annual vaccine that is updated each season much like the seasonal flu vaccine.

Sure, AstraZeneca promised it would not make any profit from this COVID-19 vaccine, but there’s a time limit on this pledge. The not-for-profit vow expires once the pandemic is over, and AstraZeneca itself can decide when that is.

Google Is Protecting Its Financial Stakes

Since Google has a direct financial interest in AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 “vaccine,” is it any wonder that its subsidiaries, like YouTube, are censoring information that threatens the future profitability of these products? I would think not.

More broadly, Silicon Valley has been pushing to transform the health care system as a whole into a system based on telemedicine and artificial intelligence (AI). Essentially, they’re looking to replace doctors with AI-driven apps and the like.

“They’ve started to sort of reimagine health care as a way of taking control over people’s lives, telling them it’s for the benefit of the public, the collective, and also their personal health, whereas it’s really a way to implement these transhumanist or technocratic technologies under the guise of that being a health-related venture,” Webb says.

Google, of course, is intimately involved in all of this. They’re also partnered directly with the U.S. military. “So, the fact that they’re censoring stuff that goes against the narrative that they want to put forth on matters relating to public health … really shouldn’t surprise anyone,” Webb says.

Johnson & Johnson

Johnson & Johnson’s COVID shot, meanwhile, is manufactured by an American company called Emergent BioSolutions, which was previously called BioPort. According to Webb, BioPort was created as a spinoff of the British biodefence facility at Porton Down.

In her April 2020 article, “A Killer Enterprise: How One of Big Pharma’s Most Corrupt Companies Plans to Corner the COVID-19 Cure Market,”9 Webb details the scandal-ridden history of BioPort and its role in the 2001 anthrax attacks and the opioid crisis. The company was rebranded as Emergent BioSolutions in 2004. In the featured video, she says:

“They were intimately involved in what happened with the 2001 anthrax attacks, because it was basically the only way they were going to manage to save their mandatory — for U.S. military personnel — anthrax vaccine program,” she says.

“They’ve been involved in scandals really ever since then … but were chosen to manufacture [the Johnson & Johnson COVID shot] despite that, and the person they put in charge of quality control at this facility that was manufacturing these Johnson & Johnson vaccines has no experience in that at all, or really in the field of any sort of pharmaceutical development or chemistry.

His background is being head of military intelligence teams for the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. [He] is also an expert on Iran and North Korea …

More recently, the scandal that’s developed in the U.S. with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is that these batches were ‘ruined,’ they say basically unusable, and who knows what would have happened to people if that had been widely used …

Of course, they gave Johnson & Johnson a pass on that, and the blame has been placed on Emergent BioSolutions, but of course, nothing has really been done to them as a company. They’re intimately connected to the U.S. military and also to the CIA and a military contractor in Ohio, Battelle, which has a lot of ties to the anthrax attacks as well.”

Many Unanswered Questions

One of several deep concerns raised in this interview is whether there are any independent controls or reviews of the contents of these COVID jabs. What’s really in them? Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, German physician and epidemiologist, asks. They’re all used under emergency use authorization (EUA), which allows many standard controls to be bypassed.

Wodarg wonders whether the drug industry may simply be using the EUA to learn more about how the mRNA technology actually works, using the public as guinea pigs.

Normally, there are very strict rules and regulations surrounding the use of gene modification technology in humans. It’s only because they’re calling them “vaccines” that they were able to get the EUA that allows a lot of standard safety regulations to be bypassed. DARPA is heavily invested in transhumanist technologies for the use in soldiers, including brain-machine interfaces and other even more extreme ideas. They recently teamed up with the Wellcome Trust to create something called ‘Wellcome Leap,’ a rather unsettling movement to usher in transhumanism.

So, who controls what goes into these shots? Wodarg points out that some injections have been found to be nothing but saline, which suggests some people are actually getting a placebo injection, even though they’re being told they’re getting the real thing and they’ve not signed up for a formal trial.

Are “undercover” studies being performed that we’ve not been told about? There are many unanswered questions about what’s really going on with this COVID “vaccine” rollout. Webb comments:

“There definitely needs to be more attention given to the manufacturers of the vaccine because the developers ostensibly just develop the formula, which is then given to the manufacturers who actually produce and create the vaccine that is injected into people.

In the case of the U.S., the main manufacturer, not just for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, [but also] a few others, is that same company, Emergent BioSolutions, which has an awful track record. The Pentagon lost a lawsuit in 2004 where they were accused of using U.S. military personnel as lab rats in an experimental off-label use of that particular anthrax vaccine they were producing …

BioPort, now Emergent BioSolutions, have a lot of interlocking ties with the U.S. military, and also with the department of health and human services. In terms of the mRNA technology, I definitely agree that they seized on this opportunity to use it more widely. So, the hidden hand, I would argue, with the mRNA vaccine, is the U.S. military.

If you look at both the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA technology, those both really started with a significant investment in 2013, to both companies, from DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency], which is the advanced research branch of the U.S. military …”

Google’s ‘DARPA’ Program

DARPA, Webb says, is also heavily invested in transhumanist technologies for the use in soldiers, including brain-machine interfaces and other even more extreme ideas. They recently teamed up with the Wellcome Trust to create something called “Wellcome Leap,” a rather unsettling movement to usher in transhumanism.

As mentioned, the Wellcome Trust has deep roots in the eugenics movement, making the collaboration doubly disturbing. For more on this, read Webb’s investigative report “A ‘Leap’ Toward Humanity’s Destruction.”10

Now, the CEO of Wellcome Leap, Regina Dugan,11 worked at DARPA. She began working there in 1996 and between 2009 and 2012 served as its first female director. She was the one who greenlighted the 2013 DARPA funding to Pfizer and Moderna. In 2012, she left DARPA to create a DARPA equivalent for Google called Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP).

She later took on a similar project at Facebook, called Building 8. Wellcome Leap is basically slated to be a “global health DARPA,” Webb says, with all the transhumanist connotations that brings.

Getting back to the issue of undercover experiments taking place in an unsuspecting public, Wodarg is very concerned that COVID-19 “vaccine” makers may be experimenting with various amounts of lipid nanoparticles, which could help explain some of the acutely lethal effects, and perhaps even the transfer phenomenon that appears to be occurring between vaccinated individuals and unvaccinated ones.

Of course, we don’t know if secret comparison trials are being done without our knowledge. What we do know is that Moderna has been working on mRNA vaccine technology for many years, and had been unable to solve the nanolipid toxicity problem. When the dosage was too low, the mRNA didn’t stick around long enough for the drug to work, and when too high, it became toxic.

Despite years of work, they were never able to determine an effective nontoxic dose of mRNA in nanolipid. At least they never announced success. Now we’re supposed to take their word that they got it all figured out in less than a year? No, most likely, they never did figure it out and are using the cover of the pandemic to release an untested vaccine on the public under the guise of emergency use authorization.

Effective nontoxic dosing is probably what the public COVID vaccination campaign is going to help them determine, so that knowledge can then be applied to other gene modification drugs and vaccines. It’s convenient in the extreme, seeing how they are not accountable for any of the damage and death their products are causing, and their unremunerated human test subjects now number in the billions.

What Is the Vaccination Campaign Really About?

According to Fuellmich, all the evidence currently suggests we’re not actually dealing with a medical emergency that would warrant the use of these gene modification tools, so the question is, why are they being pushed in such an unprecedented manner? There must be a reason for it, and if it’s not to address a medical emergency then what is it? Webb weighs in, saying:

“The Silicon Valley push to remake health care, a key part of that is what they call precision medicine … They describe it as medications and vaccines and gene therapies targeted to the individual, i.e., targeted to an individual’s own genome. This is why we’re seeing this increase, under the guise of COVID-19 testing, of this huge effort to amass genetic data of people across the world.

Of course, a lot of this is actually being held by the same Silicon Valley companies. In the case of the Western [part of] the U.S., a lot of COVID-19 testing has been done by Verily, which is a Google subsidiary, which at the same time is trying to make their AI health care based on this genetic data.

A lot of those same technologies for precision medicine also come from the U.S., military [and] involve predictive diagnoses where they say, based on an AI algorithm, you are likely to have this disease, whether it’s COVID or cancer or anything else, before you actually show symptoms of it.

That’s being co-developed right now by Google in a part of the military called the Defense Innovation Unit. There are lots of other examples of this going on. And so, I would argue that the wide-ranging use of these RNA vaccines, and treating them as regular vaccines instead of … gene therapy, is a way to normalize the same type of Silicon Valley-based precision medicine that they want to be the new normal in healthcare around the world.”

As you begin to unravel the interconnected web of players involved in this global vaccination campaign, you keep coming back to two key movements: the transhumanist movement and the eugenics movement, which in the mid-1950s actually began to merge. As noted by Fuellmich, it appears we’re observing “the coming out of a very long-running strategy” to reduce the population and alter those who are left.

“Yes, absolutely,” Webb says. “If you look back to someone like Julian Huxley, the [founding] director general of UNESCO and former president of the British Eugenics Society, which still exists today. It’s called the Galton Institute. They didn’t rename until 1989.

Adrian Hill of the AstraZeneca vaccine spoke at their 100-year anniversary, celebrating 100 years of … eugenics. The Wellcome Trust houses their archive, which they think is a great use to medicine in general.

Going back to Julian Huxley, in 1946 he said we should make the unthinkable thinkable again. Roughly 10 years later, he coined the term transhumanism and said that gene editing as a eugenics science needed to be applied along with … efforts to merge humans with machines as a way to create a new human being or human being 2.0 …

Recently, one of their board members … [published] a book that was actually positively reviewed and the UK press about eugenics in the 21st century. Front and center are these gene editing ‘medicines’ … I think it’s about control, and, ultimately … about eugenics.”

Webb goes on to discuss the January 2020 meeting of technocratic elites in Davos, Switzerland, at which an Israeli keynote speaker, Yuval Harari, warned we are entering an age of digital dictatorship where humans “are no longer mysterious souls — we are now hackable animals,”12 through the use of genetic engineering and advances in brain machine interface and technology. Needless to say, he urged the World Economic Forum members to make wise use of this technology.

Fruitful Dissent

It’s a very interesting discussion so, if you have the time, please do listen to the whole interview. In closing, Webb suggests that probably the best, most effective form or resistance is counter-economics. To joint together with others to produce what you need to survive, independent of the centralized systems and corporations that seek to control us.

“The most powerful protest at this point is going to be an economic protest,” Webb says. “Governments around the world are just waiting for more violent protest or riots. They have lots of tools and plans to deal with those. For example, in the U.S., they’re launching a war on domestic terror that is obviously going to target dissidence, from the way it is written …

That is the type of response that they’re expecting, whereas a passive nonviolent protest of economic resistance and counter-economics, just becoming independent of these people trying to build these systems [of control], I think is the most effective way to really counter it at this point.

And I think a broader counter-economics movement, in addition to a larger movement of people not consenting and just not engaging with the system, is something they fear a lot more, [which] I think could be really powerful.”
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/07/22/google-censorship-due-to-vaccine-investment.aspx

An animal study1 published in July 2021 demonstrated one mechanism through which resveratrol positively affected skin wound healing. This is significant since chronic wounds are a considerable health challenge and affect more people, with a far greater financial health burden, than has been appreciated in the past.

One study2 published in 2018 aimed to determine the cost of chronic wound care for individuals who receive Medicare benefits. They used a retrospective analysis of the data to estimate that Medicare spends from $28.1 billion to $96.8 billion on wound care, including infection costs, in just one year.

The most expensive appeared to be surgical wounds, followed closely by diabetic foot ulcers. The researchers concluded that expenditures for wound care were “far greater than previously recognized.”3 The data revealed there were approximately 8.2 million people who “had at least one type of wound or infection.”

One paper4 published in 2019 evaluated the results of 28 studies and found analyses aligned with past research, identifying the vast majority of wounds as chronic leg ulcers, a common complication of Type 2 diabetes. Some of the identified factors that affect wound healing include hydration, blood circulation, obesity, smoking, nutrition and diabetes.5,6

As discussed below, resveratrol addresses several of the factors that have a negative impact on wound healing and may potentially reduce the number of chronic wounds and positively impact wound closure. Data from the most recent study7 are encouraging.

Resveratrol May Promote Wound Healing

Researchers have been investigating skin healing properties of resveratrol for years. The focus of study has moved from demonstrating that resveratrol has a positive impact on wound healing to trying to identify the specific mechanisms through which the positive effects occur.

