Lose Them Pounds

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Mike Yeadon is a soft-spoken microbiologist and a former vice-president of allergy and respiratory research at Pfizer. He spent 32 years working for large pharmaceutical companies and is a leading expert on viral respiratory infections.

He is also a man on a mission, and his mission is to inform as many people as possible about the elite powerbrokers that are using the pandemic as a smokescreen to conceal their real objectives. Here’s Yeadon in a recent interview:1

“If you wanted to depopulate a significant portion of the world, and to do it in a way that wouldn’t require destruction of the environment with nuclear weapons, or poisoning everyone with anthrax or something, and you wanted plausible deniability, whilst you had a multi-year infectious disease crisis; I don’t think you could come up with a better plan of work than what seems to be in front of me.

I can’t say that’s what they’re going to do, but I cannot think of a benign explanation for why they are doing it.”

“Depopulation?” Who said anything about depopulation? Isn’t it a bit of a stretch to go from a mass vaccination campaign to allegations of a conspiracy to “depopulate a significant portion of the world?” Indeed, it is, but Yeadon has done extensive research on the matter and provides compelling evidence that such a diabolical objective may, in fact, be the goal.

Humans Are Capable of Unimaginable Viciousness and Cruelty

Moreover, it is not for lack of proof that people are not persuaded that Yeadon is right, but something more fundamental; the inability to grasp that men are capable of almost-unimaginable viciousness and cruelty. Here’s Yeadon again:2

“It’s become absolutely clear to me, even when I talk to intelligent people, friends, acquaintances … and they can tell I’m telling them something important, but they get to the point [where I say] ‘your government is lying to you in a way that could lead to your death and that of your children,’ and they can’t begin to engage with it.

And I think maybe 10% of them understand what I said, and 90% of those blank their understanding of it because it is too difficult. And my concern is, we are going to lose this, because people will not deal with the possibility that anyone is so evil …

But I remind you of what happened in Russia in the 20th century, what happened in 1933 to 1945, what happened in, you know, Southeast Asia in some of the most awful times in the post-war era. And, what happened in China with Mao and so on … We’ve only got to look back two or three generations. All around us there are people who are as bad as the people doing this.

They’re all around us. So, I say to folks, the only thing that really marks this one out, is its scale. But actually, this is probably less bloody, it’s less personal, isn’t it? The people who are steering this … it’s going to be much easier for them. They don’t have to shoot anyone in the face.

They don’t have to beat someone to death with a baseball bat, or freeze them, starve them, make them work until they die. All of those things did happen two or three generations back … That’s how close we are. And all I’m saying is, some shifts like that are happening again, but now they are using molecular biology.”

People ‘Cannot Imagine Anything so Demonic’

He’s right, isn’t he? Whereas, a great many people know that the government, the media and the public health officials have been lying to them about everything from the efficacy of masks, social distancing and lockdowns, to the life-threatening dangers of experimental vaccines, they still refuse to believe that the people orchestrating this operation might be pushing them inexorably toward infertility or an early death.

They cannot imagine anything so demonic, so they stick their heads in the sand and pretend not to see what is going on right beneath their noses. It’s called “denial” and it is only strengthening the position of the puppet masters that are operating behind the scenes. Here’s more from Yeadon:3

“… In the last year I have realized that my government and its advisers are lying in the faces of the British people about everything to do with this coronavirus. Absolutely everything. It’s a fallacy this idea of asymptomatic transmission and that you don’t have symptoms, but you are a source of a virus.

That lockdowns work, that masks have a protective value obviously for you or someone else, and that variants are scary things and we even need to close international borders in case some of these nasty foreign variants get in.”

Many readers may have noticed that this interview appeared on a small Christian website called Lifesite News. Why is that? Shouldn’t the informed observations of a former Pfizer vice president appear on the front pages of The New York Times or The Washington Post? Wouldn’t you expect the big cable news channels to run a hot-button interview like this as their headline story?

Of course not. No one expects that, because everyone knows that the media honchos reflexively quash any story that doesn’t support the “official narrative,” that is, that COVID is the most contagious and lethal virus of all time, which requires a new authoritarian political structure and the wholesale evisceration of civil liberties.

No One Is Allowed to Refute the Official Propaganda

Isn’t that the underlying storyline of the last year? COVID skeptics and naysayers, like Yeadon, are not allowed to refute the official propaganda or debate the issue on a public forum. They’re effectively banned from the MSM and consigned to the outer reaches of the Internet where only a scattered few will read what they have to say. Here’s more:4

“Everything I have told you, every single one of those things is demonstrably false. But our entire national policy is based on these all being broadly right, but they are all wrong. But what I would like to do is talk about immune escape because I think that’s probably going to be the end game for this whole event, which I think is probably a conspiracy.

Last year I thought it was what I called ‘convergent opportunism.’ That is, a bunch of different stakeholder groups have managed to pounce on a world in chaos to push us in a particular direction. So, it looked like it was kind of linked, but I was prepared to say it was just convergence.

I [now] think that’s naïve. There is no question in my mind that very significant powerbrokers around the world have either planned to take advantage of the next pandemic or created the pandemic. One of those two things is true because the reason it must be true is that dozens and dozens of governments are all saying the same lies and doing the same inefficacious things that demonstrably cost lives.”

Let’s pause for a minute, and ask ourselves why a modest, self-effacing microbiologist who operated in the shadows for his entire professional career has thrust himself into the limelight when he knows, for certain, he will either be ridiculed, smeared, discredited, dragged through the mud or killed.

In fact, he openly admits that he fears for his safety and assumes that he could be “removed” (“assassinated”) by his enemies. So, why is he doing this? Why is he risking life and limb to get the word out about vaccines?

A Moral Obligation to Warn People

It’s because he feels a moral obligation to warn people about the danger they face. Yeadon is not an attention-seeking narcissist. In fact, he’d rather vanish from public life altogether.

But he’s not going to do that because he’s selflessly committed to doing his duty by sounding the alarm about a malign strategy that may well lead to the suffering and death of literally tens of millions of people. That’s why he’s doing it, because he’s an honorable man with a strong sense of decency. Remember decency? Here’s more:5

“You can see that I am desperately trying not to say that it is a conspiracy, because I have no direct evidence that it is a conspiracy. Personally, all my instincts are shouting that it’s a conspiracy as a human being, but as a scientist, I can’t point to the smoking gun that says they made this up on purpose.”

Many of us who have followed events closely for the last year and have searched the internet for alternate points of view are equally convinced that it is a conspiracy, just as Russiagate was a conspiracy. And while we might not have conclusive, rock-solid proof of criminal activity, there is voluminous circumstantial evidence to support the claim.

By definition, a “conspiracy” is “an evil, unlawful, treacherous, or surreptitious plan formulated in secret by two or more persons.”6 What is taking place presently across the western world meets that basic definition.

Just as the contents of this article meet the basic definition of a “conspiracy theory,” which is “an attempt to explain harmful or tragic events as the result of the actions of a small powerful group. Such explanations reject the accepted narrative surrounding those events; indeed, the official version may be seen as further proof of the conspiracy.”7

We make no attempt to deny that this is a conspiracy theory, any more than we deny that senior-level officials at the FBI, CIA, DOJ and U.S. State Department were involved in a covert operation aimed at convincing the American people that Donald Trump was a Russian agent.

That was a conspiracy theory that was later proven to be a fact. We expect that the facts about the COVID operation will eventually emerge, acquitting us on that account as well. Here’s more from Yeadon:8

“I think the end game is going to be, ‘everyone receives a vaccine’ … Everyone on the planet is going to find themselves persuaded, cajoled, not quite mandated, hemmed-in to take a jab.

When they do that every single individual on the planet will have a name, or unique digital ID and a health status flag which will be ‘vaccinated,’ or not … and whoever possesses that, sort of single database, operable centrally, applicable everywhere to control, to provide as it were, a privilege, you can either cross this particular threshold or conduct this particular transaction or not depending on [what] the controllers of that one human population database decide.

And I think that’s what this is all about because once you’ve got that, we become playthings and the world can be as the controllers of that database want it.”

Mass Vaccination a Pathway to Absolute Social Control

So mass vaccination is actually the pathway to absolute social control by technocratic elites accountable to no one? Are we there yet? Pretty close, I’d say. Here’s more:9

“And they are talking the same sort of future script which is, ‘We don’t want you to move around because of these pesky ‘variants’ — (but) ‘don’t worry, there will be ‘top-up’ vaccines that will cope with the potential escapees.’ They’re all saying this when it is obviously nonsense.”

Is he right? Is the variant hobgoblin now being invoked to prolong the restrictions, intensify the paranoia and pave the way for endless rounds of mass vaccination? Judge for yourself, but here’s a sampling of articles that appeared in recent news that will help you decide:

1. Reuters — South African Variant Can ‘Break Through’ Pfizer Vaccine, Israeli study says10

“The coronavirus variant discovered in South Africa can ‘break through’ Pfizer/BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine to some extent, a real-world data study in Israel found, though its prevalence in the country is low and the research has not been peer reviewed …

We found a disproportionately higher rate of the South African variant among people vaccinated with a second dose, compared to the unvaccinated group. This means that the South African variant is able, to some extent, to break through the vaccine’s protection,” said Tel Aviv University’s Adi Stern. (So, according to the article — the vaccine doesn’t work.)

2. The New York Times — Rise of Variants in Europe Shows How Dangerous the Virus Can Be11

“Europe, the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic last spring, has once again swelled with new cases, which are inundating some local hospitals and driving a worrisome global surge of Covid-19.

But this time, the threat is different: The rise in new cases is being propelled by a coronavirus variant first seen in Britain and known as B.1.1.7. The variant is not only more contagious than last year’s virus, but also deadlier.

The variant is now spreading in at least 114 countries. Nowhere, though, are its devastating effects as visible as in Europe, where thousands are dying each day and countries’ already-battered economies are once again being hit by new restrictions on daily life …

Vaccines will eventually defeat the variants, scientists say. [So, they don’t work now??] And stringent restrictions can drive down cases of B.1.1.7. [So, don’t leave your home.] …

‘We’ve seen in so many countries how quickly it can become dominant,’ said Lone Simonsen, a professor and director of the PandemiX Center at Roskilde University in Denmark.

‘And when it dominates, it takes so much more effort to maintain epidemic control than was needed with the old variant.’” [In other words, we are effectively dealing with a different pathogen that requires a different antidote. It’s an admission that the current crop of vaccines doesn’t work.]

3. Cell — SARS-CoV-2 Variants B.1.351 and P.1 Escape From Neutralizing Antibodies12

“… our findings indicate that the B.1.351 and P.1 variants might be able to spread in convalescent patients or BNT162b2-vaccinated individuals and thus constitute an elevated threat to human health.

Containment of these variants by non-pharmaceutic interventions is an important task.” [Note — In other words, the new vaccines don’t work against the new COVID strains, so we might need to preserve the onerous lockdown restrictions forever.]

How can people read this fearmongering bunkum and not see that it is designed to terrify and manipulate the masses into sheeplike compliance?

Variant Being Used to Fuel COVID Hysteria

There’s no denying that the variant is being used to fuel the COVID hysteria and perpetuate the repressive social restrictions. So, the question we should be asking ourselves is whether we can trust what we are being told by the media and the public health officials?

And the answer is “No,” we cannot trust them. They have repeatedly misled the public on all manner of topics including masks, asymptomatic transmission, immunity, infection fatality rate, social distancing and now variants. According to Sunetra Gupta, who is professor of theoretical epidemiology in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford, and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Fellow:13

“… some of these variants could be more transmissible, but the truth is … even with a marginal increase in transmissibility … that does not have much of a material effect or difference in how we deal with the virus. In other words, the surge of the virus cannot be ascribed to a new variant …

The other question is are these variants more virulent, and the truth is we don’t know, but it is unlikely because the data don’t seem to say so despite the scary headlines … Pathogens tend to evolve toward lower virulence … because that maximizes their transmissibility … It is much more probable that these strains will not be materially so different that we would have to alter our policies.”

So, according to Gupta, even if the new strains of COVID are more transmissible, it is highly unlikely that they are more lethal. Here’s more on the topic from diagnostic pathologist Dr. Clare Craig, who provides a more technical explanation:14

“SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequence has ~30,000 letters. Alterations in a handful of letters will not change it’s shape much — if it did it wouldn’t function properly anyway. Fear mongering about immune escape is not needed and is irresponsible especially when no evidence to support the claims.”

In essence, Craig is saying the same thing we said earlier, that the slight mutations to the infection will not impact the immune reaction of people who already had the virus. Thus, the current crop of “variants” should not be a cause for alarm. If you have already had COVID or if you already have prior immunity due to previous exposure to similar infections, (SARS, for example) the new strain should not be a problem.

It should also not be a problem if the new vaccines provide the type of broad-based immunity that one should expect of them. Again, the mutations represent only the slightest change in the composition of the pathogen (less than 1%), which means that — if the vaccines don’t work — they are, in effect, useless.

Media Misstating Science to Terrify the Public

Here’s a longer explanation that some readers might find overly technical and perhaps tedious, but it’s worth wading through in order to see that the media is deliberately misstating the science to terrify the public. This excerpt is from an article by Yeadon. Here’s what he said:15

“The idea is planted in people’s mind that this virus is mutating in such a way as to evade prior immunity. This is completely unfounded, certainly as regards immunity … (that is) gained naturally, after repelling the virus … It’s important to appreciate that upon infection, the human immune system cuts up an infectious agent into short pieces.

Each of these short pieces of protein are presented to other cells in the immune system, like an identity parade … These have a range of functions. Some make antibodies & others are programmed to kill cells infected by the virus, recognized by displaying on their surface signals that tell the body that they’ve been invaded.

In almost all cases … this smart adaptive system overcomes the infection. Crucially … this event leaves you with many different kinds of long-lived ‘memory’ cells which, if you’re infected again, rapidly wipe out any attempt at reinfection.

So, you won’t again be made ill by the same virus, and because the virus is simply not permitted to replicate, you are also no longer able to participate in transmission … The general ‘direction of travel’ (for viruses) is to become less injurious but easier to transmit, eventually joining the other 40 or so viruses which cause what we collectively term ‘the common cold.’

What generally doesn’t happen is for mutants to become more lethal to the hosts (us). But the key point I wanted to get across is just how large SARS-COV-2 is. I recall it’s of the order of 30,000 letters of genetic code which, when translated, make around 10,000 amino acids in several viral proteins.

Now you can see that the kinds of numbers of changes in the letters of the genetic code are truly tiny in comparison with the whole. 30 letter changes might be roughly 0.1% of the virus’s code. In other words, 99.9% of that code is not different from the so-called Wuhan strain.

Similarly, the changes in the protein translated from those letter code alterations are overwhelmed by the vast majority of the unchanged protein sequences. So your immune system, recognizing as it does perhaps dozens of short pieces … will not be fooled by a couple of small changes to a tiny fraction of these.

