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Last week, the actor James Woods tweeted a video about the history of the Democratic Party:
Dr Carol Swain, Professor of Political Science and Law at Vanderbilt University, guides us through the Democrats’ murky past in this short video, which is just under six minutes long:
Discover who prevented blacks from improving their lives, whether after Reconstruction (post-Civil War), in the early 20th century (KKK) or in the 1960s, when Lyndon Baines Johnson created the welfare state to encourage blacks to vote for Democrats ‘for the next 200 years’.
Democrats also did not want to give black Americans the right to vote. Republicans had to encourage them. Those voting rights came in 1965.
Yes, now is the time for all of us to become more interested in politics.
This is an election year. Be aware of history. Be better informed.
An American named Chaziel Sunz used to belong to Black Lives Matter some years ago.
In 2017, he made a 15-minute video about the movement having been ‘infiltrated’ and controlled by ‘Soros and Clinton’. He warned blacks not to play into the desire of them and the Democrat Party who want a civil war.
He said that left-wing movements, such as BLM and Antifa, are ‘bogus’ and are preying upon people’s emotions. Those in charge of them want a fully divided right and left. He also said this is another reason why gun control is such a big deal with the Democrats. They want everyone unarmed for a reason.
Sunz asked that people put any race issues they have to a side and approach this issue with a clear head: don’t fall into the trap of a civil war.
He also said that the Las Vegas attack, which had taken place on October 1 that year, was a far-Left act, purposely against those attending the country music festival.
I only saw this video a few days ago. Apparently, it’s been taken down several times since 2017:
If this is removed, Gateway Pundit have another copy of it with this key quote:
Chaziel Sunz: They got us working for them. How they get us is they playing us emotionally… They getting anybody who basically doesn’t like Donald Trump to fight for war that is being started on American turf very, very soon. And they want us to be a part of their side. What I’m trying to get the black population to understand, and this is critical, is the movement has been compromised… BLM is not actually a black organization and never was… If you have any kind of brain you know BLM is endorsed by the Soros and Clinton family.
Chaziel Sunz made another video earlier that year, just after the Manchester bombing in England in May. Even though it’s three years old, now is an apposite time to watch it. He accuses the media of ginning up falsely emotional reactions to news events. Again, he asks us not to get too emotional about these things. If we want to pray, fine, but he said that a lot of people are making money out of false sympathy when these attacks occur:
He’s not a Trump fan, in case anyone is wondering.
He does want unity in a time when manipulation is rife.
I hope he has been talking with community groups about his experiences and knowledge from his time as a left-wing activist.
As was true with coronavirus, Trump’s impeachment, Brexit and everything else, the media are driving their own narrative with the protests and riots concerning the death of George Floyd.
Let’s remember that the US Constitution has not changed. Here’s President Trump’s newish press secretary Kayleigh McEnany:
Oddly, the New York Times agrees:
Yet, in general, the media are standing up for, if not promoting, violence on streets across the United States:
Politely put.
In addition to the media, we have public officials, such as the Chair of New York City Council health committee. Here are a few of his tweets, which include coronavirus commentary:
Earlier in the year, he tweeted about Chinese New Year, in spite of the coronavirus threat, which he downplayed at the time:
The governor of North Carolina joined a local protest but had the gall to tell President Trump that, for social distancing purposes, he would have to downsize the already-booked Republican National Convention this summer:
Then there are those defending America — National Guardsmen — who feel compelled to take a knee for the protesters, so they can be left alone. Or is it that they would rather not be there?
And that sort of thing leads to this (too sad to post). It took place in London, encouraged by a mother who should know better.
I am glad someone posted about that video. He has a long thread about this and has added two more videos. Excerpts follow:
He drops a name in his thread, then continues:
He should have briefed them before they went out that day — and obeyed the rules himself.
Continuing with the thread:
Kneel before no one, especially when they might be lawbreakers:
Well said.
Perhaps you have seen scenes like this on the news during the past several days:
In fact, yes, someone did hurt a dog — a rescue puppy in Memphis. Unthinkable:
Some equally unbelievable things happened with regard to law enforcement and justice:
Active and retired policemen have been shot and, in some cases, killed in these riots.
I hope this officer recovers:
At least they made an arrest:
Sadly, this retired police captain from St Louis died. He was working in his friend’s pawn shop at the time:
Then there were the Catholic and Episcopal clergy upset with President Trump. I won’t go into the Episcopal side of things in this post, but the Catholic archbishop was outraged that the First Couple went to visit the Shrine of Pope John XXIII.
Such visits are normally booked well in advance for security reasons. It’s unlikely the Trumps just turned up.
But, there’s a little more to the archbishop’s story — hypocrisy:
As for the visit to St John’s Episcopal Church in Lafayette Square, it turns out that the Pentagon advisor who resigned is a Democrat donor:
Tucker Carlson has called out the rest of the media for spinning these ‘protests’ like crazy when many of them turn into riots and looting:
Indeed.
Fortunately, the public are getting clued up:
Indeed, messaging will be key this year.
Meanwhile, let’s stop trusting our media outlets.
I’ll have more on the protests tomorrow.
Overnight, at the end of May, social distancing disappeared in big cities in the United States once the riots over George Floyd started.
Social distancing then disappeared in Paris and London the following week, as those cities had sympathy protests for the same cause.
It is a strange development:
This is how twisted the logic gets. Mark D Levine chairs the New York City Council health committee:
All of a sudden, it was acceptable for tens of thousands of protesters to gather together.
Yet, at the same time, a large family cannot share dinner together in a restaurant:
And it is against the law for more than ten people to attend a funeral:
These are the conversations taking place with regard to funerals versus protests. There is an unbelievable lack of empathy with this man, who is mourning the loss of his own mother:
Uh oh.
Reread the last sentence of that final tweet.
Online journalists, such as Mark Levin, also think that the coronavirus lockdown was a ruse, ginned up by the media:
Here is The Federalist‘s Sean Davis:
This is from an eye doctor, retinal specialist Dr Brian C Joondeph:
Dr Joondeph writes (emphases mine):
… these riots have unintentionally shown us that Trump rallies are safe and that the Chinese virus is no longer a serious threat. Mail in ballots are dead too since if people can leave their homes to loot and riot, they can leave their homes to vote.
Notice how quickly concern about cities and states opening too quickly has been forgotten as thousands take to the streets, in contradiction to everything the smart set has been advocating. This is lost, or willfully ignored by the media, now focused back on Trump’s latest tweet.
Completely agree.
Social distancing is done and dusted:
Time now, whether in the US, England or France, to open everything up — pronto.
They might be small in number right now, but a growing number of doctors involved in the coronavirus outbreak are wondering about the wisdom of nationwide lockdowns.
In some countries, lockdown did not make much difference to the number of deaths.
On May 14, France’s Prof Didier Raoult posted a study from Spain which showed that those who kept working outside the home were less at risk of falling victim to COVID-19. Replies follow:
Why we were told the world over to stay indoors, I do not understand. It runs counter to everything we’ve been taught over 120 years with regard to fighting epidemics:
This chart comes from another source and has more testimony about New York’s lockdown:
A doctor from Paris can corroborate that households staying indoors did get COVID-19 more often than those who did not. People were already infected before lockdown and did not show symptoms until later on.
On Tuesday, May 26, RMC — France’s talk radio station — interviewed Dr Robert Sebbag, a specialist in infectious diseases, who works at the famous Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris. The interview is a little over 19 minutes long.
Sebbag worked on the COVID-19 ward and said that if one family member was admitted to hospital with coronavirus, others from the same households were also infected days later.
