Lose Them Pounds

As Ivor Cummins demonstrates in the video above, available data reveal lockdowns have been completely ineffective at lowering positive test rates, while extracting a huge cost in terms of human suffering and societal health. All of the reports and studies reviewed in his video are also available on his website, TheFatEmperor.com.1
To that long list of evidences, we can add yet another report from Canadian pediatric infectious disease specialist Dr. Ari Joffe, which shows lockdown harms are about 10 times greater than the benefits.2
In his 51-page paper,3 “COVID-19: Rethinking the Lockdown Groupthink,” Joffe reviews how and why initial modeling predictions failed to match reality, what the collateral damage of lockdown policies have been, and what cost-benefit analyses tell us about the efficacy of the lockdown strategy.
Mortality Predictions Were Staggeringly Wrong

While initial models predicted 510,000 Britons, 2.2 million Americans and 40 million people worldwide would end up dead from COVID-19 unless suppression tactics such as lockdowns were implemented at least two-thirds of the time for the next two years,4 such prognostications have turned out to be complete hogwash.
As noted by Joffe, the lethality of SARS-CoV-2 was quickly shown to be nowhere near as high as the 2% to 3% initially predicted. He writes:5

“The WHO recently estimated that about 10% of the global population may have been already infected, which, with a world population of 7.8 billion, and 1.16 million deaths, would make a rough approximation of IFR [infection fatality rate] as 0.15% …

A serology-informed estimate of the IFR in Geneva, Switzerland put the IFR at: age 5-9 years 0.0016%, 10-19 years 0.00032%, 20-49 years 0.0092%, 50-64 years 0.14%, and age 65+ outside of assisted care facilities 2.7%, for an overall population IFR 0.32%.

Similarly, a large study from France found an inflection point in IFR around the age of 70 years … By far the most important risk factor is older age. There is a ~1000-fold difference in death risk for people >80 years old versus children.”

Herd Immunity Threshold Vastly Overestimated
Modelers were also incorrect when they predicted that 70% to 80% would get infected before herd immunity would naturally allow the spread of infection to taper off.
In reality, the herd immunity threshold has turned out to be far lower, which removes the justification for social distancing and lockdowns. More than a dozen scientists now claim the herd immunity threshold is likely below 50%,6 perhaps even as low as 10%.7,8 Data from Stockholm County, Sweden, show a herd immunity threshold of 17%.9 In an essay, Brown University professor Dr. Andrew Bostom noted:10

“Lead investigator Dr. Gomes, from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, and her colleagues concluded: ‘naturally acquired immunity to SARS-CoV-2 may place populations over the herd immunity threshold once as few as 10-20% of its individuals are immune.’11

Separate HIT [herd immunity threshold] calculations of 9%,12 10-20%,13 17%,14 and 43%15,16 — each substantially below the dogmatically asserted value of ~70%17 — have been reported by investigators from Tel-Aviv University, Oxford University, University College of London, and Stockholm University, respectively.”

How could they get this so wrong? Herd immunity is calculated using reproductive number, or R-naught (R0), which is the estimated number of new infections that may occur from one infected person.18 R0 of below 1 (with R1 meaning that one person who’s infected is expected to infect one other person) indicates that cases are declining while R0 above 1 suggests cases are on the rise.
It’s far from an exact science, however, as a person’s susceptibility to infection varies depending on many factors, including their health, age and contacts within a community. The initial R0 calculations for COVID-19’s herd immunity threshold were based on assumptions that everyone has the same susceptibility and would be mixing randomly with others in the community.
That doesn’t happen in real life though. According to professor Karl Friston, a statistician, “effective susceptible population,” meaning those not already immune to COVID-19 and therefore at risk of infection, was never 100%. At most, it was 50% and most likely only around 20%.19
Despite the mounting of such data, and the clear knowledge that lockdowns were causing unimaginable harm to mental health, physical health, education and local economies, lockdowns were repeatedly implemented in various parts of the world.
The initial modeling report from the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team actually admitted it did “not consider the ethical or economic implications” of the pandemic measures proposed, noting only that “The social and economic effects of the measures which are needed to achieve this policy goal will be profound.” Today, we have a much better grasp on just how profound the social and economic effects have in fact been, and they’re devastating.
Stark Reality Facing Off Against Fiction
When we consider the path forward, it’s important to separate the fiction created and promulgated by Imperial College modelers and other doomsday prophets within our government and various health agencies, from more objective, reality-based data.
The fact that lockdowns are still being implemented tells us they’re still operating based on fictional assumptions. The answer is to push back with real-world data and refuse to acquiesce to fantasy doomsday scenarios.
We also need to insist on formal cost-benefit analyses. To this day, no government has presented such an analysis to the public, which is what prompted Joffe to investigate the matter. As noted by Joffe in an interview with Toronto Sun columnist Anthony Furey:20

“Since lockdowns are a public health intervention, aiming to improve the population wellbeing, we must consider both benefits of lockdowns, and costs of lockdowns on the population wellbeing.

Once I became more informed, I realized that lockdowns cause far more harm than they prevent … Emerging data has shown a staggering amount of so-called ‘collateral damage’ due to the lockdowns.”

Collateral damage cited by Joffe include:21

82 million to 132 million more people affected by food insecurity

70 million being pushed into severe poverty

1.7 million mothers and infants dying due to interrupted health care

Millions of deaths caused by other infectious diseases due to interrupted health care services (such as tuberculosis, malaria and HIV)

Millions of children losing future earning potential and life span due to school closures and educational shortfalls

Millions of women affected by worsened or pandemic-initiated domestic abuse

Unemployment, which is one of the strongest risk factors for early mortality, reduced life span and chronic disease

Increased loneliness and all the adverse health conditions associated with it

Increased homelessness

Mental health deterioration across society and an increase in “deaths of despair”

Increases in opioid related deaths

An 83% increase in excess deaths from dementia in England/Wales in April 2020, and an increase in Alzheimer disease and dementia deaths in the U.S., attributed to lack of social contact22

Cost-Benefit Analysis of Lockdowns

Essentially, Joffe’s paper is the cost-benefit analysis of lockdowns that should have at least been attempted before being implemented worldwide and then kept in place for months on end. In his interview with Furey, Joffe explains his approach:23

“In the cost-benefit analysis I consider the benefits of lockdowns in preventing deaths from COVID-19, and the costs of lockdowns in terms of the effects of the recession, loneliness, and unemployment on population wellbeing and mortality.

I did not consider all of the other so-called ‘collateral damage’ of lockdowns mentioned above. It turned out that the costs of lockdowns [in Canada] are at least 10 times higher than the benefits. That is, lockdowns cause far more harm to population wellbeing than COVID-19 can.”

A primary benefit of the lockdowns was supposed to be the prevention of COVID-19 deaths. As detailed in Joffe’s report,24 “Using the age distribution of deaths and comorbidities, in the U.K. the average person who died due to COVID-19 had 3 to 5 healthy years left to live.” That’s a Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALY) score of 3 to 5, which equates to a Wellbeing Years (WELLBY) score of 18 to 30.
Joffe presents data showing that lockdowns “saved” 58.5 QALY or 360 million WELLBY, at most, seeing how herd immunity threshold and infection fatality rates are far lower than predicted. Joffe suspects the total number of deaths actually prevented by lockdowns is fewer than 5.2 million.
Meanwhile, the cost of the lockdowns in the U.K., in terms of WELLBY, is five times greater than might optimistically be saved, and may in reality be anywhere from 50 times to 87 times greater.
As mentioned by Joffe in the interview quote above, the cost for lockdowns in Canada is at least 10 times greater than the benefit. In his report, he cites data showing that 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 QALY was 94.9 times higher than the benefit. In his report, Joffe also cites research estimating that in order to “break even and make a radical containment and eradication policy worthwhile,” the infection fatality rate of SARS-CoV-2 would need to be 7.8%.25
No matter how many non-COVID deaths are falsely attributed to COVID-19, you’re not going to reach that level of lethality, which means lockdowns are robbing the population of more life than the virus.
CDC Inflated COVID-19 Deaths by 1,670%, Violated Fed Law

Indeed, according to an October 2020 peer-reviewed study26,27 by the Public Health Policy Initiative of the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention inflated COVID-19 mortality statistics by 1,670%, yet we’re still nowhere near a fatality ratio of 7.8%.
According to that study, the CDC appears to have violated federal law, including the Information Quality Act in Section 515 of Public Law 106-554 and the Paperwork Reduction Act codified at 44 USC 3501, and by doing so, the CDC was able to bypass essential oversight by the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.
As of August 23, 2020, the CDC reported a COVID-19 death toll of 161,392. Meanwhile, the more accurate fatality rate, using the standard reporting guidelines that had been in place since 2003, was a mere 9,684.
It’s an eye-opening report, which I encourage you to read through. It can offer a sobering reality check if you’re still worried. For example, on page 20, there’s a graph comparing the COVID-19 fatalities based on the CDC’s illegally updated reporting guidelines, against the fatality count had they continued using the guidelines that had been in use for the past 17 years.
As of August 23, 2020, the CDC reported a COVID-19 death toll of 161,392. Meanwhile, the more accurate fatality rate, using the standard reporting guidelines that had been in place since 2003, was a mere 9,684. No matter what data sets we look at, we find that the COVID-19 pandemic has been grossly overhyped and kept alive long past its natural expiration date.
How Did We Get Here and How Do We Move Forward?

Joffe answers these questions in his interview with Furey, stating:28

“[The] initial modelling and forecasting were inaccurate. This led to a contagion of fear and policies across the world. Popular media focused on absolute numbers of COVID-19 cases and deaths independent of context. There has been a sheer one-sided focus on preventing infection numbers.

The economist Paul Frijters wrote that it was ‘all about seeming to reduce risks of infection and deaths from this one particular disease, to the exclusion of all other health risks or other life concerns.’ Fear and anxiety spread, and we elevated COVID-19 above everything else that could possibly matter.

Our cognitive biases prevented us from making optimal policy: we ignored hidden ‘statistical deaths’ reported at the population level, we preferred immediate benefits to even larger benefits in the future, we disregarded evidence that disproved our favorite theory, and escalated our commitment in the set course of action …

Each day in non-pandemic years over 21,000 people die from tobacco use, 3,600 from pneumonia and diarrhea in children under 5-years-old, and 4,110 from Tuberculosis. We need to consider the tragic COVID-19 numbers in context.

I believe that we need to take an ‘effortful pause’ and reconsider the information available to us. We need to calibrate our response to the true risk, make rational cost-benefit analyses of the trade-offs, and end the lockdown groupthink.”

He repeats these sentiments in his report, in which he stresses the need to focus on protecting those at highest risk for severe COVID-19 and death thereof. This includes:

Hospitalized patients
Nursing home residents
Crowded institutions such as homeless shelters, prisons and any large gathering
People over the age of 70, especially if they have severe comorbidities

In these instances, universal masking and other infectious control strategies are warranted, Joffe says. The rest of the population can and should go back to normal life. Certainly, people should not be universally treated as high risk. The closing of schools, for example, is likely to have far-reaching and devastating consequences that are completely unnecessary. As noted by Joffe:29

“We need to keep schools open because children have very low morbidity and mortality from COVID-19, and (especially those 10 years and younger) are less likely to be infected by, and have a low likelihood to be the source of transmission of SARS-CoV-2.”

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/02/25/public-health-officials-lying-about-lockdowns.aspx

A new study shows children have experienced great psychological, behavioral and physical harm from the mandates and lockdowns handed down during the COVID-19 pandemic. This harm affects the next generation of leaders and has dampened the spirits of people around the world. Yet, there is one place that appears to have side-stepped this damage.

Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, there have been events that have changed the world. They include the two World Wars, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the 9/11 attacks and the COVID-19 pandemic.1

The current pandemic has undoubtedly been the most traumatic period for many people. The devastation that has been wrought on the world is incalculable, including things that aren’t easily measured like mental health, food insecurity and physical abuse.

The harsh reality is that virtually none of it was necessary and the real damage has been the result of decisions made by global health and government officials who appear to have been acting in concert, according to some predetermined plan.

The fallout from this event will be experienced by many for the remainder of their lives. Suicide rates,2 child abuse3 and drug deaths4 have risen dramatically. Prescriptions for anti-anxiety drugs had risen 31% and for antidepressants by up to 22% by mid-2020.5 But children, whose voices are not often heard, may be suffering the most.

Children Show Physical, Behavioral and Psychological Harm

A recent study6 has been published online using data from Germany’s first registry recording the experience children are having wearing masks. Parents, doctors and others can enter their observations; the registry had recorded use by 20,353 people as of October 26, 2020.

Using this data on 25,930 children, the researchers discovered interesting information. The average time children were wearing a mask was 270 minutes each day. There were 24 health issues reported that were associated with wearing masks that fell into the categories of physical, psychological and behavioral issues.7

Of the problems that children were having wearing masks, 68% of them were reported to the registry by parents. The researchers concluded the frequency of registry use and the variety of symptoms being reported indicated the importance of the subject. They recorded symptoms that:8

“… included irritability (60%), headache (53%), difficulty concentrating (50%), less happiness (49%), reluctance to go to school/kindergarten (44%), malaise (42%), impaired learning (38%) and drowsiness or fatigue (37%).”

Added to these concerning symptoms, they also found 29.7% reported feeling short of breath, 26.4% being dizzy and 17.9% were unwilling to move or play.9 Hundreds more experienced “accelerated respiration, tightness in chest, weakness and short-term impairment of consciousness.”

Measurements of anxiety or depressive disorder jumped dramatically for adults between January through June 2019 and January 2021. According to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,10 the percentage of adults reporting symptoms of anxiety disorder and/or depressive disorder was 11% in the first quarter of 2019 but jumped dramatically to 41.1% across the nation by January 2021.11

Evidence has shown that there is a positive relationship between a child’s behavioral problems and mental health with maternal mental health12 and parental mental health.13 This means that independent of their own stress and physiological harm from mask-wearing and lockdowns, children will also respond negatively to the rising rate of anxiety and depression exhibited by adults.

More Families Seeking Drugs to Manage Remote Learning

In spring 2020 began an unprecedented remote learning experiment for schools around the world. Suddenly, tens of millions of students were at home, plugged into their computer for their education. In one survey, Educators for Excellence14 reported 67% of teachers said their students’ homework or assignments were completed “somewhat worse” or “much worse” than before remote learning was mandatory.

In another survey,15 teachers reported their sense of success dropped from 96.3% when teaching in the classroom to 73.1% teaching remotely. On average, the same teachers reported that only 60% of their students were engaged in learning activities.

Remote learning has been especially challenging for young children and for the 20% of students living in the U.S. who do not have access to the necessary technology.16 According to Education Week, 80% of teachers believe their students are having trouble focusing during the shutdown.17

Each of these factors may contribute to the growing number of parents who are seeking treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) for their children. NBC News reports18 specialists are flooded with questions and requests for diagnosis and prescriptions for ADHD.