No: your immune system knows immediately that this is an invader it’s seen before, and has no difficulty whatsoever in dealing with it swiftly & without symptoms. So, it’s a scientifically invalid …

… even if mutations did change a couple of these, the majority of the pieces … of the mutated virus will still be unchanged & recognized by the vaccine-immune system or the virus-infected immune system & a prompt, vigorous response will still protect you.”

Why Are Public Health Officials and the Media Lying?

Let’s summarize: We have presented the informed views of three reputable scientists all of who explicitly refute the idea that the so called “variants:”

Are more lethal
Have the potential to reinfect people who have already had COVID
Have mutated enough to reinfect people who have already been vaccinated (unless, of course) the vaccine does not provide broad-based immunity to begin with (which is possible since Phase 3 long-term trials were never conducted).

So, why are the public health officials and the media lying about this matter, which is fairly clear-cut and uncontroversial? That is the question.

Yeadon concludes that there is something flagrantly diabolical about their denial. He thinks they are lying in order to dupe more people into getting injected with a substance that will either render them infertile, cause them great bodily harm or kill them outright. Take your pick. Here’s more:16

“The eugenicists have got hold of the levers of power and this is a really artful way of getting you to line-up and receive some unspecified thing that will damage you. I have no idea what it will actually be, but it won’t be a vaccine because you don’t need one. And it won’t kill you on the end of the needle because you would spot that.

It could be something that will produce normal pathology, it will be at various times between vaccination and the event, it will be plausibly deniable because there will be something else going on in the world at that time, in the context of which your demise, or that of your children will look normal.

That’s what I would do if I wanted to get rid of 90 or 95% of the world’s population. And I think that’s what they’re doing.”

“The eugenicists have got hold of the levers of power?” Has Yeadon gone mad?

Has the pressure of the global pandemic pushed him off the deep end or is he “on to something” big, something that no one even dares to even think about; a plan so dark and sinister that its implementation would constitute the most grievous and coldblooded crime against humanity of all time; the injection of billions of people with a toxic elixir whose spike protein dramatically compromises their immune systems clearing the way for agonizing widespread suffering followed by mountains of carnage?

There are others, however, who see a connection between the current vaccination campaign and “the eugenicists.” In fact, Dr. Joseph Mercola points to the link between the lead developer of the AstraZeneca vaccine, Adrian Hill, and the Eugenics movement. According to Mercola:

“Hill gave a lecture at the Galton Institute (which was known as the U.K. Eugenics Society) in 2008 for its 100-year anniversary. As noted in Webb’s article:17

‘Arguably most troubling of all is the direct link of the vaccine’s lead developers to the Wellcome Trust and, in the case of Adrian Hill, the Galton Institute, two groups with longstanding ties to the UK eugenics movement.

The latter organization, named for the ‘father of eugenics’ Francis Galton, is the renamed U.K. Eugenics Society, a group notorious for over a century for its promotion of racist pseudoscience and efforts to ‘improve racial stock’ by reducing the population of those deemed inferior.

The ties of Adrian Hill to the Galton Institute should raise obvious concerns given the push to make the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine he developed with [Sarah] Gilbert the vaccine of choice for the developing world, particularly countries in Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa, the very areas where the Galton Institute’s past members have called for reducing population growth …

Emeritus professor of molecular genetics at the Galton Institute and one of its officers is none other than David J. Galton, whose work includes ‘Eugenics: The Future of Human Life in the 21st Century.’

David Galton has written that the Human Genome Mapping Project… had ‘enormously increased … the scope for eugenics … because of the development of a very powerful technology for the manipulation of DNA.’

This new ‘wider definition of eugenics,’ Galton has said, ‘would cover methods of regulating population numbers as well as improving genome quality by selective artificial insemination by donor, gene therapy or gene manipulation of germ-line cells.’ In expanding on this new definition, Galton is neutral as to ‘whether some methods should be made compulsory by the state, or left entirely to the personal choice of the individual.

… The Wellcome Centre regularly cofunds the research and development of vaccines and birth control methods with … a foundation (name withheld) that actively and admittedly engages in population and reproductive control in Africa and South Asia by, among other things, prioritizing the widespread distribution of injectable long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs).

The Wellcome Trust has also directly funded studies that sought to develop methods to ‘improve uptake’ of LARCs in places such as rural Rwanda…’ LARCs afford women in the Global South ‘the least choice possible short of actual sterilization.’

Some LARCs can render women infertile for as long as five years, and, as Levich argues, they ‘leave far more control in the hands of providers, and less in the hands of women, than condoms, oral contraceptives, or traditional methods.’

… Slightly modified and rebranded as Jadelle, the dangerous drug was promoted in Africa … Formerly named the Sterilization League for Human Betterment, EngenderHealth’s original mission, inspired by racial eugenics, was to ‘improve the biological stock of the human race.’”

Does Eugenics Factor Into the mRNA Vaccine?

So, how does “eugenics” factor into the creation and distribution of the mRNA vaccine? Is there a link or are we grasping at straws? We can’t answer that question, but a recent article by Mathew Ehret at Off-Guardian provides a few interesting clues. Here’s what he said:18

“The fact that the organizations promoting the rise of this eugenics policy throughout Nazi Germany and North America included such powerhouses as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and the Human Sterilization League for Human Betterment … which have all taken leading roles in the World Health Organization over recent decades is more than a little concerning.

The fact that these eugenics organizations simply re-branded themselves after WWII and are now implicated in modern RNA vaccine development alongside the Galton Institute (formerly British Eugenics Association), Oxford’s AstraZeneca, Pfizer and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation should give any serious thinker pause as we consider what patterns of history we are willing to tolerate repeating in our presently precarious age.”

We’ll end this piece with an excerpt from a 2010 article by Andrew Gavin Marshall at Global Research, who presciently noted that:19

“Eugenics is about the social organization and control of humanity … (particularly) population control …

The ideas of Malthus, and later Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin were remolded into branding an elite ideology of ‘Social Darwinism,’ which was ‘the notion that in the struggle to survive in a harsh world, many humans were not only less worthy, many were actually destined to wither away as a rite of progress. To preserve the weak and the needy was, in essence, an unnatural act.’

This theory simply justified the immense wealth, power and domination of a small elite over the rest of humanity, as that elite saw themselves as the only truly intelligent beings worthy of holding such power and privilege.

Francis Galton later coined the term “eugenics” to describe this emerging field. His followers believed that the ‘genetically unfit’ ‘would have to be wiped away,’ using tactics such as ‘segregation, deportation, castration, marriage prohibition, compulsory sterilization, passive euthanasia — and ultimately extermination’ …

Sir Julian Huxley was also a life trustee of the British Eugenics Society from 1925, and its President from 1959-62 … ‘Huxley believed that eugenics would one day be seen as the way forward for the human race,’ and that, ‘A catastrophic event may be needed for evolution to move at an accelerated pace’ … It is much the same with ideas whose time has not yet come; they must survive periods when they are not generally welcome.

The 21st-century technologies are so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses. Most dangerously, for the first time, these accidents and abuses are widely within the reach of individuals or small groups.

They will not require large facilities or rare raw materials. Knowledge alone will enable the use of them … I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.

… Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system.

If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite …

A horrifying vision indeed; but one which builds upon the ideas of Huxley, Russell and Brzezinski, who envisioned a people who — through biological and psychological means – are made to love their own servitude. Huxley saw the emergence of a world in which humanity, still a wild animal, is domesticated; where only the elite remain wild and have freedom to make decisions, while the masses are domesticated like pets.

Huxley opined that, ‘Men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.’”

We must ask ourselves whether the current mass vaccination campaign is a science-based effort to relieve sickness and disease or a fast-track to a dark and frightening dystopia conjured up by evil men seeking to tighten their grip on all humanity?
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/04/26/coronavirus-pandemic-lies-cost-lives.aspx

“Vaccine refusal will come at a cost — for all of us,” Edward-Isaac Dovere, a staff writer for The Atlantic, proclaims in an April 10, 2021, political commentary.1 Unvaccinated individuals “will have higher health care costs,” he says, and the vaccinated will have to foot the bill, either through taxes or insurance premiums.
This argument could have been made for decades, and can still be made today, for any number of groups. Obese individuals have far higher health care costs than those of normal weight. Insulin resistant people and those with Type 2 diabetes end up costing the health care system enormous sums. Who pays for them?
Overall, healthy individuals — people who generally do what they can to take good care of themselves to prevent chronic conditions — have always paid for those who are less particular about their diets and lifestyle.
The Economic Costs of Vaccination Vs. Vaccine Refusal

Dovere predicts the economic costs of vaccine refusal will begin to feature heavily as we move forward. He quotes Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who told him,2 “You have a liberty right, and that unfortunately is imposing on everyone else and their liberty right not to have to pay for your stubbornness.” Not surprisingly, Dovere and Inslee both focus on just one side of what needs to be a two- if not four-sided equation.
When making public health policy, you have an obligation to analyze both the benefit and the cost of any given policy. In this case, what might be the cost of vaccine side effects, both in terms of health care costs and lives lost? As of April 1, 2021, VAERS had received 56,869 adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination, including 7,971 serious injuries and 2,342 deaths.3 By April 13, the had updated that death toll to 3,005.4
What might be the cost if the vaccines don’t work and you get sick anyway? As of April 15, 2021, some 5,800 Americans who had been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 had been diagnosed with COVID-19 post-vaccination; 396 (7%) required hospitalization and 74 died.5 These cases are popping up all over the world.
The vaccines are not foolproof. In fact, so-called “breakthrough cases,” meaning cases in which a fully vaccinated individual is diagnosed with COVID-19 are to be expected. I’m not sure why anyone is surprised, seeing how the vaccine makers have acknowledged that the mRNA injections are not designed to actually make you immune to SARS-CoV-2.
You can still contract the virus and spread it to others. What the shots may do is lessen your symptoms if and when you get infected with SARS-CoV-2. So, of course people can still get sick, as they did before. Some will require hospitalization. Some will die — just like they did previously, before the vaccine.
Then there’s the question of whether vaccinated individuals end up being more susceptible to variants of the virus than unvaccinated individuals. Preliminary research6,7,8,9 found that people who had received both doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine were eight times more susceptible to contracting the South African variant of SARS-CoV-2, called B.1.351, (5.4% compared to 0.7%).
Unfortunately, the study was too small to glean any information about outcomes, so we don’t know whether they developed milder or more serious illness than unvaccinated people sickened by the same variant.
Either way, if vaccinated people are more susceptible to more dangerous variants (which they claim B.1351 is), why assume that unvaccinated people would incur higher health care costs? Variants are now cropping up all over the place, so maybe vaccinated people will end up being responsible for a greater share of medical expenses. Maybe, if they have milder illness and unvaccinated have more serious illness, the costs might end up about the same for each group.
May There Be Economic Benefits to Vaccine Refusal?

In my view, the notion that COVID-19 vaccines will end this pandemic is an illogical fallacy since these shots do not provide actual immunity. The fizz in Dovere’s argument starts going flat on that basis alone. But there’s much more.
To really determine what’s best for public health, you’d also want to do the benefit and cost analysis of not vaccinating and relying on naturally-acquired immunity in combination with immune-boosting strategies instead, such as improving vitamin D levels across the entire population, for example.
Only when you have made all of those calculations — the benefit and cost of vaccinating, and the benefit and cost of not vaccinating — can you compare the two and begin to make statements about how certain groups of people may incur higher health care costs, and which strategy is likely to save the most lives. As of right now, it’s pure guesswork as to who’s going to cost more in the long run.
For example, I don’t know of any actual data showing that the health of people who are planning to forgo the vaccine place them at increased risk of serious COVID-19. If I were to guess, and this is pure speculation, people who have decided not to get vaccinated may be doing so because a) they know they’re in a low-risk category and/or b) they are health-conscious people who feel confident that they can prevent and/or treat COVID-19 in other cost-effective ways, should they get sick.
There are a lot of data that need to be compiled and analyzed before we can start declaring the COVID-19 vaccination campaign a public health care success, let alone a cost-saving imperative.
Appeal to Illogical Reasoning

Dovere goes on to discuss some of the messaging campaigns employed to lure people out of their vaccine hesitancy:10

“Two appeals seem to work best: First, the vaccines are safe, and they’re more effective than the flu vaccine. Second, you deserve this, and getting vaccinated will help preserve your liberty and encourage the government to lift restrictions.

(That last idea is what Jerry Falwell Jr. focused on in the vaccination selfie he posted11 this week, captioned, ‘Please get vaccinated so our nutcase of a governor will have less reasons for mindless restrictions!’) Inslee hopes that emphasizing those points will persuade more Republican men to get their shots.”

Sometimes it can help to spell out a logical fallacy using different words. (Personally, I believe Falwell was simply trying to be funny, but Dovere and Inslee have apparently seized the “lift restrictions” angle as a social conditioning opportunity, so that’s really what I’m addressing here.)
One rewrite of Falwell’s plea could be: “Please ignore your current health status and potential vaccine risks and just obey so that our governor will have less reason to impose unconstitutional and unscientific limitations on our basic rights and freedoms.”
In my view, a more appropriate way to prevent “mindless restrictions” would be to peacefully disobey and/or take the governor to court, as has been done to California Gov. Gavin Newsom. The Supreme Court has ruled against him no less than six times, finding he abused his power, overstepped his authority and violated the Constitution with his pandemic restrictions on churches.12
Urging someone to take a vaccine to prevent an elected official — who can be unseated — from implementing unscientific and/or unconstitutional restrictions is hardly rational. Let’s not forget that cost-benefit analyses13 have actually been done for lockdowns — perhaps one of the most mindless of restrictions — and the cost is far greater than the benefit.
The cost of the lockdowns in the U.K., in terms of Wellbeing Years (WELLBY), is five times greater than might optimistically be saved, and may in reality be anywhere from 50 times to 87 times greater. The cost for lockdowns in Canada is at least 10 times greater than the benefit.
In Australia, the minimum cost is 6.6 times higher, and in the U.S., the cost is estimated to be at least 5.2 times higher than the benefit of lockdowns. A cost-benefit analysis performed for New Zealand, which looked at the cost of adding just five extra days of “COVID-19 alert level 4” found the cost in Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALY) was 94.9 times higher than the benefit.
Should We Penalize Obesity and Vitamin D Deficiency?
If it’s determined that unvaccinated individuals need to be penalized socially, financially or otherwise, then how can we not also penalize other choices that significantly add to the COVID-19 burden? We know, for example, that vitamin D deficiency significantly raises your risk of COVID-19. In one analysis,14 82.2% of COVID-19 patients were vitamin D deficient.
I published a scientific review15 on the impact of vitamin D in COVID-19 in October 2020, co-written with William Grant, Ph.D., and Dr. Carol Wagner, both of whom are part of the GrassrootsHealth expert vitamin D panel. You can read the paper for free on the journal’s website.
Another major COVID-19 factor is obesity. As reported by CNN16 March 5, 2021, the COVID-19 death rates were more than 10 times higher in countries where more than half the adult population was overweight, compared to countries in which the obesity rate was below 50%. The COVID-19 death rates also rose in tandem with the prevalence of obesity, thereby strengthening the link, according to the report, released by the World Obesity Federation.
At the lowest end is Vietnam, which has an obesity rate of 18.3% and a COVID-19 death rate of 0.04 per 100,000. Toward the high end is the U.S., which has an obesity rate of 67.9% and a COVID-19 death rate of 152.49 per 100,000. (Of course, this report used COVID-19 mortality statistics that have been proven to be wildly exaggerated, as detailed in my interview with Dr. Henele.)
Making an already dire situation worse, recent data17 show 42% of U.S. adults have packed on unwanted pounds, with an average weight gain of 29 pounds, since the start of the pandemic. Only 18% report undesired weight loss, with an average weight loss of 26 pounds.
Government Has Ignored the Value of Healthy Population
According to the World Obesity Federation report, obesity was the second most important risk factor for hospitalization and death from COVID-19 — old age being the primary risk factor — and as noted by Johanna Ralston, CEO of the World Obesity Federation:18

“Old age is unavoidable, but the conditions that contribute to overweight and obesity can be highly avoidable if governments step up and we all join forces to reduce the impact of this disease. The failure to address the root causes of obesity over many decades is clearly responsible for hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths.”