He said that this led him and his colleagues to believe that general lockdowns are a bad idea. He explained that politicians were afraid of the number of deaths from this novel (new) coronavirus and decided to impose blanket lockdowns:
He said that the hospital, in the early days of the outbreak, was very gloomy indeed, with a seemingly endless number of COVID-19 patients being admitted. He, his colleagues and hospital staff were worried that they would be completely overwhelmed:
He thinks that an assessment needs to be done of how COVID-19 was handled in the first half of this year. While he personally thinks masks are a good idea, he objects to the restriction on nursing and care home visits, which he says are essential for patient well being, especially among the elderly:
Presumably, care home administrators can work out a system for visiting, perhaps requiring that healthy family members and friends make an appointment before visiting.
The greater question there surrounds infected patients being discharged from hospitals into care homes. This happened in the US, the UK, France and Germany. The very real pressure on the hospitals meant that they had to discharge elderly patients before they were fully recovered to make room for new COVID-19 patients. As such, care homes were overwhelmed with infection in some cases.
People rightly wonder if we will get a second wave. Some medical experts say no. Some say yes. Others say that we have to find a way of treating patients effectively so that coronavirus is no longer a fatal disease. The honest answer at this point is that we do not know whether there will be a second wave of infections.
As lockdowns are fully lifted in the coming weeks, we will all have to take greater responsibility for our own behaviour in a COVID-19 world. I dislike referring readers to the BBC, but they did have a good article on Sunday, May 24: Health Correspondent Nick Triggle’s ‘Coronavirus: How scared should we be?’ It is well worth reading.
For a start, we do not live in a risk-free world:
Prof Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at Edinburgh University, says the question we should be asking is whether we are “safe enough”.
“There will never be no risk. In a world where Covid-19 remains present in the community it’s about how we reduce that risk, just as we do with other kinds of daily dangers, like driving and cycling.”
We might become more dependent on our ‘least worst’ options in managing that risk:
Statistician Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter, an expert in risk from Cambridge University and government adviser, says it has, in effect, become a game of “risk management” – and because of that we need to get a handle on the magnitude of risk we face.
There are two factors that influence the risk we face from coronavirus – our risk of becoming infected and, once infected, our risk of dying or becoming seriously ill.
We should also keep in mind that, for most people, coronavirus is relatively mild:
… only one in 20 people who shows symptoms is believed to need hospital treatment …
Think of it this way:
If your risk of dying was very low in the first place, it still remains very low.
As for children, the risk of dying from other things – cancer and accidents are the biggest cause of fatalities – is greater than their chance of dying if they are infected with coronavirus.
During the pandemic so far three under 15s have died. That compares to around 50 killed in road accidents every year.
In the months to come, there will likely be tests and tools, such as this one from University College London, that can help us assess our individual risk of catching this unpredictable and sometimes fatal disease.
The most important aspect, even more than the dreaded mask, is hand hygiene. Wash hands regularly and thoroughly with soap or soap gel, then dry them well. Damp or wet hands create a good atmosphere for viruses and bacteria.
Also keep hands away from the face, the best receptor for infections.
On Monday, May 25, 2020, the WHO dropped its hydroxychloroquine trials as a possible treatment for coronavirus.
The drug is one of a selection of anti-malarials which have been used successfully, under the right protocols.
In Europe, Prof Didier Raoult is the champion of this type of treatment. He has successfully used a protocol involving Plaquenil and azithromycin on his patients in Marseille. Raoult is the director of the regional institute for research on infections, the IHU Méditerranée Infection.
The medical establishment worldwide is attempting to discredit the renegade physician. The latest is the Lancet, Britain’s renowned medical journal. The results of their studies with the drug prompted the WHO to halt their trials.
The BBC reports:
The Lancet study involved 96,000 coronavirus patients, nearly 15,000 of whom were given hydroxychloroquine – or a related form chloroquine – either alone or with an antibiotic.
The study found that the patients were more likely to die in hospital and develop heart rhythm complications than other Covid patients in a comparison group.
The death rates of the treated groups were: hydroxychloroquine 18%; chloroquine 16.4%; control group 9%. Those treated with hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine in combination with antibiotics had an even higher death rate.
The researchers warned that hydroxychloroquine should not be used outside of clinical trials.
President Trump is currently taking hydroxychloroquine as a preventive measure. He receives it via prescription.
The WHO advises people not to self-medicate with these drugs.
Indeed, Prof Raoult uses them only on people who test positive for COVID-19. He also runs a battery of tests on potential patients before administering the tablets. Anti-malarials can worsen pre-existing heart conditions.
His and his team’s paper was published in May:
He was delighted to see that another study using the same two drugs was equally successful. Beneath it are the results of the less successful Lancet study, which used hydroxychloroquine and macrolide, instead of azithromycin:
He is aware that the medical establishment, including France’s two most recent health ministers, Agnès Buzyn and Olivier Véran, want him out of the picture:
That’s unfortunate, because I listen to RMC during the week and the callers from Marseille and the rest of the region of Provence-Alpes Maritimes-Côte d’Azur (PACA) consider him a hero.
However, RMC’s morning show hosts dismiss Raoult and hydroxychloroquine. Now I know why. One of the station’s main shareholders also is a major shareholder in Gilead, which is working on Remdesivir, a drug used to treat Ebola. So far, Remdesivir trials on COVID-19 have not been that successful but the marketing is good, and it would be a money maker:
Last Tuesday on RMC, the WHO/Lancet news was a topic for discussion on the mid-morning show. They took a poll of Raoult’s popularity. Three-quarters of their listeners voting during the show love the man. The poll was open for another day:
One of the show’s guests said that Didier Raoult was achieving success, not talking about hypotheticals. He found it strange that few of the other studies manage to reproduce his success:
A nurse from Marseille who used to work the the professor, who is a physician, said that the others are not following his protocol to the letter. She said that, if they were, they would get the same results.
Raoult points out in the next tweet that the other studies are not using the drugs on people who actually have the disease. Therefore, results will differ:
Back to RMC. One of the panellists compared Raoult to Trump: a renegade one loves or loathes. She said that, like Trump, Raoult is trending in popularity:
Needless to say, the conversation about Raoult got heated. The first panellist said he was annoyed that his GP wouldn’t prescribe him hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. The show’s hosts, on either side of him, thought the GP was right not to do so:
A third panellist said that Raoult is resisting all the discrediting of his work — ‘He’s extremely courageous’:
Criticised though Raoult might be, America’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) will be doing a study on hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin:
Although Raoult gives Dr Anthony Fauci the credit, I think it actually belongs to President Trump.
——————————————————————————
MAJOR UPDATE — JUNE 4: The Guardian has investigated the Lancet paper and reports that it had to be withdrawn. The WHO is now resuming its hydroxychoroquine trials.
This never should have happened to a respected medical journal.
Emphases mine below:
The Lancet paper that halted global trials of hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19 because of fears of increased deaths has been retracted after a Guardian investigation found inconsistencies in the data.
The lead author, Prof Mandeep Mehra, from the Brigham and Women’s hospital in Boston, Massachusetts decided to ask the Lancet for the retraction because he could no longer vouch for the data’s accuracy.
The journal’s editor, Richard Horton, said he was appalled by developments. “This is a shocking example of research misconduct in the middle of a global health emergency,” he told the Guardian.
A Guardian investigation had revealed errors in the data that was provided for the research by US company Surgisphere. These were later explained by the company as some patients being wrongly allocated to Australia instead of Asia. But more anomalies were then picked up. A further Guardian investigation found that there were serious questions to be asked about the company itself.
An independent audit company was asked to examine a database provided by Surgisphere to ensure it had the data from more than 96,000 Covid-19 patients in 671 hospitals worldwide, that it was obtained properly and was accurate.
Surgisphere’s CEO, Sapan Desai, had said he would cooperate with the independent audit, but it is understood he refused to give the investigators access to all the data they asked for.