Dr. Melvin Oatis from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry believes that the pandemic has “been a tipping point that has pushed some families to get help.”19

However, Dr. Arthur Lavin, who is a pediatrician with service on several national committees of the American Academy of Pediatrics, warns, “Our concern is that pediatricians and families be very careful to not simply list the symptoms of ADHD, but to look at the child’s history and use differential diagnosis to make sure we have the best possible explanation for the symptoms.”20

The fuzziness surrounding a diagnosis of ADHD has also led to some over-identification of these issues. University of Minnesota psychologist Stephanie Carlson finds that students are often misidentified as having deficits in executive functioning skills when the behavior is within normal limits.21

For example, younger students are more likely to be labeled with ADHD than their older peers. Boys are labeled more often than girls, and black and Latino students have a lower probability of being diagnosed or taking medicine.

Schools Are Not Super Spreaders

Early data are now available from a study22 performed by the University of Warwick in the U.K. looking at information on school absences between September 2020 and December 2020. The researchers were interested in students who stayed home from school sick because of COVID-19 infections and how the number who became ill varied across time.

The study evaluated pupils and teachers and how those absences changed during November lockdown and in December when the lockdown was lifted. What they found was that the infection rate in the schools matched the wider community, indicating there was no evidence that schools were a driver in producing more cases of COVID-19.

As in the U.S., students in the U.K. have been offered remote learning options. Dr. Mike Tildesley is one of the researchers and a scientific adviser to the U.K. government. He suggests using a staggered approach as plans for reopening the schools are underway.23

While the rates of infection between the schools and community were the same, the researchers could not comment if the students and teachers who did have COVID-19 caught it in the school or the community.24 As would be expected with what is known about the virus, the rate of infection was lower in primary schools than secondary schools.

When speaking to a BBC reporter, Tildesley had a telling comment about how decisions to reopen schools should be made: “You could potentially think about doing early years first. But this is a political decision.”25

Face Masks Do Not Effectively Reduce COVID-19 Infections

The first randomized controlled trial evaluating the effectiveness of surgical face masks against SARS-CoV-2 was published in November 2020 in the Annals of Internal Medicine.26

During the trial, researchers evaluated more than 6,000 individuals and found that masks did not statistically significantly reduce the incidence of infection of COVID-19. Among the people who wore masks, 1.8% tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, compared to 2.1% among the control group.

When the researchers removed those who did not adhere to proper mask-wearing, the results remained the same — 1.8%. This suggests that in this group of 6,000 individuals, wearing a mask made no significant difference as to whether they would acquire COVID-19.

In the group that reportedly wore their masks “exactly as instructed,” 2% tested positive for the virus as compared to 2.1% of the controls. Despite a lack of evidence that mask-wearing in the general public was effective, widespread mask mandates were rolled out.

At the end of December 2020, researchers from Rational Ground revealed results of data analysis evaluating the use of masks from all 50 U.S. states.27 It was completed by data analysts, computer scientists and actuaries, who divided the information into states that had mask mandates and those that did not.

They evaluated data from May 1, 2020, through December 15, 2020, and calculated how many cases per day occurred by population with and without mask mandates. Among states without a mask mandate, 5,781,716 cases were counted over 5,772 days, which worked out to:28

No mask mandates — 17 cases per 100,000 people per day
Mask mandates — 27 cases per 100,000 people per day

In other words, the evidence does not support the use of masks and school lockdowns. And, there is powerful evidence that masks and school lockdowns are causing significant damage to the physical and psychological health of children. Yet, these mandates and lockdowns have garnered support from schools and parents, likely driven by fear of the virus.

Countrywide Mandates Prove Successful

In fact, fear seems to have been the force used to drive mandates the public would not have otherwise accepted — except, that is, in Sweden. In a 45-minute documentary, Claudia Nye shows how Sweden has approached COVID-19.

Under the guidance of chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, Sweden did not institute a universal lockdown, close small businesses or schools, or enact mandatory mask mandates. Instead, they chose to use enough reasonable strategies to protect their citizens. According to Tegnell, “We don’t want to hurt anyone unnecessarily, but we want to have as good effect as possible.”29

Using this as the basis for their decision-making, only some schools were closed during certain periods of time and only office workers were asked to work from home to minimize crowding on public transportation. Retail shops, gyms and restaurants remained open, a vast difference from what happened in other countries around the world.

Businesses recommended social distancing and masks, but it wasn’t a strict rule. Around the globe, people were told to stay home or face jail time. Yet, in Sweden people were asked to take commonsense precautions based on their individual circumstances.

It was recommended seniors and other high-risk individuals stay home, use social distancing and wear masks. All others were free to live as they normally would. Tegnell noted that in Sweden, “We have chosen a voluntary way and it’s proven to be sustainable and it’s proven also to be effective.”30

According to the Imperial College of London model, Sweden should have experienced a death toll of 80,000 by the end of June 2020 without a lockdown.31 However, the true number September 30, 2020, after no lockdowns, stood at 5,893,32 a vast majority of whom were elderly with comorbidities.

In fact, of those, only 872 were a direct result of COVID-19. The rest had one or more conditions that contributed to the death.33 Nye tells more of this story in her engaging documentary that won the Outstanding Achievement Award in the Los Angeles International Indie Short Fest film festival in January 2021.

I believe without being aware of how your behavior is being influenced, the world will continue to become decidedly different and more difficult. To protect our children, future generations and your finances, I encourage you to share “Public Health Officials Are Destroying Humanity.”

It may seem like science fiction, but just one year ago you probably could not have imagined the world as it is today. Unless and until more people understand the direction that leadership is sending the world, it will only continue down the same path.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/02/27/effects-of-mask-mandates-and-school-closures.aspx

The premise that hunger makes food look more appealing is a widely held belief.

Prior research studies have suggested that the hunger hormone ghrelin, which your body produces when it’s hungry, might act in your brain to trigger this behavior.
New studies suggest that ghrelin might also work in your brain to make you keep eating “pleasurable” foods when you’re already full.
Scientists previously have linked increased levels of ghrelin to intensifying the rewarding or pleasurable feelings that can be obtained from cocaine or alcohol.
Researchers observed how long mice would continue to poke their noses into a hole in order to receive a pellet of high-fat food. Animals that didn’t receive ghrelin gave up much sooner than the ones that did receive ghrelin.
Humans and mice share the same type of brain-cell connections and hormones, as well as similar architectures in the “pleasure centers” of the brain.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/01/16/why-do-people-continue-to-eat-when-they-are-full.aspx

As of February 4, 2021, the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) had received 12,697 injury reports and 653 deaths following COVID-19 vaccination.1

Of the cases reported between December 14, 2020, and February 4, 2021, 3.69% were life threatening and the number of deaths account for 5.14% of the total reports. The Pfizer vaccine accounted for 58% of deaths; Moderna’s accounted for 41%.

What’s more, when you look at vaccine-related deaths between January 2020 and January 2021, you find that COVID-19 vaccines account for a staggering 70% of the annual vaccine deaths, and that’s while having been available for less than two months. The first doses of Pfizer vaccine were given in mid-December 2020,2 while Moderna’s vaccine rolled out during the last week of December 2020.3

While these numbers are staggering, they’re likely only a tiny fraction of the actual number of adverse events. According to a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services study,4 fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are ever reported to VAERS.
This is primarily because VAERS reporting is voluntary. Many don’t even know it exists, or that you don’t have to be a medical professional to file a report. This would mean that there may, in reality, be over 1 MILLION COVID vaccine injuries, since 99% typically go unreported.
Report All COVID-19 Vaccine Side Effects

To address these shortcomings and monitor the public health effects of this mass vaccination campaign, the Children’s Health Defense is calling on all who have suffered a side effect from a COVID-19 vaccine to do three things:5

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

Children Are Next
Despite the clear and present dangers of these so-called vaccines, which are in actuality gene therapy, COVID-19 vaccine makers are steamrolling ahead with trials on children as young as 6 years old.

As reported6 by the University of Oxford, which is collaborating on a COVID-19 vaccine7,8 with AstraZeneca, children between the ages of 6 years and 17 years and 8 months are eligible for participation at four U.K. centers. Those over the age of 16 do not even require a parent’s approval but can consent on their own. The remuneration for those putting their entire future at risk is £10 (about $14) per visit.

A total of 300 children are scheduled to participate, 240 of whom will receive the candidate vaccine while so-called controls will receive a meningitis vaccine. The lack of a true placebo is a red flag in and of itself, as using a vaccine as a “placebo” helps mask any number of common side effects, making the vaccine appear safer than it actually is.

The AstraZeneca vaccine has received authorization for use in the U.K. but not the U.S. Contrary to the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines authorized for use in the U.S., the AstraZeneca vaccine delivers double-stranded DNA for the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein inside a chimpanzee adenovirus.9

Moderna started testing its RNA-based gene therapy on American children between the ages of 12 and 17 back in December 2020,10 and the first Pfizer trials involving adolescents began in mid-October 2020.11 In China, Sinovac and SinoPharm trials have been enrolling children as young as 3.12
Children Do Not Need This Vaccine
Considering children are at extremely low risk of severe COVID-19, and have been shown to not be a significant vector of infection,13 why do children even need this vaccine? Dr. Robert Frenck, lead investigator of the COVID-19 vaccine trials at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, told ABC News:14

“If you wipe out the infection in the younger children, they don’t spread it to the adults, and so then, you can get a big handle on disease just by targeting the younger children and getting the infection out of that age group.”

This is a standard justification, but it’s really little more than a mind game. In essence, children are being required to play Russian roulette with their health based on the premise that it will benefit the whole, but is it really reasonable to ask the youngest among us, who are at lowest risk from the infection, to sacrifice their health to, presumably, protect the elderly?

Studies15 have shown children not only very rarely transmit the disease, either between themselves or to adults, but also, if they get the disease, they virtually never suffer any serious complications. So Frenck’s argument really flies in the face of the available data. If children don’t transmit the disease, how can you get “a big handle” on it by vaccinating them?

In reality, this argument appears to be designed to coerce parents into vaccinating their children even though the public benefit from doing so is minimal. Rather than being a true public health incentive, it seems the drive to vaccinate children is more about increasing profits. Additionally, early reports suggest that the elderly also have a tendency to die shortly after the inoculation,16,17 which is raising suspicions and concern.
Adverse Effects May Take Years to Develop
In children, the side effects are likely to be less immediately noticeable, but may instead result in future health problems. In a Microbiology & Infectious Diseases paper,18 immunologist Dr. J. Bart Classen warns the mRNA jabs may instigate adverse events that take years to fully develop.19

“One such potential adverse event is prion based diseases caused by activation of intrinsic proteins to form prions. A wealth of knowledge has been published on a class of RNA binding proteins shown to participate in causing a number of neurological diseases including Alzheimer’s disease and ALS,” Classen writes.

Since research had not been done to ascertain whether mRNA gene therapy might trigger prion-based disease, Classen conducted that study. He writes:20

“Analysis of the Pfizer vaccine against COVID-19 identified two potential risk factors for inducing prion disease is humans. The RNA sequence in the vaccine contains sequences believed to induce TDP-43 and FUS to aggregate in their prion based conformation leading to the development of common neurodegerative diseases.
In particular, it has been shown that RNA sequences GGUA, UG rich sequences, UG tandem repeats, and G Quadruplex sequences, have increased affinity to bind TDP-43 and or FUS and may cause TDP-43 or FUS to take their pathologic configurations in the cytoplasm.
In the current analysis, a total of sixteen UG tandem repeats (?G?G) were identified and additional UG (?G) rich sequences were identified. Two GG?A sequences were found. G Quadruplex sequences are possibly present but sophisticated computer programs are needed to verify these.
The spike protein encoded by the vaccine binds angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), an enzyme which contains zinc molecules. The binding of spike protein to ACE2 has the potential to release the zinc molecule, an ion that causes TDP-43 to assume its pathologic prion transformation.”

mRNA Vaccines Are Actually Gene Therapies
As detailed in “COVID-19 mRNA Shots Are Legally Not Vaccines,” these inoculations are more accurately described as gene therapies, and by referring to them as “vaccines,” the U.S. government is likely in violation of the 2011 U.S. Code Title 15, Section 1125,21 which regulates deceptive practices such as false descriptions in medical claims.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,22 a vaccine is “a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease.” Immunity, in turn, is defined as “Protection from an infectious disease,” meaning that “If you are immune to a disease, you can be exposed to it without becoming infected.”

Neither Moderna nor Pfizer claim this to be the case for their COVID-19 “vaccines.” In fact, in their clinical trials, they specify that they do not even test for immunity.

COVID-19 “vaccines” do not impart immunity or inhibit transmissibility of the disease. In other words, they are not designed to keep you from getting sick with SARS-CoV-2; they only are supposed to lessen your infection symptoms if or when you get infected. As such, these products do not meet the medical definition of a vaccine.

Unlike real vaccines, which use an antigen of the disease you’re trying to prevent, the COVID-19 injections contain synthetic RNA fragments encapsulated in a nanolipid carrier compound,23 the sole purpose of which is to lessen clinical symptoms associated with the S-1 spike protein, not the actual virus. 

They do not actually impart immunity or inhibit transmissibility of the disease. In other words, they are not designed to keep you from getting sick with SARS-CoV-2; they only are supposed to lessen your infection symptoms if or when you do get infected.24,25 As such, these products do not meet the medical definition of a vaccine.

Not to worry, though, the Merriam-Webster dictionary recently updated its definition of “vaccine” to include mRNA technology,26 just in time for fact checkers to be able to “debunk” the entirely factual claim of the difference between true vaccines and mRNA technology.