Resveratrol has demonstrated the ability to increase granulation and wound healing in animal studies,8 and has demonstrated improvement in cutaneous healing, scarring and photoaging in a review of 41 studies.9

In 2020, a lab study10 demonstrated that resveratrol increased mesenchymal stem cell secretion of growth factors that improved impaired wound healing in a dose-dependent manner. In the same year, authors of another paper proposed that after reviewing the benefits of resveratrol on the skin, they believed the:11

“Evidence suggests that topical resveratrol could be a valuable alternative not only for daily skin care, but also for the prevention and treatment of various cutaneous disorders.”

Topical administration of resveratrol in mice with Type 2 diabetes improved chemical responses that correlated with higher blood vessel density, which suggested that resveratrol could promote endothelial cell proliferation in those with diabetes.12

The 2021 study13 published in Laboratory Investigation, sought to analyze one pathway that resveratrol uses to regulate skin repair. They used both a lab model and an animal wound healing model, through which they evaluated cell viability and apoptosis. The aim was to measure the correlation between microRNA-212 (miR-212) and caspase 8 (CASP8).

CASP8 are cysteine protein cases that are involved in apoptosis and cytokine processing.14 miR-212 are single strand, noncoding RNA molecules that play a role in regulating gene expression.15

The researchers measured the wound area to determine the effectiveness of resveratrol on healing. They also found that it promoted cell proliferation and migration by increasing miR-212. When used to treat miR-212 knockdown mice, the wound healing was reduced. The researchers found this suggested that resveratrol:16

“… facilitates cell proliferation and migration in LPS-treated HaCaT cells and promotes skin wound-healing in a mouse model by regulating the miR-212/CASP8 axis.”

Neuroprotective Effects Support Brain Health

The compound resveratrol is found naturally in the skin of grapes, blue and purple berries and dark chocolate.17 Evidence suggests it can cross the blood-brain barrier.18 This is a natural barrier your body uses to protect the brain from substances that may have a toxic effect on the central nervous system.

Since resveratrol can cross the blood-brain barrier it may help regulate brain inflammation, which is a significant factor in the development of many neurodegenerative diseases.19 According to a report from Georgetown University Medical Center,20 giving resveratrol to individuals with Alzheimer’s helps restore the blood-brain barrier integrity and reduces the ability of harmful immune molecules to infiltrate the brain tissue.

By slowing the inflammation of the brain cells, it slowed the cognitive decline of individuals, as compared to a matched group of placebo-treated patients with Alzheimer’s. Another animal study involving resveratrol had interesting effects, including increased aerobic activity and running time, protection against diet-induced obesity and insulin resistance, regulated metabolic function and stable health.21

Improvements in aerobic activity and reduction in insulin resistance and obesity are also neuroprotective. Resveratrol was found to suppress inflammatory effects in certain brain cells by inhibiting different proinflammatory cytokines and key signaling molecules.22 Later, another group of scientists confirmed the anti-inflammatory properties have neuroprotective effects.23

There’s also solid data that it helps to clear out the plaque in your brain that leads to Alzheimer’s disease. One study published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry found resveratrol to exert “potent anti-amyloidogenic activity.”24

A Chinese animal study25 also found that resveratrol can lower the risk for vascular dementia, the second most common form of dementia after Alzheimer’s.26 Unlike Alzheimer’s, vascular dementia results from impaired blood flow. One study27 in 2010 found the single dose may improve blood flow to the brain, following scientists’ findings in 2017:28

“… resveratrol suppresses vascular smooth muscle cell proliferation, promotes autophagy, and has been investigated in the context of vascular senescence.

Pre-clinical models unambiguously demonstrated numerous vasculoprotective effects of resveratrol. In clinical trials, resveratrol moderately diminished systolic blood pressure in hypertensive patients, as well as blood glucose in patients with diabetes mellitus.”

Other studies29 showed it also activates autophagy and inhibits neuronal apoptosis, working to improve cognitive function.30 A human study in 2020 showed that:31

“… regular consumption of resveratrol can enhance cognitive and cerebrovascular functions in postmenopausal women, with the potential to slow cognitive decline due to ageing and menopause.”

Resveratrol Improves Bone Density, Blood Sugar and Immunity

Evidence suggests resveratrol has many other health benefits. Studies have demonstrated it has anti-inflammatory, cardioprotective, antioxidant, antiaging and chemoprotective properties.32 Additional blood flow to the brain has demonstrated it can improve learning,33 mood and memory.34

One 2019 study35 published in the journal Nutrients also finds it helps prevent chronic diseases or progression of chronic diseases through several immune pathways. The researchers wrote:36

“… resveratrol regulates immunity by interfering with immune cell regulation, proinflammatory cytokines’ synthesis, and gene expression … it targets sirtuin, adenosine monophosphate kinase, nuclear factor- ?B, inflammatory cytokines, antioxidant enzymes along with … gluconeogenesis, lipid metabolism, mitochondrial biogenesis, angiogenesis, and apoptosis.

Resveratrol can suppress the toll-like receptor (TLR) and pro-inflammatory genes’ expression. The antioxidant activity of resveratrol and the ability to inhibit enzymes involved in the production of eicosanoids contribute to its anti-inflammation properties.”

The immune-boosting potential has spawned an outgrowth of research into the possible effect it may have on cancers.37 Researchers wrote some of the mechanisms resveratrol uses that may alter the immune system include reducing the effects of mitochondrial damage, diminishing abnormal T-cell activation and boosting natural killer cells.38

Resveratrol also has an effect on your bone density and quality of bone. In postmenopausal women, osteoporosis is a widespread and serious condition. As bones become more fragile and porous, they are at greater risk of fracture. Of all people over age 50, approximately 50% of women and 25% of men may suffer a fracture in the years to come.39

One study40 from the University of Newcastle in New South Wales found improvements in bone density in postmenopausal women who were given resveratrol. The participants took 75 milligrams (mg) twice daily or a placebo for 12 months. Bone density was measured with dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry scans, commonly called DEXA scans.

One author in the study said the modest increase at the femoral neck resulted in improvements and “a reduction in the 10-year probability of major fracture risk.”41 Doctors prescribe replacement hormones and bisphosphonates to treat osteoporosis but, as mentioned in a study in Nutrients,42 their side effects can be so dangerous that they may outweigh the benefits.

The compound has also been found to improve blood sugar in those with Type 2 diabetes.43 After just eight weeks of supplementation, fasting blood sugar declined, high-density lipoproteins increased, and insulin levels improved.

The study was done on 71 overweight patients with Type 2 diabetes and a body mass index between 25 and 30. The participants received either 1,000 mg per day of trans-resveratrol or methylcellulose (placebo) for eight weeks. A second study with 56 participants who had Type 2 diabetes and coronary heart disease found similarly encouraging results. The researchers concluded:44

“Resveratrol reduced fasting glucose, insulin and insulin resistance and significantly increased insulin sensitivity when compared with the placebo. Resveratrol also significantly increased HDL-cholesterol levels and significantly decreased the total-/HDL-cholesterol ratio when compared with the placebo.”

Seek a Healthy Source of Resveratrol

Resveratrol is a polyphenol designed to increase the lifespan of the plant by helping it resist disease and stressors related to changes in the climate, such as too much ultraviolet light. However, while grapes are a source of resveratrol, you’ll not get the neuroprotective and antiaging benefits by drinking red wine.

Gregorio Valdez, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute. He explained that the resveratrol in wine is in such small amounts that you can’t drink enough of it to get the benefits.45 Additionally, as I’ve written before, alcohol has several significant negative effects on your health, including sleep, brain aging and damage to your DNA.

One way to access the benefits of resveratrol is by eating muscadine grapes, which contain the highest concentration among foods, especially in the skin. Mulberries and blueberries are other good sources.

Limit your intake to one-half cup per day, however, because fruit also contains fructose. A whole food resveratrol supplement containing bits of muscadine grape skin is another option.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/07/21/resveratrol-can-help-repair-skin-damage.aspx

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has been declared one of the top 10 global public health threats to humanity,1 and it didn’t disappear once the COVID-19 pandemic appeared. Instead, it’s gotten worse, as infection control measures and hand hygiene using antimicrobial gels have become ubiquitous.

AMR causes about 700,000 deaths globally every year, but researchers estimated in mid-2020 that an additional 130,000 AMR deaths would occur in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.2 The number of AMR deaths will likely surpass the number of COVID-19 deaths by at least threefold — annually — by 2050,3 with some estimates suggesting AMR deaths may reach as high as 10 million deaths per year.4

Prior to the pandemic, antimicrobial stewardship programs5 had been set up worldwide to help stop the inappropriate use of antimicrobials in hospitals, long-term care facilities and other settings, but a review by scientists with Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences in Iran, published in Frontiers in Microbiology, predicts that an overuse of antibiotics, biocides and disinfectants to fight COVID-19 may “raise disastrous effects.”6 Further, the overuse of antibiotics may also be directly harming immune response.

Antibiotics Given to COVID-19 Patients ‘Just in Case’

Now remember that COVID-19 is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which means antibiotics are useless against it. Despite this, antibiotics have been used prophylactically throughout the pandemic for COVID-19 patients, typically using the logic that it could prevent bacterial co-infections.

However, the rate of secondary bacterial co-infections has generally been low, while the use of antibiotics has remained high. This isn’t a case of antibiotics being used strategically for patients who develop bacterial infections, but rather using them “just in case.”7 In a study of 38 Michigan hospitals, 56.6% of patients with COVID-19 were given antibiotics early in their stay, but only 3.5% of them turned out to have a bacterial infection.8

“For every patient who eventually tested positive for both SARS-Cov2 and a co-occurring bacterial infection that was present on their arrival, 20 other patients received antibiotics but turned out not to need them,” Dr. Valerie Vaughn, the study’s lead author, said.9 Other studies have revealed similar signs of rampant antibiotic overuse.

In a study of 99 COVID-19 patients in Wuhan, China, 71% received antibiotic treatment, but only 1% had bacterial co-infections.10 Overall, it’s estimated that 1% to 10% of patients with COVID-19 contract a bacterial co-infection,11 yet antibiotics remained a mainstay of treatment for the majority of cases.

Antibiotics Considered ‘Routine’ Part of COVID-19 Treatment

Despite decades of efforts to reduce the unnecessary use of antibiotics, one of the largest studies of antibiotic use in hospitalized COVID-19 patients revealed that such drugs are being used indiscriminately and inappropriately for COVID-19. More than half (52%) of the approximately 5,000 patients included in the study received antibiotics, and in 36% of cases, more than one antibiotic was given.12

Most of the time, in 96% of cases, the antibiotics were given before a bacterial infection was confirmed, either at admission or within the first 48 hours of hospitalization. As it turned out, only 20% ended up actually having a suspected or confirmed bacterial infection for which the antibiotics would be indicated. The rest received them unnecessarily. The Frontiers in Microbiology researchers explained:13

“It is noteworthy to be highlighted that the inappropriate use of antibiotics could considerably and silently lead to AMR development during this global outbreak. Unfortunately, recent studies reveal that, in several countries, common and extensive use of antibiotic treatment for COVID-19 hospitalized patients is considered as a part of the routine treatment package.”

Even the World Health Organization made it clear that countries were at risk of the accelerated spread of AMR due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They cited data showing antibiotic use increased throughout the pandemic. About 79% to 96% of people who reported taking antibiotics didn’t have COVID-19 but were taking them in the hopes of preventing infection, even though antibiotics don’t work against viral infections.14

Antimicrobial Overuse Could Damage Immunity

Antibiotics can cause a number of serious adverse effects, a little-known one being damage to your mitochondria, which are genetically closely linked to bacteria.15 Your mitochondria are responsible for most of your cellular energy production and also play a role in antibacterial and antiviral immune responses — and they’re an off-site target of certain antibiotics,16 which are known to inhibit mitochondrial activity, DNA synthesis and biogenesis.

“Thus, antibiotic therapy could be an important and not well appreciated cause of mitochondrial dysfunction. This in turn may weaken your immune response against the COVID-19 infection,” according to the featured review.17 In April 2020, scientists called for “urgent thinking out of the box” when it comes to antibiotics against COVID-19, as they noted:18

“ … mitochondria are vulnerable to antibacterial treatments, interrupting their physiology. Inhibition of these processes by antibiotics might render the immune system less capable of fighting acute COVID-19 viral infections.”

Concerning Overuse of Biocides and Disinfectants

The COVID-19 pandemic is poised to send antimicrobial-resistant disease sky high, as along with antibiotics overuse came the excessive and liberal use of antimicrobial products like household and industrial disinfectants, hand sanitizers and other cleaners.