In a statement on Thursday, Mehra said: “Our independent peer reviewers informed us that Surgisphere would not transfer the full dataset, client contracts, and the full ISO audit report to their servers for analysis as such transfer would violate client agreements and confidentiality requirements. As such, our reviewers were not able to conduct an independent and private peer review and therefore notified us of their withdrawal from the peer-review process”…
The World Health Organization and several countries suspended randomised controlled trials that were set up to find an answer. Those trials have now been restarted. Many scientists were angry that they had been stopped on the basis of a trial that was observational and not a “gold standard” RCT.
Mehra had commissioned an independent audit of the data after scientists questioned it …
The Guardian wrote about Surgisphere on June 3. This is shocking.
Excerpts follow, emphases mine:
The World Health Organization and a number of national governments have changed their Covid-19 policies and treatments on the basis of flawed data from a little-known US healthcare analytics company, also calling into question the integrity of key studies published in some of the world’s most prestigious medical journals.
A Guardian investigation can reveal the US-based company Surgisphere, whose handful of employees appear to include a science fiction writer and an adult-content model, has provided data for multiple studies on Covid-19 co-authored by its chief executive, but has so far failed to adequately explain its data or methodology …
The Guardian’s investigation has found:
-
- A search of publicly available material suggests several of Surgisphere’s employees have little or no data or scientific background. An employee listed as a science editor appears to be a science fiction author and fantasy artist. Another employee listed as a marketing executive is an adult model and events hostess.
- The company’s LinkedIn page has fewer than 100 followers and last week listed just six employees. This was changed to three employees as of Wednesday.
- While Surgisphere claims to run one of the largest and fastest hospital databases in the world, it has almost no online presence. Its Twitter handle has fewer than 170 followers, with no posts between October 2017 and March 2020.
- Until Monday, the “get in touch” link on Surgisphere’s homepage redirected to a WordPress template for a cryptocurrency website, raising questions about how hospitals could easily contact the company to join its database.
- Desai has been named in three medical malpractice suits, unrelated to the Surgisphere database. In an interview with the Scientist, Desai previously described the allegations as “unfounded” …
You could not make this up.
Still, it’s a happy ending. Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine trials will resume, including at the WHO.
Many thanks to my reader formerdem, who alerted me to this welcome change of events in the comment section below.
Like France and other European countries, the UK is now advocating wearing face masks during the coronavirus pandemic, especially on public transport.
This Daily Mail article explores what is reopening in England and adds (emphases mine):
Firms will be told they must provide staff with face masks to be worn at work, on public transport and when shopping. But wearing face coverings will not be compulsory.
Thank goodness for that.
Metro had more:
The Government is now advising ‘that people should aim to wear a face-covering in enclosed spaces where social distancing is not always possible and they come into contact with others they do not normally meet, for example on public transport or in some shops.’ The advice continues: ‘Homemade cloth face-coverings can help reduce the risk of transmission in some circumstances. Face-coverings are not intended to help the wearer, but to protect against inadvertent transmission of the disease to others if you have it asymptomatically.’
… Note that a ‘face-covering’ is not the same as a surgical mask or respirators used as part of PPE, and the advice stands that such equipment should be reserved for those who need it. Face-coverings should not be used for anyone under the age of two, or on those who may struggle to manage them correctly. People are urged to always wash their hands before putting them on and taking them off.
What a palaver!
This is what schools in Asia look like today, reminiscent of a 1970s film with John Travolta:
One thought did cross my mind about the barriers, so I was happy to see someone on Twitter mention it:
However, masks, including homemade face coverings, are not a good idea. The same goes for making them mandatory.
This woman yells that she cannot breathe with it. The mask is around her neck as she and her small child are apprehended by police somewhere in the United States:
The same Twitter user posted a two-part video, allegedly from a nurse, who explains in layman’s terms why masks do more harm than good in healthy people. In short, most hospital masks — which is why there has been a shortage of the correct ones during the pandemic — are there to keep bacteria from travelling. A bacterium is much larger than a virus droplet, therefore, wearing ordinary hospital masks for COVID-19 are useless, especially if you are healthy:
Ann Barnhardt’s website has more in ‘**UPDATED WITH TESTIMONY OF A FIREMAN** FACE MASKS ARE GENUINELY, SCIENTIFICALLY USELESS: Multiple RNs check in’. Don’t miss the photo of the man wearing an adhesive sanitary towel!
Excerpts follow.
A nurse wrote to Ann Barnhardt to say (emphases in the original, those in purple mine):
Hello Ann,
I listened to your Podcast Episode #110. Wonderful as always, and strengthens my resolve and fight. Thank you. One thing I don’t think people know about masking is that when we don a mask if we have any virus we breathe it back inside over and over again increasing viral load and weakening our own immunity, so we get sicker, which seems to be the point.
I’m an RN, graduated 2002 from (major, redacted) school of nursing. When i started my career as an ER nurse, one requirement was TB mask fitting. They fit a duck bill mask to your face and put a plastic cylinder with a vent opening over your head and sprayed a concentrated sucrose mist. If you could taste just a bit of sweetness through mask, you were at risk for contracting TB. So again, what the hell are cloth or surgical masks gonna do?… umm make ourselves sick – that’s it. Any honest doctor/nurse/scientist/virologist knows this mask thing is bullshit.
God bless Ann keep it up. Thank you.
Another nurse wrote in to corroborate the first nurse’s comment. The second nurse says, in part:
Bottom line – if it isn’t fit tested then there’s no guarantee that the “viral particles” are being filtered out. So this mask wearing that we are all “required” to do is…..wait for it….BEE ESS.
I laugh when I see the general public wearing N95s they bought at Home Depot. Unless you fit test it (an N95), you have no idea if it’s actually “working”.🙄
It’s all a mind game.
The fireman said, in part:
Having conducted countless N95 quantitative tests for medics on base when I was still in the military, I can echo that not being fit tested for an N95 pretty much renders it useless.
The proper fit varies from person to person not only by size of the mask, but by brand. So you can’t just say you need a medium, but a medium in brand X. So optimally, your employer would have to buy the right size and right brand for each employee that they attained an acceptable fit factor in. Good luck with that. N95’s are probably the hardest masks to get a proper fit on.
This is all smoke and mirrors.
On masks, Barnhardt concludes:
And remember, folks, this ONLY applies to N95-level masks. Putting a few ridiculous layers of gauze, or even more ridiculously, FASHION FABRIC (I’ve even seen DENIM – that’s just going to give you elevated Carbon Dioxide levels – absolutely STUPID. Carbon Dioxide inhalation is a common method of stunning hogs at slaughter) serves ABSOLUTELY NO PURPOSE WHATSOEVER EXCEPT to signal TOTAL SUBMISSION TO THE LIE and to THE TOTALITARIAN REGIME.
It isn’t a “sanitary barrier.” It doesn’t block viruses, and certainly not this common cold virus. COLD VIRUSES CANNOT BE CONTAINED ANY MORE THAN MANKIND CAN AFFECT THE GLOBAL WEATHER. Such a contention is PURE, HUBRISTIC, LYING BULLSHIT.
Regarding the pandemic regulations in general, she rightly thinks these can damage susceptible children (red used in the original):
Finally, let me just put out there the call for one and all to sit in stillness and think about the intense psycho-spiritual damage that is being done to CHILDREN with each passing day that this facemask psy-op goes on. How many children are now deeply terrified of OTHER HUMAN BEINGS in se, because of this, with the mask being a visible, frightening vector of this terror?
How many children are right now, as we speak, telling themselves internally, in simple, childish terms that they themselves could not yet articulate, but feel with tremendous force, that OTHER PEOPLE ARE SOMETHING BAD, AND THAT TO LOVE ANOTHER HUMAN BEING IS SOMETHING BAD THAT THEY MUST NEVER DO? Because other human beings are dangerous and will hurt you if you get anywhere near them.