Crazy enough, scientists are already discussing the potential for switching out conventional vaccines that use live or attenuated viruses with this novel RNA technology.27

Considering it’s a gene therapy that turns your cells into little “bioreactors” that spit out immune system activating proteins and have no off-switch, I don’t even want to imagine what might happen if a person were to receive several different ones.
mRNA Therapy Is a Bad Idea, Especially for Children

Download Interview Transcript

Aside from the possibility of prion-based diseases, reviewed above, many medical experts warn that mRNA gene therapy can trigger autoimmune problems and a wide range of inflammatory conditions. As just one example, in a recent interview, Judy Mikovits, Ph.D., explained the mechanics that make injecting RNA so hazardous:

“Normally, messenger RNA is not free in your body because it’s a danger signal. The central dogma of molecular biology is that our genetic code, DNA, is transcribed, written, into the messenger RNA. That messenger RNA is translated into protein, or used in a regulatory capacity … to regulate gene expression in cells.
So, taking a synthetic messenger RNA and making it thermostable — making it not break down — [is problematic]. We have lots of enzymes (RNAses and DNAses) that degrade free RNA and DNA because those are danger signals to your immune system. They literally drive inflammatory diseases.
Now you’ve got PEG, PEGylated and polyethylene glycol, and a lipid nanoparticle that will allow it to enter every cell of the body and change the regulation of our own genes with this synthetic RNA, part of which actually is the message for the gene syncytin …
Syncytin is the endogenous gammaretrovirus envelope that’s encoded in the human genome … We know that if syncytin is expressed aberrantly in the body, for instance in the brain, which these lipid nanoparticles will go into, then you’ve got multiple sclerosis. 
The expression of that gene alone enrages microglia — literally inflames and dysregulates the communication between the brain microglia — which are critical for clearing toxins and pathogens in the brain and the communication with astrocytes.
It dysregulates not only the immune system, but also the endocannabinoid system, which is the dimmer switch on inflammation. We’ve already seen multiple sclerosis as an adverse event in the clinical trials … We also see myalgic encephalomyelitis. Inflammation of the brain and the spinal cord …”

Indeed, many of the side effects being reported are suggestive of neurological damage. Examples include severe dyskinesia (impairment of voluntary movement), ataxia (lack of muscle control) and intermittent or chronic seizures. As explained by Mikovits, these symptoms are caused by neuroinflammation, a dysregulated innate immune response, and/or a disrupted endocannabinoid system.
Another common side effect from the vaccine we’re seeing is allergic reactions, including anaphylactic shock. A likely culprit in this is PEG (polyethylene glycol), to which Mikovitz says an estimated 70% of Americans are allergic.
COVID-19 Vaccine Is an Unnecessary Risk

Overall, with reported severe side effects and deaths climbing by the hundreds every week, it’s astonishing to think that people would voluntarily risk their children in these trials. It’s even more astonishing that public health agencies are pushing for mass inoculation of children with these experimental gene therapies, when there’s no data whatsoever to assure parents that their children’s health won’t be destroyed in years to come.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I suspect this global vaccination campaign will result in an avalanche of chronic health problems and deaths so great that any talk of mandates will have to be abandoned, or rescinded if already implemented.
So, if you care about your and your family’s health, the answer may simply be to put off getting vaccinated against COVID-19 for as long as possible and wait for the inevitable truth to come to light. 
There are several prevention strategies and treatments readily available that have been shown to be highly effective, which means the need for a vaccine in the first place is nearly moot. Among them, nebulized hydrogen peroxide with iodine, which I’ve written about in previous articles, works very well.
For a refresher, see “How Nebulized Peroxide Helps Against Respiratory Infections.” Other treatments include hydroxychloroquine with zinc, ivermectin and the iMASK and MATH+ protocols, which you can learn more about in the linked articles.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/02/23/covid-vaccine-children.aspx

February 10, 2021, Instagram banned the account of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an attorney, founder of Children’s Health Defense, and co-founder and president of the environmental group, River Alliance. According to Instagram, his account was removed for “sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines.”1
This comes as no surprise to anyone who has paid attention over the past year, when privately owned social media companies started censoring users in earnest, often at the request of government officials, thereby qualifying themselves as bona fide instruments of fascism.
As described in “Fascism Definition With Examples,”2 a hallmark of fascism is an economic system in which government controls private corporations and where “a central planning authority directs company leaders to work in the national interest, which actively suppresses those who oppose it.”
The welfare of the population at large is subjugated in such a system in order to achieve “imperative social goals.” This could, for example, be the goal to vaccinate the entire population against COVID-19, which will ensure the vaccine industry can profit rather than go bust. Public health be damned.
Of course, the entire premise of a mass vaccination campaign against COVID-19 is that it will protect people and prevent unnecessary deaths from the virus. But a hidden, underlying agenda is revealed by the fact that injuries and deaths from the vaccine are either suppressed or shrugged off as collateral damage in the name of the greater good.
In other words, dying due to poor health is unacceptable and must be prevented with a vaccine, whereas dying in good health and at a young age due to vaccine injury is a perfectly acceptable price to protect the vulnerable. The end result is the same: People die. The only differences are how and why people die, and whether or not big business, which funds politicians, can profit in the process.
Don’t Trust the Medical or National Security Establishment

In the August 2020 Ron Paul Liberty Report above,3,4 Kennedy talks about evidence suggesting his father, Robert Kennedy, was assassinated by a CIA agent hired as a security guard.
He goes on to review some of the history of the CIA — how it was initially established as an espionage organization tasked solely with intelligence gathering, only to transform into a paramilitary agency engaged with the overthrowing of democracies around the world and other nefarious and antidemocratic activities.
He also touches on the infamous CIA program called MK Ultra, in which individuals are brainwashed to carry out orders, including murders, against their own will.
CIA and Corporate Media Are One and the Same

The CIA’s role in the current flood of censorship may be more significant than most people imagine. In the Off-Guardian article,5 “Opening the CIA’s Can of Worms,” Edward Curtin highlights the close ties between the CIA and corporate mainstream media.
The CIA and the media are part of the same criminal conspiracy.
He cites Douglas Valentine’s book, “The CIA as Organized Crime,” in which Valentine states that “The CIA and the media are part of the same criminal conspiracy.” Curtin describes the media as “stenographers for the national security state’s ongoing psychological operations aimed at the American people,” adding that:

“For all practical purposes when it comes to matters that bear on important foreign and domestic matters, the CIA and the corporate mainstream media cannot be distinguished.”

While information warfare and psyops have been par for the course for a long time, it’s only in recent years that more people have started really noticing it, and it’s only become blatantly obvious in the past year or so, thanks to the rapid expansion of individuals, groups and topics being silenced.
In the past year, even licensed medical doctors and award-winning scientists have undergone the modern version of being tarred and feathered online, followed by expulsion from their web-based communities for the crime of asking commonsense questions and speaking truth to power.
Guilt by Headline

The aim and purpose of the kind of information warfare we currently find ourselves embroiled in is to “win the hearts and minds of the American people and pacify them into victims of their own complicity,” Curtin writes. Again, with regard to COVID-19, the purpose is clearly to get everyone to buy into the necessity of getting vaccinated and to reject objections, no matter how logical.
That the CIA-run media, medical establishment and national security apparatus are all working in tandem on this issue, and using classic propaganda tactics, is unmistakable. Curtin writes:6

“Just the other day The New York Times had this headline: ‘Robert Kennedy Jr. Barred From Instagram Over False Virus Claims.’ Notice the lack of the word alleged before ‘false virus claims.’ This is guilt by headline.

It is a perfect piece of propaganda posing as reporting, since it accuses Kennedy, a brilliant and honorable man, of falsity and stupidity, thus justifying Instagram’s ban, and it is an inducement to further censorship of Mr. Kennedy by Facebook, Instagram’s parent company …

This is one example of the censorship underway with much, much more to follow. What was once done under the cover of omission is now done openly and brazenly, cheered on by those who, in an act of bad faith, claim to be upholders of the First Amendment and the importance of free debate in a democracy. We are quickly slipping into an unreal totalitarian social order.”

Curtin disagrees with journalists like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi and Chris Hedges, who argue that social media companies really don’t want to censor but are pressured into it by hubris-filled, power- and control-hungry corporate media personalities.
There’s more to it than that, Curtin says, pointing out that “These companies and their employees do what they are told, whether explicitly or implicitly, for they know it is in their financial interest to do so.”
He argues that they’re all “part of a large interconnected intelligence apparatus — a system, a complex — whose purpose is power, wealth, and domination for the very few at the expense of the many,” and that, it is this that makes the CIA and media “parts of the same criminal conspiracy.”
Who Pulls the Levers of Control?

“To argue that the Silicon Valley companies do not want to censor but are being pressured by the legacy corporate media does not make sense,” Curtin says, because:

“These companies are deeply connected to U.S. intelligence agencies, as are the NY Times, CNN, NBC, etc. They too are part of what was once called Operation Mockingbird, the CIA’s program to control, use, and infiltrate the media. Only the most naïve would think that such a program does not exist today.”

Indeed, many suspect Facebook is the public-friendly version of DARPA’s Lifelog, a database project aimed at tracking the minutiae of people’s entire existence for national security surveillance purposes.7 The Pentagon pulled the plug on Lifelog February 4, 2004, in response to backlash over privacy concerns.8 Yet that same day, Facebook was launched.9 Coincidence?
Whether by fluke or pre-inception collaboration, there can be no doubt that Facebook now fulfills the Lifelog purpose of surveilling, tracking and data mining its users both on- and offline.
Similarly, Google, Amazon, Twitter and other major tech companies are also tied to the “military-industrial-intelligence-media complex,” to quote Curtin’s term. All provide invaluable surveillance and censorship functions, and without them, the totalitarian control system we now find ourselves caught in wouldn’t be possible.

“The truth is the Internet was a military and intelligence tool from the very beginning and it is not the traditional corporate media that gives [tech companies] its marching orders,” Curtin writes.10

“That being so, it is not the owners of the corporate media or their employees who are the ultimate controllers behind the current vast crackdown on dissent, but the intelligence agencies who control the mainstream media and the Silicon Valley monopolies …

All these media companies are but the outer layer of the onion, the means by which messages are sent and people controlled. But for whom do these intelligence agencies work? Not for themselves.

They work for their overlords, the super wealthy people, the banks, financial institutions, and corporations that own the United States and always have.

In a simple twist of fate, such super wealthy naturally own the media corporations that are essential to their control of the majority of the world’s wealth through the stories they tell. It is a symbiotic relationship.”

Operation Mockingbird: The Great Reset
What Curtin is talking about is the same elite 0.001% of the global population I’ve written about before in articles such as “Oneness Versus the 1%,” “What You Need to Know About the Great Reset,” “The Global Takeover Is Underway,” “The Plan for a Global System of Slavery,” “The Pressing Dangers of Technocracy,” “Technocracy and the Great Reset” and many others.
While the specific identities of the individual string-pullers are difficult to discern, what’s clear is that there is an international “deep state” whose plans are implemented in a coordinated fashion around the world, seemingly at a moment’s notice, as we saw when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out.
Within days, all the world’s leaders sang the same tune. The same message was stated in dozens of languages, often verbatim, as if they were reading the same cue card. Looking at global nongovernmental agencies makes it easier to ascertain who these cue card writers might be, as they form a vast, intertwined web that keep circling back to each other.
We can discern, then, that the core of this technocratic power structure includes entities such as the Trilateral Commission, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, the Bilderberg Group, the Club of Rome, the Aspen Institute, the Atlantic Institute, the Brookings Institute and other think-tanks, just to name some of the most obvious.
Members of these exclusive “clubs,” many of which are by invitation only, include leaders from major industries, corporate media, political offices and the military-industrial complex. 
As noted by Curtin, “They are the international overlords who are pushing hard to move the world toward a global dictatorship.” The CIA, as you might suspect by now, has also been part of this “deep state cabal” from the very beginning.
And, if the CIA and corporate media are two sides of the same coin, we can deduce that the global psyop currently underway has the purpose of ensuring the successful implementation of the Great Reset and the Fourth Industrial Revolution — two terms that describe different aspects of the same agenda of enslavement.
While it may seem unrelated to some, the vaccine agenda does play an important part in this scheme, especially long term, which is why anti-vaccine voices are now being slapped down at a furious pace. It’s not the sole reason for their silencing, however.
The Real Threat Kennedy Poses
As Curtin points out in his article, Kennedy is not censored simply because he’s raising questions about vaccines, Bill Gates or the drug industry in general. No, it’s because he’s a direct threat to the highest echelon of this hidden global power structure that seeks to take control:11

“His critiques suggest something far more dangerous is afoot: the demise of democracy and the rise of a totalitarian order that involves total surveillance, control, eugenics, etc. by the wealthy led by their intelligence propagandists.

To call him a super spreader of hoaxes and a conspiracy theorist is aimed at not only silencing him on specific medical issues, but to silence his powerful and articulate voice on all issues.

To give thoughtful consideration to his deeply informed scientific thinking concerning vaccines, the World Health Organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, etc., is to open a can of worms that the powerful want shut tight.

This is because RFK, Jr. is also a severe critic of the enormous power of the CIA and its propaganda that goes back so many decades and was used to cover up the national security state’s assassination of both his father and his uncle.

It is why his wonderful recent book, ‘American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family,’ that contains not one word about vaccines, was shunned by mainstream book reviewers; for the picture he paints fiercely indicts the CIA in multiple ways while also indicting the mass media that have been its mouthpieces.”

According to Kennedy, the CIA murdered his father. The reason they did was because he was a powerful and popular politician who, like Curtin says, “could have … tamed the power of the CIA to control the narrative that has allowed for the plundering of the world and the country for the wealthy overlords.”
In other words, he knew the CIA was the figurative center pole holding up the pole tent, and if you yank that out, the roof caves in. They couldn’t let that happen.
Connecting the Dots
Kennedy discusses many of the same topics covered in the Ron Paul Report in his much longer interview with Patrick Bet-David, above. In both interviews, he reviews his family’s tragic yet heroic history, but he also gets into the topic of vaccine safety and the folly of ignoring published science showing there are significant problems — and the fact that the medical establishment refutes and denies these problems without ever presenting any actual counter-evidence.
Kennedy also discusses data suggesting the COVID-19 lockdowns may have caused more deaths than the virus itself, as well as the civil rights issues involved. Like many other experts, he believes the lockdowns are scientifically indefensible and will kill far more people than COVID-19.
Based on a recent cost-benefit analysis12 of global lockdowns, Kennedy is correct. Data suggest the cost for lockdowns in Canada — in terms of Quality Adjusted Life Years and Wellbeing Years — 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. So, yes, pandemic measures are robbing the public of more life and fruitful years than this virus ever could.
In his interview with Bet-David, Kennedy also delves into known side effects of vaccines that in turn drive a highly profitable chronic illness industry, the lack of safety studies for vaccines, the irresponsible practice of testing vaccines against false placebos such as another vaccine, and the vaccine industry’ indemnity agreement with Congress that further prevents safe vaccines from ever being developed.
He also talks about the aggressive advertising of drugs and vaccines which, as a side effect, allows drug companies to influence media coverage of their products; the questionable integrity of Dr. Anthony Fauci; how mortality data are conflated to falsely inflate influenza deaths as a marketing ploy to sell flu vaccines; the dangers of 5G, modern-day electronic surveillance and social media’s data harvesting; and the detrimental influence of Bill Gates’ so-called philanthropy.
As Curtin notes, Kennedy’s observations, which help people connect the dots, ultimately point people to the core problem of our day, which is a hidden control structure that is seeking to destroy the American Constitution and rob us of our rights and freedoms, if we let them.
At the end of the day, that’s what all of this censorship is about. That hidden power structure does not want us to realize what’s being done to us, because then we might rebel. And, if that happens, the jig is up, since there are far more of us than there are of them.
A Well-Informed Humanity United Is the Answer

This is precisely why we must never stop seeking out and sharing this type of information. Those who buy into the propaganda are quite literally helping their soon-to-be jailers erect the prison bars around them. It’s self-destructive, which is why we need to help those we care about to understand the bigger picture and not get locked into details of differing opinions that don’t matter.
As noted in Kennedy’s October 24, 2020, online speech,13 “International Message of Hope for Humanity” — which kicked off a day of protest against the coup d’état by the technocratic elite — we must shed our imaginary fears, reject media fearmongering, insist on freedom of speech and engage in the democratic process.