The ramifications are immense and only beginning to be understood. There are potential adverse effects to human health from inhaling disinfectants, as such chemicals are known to accumulate in the lungs, liver, kidneys, stomach, brain and blood.19 Exposures were certainly elevated during the pandemic for many people, who were exposed to disinfectants by inhalation and oral routes, as well as via the skin and eyes.

There are also significant environmental concerns due to the “unusual release and dissemination of higher concentrations of biocide-based products into the surface and underground waters and also wastewater treatment systems” during the pandemic.20 When disinfectants and biocides enter the environment, they can wipe out beneficial bacterial species that are keeping drug-resistant microorganisms in check.

“[I]f the biocide concentrations reach the sub-minimum inhibitory concentration (sub-MIC), this event may augment the selective pressure, boost the horizontal gene transfer (HGT), and drive the evolution of AMR,” scientists warn.21

A team from the University of Plymouth in England also conducted a risk assessment to determine the potential environmental impact of prescribing COVID-19 patients antibiotics, which revealed, “The data for amoxicillin indicate a potential environmental concern for selection of AMR … ”22 The team urged such assessments be carried out in the future to keep tabs on the potentially disastrous effects of pandemic prescribing habits on AMR.23

Gut Microbiome Influences Immune Response to COVID

Antibiotics disturb your gut microbiome, which has far-reaching effects on your overall health, including your immune system’s ability to fight COVID-19 — marking yet another way that indiscriminate antibiotics usage is counterproductive.

When researchers with The Chinese University of Hong Kong analyzed gut microbiome compositions from 100 patients with COVID-19, they found gut commensals known to modulate the immune system were low compared to people without the infection.24 The makeup of patients’ gut bacteria — including both the volume and variety — affected the severity of COVID-19 infection as well as the immune response.25

Imbalanced gut microbiome could also contribute to the inflammatory symptoms associated with “long COVID,” in which symptoms persist for months after infection. According to the study:26

“In light of reports that a subset of recovered patients with COVID-19 experience persistent symptoms such as fatigue, dyspnea and joint pains, some over 80 days after initial onset of symptoms, we posit that the dysbiotic gut microbiome could contribute to immune-related health problems post-COVID-19.”

In the study, 50% to 75% of patients received antibiotics, while less than 7% had bacterial infections. While the researchers found no difference in outcomes with or without antibiotics, the drugs were not linked to improved patient outcome and, they noted, “it is still possible that a higher prevalence of antibiotic administration in severe and critical patients could worsen inflammation.”27

Isolation Disturbs Your Immune Response

Of all the negative effects of social isolation endured during the pandemic, those experienced by your immune system may be the last that come to mind, despite being among the most significant for your future health. What does staying home have to do with your immune system?

It alters your 24-hour light/dark cycle, on which your body is built to respond. With more time spent indoors, you have less sunlight exposure and less opportunity to produce vitamin D, which activates macrophages in your lungs that act as a first line defense against respiratory infections, among other immune activities.28

It’s true that taking vitamin D supplements can somewhat compensate for this, provided your levels are optimized, but other ill effects of lockdown are less easily remedied. Take exercise, another crucial component of a well-oiled immune response, that can reduce stress levels and diseases like heart disease and Type 2 diabetes, which are linked to worsened outcomes from COVID-19.

But even beyond that, staying indoors means you lose out on regular exposures to the natural world, which come with their own set of immune benefits. Trees release phytoncides, which people inhale and are known to alter natural killer cells.29 This is why, in Japan, shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing, is said to enhance immune function30 — but it’s difficult to spend much time immersed in the forest if you’re locked down at home.

The other factor that cannot be ignored is the lack of exposure to everyday dirt and germs that is missed when people stay home, socially distanced and sanitized. “Our immune system needs a job,” Dr. Meg Lemon, a Denver dermatologist, told The New York Times. “We evolved over millions of years to have our immune systems under constant assault. Now they don’t have anything to do.”31

What is perhaps most disturbing is that this comment was made in March 2019 — prior to the pandemic. Now, it’s exponentially worse, and your immune system is likely missing out on interactions with bacteria and other microorganisms that teach it, train it how to respond and keep it primed throughout your life.

Without proper “training” at regular intervals, your immune system can overreact when triggered by ordinarily harmless substances, leading to allergies and inflammation. Might a generation of children, kept isolated and masked, have immune repercussions when exposed to ordinarily routine childhood viruses post-pandemic?

Already, cases of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which normally circulates in the winter, have popped up in the summer months, suggesting possibly increased immunological susceptibility.32

New Antibiotics Are Unlikely to Save Us

There are 43 antibiotics in clinical development, but none of them shows much promise for solving rapidly rising AMR, as innovation is stagnant — most “new” antibiotics brought to the market are variations of drug classes that have been around since the 1980s. Further, according to WHO’s annual Antibacterial Pipeline Report, antibiotics currently in development are insufficient to tackle AMR:33

“The 2020 report reveals a near static pipeline with only few antibiotics being approved by regulatory agencies in recent years. Most of these agents in development offer limited clinical benefit over existing treatments, with 82% of the recently approved antibiotics being derivatives of existing antibiotic classes with well-established drug-resistance. Therefore, rapid emergence of drug-resistance to these new agents is expected.”

Also at issue, hospital reimbursement systems discourage the use of expensive new antibiotics, because they are only reimbursed up to a point. This means patients may be given older drugs that won’t work as well to protect the hospital from financial losses.

Legislation to reform this — the Developing an Innovative Strategy for Antimicrobial Resistant Microorganisms Act — has been introduced to help open up the use of new targeted antibiotics for superbug infections.34 Preserving the efficacy of existing antibiotics is also important, and agricultural antibiotics overuse cannot be ignored in this equation.

Worldwide, most antibiotics are used not for human illness or companion pets, but for livestock.35 Writing in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, researchers stated, “the ongoing pandemic is stretching the limits of optimal antibiotic stewardship”36 and called for an end to unnecessary use of antimicrobial agents.37

So, be sure you always avoid antibiotics unless they are absolutely necessary. Additionally, choosing organic foods, including grass fed meats and dairy products, can help you avoid exposure to antibiotic residues in the food supply, while also supporting food growers who are not contributing to AMR.

You’ll also want to be careful in your use of disinfectants and sanitizers, using them sparingly and only when truly necessary, which — if you’re outside of a hospital — will be hardly at all.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/07/21/covid-19-antibiotics-overuse.aspx

In the early months of 2020, many mainstream news media laughingly called concerns that there were more deaths reported from COVID than could be attributed to the disease a “death toll conspiracy”1 they said was led by conservative Republicans and “anti-vaxxers.”2 Yet, a few short months later, data confirm what many already knew: The number of people who died “from” COVID-19 were not the same as those who died “with” COVID-19.

In late 2020, I reported on several deaths3 that were originally counted as COVID-19, but were later retracted, for example, two deaths from gunshot wounds in Grand County, Colorado, and a motorcycle accident in Orlando, Florida. At the same time, the Freedom Foundation4 accused Washington State’s Department of Health of inflating the number of COVID deaths by up to 13%.

Although the governor denied the allegation, internal emails revealed in May 2020 that the Department of Health was counting deaths in their official COVID numbers that were not directly due to the virus.5 The high death count with COVID-19 was supported by the shameless way in which experts manipulated the PCR test they used to confirm the presence of the virus.

As I reported in 2020 and 2021, the high false positive rate with PCR test was due in considerable part to the recommended exorbitant cycle threshold. The cycle threshold refers to the maximum number of times doubling is allowed during the test. The higher the threshold, the greater the risk that a false positive will label healthy people as a “COVID-19 case.”

In reality, PCR testing is not a proper diagnostic tool even though it has been promoted as such. A rising number of COVID-19 cases from inaccurate PCR testing helped to support the death toll recorded from the virus. Recently, two counties in California have revised their numbers based on a reevaluation of the data.

Two California Counties Recount COVID Deaths

After an analysis of the data, Santa Clara and Alameda counties in California discovered there was a significant discrepancy in the number of people who died from COVID-19. The data didn’t change. The number of actual deaths didn’t change. But what authorities found was that 22% of the deaths recorded from COVID could not be attributed to the virus.6

Santa Clara County reported July 2, 2021, that the new numbers were generated by counting only those whose cause of death was from the virus and not counting people who had tested positive at the time of death. The county officials used this approach to determine the true impact COVID-19 had on their community.

The month before, in June 2021, Alameda County had also recounted deaths attributed to COVID-19 and registered a death toll drop by about 25%. University of California San Francisco professor of medicine and infectious disease expert Dr. Monica Gandhi believes that the CDC may soon ask all counties to recount their deaths from COVID-19 and the entire nation could see a drop in the death toll.7

Initially, California recorded anyone who died and who had tested positive for COVID-19 as having died from COVID-19. The newest count lists only those who have the virus as cause of death on the death certificate, as determined by the medical examiner.

Yet, despite this recount, based on the financial incentives to alter the death certificates and PCR testing that inaccurately labeled people as infected with the virus, the numbers may still not be an accurate representation of the number of people who died from the virus.

Financial Incentives Likely Inflated COVID Death Numbers

In April 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci brushed off questions that COVID-19 death counts were padded, claiming it was another “conspiracy theory” and should be ignored. A host of mainstream media also reported that suspicions that hospitals were over reporting in order to charge more money were pure conspiracy theories lacking a basis in reality.

Yet, firsthand testimony, including that of nurse Erin Olszewski, showed financial incentives were at the heart of overdiagnosis and mistreatment at a public Hospital in Queens, New York. I reported her shocking story in “Nurse on the Frontlines of COVID-19 Shares Her Experience.”

According to Olszewski, patients who tested negative were routinely listed as positive and quickly placed on ventilators, a largely inappropriate treatment that ended up killing virtually all of them. By August 2020,8 CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield admitted financial policies may have artificially inflated hospitalization rates and death toll statistics.

As reported in the Washington Examiner,9 hospitals have had a financial incentive to inflate coronavirus death, just as they do with deaths in other diseases. In response to a question before a House panel committee asked by Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer, R-Mo., about potential “perverse incentives” that hospitals might have to alter death certificates, Redfield said:10

“I think you’re correct in that we’ve seen this in other disease processes, too. Really, in the HIV epidemic, somebody may have a heart attack but also have HIV — the hospital would prefer the [classification] for HIV because there’s greater reimbursement.”

The Washington Examiner11 also reported that in August 2020 more than 3,000 people were removed from the death count in Texas after it was revealed they did not test positive but were only considered a probable case.

Are Experts Counting Actual Deaths Due to COVID?

The media also participated in a misrepresentation of reality, by equating a positive test result with being infected with the disease. The fact that a person tests positive does not equate to having COVID-19. The clinical diagnosis of COVID-19 is for someone who exhibits severe respiratory illness that is characterized by fever, coughing and shortness of breath.

If you are asymptomatic, you do not have COVID-19. The worst that can be said is that you’re infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. If you’re not actually ill, you don’t have the disease. This is one factor that differentiates a person who died from the illness compared to someone who died with a positive test result, meaning the cause of death was completely different, such as heart disease, automobile accident or a gunshot wound.

Past studies have also demonstrated a similar event in people who test positive for influenza but do not present with symptoms. One study published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine12 in 2014 evaluated five successive cohort years in England using strain-specific serology. The researchers found the influenza virus infected 18% of persons who were not vaccinated each winter.

They concluded the 2009 pandemic strain of influenza and seasonal influenza had a similarly high rate of asymptomatic infection. The author of an accompanying editorial wrote:13

“The findings reaffirm earlier reports that there are high rates of serological evidence of influenza infection without corresponding disease.

Hayward and colleagues report that roughly 20% of the community shows serological evidence of influenza infection each season, but that most infections (about 75%) are asymptomatic or at least so mild that they are not identified through weekly active surveillance for respiratory illness.”

Michael Yeadon, Ph.D., is a past vice president and chief scientific adviser of Pfizer. In an interview he talked about the number of deaths falsely attributed to COVID-19 in the U.K., saying “I’m calling out the statistics, and even the claim that there is an ongoing pandemic, as false,” noting that the definition of a “coronavirus death” in the U.K. is anyone who dies, from any cause, within 28 days of a positive COVID-19 test.

Were Total Deaths in 2020 Excessive?

In the U.S., it’s a similar story. December 30, 2020, I reported that as of December 22, 2020, the provisional total death count from all causes, according to the CDC, was 2,835,533. For comparison, the total number of deaths from all causes in 2018 was 2,839,20514 while in 2019 it was 2,854,838.15

By mid-2021, the total number of deaths recorded in 2020 was 3,389,991.16 While the number of deaths in 2020 was 535,133 more than the year before, they likely cannot all be attributed to COVID. For example, drug overdose deaths rose dramatically during 2020, and if those were erroneously counted as COVID like the motorcycle accidents and gunshot wounds, then they would inflate the COVID numbers dramatically.