Agreed. The unknown psychological damage right now could end up being terribly manifest in the months ahead.
Let’s now go to Technocracy, which has an article with quotes from Dr Russell Blaylock, a physician: ‘Blaylock: Face Masks Pose Serious Risks To The Healthy’. It is scientific, with medical terms and health conditions described the way they would be in medical school.
Blaylock notes America’s Center for Disease Control’s about-face with regard to masks (emphases mine):
As for the scientific support for the use of face mask, a recent careful examination of the literature, in which 17 of the best studies were analyzed, concluded that, “ None of the studies established a conclusive relationship between mask/respirator use and protection against influenza infection.”1 Keep in mind, no studies have been done to demonstrate that either a cloth mask or the N95 mask has any effect on transmission of the COVID-19 virus. Any recommendations, therefore, have to be based on studies of influenza virus transmission. And, as you have seen, there is no conclusive evidence of their efficiency in controlling flu virus transmission.
It is also instructive to know that until recently, the CDC did not recommend wearing a face mask or covering of any kind, unless a person was known to be infected, that is, until recently. Non-infected people need not wear a mask. When a person has TB we have them wear a mask, not the entire community of non-infected. The recommendations by the CDC and the WHO are not based on any studies of this virus and have never been used to contain any other virus pandemic or epidemic in history.
He summarises the possible dangers of mask wearing to healthy people:
Several studies have indeed found significant problems with wearing such a mask. This can vary from headaches, to increased airway resistance, carbon dioxide accumulation, to hypoxia, all the way to serious life-threatening complications.
He discusses these dangers in terms of the type of mask worn:
There is a difference between the N95 respirator mask and the surgical mask (cloth or paper mask) in terms of side effects. The N95 mask, which filters out 95% of particles with a median diameter >0.3 µm2 , because it impairs respiratory exchange (breathing) to a greater degree than a soft mask, and is more often associated with headaches. In one such study, researchers surveyed 212 healthcare workers (47 males and 165 females) asking about presence of headaches with N95 mask use, duration of the headaches, type of headaches and if the person had preexisting headaches.2
They found that about a third of the workers developed headaches with use of the mask, most had preexisting headaches that were worsened by the mask wearing, and 60% required pain medications for relief. As to the cause of the headaches, while straps and pressure from the mask could be causative, the bulk of the evidence points toward hypoxia and/or hypercapnia as the cause. That is, a reduction in blood oxygenation (hypoxia) or an elevation in blood C02 (hypercapnia). It is known that the N95 mask, if worn for hours, can reduce blood oxygenation as much as 20%, which can lead to a loss of consciousness, as happened to the hapless fellow driving around alone in his car wearing an N95 mask, causing him to pass out, and to crash his car and sustain injuries. I am sure that we have several cases of elderly individuals or any person with poor lung function passing out, hitting their head. This, of course, can lead to death.
A more recent study involving 159 healthcare workers aged 21 to 35 years of age found that 81% developed headaches from wearing a face mask.3 Some had pre-existing headaches that were precipitated by the masks. All felt like the headaches affected their work performance.
As for the elderly and infirm, masks can pose far greater problems:
Unfortunately, no one is telling the frail elderly and those with lung diseases, such as COPD, emphysema or pulmonary fibrosis, of these dangers when wearing a facial mask of any kind—which can cause a severe worsening of lung function. This also includes lung cancer patients and people having had lung surgery, especially with partial resection or even the removal of a whole lung.
He goes on to explain the dangers of low oxygen levels in the bloodstream — hypoxia — which can debilitate the immune system:
While most agree that the N95 mask can cause significant hypoxia and hypercapnia, another study of surgical masks found significant reductions in blood oxygen as well. In this study, researchers examined the blood oxygen levels in 53 surgeons using an oximeter. They measured blood oxygenation before surgery as well as at the end of surgeries.4 The researchers found that the mask reduced the blood oxygen levels (pa02) significantly. The longer the duration of wearing the mask, the greater the fall in blood oxygen levels.
The importance of these findings is that a drop in oxygen levels (hypoxia) is associated with an impairment in immunity. Studies have shown that hypoxia can inhibit the type of main immune cells used to fight viral infections called the CD4+ T-lymphocyte. This occurs because the hypoxia increases the level of a compound called hypoxia inducible factor-1 (HIF-1), which inhibits T-lymphocytes and stimulates a powerful immune inhibitor cell called the Tregs. This sets the stage for contracting any infection, including COVID-19 and making the consequences of that infection much graver. In essence, your mask may very well put you at an increased risk of infections and if so, having a much worse outcome.5,6,7
People with cancer, heart conditions and strokes must be very careful if they choose to wear masks:
… cancer grows best in a microenvironment that is low in oxygen. Low oxygen also promotes inflammation which can promote the growth, invasion and spread of cancers.8,9 Repeated episodes of hypoxia has been proposed as a significant factor in atherosclerosis and hence increases all cardiovascular (heart attacks) and cerebrovascular (strokes) diseases.10
In addition, when we wear masks, especially for hours at a time, we are breathing in our own bacteria, creating an incubator effect for the sinuses and lungs. For someone unknowingly harbouring COVID-19, he says, their recovery time might be prolonged, because their own immune system is compromised by cytokine storms, which occur when the body goes into overdrive trying to fight off illness:
When a person is infected with a respiratory virus, they will expel some of the virus with each breath. If they are wearing a mask, especially an N95 mask or other tightly fitting mask, they will be constantly rebreathing the viruses, raising the concentration of the virus in the lungs and the nasal passages. We know that people who have the worst reactions to the coronavirus have the highest concentrations of the virus early on. And this leads to the deadly cytokine storm in a selected number.
He reminds readers that COVID-19 is relatively benign for most of the population, therefore:
we need to protect the at-risk population by avoiding close contact, boosting their immunity with compounds that boost cellular immunity and in general, care for them.
One should not attack and insult those who have chosen not to wear a mask, as these studies suggest that is the wise choice to make.
Lisa Williams, a reporter for the Telegraph, described six things no one says about wearing a mask.
She felt cut off from people because they could not see her face, but the mask was also uncomfortable to wear:
The mask tickled my nose, felt hot and damp almost instantly, and I was constantly having to reloop it back around my ears. I found it a challenge to wear one for this short trip, let alone while performing heart surgery.
It also distracted her:
It feels suffocating, and the noise of your breath on fabric becomes distracting. You never realised your breathing was so LOUD.
Furthermore, one size does not fit all:
Although many masks have a degree of stretch, there is a big difference in how our heads are built and the average mask does not account for this.
While she says that homemade fabric masks could be useful, I rather doubt that — unless they are for short periods of time — because fabric is often treated with chemicals that should not be near our mouths or noses, or the fabric is much too thick. As Ann Barnhardt and Dr Blaylock say above, they can give us potentially fatal C02 levels.
In conclusion: beware of — rather than wear — masks unless instructed to do so by a medical professional, or mandated by law.
We have been told that our coronavirus lockdowns will not end until a vaccine has been successfully developed.
Meanwhile, in France, Professor Didier Raoult has been successfully using chloroquine, where suitable, on his COVID-19 patients at the IHU Méditerranée Infection facility, where he is the Director.
Professor Raoult is also a physician. A number of his fellow doctors oppose his use of an anti-malarial drug, which is cheap as chips, to treat this novel (new) coronavirus, said to have no known remedy, much less cure, at this time.
Raoult describes himself as a ‘renegade’ physician. Other doctors in France certainly agree. They doubt his claims. Now they want to suspend him from France’s national medical association, l’Ordre des Médecins (The Order of Physicians).