“The only way we can win it is with democracy,” he said. “We need to fight to get our democracy back, to reclaim our democracy from these villains who are stealing it from us. Notice the people who are getting richest from this quarantine are the same people who are censoring criticism of the quarantine.”

Kennedy also stressed another crucial point, namely the need to unify. We must put aside our quibbles over nonessential things like race, religion and political affiliations, and stay laser-focused on the real enemy.

“What the Big Tech villains … want us to do is fight with each other. They want Blacks fighting against whites. They want republicans fighting against democrats. They want everybody polarized. They want everybody fragmented because they know that if we all get together, we’re going to start asking questions and those are questions they can’t answer …

If you’re a republican or democrat, stop talking about that. Stop identifying yourself. The enemy is Big Tech, Big Data, Big Oil, Big Pharma, the medical cartel, the government totalitarian elements that are trying to oppress us, that are trying to rob us of our liberties, of our democracy, of our freedom of thought, of our freedom of expression, of our freedom of assembly and all of the freedoms that give dignity to humanity …

The free-flow of information, the cauldron of debate, is the only thing that allows governments to develop rational policies in which self-governance will actually work and triumph.

You are on the front lines of the most important battle in history — the battle to save democracy, freedom, human liberty and human dignity from this totalitarian cartel that is trying to rob us, simultaneously, in every nation in the world, of the rights that every human being is born with …

And I pledge to you: I will go down dying with my boots on, fighting side-by-side with all of you to make sure that we return these rights and preserve them for our children.”

And, that, right there, is why Kennedy, like his father and uncle before him, is a target for elimination by the technocratic-CIA-media-drug-industrial-political-military complex. The good news is that the more people know and understand who the real enemy is, the lower the risk is for those in the know.
After all, the CIA cannot assassinate an entire country, or the entire world. At a certain point, silencing people becomes moot because too many people know the truth already. I believe this is the case with Kennedy at this point, which is why the worst they can do is try to limit his reach on social media. And with your help, even those efforts will ultimately fail.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/02/27/rfk-jr-opens-cia-can-of-worms.aspx

Exposure to light at night is a recent phenomenon that increased dramatically after the invention of electric lighting. Human bodies have not entirely adjusted to this change, and still run on a 24-hour cycle, or circadian rhythm, which includes regular cycles of light and dark.
When you’re exposed to light at night — a time when your body expects it to be dark — physiological changes occur. Inside the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) of your brain, which is part of your hypothalamus, resides your master biological clock. Based on signals of light and darkness, your SCN tells your pineal gland when it’s time to secrete melatonin — promoting sleep — and when to turn it off.
Exposure to light leads to advances or delays in your circadian rhythm, known as phase shifts. Typically, exposure to light early in the morning causes a phase advance, which leads to earlier waking. Light exposure at bedtime will lead to a phase delay, or later wakening.
Nighttime exposure to light inhibits the secretion of melatonin, which can cause circadian disruptions that play a role in cancer.1 In fact, it’s previously been shown that higher exposure to outdoor light at night may increase the risk of postmenopausal breast cancer,2 and emerging evidence suggests light at night may increase thyroid cancer, too.3
Light at Night Increases Thyroid Cancer Risk

It’s believed that both breast cancer and thyroid cancer “share a common hormone?dependent etiology,” while thyroid function is also regulated by circadian rhythm. These two factors led researchers from The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston School of Public Health to evaluate whether exposure to light at night plays a role in the incidence of thyroid cancer.
The study followed 464,371 participants in the National Institutes of Health-American Association of Retired Persons Diet and Health Study for an average of 12.8 years.4 Satellite data was used to estimate nighttime light exposure, which was then linked to residential addresses, while thyroid cancer cases were followed via state cancer registries.
Adjustments were also made for other contributors to thyroid cancer risk, including sociodemographic, lifestyle and environmental factors. A positive association was found between light exposure at night and thyroid cancer risk, with those in the highest quintile of nighttime light exposure having a 55% increased risk of thyroid cancer compared to those in the lowest quintile.
“The association was primarily driven by papillary thyroid cancer and was stronger in women,” the researchers noted. “In women, the association was stronger for localized cancer, whereas in men, the association was stronger for a more advanced stage. Results were consistent across different tumor sizes.”5
The study is observational and therefore doesn’t prove causality, however the findings suggest additional research is warranted. Study author Qian Xiao, Ph.D. said in a news release:6

“[W]e don’t know if higher levels of outdoor light at night lead to an elevated risk for thyroid cancer; however, given the well-established evidence supporting a role of light exposure at night and circadian disruption, we hope our study will motivate researchers to further examine the relationship between light at night and cancer, and other diseases.”

Strong Link Between Thyroid Cancer and Circadian Disruption

Thyroid cancer is the most common cancer of the endocrine system, and rates have increased significantly in the last few decades.7 Insulin resistance is one of the most significant, and modifiable, risk factors,8 but increasing attention is also being given to environmental factors like circadian clock disruption.
Your body’s 24-hour circadian clock regulates many physiological functions — endocrine rhythms among them. Writing in the journal Cancers, Italian researchers suggested that one way circadian disruption may be linked to thyroid cancer is by inducing insulin resistance:9

“Disruption of the circadian timing system caused by circadian misalignment such as shift work, chronic jet lag, high fat intake, inappropriate eating times, and abnormal sleep patterns could be responsible of insulin resistance, diabetes mellitus type 2, obesity, metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular diseases and several types of cancers, including TC [thyroid cancer].

Conversely, proper coordination of circadian behavior and sleep homeostasis may improve several conditions including insulin resistance and overall metabolic fitness.

The molecular mechanisms linking circadian clock disruption and TC are still unknown but could be, at least in part, insulin resistance. Indeed, this metabolic alteration is associated with a well-known risk factor for TC i.e., hyperthyrotropinemia, which, in turn, has also been associated to sleep disturbances.”

They also pointed out a number of mechanisms that occur via circadian disruption that could contribute to thyroid disorders. Among them:10

Alterations in the rhythmicity of thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) secretion
Disruptions to hypothalamic-pituitary-thyroid (HPT) axis function
Modifications in genes controlling the cell cycle, apoptosis, DNA damage, inflammation and immune response

Strong changes in the expression of variants of various “clock” genes, including PER2–3, CRYs, BMAL1, REV-ERBs and RORs, have also been found on the transformation of thyroid nodules into cancer, and have even been suggested as biomarkers for use with thyroid nodules that could potentially be predictive of thyroid cancer.11
Clock genes are known to control rhythms that affect physiology and behavior,12 and may also be involved in cancer. Indeed, researchers wrote in Genome Medicine while exploring the many ties between circadian rhythms and disease, “Epidemiological studies have linked circadian disruption to increased cancer susceptibility in all key organ systems.”13
Light Exposure, Sleep Deprivation and Cancer
It’s more difficult to sleep well if you’re exposed to light at night, and the resulting sleep deprivation may also increase cancer risk. An association has been found between insomnia and thyroid cancer, for instance,14 with women with insomnia having a 44% increased risk of thyroid cancer compared to those without. Sleep deprivation is also linked to higher thyroid-stimulating hormone concentration, which in turn is linked to thyroid cancer.15
Further, in a study involving 1,654 adults from the Penn State Adult Cohort, those who slept less than six hours and had cardiometabolic risk factors (high blood pressure, elevated glucose or Type 2 diabetes) had an increased risk of dying from cancer, by 2.92 times.16
In relation to thyroid cancer, specifically, chronic sleep deprivation is linked to disruption of rhythmic thyroid stimulating hormone secretions, which is associated with an increased risk of thyroid cancer. Researchers continued in Cancers:17

“Furthermore, disruption of circadian rhythm has been linked to alterations in gene-related apoptosis, DNA damage, cell cycle, and stemness, and thereby to carcinogenesis … In light of this evidence, it is biologically plausible that circadian clock alterations could represent a potential risk factor of developing TC. However, so far, no epidemiologic study has been directly addressed in this relationship.”

Disrupted sleep also wreaks havoc on your metabolic health, which could indirectly increase thyroid cancer risk. Irregular sleep patterns increase the risk of metabolic syndrome by 23% for each one hour of sleep difference, such as going to bed earlier or later than usual; chronic one-hour loss increases the risk by 27%.18
Metabolic syndrome is characterized by three or more of these factors: a large waist circumference, high blood pressure, insulin resistance and/or high blood sugar, low high-density lipoproteins and high triglycerides. Since insulin resistance and related metabolic disorders are linked to thyroid cancer, this is another way that light exposure at night plays a role. Researchers noted:19

“Based on these observations, it is reasonable to expect that improving insulin resistance through synchronization of circadian rhythm or chronotherapy in conjunction with a healthy diet, physical activity and conventional anti-cancer therapies, could exert beneficial effects on prevention and treatment of TCs developed in insulin resistant patients with disrupted circadian rhythms.”

It’s likely that sleep disturbances induced by exposure to light at night may contribute to cancer via multiple mechanisms, including a suppression of immune function by disrupting circadian rhythms, reduced production of melatonin and promotion of inflammation.20
Light Pollution Could Lead to Dire Health Outcomes

Chris Kresser, an acupuncturist, licensed integrative medicine clinician and co-director of the California Center for Functional Medicine, is among those who have sounded an alarm over the health risks of exposure to light at night and light pollution.
Most of your endocrine hormones, including not only thyroid hormones but also growth hormone, cortisol, leptin, melatonin and insulin, have a daily rhythm that, when disrupted, may interfere with how your body functions.
According to Kresser, the most potent regulator of your circadian rhythm is exposure to light at the proper times and intensities — and vice versa, in that light pollution is a potent disruptor of your circadian rhythm that interferes with sleep, hormones, mood, cognition and more.
“Thyroid hormones have circadian rhythms, too,” he writes. “Sleep deprivation from ill-timed light is associated with abnormal thyroid function.” In addition, he cited 11 other health consequences of light pollution, which include:

Inflammation
Immune suppression

Disruption of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which controls the stress response
Gut problems

Obesity
Diabetes

Fertility and menstrual problems
Cardiovascular disease

Depression and mood disorders
Cognition and memory deficits

Cancer

How to Reduce Light Exposure at Night

In the modern world, avoiding light exposure at night isn’t always as simple as turning off the lights. If your bedroom is affected by light pollution, be sure to use blackout shades to keep light out or wear an eye mask when you go to sleep. Remove all sources of light from your bedroom, including a digital alarm clock.
You should also swap out LED lights with incandescent bulbs, which are less efficient at suppressing melatonin, particularly in areas where you spend most of your time during the day and evening, such as your kitchen, bathroom and bedroom. Leave the LEDs for areas such as hallways, closets, garage and porch, where your exposure to them is minimal.
When it gets to be late afternoon and evening, wear amber-colored glasses that block blue light, and turn off electronics — or at least be sure to wear the glasses while you’re using them. You can also install blue light-blocking software like Iris on your computer, cellphone and tablet.21
Part of optimizing your circadian rhythm is avoiding light at night, but the flipside is also important: if you’re in darkness all day long, your body can’t appreciate the difference and will not optimize melatonin production. So, ideally, to help your circadian system reset itself for thyroid health and overall health and wellness, avoid light at night and get at least 10 to 15 minutes of light first thing in the morning as well.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/02/24/light-exposure-at-night-can-destroy-your-thyroid.aspx

Hospitalization rates1 associated with COVID have dropped from a high of 132,500 Americans on January 6, 2021, to 71,500 on February 12, 2021. The U.S. had 920,000 staffed hospital beds in 2019,2 of which 14.4% harbored a COVID case in January 2021, and 7.8% do so far in February 2021.

This tremendous drop was predicted. Every hospitalized patient is tested for COVID, often repeatedly, using PCR tests with high false positive rates. False positives are due in considerable part to exorbitant cycle thresholds. This refers to the maximum number of doublings that are allowed during the test.

The problem caused by excessive cycle thresholds was well described in an August 2020 New York Times article,3 but has otherwise been ignored by the mass media. Dr. Sin Hang Lee, director of Connecticut-based Milford Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory, challenged4 the FDA’s reliance on exorbitant cycle thresholds in its acceptance of efficacy claims for Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine in early December 2020. He and FDA remain engaged in this debate.

The WHO instructed PCR test users and manufacturers on December 14, 2020,5 and again on January 20, 2021,6 that PCR cycle thresholds needed to come down. The December 14 guidance stated WHO’s concern regarding “an elevated risk for false SARS-CoV-2 results” and pointed to “background noise which may lead to a specimen with a high cycle threshold value result being [incorrectly] interpreted as a positive result.”

The first instruction7 has been superseded by the second, which additionally advises on clinical use of the test:8 If the “test results do not correspond with the clinical presentation, a new specimen should be taken and retested …”

While this implies that the test should only be performed in those with symptoms, and its results should be interpreted with the clinical context in mind, most PCR tests in the U.S. are used very differently: to screen asymptomatics at work, at colleges and universities and to permit border crossings.

No Caution Is Applied to the Results

One single positive test defines someone as a COVID case. Yet, it is well known,9 and was acknowledged in WHO’s January 2021 guidance, that screening in low COVID prevalence situations, such as in the screening of asymptomatics, increases the risk of false positives.

And, the risk increases as the prevalence of disease drops, such that in situations of low disease prevalence, it is common to find that most positives are actually false positives. For example, see this [referenced] BMJ chart and then the real-life example in the comment below it.10

Everyone in the field knew that the PCR test results were bogus. Even Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted11 in July 2020 that cycle thresholds above 35 were not measuring virus, and furthermore that virus could not be cultured from samples that required a high number of cycles to show positivity.

But the drumbeat from the Coronavirus Task Force12 and some academics13 and others14 was “test all, test often” — despite the inordinate numbers of false positives and negatives. Congress repeatedly15 allocated16 many billions of dollars for testing (often free for the person being tested) and so testing quickly mushroomed.

Nearly 2 million COVID tests a day17 were recorded in the U.S. between November 20, 2020, and January 19, 2021. Most of these have been PCR tests that, despite their problems, are still considered the most accurate. Most of the remaining tests performed were rapid antigen tests. These tests too suffer from high false positive rates, as the FDA warned in November 2020.18

While daily deaths have only dropped about 15% since January 12, 2021, there have been dramatic drops during the month in new cases19 (down 60% from 250,000 new cases a day to 100,000) and, as noted, in hospitalizations20 (down 46%). Reports claim more than 486,000 Americans have died from COVID as of February 16, 2021.21

However, none of these numbers is reliable. In addition to inaccurate PCR results, a variety of other measures have skewed the reported number of deaths from COVID. While CDC electronically codes other causes of death, it has chosen to hand code every COVID death,22 and explains:

“It takes extra time to code COVID-19 deaths. While 80% of deaths are electronically processed and coded by NCHS within minutes, most deaths from COVID-19 must be coded by a person, which takes an average of 7 days.”

CDC Treating COVID Deaths Differently

I am waiting for CDC to answer my Freedom of Information Act query, which requested the protocol CDC’s coders use for coding COVID-19 as a cause of death. Why is CDC treating COVID deaths differently from deaths due to other conditions?