Lead author of the report, Dr. Tim Lobstein, added:19

“Governments have been negligent, and ignored the economic value of a healthy population at their peril. For the last decade they have failed to tackle obesity, despite setting themselves targets at United Nations meetings. COVID-19 is only the latest infection exacerbated by weight issues, but the warning signs were there. We have seen it in the past with MERS, H1N1 and other respiratory diseases.”

Let’s Not Accept Hypocrisy and Double Standards
Even WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus commented on the report saying it “must act as a wake-up call to governments globally,” as “The correlation between obesity and mortality rates from COVID-19 is clear and compelling.”
That said, let’s get back to Dovere’s argument that unvaccinated people are bound to incur higher health care costs due to COVID-19, and therefore there must be some way to penalize those people or force them into compliance.
If you cannot fathom penalizing obesity, insulin resistance, diabetes or vitamin D deficiency — conditions known to significantly raise your risk of severe COVID-19 — then how could you possibly consider penalizing an unvaccinated person based on that single parameter alone?
Using that logic, what, then, do we need to do about obese individuals, whose risk of hospitalization due to COVID-19 is anywhere from 40% to 113% greater, and their chances of requiring intensive care 74% higher,20 than that of their non-obese peers? What do we need to do about people who just refuse to get their vitamin D levels up, and end up taking up the lion’s share of hospital beds?
To be clear, I am NOT proposing we penalize people based on their weight, metabolic flexibility or vitamin D status. I do not support that any more than I support penalizing unvaccinated people — and that is the whole point. Most would agree that this would be completely ridiculous.
My point is, if you cannot fathom penalizing obesity, insulin resistance, diabetes or vitamin D deficiency — conditions known to significantly raise your risk of severe COVID-19 — then how could you possibly consider penalizing an unvaccinated person based on that single parameter alone?
The question is especially valid because, again, vaccinated persons can contract and spread SARS-CoV-2 like anyone else. It’s really unclear how vaccinated people are “safer” than unvaccinated ones, when the only person standing to gain from these shots is the person getting it (in the form of milder symptoms when sickened).
Are You ‘Pure’ Enough for Your Government?
I think it’s important to realize that the COVID-19 vaccine campaign is less about protecting public health and more about creating the infrastructure and psychological climate required for the implementation of global tyranny, which will likely begin with the introduction of vaccine passports that are very similar to the China social credit system.
As discussed in “Vaccines Are the New ‘Purity Test,’” it can almost be likened to a loyalty test. Or perhaps it could best be described as a totalitarian submission test?
Getting private companies to require these vaccine passports only makes sense if there is a strong vaccine push, and this is one of many clues as to what’s really behind the stated “need” for the whole world to get vaccinated.
We’re not all at risk for COVID-19. For a vast majority of individuals, the vaccines make little or no sense, as for young, healthy individuals, their risks outweigh the benefit. Now they are pushing to vaccinate children, whose risk of getting COVID-19 is well-established as being profoundly minuscule.
They are at exponentially higher risk from many other factors. There are currently fewer than 500 children who are reported to have died from COVID-19, even with the massively manipulated causes of death. Remember, if you had a positive COVID test and died from terminal cancer or a motorcycle accident, you were classified as a COVID-19 death.
As you can see from the graph below, there are 10 higher risks of death than COVID-19 for children. To be logically consistent, the government would need to be equally rigid about addressing all of these causes as aggressively as they are pursuing COVID-19 vaccination for children.

But it’s not about simply getting a vaccine into your arm. Ultimately, it’s about getting you tied into the digital system being launched in the form of vaccine passports. As explained by former Clinton adviser and author Naomi Wolf (whom I will be interviewing shortly) in a March 28, 2021, interview with Fox News’ Steve Hilton:21,22

“‘Vaccine passport’ sounds like a fine thing if you don’t understand what those platforms can do. I’m [the] CEO of a tech company, I understand what these platforms can do. It is not about the vaccine, it’s not about the virus, it’s about your data.

Once this rolls out, you don’t have a choice about being part of the system. 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. You credit history can be included. All of your medical and health history can be included … 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.”

Dangerous Curves Ahead
Wolf also points out the horrific history of IBM, which developed a sophisticated system of punch cards that allowed Nazi Germany to create a two-tier society and ultimately facilitated the rounding up of Jews for extermination. Fast-forward to today, and IBM is now a leader in the vaccine passport business. I wrote about this in “IBM Colluded With Hitler, Now Makes Vaccine Passports.”
In Nazi Germany, the obsession with purity — both in terms of hygiene and race theory — drove the genocide of Jews, the old, the handicapped and the mentally challenged.
In present day, the public narrative has eerily followed Nazi Germany’s playbook for genocide, starting with the scapegoating of healthy people, as the rapid spread of COVID-19 was blamed on asymptomatic individuals not properly masking, social distancing and self-isolating.
That then grew into the nurturing of prejudice against people who refuse to wear masks, and now we’re seeing the narrative building toward persecution of those who do not want to get the vaccine. It will start with discrimination, and already, we’re hearing talk of how only vaccinated people ought to have the right to partake in certain social activities. If that is tolerated, then outright persecution will be the inevitable next step.
This is why I reject and counter commentaries such as that by Dovere. These half-baked, one-sided, persecutory arguments must be challenged at every turn, because they only lead us one way. And unless you’re part of the technocratic elite, you — regardless of how you feel about vaccination right now — do not want to end up there.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/04/23/should-unvaccinated-and-obese-be-penalized.aspx

While, for many years, I’ve been a popular target for Big Pharma smear campaigns, 2020 onward has really given new meaning to what it means to be under attack. I’m not alone, by any means, as censorship of anti-propaganda narratives have ratcheted up to unprecedented levels for many others seeking to uncover the truth.
These days, even elected government officials misuse their positions of power to openly call for censorship of certain groups, organizations and individuals in direct violation of Constitutional law — the highest law of the land.
The latest in this series of attacks comes from two state attorneys general, Letitia James of New York and William Tong of Connecticut, who in an April 8, 2021, op-ed1 in The Washington Post stated, right in the headline, that “Anti-vaxxers put us all at risk,” and that “Facebook and Twitter must ban them.”
According to James and Tong, COVID-19 vaccine availability marks “the end of the pandemic and the start of our recovery,” but “vaccine availability means nothing without vaccine acceptance.”
This lack of acceptance of novel gene therapy technology, they claim, is all because a small group of individuals with a social media presence — myself included — are successfully misleading the public with lies about nonexistent vaccine risks.

“The solution is not complicated. It’s time for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to turn off this toxic tap and completely remove the small handful of individuals spreading this fraudulent misinformation,” they write.2

‘The Disinformation Dozen’

The basis for their censorship push is a report by two previously unknown groups called the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and Anti-Vax Watch, both of which are opaque in the extreme as to their history and funding.
According to that report,3 “The Disinformation Dozen,” a mere 12 individuals “are responsible for a full 65% of anti-vaccine content on Facebook and Twitter,” Tong and James write, again stressing that “they must be removed from the platforms.”4
But, just who are these “social media researchers” whose word Tong and James take as gospel? An online search for “Anti-Vax Watch” delivers a single hit for a site called antivaxwatch.org, which is nothing but a simple news aggregator. Its “About” page provides no names, no indication of who is part of this group, or who funds them.
The CCDH is only marginally better. As detailed in “Pressure Mounts to Ban My New Book From Amazon,” the CCDH is a one-man organization with undisclosed funding and connections to technocrat-led institutions that support the Great Reset.
By way of its board members, the CCDH can be linked to the Trilateral Commission, the Atlantic Council, the European Council of Foreign Relations, Save the Children Fund (funded by the Gates Foundation and a partner of Gates’ GAVI Vaccine Alliance), the British Parliament, the CIA and Reuters. CCDH chairman Simon Clark even has ties to a participant of Event 201 (former CIA deputy director Avril Haines).
Event 201 was a coronavirus pandemic exercise held in October 2019 that foreshadowed and “played out” the draconian countermeasures implemented when COVID-19 appeared mere months later. Curiously enough, a primary focus of that exercise was how to best censor and counteract problematic narratives about the virus, public disagreement with pandemic measures and doubts about vaccine safety.
It’s All About Social Engineering

You would think that if public health were the primary concern and impetus behind such an exercise — as opposed to wealth transfer, economic destruction and societal reformation — it would focus on the medical and scientific strategies of how to best contain and control the actual virus, and not how best to contain and control information about the virus. Infectious disease control science would have been the key feature, not the science of social engineering.

“Let us be clear — nothing is wrong with asking questions and researching vaccine effectiveness and safety,” Tong and James write.5 “We are not in any way looking to limit the ability of individuals to ask these important questions, but the small handful of people we’re talking about are simply promoting dangerous lies …”

People in search of vaccine information should “seek out legitimate medical experts … and official sources, such as local departments of public health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” they say, adding that:

“As the chief law enforcement officers of our states, we can say that there is no First Amendment right to spread disinformation on social media.”

What Is Disinformation?
The problem with this argument is that what they perceive and label as “disinformation” is entirely subjective. The definition of “disinformation” provided by the American Heritage dictionary is: “Deliberately misleading information” and “Dissemination of intentionally false information to deliberately confuse or mislead.”
I — and, as far as I know, none of the others on the CCDH’s hit list — am not engaging in the dissemination of “intentionally false” information with the “deliberate intent” to confuse or mislead. We provide information — the other side of the story — that “official” sources and mainstream media not only refuse to share but social media platforms will ban them for sharing. We provide a counterbalance to the wholly one-sided official narrative.
With respect to my own site, my articles are fully referenced to publications in the medical literature, and I make every effort to clearly indicate where I insert my own opinions.

I’ve also published my own research in peer-reviewed journals, the last of which was a scientific review6 on the impact of vitamin D in COVID-19, co-written with William Grant, Ph.D., and Dr. Carol Wagner, both of whom are part of the GrassrootsHealth expert vitamin D panel. You can read the paper for free on the journal’s website.

Opinions are protected speech under the First Amendment, as is reporting on published science — even if that science is later found to be flawed, incomplete or, in worst case, outright fraudulent. The fake hydroxychloroquine study in The Lancet, which was ultimately retracted after being exposed, is a perfect example.
This study, which was found to be completely fraudulent, was reported as fact, worldwide, by virtually all mainstream media and continues to serve as the basis for the WHO’s discrediting of hydroxychloroquine. If opinion and scientific reporting were not protected speech, Tong’s and James’ own op-ed could be banned, as could every single mainstream media report on scientific findings that has ever been published.
No one has unequivocal rights to the truth. No one “owns” the truth. There is no single group or organization on this earth that knows everything, has all the facts and tells the unbiased truth. Tong and James would like you to believe otherwise. They want you to listen to select sources only — sources which, curiously, only present one side of any given argument. This is what social engineering is all about.
“Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime,” Lavrentiy Beria once said. Beria, described7 as “the most ruthless and longest-serving secret police chief in Joseph Stalin’s reign of terror,” claimed he could prove criminal conduct on behalf of anyone, even people who were completely innocent.
Indeed, anyone can be made to look like a crook. Facts can be twisted through clever wording salted with hidden bias. But, usually, truth tends to win in the end. You just have to survive long enough.
Illegal Attacks on Free Speech
In their op-ed, Tong and James admit they intend to use their official powers to force social media companies to comply with their demand to censor certain individuals. If platforms refuse to violate the free speech of select people, they will find something to prosecute. Does this sound unethical to anyone else but me?

The government cannot accomplish through threats of adverse government action what the Constitution prohibits it from doing directly. ~ Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas

As noted by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in an April 5, 2021, ruling8 in which he weighed in on the ability of social media giants to control free speech:

“The government cannot accomplish through threats of adverse government action what the Constitution prohibits it from doing directly … Under this doctrine, plaintiffs might have colorable claims against a digital platform if it took adverse action against them in response to government threats.”

As attorneys general, Tong and James are government officials and, as such, they are legally barred from accomplishing “through threats of adverse government action what the Constitution prohibits [them] from doing directly.”

In other words, they do not have the legal right to pressure social media companies into violating the First Amendment rights9 of Americans when they do not have the legal right to censor or “abridge”10 free speech themselves. Put yet another way, it is illegal for government officials to pressure private companies into censoring free speech on their behalf or at their request, since they as government officials do not themselves have the right to infringe on free speech.
‘Free Press’ Pushes for Censorship, and More
The fact that attorneys general are now getting involved and calling for censorship is to me a sign of just how desperate Big Pharma and the Great Reset interests are getting. There’s no room for free speech and the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment in that New World Order.
To their credit, they have, over the decades, masterfully infiltrated and now appear to control all the required areas of influence, from media, Big Tech and Hollywood, to nongovernmental organizations with global influence, government agencies and intelligence agencies of all stripes.
In a sane, free world concerned with democratic processes, we simply would not see a “free press” calling for the censorship of books,11 we would not see public officials calling for the selective elimination of free speech (as has been done by several congressmen and senators in recent months12,13,14), and writing legislation aimed at penalizing social media companies that refuse to censor.15
We would not see a dozen state attorneys general — chief law enforcers — calling for the selective elimination of First Amendment rights by private companies,16 and we would not see intelligence agencies using sophisticated cyberwarfare tools to aid in the elimination of select speech online.17,18,19
In a free world, all of these would stand squarely on the side of free speech rights. So, that must mean we no longer live in a free world where democratic processes and Constitutional rights are given their due consideration.
Decentralized Uncensorable Web Is Part of the Answer
In his legal commentary,20 Supreme Court Justice Thomas presents an intriguing idea for how to address the monopolistic power over speech currently wielded by social media giants like Facebook and Twitter, which would be to treat them as public utilities that, like phone service providers, must serve all customers, without discrimination.21

That’s certainly one way to go, and would probably be a positive strategy. Beyond that, however, we really need a more censor-proof web in general. This is something a decentralized, blockchain-based web can provide. I am currently working with some of the brightest minds in the tech space who are committed to preserving your personal freedoms and liberties.
The technology22 focuses on maintaining data sovereignty, giving you control over your data and privacy, and undoing the current system of surveillance capitalism where Big Tech profits off your personal data and uses it against you at the same time. In this Web 2.0, tech monopolies also will no longer have the ability to censor.