On Saturday, April 25, Geopolintel (French language, translated below) reported that the ANSM (French National Agency for Medicines and Health Products Safety), INSERM (French National Institute of Health and Medical Research) and the biopharmaceutical drug company Gilead are out to get Raoult.
The article is an open letter to Raoult’s critics:
The Covid-19 crisis shows the destructive ideology of your policies as well as that of the health institutions of our country.
Given the sums of money involved, it takes any and all costs to transfer the professor from Marseille for the generalized vaccination agreement between Macron and Bill Gates to be realized.
Censors, you have lost public opinion and you cannot regain it by threatening Professor Raoult with suspension by the Order of Physicians.
He makes fun of your stories of cash and corruption, unlike you, he treats and does not bear responsibility for death by organized shortage.
What displeases you in him is his indifference to lobbies and sirens of glory and as a professor, researcher and doctor; he cares while you polish your the seats of your trousers on the leather armchairs of the circles of initiates who have done nothing in their lives other than lying and earning dirty money.
There have been major pharmaceutical scandals in France in recent years, yet the establishment is going after Raoult, who has provided patient relief in an inexpensive prescription anti-malarial drug available at pharmacies. The medical establishment has accused the professor of employing ‘illegal medical research protocols’:
Regarding the “illegal clinical research protocols” which are attributed to Didier Raoult, what about the scandals of the Pick (Médiator), Depakin and other drugs approved in the so-called respect for randomized trial protocols?
As for his possible suspension by the Order of Physicians:
The Council of the Order of Physicians threatens Professor Raoult with immediate suspension of activity, because his clinical trials “do not comply with official procedures”, and he risks up to a year in prison and 15,000 euros in fines.
Yet, President Macron visited Raoult in Marseille recently to find out more about the doctor’s success with his COVID-19 patients. About this, the article says:
As a reminder, Professor Raoult presented Emmanuel Macron with the results of his work on 1,061 patients.
Almost 92% of patients cured in ten days,
Nearly 5% of patients cured “late”
Less than 5% of “patients with complications”.
Or 31 patients hospitalized for more than ten days,
10 transferred to intensive care,
and 5 deaths. On 1061: do your accounts and compare to the rest of France…
The abstract and summary table of the data in our article on the treatment of 1061 patients are online!
The abstract and the summary table of our paper on the treatment of 1061 patients are online! https: //t.co/mTWj6aGpTk https: //t.co … pic.twitter.com/PLdygNolxG
– Didier Raoult (@raoult_didier) April 10, 2020
These are the full results of Raoult’s study:
The article concludes:
The first reaction of the simple man that I am, in the delusional French context that I observe from afar, is this: Raoult heals while the profession flounders. It has no response, no treatment, adding the humiliation of the mandarins to the resentment of the rascals. In short, Raoult must be suspended. It is urgent: he risks treating even more people.
Now, it must be said that chloroquine doesn’t work on everyone. Nor does a similar drug, hydroxychloroquine, often combined with azithromycin (which contains zinc), in COVID-19 treatment. The latter is the treatment that President Trump has been championing for weeks.
Both should be used with caution and under medical supervision. They can harm patients with certain types of heart ailments. Never self-medicate!
As is true in France, the American medical establishment is eager to pour cold water on Trump’s claims.
On April 16, 2020, MedRxiv published an abstract of one such study: ‘Outcomes of hydroxychloroquine usage in United States veterans hospitalized with Covid-19’, which ends as follows:
CONCLUSIONS: In this study, we found no evidence that use of hydroxychloroquine, either with or without azithromycin, reduced the risk of mechanical ventilation in patients hospitalized with Covid-19. An association of increased overall mortality was identified in patients treated with hydroxychloroquine alone. These findings highlight the importance of awaiting the results of ongoing prospective, randomized, controlled studies before widespread adoption of these drugs.
Yet, nearly half of America’s 50 states are stockpiling the drug, as Axios reported on April 25 (emphases in the original):
At least 22 states and Washington, D.C., are building up stores of the anti-malarial drug President Trump previously touted as a possible solution for the novel coronavirus, AP reports.
Why it matters: The Food and Drug Administration advised doctors Friday against prescribing hydroxychloroquine or the related drug chloroquine to coronavirus patients as it appears to be causing some serious and potentially life-threatening side effects.
-
- ‘The warning comes as doctors at a New York hospital published a report that heart rhythm abnormalities developed in most of 84 coronavirus patients treated with hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic azithromycin, a combo Trump has promoted,” AP notes.
What they’re saying: “While clinical trials are ongoing to determine the safety and effectiveness of these drugs for COVID-19, there are known side effects of these medications that should be considered,” FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn said.
The state of play: Some health experts worry the public could misuse the drug if it is made more widely available.
The FDA has authorised use of hydroxychloroquine under the following conditions, summarised on page 4 of their guidelines:
The hydroxychloroquine sulfate may only be used to treat adult and adolescent patients who weigh 50 kg or more hospitalized with COVID-19 for whom a clinical trial is not available, or participation is not feasible.9
South Dakota is the first state to participate in a trial of the drug:
Kudos to their governor, Kristi Noem, who ignored calls for lockdown. South Dakotans rewarded her with a parade:
But I digress.
Health Feedback is a site that debunks current coronavirus remedies or possible cures. Another is Poynter. Both must be busy.
There has been much talk of using ventilators on ICU patients with COVID-19. However, in some cases, ventilators do not always work and, in some instances, have worsened patients’ outcomes.
On March 20, Cleveland Clinic published an explanation of the damage that COVID-19 can do to the lungs, leading to the need for intensive care and, likely, a ventilator. Excerpts follow (emphases mine):
Although many people with COVID-19 have no symptoms or only mild symptoms, a subset of patients develop severe respiratory illness and may need to be admitted for intensive care.
In a new video, lung pathologist Sanjay Mukhopadhyay, MD, lays out in detail how the lungs are affected in these severe cases. The 15-minute video walks through how COVID-19 causes a “dangerous and potentially fatal” condition known as acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) while providing stark images that underscore the severity of the damage that condition can cause to your lungs.
As Dr. Mukhopadhyay explains, Chinese researchers have linked COVID-19 to ARDS. Their study examined risk factors for 191 confirmed coronavirus patients who died while being treated in two hospitals in Wuhan, China.
The researchers found 50 of the 54 patients who died had developed ARDS while only nine of the 137 survivors had ARDS …
If you have ARDS, you’ll have symptoms like sudden breathlessness, rapid breathing, dizziness, rapid heart rate and excessive sweating.
But the four main things doctors will look for are:
-
- If you have an acute condition, symptoms that started within one week of what they call a “known clinical insult,” or new or worsening symptoms.
- If your shortness of breath isn’t explained by heart failure or fluid overload.
- Having low oxygen levels in your blood (severe hypoxia).
- Both lungs appearing white and opaque (versus black) on chest X-rays (called bilateral lung opacities on chest imaging) …
There might have been other articles like this circulating recently, ones that mention hypoxia.
Hypoxia has been mentioned often in online discourse and in some online articles, such as one from April 5, posted on Medium, ‘Covid-19 had us all fooled, but now we might have finally found its secret’, written by a non-medic whose Medium account has since been deleted.
That article has appeared all over various fora over the past few weeks.
It does sound really plausible, even though Poynter and Health Feedback have both debunked it, which I’ll get to below.
Not being a medic or have anyone in the family who is, I’m just going to throw these excerpts out there.
As such, I wonder if this is accurate, i.e. something that front line physicians will mention a year from now. Anyone with a medical background reading this should feel free to leave a comment below.
The author explains why ventilators don’t always work on COVID-19 patients. This is what caught my eye:
There is no ‘pneumonia’ nor ARDS. At least not the ARDS with established treatment protocols and procedures we’re familiar with. Ventilators are not only the wrong solution, but high pressure intubation can actually wind up causing more damage than without, not to mention complications from tracheal scarring and ulcers given the duration of intubation often required… They may still have a use in the immediate future for patients too far to bring back with this newfound knowledge, but moving forward a new treatment protocol needs to be established so we stop treating patients for the wrong disease.
