Plagues
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Bizarro Earth

Black fungus disease detected in South America

black fungus
© PTIA doctor checking a patient for black fungus at a hospital in Navi Mumbai on Saturday
Both South American countries have reported one case each of the deadly fungal infection, which has the scientific name mucormycosis. The very rare infection is caused by exposure to mucor mould and normally affects people with severely compromised immune systems, such as diabetics and HIV/Aids sufferers. However, India has seen an explosion of cases in patients recovering from Covid-19.

Mucormycosis affects the sinuses, the brain and lungs and has a 50 percent mortality rate - if it is not treated early.

Uruguayan scientists last week discovered a case of "black fungus" in a 50-year-old man recovering from Covid.

Comment: See also:


Attention

World-renowned physician blows lid off COVID vaccines

Dr. Peter McCullough
© Health Impact News
Dr. Peter McCullough discusses the dangers of the novel COVID vaccine and it's roll out. This is a product that had minimal testing but is being pushed on the masses. Must we all get the shot for things to "go back to normal"? Are you going to get the shot?

Dr. Peter McCullough has been the world's most prominent and vocal advocate for early outpatient treatment of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) Infection in order to prevent hospitalization and death. On May 19, 2021, he was interviewed regarding his efforts as a treating physician and researcher. From his unique vantage point, he has observed and documented a PROFOUNDLY DISTURBING POLICY RESPONSE to the pandemic -- a policy response that may prove to be the greatest malpractice and malfeasance in the history of medicine and public health.


Biohazard

Highly pathogenic bird flu outbreak already reported in 46 countries, has spread to humans with 862 cases

duck bird flu
© Carsten Koall/Getty ImagesA pathologist swabs a wild duck for H5N8 in Rostock, Germany in 2014.
While the world was distracted with the rampant spread of a novel coronavirus, 2020 also witnessed an explosion in another deadly pathogen that could pose a threat to global public health.

H5N8, a subtype of highly pathogenic avian influenza virus (HPAIV), was identified decades ago, but during 2020 a series of emerging and ongoing H5N8 outbreaks in avian populations across dozens of countries have led to the death or slaughter of millions of birds worldwide.

"The affected geographic regions have been expanding continuously, and at least 46 countries have reported highly pathogenic H5N8 AIV outbreaks," virus researchers Weifeng Shi and George F. Gao write in a new perspective article in Science, warning of the dangers of H5N8 if we don't closely monitor and contain this worrisome trend.

Comment: This poses not just a threat to human health directly but also the massive culls of poultry in order to curb any spread could put the food supply at risk: Bird flu hits largest poultry farm in Japan, record 1.6 million chickens to be culled

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Attention

The Big Lie

The Big Lie
© Eric Peters Autos
It's not the Big Lie that succeeds.

It is the small kernel of truth that makes the lie succeed.

Consider the 'Rona. A small kernel of truth - some people were getting sick - used to propagate the lie that everyone was at risk of getting dead. Unless, of course, they accepted a one-size-fits-all regime of "lockdowns" and "practiced" patently silly (and incredibly dehumanizing) sickness kabuki, including the wearing of something over their faces - it didn't matter whether it served any medical purpose - so long as people turned themselves into NPC people by effacing their faces.

It succeeded.

Pandemics History
© Eric Peters Autos
America became a kind of sickness gulag. Millions of people have been turned into possibly permanently damaged weaponized hypochondriacs, obsessed with sickness and death - because of a concerted, deliberate campaign of mass hysteria intended to create the impression of mass death impending. All of it premised on the nugget of truth that some people were dying . . . almost all of them people already dying from other things, such as old age and cardiac/respiratory problems, possibly pushed over the edge by the 'Rona.

The truth is that very few people have died of the 'Rona, as opposed to with the 'Rona. It is an important distinction. If someone is killed in a car crash and they are found - at autopsy - to have clogged arteries, it does not mean they died because their arteries were clogged. To assign the death to "cardiovascular disease" rather than the car crash is inaccurate and misleading. To do it to inflate heart death numbers is deliberately misleading.