In the meantime, consider ditching social media networks that erode your civil liberties, and to join those that promote freedom of speech instead. For example, free-speech alternatives to Facebook and Twitter include Gab, MeWe, Minds and Parler. Uncensored alternatives to YouTube include Bitchute, Rumble, Brighteon, BrandNewTube, Banned.video and Thinkspot.

For content creators and alternative news sources that no longer have a social media presence due to censoring, subscribe to their newsletter if available, and/or mark their website in your favorites and check back on a regular basis.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/04/22/attorneys-general-censor-mercola.aspx

Cinnamon is a popular spice used in desserts and savory dishes from the Middle East and is often paired with apples. But did you know it also has several health benefits, one of which may help modulate the cytokine storm associated with severe COVID-19?1

The spice is made from the cinnamon tree when strips from the inner bark are dried. The strips curl as they dry into what you know as cinnamon sticks.2 Later, the small pieces can be ground into powder or made into an extract. The unique properties of the spice are from the essential oils and chemical compounds found in cinnamon, and particularly cinnamaldehyde, which gives the spice its unique flavor.3

The most common type of cinnamon found on grocery store shelves is cassia cinnamon, which originated in South and Southeast Asia and China.4 The second type is called true cinnamon or Ceylon cinnamon (Cinnamomum zeylanicum) and has a distinctively lighter color and delicate taste.5 Ceylon cinnamon is native to Sri Lanka, formerly known as Ceylon.6

Other varieties of cinnamon include Saigon cinnamon, camphor laurel and Indonesian cinnamon. There is an important difference between cassia and Ceylon cinnamon. This is the level of coumarin found in the spice.7 Levels in cassia are much higher than those in Ceylon and can present a health risk if eaten on a regular basis.

As reported in one study,8 according to the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment there are 2.1 to 4.4 grams of coumarin in every kilogram of cassia. This is above the Tolerable Daily Intake set by the European Food Safety Authority.9

By comparison, Ceylon has a much lower percentage of coumarin. Coumarin is a naturally occurring substance found in cinnamon.10 Synthetically produced coumarin is also added to cosmetic products to give them a fresh scent. Medically it can be used to treat edema and has exhibited antitumor activity.11 However, when used medicinally, even in low doses it can cause liver damage over a short time.12

Ceylon Cinnamon Extract May Modulate Severe COVID

A 2021 paper published in Frontiers in Plant Science13 reviewed the medicinal uses of hops and Ceylon cinnamon. Although cassia cinnamon is much easier and cheaper to acquire, the health risks associated with coumarin make it an unsound choice.

There were several bioactive compounds identified in Ceylon cinnamon extract including cinnamic acid, trans-cinnamaldehyde, cinnamyl alcohol and benzoic acid. The review of the research demonstrated that the synergistic activity between all the compounds in the extract offered greater anti-inflammatory properties than the actions of single compounds.14

In one animal study,15 Ceylon cinnamon extract demonstrated the ability to protect the aorta from induced atherosclerosis. During their review of past studies, the scientists found evidence that cinnamaldehyde is an effective Nrf2 inducer, which elicited an antioxidant response in the human colon cells tested during a lab study.16

Nrf2 helps regulate cellular antioxidant activity, helping to detoxify reactive oxygen species.17 The paper then went on to review past clinical studies using Ceylon cinnamon, often administered as a powder in pill form.18

There were no specific clinical studies evaluating Ceylon cinnamon for the effect it may have on a cytokine storm, but they found 30 clinical studies that dealt with the anti-inflammatory effects the compound had on a variety of health conditions, including diabetes, polycystic ovary syndrome and obesity.

Referring to the cytokine storm, they hypothesized that “the strong anti-inflammatory properties of Ceylon cinnamon may mitigate this complication.”19 Additionally, the writers cite past research that concluded, “Our results demonstrate no significant side effects and toxicity of CZ [Cinnamomum zeylanicum], including hepatotoxicity and anti-coagulation properties.”20

They found additional research that demonstrated cinnamon extract could inhibit vascular endothelialitis, angiogenesis and thrombosis, which all play a part in severe COVID-19 infections.21 The preponderance of the evidence gathered from the literature review suggested to the researchers that:22

“Ceylon cinnamon extracts may ameliorate complications that are associated with severe cases of COVID-19 and that testing both extracts, either alone or in combination, and particularly as a supplemental treatment to other medications, might be a promising therapeutic approach.”

Anti-Inflammatory Effect Helps Reduce Migraines

Migraines are recurring headaches that can cause moderate to severe pain. Up to 25% of people report that before the headache they experience an aura,23 which is a temporary neurological change that goes away as the pain begins. Migraines often trigger nausea, weakness and sensitivity to light and sound.24

Some experts believe there may be a genetic predisposition to migraines that are then triggered by specific environmental causes. These can include stress, anxiety, hormones, loud noises and medications to name a few.

According to the Migraine Research Foundation,25 nearly 1 in 4 households in America include a person with a history of migraine. It’s estimated 18% of women and 6% of men in the U.S. have a history of migraine headaches, which occur more commonly from age 18 to 44.

During a migraine headache, increased levels of nitric oxide, interleukin-6 and calcitonin gene-related peptide contribute to the pain and rising inflammation. There are several treatment options, which include acute and preventive medications.26

A treatment option that helps to protect the neurological system and has anti-inflammatory properties is cinnamon. One study27 published in Phytotherapy Research engaged 50 participants who had a history of migraine headaches. They were split into two groups: The intervention group received 1,800 milligrams (mg) of cinnamon each day and the control group received 100 mg of cornstarch.

The study went on for two months, during which the participants measured the duration, frequency and severity of their migraine attacks. Blood tests for interleukin-6, calcitonin gene-related peptide and nitric oxide were also given and compared between the two groups.

The intervention group had significantly lower levels of interleukin-6 and nitric oxide than the control group, but the levels of calcitonin gene-related peptide remained unchanged. The researchers concluded that supplementation with cinnamon may be “regarded as a safe supplement to relieve pain and other complications of migraine.”28

Studies Link Depression to Inflammation

According to the National Institute of Mental Health,29 one of the most common mental conditions in the U.S. is major depression. There were an estimated 17.3 million adults over the age of 18 who had at least one episode in 2017. This was 7.1% of the population.

Although the condition can develop in men and women at any age, it appears more prevalent in women and the median onset is 32.5 years.30 A study31 published in September 2020 concluded that the prevalence of symptoms of depression during 2020 was three times higher as compared to before the COVID pandemic.

The initial theory that depression was caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain was a driving force behind development and manufacture of many pharmaceuticals. Today, it’s been largely discredited as data repeatedly show the popular selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor class of antidepressants work no better than placebos for those who experience mild to moderate symptoms.32

However, researchers are finding links between inflammation and depression. In one systematic review33 of the safety and effectiveness of anti-inflammatory agents in people with depression, the data revealed these medications reduce symptoms when compared against a placebo. Results from another large literature review34 revealed similar findings.

It showed anti-inflammatory medications reduced the symptoms of depression when used alone and compared against a placebo. Yet another study35 demonstrated patients with depression who were treated with immunotherapeutics for an inflammatory disorder experienced symptomatic relief that was not associated with treatment-related changes and their physical health.

The link between depression and inflammation indicates the use of anti-inflammatory substances would trigger antidepressant activities. This theory was born out in a 2017 published animal study.36 The researchers used cinnamon essential oil and concluded that it may be an adjunctive therapy in the treatment of depression and anxiety.

The researchers believe the results may in part be due to the increase of neurotrophic factors, such as BDNF, that occur with the administration of cinnamon. This increase may have a positive effect on the treatment of depressive disorders.

In another animal study37 published in 2020, researchers believed cinnamon extract “possessed antidepressant efficacy by inhibiting the inflammatory process in the hippocampus so it was able to optimally increase serotonin levels in the hippocampus.”38

More Benefits Associated With Cinnamon

In addition to the anti-inflammatory effects that may impact the treatment of severe COVID-19, migraines and depression, cinnamon has more benefits. For example, cinnamon contains several polyphenols, including rutin, catechin and quercetin.39 When the antioxidant capacity of cinnamon was compared against other plants in the same family, it was a clear winner.40

These antioxidants may play a role in data that show cinnamon can enhance cognitive function. Information presented to the Association for Chemoreception Sciences41 demonstrated that whether it was smelled or tasted, cinnamon increased the participants’ “scores on tasks related to attentional processes, virtual recognition memory, working memory and visual-motor response speed.”42

This may also affect performance. For example, the results of a study from Wheeling Jesuit University in Wheeling, West Virginia, demonstrated that the smell of cinnamon or peppermint while driving may keep you more alert, reduce your frustration and reduce the demand on your temporal lobe.43

Cinnamon also plays a role in the structural health of your brain. Two compounds in cinnamon, cinnamaldehyde and epicatechin, can inhibit the aggregation of a protein called tau.44 Tau plays a significant role in the structure and function of neurons.

Although this protein is normal in cell structures, if tau accumulates it can develop “neurofibrillary tangles,” which are a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. Cinnamaldehyde and epicatechin were proven to protect tau from oxidative damage that can lead to dysfunction.45

Cinnamon also has a positive impact on glycemic status indicators in people with Type 2 diabetes.46 Data showed it helps to lower blood sugar levels, weight, BMI and body fat mass.

Using Cinnamon at Home

As I mentioned, there are two main types of cinnamon, cassia and Ceylon. Cassia is darker, has a stronger flavor and is the cinnamon you likely find on your grocery store shelves. Ceylon is typically more expensive and more difficult to find. It’s lighter in color and has a more delicate flavor.47

Using cassia as a dietary spice does not pose significant health challenges. However, when considering cinnamon as a dietary supplement in larger doses, it is important to seek out Ceylon cinnamon that has less coumarin than cassia and is therefore less likely to cause liver injury.

There are several ways of enjoying the health benefits from cinnamon, including drinking cinnamon tea, flavoring your food, taking supplements or making an infused cinnamon bark oil. If you’re considering supplementing with cinnamon, whether as an oil, supplement or using a daily in your food, it is wise to use Ceylon cinnamon.

A cup of cinnamon tea is a warm and relaxing way of getting your daily dose. Simply boil one or two sticks of Ceylon cinnamon in water. Try adding a little raw honey, some fresh ginger or the peelings from organic apples as you’re boiling your tea. Of course, cinnamon is not a cure-all to make up for poor dietary habits or lack of exercise. However, adding it to your diet is a positive step.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/04/24/cinnamon-extract.aspx

Animals often act as sentinels for what’s to come — the canaries in the coal mine for a number of potential environmental threats. The dubious sentiment tragically now applies to sea lions in California, which are being struck with cancer at an alarming rate.

About 250,000 California sea lions live along the west coast of North America.1 These long-lived marine mammals have a lifespan of 20 to 30 years,2 which gives time for environmental contaminants to accumulate in their bodies.

While cancer is generally rare in wild animals, 25% of California sea lions have cancer — one of the highest cancer prevalence in mammals, according to a team of researchers with the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, California.3 The study’s lead author, veterinarian Dr. Cara Field, called the finding “extremely alarming” and “unprecedented in wildlife.”4

Environmental Contaminants to Blame

When examined post-mortem,5 it was found that 18% to 23% of the sea lions were primarily suffering from urogenital carcinoma (UGC), which has previously been associated with organochlorines such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethanes (DDTs), and infection with otarine herpesvirus-1 (OtHV-1).

After conducting post-mortem exams on 394 animals collected over a 20-year period, the risk of cancer was found to be 43.57 times higher in sea lions infected with OtHV-1, along with 1.48 times higher for every unit increase in contaminant concentrations in their blubber.6 Sadly, the sea lions live in an area that’s heavily polluted. Writing in Frontiers in Marine Science, the researchers explained:7

“The central California coast and its food web are exposed to high levels of potentially carcinogenic persistent organochlorines following dumping of industrial waste DDTs (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethanes) in the 1960s and urbanization and industrialization of the coast increasing run-off of newer chemical contaminants.”

Previous studies have tied pollutants with cancer in marine mammals, such as the beluga, while California sea lions with cancer are known to have higher levels of PCBs and DDTs in their blubber than sea lions without cancer. Higher levels of PCBs were linked to eight times the cancer risk in sea lions while DDTs raised the risk sixfold.8

Synergism Between Virus and Pollutants Causing Cancer

The featured study suggests exposure to OtHV1 in addition to early exposure to pollutants could be driving cancer rates up in sea lions, with potential implications for humans. People in the Huaihe River Basin in China, for example, have a high rate of esophageal carcinoma that is associated with human papillomavirus and exposure to the highly carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon 3-methylcholanthrene.9

Sea lions are exposed to PCBs and DDTs in utero, as the chemicals travel across the placenta, as well as via milk early in life. It’s likely, the researchers suggested, that a synergism between the pollutants and later infection with OtHV1, which is sexually transmitted and localized to the reproductive tract where the cancer is occurring, may be driving up cancer rates in the animals:10

“As carcinogenesis is a multistep process requiring multiple mutagenic events and may necessitate replication and fixing of the DNA damage caused by promoters, this study supports the hypothesis that carcinoma in California sea lions is a multifactorial disease …

… Thus, as there is often a long latency period between the initial DNA damage and the onset of neoplasia, this study suggests early exposure to persistent organic pollutants, followed by infection with OtHV1, are important in the pathogenesis of UGC in wild sea lions.”

How Are the Pollutants Causing Cancer?

PCBs are “complete carcinogens”11 and have also been linked to fertility, reproductive and endocrine damage along with neurological effects, including damage to learning and memory. Even though PCBs have been banned in the U.S. for decades, these chemicals are extremely persistent in the environment.

Exposure to DDT is also linked to reproductive effects in humans, and the chemical is classified as a probable human carcinogen that’s been linked to liver tumors in animal studies.12

Elevated levels of DDT are also associated with high blood pressure in adults,13 while exposure to DDT is also known to induce epigenetic changes that promote obesity and kidney, testis and ovary disease that are passed on to future generations.14 Other toxic effects of DDT exposure in humans include:15

Developmental abnormalities
Reproductive disease
Neurological disease
Cancer

The chemicals may induce cancer directly via DNA damage or could affect cancer risk indirectly by suppressing the immune system, making it easier for viral infections to occur. Indeed, in 2016 it was revealed that DDT may inhibit P-glycoprotein, a “defense protein” that’s important for protecting organisms against environmental toxins.16

Research also suggest contaminants can modulate the immune system’s antiviral and tumor-surveillance activities. In addition to immune system suppression, the chemicals’ endocrine-disrupting effects are also problematic:17

“[I]t is possible that modulation of the immune system by organic contaminants can lead to variations in effectiveness of immune responses to OtHV-1 and cellular transformation.