While the rates have not yet been tabulated, the estimated percent of increase in drug deaths in the first eight months of 2020 as compared to the same period in 2019 ranged from less than 10% to greater than 60% depending on the state.17 Additionally, according to Yeadon and an article in The Guardian,18 some of the increased number of deaths in the U.K. in people aged 45 to 65 were mainly from heart disease, stroke and cancer.

These types of deaths suggest there was the higher number could be due to inaccessibility to routine medical care when people were either afraid of or discouraged from going to the hospital.

Conversely, COVID Vaccine Adverse Events Likely Underreported

As I wrote in “COVID Vaccine Deaths and Injuries Are Secretly Buried,” the reports of death and serious injuries from the COVID-19 shot have been mounting with breakneck rapidity. Those familiar with the historical vaccine injury rate agree we’ve never seen anything like it, anywhere in the world.

In the linked article, I reported that as of June 11, 2021, the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), had posted 358,379 adverse events. That number jumped to 438,440 events through July 7, 2021.19 This includes 9,048 deaths, 985 miscarriages, 3,324 heart attacks and 7,463 people disabled.

In the European Union’s database of adverse drug reactions from COVID shots, called EudraVigilance, there were 1,509,266 reported injuries, including 15,472 deaths as of June 19, 2021.20 EudraVigilance only accepts reports from EU members, so it covers only 27 of the 50 European countries.

Reports have poured in from around the world of people who died shortly after receiving the COVID-19 shot. In January 2021, Norway had already recorded 29 senior citizen deaths in the wake of their vaccine program21 and in Australia, two people died from blood clots after taking AstraZeneca’s COVID shot while only one has died from the disease this year.22

As I discussed in “CDC Caught Cooking the Books on COVID Vaccines,” the rising number of vaccine adverse events aren’t the only things being manipulated. To boost the appearance that the vaccine is effective, the CDC is using several strategies.
First, the cycle threshold has been significantly lowered from 4023 to 28,24,25 which will hide any breakthrough cases in those who have had the COVID shot. Next, the CDC no longer records a mild or asymptomatic infection in any person who has been vaccinated as a COVID case.

Now, the only cases that count in people who have had the shot are those that result in hospitalization or death.26 However, if you’re not vaccinated and have a mild case or test positive at a higher cycle threshold, you still count as a COVID case.27 As an example of how changing the analysis affects the statistics, as of April 30, 2021, the CDC had received a total of 10,262 reports of vaccine breakthrough infections.28

At the time they called this a “substantial undercount” since they were using a passive surveillance system that relies on voluntary reporting. However, 67 days later on July 6, 2021, the number of breakthrough cases was slashed to 5,186.29 This was done under the new guidelines that take only hospitalizations and deaths into account for vaccine breakthrough.

Do Your Own Risk-Benefit Analysis Before Deciding

In my most recent interview with Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, we discuss the acute, subacute and long-term risks for those who have accepted the COVID shot. Additionally, he outlines a strategic plan you can use to help protect your health if you or someone you know got the COVID shot and now have serious regrets.

You can see the interview and the strategies to help protect your health in “Might COVID Injections Reduce Lifespan?” For those who are still deciding, it’s important to do your own risk-benefit analysis based on your individual situation before making up your mind.

You can track the rate at which the total number of vaccine adverse events are being reported to the VAERS system on their website.30 They also publish the number of deaths, hospitalizations, Bell’s Palsy, heart attacks and life-threatening side effects being reported in the system in an easy-to-read graphic.

Additionally, it’s important to remember that the lethality of COVID-19 is actually surprisingly low. Data analysis has shown that for community-based people younger than 60, it is lower than the lethality of flu for those over 65.31

And, if you’re under the age of 40 your risk of dying is 0.01%. This means you have a 99.99 percent chance of surviving the infection. Since the mRNA vaccines are not designed to prevent infection and only reduce the severity of the symptoms, it begs the question — what is being protected?

I won’t tell anyone what to do, but I do urge you to take the time to review the science and weigh the potential risks and benefits before making a decision that may have permanent repercussions for the rest of your life.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/07/20/inflated-reporting-of-covid-deaths.aspx

Will COVID shots drive the mutation of SARS-CoV-2, creating ever more variants? Or are the mutations primarily occurring in unvaccinated people? In the video report above, The Last American Vagabond host dives into the scientific research to find out.

As noted by The Vagabond, unvaccinated Americans are actually in the majority, still, despite what you’re hearing on the news. Those saying “no” to participating in a medical gene modification experiment are not a small fringe group.

We are the majority, at just over half (51%) of the United States population over the age of 18, as of July 12, 2021. (More specifically, 56% have received one dose, and 49% are fully vaccinated, which for Moderna and Pfizer means having received two doses.1)

Based on the scientific evidence, the narrative that unvaccinated people are viral factories for more dangerous variants is simply false. Worse, it’s the complete opposite of the truth and hides the fact that mass vaccination may be putting us all in a far direr situation than necessary.

Vaccines Drive Viruses to Mutate

As explained in “Vaccines Are Pushing Pathogens to Evolve,” published in Quanta Magazine,2 “Just as antibiotics breed resistance in bacteria, vaccines can incite changes that enable diseases to escape their control.”

The article details the history of the anti-Marek’s disease vaccine for chickens, first introduced in 1970. Today, we’re on the third version of this vaccine, as within a decade, it stops working. The reason? The virus has mutated to evade the vaccine. The virus is also becoming increasingly deadly and more difficult to treat.

A 2015 paper3 in PLOS Biology tested the theory that vaccines are driving the mutation of the herpesvirus causing Marek’s disease in chickens. To do that, they vaccinated 100 chickens and kept 100 unvaccinated. All of the birds were then infected with varying strains of the virus. Some strains were more virulent and dangerous than others.

Over the course of the birds’ lives, the unvaccinated ones shed more of the least virulent strains into the environment, while the vaccinated ones shed more of the most virulent strains. As noted in the Quanta Magazine article:4

“The findings suggest that the Marek’s vaccine encourages more dangerous viruses to proliferate. This increased virulence might then give the viruses the means to overcome birds’ vaccine-primed immune responses and sicken vaccinated flocks.”

Vaccinated People Can Serve as Breeding Ground for Mutations

As noted by Reilly, before 2021, it was quite clear that vaccines push viruses to mutate into more dangerous strains. The only question was, to what extent? Now all of a sudden, we’re to believe conventional science has been wrong all along.

Here’s another example: NPR as recently as February 9, 2021, reported that “vaccines can contribute to virus mutations.” NPR science correspondent Richard Harris noted:5

“You may have heard that bacteria can develop resistance to antibiotics and, in a worst-case scenario, render the drugs useless. Something similar can also happen with vaccines, though, with less serious consequences.

This worry has arisen mostly in the debate over whether to delay a second vaccine shot so more people can get the first shot quickly. Paul Bieniasz, a Howard Hughes investigator at the Rockefeller University, says that gap would leave people with only partial immunity for longer than necessary.”

According to Bieniasz, partially vaccinated individuals “might serve as sort of a breeding ground for the virus to acquire new mutations.” This is the exact claim now being attributed to unvaccinated people by those who don’t understand natural selection.

It’s important to realize that viruses mutate all the time, and if you have a vaccine that doesn’t block infection completely, then the virus will mutate to evade the immune response within that person. That is one of the distinct features of the COVID shots — they’re not designed to block infection. They allow infection to occur and at best lessen the symptoms of that infection. As noted by Harris:6

“This evolutionary pressure is present for any vaccine that doesn’t completely block infection … Many vaccines, apparently, including the COVID vaccines, do not completely prevent a virus from multiplying inside someone even though these vaccines do prevent serious illness.”

In short, like bacteria mutate and get stronger to survive the assault of antibacterial agents, viruses can mutate in vaccinated individuals who contract the virus, and in those, it will mutate to evade the immune system. In an unvaccinated person, on the other hand, the virus does not encounter the same evolutionary pressure to mutate into something stronger. So, if SARS-CoV-2 does end up mutating into more lethal strains, then mass vaccination is the most likely driver.

COVID Variants Are More Similar Than You Think

Now, the fearmongering over variants is just that: fearmongering. So far, while some SARS-CoV-2 variants appear to spread more easily, they are also less dangerous. The Delta variant, for example, is associated with more conventional flu-like symptoms like runny nose and sore throat than the hallmark COVID-19 symptoms involving shortness of breath and loss of smell.7

In an interview for the documentary “Planet Lockdown,”8 Michael Yeadon, Ph.D., a life science researcher and former vice-president and chief scientist at Pfizer, pointed out the fraud being perpetrated with regard to variants. He actually refers to them as “simians,” because they’re near-identical to the original. And, as such, they pose no greater threat than the original.

“It’s quite normal for RNA viruses like SARS-CoV-2, when it replicates, to make typographical errors,” Yeadon explains. “It’s got a very good error detection, error correction system so it doesn’t make too many typos, but it does make some, and those are called ‘variants.’

It’s really important to know that if you find the variant that’s most different from the sequence identified in Wuhan, that variance … is only 0.3% different from the original sequence.

I’ll say it another way. If you find the most different variance, it’s 99.7% identical to the original one, and I can assure you … that amount of difference is absolutely NOT possibly able to represent itself to you as a different virus.”

Your immune system is a multifaceted system that allows your body to mount defenses against all sorts of threats. Parasites, fungi, bacteria and viruses are the main threat categories. Each of these invades and threatens you in completely different ways, and your immune system has ways of dealing with all of them, using a variety of mechanisms.

Whether you’re going to be susceptible to variants has very little to do with whether or not you have antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, because antibodies are not your primary defense against viruses, T cells are. What this means then, is that getting booster shots for different variants is not going to help, because these shots do not strengthen your T cell immunity.

The importance of T cells has been known for a long time, and their role in COVID-19 was confirmed early on in the pandemic. Scientists wanted to find out if patients who recovered from SARS-CoV-1, responsible for the SARS outbreak some 17 years ago, might have immunity against SARS-CoV-2. As it turns out, they did.

They still had memory T cells against SARS-CoV-1, and those cells also recognized SARS-CoV-2, despite being only 80% similar. Now, if a 20% difference was not enough to circumvent the immune system of these patients, why should you be concerned with a variant that is at most 0.3% different from the original SARS-CoV-2?

“When your government scientists tell you that a variant that’s 0.3% different from SARS-CoV-2 could masquerade as a new virus and be a threat to your health, you should know, and I’m telling you, they are lying,” Yeadon says.

“If they’re lying, and they are, why is the pharmaceutical industry making top-up [booster] vaccines? … There’s absolutely no possible justification for their manufacture.”

Mutations Are Good for Vaccine Business

Of course, by pushing fear of variants, vaccine makers ensure a steady supply of people willing to participate as guinea pigs in their for-profit business scheme. Pfizer plans to ask for EUA authorization for a third COVID booster shot in August 2021, Bloomberg reports.9

According to Pfizer’s head of research, Dr. Mikael Dolsten, initial data suggest a third dose of the current Pfizer shot can raise neutralizing antibody levels by anywhere from fivefold to 10-fold.10 The company is also working on variant-specific formulations.

Dolsten points to data from Israel, where Pfizer’s mRNA injection was used exclusively, which shows a recent uptick in breakthrough cases. This suggests protection starts to wane around the six-months mark. For now, the FDA is not recommending boosters,11 but that can change at any moment, and most likely will.

Pfizer recently announced it intends to raise the price on its COVID shot once the pandemic wanes,12 and during a recent investor conference, Pfizer’s chief financial officer Frank D’Amelio said there’s “significant opportunity” for profits once the market shifts to annual boosters.13

In an April 2021 article, The Defender reported expected profits from current COVID shots and boosters in coming years:14

Pfizer expects a minimum revenue of $15 billion to $30 billion in 2021 alone
Moderna expects sales of $18.4 billion in 2021; Barclays analyst Gena Wang forecasts the company’s 2022 revenue to be somewhere around $12.2 billion and $11.4 billion in 2023
Johnson & Johnson expects sales of $10 billion in 2021

Vaccine Treadmill Ahead

The way things have been going, it seems inevitable that we’re facing a vaccine treadmill, where new variants will “necessitate” boosters on a regular basis. Boosters will also drive the “need” for vaccine passports to keep track of it all. As reported by The Defender:15

“Annual COVID booster shots are music to the ears of investors. But some independent scientists warn16 that trying to outsmart the virus with booster shots designed to address the next variant could backfire, creating an endless wave of new variants, each more virulent and transmissible than the one before …

According to Rob Verkerk Ph.D., founder, scientific and executive director of Alliance for Natural Health International, variants can become more virulent and transmissible, while also including immune (or vaccine) escape mutations if we continue on the vaccine treadmill — trying to develop new vaccines that outsmart the virus.

