Alex_Krycek

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Promising news about a new breakthrough treatment from Australia: --------- Queensland researchers and a US team have developed an antiviral therapy that has killed off the COVID-19 viral load in infected mice by 99.9 per cent. Key points: Gene-silencing RNA technology is used to destroy the COVID-19 virus genome directly and stops the virus replicating The treatment could be available as early as 2023, depending on the next phase of clinical trials The research has been published in Molecular Therapy Lead researcher Professor Nigel McMillan, from Griffith University, called it a "seek and destroy mission" where the therapy genetically targeted the potentially deadly virus. The international team of scientists from the Menzies Health Institute Queensland and the US research institute City of Hope began their collaborative research last April. They used a "next-generation" viral approach using gene-silencing RNA technology to attack the virus genome directly, which stops the virus spreading. "It causes the genome to be destroyed and the virus can't grow anymore — so we inject the nanoparticles and they go and find the virus and destroy it just like a heat-seeking missile," Professor McMillan said. "This is the first time we have been able to package this up as a particle, send it through the blood stream to attack the virus. Source: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-05-17/queensland-coronavirus-antiviral-treatment-covid-19/100144370 https://www.cell.com/molecular-therapy-family/molecular-therapy/fulltext/S1525-0016(21)00256-2 Full Paper: https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S1525-0016(21)00256-2

As you know, 80% of those who contract COVID-19 have no symptoms. Those who do exhibit symptoms of a common cold. Only a very small percentage progresses to a severe stage. The staff could have been exposed numerous times with no outward sign of infection. It's possible they underestimated the nature of the pathogen they were working on, believing that the safety protocols they had in place were sufficient, and, seeing no overt consequences if someone did get infected, became complacent. ---- Let's compare the difference between BSL-4 conditions and BSL-2 conditions (which were the alleged conditions at the WIV). BSL-4 Conditions Biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) is the highest level of biosafety precautions, and is appropriate for work with agents that could easily be aerosol-transmitted within the laboratory and cause severe to fatal disease in humans for which there are no available vaccines or treatments. BSL-4 laboratories are generally set up to be either cabinet laboratories or protective-suit laboratories. In cabinet laboratories, all work must be done within a class III biosafety cabinet. Materials leaving the cabinet must be decontaminated by passing through an autoclave or a tank of disinfectant. The cabinets themselves are required to have seamless edges to allow for easy cleaning. Additionally the cabinet and all materials within must be free of sharp edges in order to reduce the risk of damage to the gloves. In a protective-suit laboratory, all work must be done in a class II biosafety cabinet by personnel wearing a positive pressure suit. In order to exit the BSL-4 laboratory, personnel must pass through a chemical shower for decontamination, then a room for removing the positive-pressure suit, followed by a personal shower. Entry into the BSL-4 laboratory is restricted to trained and authorized individuals, and all persons entering and exiting the laboratory must be recorded.[11] As with BSL-3 laboratories, BSL-4 laboratories must be separated from areas that receive unrestricted traffic. Additionally airflow is tightly controlled to ensure that air always flows from "clean" areas of the lab to areas where work with infectious agents is being performed. The entrance to the BSL-4 lab must also employ airlocks to minimize the possibility that aerosols from the lab could be removed from the lab. All laboratory waste, including filtered air, water, and trash must also be decontaminated before it can leave the facility.[11] Biosafety level 4 laboratories are used for diagnostic work and research on easily transmitted pathogens which can cause fatal disease. These include a number of viruses known to cause viral hemorrhagic fever such as Marburg virus, Ebola virus, Lassa virus, and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever. Other pathogens handled at BSL-4 include Hendra virus, Nipah virus, and some flaviviruses. Additionally, poorly characterized pathogens which appear closely related to dangerous pathogens are often handled at this level until sufficient data are obtained either to confirm continued work at this level, or to permit working with them at a lower level.[15] This level is also used for work with Variola virus, the causative agent of smallpox, though this work is only performed at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, United States, and the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology in Koltsovo, Russia.[19] BSL-2 Conditions At this level, all precautions used at Biosafety Level 1 are followed, and some additional precautions are taken. BSL-2 differs from BSL-1 in that: Laboratory personnel have specific training in handling pathogenic agents and are directed by scientists with advanced training. Access to the laboratory is limited when work is being conducted. Extreme precautions are taken with contaminated sharp items. Certain procedures in which infectious aerosols or splashes may be created are conducted in biological safety cabinets or other physical containment equipment.[11] Biosafety level 2 is suitable for work involving agents of moderate potential hazard to personnel and the environment.[12] This includes various microbes that cause mild disease to humans, or are difficult to contract via aerosol in a lab setting.[14] Examples include Hepatitis A, B, and C viruses, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), pathogenic strains of Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus, Salmonella, Plasmodium falciparum, and Toxoplasma gondii.[14][15] -------- If they were working on COVID-19 in BSL-2 conditions, it seems inevitable there would be a leak, given how easily transmissible it is and how long the virus survives on surfaces.