Another possibility is that persistent organic pollutants may increase the likelihood of cancer via their hormone mimicking properties, as sea lion reproductive tracts which are prone to cancer have estrogen and progesterone receptors and alteration of receptor expression is noted in UGC. The endocrine-disrupting properties of organochlorine pesticides are well recognized, as are the endocrine associations with cancer.”

Secret DDT Dumpsite Discovered Off California Coast

The reason why California sea lions may have some of the highest contaminant levels ever recorded in their blubber is due to the chronic dumping of persistent organic pollutants off the California coast prior to their ban.

Marine biologist Rachel Carson was the first to sound the alarm that chemicals like DDT were destroying nature. But prior to that DDT was praised as “the war’s greatest contribution to the future health of the world” by Brig. Gen. James Simmons, the U.S. Army’s chief of preventive medicine, during World War II — a time when the chemical was sprayed onto soldiers to protect them from malaria and typhus.18

In DDT’s early years of production, the ocean was considered to be an acceptable place to dispose of waste. In addition to being very persistent in the environment, DDT is known to accumulate in fatty tissues and travels long distances in the upper atmosphere.19 It’s because of its persistence in the environment that even residues dumped decades ago remain a significant environmental and human health concern today.

Yet, shipping logs show that thousands of barrels of DDT-laced acid sludge were dumped into the ocean off the coast of Los Angeles, California each month following World War II.20

The barrels were dumped by Montrose Chemical Corp. at an estimated rate of 2,000 to 3,000 per month — an amount equal to about 1 million gallons of waste per year — from 1947 to 1961.21 This was a legal process at the time, and researchers suggested the waste may contain 0.5% to 2% DDT, amounting to a total DDT discharge of 384 tons to 1,535 tons.22

Photos taken by a deep-sea robot confirmed the barrels exist on the ocean floor, covered in sediment and some with slashes through them because, “when the barrels were too buoyant to sink on their own, one report said, the crews simply punctured them.”23 Other animals aside from sea lions are being affected as well.

When researchers tested the blubber of eight Southern California bottlenose dolphins, it contained 45 bioaccumulative DDT-related compounds, 80% of which are not typically monitored for.24 The dolphins lived in deeper waters, which was why researchers were surprised at their results, which showed higher levels of DDT than dolphins tested in Brazil and other areas.

Serious Implications for Humans

If higher levels of DDT and other chemicals increase the risk of cancer, there’s a good chance the same can be said for humans. It’s already known, for instance, that exposure to DDTs in utero increases breast cancer risk later in life, with researchers suggesting in 2015, “Findings support classification of DDT as an endocrine disruptor, a predictor of breast cancer, and a marker of high risk.”25

Other health risks are also likely. One study found that women exposed to the most DDT before birth were 2.5 to 3.6 times more likely to develop high blood pressure before the age of 50 than those with the lowest prenatal exposure.26 Due to its environmental persistence, people and animals continue to be exposed to these chemicals even in areas where they’re no longer produced.

Biologists know that pesticides like DDT are bioaccumulating in wildlife and becoming more concentrated as they move up the food chain — and the food chain includes humans. If you eat farmed salmon, you’re likely being exposed, and this is just one avenue of exposure. When the Environmental Working Group tested farmed salmon from U.S. grocery stores, they found farmed salmon had, on average:27

16 times more polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) than wild salmon
Four times more PCBs than beef
3.4 times more PCBs than other seafood

What’s more, in 2005 researchers found that farmed Atlantic salmon were so contaminated with PCBs, toxaphene, dieldrin, dioxins and polybrominated diphenyl ethers that they posed a cancer and additional health risks to humans, even when consumed in moderate amounts.28

The featured study highlighted the implications for human health, including the fact that virally associated cancer occurs in humans. “[The] … likelihood of cancer development could similarly be increased by exposure to environmental contaminants [in humans as it is in sea lions],” they wrote. “Efforts to prevent ecosystem contamination with persistent organic pollutants must be improved to protect both wildlife and human health.”29

Reducing Your Toxic Burden

In addition to avoiding farmed salmon in favor of safer seafood choices such as wild-caught Alaskan salmon, sardines, anchovies, mackerel and herring, it’s important to take steps to avoid environmental pollutants as much as possible while adding in elements to help your body detoxify. Eating a high-fiber diet is one example, which may reduce your risk of heart disease from PCBs.30

Broccoli sprouts may also help detox environmental pollutants,31 while choosing organic and/or biodynamically grown food can also help cut down on your chemical exposure. As for the California sea lions, they serve as an important warning for humans. Frances Gulland, a research associate at UC Davis, told the Los Angeles Times:32

“Sea lions, they’re coming up on the beach, using the same waters that we swim and surf in, eating a lot of the same seafood that we eat. They’re predisposed to cancer by these high levels of legacy compounds that are still in the environment — and we are also exposed to these chemicals.”
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/04/21/pcb-and-ddt-pollutants-in-california-sea-lions.aspx

Dandelions (Taraxacum officinale) are members of the Asteraceae family, otherwise known as the daisy family, which includes sunflowers, chrysanthemums, coneflowers and artichokes.1 You are likely familiar with these short yellow-flowered weeds in your garden and lawn.

They can be found around the world and appear to thrive nearly anywhere, including between cracks in a sidewalk, in abandoned city lots and in well-manicured lawns.2 Something you may not know is that what looks like one flower at the end of the stem of a dandelion is actually hundreds of tiny flowers that are growing together on one base.

The toothed edges of the leaves were the inspiration for the French name “dent de lion” or lion’s tooth. At the end of its life, the dandelion flower produces a wispy ball of seeds that is easily carried on the slightest breeze. Although they have become the bane of many homeowners, it is interesting and important to note that they have been prized for their medicinal and nutritional value since ancient times.3

In addition to improving human health, dandelions also help raise soil quality.4 The long tap root goes deep and can break through hard-packed soil. While growing, the roots draw up minerals, which are concentrated in the plant and likely give it many of the health benefits I discuss below.

However, when the plants are left to die, these minerals are absorbed by the topsoil, improving soil quality. Dandelions were used by ancient Egyptians, Romans and Greeks for their nutritional and medicinal properties and it’s likely they were purposely brought to the U.S. on the Mayflower.5

Although many homeowners grab for bottles of weed killer to get rid of them, consider that they may be one of the most expensive foodstuffs you can buy. Organic dandelion coffee can sell for up to $35 a pound.6

Dandelions Benefit Cardiovascular Health

A report from the American Heart Association in 20197 found 121.5 million U.S. adults were living with some form of cardiovascular disease. This is up 35.9 million people from the 85.6 million recorded three years earlier in the 2016 update.8 The precipitous rise in number was in part the result of changes in the definition of high blood pressure published in 2017.9

Moving the indicators down just 10 points for systolic and diastolic blood pressure from 140/90 to 130/80 increased the number of people with cardiovascular disease to nearly 48% of the population.10

Yet a mere two years later, the 2021 report11 found there were 126.9 million people 20 years old and older with cardiovascular disease. This comprised 49.2% of the overall population. In other words, while the change in guidelines resulted in an immediate and significant rise in number, the number of people with cardiovascular disease has only continued to grow.

High blood pressure is also known as the “silent killer” as there are often no symptoms until you have a heart attack or stroke. Many of the medications used to treat high blood pressure come with a long list of side effects and risks.12 However, there are several natural strategies you can use to help support your cardiovascular system and consuming dandelions is one of them.

One type of medication used to support the cardiovascular system is diuretics. These are sometimes called water pills because they help the body release more salt and water into the urine. Side effects13 from these medications can include muscle cramps, vomiting, electrolyte imbalances and a decrease in libido.

Dandelions also have strong diuretic activity,14 which may be due in part to the high potassium content in the plant. The plant can also help the body get rid of waste products, including drugs, metabolic waste and dietary toxins through the liver and kidneys.15

Additionally, a scientific review of the literature16 revealed that extracts from the dandelion root demonstrated antiplatelet activity in the lab setting. This helps to inhibit the adhesion of platelets on the endothelial walls and reduce the potential for plaque formation.

It is important to note that if you are on blood thinners, taking medication to treat diabetes or have any other health condition where taking a diuretic could present a problem, you should not include the dandelion plant in your daily regimen.

Hepatoprotective Effects in Chronic Liver Failure

Evidence also points to the hepatoprotective effects of dandelion compounds. This is important in the face of the rising number of people with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).17 This is a condition in which excess fat in the liver makes it more difficult for the liver to function and affects up to 25% of the U.S. population.

The excess fat build-up is not caused by alcohol but, rather, is associated with the adoption of a sedentary lifestyle and poor dietary practices.18 One study19 evaluated the effectiveness of using dandelion in patients with a history of high blood pressure and concurrent chronic liver injury. In addition to conventional drugs, the patients received a dandelion decoction twice a day over five months.

The researchers evaluated blood pressure levels, liver enzymes and other parameters. The results demonstrated a mild reduction in blood pressure and additional hepatoprotective properties including enhancement of regenerative capabilities in the liver. During the trial, 93.8% of those taking the intervention had maintained blood pressure lower than 140/90.

A second animal study20 evaluated the hepatoprotective effects of a dandelion root extract and compared that against treatment with silymarin. The animals were administered the interventions for seven days after chronic liver failure was induced. The researchers then measured liver and kidney parameters and oxidative stress markers.

The data demonstrated that the dandelion root extract helped to lower tests that demonstrated liver and kidney injury, as well as improve triglyceride levels and oxidative stress tests. The researchers concluded that the extract had a “hepatoprotective effect and reduces renal dysfunction. These effects were correlated with the antioxidant activity and systemic oxidative stress reduction.”21

Dandelions Help Manage Blood Sugar

Diabetes is a metabolic condition with insulin resistance as its hallmark symptom. According to the American Diabetes Association,22 in 2018 there were 34.2 million Americans who had the condition. Of these, it was estimated that 7.3 million were undiagnosed. Each year, 1.5 million people in the U.S. are diagnosed with diabetes.

There are several health complications associated with diabetes, including glaucoma, peripheral neuropathy, kidney disease, cardiovascular disease and high blood pressure.23 In addition to having an effect on your cardiovascular system and blood pressure, dandelion plants can also help manage blood sugar.

A 2021 study24 published in Food Chemistry found flavonoids from the dandelion plant could inhibit pancreatic alpha amylase in a noncompetitive manner. Pancreatic alpha amylase is manufactured in the pancreas and used in the initial step of carbohydrate metabolism to produce glucose.25 This function has made it a target in the research for treatments of Type 2 diabetes.

This is likely one of the mechanisms that make dandelion compounds antidiabetic. In some countries, dandelions are used for blood sugar control.26 Much of the initial research into dandelions demonstrated promising results against Type 2 diabetes. However, further work, such as that published in Food Chemistry, is needed to determine the exact cellular impact and identify the active components within the plant.

During the fall months, the dandelion plant becomes higher in inulin.27 This is a dietary fiber that acts as a prebiotic to nourish beneficial gut bacteria and may help control blood sugar.

In one study,28 participants with prediabetes took an inulin supplement for 18 weeks. The group taking inulin lost weight and liver fat. Researchers believe by promoting weight loss and reducing hepatocellular and muscle fat, the inulin had a positive impact on fasting blood sugar measurements.

In an earlier study,29 inulin supplementation also improved glycemic indices in women with Type 2 diabetes. The normalization of liver fat may help reduce insulin resistance and improve Type 2 diabetes.30

More Health Benefits From Dandelions

Many of the health benefits attributed to dandelion leaves, flowers and roots are likely the result of the high nutritional content of the plant. An analysis of dandelion extract shows appreciable concentrations of vitamins A, B complex, C and E.31

One cup of chopped dandelion leaves32 has 24.7 calories, 535% of your daily recommended amount of vitamin K and 112% of vitamin A. The plant is also high in calcium, iron, manganese and choline. The plant is rich in phytochemicals, which may account for the description as a “nontoxic herb with exceptional biological activity.”33

Dandelion extract also demonstrates broad-spectrum activity against a variety of pathogenic fungi and bacteria tested in the lab.34 There has been considerable interest in analyzing natural antimicrobial agents in the face of multiple drug-resistant pathogenic organisms that have developed in the past 10 years in response to the indiscriminate use of antibiotics.

Dandelion extract is one of those natural remedies that has demonstrated effective antimicrobial properties.35 The plant is also rich in antioxidants, which may be one of the reasons it has such broad applications for health and wellness. It’s also rich in beta-carotene36 and polyphenols, which are found in the greatest concentration in the flower.37

Many of these vitamins and antioxidants play a role in protecting your skin against damage. It has been used in folk medicine for boils, sore throats and fever.38 In one study,39 dandelion leaf and flower extracts were applied just prior to or immediately after being exposed to UVB radiation, and demonstrated the ability to protect the skin from sun damage.

Interestingly, the extract produced from the root was not as effective. As discussed above, the fall harvest of dandelions is high in inulin, which helps protect the health of your gut microbiome and the bodily systems it impacts.

How to Use Dandelions at Home

If you are on medication, work with your health care provider to add dandelion to your health regimen as it may change your medication requirements. If you’re foraging for dandelions, be sure you are looking in areas that have not been sprayed with pesticides.40

It is best to avoid roadsides, railroad areas and agricultural areas as these have likely been sprayed with herbicides and pesticides that can make you sick. It is also important to note that there are many look-alike plants with similar leaves. Be sure you’re picking dandelion leaves, which are hairless and toothed.

Dandelion flowers taste best before they’ve opened. You can pick them right off the stem, remove the base petals and pop them in a salad. Dandelion leaves have the best taste in spring and early summer and are paired well in a salad.

However, the older leaves can also be steamed and added to stir fry or soups. The heating process can reduce the bitter flavor. Dandelion tea and coffee are a relaxing way of enjoying the health benefits. Tea can be made with a fresh or dried root or the flowers of the plant and coffee is made by drying the root and grinding it into a powder.41
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/04/23/dandelion-health-benefits.aspx

Dr. Mercola Interviews the Experts
This article is part of a weekly series in which Dr. Mercola interviews various experts on a variety of health issues. To see more expert interviews, click here.

In this interview, Dr. Val Kanter, a board-certified endodontist and biological dentist with a practice in Beverly Hills, California, discusses the oft-ignored dangers of root canal procedures and modern technologies with which these issues can be effectively addressed and corrected.
Unfortunately, few regular dentists fully appreciate the intimate links between your oral health and overall physical health and, as a result, some of their interventions can actually cause catastrophic health challenges.
The sad reality is that if we knew how to eat properly from the time we were born, the need for just about any type of dentistry would, in my view, decrease by at least 90%, because we just wouldn’t develop cavities.
Thankfully we have trained professionals who can help restore our health, and Kanter is one of them. Her transition into holistic dentistry occurred after she moved from Florida to California and started doing some self-exploration.