Verkerk said ‘if we put all our eggs’ in the basket of vaccines that target the very part of the virus that is most subject to mutation, we place a selection pressure on the virus that favors the development of immune escape variants.”

Vaccinologist Dr. Geert Vanden Bosche,17 whose resume includes work with GSK Biologicals, Novartis Vaccines, Solvay Biologicals and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, published an open letter18 to the World Health Organization, March 6, 2021, in which he warned that implementing a global mass vaccination campaign during the height of the pandemic could create an “uncontrollable monster” where evolutionary pressure will force the emergence of new and potentially more dangerous mutations.

“There can be no doubt that continued mass vaccination campaigns will enable new, more infectious viral variants to become increasingly dominant and ultimately result in a dramatic incline in new cases despite enhanced vaccine coverage rates. There can be no doubt either that this situation will soon lead to complete resistance of circulating variants to the current vaccines,” Bossche wrote.19

Will COVID-19 Shots Save Lives? Probably Not

As noted in the BMJ paper20 “Will COVID-19 Vaccines Save Lives? Current Trials Aren’t Designed to Tell Us,” by associate editor Peter Doshi, while the world is betting on gene modification “vaccines” as the solution to the pandemic, the trials are not even designed to answer key questions such as whether the shots will actually save lives.

In an October 23, 2020, response21 to that paper, Dr. Allan Cunningham, a retired pediatrician, provided a summary of papers dating back to 1972, showing vaccines have been notoriously ineffective. In many cases, deaths have actually risen in tandem with increased vaccination rates, suggesting they may actually have a net negative effect on mortality.

Cunningham also lists studies arguing that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has exaggerated flu mortality statistics in an effort to increase uptake of the flu vaccine. They’re clearly doing the same thing with COVID-19 mortality statistics. If people had not been so misled by government authorities about the true lethality of COVID-19, half the country would not have rolled up their sleeves to take an experimental gene modification injection. As noted by Cunningham:22

“2020: A 14-year study finds that influenza vaccines are associated with an 8.9% increase in the risk of all-cause mortality in elderly men … During six A/H3N2-predominant seasons their all-cause mortality increase was 16.6%! …

The unfortunate history of influenza vaccines should warn us against repeating the process with Covid-19 vaccines. Peter Doshi may be understating the case when he suggests that influenza vaccines have not saved lives. The foregoing history and other observations suggest that in whole populations over the long run seasonal flu campaigns have actually cost lives …

This idea is hard to grasp in the face of massive publicity and reports of ‘vaccine effectiveness.’ The vaccines provide modest short-term protection against seasonal flu, but the VE studies completely ignore adverse effects (e.g. high fever, seizures, narcolepsy, oculo-respiratory syndrome, Guillain-Barre syndrome) … We don’t need another vaccine treadmill that could do more harm than good.”

Natural Selection Will Win

As we move forward, it’s really important that we not cast aside hard-won science lessons in favor of politically-driven propaganda. The propaganda is not science. Do not confuse the two.

If you don’t have these pathogens evolving in response to vaccines, then we really don’t understand natural selection. ~ Evolutionary Biologist Paul Ewald, University of Louisville

If there’s a silver lining to this whole mess, it’s that more and more people are starting to get educated about health, biology, virology and vaccinology. These are heady topics, but to begin to tease out truth from fiction, many are now taking the time to listen to doctors and scientists who are explaining the science behind it all.

The obvious and blatant lies and propaganda and over-the-top censorship is starting to wake up tens of millions of people in the U.S. about the vaccine frauds; not only the COVID jabs but the whole lot of them. It’s getting easier by the day to tell the quacks from the real McCoy, because the truth tellers will actually explain how things work, whereas the propagandists juggle catchphrases and attack those who ask questions.

In closing, here are two more excerpts from articles detailing the inevitability of vaccines driving the mutation of viruses through natural selection. Quanta Magazine writes:23

“Recent research suggests … that some pathogen populations are adapting in ways that help them survive in a vaccinated world … Just as the mammal population exploded after dinosaurs went extinct because a big niche opened up for them, some microbes have swept in to take the place of competitors eliminated by vaccines.

Immunization is also making once-rare or nonexistent genetic variants of pathogens more prevalent, presumably because vaccine-primed antibodies can’t as easily recognize and attack shape-shifters that look different from vaccine strains.

And vaccines being developed against some of the world’s wilier pathogens — malaria, HIV, anthrax — are based on strategies that could, according to evolutionary models and lab experiments, encourage pathogens to become even more dangerous.24 Evolutionary biologists aren’t surprised that this is happening.

A vaccine is a novel selection pressure placed on a pathogen, and if the vaccine does not eradicate its target completely, then the remaining pathogens with the greatest fitness — those able to survive, somehow, in an immunized world — will become more common.

‘If you don’t have these pathogens evolving in response to vaccines,’ said Paul Ewald, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Louisville, ‘then we really don’t understand natural selection.'”

Similarly, Alliance for Natural Health International points out:25

“‘Mutants of concern’ are clearly on most of our radars. An important question is: are they growing or declining in frequency? In some countries, including ones where vaccinations have occurred at a high rate … they are increasing and have already become dominant … That should be a very large, flappy, red flag to anyone who has a reasonable grasp of evolutionary selection pressure on viruses with pathogenic capacity.

More infection — including more silent infection among asymptomatic people (even if reduced by vaccination) — provides more opportunities for mutation. If we continue to drag out the time it takes for the virus to just become another endemic component of our virosphere, there will be more opportunities and more mutations. Not dissimilar to a game of Russian roulette — so why don’t we start counting our chances?

If variants become both more transmissible and more virulent, while also including immune (or vaccine) escape mutations — all trends we are witnessing in some parts of the world — we could be in deep trouble down the road.

At the very least, we stay on the vaccine (or monoclonal antibody) treadmill, trying to develop new vaccines (or monoclonal antibody therapies) that outsmart the virus when we should know better; that the virus will continue to outsmart us if we maintain such intense selection pressure on it …

Let me throw in one more concept that is ecological in nature: herd immunity. The base equation used by government scientists that estimates around 70% of the population need to be vaccinated or exposed to the virus to achieve herd immunity is flawed.

It is predicated on a number of assumptions that don’t apply: equal mixing of populations and successful sterilization of the virus in vaccinated people and those exposed to wild virus being just two. This just isn’t the case. In the real world, the situation is much more complex than in an idealized model.

Randolph and Barreiro remind us in their review26 in the journal Immunity that ‘[e]pidemiological and immunological factors, such as population structure, variation in transmission dynamics between populations, and waning immunity, will lead to variation in the extent of indirect protection conferred by herd immunity.’

For vaccinated people, antigen-specific antibodies bind firmly to virus particles and competitively oust natural antibodies, giving vaccinated people potentially less cross-immunity to mutant variants that are more infectious and the wave of infectivity continues.”
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/07/20/covid-vaccine-drives-mutations.aspx

A June 2021 study using high resistance Inspiratory Muscle Strength Training (IMST) demonstrated a reduction in blood pressure measurements as well as aerobic exercise or medication.1 High blood pressure, which is also called hypertension, is one of the most prevalent health conditions in the U.S. It is estimated that 47.3% of U.S. adults, or 116 million people, have high blood pressure.2

High blood pressure can increase your risk of a heart attack and stroke. The American Heart Association reported that the death rate from this condition increased nearly 11% from 2005 to 2015.3 Despite advances in education, screening and treatment, cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death in the world, claiming the lives of 659,041 people in the U.S. in 2019 (latest data available).4

The American Heart Association5 recommends making lifestyle changes that include changing your diet, monitoring your blood pressure, limiting alcohol, maintaining a healthy weight and getting exercise.

When these measures do not reduce your blood pressure to within normal limits the standard recommendation is high blood pressure medications.6 The types of medication can include diuretics, beta blockers, ACE inhibitors and calcium channel blockers — which may be prescribed individually or in a combination as determined by your doctor. Each comes with a list of possible side effects that may include weakness, fatigue, a loss of taste and swollen feet and ankles.7

If you have high blood pressure or would like to help reduce your risk of getting high blood pressure, the results of this recent study are encouraging. There are additional strategies you can use that I discuss below.

Breathing This Way May Lower Blood Pressure as Well as Drugs

The current study8 is the strongest evidence presented yet that IMST may play a role in reducing blood pressure, thus reducing the risks of cardiovascular disease. Although aerobic exercise is one foundational strategy for controlling blood pressure, fewer than 40% meet the current recommended guidelines.9

Lead author Daniel Craighead is an assistant research professor in the department of Integrative Physiology. Researchers were seeking a time efficient way of helping to reduce blood pressure, since more than 60% of people were not meeting exercise guidelines. Craighead commented in a press release:10

“There are a lot of lifestyle strategies that we know can help people maintain cardiovascular health as they age. But the reality is, they take a lot of time and effort and can be expensive and hard for some people to access. IMST can be done in five minutes in your own home while you watch TV.

We found that not only is it more time-efficient than traditional exercise programs, the benefits may be longer lasting.”

IMST was originally developed for critically ill patients with respiratory diseases to help improve the strength of their inspiratory muscles. The strategy uses a handheld device that provides resistance to the user as they inhale vigorously, thus strengthening muscles.

Initially, physicians recommended a 30-minute program each day with a low level of resistance. However, recent tests using high resistance six days a week were initiated to determine if the participant would reap the same benefits with respiratory, cardiovascular and cognitive improvements.

In the most recent study researchers engaged 36 adults ages 50 to 79 who had above normal systolic blood pressure. Half the participants used high resistance IMST and half used lower resistance IMST for six weeks. At the end of the intervention the group using high resistance IMST experienced a nine-point reduction in their systolic blood pressure.11

Respiratory Conditioning May Benefit Cognitive Function

Six weeks after stopping the program, the group maintained most of their improvement. Additionally, the researchers measured a 45% improvement in vascular endothelial function, an increase in the level of nitric oxide and a reduction in markers of oxidative stress and inflammation. The researchers were encouraged by the compliance rate in the group as they completed 95% of the sessions.

Senior author of the study, Doug Seals, is a distinguished professor of integrative physiology. In his past research, data demonstrated that postmenopausal women don’t get as much benefit from aerobic exercise as men do. However, in the current study, IMST improved markers in postmenopausal women as much as in men. “That’s noteworthy,” Seals said.

Preliminary results also suggest that it improves some cognitive function and physical fitness. The researchers are unable to explain how using IMST can lower blood pressure, but they postulate it has something to do with raising the level of nitric oxide. Craighead uses IMST in his marathon training. He says:12

“If you’re running a marathon, your respiratory muscles get tired and begin to steal blood from your skeletal muscles. The idea is that if you build up endurance of those respiratory muscles, that won’t happen and your legs won’t get as fatigued. It’s easy to do, it doesn’t take long, and we think it has a lot of potential to help a lot of people.”

There are some physiological conditions that contraindicate IMST,13 including a history of spontaneous pneumothorax, a pneumothorax related to a traumatic injury that isn’t healed and a ruptured eardrum that is not fully healed.

Some asthma patients with unstable disease or individuals with abnormally low perception of dyspnea may also be unsuitable candidates. Researchers encourage people who want to consider trying IMST to first consult with their health care provider.14

What Does Blood Pressure Measure?

Your blood pressure measurement is an indication of how much pressure exists within your arterial system. As blood moves through your arteries, it places pressure along the walls of the vessels.

Your systolic blood pressure is the pressure exerted on the arteries when the heart beats and is the top number in the measurement. Your diastolic blood pressure is the pressure in the blood vessels as the heart muscle relaxes between beats.

The systolic blood pressure is always higher than the diastolic blood pressure. Blood pressure measurements are given in units of millimeters of mercury (mm Hg). In 2017, the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology,15 in collaboration with nine other health organizations,16 developed new guidelines lowering the systolic and diastolic blood pressure numbers for the diagnosis of high blood pressure.