CDC changed the way it coded death certificates for a COVID-caused death in March 2020, to include everyone for whom COVID is in any way contributory to the death. By placing different parts of the instructions about coding on different web pages, CDC successfully hid what it was doing.

On one page, the guidance23 states, “If COVID-19 is determined to be a cause of death, it should be reported on the death certificate.” On a different webpage, CDC states: “When COVID-19 is reported as a cause of death on the death certificate, it is coded and counted as a death due to COVID-19.”24

CDC has encouraged providers to be generous with COVID designations.25 And the COVID death definition appears to be a moving target,26 variable across states. CDC attempts to explain27 why its mortality numbers do not add up, and includes this excuse: “Other reporting systems use different definitions or methods for counting deaths.” But it is CDC that chose not to issue uniform guidelines.

COVID Diagnosis Liberally Applied

Anyone with a positive COVID test who dies within 30 days of the test is counted as a death due to COVID, even if COVID is not mentioned on the death certificate in Nevada.28 Colorado coroners are being forced to list gunshot wound deaths as due to COVID29,30 if the victim had a positive recent test. Oregon’s health agency reported in August 2020:31

“We consider COVID-19 deaths to be: Deaths in which a patient hospitalized for any reason within 14 days of a positive COVID-19 test result dies in the hospital or within the 60 days following discharge. Deaths in which COVID-19 is listed as a primary or contributing cause of death on a death certificate.”

CDC guesstimates that many deaths, perhaps half, which list generic pneumonia as the cause of death are actually COVID deaths, and redesignates them as COVID-caused deaths.

CDC created a new statistical category for deaths, titled “Pneumonia, Influenza and COVID-19,” or PIC,32,33 to facilitate this redesignation.

CDC admitted:34

“Weekly mortality surveillance data include a combination of machine coded and manually coded causes of death collected from death certificates. Prior to week 4 (the week ending January 30, 2021), the percentages of deaths due to PIC were higher among manually coded records than more rapidly available machine coded records.

Improvements have been made to the machine coding process that allow for more COVID-19 related deaths to be machine coded, and going forward, the percentage of PIC deaths among machine coded and manually coded data are expected to be more similar.

The data presented are preliminary and expected to change as more data are received and processed, but the amount of change in the percentage of deaths due to PIC should be lower going forward. Weeks for which the largest changes in the percentage of deaths due to PIC may occur are highlighted in gray in the figure below and should be interpreted with caution.”

CDC applies several statistical techniques to deal with anomalous data before publishing its cause of death results. The raw death data are not made available to the public.

If COVID is listed as one contributor to a death on the death certificate, even if the death is caused by cancer or heart attack, CDC relabels it a death caused by COVID.

Because hospitals are paid several times more by Medicare for patients who have been given a COVID diagnosis, and a positive COVID test is not required, it is assumed that the diagnosis of COVID is applied liberally in hospitalized patients.

By changing the methods by which it performs its calculations, CDC has made it impossible to compare prior year statistics with the period since the onset of COVID.

Physician and former Minnesota state legislator Scott Jensen described an audit35 of death certificates attributed to COVID in Minnesota. The death certificates listing COVID as the underlying cause of death totaled 2,715, but the deaths attributed to COVID included an extra 878 deaths, a 32% increase.

The Public Is in the Dark

By accepting excessive cycle thresholds for COVID PCR tests, CDC considerably expanded the numbers of COVID-positive cases, hospitalizations and deaths. By using a variety of idiosyncratic and changing statistical measures, CDC was able to control and further increase the number of deaths attributed to COVID-19.

I do not mean to imply that the PCR tests, whose manufacturers may have recently reduced their cycle thresholds, are now accurate. Over 200 different PCR tests have been “authorized” under emergency rules36 by the FDA, which so far has not standardized or formally approved them.

The public is in the dark as to whether and how each individual test may have changed in response to WHO’s instruction, and we remain uninformed about the accuracy of each test. In fact, it has been established37 by the American College of Pathology that COVID-19 PCR test results are not reproducible.

By hand-coding each death due to COVID, CDC gave itself the power to determine how many COVID deaths would be counted at any particular time. And by creating excessively loose case definitions38 for COVID, several of which did not require a single sign of illness, just a positive test, CDC was able to calibrate the number of COVID-positive cases by the rate at which it rolled out tests to the nation.

Today, the media are telling us to rejoice. Maryland has just gotten its percentage of positive COVID tests below 5%,39 when a month ago the rate was 8.76%. In my state of Maine, a reduction in the percentage of test results that are positive has turned all counties “green,” allowing schools to be open.40 How much of this is due to dialing down the cycle thresholds?

We Are Being Lied Into the Abyss

Things are worse, things are better. Wear no mask41 — no, wear a mask — hey, wear two masks.42 New variants with even more infectivity are coming! But they are no more lethal, and SARS-CoV-2 is quite infectious already, so will the new strains make an appreciable difference?

It seems that despite having recovered from COVID, you can be reinfected with the new viral strains. But how common is that? Does it simply mean you can have a positive PCR test, but be otherwise asymptomatic? I found only a single case report43 of a person becoming severely ill from a new strain after having recovered from original COVID.

The point is to keep us begging for the latest vaccine as soon as we have received the last, but no-longer-effective, vaccine.
The point is to keep coming up with narratives to justify locking us up and reducing productivity.
The point is to keep us frightened and confused and unable to use our wits.
The point is to stop us looking deeply and clearly into what is happening, while the media blares COVID hysteria nonstop.

Our families are being torn apart. Our small businesses are going bankrupt. Our countries, and probably we ourselves, are being scooped up by the banks, as borrowing on an unheard-of scale persists at a dizzying pace. Who will pay these debts? What will be the price? Can you see that the looting and crashing of our economies is intentional, buttressed by lie after lie?

We are being lied into the abyss. Our so-called leaders are tossing us and especially our children and grandchildren over a cliff. They threw away our Constitution long ago. Now, they have stolen and sold our future.

Please calm down. Turn off all the “news” and ponder what has been happening. We can fix this mess, once enough of us understand it. Give it the time and focus it deserves. Our leaders won’t save us. Only WE can.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/02/26/pcr-test-false-positive-rate.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, Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., a senior research scientist at MIT, reviews the health impacts of glyphosate. She has just finished writing a book about glyphosate called “Toxic Legacy: How the Weedkiller Glyphosate is Destroying Our Health and the Environment,” which is expected to be published in June 2021.
For years, glyphosate was assumed safe and claims of toxicity were vehemently denied. But in recent years, studies on glyphosate have been demonstrating toxicity even at very low levels. Seneff also believes glyphosate exposure may be a key player in cases of severe COVID-19, which we’ll unravel in this interview.
Glyphosate’s Mechanism of Action The “gly” in glyphosate actually stands for the amino acid glycine. The glycine amino acid in glyphosate has a methylphosphonate group attached to its nitrogen atom, which is responsible for its effects and toxicity.
After studying the research literature on glyphosate, Seneff has reached the conclusion that your body sometimes substitutes glyphosate for the amino acid glycine when it is constructing proteins, and this can have devastating consequences in some cases. The proteins created with glyphosate instead of glycine simply don’t work because glyphosate is much larger than glycine and also negatively charged, and as a result this alters important physical characteristics.
Monsanto’s own research, dating back to the late 1980s, shows that glyphosate accumulates in various tissues, even though they claim it doesn’t.1 The Monsanto researchers proposed that it was “incorporated into” the proteins in the tissues. This is not widely appreciated, even in the natural health community.
Now, if you have a distorted analog of glycine (in the form of glyphosate), the protein constructed from it is not going to work like it’s supposed to. In her book, Seneff details the amino acids in proteins that are most susceptible to damage because of what she calls a “glyphosate susceptible motif.”

“It’s really fascinating biology and so terrifying when you think of the potential consequences, if I’m right,” she says. “It matches so well with all the diseases that are going up dramatically in our society that I really think I’m onto something huge here.”

An aromatic amino acid called EPSP synthase is a critical enzyme that almost surely gets disrupted by glyphosate through this mechanism of substituting for glycine. This gets a bit technical, but it is important. The plant version of EPSP synthase binds a phosphate group in its substrate phosphoenolpyruvate at a site where there is a highly-conserved glycine residue (highly conserved usually means that it is critical for proper function). 
It has been shown experimentally that, if you change the DNA code so that the glycine is substituted by an amino acid called alanine (one extra methyl group), the enzyme becomes completely insensitive to glyphosate at any concentration. It also takes a hit on phosphate binding because of the extra methyl group, but you can tweak another amino acid nearby to fix this problem, while still keeping its insensitivity to glyphosate. 
Researchers from Dow-Dupont did exactly this to a maize version of EPSP synthase using CRISPR technology and were able to create synthetically a version of the maize’s own EPSP synthase that was completely resistant to glyphosate. The title of this paper is: “Desensitizing Plant EPSP Synthase to Glyphosate: Optimized Global Sequence Context Accommodates a Glycine-to-Alanine Change in the Active Site.”2
The shikimate pathway is the pathway that produces aromatic amino acids, which are essential to humans as we cannot create these amino acids in our body. The argument is we’re not susceptible to glyphosate because our cells don’t have EPSP synthase — in fact, they don’t have the entire shikimate pathway.
However, our gut microbes do have that pathway, and they use it to make essential amino acids for the host. So, our gut microbes are indeed affected by glyphosate, and when they’re damaged, our health can suffer in any number of ways.
But what might be an even more devastating problem with glyphosate is the way it probably messes up a large number of proteins that bind phosphate at a site where there is at least one, and often three, highly conserved glycine residues. Glyphosate slips its methylphosphonate group into the spot that is supposed to be where phosphate from the substrate fits snugly. Phosphate can’t bind because glyphosate is in the way. 
The arguments for why glyphosate specifically disrupts proteins that depend on glycine for phosphate binding are described more fully in a paper Seneff published together with colleagues arguing that glyphosate is a major factor in kidney failure among young agricultural workers in Central America.3
The Importance of Deuterium Laszlo Boros is a professor of pediatrics at UCLA and an expert on deutenomics, “the science of autonomic deuterium discrimination in nature.”4 After reading one of Seneff’s papers, he contacted her, suggesting she look into deuterium.

“I was blown away, and I immediately saw the connection to glyphosate,” she says. “This was a year ago in December, and I’ve just been reading everything I can on deuterium since then and hooking it to glyphosate. It’s just astonishing what I found, even, ultimately, [linking it] to COVID-19.
It’s been quite a year for me in terms of major breakthroughs in my understanding of how metabolism works and how it’s getting messed up by glyphosate, and then how that’s causing us to not be able to effectively deal with COVID-19.”

In normal physiology, your cells, specifically the mitochondria, function to help deplete your body of deuterium. Deuterium is a naturally occurring isotope of hydrogen. If you didn’t already know, deuterium is also known as heavy hydrogen, because it has a neutron in addition to the proton and electron in the hydrogen atom.
Provided your cell is healthy, it has deuterium-depleting enzymes and organelles that help remove deuterium from your cells. If your mitochondria are damaged by glyphosate, they’re not going to be able to eliminate the deuterium properly.
Deuterium is like iron in the way that it’s both essential in the right amounts and toxic in excess. Hydrogen is the smallest atom and by far the most common atom in your body. Deuterium, being a heavy hydrogen, has one extra neutron, in addition to the normal proton and electron that regular hydrogen has.
Now, your cells are surrounded by structured water, which is negatively charged and contributes to your body’s energy production by supplying deuterium-depleted hydrogen to lysosomes and mitochondria. The structured water is maintained by sulfates, which makes sulfate extremely important for health. Sulfate is made dysfunctional by glyphosate, which in turn destroys structured water, resulting in impaired energy production in the cell.5

“The mitochondria have [a] membrane, which has a part inside the membrane that’s really, really important,” Seneff says. “That’s where you have those protons, and you really don’t want it to be deuterons. This is what Laszlo brought home to me.”

How Your Body Creates Deuterium-Depleted Water
Endothelial NOS (eNOS) makes nitric oxide (NO), and for every molecule of NO that it makes, it produces two molecules of water, which are deuterium depleted. Stephanie believes the NO created by eNOS may act as a signal that deuterium-depleted water has been created. Interestingly enough, deuterium-depleted water is also created during the inflammatory process.

“The inflammation is there for a good reason, and the reason is to produce deuterium-depleted water,” Seneff says. “It’s all because the mitochondria are failing in their task of producing their own deuterium-depleted water, which they get in part through the structured water from the sulfate [and] through enzymes that are highly skilled at choosing hydrogen over deuterium …
NADH and NADPH are also fascinating. I’ve been chasing them through all the proteins. They are interesting because they are the carriers of that wonderful hydrogen that’s not deuterium. When you trace what’s doing what, where, you realize that the cytoplasm is producing NADH and handing it over to the mitochondria.
The mitochondria then take that H [hydrogen atom] off and throw it into the intermembrane space. So, the whole process ends up with the intermembrane space being assured that this is H [hydrogen] and not D [deuterium].
This is crucial because then those protons, once they build up, come back through the ATPase [ATP synthase] pump. If they are deuterons, they are going to wreck the pump … You release reactive oxygen species [that] break it, and of course, then you can’t make ATP.”

For clarification, the ATP synthase pump works like a mini-motor. When a hydrogen atom with one proton goes through it, it works flawlessly and generates ATP. If deuterium enters it, which has one neutron and one proton, making it twice the weight of hydrogen, it breaks that motor.
Interestingly, deuterium is everywhere, naturally, but your body has developed an intricate way to make it harmless by trapping it in the structured water, where it’s beneficial, as it actually supports the creation of structured water.
Problems arise when you cannot make enough structured water to sequester it all. Then, the deuterium gets loose, causing mitochondrial dysfunction, impairing energy production and contributing to chronic disease.
Glyphosate Damages Health in Many Ways

As noted by Seneff, glyphosate harms your health in a number of ways. For example, she cites a recent paper showing it causes endocrine disruption, which can lead to breast cancer, reproductive issues, obesity and thyroid problems.6

Another paper shows glyphosate sensitizes cells to be more receptive to cancer after exposure to other chemicals.7 “Glyphosate makes everything else more toxic than it would otherwise be,” Seneff says. “It disrupts your defense system against toxic chemicals.” Other research shows epigenetic and generational effects, even when no apparent problems can be found in the first generation exposed.8
I think [COVID-19] is mostly about glyphosate. If you’ve accumulated a lot of glyphosate in your tissues, you’re not going to do well with COVID-19, and that’s because [your body] is trying to repair the mitochondria in the immune cells so that the immune cells can actually clear the virus. If they can’t make ATP, they can’t do their job, and the virus flourishes. ~ Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D.

Glyphosate also impairs flavoproteins — proteins that bind flavins. Many of these proteins play a crucial role in transferring hydrogen from NADH or NADPH to other molecules, essentially supporting the delivery of pure hydrogen to the mitochondria. Flavoproteins have a characteristic GxGxxG motif at the site where they bind phosphate in the flavins. The ‘G’ stands for glycine and the ‘x’ is a wildcard — any amino acid, including glycine.