“I had some enlightening moments,” she says, “and it was really interesting because I was raised in mainstream dentistry and mainstream health, not really understanding what I do now. It was through that self-discovery that I actually learned about water fluoridation and the major damage that has created.
I got involved with the Fluoride Action Network and worked closely with Michael [Connett] for a long time, publishing research on some of the damages. One of the things that is so obvious to us is fluorosis in kids. It was originally thought to affect only 10% of kids, and now we’re up to a place where it’s affecting 50% or more.
That’s a window. It’s a view of what’s happening inside the body. That’s what got me on the path and that led me into learning about ozone and laser therapy and it really opened up a whole new world for me in the field of endodontics.”

Do You Really Need a Root Canal?

One of the founding members of the American Endodontics Society, Dr. George Meinig, wrote the book “Root Canal Cover-Up.” It’s a really good primer and provides solid information as to why you may want to consider avoiding root canal treatment.
The conventional idea is that it’s best to preserve whatever you can of the original tooth rather than replacing it entirely. Hence, they’ll do a root canal and attach a crown rather than pull the tooth and replace it, typically with an implant. The downside is that root canal-treated teeth can cause significant health complications that often aren’t recognized as being a side effect of the root canal.
There’s a whole new world of regenerative dentistry and regenerative endodontics that if you’re using the proper equipment, you can preserve the vitality of the teeth. ~ Dr. Val Kanter
According to Kanter, more than 20 million root canal procedures are done every year in the U.S. “It’s an astronomical number, and most of those root canal procedures are done by general dentists,” she says. That in itself is a problem, as you typically do less than 10 root canals while in dental school, and once you’re in practice, much of the training you get is done by sales reps of various equipment.

“One of the most important things that I want the listeners to understand,” Kanter says, “is that there is a specialty out there that focuses on this procedure. If you do decide to have the procedure done, please go see a specialist. See two or three. Get multiple opinions.
It’s so important, because I feel that a lot of root canal procedures are done unnecessarily. It’s a quick way to hit a symptom, just like a medication. It’s, ‘Oh, let’s take out the nerve and the pain will stop.’ These inflammations inside the teeth can be reversed. I see it daily in my practice. I see a lot of patients who want to prevent a root canal.
There’s a whole new world of regenerative dentistry and regenerative endodontics that if you’re using the proper equipment, you can preserve the vitality of the teeth and that’s my passion and goal. With that said, most of my practice is retreating old, contaminated root canals …
My goal is to teach all of the dentists out there about these procedures because then it doesn’t even have to go to that level. If someone needs a root canal procedure, they should see an endodontist if they decide to go that route.
I think one of the top things that you should be seeking if you are a patient looking for a practitioner that’s going to resonate with the things that you want — which are some of these regenerative procedures — is finding dentists that are using this laser therapy.
It’s becoming more and more popular, but still probably about 10% of dentists use dental lasers. I would start there. Go to Fotona’s website1 and find someone in your area using this laser therapy.”

Prevention Basics
Of course, prevention is the best medicine, and some basic care can help you minimize the time you need to spend in a dentist chair. The most important factor in that regard is nutrition. Three crucial nutrients for oral and dental health are vitamins A, D and K. You also need a good supply of minerals.
“Unfortunately, most of our food is deficient in the minerals and micronutrients we need because of the way that farming has been done,” Kanter says. Ideally, you’ll want to do micronutrient testing along with testing your vitamin D level and hemoglobin A1C. Kanter will perform many of these tests at her office, and helps patients customize their diet.

“It’s challenging because the nutritional component of dental schools is minuscule. That’s why I did advanced training with the ACIMD, which is basically integrative biological dentistry and medicine training to become a naturopath … By decreasing sugar in your diet, and stress, you can actually [heal your teeth].
Your teeth are a beautiful complex system that are actually healing themselves constantly. There’s an outward fluid flow inside the nerve complex in your tubules and it’s protecting your teeth. As soon as you start loading your body with sugar and all of these other things, the fluid flow just reverses, and that leads to an influx of bacteria and other toxins that can start to create inflammation in the tooth.
The tooth is a very complex and unique system, unlike anywhere else in the body. If you have inflammation from any other injury, your skin can stretch and swell, whereas the tooth is encapsulated in enamel, and it can’t stretch. When inflammation starts to build up, it can quickly turn into a pathological process and that’s what leads to major nerve damage.”

Ozone and Laser Therapy
Once pain sets in, you’re past the point of being able to prevent deterioration, but this is where regenerative dentistry can come in and save the day (and your tooth). One is ozone therapy. Another is laser therapy.
Pulpitis is inflammation of the pulp nerve complex of the tooth. Using these regenerative therapies, Kanter has successfully reversed this kind of inflammation in many patients. Even when decay and bacteria have made it all the way into the nerve tissue, laser therapy can sterilize the surface of the nerve, while ozone gas, which also kills pathogens, can actually stimulate your immune system to kick in and eradicate the remaining infection.
In the interview, you’ll find a video showing how the Erbium YAG laser treatment seemingly melts away the decayed tooth structure. Contrary to mechanical drilling, the laser is so gentle on the tooth structure, you don’t even need anesthesia. It also sterilizes the surface as you go along. Why is this important? Kanter explains:

“When you drill, you’re starting to remove decay filled with bacteria. As the dentist is drilling deeper into the tooth into the more vulnerable layers near the nerve, you’re carrying that bacteria that’s trapped in the bur and you’re actually driving it deeper in the tooth. With the laser, you’re sterilizing cell layer by cell layer.”

Were the laser to hit the nerve, it also will not kill the nerve. Once the area is free of decay, Kanter will ozonate the entire surface, and since it’s a gas, the ozone is able to penetrate into and actually disinfect the tubules. Special bioceramic materials that are highly biocompatible are then used to complete the restoration of the tooth.

“Using photobiomodulation or low-level laser … a neodymium YAG laser, which is 1064 wavelength … you can actually stimulate the mitochondria inside the tissues, upregulating ATP production, collagen synthesis and angiogenesis,” she says.
“I generally use it at 20 Hertz, so the frequency is 20. Then, if it’s intraoral, we usually use it at a 2-watt power level. It takes just a couple of minutes … We do these low-level laser procedures on every single patient that’s coming to see me, and it’s profound, the amount of healing and the reduction of pain and inflammation that we can see.”

In the future, we may even have the ability to regenerate tooth material naturally. As explained by Kanter, researchers are investigating the ability of collagen matrices embedded with different medications to stimulate natural tooth formation. There are also studies looking at how to regrow teeth from scratch.
The Hidden Hazards of Root Canals

There are several reasons for avoiding root canals. Importantly, research by Dr. Weston A. Price demonstrated just how interconnected your teeth are with your overall health. He implanted infected root canaled teeth under the skin of rabbits, and in many cases, the rabbits went on to develop the very disease that the donor of the tooth had.
Granted, dentistry has changed a lot since Price, so his results may not be directly applicable to today. Kanter, who is the endo director of the International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology (IAOMT), is now in the process of developing studies to try to recreate some of his studies to see whether the root canals of today, in which teeth are able to be cleaned to a far greater degree, still produce the same systemic effects.
That said, as recently as nine years ago, the American Association of Endodontists, which oversees the specialty of endodontics, admitted that current techniques fail to completely remove all infected material from root canaled teeth. To illustrate this, Kanter shows a CT scan of a root canaled tooth (see video).

“The red area is the area that the instrument has cleaned out. The green area wasn’t even touched. What this means is that a third of the soft tissue of this necrotic tissue in the tooth is completely untouched by instruments. Unfortunately, most [dental students] have in their head, ‘I need to get these instruments in and I got to do this shaping of these canals,’ and that’s actually not what’s cleaning the teeth at all.
What’s happening is that the dentist is grabbing a syringe of a fluid to irrigate the tooth. Generally, they’re using sodium hypochlorite, which is essentially bleach, and they’re just taking a syringe with a small needle on it and they’re introducing it down into the canal. It’s not cleaning everything out. It’s only cleaning a teeny tiny percentage of the dentinal tubules, leaving a ton of bacteria and toxins behind.
In the picture on the right, you see all this black material. These are complete channels of necrotic tissue that are left behind during these procedures. We can see why these teeth can be so toxic if all of this material is left behind. That’s just looking at the main nerve channels, not even tubules. It’s surprising that root canal treatments ever work.”

The good news is that the relationship of apical periodontitis and systemic illnesses is finally starting to be more widely recognized. Apical periodontitis is an infection around a tooth that leads to infection in the bone. “If you have apical periodontitis, you’re three times more likely to develop coronary artery disease,” Kanter says. It’s also associated with a higher risk of kidney disease and cancer.
Up to 78% of the plaques found in heart attack victims have oral pathogens in them, and they’re the exact same pathogens you find in failed root canal treatments. This kind of systemic infection can be identified by looking at biomarkers such as CRP and interleukin-6.
Yes, There Are Ways to Make Root Canals Safer

In cases where regenerative techniques are inappropriate and more aggressive treatment is required, you basically have only two options left: extraction of the tooth or a root canal. The good news is that there are safer ways of doing a root canal these days, but you need to use a combination of ozone and laser therapy in order to achieve optimal sterilization. Ozone alone isn’t even enough. Kanter explains:

“I have incorporated ozone therapy into my root canal procedures for the last five years. In fact, I started a pilot study at UCLA looking at the efficacy of ozone gas and comparing it to traditional techniques. It was a blow to me, but unfortunately the ozone gas wasn’t doing the job.
We use that at about 100 micrograms per milliliter, which is very high, but we only did it for one minute per canal. Now, what we know about ozone is that it’s both dose dependent and time dependent. Further studies are going to be done, but we may need to create a closed system where we can completely infuse the tooth with the ozone gas in order to sterilize it because, yes, of course, a gas is going to travel deeper into tubules than a liquid is.
The main issue is that if there’s debris and blockages in these tubules, I don’t believe the ozone gas to be able to penetrate. Now, with the traditional techniques, you’re leaving so much behind. I have a really cool video that compares the traditional technique with the new laser activated irrigation. This is what’s made me feel really good about these treatments that I’m doing on my patients …
With the new laser activation that I’m using in my practice, watch how quickly this biofilm is disrupted. The laser is simply at the top of the tooth. It doesn’t have to extend down the canal, and look at that energy.
This is what not a lot of people are familiar with. You cannot have a root canal procedure without an advanced irrigation. It is absolutely critical. Within 10 to 20 seconds, look at the amount of biofilm that’s disrupted. We’re also seeing complete cleaning of the dentinal tubules … down to the microtubules as well …
There’s one more technology on the market that’s reaching a lot of endodontists. If you need a root canal procedure, find someone that’s using either the laser or this gentle procedure. The general aid is using sound energy … all of these different frequencies, and you have a closed system on the tooth and it actually sucks all of the necrotic tissue and debris out of the root structure.
Between these two technologies, we’re getting results like this. This is the look of the tubules when they’re just sparkling clean. It is possible, but unfortunately the majority of root canal procedures that are being done are not using this.”

Hyperbaric Oxygen Treatment
Another alternative treatment that can be very useful is hyperbaric oxygen treatment. By introducing higher pressures, you’re able to get oxygen deeper into the tooth area, thereby facilitating and speeding healing. Kanter has a couple of different hyperbaric centers in Los Angeles that she will sometimes refer patients to.

“The patients that come see me are generally very committed to their health. We do a variety of treatments that support the procedures that we’re doing. We do ozone inside the tooth, where it has an antibacterial effect, but we also inject it around the tooth. We do that at their recall appointments as well, so we’re constantly stimulating the immune system around these teeth.
We’re also doing the low-level laser treatments, as well as microcurrent and other things to keep energy flowing in these areas where I know that there is scar tissue. We have to break that down, and eventually energy can start flowing through,” she says.

Why Extraction Isn’t an Ideal Solution
The second option, to extract the infected tooth, also has its issues. For example, there’s a decrease in neurofeedback to the brain, and so it’s correlated with early Alzheimer’s and other degenerative, neurodegenerative diseases, Kanter says. Also, when you take a tooth out, the periodontal ligament that encompasses the root needs to be completely removed as well.
This ligament nourishes the root from the outside and acts as a defense mechanism against bacteria. The problem is it also provides 70% of the blood flow to the surrounding jaw bone. So, when you take a tooth and the surrounding ligament out, you also cut the blood supply to your jaw in that area by 70%, which is why you end up seeing bone degeneration and resorption, as there’s nothing left to support that bone.

“There’s definitely cases [in which] a tooth extraction is indicated, but I think there’s plenty of patients out there that can withstand having a root canal procedure and remain healthy. Even Weston Price said there are different categories of patients out there.
There are patients who are going to be very susceptible to any sort of remnant bacteria in these teeth, causing systemic illnesses, and then there’s going to be people that are just fine … Apical periodontitis or root canal infections cause systemic illnesses. But a root canal procedure or a root canal treated tooth in itself does not cause the systemic illness …
We need to do more research with these new techniques. It’s definitely a goal of mine to get the research done, to mimic some of these older studies, using the new technology, and looking at not only getting rid of the bacteria but getting rid of the endotoxins and everything else the bacteria leave behind, because those move quicker than the bacteria once they’re released into the body.”

Replacing Extracted Teeth
If you have a periapical abscess, it is typically too late to save the tooth as it is dead and seriously infected. In that case, it will need to be removed. Once a tooth is extracted, you then have to decide what you’re going to replace it with. Here, there are a number of options — implant, bridge or partial — each with its own pros and cons.

“First of all, if you’re going to extract the tooth, it needs to be done by a surgeon using things like PRF, platelet rich fibrin, which really helps the site heal and create new bone and collagen in the area quickly, and also provides an immune response in the area. That’s really important,” Kanter says.
“Also, if you’re thinking about doing an implant, you need to do sensitivity testing … because [many] are sensitive to titanium, and most of the implants being placed are made of titanium. There are alternatives like zirconia, but it’s important that you find out if you are compatible with these materials before you put them in your body.
If you’re not able to put these in your body because of sensitivity, then your options are going to be a bridge or a partial. But metal in the mouth is becoming more and more of an issue. We’re seeing it constantly. It’s creating these interference fields in the mouth and a lot of people are having hypersensitivity reactions to them.
It turns into a domino effect on the patient’s overall health. We’re constantly evaluating that and helping our patients figure out what materials are best for them and what prosthesis or restorative plan is going to be best for them.”

Call to Action

Unfortunately, many have improperly cleaned root canal-treated teeth, and more often than not, there can be silent infections around these teeth. For this reason, Kanter urges anyone who has a root canaled tooth to get a three-dimensional cone beam image done of the tooth.
Many endodontists have this machine. If they don’t have one, they should be able to refer you out for one. “You should have a 3D scan if you’ve ever had a root canal procedure,” Kanter says. “That’s my call of action to all of your listeners.”
In the interview video, she shows what an infected root canal looks like. You cannot see this infection, however, on a standard dental X-ray. These are the kinds of post-root canal problems Kanter deals with in her practice, using the regenerative technologies discussed above.

“That’s 75% of my practice,” she says. “Patients get the CT, we find these issues, we find the connections into the sinus, how it’s related to all of these [health] problems, and we just start breaking it down and doing our best to help these patients.”