Previously, elevated blood pressure started at 140/90 for people younger than age 65 and 150/80 for people 65 and older.17 The new guidelines were created to help address high blood pressure earlier and thus hopefully reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke. There are five categories of blood pressure measurements that are recognized by the American Heart Association.18

Normal blood pressure is consistently 120/80 or less
Elevated blood pressure is consistently 120-129/80
Hypertension Stage 1 is blood pressure that is consistently 130-139/80-89
Hypertension Stage 2 is blood pressure that is consistently 140/90 or greater

A hypertensive crisis occurs when blood pressure readings are suddenly 180/120 or greater, which may trigger organ damage with symptoms that include chest pain, shortness of breath, changes in vision or difficulty speaking. It is crucial you seek emergency medical treatment immediately.

Risks Associated With High Blood Pressure

There are multiple risks associated with chronic high blood pressure. These include kidney disease and kidney failure, heart attack, stroke, vision loss, heart failure and sexual dysfunction.19

High blood pressure also increases your risk for peripheral artery disease (PAD). This occurs when the arteries in your extremities, stomach or head become narrowed. It causes pain and fatigue when the arteries cannot deliver enough oxygen to the muscles.20 Another recent risk factor of high blood pressure is the increased risk of death with COVID-19.

If high blood pressure is allowed to continue it can also lead to vascular dementia.21 In one study,22 researchers found that older adults who had a consistently elevated average systolic blood pressure had a greater risk for brain lesions and tangles associated with Alzheimer’s disease. In this study, the average pressure in the senior adults was 134/71. As reported in the press release:23

“Researchers found that the risk of brain lesions was higher in people with higher average systolic blood pressure across the years. For a person with one standard deviation above the average systolic blood pressure, for example 147 mmHg versus 134 mmHg, there was a 46 percent increased risk of having one or more brain lesions, specifically infarcts.

For comparison, the effect of an increase by one standard deviation on the risk of having one or more brain infarcts was the equivalent of nine years of brain aging.”

This Also Raises Nitric Oxide to Relax Blood Vessels

Researchers in the current study postulated that one of the reasons the breathing exercise helps reduce blood pressure may be because it helps release nitric oxide into the arterial system. Another way to get nitric oxide naturally is using a simple and quick exercise developed by Dr. Zach Bush.

The exercise is called the Nitric Oxide Dump and is an efficient anaerobic activity that works better the more you do it. I demonstrate a version of that work out in the video above. The routine works best if you complete it three times a day and wait at least 2 hours between each session.

This allows nitric oxide to be synthesized so it can be released. Benefits to naturally releasing nitric oxide include relaxing your arterial system and potentially lowering blood pressure, improving age-related decline in muscle mitochondria and reducing insulin resistance.

For further explanation of the many benefits behind releasing nitric oxide naturally, see “Fitness Checkup: Why You Need to Try the Nitric Oxide Dump Workout.”

These Strategies May Also Help Lower Blood Pressure

In addition to strategies you can use to reduce your blood pressure, it’s important to note one study24 published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology demonstrated there are differences between taking a central aortic blood pressure, which is an invasive procedure, and a peripheral blood pressure using a cuff on your arm or leg.

To reduce the potential inaccuracies in taking a peripheral blood pressure, several factors must be taken into consideration. These include the size of the cuff and relationship to your arm, the placement of the blood pressure cuff, your body position and activity during blood pressure reading and nicotine, caffeine or alcohol intake prior to having your blood pressure measured.

You’ll find further explanations and ways to reduce potential inaccuracies in “Blood Pressure Testing Is Mostly Inaccurate.” You must also take care to reduce the effect of identified factors that contribute to high blood pressure. These include insulin and leptin resistance,25 elevated uric acid levels,26 lead exposure27 and air28 and sound pollution.29 Below are several additional lifestyle strategies that can help lower your blood pressure naturally.

Optimize your vitamin D level — Vitamin D deficiency is associated with both arterial stiffness and hypertension.30 For optimal health, maintain a vitamin D level between 60 and 80 nanograms per milliliter year-round.

Mind your sodium-to-potassium ratio — According to Dr. Lawrence Appel,31 lead researcher on the DASH diet and director of the Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology and Clinical Research at Johns Hopkins, your diet as a whole is the key to controlling hypertension — not salt reduction alone. He believes a major part of the equation is this balance of minerals — i.e., most people need less sodium and more potassium, calcium and magnesium.

Consider intermittent fasting — Intermittent fasting is one of the most effective ways I’ve found to normalize your insulin/leptin sensitivity, which is a root cause of hypertension.

Exercise regularly — A comprehensive fitness program can go a long way toward regaining your insulin sensitivity and normalizing your blood pressure. If you are insulin resistant, you’ll also want to include weight training. When you work individual muscle groups, you increase blood flow to those muscles, and good blood flow will increase your insulin sensitivity.

Walk barefoot — Going barefoot will help you ground to the earth. Experiments show that walking barefoot outside (also referred to as Earthing or grounding) improves blood viscosity and blood flow, which help regulate blood pressure. So, do yourself a favor and ditch your shoes now and then.
Grounding also calms your sympathetic nervous system, which supports your heart rate variability. This in turn promotes homeostasis, or balance, in your autonomic nervous system. In essence, anytime you improve heart rate variability, you’re improving your entire body and all of its functions.

Address your stress — The connection between stress and hypertension is well documented, yet still does not receive the emphasis it deserves. Suppressed negative emotions such as fear, anger and sadness can severely limit your ability to cope with the unavoidable everyday stresses of life. It’s not the stressful events themselves that are harmful, but your lack of ability to cope.
The good news is, strategies exist to quickly and effectively transform your suppressed, negative emotions, and relieve stress. My preferred method is the Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), an easy to learn, easy to use technique for releasing negative emotions. EFT combines visualization with calm, relaxed breathing, while employing gentle tapping to “reprogram” deeply seated emotional patterns.

Essential oils — Several essential oils can also be helpful, including lavender, ylang-ylang, marjoram, bergamot, rose, frankincense, rosemary, lemon balm and clary sage. In one study,32 scientists found exposure to essential oil for one hour effectively reduced stress as measured by a reduction in the participants’ heart rate and blood pressure.
The effect was only temporary, however. In another, similar study,33 inhalation of a blend of lavender, ylang-ylang, neroli and marjoram essential oils was associated with a reduction in blood pressure and cortisol secretion, which is often elevated during stress.

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/07/19/imst-for-lowering-blood-pressure.aspx

1 Recent animal research shows the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein can cause myocarditis by:

Triggering an exaggerated immune response — a cytokine storm — in the heart cells

Animal research shows the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein subunit directly damages the heart and causes myocarditis by triggering an exaggerated immune response — a cytokine storm — in the heart cells. Learn more.

Permanently attaching to and poking holes in the heart cells
Activating the innate immune system
Deactivating the ACE2 receptor on the heart cells

2 Powerful investment firms are purchasing a sizeable number of U.S. homes, often over asking price, in order to:

Offer them back to Americans at a discounted price
Turn them into single-family rentals

While they’re competing with middle-class Americans for the homes, the average American has no chance of winning a home over an investment firm, which may pay 20% to 50% over asking price, in cash, sometimes scooping up entire neighborhoods at once so they can turn them into rentals. Learn more.

Ensure that everyone has a place to live
Equitably distribute them to low- and middle-class families

3 What’s at stake if society truly goes cashless?

Loss of your local bank
Hidden fees could become the norm
Your privacy and your freedom

But, in the DW documentary “Cash or Card — Will COVID-19 Kill Cash?” producer Kersten Schüssler asks some important questions, like what’s at stake if society truly goes cashless? The answer is both your privacy and your freedom. Learn more.

You’ll have to upgrade your cellphone annually

4 What is the Fourth Industrial Revolution?

Reverting from chemical to organic and biodynamic farming
A mind-body-spirit centered approach to medicine
The transition to individualized medicine
The merger of digital, physical and biological systems, and the reliance on technological surveillance rather than the rule of law to maintain public order

The Fourth Industrial Revolution refers to the merging of digital, physical and biological systems, and the reliance on technological surveillance rather than the rule of law to maintain public order. The Fourth Industrial Revolution will transform not only how we live and interact but who we are as a human species, as man will ultimately be merged with machine. Learn more.

5 Which of the following are totalitarian brainwashing tactics routinely deployed in American institutions of learning?

Focus on race and gender divisions and political correctness

Totalitarian brainwashing tactics routinely deployed in American institutions of higher education include anti-American propaganda, the creation of race and gender divisions, the promotion of collective guilt and stifling political correctness enforced through shaming and cancel culture. Learn more.

Forcing students to read classical works of fiction
Memorizing the U.S. Constitution
Comparing systems of government within a historical context

6 There are several ways to make a virus more lethal. According to Dr. Steven Quay, one way to do that is to:

Genetically manipulate the virus with mouse cells in a lab and then release the cells in a human vector
Insert a new synthetic amino acid into a pathogen and then do what is called a “serial passage” that passes through a series of animal and human tissues

If you know what you want to alter, you can insert a new synthetic amino acid into the pathogen. If you don’t have a precise idea of the change you want to achieve, but you want the pathogen to adapt from an animal to a human, you can do what is called serial passage, where the virus is passed through a series of animal and human tissues. Learn more.

Cross the virus with a known pathogen and allow the pathogen to mutate
Allow the virus to grow unhindered with the help of carcinogenic compounds and splice it into the DNA of another dangerous pathogen

 
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/07/19/week-191-health-quiz.aspx

As detailed in “How COVID Vaccines Can Cause Blood Clots and More,” the gene-based COVID-19 injections are a disaster in the making. mRNA-based “vaccines” have been in the works for years, and were never perfected. Now all of a sudden, despite evidence of serious danger, a number of mRNA “vaccines” are in the pipeline.

Among them is a COVID-flu RNA vaccine combo, which is currently being tested on ferrets,1,2,3 and several different mRNA seasonal influenza vaccines,4 which have already entered human trials. As reported by The Verge, July 7, 2021:5

“Moderna gave its mRNA-based seasonal flu vaccine to the first set of volunteers in a clinical trial, the pharmaceutical company announced today. The start of the trial marks the next stage of the company’s work on this type of vaccine technology after the overwhelming success of its COVID-19 vaccine, which was built using the same strategy …

People who get an mRNA vaccine are injected with tiny snippets of genetic material from the target virus. Their cells use that genetic information to build bits of the virus, which the body’s immune system learns to fight against …

Moderna is the second group to start testing its mRNA flu shot in human trials — Sanofi and Translate Bio kicked off a trial this summer. Pfizer and BioNTech have been interested in mRNA flu shots for a few years, and they’re pushing forward with those plans as well.”

Moderna Tests Quadrivalent mRNA Flu ‘Vaccine’

Moderna plans to enroll 180 participants aged 18 and older in its Phase 1/2 randomized, stratified, observer-blind, dose-ranging6 study of mRNA-1010, a quadrivalent flu “vaccine” that aims to protect against seasonal influenza A H1N1, H3N2 and influenza B Yamagata and Victoria.

In a press release, Moderna’s CEO Stephanie Bancel stated the company hopes to be able to create combination vaccines to protect against several different infections at the same time, such as influenza, COVID-19 and other respiratory infections:7

“Respiratory combination vaccines are an important pillar of our overall mRNA vaccine strategy,” Bancel said. “We believe that the advantages of mRNA vaccines include the ability to combine different antigens to protect against multiple viruses and the ability to rapidly respond to the evolution of respiratory viruses, such as influenza, SARS-CoV-2 and RSV.

Our vision is to develop an mRNA combination vaccine so that people can get one shot each fall for high efficacy protection against the most problematic respiratory viruses.”

The rapid push to replace conventional flu vaccines with mRNA-based alternatives — before mRNA COVID shots have even been licensed — raises the question, and risk, of whether mRNA flu shots might be getting emergency use authorization (EUA) next.

Worldwide, 3 million to 5 million people come down with influenza, which places “substantial burden on health care systems,” according to Moderna,8 so it’s not hard to imagine the U.S. Food and Drug Administration giving EUA to any number of shots under the justification that we need to protect the health care system from being overloaded with respiratory infection cases.

Vaccines and Virus Interference

Whether combo mRNA shots against several different types of respiratory viruses will actually work or have an even worse disaster potential than the COVID shots remains to be seen. What we do know is that conventional flu vaccines have the potential to cause viral interference with the mRNA COVID shots, essentially making you more prone to severe COVID-19 if you’ve received a conventional flu vaccine.

We discussed this in my May 2020 interview with Judy Mikovits, Ph.D. Dr. Michael Murray, a naturopathic physician and author, also pointed this out in his blog post, “Does Flu Shot Increase COVID-19 Risk?”9 The trend was particularly evident in Italy at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, where many elderly succumbed to the infection.