Then the author quotes someone in the medical profession who published a paper that seems to have gone nowhere (see below). Unfortunately, there is no reference to what or whom he quotes, which is this:
The past 48 hours or so have seen a huge revelation: COVID-19 causes prolonged and progressive hypoxia (starving your body of oxygen) by binding to the heme groups in hemoglobin in your red blood cells. People are simply desaturating (losing o2 in their blood), and that’s what eventually leads to organ failures that kill them, not any form of ARDS or pneumonia. All the damage to the lungs you see in CT scans are from the release of oxidative iron from the hemes, this overwhelms the natural defenses against pulmonary oxidative stress and causes that nice, always-bilateral ground glass opacity in the lungs. Patients returning for re-hospitalization days or weeks after recovery suffering from apparent delayed post-hypoxic leukoencephalopathy strengthen the notion COVID-19 patients are suffering from hypoxia despite no signs of respiratory ‘tire out’ or fatigue.
I only found the Medium article last week, but I have many COVID-19 links bookmarked, including this one from April 10:
The article is behind a paywall, but you can read it here in its entirety. The doctors the Telegraph interviewed seem to be saying the same as the Medium author does: no ARDS, no pneumonia, therefore, no ventilator, which can do more harm than good:
British and American intensive care doctors at the front line of the coronavirus crisis are starting to question the aggressive use of ventilators for the treatment of patients.
In many cases they say the machines, which are highly invasive and require the patient to be rendered unconscious, are being used too early and may cause more harm than good. Instead they are finding that less invasive forms of oxygen treatment through face masks or nasal cannulas work better for patients, even those with very low blood oxygen readings.
Dr Ron Daniels, a consultant in critical care at University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, on Thursday confirmed reports from US medics that he and other NHS doctors were revising their view of when ventilators should be used.
At the heart of the issue was the “bizarre” and “frankly baffling” phenomenon of Covid-19 patients presenting with catastrophically low blood oxygen levels but few other ill effects.
The Telegraph says that this new protocol goes against prior received wisdom on the unknown COVID-19. Prime Minister Boris Johnson had been in intensive care that week, released back to a general ward on the evening of Maundy Thursday, April 9:
The initial recommendations from doctors in China and Italy were to ventilate Covid patients early and aggressively, with the so-called “PEEP” pressure on the machines turned up high so their lungs did not contract when they exhaled.
“The initial message was treat as if you were treating for acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) with a high PEEP,” said Daniels. “But now we are becoming braver. We are tolerating much lower blood oxygen levels and using lower pressures. We are learning as we go along”.
The alternative to mechanical ventilation is oxygen treatment delivered via a mask or a nasal cannula or via a non-invasive high flow device. This is the sort of treatment the Prime Minister Boris Johnson is said to be receiving in an intensive care unit at St Thomas’s hospital London. His blood oxygen levels are not known.
Increasingly doctors in the UK, America and Europe are using these less invasive measures and holding back on the use of mechanical ventilation for as long as possible …
Doctors in Italy and Germany wrote to the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine last week making a similar point. They urged other doctors to be “patient” with Covid patients, arguing for “gentle ventilation” wherever possible …
It is not known why Covid-19 allows some patients to tolerate such low blood oxygen readings without air hunger or obvious confusion. One clue may be that patients are still able to exhale carbon dioxide – a toxin – through their lungs even if they are having difficulty absorbing oxygen.
“The patients in front of me are unlike any I’ve ever seen,” one American doctor working in a Brooklyn hospital told the specialist health publication STAT this week. “They looked a lot more like they had altitude sickness than pneumonia.”
Dr Daniels agreed that there were similarities with altitude sickness, itself a potentially fatal condition. “We’ve seen a lot of headache and dizziness”, he noted …
You might have heard of Drs Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi, whose two-part press briefing in California was removed last week from YouTube. The two went against the received wisdom of the WHO. I watched both videos when they came out at the beginning of April. In the second video, they warned against the aggressive use of ventilators when treating COVID-19.
Therefore, the Medium article might not be either wrong or fake news with regard to ventilators.
It has an explanation of what might be happening whereby blood gets starved of oxygen through COVID-19, and it is this which has proven to be controversial with physicians:
Your red blood cells carry oxygen from your lungs to all your organs and the rest of your body. Red blood cells can do this thanks to hemoglobin, which is a protein consisting of four “hemes”. Hemes have a special kind of iron ion, which is normally quite toxic in its free form, locked away in its center with a porphyrin acting as it’s ‘container’. In this way, the iron ion can be ‘caged’ and carried around safely by the hemoglobin, but used to bind to oxygen when it gets to your lungs.
When the red blood cell gets to the alveoli, or the little sacs in your lungs where all the gas exchange happens, that special little iron ion can flip between FE2+ and FE3+ states with electron exchange and bond to some oxygen, then it goes off on its little merry way to deliver o2 elsewhere.
Here’s where COVID-19 comes in. Its glycoproteins bond to the heme, and in doing so that special and toxic oxidative iron ion is “disassociated” (released). It’s basically let out of the cage and now freely roaming around on its own. This is bad for two reasons:
1) Without the iron ion, hemoglobin can no longer bind to oxygen. Once all the hemoglobin is impaired, the red blood cell is essentially turned into a Freightliner truck cab with no trailer and no ability to store its cargo. It is useless and just running around with COVID-19 virus attached to its porphyrin. All these useless trucks running around not delivering oxygen is what starts to lead to desaturation, or watching the patient’s spo2 levels drop. It is INCORRECT to assume traditional ARDS and in doing so, you’re treating the WRONG DISEASE. Think of it a lot like carbon monoxide poisoning, in which CO is bound to the hemoglobin, making it unable to carry oxygen. In those cases, ventilators aren’t treating the root cause; the patient’s lungs aren’t ‘tiring out’, they’re pumping just fine. The red blood cells just can’t carry o2, end of story. Only in this case, unlike CO poisoning in which eventually the CO can break off, the affected hemoglobin is permanently stripped of its ability to carry o2 because it has lost its iron ion. The body compensates for this lack of o2 carrying capacity and deliveries by having your kidneys release hormones like erythropoietin, which tell your bone marrow factories to ramp up production on new red blood cells with freshly made and fully functioning hemoglobin. This is the reason you find elevated hemoglobin and decreased blood oxygen saturation as one of the 3 primary indicators of whether the shit is about to hit the fan for a particular patient or not.
2) That little iron ion, along with millions of its friends released from other hemes, are now floating through your blood freely. As I mentioned before, this type of iron ion is highly reactive and causes oxidative damage. It turns out that this happens to a limited extent naturally in our bodies and we have cleanup & defense mechanisms to keep the balance. The lungs, in particular, have 3 primary defenses to maintain “iron homeostasis”, 2 of which are in the alveoli, those little sacs in your lungs we talked about earlier. The first of the two are little macrophages that roam around and scavenge up any free radicals like this oxidative iron. The second is a lining on the walls (called the epithelial surface) which has a thin layer of fluid packed with high levels of antioxidant molecules… things like ascorbic acid (AKA Vitamin C) among others. Well, this is usually good enough for naturally occurring rogue iron ions but with COVID-19 running rampant your body is now basically like a progressive state letting out all the prisoners out of the prisons… it’s just too much iron and it begins to overwhelm your lungs’ countermeasures, and thus begins the process of pulmonary oxidative stress. This leads to damage and inflammation, which leads to all that nasty stuff and damage you see in CT scans of COVID-19 patient lungs. Ever noticed how it’s always bilateral? (both lungs at the same time) Pneumonia rarely ever does that, but COVID-19 does… EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.