So, getting a 3D cone scan of your tooth is the first step. Kanter recommends having the scan radiographically interpreted by your nearest university or a company called Beam Readers. “These are board-certified radiologists that look through every detail,” Kanter explains.
Again, to locate a biological endodontist familiar with the regenerative technologies discussed in this interview, check out fotona.com, or gentlewave.com. They offer lists of practitioners that are using these technologies.

“If you’re going to someone using either of these technologies, you’re going to generally be in good hands,” Kanter says. “In my practice, I’m using both. I use the laser and the gentle wave, so we are cleaning to the ultimate capacity in these teeth and that’s what I feel is necessary.”

More Information

Kanter is creating an educational platform to teach and endodontists and dentists about diagnosis and precision dentistry on her website, i-endo.com. “These new courses are already starting, and I’m going to be spending the next decade really trying to change this paradigm and shift into the new way of healthcare,” she says.
To learn more about the nutritional aspects of dental health, check out Weston Price’s classic book, “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration,” and for a foundational understanding of the health hazards of root canal treatment, see “Root Canal Cover-Up.”
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/04/25/the-hidden-dangers-of-root-canals.aspx

A question that has lingered since the 2009 mass vaccination campaign against pandemic H1N1 swine flu is whether seasonal influenza vaccination might make pandemic infections worse or more prevalent.1
Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Michael Murray, naturopath and author, confirmed what Judy Mikovits, Ph.D., told me in her second interview with me, namely that seasonal influenza vaccinations may have contributed to the dramatically elevated COVID-19 mortality seen in Italy. In a blog post, he pointed out that Italy had introduced a new, more potent type of flu vaccine, called VIQCC, in September 2019:2

“Most available influenza vaccines are produced in embryonated chicken eggs. VIQCC, however, is produced from cultured animal cells rather than eggs and has more of a ‘boost’ to the immune system as a result.

VIQCC also contains four types of viruses — 2 type A viruses (H1N1 and H3N2) and 2 type B viruses.3 It looks like this ‘super’ vaccine impacted the immune system in such a way to increase coronavirus infection through virus interference …”

Vaccines and Virus Interference
The kind of virus interference Murray was referring to had been shown to be at play during the 2009 pandemic swine flu. A 2010 review4,5 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. At the time, Skowronski commented on her team’s findings, telling MedPage Today:6

“There may be a direct vaccine effect in which the seasonal vaccine induced some cross-reactive antibodies that recognized pandemic H1N1 virus, but those antibodies were at low levels and were not effective at neutralizing the virus. Instead of killing the new virus it actually may facilitate its entry into the cells.”

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:7

“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
A study8,9 published in the January 10, 2020, issue of the journal Vaccine also found people were more likely to get some form of coronavirus infection if they had been vaccinated against influenza. As noted in this study, titled “Influenza Vaccination and Respiratory Virus Interference Among Department of Defense Personnel During the 2017-2018 Influenza Season:”

“Receiving influenza vaccination may increase the risk of other respiratory viruses, a phenomenon known as virus interference … This study aimed to investigate virus interference by comparing respiratory virus status among Department of Defense personnel based on their influenza vaccination status.”

While seasonal influenza vaccination did not raise the risk of all respiratory infections, it was in fact “significantly associated with unspecified coronavirus” (meaning it did not specifically mention SARS-CoV-2, which was still unknown at the time this study was conducted) and human metapneumovirus (hMPV10).
Remember, SARS-CoV-2 is one of seven different coronaviruses known to cause respiratory illness in humans.11 Four of them — 229E, NL63, OC43 and HKU1 — cause symptoms associated with the common cold.
OC43 and HKU112 are also known to cause bronchitis, acute exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and pneumonia in all age groups.13 The other three human coronaviruses — which are capable of causing more serious respiratory illness — are SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2.
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.14,15
Influenza Vaccination Linked to Higher COVID Death Rates
October 1, 2020, professor Christian Wehenkel, an academic editor for PeerJ, published a data analysis16 in that same journal, in which he reports finding a “positive association between COVID-19 deaths and influenza vaccination rates in elderly people worldwide.”
In other words, areas with the highest vaccination rates among elderly people also had the highest COVID-19 death rates. To be fair, the publisher’s note points out that correlation does not necessary equal causation:

“What does that mean? By way of example, in some cities increased ice cream sales correlate with increased murder rates. But that doesn’t mean that if more ice creams are sold, then murder rates will increase. There is some other factor at play — the weather temperature.

Similarly, this article should not be taken to suggest that receiving the influenza vaccination results in an increased risk of death for an individual with COVID-19 as there may be many confounding factors at play (including, for example, socioeconomic factors).”

That said, one of the reasons for the analysis was to double-check whether the data would support reports claiming that seasonal influenza vaccination was negatively correlated with COVID-19 mortality — including one that found regions in Italy with higher vaccination rates among elders had lower COVID-19 death rates.17 “A negative association was expected,” Wehenkel writes in PeerJ. But that’s not what he found:

“Contrary to expectations, the present worldwide analysis and European sub-analysis do not support the previously reported negative association between COVID-19 deaths (DPMI) [COVID-19 deaths per million inhabitants] and IVR [influenza vaccination rate] in elderly people, observed in studies in Brazil and Italy,” the author noted.18

“To determine the association between COVID-19 deaths and influenza vaccination, available data sets from countries with more than 0.5 million inhabitants were analyzed (in total 39 countries).

To accurately estimate the influence of IVR on COVID-19 deaths and mitigate effects of confounding variables, a sophisticated ranking of the importance of different variables was performed, including as predictor variables IVR and some potentially important geographical and socioeconomic variables as well as variables related to non-pharmaceutical intervention.

The associations were measured by non-parametric Spearman rank correlation coefficients and random forest functions.

The results showed a positive association between COVID-19 deaths and IVR of people ?65 years-old. There is a significant increase in COVID-19 deaths from eastern to western regions in the world. Further exploration is needed to explain these findings, and additional work on this line of research may lead to prevention of deaths associated with COVID-19.”

What Might Account for Vaccination-Mortality Link?
In the discussion section of the paper, Wehenkel points out that previous explanations for how flu vaccination might reduce COVID-19 deaths are not supported by the data he collected.
The influenza vaccine may increase influenza immunity at the expense of reduced immunity to SARS-CoV-2 by some unknown biological mechanism … Alternatively … reduced non-specific immunity in the following weeks, probably caused by virus interference. ~ Professor Christian Wehenkel
For example, he cites research attributing the beneficial effect of flu vaccination to improved prevention of influenza and SARS-CoV-2 coinfections, and another that suggested the flu vaccine might improve SARS-CoV-2 clearance.
These arguments “cannot explain the positive, direct or indirect relationship between influenza vaccination rates and both COVID-19 deaths per million inhabitants and case fatality ratio found in this study, which was confirmed by an unbiased ranking variable importance using Random Forest models,” Wehenkel says.19 (Random Forest refers to a preferred classification algorithm used in data science to model predictions.20) Instead, he offers the following hypotheses:21

“The influenza vaccine may increase influenza immunity at the expense of reduced immunity to SARS-CoV-2 by some unknown biological mechanism, as suggested by Cowling et al. (2012)22 for non-influenza respiratory virus.

Alternatively, weaker temporary, non-specific immunity after influenza viral infection could cause this positive association due to stimulation of the innate immune response during and for a short time after infection.23,24

People who had received the influenza vaccination would have been protected against influenza but not against other viral infections, due to reduced non-specific immunity in the following weeks,25 probably caused by virus interference.26,27,28

Although existing human vaccine adjuvants have a high level of safety, specific adjuvants in influenza vaccines should also be tested for adverse reactions, such as additionally increased inflammation indicators29 in COVID-19 patients with already strongly increased inflammation.”30

The Flu Vaccine Paradox
Since Wehenkel’s analysis focuses on the flu vaccine’s impact on COVID-19 mortality among the elderly, it can be useful to take a look at information presented at a World Health Organization workshop in 2012. On page 6 of the workshop presentation31 in question, the presenter discusses “a paradox from trends studies” showing that “influenza-related mortality increased in U.S. elderly while vaccine coverage rose from 15% to 65%.”
On page 7, he further notes that while a decline in mortality of 35% would be expected with that increase in vaccine uptake, assuming the vaccine is 60% to 70% effective, the mortality rate has risen instead, although not exactly in tandem with vaccination coverage.
On page 10, another paradox is noted. While observational studies claim the flu vaccine reduces winter mortality risk from any cause by 50% among the elderly, and vaccine coverage among the elderly rose from 15% to 65%, no mortality decline has been seen among the elderly during winter months.32,33
Seeing how the elderly are the most likely to die due to influenza, and the flu accounts for 5% to 10% of all winter deaths, a “50% mortality savings [is] just not possible,” the presenter states. He then goes on to highlight studies showing evidence of bias in studies that estimate influenza vaccine effectiveness in the elderly. When that bias is adjusted for, vaccine effectiveness among seniors is discouraging.
Interestingly, the document points out that immunologists have long known that vaccine effectiveness in the elderly would be low, thanks to senescent immune response, i.e., the natural decline in immune function that occurs with age. This is why influenza “remains a significant problem in elderly despite widespread influenza vaccination programs,” the presenter notes.
Report All COVID-19 Vaccine Side Effects
My belief is that current COVID-19 “vaccines,” which use mRNA gene therapy technology, are likely to do more harm than good in most people. There are many reports of elderly in nursing homes dying within hours or days of getting the vaccine. This is likely due to an overwhelming inflammatory response.
If you’re elderly and frail, or have a family member who is elderly and thinking of getting the vaccine, I would urge you to take a deeper dive into the available research, and to review the side effect statistics before making your decision.
Last but not least, if you or someone you love have received a COVID-19 vaccine and are experiencing side effects, be sure to report it:34

If you live in the U.S., file a report on VAERS
Report the injury on VaxxTracker.com, which is a nongovernmental adverse event tracker (you can file anonymously if you like)
Report the injury on the CHD website

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/04/26/flu-vaccine-increases-covid-mortality.aspx

Evidence suggests that including bay leaves and ginger in your nutritional plan may have a positive impact on your blood sugar and gut health. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,1 6 in every 10 adults living in the U.S. have a chronic disease. Nearly 4 in every 10 adults have two or more chronic illnesses that may include heart disease, diabetes, chronic kidney disease or cancer.

Many of these conditions are associated with behaviors that include poor nutrition, lack of physical activity, exposure to smoke or excessive alcohol use. Two health conditions that contribute to chronic diseases include metabolic syndrome and poor gut health, or gut dysbiosis.

Metabolic syndrome is a group of five health conditions that are associated with other chronic problems, including cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes and chronic kidney disease. When a person has three or more of the five risk factors they are diagnosed with metabolic syndrome. These include:2,3

High blood glucose
High blood pressure
Obesity, a BMI of 30 or above or a large waist (40 inches in men; 35 in women)
High triglycerides
Low high-density lipoproteins (HDL) cholesterol

Your nutritional choices also have an impact on your gut health. Optimizing your gut microbiome is a pursuit that has far-reaching effects on your physical and emotional health. There is mounting scientific evidence to suggest that a large component of nutrition centers on nourishing beneficial bacteria in your gut, which may help keep harmful microbes in check.

This in turn reduces your risk of chronic disease. The list of conditions influenced by your gut microbiome includes learning disabilities, obesity,4 diabetes5 and Parkinson’s disease.6 In fact, one scientific review7 published in 2020 goes so far as to suggest all inflammatory diseases begin in the gut.

Prevalence of Metabolic Syndrome Is Rising

Metabolic syndrome, also called Syndrome X, has risen to epidemic proportions across the world.8 While the constellation of symptoms began in the Western world, the ever-growing spread of this lifestyle has created a global problem.

A combination of calorie-dense foods and a reduction in physical activity has fed the spread of metabolic syndrome that has led to a rising number with cardiovascular diseases, Type 2 diabetes and other disabilities. It’s estimated the total direct and indirect cost to the economy is in the trillions.

According to the CDC,9 data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey gathered from 1988 to 2012 demonstrated that more than 33% of all adults living in the U.S. had met the criteria for metabolic syndrome.

The prevalence of metabolic syndrome closely follows the rates of obesity,10 which have only continued to rise.11 It is a safe assumption that as the rates of obesity continue to rise, so has the prevalence of metabolic syndrome.

These Ingredients May Affect Symptoms of Metabolic Syndrome

Making small lifestyle changes can help normalize weight management and reduce insulin resistance, a hallmark of Type 2 diabetes. Adding ginger and bay leaves in your dietary regimen are two small steps that may help support lifestyle changes. Bay leaves are popular in pickling, marinating and flavoring stews, soups and stuffing.

The leaves can be up to 2 inches long12 and are almond-shaped. While they are added for marinating or cooking, you shouldn’t eat them since biting into a bay leaf is unpleasant. The flavor of the bay leaf changes after simmering it for an hour or two and it adds a complex profile to foods.

There are a variety of plants that are called bay leaves, but it is the Indonesian bay leaf (Syzygium polyanthum) that has demonstrated the ability to reduce fasting blood sugar in individuals with Type 2 diabetes. In a pilot study,13 researchers gave 350 milligrams (mg) of an extract in capsule form once a day for 14 days to the intervention group.

They found at the end of the 14 days the fasting blood sugar in the group receiving the supplement was lower than in the control group. This supported an earlier animal study14 also using an extract of Indonesian bay leaves.

Ginger is another flavorful choice you can add to your diet that may help reduce your blood sugar and has advantages for obesity and metabolic syndrome. The most frequent references for ginger have been for the treatment of nausea without any adverse side effects.15

However, ginger has also been shown to reduce blood sugar levels in human and animal studies. In 2014, an animal study16 using obese diabetic rats demonstrated those given cinnamon and ginger “significantly reduced their body weight and body fat mass” and “decreased blood glucose and leptin and increased insulin serum levels.”

A 2015 study17 using a ginger powder supplement for 12 weeks demonstrated the people in the intervention group had lower levels of hemoglobin A1c, which is a measurement of long-term blood glucose control. In 2016, an animal study18 demonstrated ginger extract supplementation in rats with diabetes may help protect against cardiovascular complications that are commonly found with diabetes.

Bay Leaves May Help Lower High Blood Pressure

High blood pressure is another symptom of metabolic syndrome that may be affected by the addition of a bay leaf supplement. On its own, high blood pressure can also increase your risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke and may double your risk of dying from COVID-19.19 Bay leaves are a traditional Malay treatment for high blood pressure,20 which may be associated in part with diuretic properties.21

Using an Indonesian bay leaf supplement, another study22 published in 2020 found that it has an influence on your vascular system. The researchers examined the effect against vascular endothelial growth using an animal model in which acute coronary syndrome was surgically induced.

The animals were then treated with bay leaf extract. When evaluated, they found there was a significant expression of vascular endothelial growth factors in the intervention group as compared to the control group. This led the researchers to conclude that the extract could have a potential effect on angiogenesis and act as an adjuvant treatment that could lead to better prognosis for reperfusion.23

These changes have the potential to improve recovery after a cardiovascular event that triggers tissue ischemia and damage. However, the results of a second study24 indicated that the extract also has an effect before cardiovascular damage and may help reduce systolic and diastolic blood pressure.