This means they have at least three susceptible glycines at this critical region of the protein. Flavoproteins are molecules that facilitate the transfer of protons and electrons, and know how to avoid deuterium, by exploiting a special feature of hydrogen called proton tunneling.

All of them can be expected to be disrupted by glyphosate. A critical flavoprotein is succinate dehydrogenase, and several papers have shown it is adversely affected by glyphosate, Seneff says. It is the only enzyme that plays a role in both oxidative phosphorylation and the citric acid cycle in the mitochondria.

In addition to aromatic amino acids, the shikimate pathway is essential for riboflavin synthesis, and riboflavin, a B vitamin, is the main precursor to flavins. This means that riboflavin deficiency can be triggered from glyphosate exposure as well.
Glyphosate also causes damage by:

Increasing calcium uptake in cells, which causes toxicity to neurons
Interfering with the ability to take glutamate out of your synapses
Making manganese unavailable — This in turn disrupts and prevents glutamate from being turned into nontoxic glutamine after it’s removed from your synapses. The enzyme responsible for the conversion is also highly dependent on glycine, which could be replaced by glyphosate

Deuterium-Depleted Water May Be Central to Metabolism According to Seneff, it appears deuterium-depleted water plays a central, hitherto unappreciated role in metabolism, as your body has so many ways to create it. For example, deuterium-depleted water is created through:

• Fatty acid synthesis and metabolism — The enzymes that synthesize fatty acids incorporate hydrogen that is carried by NADPH. This hydrogen atom has been carefully selected to be assured not to be deuterium. Interestingly, lipoxygenase is a protein expressed during conditions of stress, and according to Seneff, it has the greatest ability to select protons over deuterons of any protein.

It is highly upregulated in severe COVID-19 infection. It appears the virus triggers an increase in lipoxygenase because the virus captures linoleic acid (LA) in pockets in the viral membrane. However, lipoxygenase is not a flavoprotein, and it also doesn’t bind heme — this makes it resistant to damage from glyphosate. So, its activation becomes an alternative pathway to fix the mitochondrial deuterium problem.

SARS-CoV-2 picks up the omega-6 LA as it crosses the cellular membrane, and the LA then triggers the production of lipoxygenase that modifies the LA into leukotrienes — signaling molecules that bring in damaging macrophages.
But deuterium-depleted water is also produced in this process, by yanking two hydrogen atoms out of the fat and combining them with oxygen to make water. Note that this is just yet another way that excess LA damages your body, but with an ulterior motive that we often fail to appreciate.
• Sterol synthesis and metabolism — including cholesterol, vitamin D, cortisol, and sex hormones.

• Aromatic amino acid derivatives — including melatonin and neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin, as well as thyroid hormone.

“All these molecules that go through these complicated steps are all focused on delivering deuterium-depleted water to the mitochondria,” Seneff says. “I mean, it’s an absolute obsession that the cell has.” She goes on to review how processes that may appear to have nothing but harmful effects are actually an effort to heal the body. This, for example, seems to be the case in COVID-19:

“I believe that whatever biology is doing, it’s doing it for a good reason. There may be damage, but there’s a good reason why you need that damage in order to survive long term. It’s trying to fix a problem that’s very serious, and that’s what I think is happening with [SARS-CoV-2].
Not only does it induce this lipoxygenase, which produces deuterium-depleted water, it then creates this inflammatory environment, which brings in the platelets and the macrophages, the immune cells and the stem cells. All these are having a big party in there in all this fluid that’s building up inside the lungs.
Meanwhile, it also increases the production of hyaluronic acid. Hyaluronic acid is able to trap deuterium-depleted water. It makes structured water. So, you get structured water inside the alveoli of the lungs, and then you get fluid water in the interstitial spaces.
The blood vessels are leaky, the capillaries are leaky. Everything’s coming out of the capillaries into this interstitial space where there’s this fluid water, and you’ve got this lipoxygenase making deuterium-depleted water.
So, you’re producing this environment of deuterium-depleted water, inviting the macrophages to come in, and the platelets release their mitochondria … the stem cells also come in and release their mitochondria, and then macrophages sweep up the mitochondria — and all this is happening in the interstitial space in the lungs where the fluid is. This is why you cannot breathe. You’re drowning.
Maybe one of the most important things platelets do is hang on to mitochondria that they can deliver to the macrophages under conditions of stress. So, what happens is all these mitochondria get released in that interstitial space, and the macrophages induce this macropinocytosis, where they actually sweep up the water and everything that’s in it and bring it inside the macrophage, including the mitochondria.
It’s actually been shown that platelets can release mitochondria into the environment, and macrophages can take them up and use them as perfectly functioning mitochondria. It’s astonishing. So, what they’re doing is restoring the mitochondrial health to the immune cells.”

Glyphosate Damage May Be a Factor in Severe COVID-19

As explained by Seneff, your immune cells are impaired by glyphosate, so the older you are, the more likely you’ve been exposed to glyphosate for decades and therefore have poorly functioning immune cells. Interestingly, Seneff points out that the comorbidities of COVID-19 — obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure — are also diseases whose prevalence is going up dramatically over time, exactly in step with glyphosate usage on core crops.

“So, I think it’s mostly about glyphosate,” she says. “If you’ve accumulated a lot of glyphosate in your tissues, you’re not going to do well with COVID-19, and that’s because [your body] is trying to repair the mitochondria in the immune cells so that the immune cells can actually clear the virus. If they can’t make ATP, they can’t do their job, and the virus flourishes.”

The key take-home message here is that this is yet another reason to clean up your diet to make sure you’re not exposed to glyphosate. It basically wrecks your immune cells, and the cascading damage that takes place in severe cases of COVID-19 appears to be your body’s response to salvage or repair those poorly functioning immune cells.
Dietary Recommendations The answer to this problem is, first of all, to eat certified organic foods whenever possible. “We won’t buy it if we can’t find certified organic, and we’ve really seen health improvements since we’ve started doing that,” Seneff says. “I really swear by it, and I try to get all my friends to do the same. I think if you can eliminate glyphosate, you can really see great improvements in your health no matter what your problems are.” Other dietary recommendations include eating/drinking more:

Sulfur-containing foods such as organic eggs and seafood

Organic grass fed milk and butter. Butter is one of the lowest deuterium foods available

Glacier water, which is naturally low in deuterium

Animal fats, which are also low in deuterium

Molecular hydrogen

Probiotics foods such as sauerkraut and apple cider vinegar

To help “push” glyphosate out of your body and mitigate its toxicity, you can take an inexpensive glycine supplement. I take between 5 and 10 grams a day. It has a light, sweet taste, so you can actually use it as a sweetener.

“It makes sense because it’s basically going to outnumber the glyphosate molecules,” Seneff says. “Remember, glyphosate’s going to compete with glycine in building the protein. If there’s a lot of glycine around, then it’s much less likely that glyphosate will get in there.”

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/02/28/stephanie-seneff-glyphosate.aspx

Vitamin D plays an important role in most diseases, including infectious disease, which is why from the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I suspected that optimizing vitamin D levels among the general population would significantly lower COVID-19 incidence and death.
Since then, mounting evidence reveals this is indeed the case, as researchers have repeatedly demonstrated that higher vitamin D levels reduce rates of positive tests, hospitalizations and mortality related to this infection.
Vitamin D3 Reduces ICU Admissions and Mortality

Most recently, a Spanish study1,2 (which has yet to undergo peer-review) found giving supplemental vitamin D3 (calcifediol) to hospitalized patients with PCR-confirmed COVID-19 reduced ICU admissions by 82% and mortality by 64%.3 People who already had higher vitamin D at baseline were 60% less likely to die.
The study included 930 patients, 551 of whom received vitamin D3 — 532 micrograms on the first day of admission followed by 266 mcg on days 3, 7, 15 and 30. The remaining 379 patients served as controls.
All were given standard of care, which included hydroxychloroquine and an antibiotic (or two antibiotics in cases where bacterial infections were diagnosed), plus a steroid in cases involving pulmonary inflammation and/or cytokine storm.4 As reported by the authors:5

“ICU assistance was required by 110 (11.8%) participants. Out of 551 patients treated with calcifediol at admission, 30 (5.4%) required ICU, compared to 80 out of 379 controls (21.1%).
Logistic regression of calcifediol treatment on ICU admission, adjusted by age, gender, linearized 25(OH)D levels at baseline, and comorbidities showed that treated patients had a reduced risk to require ICU (RR 0.18).
Baseline 25(OH)D levels inversely correlated with the risk of ICU admission (RR 0.53). Overall mortality was 10%. In the Intention-to-treat analysis, 36 (6.5%) out of 551 patients treated with calcifediol at admission died compared to 57 patients (15%) out of 379 controls.
Adjusted results showed a reduced mortality for more of 60%. Higher baseline 25(OH)D levels were significantly associated with decreased mortality (RR 0.40).
Age and obesity were also predictors of mortality. Interpretation: In patients hospitalized with COVID-19, calcifediol treatment at the time of hospitalization significantly reduced ICU admission and mortality.”

Renewed Calls for Vitamin D Recommendations

In response to the Spanish findings, British MP David Davis tweeted that “The findings of this large and well conducted study should result in this therapy being administered to every COVID patient in every hospital in the temperate latitudes,” adding that:6

“Since the study demonstrates that the clear relationship between vitamin D and COVID mortality is causal, the U.K. government should increase the dose and availability of free vitamin D to all the vulnerable groups. These approaches will save many thousands of lives. They are overdue and should be started immediately.”

Many others are also calling for official vitamin D recommendations to be issued by their governments. Among them, Emer Higgins,7 a member of the Irish political party Fine Gael, who called on the Irish health minister, Stephen Donnelly, to include vitamin D supplementation in its “Living with COVID-19” strategy, slated for launch at the end of February 2021.
Higgins leaned on evidence from the Irish Covit-D Consortium,8 which shows vitamin D helps optimize your immune response. “There is negligible risk in this strategy and potentially a massive gain,” she said. According to the Covit-D Consortium, the nutrient can lower the risk of death from COVID-19 in the elderly by as much as 700%.9
Low Vitamin D Linked to COVID-19 Outbreaks and Severity

Another recent study10 published in the journal Scientific Reports confirmed vitamin D is a contributing factor to COVID-19 outbreaks and infection severity. According to the authors, the surges in daily positive test results during the fall of 2020 in 18 European countries linearly correlate with latitude, and hence sun exposure and vitamin D levels. They point out that:

“The country surge date corresponds to the time when its sun UV daily dose drops below ? 34% of that of 0° latitude. Introducing reported seasonal blood 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D) concentration variation into the reported link between acute respiratory tract infection risk and 25(OH)D concentration quantitatively explains the surge dynamics …
The date of the surge is an intrapopulation observation and has the benefit of being triggered only by a parameter globally affecting the population, i.e. decreases in the sun UV daily dose.
The results indicate that a low 25(OH)D concentration is a contributing factor to COVID-19 severity, which, combined with previous studies, provides a convincing set of evidence.”

While it’s well-recognized that most elderly individuals are deficient in vitamin D, the problem is widespread in all age categories, including children.
As noted in a February 2021 study11 comparing vitamin D levels in breast milk collected in 1989 and 2016/2017, vitamin D concentrations are consistently higher during the summer, but overall, vitamin D levels have declined since 1989. As a result, pregnant and lactating mothers and their infants may require vitamin D supplementation for optimal health.
Vitamin D Is Crucial for Optimal T Cell Responses

One of the reasons why vitamin D is so important against COVID-19 has to do with its influence on T cell responses. Animal research12 published in 2014 explained how vitamin D receptor signals regulate T cell responses and therefore play an important role in your body’s defense against viral and bacterial infections.
As noted in that study, when vitamin D signaling is impaired, it significantly impacts the quantity, quality, breadth and location of CD8 T cell immunity, resulting in more severe viral and bacterial infections.
Strong antibody response correlates with more severe clinical disease while T-cell response is correlated with less severe disease.
What’s more, according to a December 11, 2020, paper13 in the journal Vaccine: X, high-quality T cell response actually appears to be far more important than antibodies when it comes to providing protective immunity against SARS-CoV-2 specifically:14

“The first SARS-CoV-2 vaccine(s) will likely be licensed based on neutralizing antibodies in Phase 2 trials, but there are significant concerns about using antibody response in coronavirus infections as a sole metric of protective immunity.
Antibody response is often a poor marker of prior coronavirus infection, particularly in mild infections, and is shorter-lived than virus-reactive T-cells …
Strong antibody response correlates with more severe clinical disease while T-cell response is correlated with less severe disease; and antibody-dependent enhancement of pathology and clinical severity has been described.
Indeed, it is unclear whether antibody production is protective or pathogenic in coronavirus infections. Early data with SARS-CoV-2 support these findings. Data from coronavirus infections in animals and humans emphasize the generation of a high-quality T cell response in protective immunity.”

The authors go on to state that epitopes associated with SARS-CoV2 have been identified on CD4 and CD8 T-cells in the blood from patients who have successfully recovered from COVID-19, and that these epitopes “are much less dominated by spike protein than in previous coronavirus infections.”15
As a refresher, aside from SARS-CoV-2, there are six other coronaviruses known to cause respiratory disease in humans:16

Types 229E, NL63, OC43 and KHU1 are quite common and cause mild to moderate respiratory infections such as the common cold.
SARS-CoV (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus), associated with severe respiratory illness.17,18
MERS-CoV (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus) which, like SARS, causes more severe respiratory infections than the four common coronaviruses.19

Understanding the Role of Epitopes
What do they mean by “epitopes associated with SARS-CoV2 have been identified on CD4 and CD8 T-cells”? Epitopes20 are sites on the virus that allow antibodies or cell receptors in your immune system to recognize it. This is why epitopes are also referred to as “antigenic determinants,” as they are the part that is recognized by an antibody, B-cell receptor or T-cell receptor.
Most antigens — substances that bind specifically to an antibody or a T-cell receptor — have several different epitopes, which allow it to be recognized by several different antibodies. Importantly, some epitopes can cause autoimmunological pathogenic priming if you’ve been previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 or exposed via a COVID-19 vaccine.21
In other words, if you’ve had the infection once, and get reinfected (either by SARS-CoV-2 or a sufficiently similar coronavirus), the second bout has the potential to be more severe than the first. Similarly, if you get vaccinated and are then infected with SARS-CoV-2, your infection may be more severe than had you not been vaccinated.

For this reason, “these epitopes should be excluded from vaccines under development to minimize autoimmunity due to risk of pathogenic priming,” a recent paper22 in the Journal of Translational Autoimmunity warns.