As it turns out, Italy had introduced a new, more potent type of flu vaccine, called VIQCC, in September 2019. VIQCC is produced using cultured animal cells rather than embyonated chicken eggs, which gives a greater boost to the immune system. It also contains four types of influenza viruses.10 “It looks like this ‘super’ vaccine impacted the immune system in such a way to increase coronavirus infection through virus interference,” Murray wrote.

Lessons From the 2009 Swine Flu Pandemic

The kind of virus interference Murray was referring to had been shown to be at play during the 2009 pandemic swine flu. A 2010 review11,12 in PLOS Medicine led by Dr. Danuta Skowronski, a Canadian influenza expert with the Centre for Disease Control in British Columbia, found the seasonal flu vaccine increased people’s risk of getting sick with pandemic H1N1 swine flu and resulted in more serious bouts of illness.

People who received the trivalent influenza vaccine during the 2008-2009 flu season were between 1.4 and 2.5 times more likely to get infected with pandemic H1N1 in the spring and summer of 2009 than those who did not get the seasonal flu vaccine.

To double-check the findings, Skowronski and other researchers conducted a follow-up study on ferrets. Their findings were presented at the 2012 Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.

In all, five observational studies conducted across several Canadian provinces found identical results. These findings also confirmed preliminary data from Canada and Hong Kong. As Australian infectious disease expert professor Peter Collignon told ABC News:13

“Some interesting data has become available which suggests that if you get immunized with the seasonal vaccine, you get less broad protection than if you get a natural infection …

We may be perversely setting ourselves up that if something really new and nasty comes along, that people who have been vaccinated may in fact be more susceptible compared to getting this natural infection.”

Flu Vaccination Raises Unspecified Coronavirus Infection

Virus interference was also demonstrated in a January 2020 study14,15 which found Department of Defense personnel who were vaccinated against influenza were significantly more likely to contract other respiratory viruses, including unspecified coronavirus infections and human metapneumovirus (hMPV16).

Service members who had received a seasonal flu shot during the 2017-2018 flu season were 36% more likely to contract coronavirus infection and 51% more likely to contract hMPV infection than unvaccinated individuals.17,18 As it turns out, hMPV is one of the respiratory viruses Moderna plans to combat using mRNA combination shots.19

Another is respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which is similar to coronavirus. RSV is yet another virus shown to be very difficult to prevent with a vaccine. RSV vaccine experiments done in the 1960s ended in disaster, as several of the children studied developed antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) and died from the resulting cytokine storm when exposed to the wild virus.20

Considering influenza antibodies increase your risk for hMPV and coronavirus infection, and an RSV vaccine has yet to be developed due to the well-known risk of RSV vaccine-enhanced disease, why is Moderna focusing on making an mRNA shot against all four viruses at the same time?

COVID-19 Shots Confer Narrow Immunity

The problem that all of these studies highlight is that influenza vaccination confers very narrow immunity against a specific viral strain, leaving your body open to other viruses. The mRNA shots confer even more specific immunity, as your body is responding to the antigen alone rather than the whole virus.

If you instruct your body to develop a narrow range of antibodies against, say, SARS-CoV-2, a couple of influenza strains, along with hMPV and/or RSV, will that make you more susceptible to other far more serious infections? Or will they start canceling each other out or cause cross-reactions? Might such a combination exhaust and destroy your immune system entirely?

When it comes to SARS-CoV-2 — which appears to be a genetically manipulated virus designed to attack your cardiovascular system and basic immune function — the spike protein is actually the most dangerous part. This explains why so many are having serious side effects from these COVID shots. The spike protein acts as a toxin in and of itself.

The question is: If you instruct your body to develop a narrow range of antibodies against, say, SARS-CoV-2, a couple of influenza strains, along with hMPV and/or RSV, will that make you more susceptible to other far more serious infections? Or will they start canceling each other out or cause cross-reactions?

Might such a combination exhaust and destroy your immune system entirely? These are just some of the questions that come to mind, based on what we’ve seen happen with other conventional vaccines and the current mRNA shots for COVID.

Pfizer Requests EUA for Third Booster Dose

Pfizer plans to ask for EUA authorization for a third COVID booster shot in August 2021, Bloomberg reports.21 According to Pfizer’s head of research, Mikael Dolsten, initial data suggest a third dose of the current Pfizer shot can raise neutralizing antibody levels by anywhere from fivefold to 10-fold.22 The company is also working on variant-specific formulations.

The booster would be given six to eight months after the second dose. Dolsten points to data from Israel, where Pfizer’s mRNA injection was used exclusively, which shows a recent uptick in breakthrough cases. This suggests protection starts to wane around the six-month mark, although Dolsten said it still appears to offer good protection against more severe illness.

For now, the FDA is shying away from authorizing boosters, saying the current shots appear effective enough. In a joint statement published July 8, 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and FDA stated:23

“Americans who have been fully vaccinated do not need a booster shot at this time. We are prepared for booster doses if and when the science demonstrates that they are needed.”

The way things have been going, though, there’s no doubt in my mind they’ll greenlight an entire line of boosters for emerging variants. The call for boosters will probably grow in tandem with recognized breakthrough cases, which will be interpreted as waning immunity rather than a sign of outright vaccine failure or ADE.

Freedom Based on the Drugs You Accept

Another reason why I’m certain booster shots will gain EUA authorization is because the treadmill of boosters will support the stated “need” for vaccine passports to keep track of them all. Let’s face it, vaccine passports are really pharmaceutical passports.

Eventually, they will dictate what you can and cannot do based on what pharmaceutical products and treatments you accept. Beyond that, they’re part of a much larger social credit system, where any infraction will sorely limit your freedom. As noted by former Clinton adviser and author Naomi Wolf in a Fox News interview:24,25

“It is not about the vaccine, it’s not about the virus, it’s about your data … What people have to understand is that any other functionality can be loaded onto that platform with no problem at all. It can be merged with your Paypal account, with your digital currency.

Microsoft is already talking about merging it with payment plans. Your network can be sucked up. It geolocates you everywhere you go. Your credit history can be included. All of your medical and health history can be included.

This has already happened in Israel, and … we’re hearing from activists that it’s a two-tiered society and that basically, activists are ostracized and surveilled continually. It is the end of civil society, and they are trying to roll it out around the world.

It is absolutely so much more than a vaccine pass … I cannot stress enough that it has the power to turn off your life, or to turn on your life, to let you engage in society or be marginalized.”

Wolf also pointed out the horrific history of IBM,26 whose Digital Health Pass will tie biometric IDs to health data through its smartphone app. This “health pass” will then grant or deny you access to public spaces and events, based on your vaccination status.

This is essentially the modern-day version of the punch card system — the forerunner to digital entry on computers — that IBM developed for the Nazi regime, which allowed them to create a census of Jews and other undesirables, who could then be identified, tracked and sorted into groups slated for incarceration or extermination.

Not only did IBM survive past the end of the war, despite having played an integral role in the genocide, it has now been chosen to create an identical but more technologically advanced copy of the identification and tracking system it created for the Nazi regime. Somehow, that doesn’t strike me as entirely accidental. To learn more about IBM’s frightening track record, see “IBM Colluded With Hitler, Now Makes Vaccine Passports.”

Combating Zoonotic Transmission With Transmissible Vaccines

Disturbingly, in addition to the extremely dangerous mRNA COVID “vaccines” we’re now being coerced into taking, we’re also facing a future of transmissible vaccines, which would erase free will and informed consent altogether.

The promise of transmissible vaccines is detailed in a January 2021 article in the journal Virus Evolution,27 where they discuss “the development of recombinant viral vaccines that are transmissible, and thus capable of self-dissemination through hard to reach populations of wild animals.”

According to mathematical models, transmissible vaccines would significantly reduce the effort required to control pathogens in animal reservoirs, and by lowering the infection rate there, chances of human infection would be diminished. The problem, however, is that vaccination puts the pathogen under evolutionary pressure, which speeds up mutations. Here’s how the authors describe it:28

“A key challenge facing these new vaccines … is the inevitability of evolutionary change resulting from their ability to self-replicate and generate extended chains of transmission. Further, carrying immunogenic transgenes is often costly, in terms of metabolic burden, increased competition with the pathogen, or due to unintended interactions with the viral host regulatory network.

As a result, natural selection is expected for favor vaccine strains that down-regulate or delete these transgenes resulting in increased rates of transmission and reduced efficacy against the target pathogen.

In addition, efficacy and evolutionary stability will often be at odds; as when longer, more efficacious antigens experience faster rates of evolutionary decay … However, we find that, at least in some cases, vaccine stability and overall performance can be improved by the inclusion of a second, redundant antigen.”

Interestingly enough, the authors include COVID-19 in their list of “zoonoses for which the risk of spillover could possibly be reduced or eliminated through the use of transmissible vaccines.” However, as detailed in Dr. Steven Quay’s Bayesian analysis,29 SARS-CoV-2 has not been found in any of the 80,000 samples taken from 209 different animal species.

This fact alone proves SARS-CoV-2 is laboratory derived and did not occur through zoonotic spillover. Moreover, none of the first 259 cases in China were traced back to animal contact.30 All were human-to-human transmissions. It’s understandable that researchers would allude to their work being beneficial against COVID-19 though, seeing how it has completely taken over the global dialogue.

Are Human Transmissible Vaccines Next?

What bothers me most about the development of transmissible vaccines is that it’s only a matter of time before they’ll be used in the human population. I predict transmissible vaccines will be the next big thing after mRNA “vaccines.”

In a best-case scenario (and it’s far from good), transmissible vaccines could be rolled out if COVID-19 shots were to become mandatory worldwide. In a worst-case scenario, they might be introduced even in the absence of a global vaccine mandate. In either case, you can kiss medical freedom goodbye.

Anecdotal evidence of spike protein or exosome transmission between people who have gotten the COVID shot and those who have not also raises the question of whether transmissible vaccines are here already.

While that’s still speculative, we can be sure that mRNA flu “vaccines” that turn your body’s cells into antigen factories are coming. Scientists have locked in on this transhumanist model of altering your God given genetic instructions rather than preventing illness through healthy lifestyles and treatments using safe medicines.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/07/19/mrna-flu-vaccines.aspx

In this interview, Dr. Steven Quay — one of the most-cited scientists in the world1 — discusses his Bayesian analysis,2 published January 29, 2021, which concludes beyond a doubt that SARS-CoV-2 is laboratory derived. Quay is an M.D. with a Ph.D. in chemistry. You can learn more about Dr. Quay on his website.

He did his medical residency at Mass General at Harvard Hospital and his postdoctoral work at MIT with a Noble laureate. He holds 87 patents in 22 fields of medicine, including the gadolinium used with MRI imaging.

During his career, Quay published 360 papers, which have been cited over 10,000 times. His COVID origin paper, however, has already been downloaded 170,000 times. Bayesian analysis,3 or Bayesian inference, is a statistical tool used to answer questions about unknown parameters by using probability distributions for observable data.

Quay’s highly conservatively-skewed analysis shows there’s only a 0.2% likelihood that this virus came from nature, and a 99.8% probability that it came from a lab. His 140-page paper can be downloaded from zenodo.org4 for those who want to dive into the nitty gritty of this statistical analysis. He presented these data to House Representatives during a June 26, 2021, subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis meeting.5

Instead of using the observed statistics of the data he gathered, he radically reduced the probability to 1 in 20. When one combines all the statistical anomalies from the 26 different data points he collected, the real likelihood of the virus coming from nature is less than 1 in all the atoms of the universe — 1080 — which is a very, very large number, making it virtually impossible.

SARS-CoV-2 Has a Protein Sequence Found in Bee Venom Toxin

As early as January 2020, Quay knew SARS-CoV-2 could be problematic. 

“Nobody was paying any attention because there was no need to at that point,” he says. “I saw this virus coming out of China. I looked at the sequence of it and I remember telling my wife, ‘I know what this thing is going to do in cells,’ because for five years at Stanford, I was studying and was the world expert on the toxin melittin, which is a bee venom toxin, the thing that hurts when you get a bee venom …

This melittin, this toxin in bee venom, has the same sequence that SARS-CoV-2 had … I run a public company, so I went to the board a couple weeks later and said, ‘Look, I think we can come up with some therapeutics and some ideas around this.’ We actually are in clinical trials with some products for therapeutics against SARS-CoV-2.

Then I started hearing some really crazy public health advisories around masks, social distancing and things, so I ended up writing a little book that was a No. 1 best seller for a few weeks called ‘Stay Safe: [A Physician’s Guide to Survive Coronavirus,]’ on Amazon. That took me through the summer. Then I started going back to something. I was very concerned about what I saw as properties of this virus that had never been seen before.