The researchers engaged 39 pregnant women and split them into an intervention group and control group. The women in the intervention group were given 80 mg of Indonesian bay leaf nanoparticles in combination with 10 mg of nifedipine for 14 days. The control group received just the nifedipine.

Nifedipine is a calcium channel blocker used to treat high blood pressure and control angina,25 and is prescribed in the treatment of high blood pressure in pregnancy.26 The data revealed there was a greater decrease in the systolic and diastolic blood pressure of the women in the intervention group when the medication was augmented with bay leaf nanoparticles.

Bay Leaves May Help With Intestinal Issues

According to a scientific review27 the chronic inflammatory diseases that are linked to leaky gut may depend in part on the types of exposures you’ve had, your genetic makeup and the composition of your gut microbiome. The author mentions several inflammatory diseases that are associated with dysregulation, including metabolic and autoimmune disorders and infections.28

Your gut bacteria are part of your natural immune defense, including antiviral defense as recent research has shown.29 According to a report by Harvard Medical School,30 researchers have for the first time identified specific populations of beneficial bacteria that help “ward off viral Invaders.”

Bay leaves have traditionally been used to help those who are having intestinal problems. Olga Korapliova, a nutrition expert, believes in part this may be due to the mineral and vitamin composition of bay leaves,31,32,33 which includes magnesium, potassium, trace selenium, iron and vitamins A, C, B6, B12 and B9 (folate).

These may assist in soothing an upset stomach and help in eliminating toxins from the gastrointestinal tract.34 It is also an Ayurvedic remedy that helps to manage indigestion. According to a report in Medicinal Plants of South Asia Journal,35 bay leaves have traditionally been used to relieve abdominal pain, gastrointestinal problems, constipation and diarrhea.

Ginger Fights Obesity and Aids Digestion

Ginger also helps aid digestion. Studies have demonstrated that ginger can reduce systemic inflammation, body weight and blood sugar,36 which helps protect against nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), found in up to 40% of U.S. adults.37

This in part may be related to an elaborate chemical makeup that includes bioactive compounds with antioxidant, antiemetic and anti-inflammatory properties.38 The compounds in ginger tend to concentrate in the gastrointestinal tract,39 which may be why so many of the benefits are related to this system.

It also has an exceptional ability to break up and get rid of intestinal gas that can cause cramping, pressure and vomiting. Some researchers also theorize that ginger can stimulate the digestive tract and is associated with rising levels of digestive enzymes.40

Together with elevating saliva41 and improving gastric motility,42 ginger helps keep food moving through the gut, so fermentation or gas buildup is less likely to occur.

How to Add Ginger and Bay Leaves

As mentioned before, bay leaves are often added to stews or in a marinade. However, you can also steep bay leaves for a flavorful tea. How long you steep the bay leaf will depend on the flavor profile you enjoy. Consider grating raw ginger to add a punch to foods, salad dressings and drinks or slicing the root and steeping a fresh hot cup of tea.

As you’re considering adding bay leaves and ginger, remember to choose organically grown herbs and spices over processed products. Try to be consistent with adding these to your diet. It is regular consumption over a period of weeks that has demonstrated positive results and not intermittent use.

Bay leaves are likely safe for most people but there isn’t enough information about safety for women who are pregnant or nursing.43 Since the leaf cannot be digested, it may remain intact while passing through the digestive system and may pierce the digestive system if an intact leaf is swallowed.

People who are on antidiabetic medications, narcotics or sedative medications should speak with their health care provider before using bay leaf supplements or adding a bay leaf to their daily routine.44 Bay leaves can decrease how quickly the body metabolizes narcotics and may cause sleepiness or drowsiness, especially when combined with sedative medications.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/04/22/bay-leaves-and-ginger-for-gut-health-and-blood-sugar.aspx

Dr. Paul Saladino is the author of “The Carnivore Code,” a book on nose-to-tail animal-based eating. He believes that animals, including organ meats, provide all of the nutrients needed for humans to thrive, in their most bioavailable forms.1 In the video above, he debates Dr. Joel Fuhrman, a family physician and author who coined the term “Nutritarian,” which refers to a nutrient-dense style of eating that’s primarily plant-based.
“It was a friendly debate but at times it got heated as all debates do,” Saladino said. “As you will hear in this video we disagreed on a lot of things.” Eventually, the two agree to disagree, but if you’ve ever wondered about which diet is best — animal-based or plant-based — this video provides some excellent food for thought.
Despite their differing opinions on diet, Saladino and Fuhrman share many similarities, including attending medical school in their 30s and ultimately pursuing nutrition and natural healing to promote human health. Both of their strategies have helped people to improve their health, but the underlying reasons why may differ, as may the ultimate long-term effects.
“It’s so interesting,” Saladino said, “that both animal-based diets and plant-based diets can lead to reversal of chronic disease that Western medicine calls untreatable and that mainstream Western medicine wants to treat with pharmaceuticals.” This may be because any diet that focuses on whole foods in lieu of the processed ones that make up a typical Western diet is a vast improvement.
In the Western world, people typically lose vitality consistently throughout life, but this doesn’t happen in native hunter-gatherer societies that are still eating their traditional — and meat-based — diet.
Observational Study in Favor of a Plant-Based Diet

Saladino asked Fuhrman why he believes meat is better off avoided, to which he replied, “I don’t really believe there’s a controversy here and I don’t really think there are two sides. I think the evidence is overwhelming and noncontroversial [in favor of a plant-based diet].”
He cited one study published in The Lancet Public Health, which found that, over a 25-year period, low-carb diets with higher animal-derived protein and fat sources were associated with higher mortality compared to diets that favored plant-derived protein and fats.2 Others, he said, have linked increased animal protein intake to deaths from breast, colon and bowel cancers. Speaking to Saladino, he added:

“… You’re a nice guy but I think you’re very misguided … and it’s like a religion where people aren’t weighing science and logic and overwhelming amounts of evidence. They just pick the side they want to choose to be on and then they try to accumulate data to support that way of living and eating instead of having an open slate …

So if I can reverse a person’s heart disease, get them off their blood pressure medication or get rid of their psoriasis with a diet that’s going to enable them to live to be 100 years old, I’d rather do that … because using a diet style that you’re recommending is like using a chemotherapeutic agent by a rheumatologist because they may feel better and you know just from certain things they’re doing …

But long term it’s not going to be great for their health. So, you’re selling the people out with inadequate and misguided information.”

Flaws With Plant-Based Ideology

Saladino takes issue with The Lancet Public Health study, which is observational epidemiology, not an interventional study. “I offer you the opportunity to show me one single interventional study with nonprocessed red meat that shows harm because it does not exist that I’m aware of,” he said.
In contrast, he cites multiple studies that show increasing red meat in the human diet leads to improvements in inflammatory markers and other markers of human health, such as diabetes.
Observational studies are often plagued by healthy and unhealthy user bias. In western countries, increased consumption of red meat is often associated with other unhealthy behaviors, while those who eat more fruits and vegetables are more likely to be engaging in other healthy behaviors like outdoor activity.
So, it’s not necessarily the eating of red meat that’s the problem, as the entire lifestyle must be factored in — something that isn’t accounted for in an observational study, which cannot determine causation. A reliance on observational epidemiological studies has contributed to the belief system that plant-based diets are better than meat-based ones. Saladino said:

“We have to look at these studies and ask is it really the red meat that is causing these problems in humans or is it something else these people are doing or not doing, and I think it is much more likely that it is the latter case because of unhealthy user bias … when I look at epidemiology I say, ‘This is garbage.’

There’s an acronym in computer programming — garbage in garbage out. We cannot base medical decisions on garbage science, but the good news is that we actually do have interventional studies with red meat studies where people replace large amounts of carbohydrates in their diet, presumably from grains, with eight ounces of red meat per day and they see lower CRP and improved markers of insulin sensitivity.”

Red Meat Does Not Increase Inflammation

Saladino cites a study published in the Journal of Nutrition, in which 60 people partially replaced carbohydrate-rich foods in their diet with 8 ounces of lean red meat daily for eight weeks.3 Markers of oxidative stress and inflammation did not increase and, in fact, CRP, a marker for inflammation in the body, decreased. Markers of insulin resistance and insulin sensitivity also improved.
Fuhrman points out that the type of carbohydrates being replaced matters in studies like these, as removing processed white flour, for example, in favor of red meat may show benefits simply because it’s better than white flour — but if it were replacing nuts or vegetables a different effect may occur.
Another study Saladino mentioned, published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition,4 compared trends in meat consumption and associations with meat intake and mortality in Asia. Nearly 300,000 men and women were followed for 6.6 to 15.6 years.
No association was found between total meat intake and risks of all-cause, cardiovascular or cancer mortality. Further, red meat intake was inversely associated with death from cardiovascular disease in men and with cancer mortality in women.
Research published in the Journal of Epidemiology, which followed 223,170 people in Japan, also found the risk of mortality from cerebrovascular disease was inversely associated with the consumption of milk, meat and fish.5 “I will admit this is correlation — we cannot draw causative inference,” Saladino said, “but you are incorrect if you make the statement that every study shows increasing meat … animal fat consumption is harmful.”
An interventional study cited by Saladino also found that beef tallow, compared to soybean oil, increases apoptosis and decreases aberrant crypt foci, which are considered the earliest lesions indicative of colon cancer, challenging the long-held notion that red meat increases colon cancer risk.6
Plant-Based Diets Versus Animal-Based Diets

Fuhrman suggests that virtually every study available highlights the benefits of eating plant-based over meat-based, but Saladino quickly pulls up interventional studies pitting the two diets against one another — and meat doesn’t turn out to be the villain it’s widely portrayed as.
One 2020 study examined a high-protein diet against a high-plant protein diet in 37 people with Type 2 diabetes for six weeks.7 Both of the diets ended up reducing levels of proinflammatory markers, although calprotectin, a marker of gastrointestinal inflammation, increased in those following the plant-protein diet while decreasing in those eating more animal protein.
Another study investigated the effects of diets high in animal protein — rich in meat and dairy foods — versus plant protein — primarily legume protein — in people with Type 2 diabetes and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease.8 Again, both of the diets reduced liver fat by 36% to 48% within six weeks. Markers of inflammation also decreased while insulin sensitivity increased.
“[These studies show] the exact same thing, that when we really look at this there is no evidence that meat is harmful for humans. It’s very clear, it’s extremely clear that meat is actually quite good for humans and improves so many of these outcomes,” Saladino said. He also takes issue with Fuhrman’s claims that saturated fats from animal foods are linked to heart disease — a myth that stems from Ancel Keys’ flawed hypothesis in 1960-1961.9
The introduction of the first Dietary Guidelines for Americans in 1980, which recommended limiting saturated fat and cholesterol, coincided with a rapid rise in obesity and chronic diseases such as heart disease.
Are Phytonutrients Helpful or Harmful?

The debate briefly touches on the health benefits and hazards of phytonutrients, i.e., plant-based nutrients, which is highly controversial. I was under the belief that phytonutrients were largely responsible for activating profoundly powerful pathways for longevity.
Saladino does point out that grass fed meats and dairy products are naturally higher in phytonutrients, which accumulate in meat and liver. However, many phytochemicals are plant defense molecules that have negative effects in humans. Saladino’s work caused me to seriously reevaluate my views on phytonutrient supplementation.
Nutrient deficiencies are another risk of following a strictly plant-based diet. Nutrient deficiencies that can compromise immune function, for instance, include vitamins, A, C, D, E, B2, B6, B12, folate, iron, selenium and zinc. These vitamins are primarily found in animal foods, which is why shunning animal foods tends to lead to nutrient deficiencies. Even folate is found in organ meats in highly bioavailable form.
Nutrient deficiencies are not only possible with a strict plant-based diet but probable, depending on your diet, with choline being among them. Research has found that eating eggs is one of the best ways to improve choline intake, and it’s difficult to get enough of this essential nutrient if you don’t consume them.10
Saladino cited studies showing that partially replacing animal proteins with plant proteins for 12 weeks had risks for bone health in healthy adults,11 and another even suggested that while vegetarians may have an aversion to eating meat on a subjective level, on a neural level they’re still intrinsically motivated to eat this food.12 He noted:

“I think this is a very strong argument for the fact that we evolved eating meat and it remains at the center of our nutritional paradigm for healthy humans and so with all of this taken together — the evolutionary past of humans, the fact that we evolved eating meat, that the unique nutrients in meat made us human — this is really difficult to debate.”

Problems With Blue Zone Observations

Blue Zones are areas in the world where people tend to be unusually long-lived. Many suggest that the unifying factor of the Blue Zones is that they consume limited amounts of animal protein, but Saladino points out that the five “Blue Zones” have been cherry-picked, avoiding areas that don’t fit with the hypothesis, like Hong Kong, where meat is consumed daily, and Iceland, which also has an animal-based diet yet has a high number of centenarians.
In one of the Blue Zones, Loma Linda, California, research even showed “the vegetables-based food intake decreased sperm quality,”13 and, according to Saladino, many of the centenarians living in Blue Zones actually eat meat:

“The socio-demographic and lifestyle characteristics of the oldest people living in Korea … they do not eat less meat than the general Greek population. In fact, they eat more meat. I had a woman on my show named Mary Ruddock who lives in Greece, who spent time with the people in Ikoria and ate lamb liver with them.

They do not shun meat. Furthermore, we can move to Okinawa. The Okinawan diet … the Japanese elderly … they did not find a single centenarian among the vegetarians in Okinawa. And imagine that, the Okinawans also eat lots of meat … Why are people using Okinawans to support their concept of the Blue Zones when there were no centenarians among the vegetarians in Okinawa? The Blue Zones are a farce.”

Fuhrman suggested that the observational studies are still beneficial due to the long-term nature of nutrition; it can take time for the health effects of a poor or healthy diet to show up. Yet, Saladino noted, human evolution may be the best long-term “study” of all, supporting the consumption of naturally raised, grass fed animal foods:

“The best long-term nutritional study that’s ever been done is human evolution. And so these hunter-gatherer tribes like the Hadza cannot be ignored because we find them hunting meat every single day of their life and yet they are free from chronic disease.

These are 50-, 60-, 70-year-old people who have decades and decades of observational studies if you’re going to do these. These have been done, it’s called anthropology. It’s called human evolution.

I just went to Tanzania and spent time with some of the last remaining hunter-gatherers on the planet, the Hadza. We hunted every single day. We ate meat over the fire, and they were healthy and fit and free from diabetes, obesity, autoimmune disease, depression, cancer.”

When it comes to the interventional studies of animal foods causing worsened health outcomes, which Fuhrman said he could provide, Saladino is still waiting: “He could not produce a single one during the podcast, nor did he send me a single study, a single interventional study, showing that animal foods were harmful in humans. So, I continue to wait for these, but I’ve never seen them. They don’t exist as far as I can tell.”
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/04/24/experts-face-off-plant-based-versus-meat-based.aspx