One of the reasons why mRNA gene therapy “vaccines” are causing so many problems may in fact be because they have failed to “screen out unsafe epitopes to reduce autoimmunity due to homology between parts of the viral protein and the human proteome,” according to that Journal of Translational Autoimmunity paper.23
Natural SARS-CoV-2 Infection Induces Broad Epitope Coverage
The authors of the Vaccine: X paper point out that while most COVID-19 gene therapy “vaccines” focus on the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein as a natural antigen, “natural infection by SARS-CoV-2 induces broad epitope coverage, cross-reactive with other betacoronviruses.”
Indeed, this has been demonstrated in a number of studies, including a Singaporean study24,25,26 that found common colds caused by the betacoronaviruses OC43 and HKU1 might make you more resistant to SARS-CoV-2 infection, and that the resulting immunity might last as long as 17 years.
In other words, if you’ve beat a common cold caused by a OC43 or HKU1 betacoronavirus in the past, you may have a 50/50 chance of having defensive T-cells that can recognize and help defend against SARS-CoV-2. What the Vaccine: X authors are basically warning about is that the so-called vaccines are unlikely to provide the same level of immunity as natural infection does, and may even cause pathogenic priming.
Vitamin D Speeds Viral Clearance

Other research,27 published in November 2020 in the Postgraduate Medical Journal, shows oral vitamin D supplementation also helps speed up SARS-CoV-2 viral clearance. This study included only asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic SARS-CoV-2-positive individuals who also had vitamin D deficiency (a vitamin D blood level below 20 ng/mL).
Participants were randomly assigned to receive either 60,000 IUs of oral cholecalciferol (nano-liquid droplets) or a placebo for seven days. The target blood level was 50 ng/mL. Anyone who had not achieved a blood level of 50 ng/mL after the first seven days continued to receive the supplement until they reached the target level.
Periodically, all participants were tested for SARS-CoV-2 as well as fibrinogen, D-dimer, procalcitonin and CRP, all of which are inflammatory markers. The primary outcome measure of the study was the proportion of patients testing negative for COVID-19 before Day 21 of the study, as well as changes in inflammatory markers. As reported by the authors:28

“Forty SARS-CoV-2 RNA positive individuals were randomized to intervention (n=16) or control (n=24) group. Baseline serum 25(OH)D was 8.6 and 9.54 ng/mL, in the intervention and control group, respectively.
10 out of 16 patients could achieve 25(OH)D>50 ng/ml by day-7 and another two by day-14 … 10 (62.5%) participants in the intervention group and 5 (20.8%) participants in the control arm became SARS-CoV-2 RNA negative. Fibrinogen levels significantly decreased with cholecalciferol supplementation unlike other inflammatory biomarkers.
[A] greater proportion of vitamin D-deficient individuals with SARS-CoV-2 infection turned SARS-CoV-2 RNA negative with a significant decrease in fibrinogen on high-dose cholecalciferol supplementation.”

More Evidence Vitamin D Impacts COVID-19
If you haven’t already gone to the free website I created to educate the world about vitamin D, please do now. It’s www.stopcovidcold.com. You can download the free condensed version of the paper I had published last year that is easier to read and full of graphics to illustrate the information.

October 31, 2020, my own vitamin D review,29 co-written with William Grant, Ph.D., and Dr. Carol Wagner, both of whom are part of the GrassrootsHealth expert vitamin D panel, was published in the peer-reviewed journal Nutrients. You can read the paper for free on the journal’s website.

As noted in that paper, dark skin color, increased age, pre-existing chronic conditions and vitamin D deficiency are all features of severe COVID disease, and of these, vitamin D deficiency is the only factor that is readily and easily modifiable.
You may be able to reverse chronic disease, but that typically takes time. Optimizing your vitamin D, on the other hand, can be achieved in just a few weeks, thereby significantly lowering your risk of severe COVID-19.
In our paper, we review several of the mechanisms by which vitamin D can reduce your risk of COVID-19 and other respiratory infections, including but not limited to the following:30

Reducing the survival and replication of viruses31
Reducing inflammatory cytokine production
Maintaining endothelial integrity — Endothelial dysfunction contributes to vascular inflammation and impaired blood clotting, two hallmarks of severe COVID-19
Increasing angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) concentrations, which prevents the virus from entering cells via the ACE2 receptor — ACE2 is downregulated by SARS-CoV-2 infection, and by increasing ACE2, you also avoid excessive accumulation of angiotensin II, a peptide hormone known to increase the severity of COVID-19 

Vitamin D is also an important component of COVID-19 prevention and treatment for the fact that it:

Boosts your overall immune function by modulating your innate and adaptive immune responses
Reduces respiratory distress32
Improves overall lung function
Helps produce surfactants in your lungs that aid in fluid clearance33
Lowers your risk of comorbidities associated with poor COVID-19 prognosis, including obesity,34 Type 2 diabetes,35 high blood pressure36 and heart disease37

Data from 14 observational studies — summarized in Table 1 of our paper38 — suggest that vitamin D blood levels are inversely correlated with the incidence and/or severity of COVID-19, and the evidence currently available generally satisfies Hill’s criteria for causality in a biological system.39 Our paper40 also details several features of COVID-19 that suggest vitamin D deficiency is at play in this illness.
How to Optimize Your Vitamin D
While most people would probably benefit from a vitamin D3 supplement, it’s important to get your vitamin D level tested before you start supplementing. The reason for this is because you cannot rely on blanket dosing recommendations. The crucial factor here is your blood level, not the dose, as the dose you need is dependent on several individual factors, including your baseline blood level.
Data from GrassrootsHealth’s D*Action studies suggest the optimal level for health and disease prevention is between 60 ng/mL and 80 ng/mL, while the cutoff for sufficiency appears to be around 40 ng/mL. In Europe, the measurements you’re looking for are 150 to 200 nmol/L and 100 nmol/L respectively.
I’ve published a comprehensive vitamin D report in which I detail vitamin D’s mechanisms of action and how to ensure optimal levels. I recommend downloading and sharing that report with everyone you know. A quick summary of the key steps is as follows:

1. First, measure your vitamin D level — One of the easiest and most cost-effective ways of measuring your vitamin D level is to participate in the GrassrootsHealth’s personalized nutrition project, which includes a vitamin D testing kit.

Once you know what your blood level is, you can assess the dose needed to maintain or improve your level. If you cannot get enough vitamin D from the sun (you can use the DMinder app41 to see how much vitamin D your body can make depending on your location and other individual factors), then you’ll need an oral supplement.
2. Assess your individualized vitamin D dosage — To do that, you can either use the chart below, or use GrassrootsHealth’s Vitamin D*calculator. To convert ng/mL into the European measurement (nmol/L), simply multiply the ng/mL measurement by 2.5. To calculate how much vitamin D you may be getting from regular sun exposure in addition to your supplemental intake, use the DMinder app.42

3. Retest in three to six months — Lastly, you’ll need to remeasure your vitamin D level in three to six months, to evaluate how your sun exposure and/or supplement dose is working for you.

Take Your Vitamin D With Magnesium and K2
As detailed in “Magnesium and K2 Optimize Your Vitamin D Supplementation,” it’s strongly recommended to take magnesium and K2 concomitant with oral vitamin D. Data from nearly 3,000 individuals reveal you need 244% more oral vitamin D if you’re not also taking magnesium and vitamin K2.43
What this means in practical terms is that if you take all three supplements in combination, you need far less oral vitamin D in order to achieve a healthy vitamin D level.

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/02/22/vitamin-d3-for-coronavirus.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.

Many doctors around the world started using the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) early on in the COVID-19 pandemic. Among them is Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, a practicing physician in a Jewish community in Monroe County, New York.
He garnered national attention in March 2020 when he told radio host Sean Hannity that he’d had a near-100% success rate treating COVID-19 patients with HCQ, azithromycin and zinc sulfate for five days.1 “I’ve seen remarkable results; it really prevents progression of disease, and patients get better,” he said at the time.
In response, county health officials said Zelenko’s claims were “unsubstantiated” and urged residents to listen to public health officials.2 In this interview, he explains how HCQ works against COVID-19, and discusses the lies spun about the drug to suppress its widespread use. Zelenko had a very active Twitter account and would get millions of views on his tweets, and like many other truth tellers in this crazy pandemic, he was censored and recently removed from Twitter.

“When we have a large population of people that need to be treated, it has to be oral, cheap, safe and effective,” he says. “By the way, this is not new. This information was known in 2005 — even before.
There are papers with [Dr. Anthony] Fauci’s name on it, calling [HCQ] a miracle drug. Fauci called HCQ a vaccine. There’s a paper in which he called it an absolute dream treatment and vaccine. So, it’s conveniently forgotten but that’s what it is. It’s a matter of scientific record.”

What is most impressive to me is that he, through deep research and trial and error in the trenches, determined an incredibly effective protocol, and he did this under enormous personal health challenges. During the spring of last year, he was diagnosed with a type of pulmonary sarcoma that is typically considered terminal, and although improved, he continues to be under treatment for this condition.
Finding Solutions to Avoid a Death Trap

As the SARS-CoV-2 swept through his tight-knit Jewish community, Zelenko was seeing anywhere from 50 to 250 patients per day. At this point, he’s treated more than 3,000 patients with COVID-19-related symptoms. Only one-third of them actually received the triple-drug regimen. The remaining two-thirds were in low-risk categories and did not need drug treatment.
In all, Zelenko has only had 15 patients who ended up requiring hospitalization, four of whom were intubated. All were eventually successfully extubated and recovered. The remaining 11 were admitted for intravenous antibiotics for pneumonia. In all, only three of his high-risk patients died from COVID-19, which puts the mortality rate for this treatment at just 0.3%.

“You cannot ignore that. That’s not even counting the risk stratification patients, which I chose not to treat. In other words, I was able to tell these patients, ‘I know you’re going to be fine. Go home, and you’ll be fine.’ And that has value.
If you include those, the mortality rate is even less. And this has been reproduced. You don’t have to listen to me. You can call it anecdotal all you want, but there are now Harvard professors of virology with 4,000 patient experiences.
Dr. George Fareed, for example, or Dr. Harvey Risch from Yale School of Epidemiology, who has shown that it’s absolutely statistically proven that HCQ used in the prehospital setting is absolutely effective. It’s impossible for it to be a mistake,” he says.

Why HCQ?
Zelenko tells the story of how he got started treating COVID-19 patients with HCQ:

“Hospitals were near capacity and all the outpatient services were closed. Half my staff was sick and all of a sudden I had a war zone. I basically started learning triage medicine, trying to save as many people as possible.
At that time, the whole world had been focusing on building respirators and hospital capacity [instead of putting] emphasis on prehospital care. I found that bizarre because that’s never what we do in medicine. We [use] common sense and intervene in the earliest stages.
It’s much easier to fix a small problem than a large problem. For example, someone has cancer, we don’t wait for it to become metastatic disease. We treat as soon as possible. Someone has a small infection. We put the infection out.
If you look at the CDC, they recommend starting the treatment of influenza with antiviral drugs within the first 48 hours, not the week, except when it came to COVID-19. We were told to send patients home, and when they get sicker, send them to the hospital, where there was a good chance they were going to get intubated, especially in March and April.
At that point, in the city, they had mortality rates above 80%. So, it was a death sentence. None of that made sense to me at all. So, I quickly started to brush up on my virology.
I wanted to understand how this virus works and more importantly, what I can do about it. A series on YouTube called MedCram, Episode 34, saved the world. It explains the biology behind how zinc inhibits RNA polymerase, and the fact that zinc can’t get into the cell. So, it needs help.”

Zelenko goes on to describe how he settled on HCQ, a so-called zinc ionophore, meaning it shuttles zinc into the cell. He decided to treat high-risk patients as early as possible, and this turned out to be key. Early treatment really saves lives when it comes to COVID-19. This is not a situation where the wait-and-see strategy is well-advised.
According to Zelenko, during the first five days of SARS-CoV-2 infection, the viral load remains fairly steady. Around Day 5, it exponentially increases, potentially overwhelming the immune system. This also meant he could not afford to wait for test results, which took about five days. By then, most patients would already have progressed too far.
So, if a patient exhibited symptoms, especially if they reported loss of taste or smell as well, he’d start treatment immediately. In hindsight, about 90% of the tests of people experiencing symptoms had a positive test.
The Synergy of HCQ and Zinc

Zelenko likens HCQ and zinc like a gun and a bullet. HCQ is the gun that shoots the zinc into the cell. Zinc is the silver bullet that kills the virus by inhibiting an enzyme associated with viral replication inside the cell. The antibiotic azithromycin is given to prevent bacterial pneumonia and other secondary bacterial infections that are common in COVID-19.
Today, we have even more information, of course, which means there are more tools available beside HCQ, zinc and antibiotics. Ivermectin, for example, appears very useful, especially for prevention, as do steroids and blood thinners. So, Zelenko will now tweak the treatment of individual patients based on their symptoms.

“It’s not a cookie cutter approach, but what is absolutely the same is that high-risk patients must be treated as soon as possible, within the first five days from onset of symptoms, and they all survive,” he says.

The Psychological Operation Against HCQ
Unfortunately, as discussed by Zelenko, there was essentially a “psychological operation” put into place to scare people away from HCQ. A big part of that was turning it into a political issue. From the start, doctors who used the drug were threatened with the loss of their medical license, which is unheard of for a drug with such a long history of safe use.
The U.S. government made matters worse by only issuing emergency use authorization for in-hospital use and not for outpatient settings. Meanwhile, HCQ has been used for about 60 years in people with chronic conditions such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.

“So, the hypocrisy, the loss of common sense, the outright indoctrination killed a lot of people,” Zelenko says. “The root cause of it is the way we educate people. It used to be that higher education was about teaching critical thought and deductive reasoning, analytical analysis.
Now we indoctrinate people into responding to stimuli like dogs, like automatons, like robots. Common sense no longer matters. That’s my critique of higher education and why I think many physicians fell into the trap. Also, this country was traumatized. Even if a doctor was willing to give it, patients were afraid to take it.”