It’s now public knowledge that the government identified one of my papers, so I was contacted by the State Department in the fall and basically was an adviser to their programs there, including a three-hour deep dive from all of the different committees or agencies there …

I continue to push this because … if it came from nature, there are certain things we should do differently to not have this happen again. If it came from a laboratory, there’s a completely different set of things you need to do. It’s not a blame game.”

There Are Several Ways to Make a Virus More Dangerous

Quay recently published another paper in which he reveals that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) is also working on another virus, the Nipah virus, which has a 90% lethality rate. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what might happen if a virus with that lethality got out. Quay explains:

“[The WIV] published an early paper on samples from COVID patients in the hospital … It’s the most-read paper from the beginning of the pandemic. I did a deep dive into their raw data. The sequence is 30,000 nucleotides — the raw data’s 55 million nucleotides. What you can see in there is a fingerprint of everything they’ve been doing for the last two years. They’re doing a lot of crazy research.”

As explained by Quay, the WIV has been around for about 40 years. In 2003, after SARS-Cov-1 emerged, the U.S. and France helped China refurbish the WIV into a more secure BSL 4 biolab, the only one in China. Since then, the WIV has become a primary laboratory for zoonotic viruses. It’s also one of the top three laboratories for gain-of-function synthetic biology, which can be accomplished in several ways.

If you know what you want to alter, you can insert a new synthetic amino acid into the pathogen. If you don’t have a precise idea of the change you want to achieve, but you want the pathogen to adapt from an animal to a human, you can do what is called serial passage, where the virus is passed through a series of animal and human tissues. 

For example, you could start by infecting 20 humanized mice with a virus, then isolate the virus from the sickest mouse and give it to another 20. Humanized mice are genetically modified mice to have human lung tissue. After four or five passages like that, the virus will have mutated to attack and kill human hosts.

“The third way is to drop big chunks of material in there. For example, the part of the virus of SARS-CoV-2 that interacts with the cell is about 200 amino acids, so times three for nucleic acid, so that’s 600. You can just drop a big piece of 600 in and instantly go from an animal to humans, or whatever direction you want.

So, those are the three [primary strategies]: Knowing what to do with single spots, randomly letting nature do it in serial passage, and then dropping big chunks in.”

The Bayesian Theorem

As mentioned, Bayesian analysis is a statistical tool using probability distributions. The theorem was developed by Thomas Bayes, a 17th century Presbyterian minister and statistician-mathematician who published many papers during his lifetime. After his death, his estate discovered private notes detailing a process for understanding large complex events in a simple straightforward fashion. The Bayesian equation is A multiplied by B, divided by C. Quay explains:

“It’s exactly the same thing we do when we have a favorite baseball team and we watch it during the season. Before the season, we know what they did last year. We know who the new players are, the new coaches, all those things, and we come up with what we call a prior prediction.

We rank the teams according to what we think will happen at the World Series, and that’s what’s called our prior, our posterior probabilities. Then the season happens and you start winning games, losing games, people get injured, new players, transfers, and you update that every week.

At the start of the World Series, you’re probably quite far from where you were at the beginning of the season, because you’re now down to two teams but, nonetheless, you still don’t know the final analysis. One of the caveats for this 140-page work is, at the end, although I say there’s a 1 in 500 chance it came from nature, but that means … 499 times out of 500 it came from a laboratory.”

Bayesian Analysis of SARS-CoV-2 Origin

With regard to SARS-CoV-2, “A” would be the prior estimate of the likelihood of it coming from a lab or from nature. “B” is the new evidence, the new probability that it came from a lab, and “C” is the probability that it came from nature. When you multiply A and B and divide it by C, you get a new A prime, a single probability. However, as new data accumulate, the answer changes.

“The first thing I did was assume the prior likelihood it came from nature or a lab, knowing nothing, basically. That has to be your starting point. Three papers informed that. One paper says that eight times a year, there’s a natural jump from nature to a human.

Another paper said, once a year, there’s a lab leak in Asia, so 8-to-1 [in favor of natural origin]. That’s like 85% probability [that it came] from nature. I used three papers, and my starting point was a 98% probability it came from nature, knowing nothing else.”

Quay did not include the three papers mainstream media and fact checkers have leaned on to debunk the lab origin theory, and in his paper he explains why they were excluded. In short, they relied on speculation and not science, so the clear bias and lack of scientific facts made them too unreliable.

Next, he entered 26 different pieces of evidence into the equation. The first piece of data was the fact that the virus first emerged in Wuhan, China, which has never happened before. Wuhan has a population of 11 million people. It’s a very urban area with little man-nature contact. Wuhan also has one of only three biosafety level (BSL) 4 laboratories in the world that are conducting coronavirus research specifically. Next, he calculated probabilities.

“You know the area of China; you know the population of China. If the virus happened randomly, what is the chance it would happen in Wuhan? If there’s a laboratory in Wuhan, what are the chances it would have escaped somewhere else in China and not appeared in Wuhan?

You do the flip. If it came from nature, why did it end up in Wuhan? If it came from Wuhan, what is the probability it could have first appeared somewhere else in China? That hits your probabilities pretty hard out of the box. That was item No. 1. Then you just work through the others.”

Zoonotic Transmission

One key piece that makes a big difference in this Bayesian calculation is the question of zoonosis. In order for zoonosis to apply, you must have an animal with a backbone (vertebrae) that is infected with a microbe. Malaria, for example, is not a zoonotic disease, because mosquitoes do not have vertebrae. Malaria is a vector-transmitted disease.

The key to finding the origin of a zoonotic transmission is to locate the animal. If the animal is in the community, then zoonotic transmission occurs through a natural process. If the transmission occurs in a lab, then it’s a laboratory-acquired infection, not a zoonotic transmission. Early on, we were told up to 70% of the earliest COVID patients had visited one or more markets in Wuhan, some of which have live animals for sale.

The problem is SARS-CoV-2 was not found in any of the more than 1,000 animal specimens collected from those markets. They also sampled more than 1,000 pieces of frozen food imported from outside of China, all of which came back clean. About 15% of environmental samples, however, did have the virus.

They also collected samples from all the other markets across the Hubei Province, where Wuhan is located. No virus. About 1,000 bats in Hubei were tested, and no virus was found. Over 80,000 animals representing 209 species from every province of China were eventually tested, and no SARS-CoV-2 was found.

For comparison, SARS-1 was found in 85% of animals tested. The original host was identified as the civet cat. MERS, which came from the Middle East, originated in a bat that had jumped to a camel before turning into a human virus, and it was found in 90% of animals. Yet, after the largest surveillance ever conducted in the history of the world, having tested 80,000 animal specimens, not one has been found to carry SARS-CoV-2.

“In my Bayesian analysis … even though I should drop 80,000 into the denominator of my equation, what I did was I degraded it to the standard in clinical trials of biology to a P of .05. I said, ‘Despite the fact that zero out of 80,000 had this [virus], I’m going to treat this as if it’s a 1 in 20 event,’ because that’s the only way I could keep doing the analysis. Otherwise, I was done at the get-go,” Quay explains.

To be clear, this gives a very unfair advantage to the zoonotic origin theory, but Quay wanted to have a complete analysis of all the parameters. Diversity is a hallmark of nature, yet there’s no diversity in nature for this virus. Zoonotic proponents have argued that the virus must be found in high concentration in an intermediate species, yet not one out of 80,000 samples from 209 different animal species is a carrier of the virus.

No Animal Reservoir or Intermediate Host Has Been Found

Another key piece of the analysis is the virus itself. Bats are nature’s reservoirs for coronaviruses. The bats are never sickened by them, so the virus is never rooted out. It just lives in the bats for decades, mutating and recombining with other viruses along the way. Bat-to-human contact is very rare, so most of the time, the transfer occurs between the bats, the reservoir host and an intermediate host before it enters the human population.

Of the first 259 cases in China, not one was traced back to animal contact. All were human-to-human transmissions. This is the equivalent of going to Las Vegas and flipping a coin and getting heads 259 times, which is virtually impossible.

That’s what happened with SARS-1 and MERS. Early cases of SARS-1 and MERS were divided evenly between human to human transmission, and transmissions that occurred between different animals and humans. This means both of these viruses were most likely zoonotic in origin.

As mentioned earlier, Quay cites research showing natural jumps from nature to a human occur eight times a year, and lab escapes occur once a year. That gives us an 8-to-1 chance of zoonotic origin. However, of the first 259 cases in China, not one was traced back to animal contact. All were human-to-human transmissions.

As noted by Quay, “This is the equivalent of going to Las Vegas and flipping a coin and getting heads 259 times. When you ask your statistician to do that, it’s a P value with 84 zeros and a number, so again, that’s absolutely impossible.”

To understand how big this number is, the estimated number of atoms in the universe is 10 to the 80th power. Despite this showing it’s more or less impossible for SARS-CoV-2 to have a zoonotic origin, Quay gave this a P value of just 0.5 (or a 1 in 20 chance) — again, just to keep the analysis going.

“It’s not in the animals in nature. The virus is a pure virus … It hit the ground with one sequence, and it makes a mistake every two weeks randomly and if it’s the kind of mistake it really likes, it keeps it and then that one takes off,” he says.

“Again, SARS-1, MERS, every other zoonosis, when it jumps into humans, it’s a two-step process. Initially, it jumps into humans, but it doesn’t have all the things it needs. It can’t make very many baby viruses, et cetera, and so it burns out, and then it tries again, and it tries again. It jumps back to camels, that sort of thing.

Eventually, it gets all the mutations it needs to support human to human transfer. Then you have the foundation for an epidemic, but that’s a long process. With SARS-1 it took a year and a half. With MERS, it took two and a half years in camels before it got there. What does that mean though? Every time a human gets an infection … there is a record in their blood. They make antibodies to the virus.

Once you know that a zoonosis is going to jump into humans and leave a record in the hospital specimens and you have a test from the epidemic of the virus itself, you can go back into the hospital and find specimens. Typically, it can range from 1, to 4, to 7, to almost 20% of the specimens.

For example, people working in the market will have antibody evidence that they had the infection, whether they knew it or not.

This is a very powerful tool … Because of the unique capability of this virus to hit human to human transmission from the get-go, [Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute in California who published a paper6 supporting zoonotic origin] predicted that there would be a lot of pre-epidemic seroconversion.

These are fancy words for ‘go into a hospital, take samples out of the refrigerator, test them and find a high percentage.’ Of course, people took him up on that and tested over 9,900 banked specimens from December [2020] and before in Wuhan. How many do you think they found that were positive?

My statistician says they should have had 100 to 400. They got zero. You run the crank on that, and that’s a 1 in a million probability.

The virus has the incredible capability of being the most aggressive human to human virus that’s ever been seen in the history of virology, but it does not have the hallmark of how you would build that in nature, which is pre-epidemic human contact. You can’t have both of these properties in the same virus if it came from nature.

Now, if you take a mouse that’s been humanized in a laboratory to have human lungs and you serial passage there, that is an effective way to do it.

Amazingly, two months after the epidemic broke out, we’re February-March 2020 now, Dr. Shi at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Dr. Baric in America, the No. 1 synthetic biologist in the world of coronavirus research in North Carolina, published a paper saying, ‘Hey, if you grow this virus in transgenic mice, it kills the mice and, by the way, they get brain infections, which is really unusual.’

I’m saying, ‘Yeah, that’s probably the experiment that was done in 2019 that led to the spill.'” 

Again, using extremely conservative data, Quay’s analysis shows there’s a 99.8% probability that SARS-CoV-2 is a laboratory creation. If you want to read through it all, his paper can be downloaded from zenodo.org.7

Odd SARS-CoV-2 Proteins Suppress Your Immune Function

At the end of the interview, Quay delivers yet another bombshell. SARS-CoV-2 makes three primary kinds of proteins. The first are the structural proteins for a virus — the spike, envelope and nucleoplasm proteins. It also makes proteins that take over the cells’ manufacturing process, thereby allowing the virus to replicate inside the cell. In addition to those, it also makes two very odd proteins that are excreted into your blood.

“These strange proteins, they’re not the virus, they’re not in the cell,” Quay explains. “When you get an infection, you get a fever, you get sweaty and you get chills, you feel like crap. That’s not the virus. That’s your own interferon signaling and it helps you fight the virus and probably in prehistory it told your fellow tribe members to isolate you in your own tent. So, it evolved as a social signal for survival of the tribe.”
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/07/18/bayesian-analysis-of-sars-cov-2-origin.aspx