The big truth - actively suppressed - is that very few people are at significant risk of dying from the 'Rona. It is why almost all of us have not died over the past year, including the millions who refused to practice kabuki.

Health

Black fungus cases surge in India, mostly in patients who recovered from coronavirus

black fungus
© PTIDoctors performing a Diagnostic Nasal Endoscopy to detect black fungus in a patient at a hospital in Jabalpur on Saturday
A study on black fungus involving 210 patients found that antibiotics were used to treat 100 per cent of these Covid-19 patients, who were later diagnosed with mucormycosis. Antiobiotics - Azithromycin, Doxycycline and Carbapenems - being prescribed for Covid patients in India, are known to increase the risk of fungal infections.

Authored by Dr VP Pandey, head of medicine at the state-run Maharaja Yeshwantrao Hospital in MP's Indore, the study also reveals that steroids were used in the treatment of only 14 per cent of the respondents.

Comment: One wonders how smokers of tobacco rate in the incidence of black fungus cases? Because a recent study from India found that smokers and people in blood group O are less vulnerable to Covid-19.

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Attention

Covid skeptics champion science

COVID Skeptics
© Corbett Report
So you know how anyone who points out any problems with the rush to inject everyone on the planet with an experimental form of gene therapy is portrayed as a stupid, scientifically illiterate, COVID denying, grandma killing anti-vaxxer by the dinosaur media?

And you know how any of your attempts to articulate these problems to your (former) friends will get you labeled as an anti-science loony and castigated from society?

Well, imagine if a team of researchers from a prestigious scientific institution infiltrated the COVID skeptic community to expose their scientific ignorance . . . and instead ended up discovering that the skeptics by and large care more about science โ€” and are more knowledgeable about the scientific process โ€” than their critics?

Guess what? You can stop imagining, because that's exactly what just happened.

In this case, the researchers are from MIT, and their paper, "Viral Visualizations: How Coronavirus Skeptics Use Orthodox Data Practices to Promote Unorthodox Science Online," was published with little fanfare this past January.

It's not hard to see why this paper was overlooked. If one merely skims through the paper's abstract, it seems relatively innocuous. The researchers aim, we are informed, is to better understand how COVID skeptics use data visualizations to spread "[c]ontroversial understandings of the coronavirus pandemic" on social media. To do this, they used "a quantitative analysis of how visualizations spread on Twitter and an ethnographic approach to analyzing conversations about COVID data on Facebook."

So far, so uninteresting. It's the researchers conclusions about these visualizations where the real fireworks go off.

Nuke

New insight into radioactive particles at Australian nuke test site

Nuke Test
© Cosmos MagazineA nuclear test in Nevada, US. Australia hosted a number of nuclear tests, particularly from the British at Maralinga.
In the 1950s and 60s, hundreds of nuclear tests were carried out at Maralinga in western South Australia, releasing radioactive plutonium and uranium particles that can still be detected in the area today.

A study from Monash University in Melbourne has now examined plutonium particles from the blasts to find they're more complicated than initially thought. This has implications for how they behave in the environment, although these implications are still unclear.

"The British detonated nine nuclear bombs and conducted hundreds of nuclear tests in outback South Australia between 1953 and 1963," says Megan Cook, a PhD student at Monash and lead author on a paper describing the research, published in Scientific Reports.

"The resulting radioactive contamination and cover-up continues to haunt us."

But the effects of radioactive particles in the environment are still poorly understood. Study of these particles is "one of those things we don't have an international best practice for," Cook says.

Attention

Second Stage Terror Wars

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false."

William Casey, CIA Director, Feb. 1981
Psychopaths!
© Off-Guardian
It is well known that the endless US war on terror was overtly launched following the mass murders of September 11, 2001 and the linked anthrax attacks.

The invasion of Afghanistan and the Patriot Act were immediately justified by those insider murders, and subsequently the wars against Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc. So too the terrorizing of the American people with constant fear-mongering about imminent Islamic terrorist attacks from abroad that never came.

It is less well known that the executive director of the U.S. cover story - the fictional 9/11 Commission Report - was Philip Zelikow, who controlled and shaped the report from start to finish.