The biggest reason for the fear was unfortunately due to falsified studies and trials using toxic doses. It’s difficult to not suspect an ulterior motive in light of those facts. As noted by Zelenko, a main component of pandemic response, namely prehospital or outpatient treatment, was suppressed.
The question is why? One obvious reason was that it was a presidential election year, and then-president Trump came out in support of HCQ in March 2020. His announcement sparked immediate backlash from a chronically hostile media. “There were plenty of people willing to use every possible way to vilify the president and to discredit anything that might give him a win,” Zelenko says.
Then, of course, there were financial interests at play. Millions of dollars were being invested into new drugs like remdesivir, for example — a drug that costs more than $3,000 per treatment and is only for in-hospital use.
Hospitals were also paid tens of thousands of dollars more for COVID-19 patients, so there was no lack of incentive to get people into the hospital and keep them there either. Meanwhile, Zelenko’s early outpatient treatment costs about $20.
Fraudulent Studies Fueled Distrust

As for the fraudulent and misleading studies, the first to raise alarm was a VA study in Virginia, which found HCQ didn’t prevent death. However, they only used it on late-stage patients who were already on ventilators. From there, they incorrectly extrapolated that it would not be helpful in earlier stages, which simply isn’t true. Other trials simply used the wrong dosage.
While doctors reporting success with the drug are using standard doses around 200 mg to 400 mg per day for either a few days or maybe a couple of weeks, studies such as the Bill & Melinda Gates-funded3 Recovery Trial used 2,400 mg of hydroxychloroquine during the first 24 hours — three to six times higher than the daily dosage recommended4 — followed by 400 mg every 12 hours for nine more days for a cumulative dose of 9,200 mg over 10 days.
Similarly, the Solidarity Trial,5 led by the World Health Organization, used 2,000 mg on the first day, and a cumulative dose of 8,800 mg over 10 days. These doses are simply too high. More is not necessarily better. Too much, and guess what? You might kill the patient. As noted by Zelenko, these doses are “enough to kill an elephant.”
It’s really unclear as to why these studies used such enormous doses, seeing how the dosages this drug is normally prescribed in, for a range of conditions, never go that high. “All those studies did was prove that if you poison someone with lethal doses of a drug, they’re going to die,” Zelenko says.
Then there was the famous Lancet study that the World Health Organization used to justify essentially banning HCQ. This study was withdrawn when it was discovered that the data had been completely and utterly fabricated with falsely generated data from a fly-by-night company. It was supposed to be a meta-analysis of about 90,000 patients, which showed HCQ had lethal effects.
Unfortunately, before it was withdrawn, this fake study resulted in the WHO (or to quote Zelenko, the “world homicide organization”) putting a moratorium on the use of HCQ, which didn’t improve public trust in the drug. Even more egregious, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration used that fake paper as one of its justifications for removing the emergency use authorization for HCQ, even though the study had already been retracted.
Suppression of HCQ Needlessly Killed Tens of Thousands

According to Zelenko, “HCQ is the safest medication in the history of medicine, azithromycin is one of the most common antibiotics used in medicine, and zinc is a mineral that’s well-known and well-tolerated. These drugs were affordable and available to take at home, which was very important. And they worked.”
The virus is not dangerous if you approach it correctly. If you treat it in the right timeframe, it’s no different than a bad flu. You can deal with it. ~ Dr. Vladimir Zelenko
June 30, 2020, Zelenko and two co-authors published a study,6 showing that treating COVID-19 patients who had confirmed positive test results “as early as possible after symptom onset” with zinc, low dose HCQ and azithromycin reduced odds of hospitalization by 84% and all-cause death by 500% compared to no treatment at all.
Crazy enough, even though Zelenko went to great lengths to share his clinical findings with the White House and the National Institutes of Health, he received no support and was told they had no use for it.

“What’s happened over the last 20 years is that the academic elite and pharmaceutical industry have bred a monopoly on medical truth,” he says.
“They feel only data generated through randomized control trials, pharmaceutical sponsored trials, or those that are coming out of major academic institutions are to be viewed as truth. Anything coming from a frontline country doctor must be anecdotal.
That’s the crime here. And they created artificial barriers that prevented the flow of common sense and lifesaving information. You know which countries did take it seriously? See, this is a disease of affluence because the rich countries could afford the waste of money. The poor countries like Honduras … they had no options.
They couldn’t afford respirators. They didn’t have enough hospital capacity. So, they gravitated towards the cheap generic approaches. And those are the ones that have the best outcomes.”

Zelenko highlights Uganda, which has a population of about 50 million people, yet has recorded just 325 deaths.7 “I think this was a genocide against the elderly and a crime against humanity,” he says. “There are plenty of people who have blood on their hands, including the media.”
Coordinated Effort to Cause Harm

He also stresses that the pandemic response, including the suppression of HCQ, has clearly been a global coordinated effort.

“You have to ask yourself, who benefits from a destabilized world? Who benefits from chaos on the streets, from anarchy, from financial despair, from psychological trauma? … In some parts of this country, suicide rates are up 600%.
I speak to my colleagues in emergency rooms — the amount of child abuse and spousal abuse they’ve seen is absolutely ridiculous. The amount of collateral damage from preventable illnesses, like heart disease and cancer that are skyrocketing because people are not getting access to routine care.
A lot of people weren’t getting elective surgeries on time. So, there’s been a lot of collateral damage. The shutdown is killing more people than the virus. The virus is not dangerous if you approach it correctly. If you treat it in the right timeframe, it’s no different than a bad flu. You can deal with it. You don’t have to shut down the world.”

The True Agenda Coming Into Plain Sight

Indeed, the world is becoming increasingly black and white and it’s becoming easier and easier to see that global and national systems are not benefiting but, rather, enslaving the population, and how they’re doing it. As noted by Zelenko:

“I see the world now with such clarity … It’s no longer confusing. It’s a binary choice. It’s very clear who’s on what side. And here are the teams: There are those who want to live a life of God, conscious … Our lives have sanctity. They’re priceless and they should be preserved at all costs. And no one has the right to enslave another human being. That’s one approach.
The other is [internment] … an attempt to enslave, psychologically, and even more so physically, the world population. Do you want to know what’s coming? Look at Justin Trudeau statements. Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada, just announced that anyone who tests positive will be quarantined in a government-run facility, until the government deems you safe to return back to society.
That’s [also] what Cuomo wants to do in New York. And I’ll tell you what I think. For what I’m about to say, I’m going to be labeled as a conspiracy theorist. But you know what? I don’t care because, eventually, the truth will come out and history will prove it right.
If you look at the United Nations and the World Economic Forum, they have a plan. They have a 30-year plan, they have 100-year plan. That’s all spelled out in their charter. Just look at it.
So there’s a plan called the 2030 plan. You can go to the World Economic Forum and look at their own words. It’s being run by Klaus Schwab and his group. He wrote a book called ‘The Great Reset.’ That’s where the term comes from.
Now, all the governments are quoting him, like Justin Trudeau, Prince Charles, the Australian prime minister. There’s a myriad of other politicians calling for the great reset. So, what is the great reset? What are they asking for?
No. 1, I mean it’s absolutely ridiculous, but they’re saying, ‘You will own nothing and you will be happy.’ That is their mission. No. 2, America will no longer be a superpower. No. 3, there will be a small group of nations that determine the direction of where the world goes. No. 4, you won’t eat meat except as an occasional treat.
No. 5, there’ll be a global tax on fossil fuels to eradicate the reliance on oil. No. 6, a billion refugees will be displaced [and] we’re going to have to incorporate them and absorb them into our society. These are their stated goals.
Now, how do you take the world’s biggest country, most powerful country, richest country and make it no longer a world superpower? Well, that’s exactly what they’re doing. The economy is in shambles.
You’ve put in a government now that is passing foreign relief aid to China, Russia, Syria, Iran, the Palestinian Authority. They’re sending billions of dollars now to financially support these countries. So, you have to ask yourself, what is going on here?

This all started many years ago, but when Trump went to Davos, in the first few years of his presidency, he said, ‘I’m not part of your globalist agenda. I’m going to put my national interest first.’ That was a poke in the eye of the globalists. That’s the point when George Soros came out and said that Trump is one of the most dangerous people on the planet and he needs to be brought down.
He was dangerous to their agenda. So, what we’re really fighting for is the soul of man. God is testing us, in my opinion. Every person is being asked one simple question, either bow down to God and have the divine presence protect you or you’re going to bow down to Bill Gates … I’m calling for Nuremberg 2.0. These people need to be brought to justice.”

There’s No Rational Justification for COVID-19 Vaccines

Zelenko also shares his views on the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. He points out that while Gates is pushing COVID-19 vaccines, ostensibly to save lives, he’s on record saying he feels the world population needs to be reduced.

“If someone was a eugenicist and feels that the world population needs to be reduced, why would I take his vaccine for my health?” he asks. “The logical inconsistencies here are absolutely perverse.
I’m so pro-vaccine you can’t imagine. I’ve given tens of thousands of patients vaccinations. I give it to myself and to my children. However, I’m not COVID-19 vaccine positive. And I’ll tell you why: Because the majority of patients under the age of 45 have a near-100% recovery rate with a mild, runny nose from COVID-19. Why would I vaccinate someone with an experimental vaccine? The answer is not for medical reasons.
Another question, why would I give someone a vaccine, even if they are at high risk, if I can give them prophylaxis and/or early prehospital treatment and have a 100% recovery rate? Not for medical reasons.
Another question: Why would I give a vaccine to someone who’s already had COVID-19 and has antibodies? Not for medical reasons. And why would I give a very specific vaccine to someone who is going to be exposed to a ton of different variants and strains and mutations?
I wouldn’t. What I would use is an approach that inhibits RNA replication of RNA viruses, which works for all the strains, including, potentially, influenza. That’s the big dirty secret here.”

It’s Safe to Stop Living in Fear
Zelenko, who was born in a communist country and whose family suffered under communist and fascist rule, is quite sensitive to the signs of these authoritarian regimes. He recounts a story told in the book “The Gulag Archipelago” by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Stalin wanted to dig a canal from Moscow to St. Petersburg. The work, done in the middle of winter, led to the death of 400,000 prison workers, as they weren’t given the appropriate clothes or tools. The bodies were thrown into the cement and became a permanent part of the canal.

“No ship ever used the canal because it was too shallow. So, the question was, why was this canal built? And the answer is: So that 400,000 people would die,” Zelenko says.
“I’m not attacking the vaccine. I’m attacking the need for the vaccine. I have not enough information to say it’s good or bad. And I don’t like to guess. But what I can tell you is that I know for a fact that 99.98% of young and healthy people under the age of 45 recover, with no treatment.
I also know for a fact, from my own real-world battle-tested evidence, which has been reproduced now on hundreds of thousands of patients, that if you intervene early, you essentially eliminate hospitalization and death. And, I’ve now treated two waves. I have not seen one patient who’s had COVID-19 in the first wave, get it again …
So, the need for the vaccine doesn’t exist. It’s … been artificially conflated … offering people an artificial false hope solution in order to enslave them to be codependent on government. You know why my approach is so dangerous? Because not only does it treat COVID-19, [but] it treats anxiety. It tells people you don’t need to worry.
My statement to the American people or whoever’s listening is: Return to normal living. You do not need to worry. And by the way, there are nonprescription options … that can replace HCQ if your government or doctor are too stupid or vicious to give it to you. So, you don’t have to rely on them. You can buy over-the-counter things that will save your own life. So, my point is, return back to normal life …
It’s unbelievable the crime that’s been done on the human psyche. I’m screaming to humanity: Don’t be scared! Be cautious. Be smart. Use common sense. But don’t be scared. Return back to life. Reengage in life.”

HCQ Mechanisms of Action and Alternatives

Over-the-counter alternatives to HCQ include EGCG (green tea extract) and quercetin, both of which are zinc ionophores and therefore work much like HCQ does. Quercetin works best when taken in conjunction with vitamin C, however, as the vitamin C helps activate it. Zelenko recommends taking 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C with it.
Now, HCQ does have other mechanisms of action beside being a zinc ionophore, so it’s a better choice, but if you simply cannot get it, EGCG or quercetin are viable stand-ins. Additional benefits of HCQ include:

Inhibiting viral entry into the cytoplasm, in part by changing the pH
Inhibiting cytokine storms through anti-inflammatory properties
Stabilizing red blood cells, which improves oxygenation

“Since it has four different mechanisms of action, it’s a very effective drug, and it has a half-life of 50 days in plasma,” Zelenko says. “But if you can’t get it, you can’t get it. So, I’ll take quercetin or EGCG.”
The caveat here is you must implement this treatment within the right timeframe. It can be helpful to recognize we are in essence dealing with two diseases, or stages of disease, here.
First, there’s the viral infection, and second, there’s the immune over-response that leads to the release of inflammatory cytokines and agents that can cause blood clots. The key is to prevent the progression from the first stage to the second.
Prescription Help Is Available

Like many others who have dared run the gauntlet that is HCQ promotion, Zelenko has been attacked from several angles. His character has been assassinated in the press, his medical credentials questioned and threatened, and his online presence silenced. 

“I had had zero media experience before March 2020. I am of a quiet doctor who was taking care of his patients, living a serene life. All of a sudden, this all exploded on me …
I was on Twitter, getting 10 million impressions per tweet. They shut me down last month for platform manipulation. I’m not even sure what that means. So, I had to develop my own website. It’s free and has my protocols in 20 different languages.”

To learn more about Zelenko’s protocol, be sure to visit his website, vladimirzelenkomd.com. There, you’ll find protocols not only for early treatment but also prophylaxis, along with studies that document the rationale for each of the treatment components and patient testimonials.
His website also includes access to telemedicine via “Speak With an MD,” which can overnight your medication. “So, if you live in a state that’s tyrannical, you can have a consultation with Dr. Fields,” Zelenko says. “I had to develop this because there were patients around the country who didn’t have access [to HCQ].”
HCQ should be available to most people in the U.S. at this point, but you do need a prescription, and some doctors are still unwilling or resistant to prescribe it. Other times, pharmacies can create roadblocks. “It may take some diligence but none of my patients goes without the medication written for them,” he says.
Early Treatment Prevents ‘Long Haul’ Side Effects

In closing, it’s worth noting that when you treat early, your risk of developing long-term side effects, commonly referred to as “long-haulers,” is virtually nil. Not a single one of Zelenko’s patients who received treatment within the first five days of symptom onset went on to develop long-haul symptoms afterward.

“I had patients that were long-haulers, but they came to me after that window, and they were already advanced in the inflammatory process. At that point, the cytokine storm had already taken hold. They had developed blood clots, some of them had pulmonary infarct, or strokes actually.
Others developed ARDS or catastrophic lung damage and pneumonias, and others just are not themselves. I don’t know how to describe it, but it ate away part of their souls. They’re not the same people. There’s depression, there’s lack of energy. There’s a psychological impact as well.
So, it’s not that I don’t deal with long-haulers, I do. But the way to prevent the long-hauler syndrome is to intervene within the first five days, with appropriate antiviral medication in high-risk patients. That is 100% successful,” he says.

The Light of Truth Will Prevail
Zelenko refers to the COVID-19 pandemic and everything surrounding it as an information war, a propaganda war, and his primary objective and agenda in this war is to educate and speak truth.

“There’s a lot of false narrative being pumped into the heads of people, to create fear,” he says. “In the Psalms of David, it says, ‘With crooked people, you have to deal crookedly.’ It also says you should learn from a thief.
So, I learned from the enemy, and I use their tactics to counter them. The main tactic is to spread truth. By the way, it’s no longer dependent on me. I have second and third and fourth generation leaders that have taken on the mission and are really spreading the knowledge worldwide.
It’s unstoppable. They could try to slow it down, and they are. But the truth will come out. The truth is coming out. And when the truth will be revealed, the people that try to obstruct it and use lies to slaughter, will be destroyed by it, God willing.
I am now more optimistic than I’ve ever been, simply because there’s no more confusion. Life was very confusing. You didn’t know what was good, what was bad. Now, it’s very clear. There’s much more bad, that’s true. But I know where it is. I know where the enemy is. And I know where the good is. And a little light pushes away a lot of darkness.”

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/02/21/hydroxychloroquine-for-covid.aspx