There is some evidence for this. It's referred to as "in group, out group" behavior. Experiments have been done indicating that there is some default bias at work.

Well, to start with, being open and transparent with any data they possessed, not suppressing the fact there was a novel coronavirus outbreak, acting swiftly in concert with the WHO. This was not the case, according to the WHO officials (example: Maria Van Kerkhove, Covid-19 technical lead) who were attempting to communicate with China on the ground as the situation emerged. Audio is played from a conference call of WHO officials stating that "it's the same thing again and again, trying to request information and getting nowhere." Additionally, and this point is made in the FRONTLINE documentary I referenced: failing to disclose an outbreak of a dangerous pathogen to the international community is a direct breach of international regulations. LAWRENCE GOSTIN: "So let me tell you what international law requires. If the government knows about a novel infection that meets the criteria within the International Health Regulations, and a novel coronavirus by definition meets those criteria of a potential public health emergency of international concern, the government is obliged by law to report that to the World Health Organization within 24 hours. So it was reportable. The failure to report clearly was a violation of the International Health Regulations." If a country knows it has a dangerous outbreak - it must report it to the international community immediately. Full stop.

By "acting with equal sovereignty", I take it you mean blocking a transparent and impartial investigation into one of the most consequential events in recent human history? The WHO is an extension of the United Nations. Any UN member state should be subject to certain standards; this case is no exception. Watch the PBS FRONTLINE documentary I referenced. The WHO tried repeatedly to obtain crucial data early on and were stonewalled again and again. China already had the genome sequenced in early 2020 after the first cases were recorded, and still wouldn't release it to the international community. It took an act of disobedience to independently release the genome, at which point China officially followed suit. So I reject your accusation of partisan bias. The United States, had this pandemic begun on US soil, would have been obligated to fully participate in an independent investigation, as would any other country.

It could also indicate substandard safety protocols.

Slim to none, unfortunately. They have demonstrated a pattern of obfuscation since the beginning of this pandemic. There was an excellent FRONTLINE episode recently called "China's COVID Secrets", which investigated the initial suppression of information regarding the outbreak. (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/chinas-covid-secrets/) The authorities there will probably never allow a fully transparent investigation that might implicate them further, so the world may never know what went exactly wrong or if corrective action has been taken to prevent further outbreaks. We're left with Peter Daszak's vague assurances that the WHO "asked tough questions", without ever having access to raw data. Deeply troubling.

What does it mean to be "white"? I have friends of various ethnicities. One friend told me he was chastised by his family for "speaking too white", and he "shouldn't forget where he came from". He said he found the comments confusing. Overall I think this kind of racial framing is counterproductive.