Poynter says this is clearly wrong:
The claim that COVID-19 causes hypoxia because the causative virus binds to hemoglobin in red blood cells is unsupported. For starters, no scientific evidence demonstrates that SARS-CoV-2 can enter red blood cells. The claim that the virus binds to hemoglobin is founded on the conclusions of a single pre-print, which solely involves computational analysis, without experimental verification or peer-review. The mechanism proposed is also inconsistent with clinical evidence from COVID-19 patients.
Health Feedback posted their refutation on Wednesday, April 15. It is lengthy and thorough. Excerpts follow:
Scientists told Health Feedback that the claim was not supported by experimental and clinical evidence. “There is no direct biological evidence that SARS-CoV-2 proteins interact with hemoglobin. The claim is based on a single study performed purely in silico without proper wet lab validation,” explained Victor Tseng, pulmonologist and assistant professor of medicine at Emory University. Eva Nozik-Grayck, clinician-scientist and critical care specialist at the Children’s Hospital Colorado, stated that “without any experimental evidence, it is dangerous and misleading to make these claims.”
David Irwin, associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver, who studies hemoglobin and hypoxia, questioned the conclusions of the ChemRxiv pre-print that served as the basis for the claim. “The authors show no convincing data to suggest that the [viral] proteins of interest, such as Orf8, etc., actually bind heme other than in modeling theories. Most troubling is that there is no way that we know of to suggest that the virus accesses hemoglobin in red blood cells to attack the heme as described in the manuscript,” he said.
A Medium article authored by Matthew Amdahl, a clinician-scientist and hemoglobin researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, details the numerous problems with [Medium author] Gaiziunas’ hypothesis. Notably, he pointed out that SARS-CoV-2 is larger than the entire hemoglobin protein, but according to Gaiziunas’ hypothesis, would somehow manage to fit into “a space barely large enough for two-atom molecules like oxygen (O2)” in order to eject iron from hemoglobin and bind to porphyrin:
“To put it charitably, this would be an entirely novel and seemingly impossible sort of chemistry, and there is absolutely no scientific evidence that supports such a possibility. It’s this seemingly impossible interaction that forms the foundation of the blog post’s entire argument, and so the remainder of the conclusions drawn by the blogger simply don’t carry any weight.”
Furthermore, clinical evidence from COVID-19 patients contradict Gaiziunas’ hypothesis. Firstly, supposing that the virus did bind to hemoglobin and ejected iron from red blood cells, this would have produced a modified form of hemoglobin that has an altered ability to bind to oxygen, which can be detected by measuring the oxyhemoglobin dissociation constant …
In summary, while scientists have not ruled out a potential link between changes in red blood cell physiology and hypoxia observed in COVID-19 patients, the mechanisms proposed by Gaiziunas are founded on little to no scientific evidence, are highly implausible given what we already know of hemoglobin and the virus, and are contradicted by clinical evidence in COVID-19 patients.
We might find out more about hypoxia in COVID-19 patients in a year’s time.
For now, I can’t help but wonder if this type of hypoxia explains why hospitals have been refusing more ventilators for COVID-19 patients.
In the meantime, returning to Prof Didier Raoult, it seems that renegades are never in vogue with the establishment.
More power to him for successfully trialling on his coronavirus patients an inexpensive, prescription anti-malarial that has been on the market for decades. Well done. Millions of us support him in his work.
Because of coronavirus lockdowns, the world’s hospitality industry is being destroyed, including restaurants.
On May 3, 2020, the New York Post published two stories of interest on how Manhattan’s top chefs are stepping outside of the box to cook for others.
‘Out-of-work chefs are leaving NYC to cook for billionaires’ tells us that they have sought alternative employment during the continuing lockdown (emphases mine):
Out-of-work chefs from Jean-Georges, Daniel, Eleven Madison Park, Per Se and Gramercy Tavern are being poached by talent agents and even real estate brokers to work for wealthy families since the coronavirus shutdowns have eviscerated the restaurant industry, sources said. The supply of quality chefs is so abundant that some wealthy people say they’re getting cold called about the latest candidate.
“I received a call out of the blue asking if we wanted to hire a top chef who had worked for Jean-George’s,” one billionaire real estate developer told Side Dish.
For unemployed chefs, it’s often the only way for them to make money doing what they love at a time when sit-down dining is prohibited by the state lockdown.
One of them is Ian Tenzer, 29, formerly a sous-chef at three-star Michelin restaurant Eleven Madison Park, named the world’s best restaurant in 2017, more about which below. He told the newspaper:
I was laid off six weeks ago. It just wasn’t possible to stay, no matter how much the chef wanted to keep us. I can’t stand not working. I miss being in the kitchen.
Working as a private chef has always been a part of the industry I had thought about working in and, at this point in my career, it’s a good choice economically and professionally.
Even so, he misses the camaraderie that being part of a brigade brings:
When you work in a restaurant, you are part of a team. There are peers you look up to and others you teach. The team becomes your family and you learn to love everyone. That’s the hardest part about leaving [the restaurant job].
On the other hand, salaries are often significantly better, as the article explains:
Indeed, chefs who choose to work in private homes stand to get a 20 percent to 30 percent pay raise, as well as other perks including better hours, sources said. Sous chefs at top restaurants can earn between $120,000 and $200,000 a year working full-time for a family, compared to closer to $100,000 working at a restaurant.
Personal chefs also commonly earn discretionary bonuses, especially if they are being asked to shelter in place with their families during the COVID-19 pandemic, says David Youdovin, chief executive of Hire Society, which helps individuals recruit private staff.
“The vast majority of restaurant chefs are grossly underpaid, and seldom receive benefits,” and now clients are being “very generous and accommodating,” Youdovin said.
Of course, some families are nicer than others:
One drawback is that you never know what kind of family you’ll get, chefs said. Some families are “lovely, adventurous and curious,” but others can be quite the opposite. They can be rude and “even physically and verbally abusive. I have heard horror stories,” said one chef who asked to remain unnamed.
At least two upmarket estate agents, also out of work during lockdown, have been placing chefs with families:
Brokers Dolly and Jenny Lenz, who deal in high-end real estate, say they have sourced two top chefs for two different families who have rented Hamptons estates to wait out the crisis. People quarantining in rental homes are often looking to hire chefs, nannies and housekeepers to shelter in place with them during this time, Dolly Lenz said.
As going to someone’s house for a traditional interview is verboten at the moment, food is dropped off and interviews are done online via video conference:
… chefs are preparing tastings in their own homes and then dropping them off at their prospective employer’s front door.
This social-distancing measure, along with virtual interviews by Zoom or FaceTime, are making it tough for both the chefs and families to determine if they are making a good match, Youdovin said.
Goodness knows when restaurants will regain normality. Even where they are open in Europe, social distancing remains in place in many countries. That means having a full complement of tables is impossible and could be for months to come.
With that in mind, Ian Tenzer’s former employer, Eleven Madison Park, has a new outreach policy: ‘Eleven Madison Park chef will keep feeding needy New Yorkers’.
It revolves around ‘family meals’, a term restaurants use for the lunches and/or dinners they provide to their staff.
Head chef Daniel Humm began feeding the city’s hungry before the coronavirus outbreak and is now feeding many more:
Humm, whose three-starred Michelin restaurant was named the world’s best in 2017, is amping up his role at a non-profit, Rethink Food NYC, to become its top chef and inaugural partner as it expands nationally.
Before COVID-19, Rethink turned restaurant waste into meals, feeding 15,000 people a week. The non-profit now serves 25,000 meals a day.
Post COVID-19, restaurant staff at Eleven Madison will make extra “family meals” for Rethink to feed needy New Yorkers.