It is even less well known that Zelikow, a professor at the University of Virginia, was closely associated with Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush, Dickey Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Brent Scowcroft, et al. and had served in various key intelligence positions in both the George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations. In 2011 President Obama named him to his President's Intelligence Advisory Board as befits bi-partisan elite rule and coverup compensation across political parties.

Perhaps it's unknown or just forgotten that The Family Steering Committee for the 9/11 Commission repeatedly called for Zelikow's removal, claiming that his appointment made a farce of the claim that the Commission was independent.

Zelikow said that for the Commission to consider alternative theories to the government's claims about Osama bin Laden was akin to whacking moles. This is the man, who at the request of his colleague Condoleezza Rice, became the primary author of (NSS 2002) The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, that declared that the U.S. would no longer abide by international law but was adopting a policy of preemptive war, as declared by George W. Bush at West Point in June 2002. This was used as justification for the attack on Iraq in 2003 and was a rejection of the charter of the United Nations.

Attention

UK government scientific advisors admit they used 'totalitarian' fear tactics to control people during pandemic

Fear Tactics
© SEAN GLADWELL / Getty Images
Scientists in the UK working as advisors for the government have expressed regret for using what they now admit to be "unethical" and "totalitarian" methods of instilling fear in the population in order to control behaviour during the pandemic, according to a report.

The London Telegraph reports the comments made by Members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour (SPI-B), a sub-committee of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) the government's chief scientific advisory group.

The report quotes a briefing from March 2020, as the first lockdown was decreed, that stated the government should drastically increase "the perceived level of personal threat" that the virus poses because "a substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened".

One scientist with the SPI-B admits that "In March [2020] the Government was very worried about compliance and they thought people wouldn't want to be locked down. There were discussions about fear being needed to encourage compliance, and decisions were made about how to ramp up the fear."

The unnamed scientist adds that "The way we have used fear is dystopian."

The scientist further confessed that "The use of fear has definitely been ethically questionable. It's been like a weird experiment. Ultimately, it backfired because people became too scared."

Another separate scientist on the subcommittee professed "You could call psychology 'mind control'. That's what we do... clearly we try and go about it in a positive way, but it has been used nefariously in the past."

Another scientist warned that "We have to be very careful about the authoritarianism that is creeping in," adding "people use the pandemic to grab power and drive through things that wouldn't happen otherwise."

According to the report, another researcher with the group acknowledged that "Without a vaccine, psychology is your main weapon," adding that "Psychology has had a really good epidemic, actually."

Arrow Up

Elephants are dying in droves in Botswana and scientists don't know why

Herd of Elephants
© MURALI NARAYANAN/500PX PRIME/GETTY IMAGESAfrican elephants walk through the Moremi Game Reserve in northern Botswana, where a second wave of mysterious deaths among the pachyderms has scientists scrambling.
Die-offs of African elephants have once again erupted in Botswana. In just the first three months of 2021, 39 have succumbed.

The mysterious deaths occurred in the Moremi Game Reserve, in the northern part of the country, nearly 100 kilometers from a region of the Okavango Delta, where about 350 African elephants died during May and June in 2020. Puzzled scientists have been calling for thorough investigations as the government sends mixed messages on the cause of death.

Anthrax and bacterial infections had been ruled out in the new deaths and "further laboratory analysis is ongoing," Botswana's Department of Wildlife and National Parks reported in a March 24 news release.

However, the 39 recent deaths were linked, based on preliminary results, to the same cyanobacteria toxins blamed for last year's mass die-off, said Philda Kereng, Botswana's Minister of Environment, Natural Resources Conservation and Tourism, in a March 30 state television address.

Remote sensing of areas of last year's mass die-off supports the cyanobacteria theory. From March through July 2020, cyanobacteria abundance increased continuously as water sources were shrinking, researchers report online May 28 in the Innovation. With climate change, bodies of water get warmer and toxic cyanobacteria thrive.

Other evidence points to a pathogen as well. "The 2021 elephant mortalities are again specific to elephants, as was the case in 2020," says Shahan Azeem, a veterinary scientist at the University of Veterinary and Animal Sciences in Lahore, Pakistan.