There's been some additional dialogue over the past 2 weeks calling for a thorough investigation of the origins of COVID-19. First, there was a letter published in Science magazine on May 14th calling for a complete investigation. Excerpt from the Letter: "On 30 December 2019, the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases notified the world about a pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan, China (1). Since then, scientists have made remarkable progress in understanding the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), its transmission, pathogenesis, and mitigation by vaccines, therapeutics, and non-pharmaceutical interventions. Yet more investigation is still needed to determine the origin of the pandemic. Theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable. Knowing how COVID-19 emerged is critical for informing global strategies to mitigate the risk of future outbreaks." They continue: “We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data. A proper investigation should be transparent, objective, data-driven, inclusive of broad expertise, subject to independent oversight, and responsibly managed to minimize the impact of conflicts of interest. Public health agencies and research laboratories alike need to open their records to the public. Investigators should document the veracity and provenance of data from which analyses are conducted and conclusions drawn, so that analyses are reproducible by independent experts.” Source: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1.full Signatories of the Letter: Jesse D. Bloom, Basic Sciences and Computational Biology, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA 98109, USA. Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Chevy Chase, MD 20815, USA. Yujia Alina Chan, Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA. Ralph S. Baric, Department of Epidemiology and Department of Microbiology & Immunology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA. Pamela J. Bjorkman, Division of Biology and Biological Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA. Sarah Cobey, Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA. Benjamin E. Deverman, Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA. David N. Fisman, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5S 1A8, Canada. Ravindra Gupta, Cambridge Institute of Therapeutic Immunology & Infectious Disease, Cambridge, UK. Akiko Iwasaki, Department of Immunobiology, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT 06519, USA. Marc Lipsitch, Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases and Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA 02115, USA. Ruslan Medzhitov, Department of Immunobiology, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT 06519, USA. Richard A. Neher, Biozentrum, University of Basel and Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Basel, Switzerland. Rasmus Nielsen, Department of Integrative Biology and Department of Statistics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. Nick Patterson, Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. Tim Stearns, Department of Biology and Department of Genetics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. Erik van Nimwegen, Biozentrum, University of Basel and Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Basel, Switzerland. Michael Worobey, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA. David A. Relman, Department of Medicine and Department of Microbiology & Immunology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. ; Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. ------ There was also an article in Infection Control Today. Excerpt from the Article: Kevin Kavanagh, MD, a member of Infection Control Today®’s Editorial Advisory Board, says that “the assertion that the virus was purposefully released is probably not valid since the epicenter of the epidemic was in a highly populated portion of China and the country did not have a workable vaccine.” “There appears to be little doubt that, like the rest of the world, the Wuhan lab was experimenting on coronaviruses,” says Kavanagh. “On May 11 of this year Senator Rand Paul questioned the White House regarding 'gain of function' research, research which would be expected to make the viruses more dangerous and more transmissible. This research was also mentioned in a presidential Fact Sheet: Activity at the Wuhan Institute of Virology from the Trump administration which apparently has not yet been refuted by the Biden administration.” Ghebreyesus’s ambivalence about this (the WHO's) conclusion seemed evident. “Although the team [of WHO investigators] has concluded that a laboratory leak is the least likely hypothesis, this requires further investigation, potentially with additional missions involving specialist experts, which I am ready to deploy,” Ghebreyesus said in a statement on March 30. “There appears to be little doubt that, like the rest of the world, the Wuhan lab was experimenting on coronaviruses,” says Kavanagh. “On May 11 of this year Senator Rand Paul questioned the White House regarding 'gain of function' research, research which would be expected to make the viruses more dangerous and more transmissible. This research was also mentioned in a presidential Fact Sheet: Activity at the Wuhan Institute of Virology from the Trump administration which apparently has not yet been refuted by the Biden administration.” When the WHO report came out, Saskia v. Popescu, PHD, MPH, MA, CIC, another ICT® EAB member, agreed that more study needs to be done on the origin of COVID-19. She added, however, that “the truth is that the source of the pandemic does not change the poor response from so many countries, including the United States.” The Science letter goes into a bit more detail as to why further research on the lab leak possibility needs to be examined. The letter notes that the two theories—lab leak and zoonotic spillover—“were not given balanced consideration. Only 4 of the 313 pages of the report and its annexes addressed the possibility of a laboratory accident.” Kavanagh says that “this subject of research in the Wuhan Lab has been almost taboo in the mainstream media. However, the construction of man-made (pseudo) virus is presently an exact science, with single amino acid substitutions possible. Similar to vaccine production, you just need to be able to input the genetic code you desire and a vaccine or pseudo-virus can be made.” Kavanagh refers to what he describes as a “chilling article” by authors affiliated with China's National Institutes for Food and Drug Control (NIFDC) and WHO Collaborating Center for Standardization and Evaluation of Biologicals. “This article describes a plethora of single amino acid substitutions in the spike protein from 106 pseudo-virus which resulted in ‘ten mutations such as N234Q, L452R, A475V, and V483A was markedly resistant to some mAbs’ and that ‘the dominant D614G itself and combined with other mutations are more infectious.’” The D614G variant was the dominant variant in the United States in 2020. Source: https://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/view/weekly-rounds-with-infection-control-today ----------- Finally, an article in Politico: “There are copious precedents of pathogens leaking from labs — the original 2003 SARS virus leaked up to six times from labs across three countries. Consider that the SARS research and animal infection experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, for more than 10 years, were all performed at relatively low biosafety levels. It is currently not possible to tell from the genetic evidence whether the virus ever passed through a laboratory or a lab personnel. “The question is: How did a virus, whose lineage is found only in southern China, make its way into humans in the metropolitan city of Wuhan, more than a thousand miles away? We know that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had possibly the greatest collection of SARS viruses from numerous trips across China. We know that they were working with a batch of viruses very closely related to SARS-CoV-2. Details of these viruses and the experiments performed with them have not been shared in a timely manner.” — Alina Chan, molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard “It is worthy of a careful, rigorous, unbiased, objective examination, based on relevant, verifiable data. There are a number of plausible scenarios embedded in this label, ‘lab leak,’ and importantly, they include an unrecognized infection of a well-intentioned lab worker attempting to recover or study new coronaviruses from bats. It does not imply malice or even necessarily awareness (of the accident). Lab accidents are much more common than any of us know, or would like to admit, and they occur worldwide and even in the most safe and secure labs. U.S. biosafety labs are by no means strangers to accidents; leaks of some of the most dangerous infectious agents have occurred at CDC and other U.S. government labs.” — David A. Relman, microbiologist at Stanford University “The outbreak occurred in Wuhan, on the doorstep of the laboratory that conducts the world’s largest research project on horseshoe bat viruses and worked with the world’s closest sequenced relative of the outbreak virus. The laboratory actively searched for new horseshoe-bat viruses in horseshoe-bat colonies in caves in remote rural areas in Yunnan province, brought those new horseshoe-bat viruses to Wuhan, and then mass-produced, manipulated, and studied those new horseshoe-bat viruses, year-round, inside Wuhan. “Documentary evidence establishes that the bat-SARS-related-coronavirus projects at the Wuhan Institute of Virology used personal protective equipment (usually just gloves; sometimes not even gloves) and biosafety standards that would pose high risk of infection of field-collection, field-survey, or laboratory staff upon contact with a virus having the transmission properties of SARS-CoV-2.” — Richard Ebright, molecular biologist at Rutgers University Source: https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-nightly/2021/05/19/experts-weigh-in-on-the-wuhan-lab-leak-hypothesis-492915 ------------ Clearly many experts are seriously considering the lab leak theory as plausible. I think this is something the general public has a lot of questions about, and should be investigated as thoroughly as possible. As the world emerges from this pandemic, people are going to want answers.

Good song. I remember this from the movie "Collateral" from back in the day.

No fan of Rand Paul, but his line of questioning was interesting. There was a very comprehensive article recently examining the two origin theories featured in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, by Nicholas Wade. Wade was the staff writer for the Science Times section of the NYT from 1982 to 2012. His article here: https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/

Discovered an interesting group called the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies. Looks like they have a conference coming up. https://scu.regfox.com/2021-scu-aapc Here's their twitter feed: https://mobile.twitter.com/explorescu

One of the problems regarding capitalism is the pressure it puts on people to pursue material wealth. I see this primarily as a cultural problem. If you don't earn enough money in a capitalist system, you will become homeless and starve. Such pressure is counterproductive for several reasons. First: it locks people into jobs they don't want to do, jobs that are generally unnecessary for the advancement of society. Society becomes full of people selling useless junk to each other or doing services that in no way benefit mankind: an endless procession of scam artists. Second: it corrupts those disciplines that are truly beneficial for mankind, twisting them in the direction of self-interested profit. Third: money, and not true individual talent, become the end goal of all creative action. In my view this is the most regrettable consequence. Because of the aforementioned reasons: extreme pressure to earn a living and an incentive to work in a job that is superficial in nature, most people never really tap into their true creative ability, whatever that may be. Yes, there are a few who break the mold and actualize their creative potential, but in the vast majority this talent is suppressed, leading to a society where most people are not contributing their talents to the betterment of human civilization. For this, we all suffer. "Creative potential" is an aptitude in any discipline: engineering, mathematics, writing, - whatever discipline a person is naturally good at and interested in.

I see a correlation here with Eric Fromm's work, specifically his book: "To Have or To Be?". Seems the countries that are getting it right these days (happier citizens, more productive, more creative) are focused on creating the conditions for people to be intrinsically happy rather than to have something in order to be happy. Disagree. There are plenty of rich people who don't continuously want more and more material excesses as they accrue wealth. They get to a certain point where material luxuries are vacuous, preferring instead more meaningful aspects of life.

Therefore those negatives you outlined are not inevitable. It depends on the value ascribed to those material possessions on the part of each individual.

Those individuals are innovators. They create new value by applying science to produce groundbreaking products that are extremely useful to ordinary people.

In my view, "adversary drones" spying on the US is the least likely scenario. These type of events/craft have been reported since the mid 1940s. Further, with the competitive advantage that the US maintains in terms of military innovation and hardware, I seriously doubt that any adversary would possess technology that we don't know about, or can't respond to. Which leaves two other possibilities: it's our hardware being tested, or it's some other phenomena.

Interesting piece about Canadian pilots seeing numerous UFOs: https://www.vice.com/amp/en/article/z3xewj/air-canada-westjet-porter-pilots-ufo-sightings By combing through thousands of reports in a government flight incident database, VICE World News has uncovered dozens of recent UFO sightings from Canadian and international airlines.

Interesting article here: https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context/new-einstein-equation-wormholes-quantum-gravity

Excerpt from the article: (April 25th, 2021) Twitter removed tweets that were critical of India's response to the COVID-19 pandemic at the request of the Indian government, the company said Saturday. Twitter censored tweets from a member of parliament, an actor, a former journalist, and West Bengal's minister of labor and law, according to Indian news outlet MediaNama, which first reported the news. Indian law allows the country to censor language it deems defamatory or that it views as possibly inciting violence, The Verge noted. The country in February enacted a new regulation that could allow it to jail employees of social-media companies should they refuse to comply with the government's demands to delete content it considers illegal, Fast Company and the Wall Street Journal reported.

Yes, India - according to the article I just referenced. Administrations in other democratic countries try, although it's more difficult legally. In other news, George Dubya himself has recently been condemning misinformation online. Kyle Kulinski from Secular Talk pointed out the absurdity of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsoSz5i6wkE

India recently demanded that tweets critical of the government's handling of COVID-19 be censored under their defamation laws. This is the slippery slope that exists. Imagine if Trump had been able to quell dissent regarding his COVID inaction using some vague defamation law. In a democratic country people should have the right to voice dissent, especially in times of great difficulty. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/twitter-removed-tweets-that-criticized-indias-covid-19-response-after-the-countrys-government-asked-it-to-do-so/ar-BB1g0OvG

Fair enough, but the point is, at the end of the day human bias is at work even in the supposedly unimpeachable bastions of journalism such as the NY Times. Such bias can and does affect how certain people or issues are covered for decades, if that same editorial perspective is maintained. It's interesting to go back and read about the media's coverage of the invasion of Iraq, for example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage_of_the_Iraq_War#cite_note-autogenerated1-42 I didn't know that the NY Times wrote an exposé on Pentagon officials meeting with members of the media in a "public relations" campaign leading up to the invasion. So maybe I shouldn't be too hard on the Times after all... Pentagon military analyst group[edit] An investigation by the New York Times discovered that top Pentagon officials met with news analysts where they gave the analysts 'special information' and then tried to convince them to speak favorably about the Iraq war.[42] The discovery was based on 8000 pages of secret information that had been revealed to The New York Times through a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act. The article states that top Pentagon officials would invite news analysts to secret meetings, and urge the analysts to speak positively of the war. Often, the US would give "classified information," trips, and contracts to the news analysts.[42]

Well, the fact is, even with the highest rated news outlets on the schema you posted earlier (CNBC, NBC, CBS, Reuters, etc) there is still an editorial process that is taking place. A group of editors is deciding what is newsworthy and what isn't, what to cover in depth, what to gloss over, what stories to omit, and how to frame certain reporting. There are built in, institutional biases at play also; biases that conveniently overlook stories that might challenge the status quo. It's self serving human nature at the end of the day - nothing unusual - but it does underscore the need for independent journalism to offer an untethered, outsider perspective. There's an excellent annual publication released every year called Censored. It looks at extremely important stories that saw little to no coverage in the mainstream media. We can debate why these stories were neglected, but we can't debate that this neglect happens on a regular basis. I posted some of the news stories from Censored 2020 below. https://www.amazon.com/Censored-2020-Andy-Lee-Roth/dp/1609809602/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=censored+news+stories+2020&qid=1619283251&sr=8-2