“If every restaurant does this, we could end hunger,” said Matt Jozwiak, Rethink Food NYC’s executive director and founder, who formerly worked at Humm’s Michelin-rated restaurant.
Currently, Humm has turned Eleven Madison Park into a food commissary to help make meals for Rethink to distribute during the crisis.
Yes, if every restaurant did that, they really could end hunger.
I get tired of watching restaurant reality shows and documentaries with all their waste. Hell’s Kitchen, Masterchef: I’m looking at you. The other night, I watched a 2018 French documentary on TF1 about upmarket caterers. A top pastry chef told his staff to throw out a vat of hazelnut caramel syrup because it had one burnt hazelnut in it. Madness. Fine for him, but it could have been given to a homeless mission in Paris, which could have used it for a week in their desserts.
Some restaurateurs say that insurance companies restrict giving away food before serving for reasons of health safety. Perhaps insurers should let up on that policy in a reasonable way: documented mutual consent between a donor restaurant and a recipient organisation.
At any rate, it’s encouraging to see some good is coming out of the coronavirus crisis.
There is so much to write about COVID-19.
I have hundreds of bookmarks about PPE, lockdowns, deaths, profit-makers and more.
With regard to lockdowns and drugs, Americans and the British will remember two names after all of this is over: Dr Anthony Fauci and Professor Ian Ferguson.
Lockdowns
Professor Ian Ferguson of Imperial College London is the man primarily responsible for lockdowns in the UK and the US, heretofore known as bastions of liberty.
Unfortunately, Ferguson’s track record is less than brilliant, as this subtitled video explains. I have no idea if someone really hacked his 13-year-old modelling code. The video is what’s important here, as he did great harm to the British livestock industry on two separate occasions. Ferguson is the reason why beef and lamb have cost the earth over the past two decades:
I never thought that lockdown was the right way to go. I have not changed my mind.
I was so pleased with Prime Minister Boris Johnson and President Donald Trump for not going down that route … until they did.
Both had input from Ferguson’s faulty coronavirus modelling, which he has since revised downward — when it’s too late:
This is now reaching the media. The Spectator wrote about it on May 5 (see below):
The Spectator‘s editor Fraser Nelson wrote ‘Sweden tames its ‘R number’ without lockdown’. An excerpt follows, emphases mine:
… Imperial also applied its UK assumptions to Sweden, warning that its rejection of lockdown was likely to leave the virus rampant with an R of between 3 and 4. That is to say: every person infected would give it to three or four others. Its modelling envisaged Sweden paying a heavy price for its rejection of lockdown, with 40,000 Covid deaths by 1 May and almost 100,000 by June.
The latest figure for Sweden is 2,680 deaths, with daily deaths peaking a fortnight ago. So Imperial College’s modelling – the same modelling used to inform the UK response – was wrong, by an order of magnitude. Sweden has now published its own graph, saying its R was never near the 4 that Imperial imagined. More importantly, its all-important R level (all-important to the UK anyway – it has never much featured in the Swedish discussion) has in fact been below the safe level of 1 for the last few weeks.
As Johan Norberg has written, Imperial’s model ‘could only handle two scenarios: an enforced national lockdown or zero change in behaviour. It had no way of computing Swedes who decided to socially distance voluntarily. But we did.’ Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s state epidemiologist, has seen his trust ratings soar. Some Swedes are even having his face tattooed on their arm.
When Imperial first made its models, everyone was guessing. We know more now. Every day, in The Spectator’s Covid-19 email, we bring new studies that add more detail to our understanding of the virus. At present, Britain is considering the South Korean model: an ambitious combination of tech, surveillance, track and trace. But given that Sweden achieved what Imperial College had thought undoable, without the surveillance or the tech or the loss of liberty, its lessons are also worthy of consideration.
Sweden’s Prime Minister has said he is relying on ‘Folkvett’ – people’s wit, or common sense. As Boris Johnson considers his options, he should also ask whether a folkvett option – described in a recent Spectator leading article as a ‘trust the public’ approach – might work for Britain.
PS For all of its prominence in virus modelling, ‘the R’ is not a known number. It can only be guessed at, because the actual number of infections can only be guessed at. Sweden has not targeted the R. It has simply sought to keep the virus at manageable levels (ie, so hospitals have spare capacity). But the UK’s approach is more influenced by models, and No10 now says keeping an R below 1 is its main policy.
Fraser Nelson probably knows Boris, so I hope he sends him a copy of his article. Although Nelson began working at The Spectator a few years after Boris stopped editing the magazine to enter politics, they have probably met at the publication’s annual summer garden parties or at Conservative Party functions.
Check out this graphic, of Sweden’s coronavirus numbers predicted by Imperial and the reality. It is shocking.
Congratulations to Sweden! I knew they’d done the right thing from the get-go.
Returning to the UK, here’s one unanswered question about Britain’s coronavirus policy: why, in mid-March, was COVID-19 declassified as a high consequence infectious disease (HCID) in the UK only for us to have lockdown one week later, on the evening of Monday, March 23?
It wasn’t just the deaths that Ferguson messed up, there were other aspects of health policy, too, as Martin Geddes discusses in an excellent essay, ‘Coronagate: the scandal to end all scandals’:
The British justification for lockdown and abandonment of “herd immunity” comes from the work of Prof Neil Ferguson of Imperial College in London. This institution has received over $185m from the Gates foundation. He has a truly appalling track record, having grotesquely mis-modelled foot and mouth disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disase, H5N1, and swine flu. But he was hired again for COVID-19, where he was only out by a factor of 20 on mortality, and made obvious errors like presuming frail elderly patients would need ventilators when this is well known to be inadvisable (as it kills them).
The combination of a cataclysmic death forecast with no known treatment is what then drove draconian lockdown policy. This was despite the policy being implemented so late it cannot have had any impact on the actual peak demand for healthcare. Whether done with integrity or as sabotage only history can tell. The damage is done now.
Sadly, Martin Geddes is only too right.
How will we ever recover? Not just the UK, but the rest of the Western world?
British farmers never have. A number of them had to leave farming; they couldn’t afford it any more. Some committed suicide.
Pray God we pull out of this successfully — and relatively quickly!
Drugs
While there is no cure for COVID-19, anti-malarial drugs can be used to lessen the damage to lungs in sufferers who need it:
Geddes mentions Dr Anthony Fauci in the US, prefaced with this introduction (emphases in the original, those in purple mine):
I was going to title this essay “Hydroxychloroquine: does it cure CONS” — with the joke being CONS as an abbreviation for Credulous Official Narrative Syndrome. But people dying and losing their livelihoods worldwide for no good reason is not a joke. Coronagate is the political con job that promises to eclipse all others, even against stiff competition like Spygate.
Here’s the bottom line: Dr Fauci and his institutional sponsors have known since at least 2005 that chloroquine — and its milder derivative hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) — inhibit coronaviruses like SARS from replicating in the body. They have withheld this important information from the public and failed to act on it when forming policy. Instead these besuited criminals have pushed experimental and expensive drugs, whilst having huge financial conflicts of interest.
This means that the present lockdown and the immense disruption and harm it is causing is for no real benefit. We could be offering cheap and effective prophylactic and therapeutic treatments for COVID-19, targeted at the vulnerable (like healthcare workers, elderly, those with comorbidities). Indeed, several countries are taking this course now with proven success.
Later on in his essay, he says:
The smoking gun is a Virology Journal paper from 2005 from the NIH, where Dr Fauci was director: “Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread.” COVID-19 is a SARS virus similar to the one from 2005. It is undeniable that this information was public and known to Dr Fauci and his colleagues.
Yet, Fauci appears more often than not on the dais for America’s daily coronavirus briefings! WHY?
I have quoted one of my readers — Prex — before on matters coronaviral. This is an excerpt from Prex’s take on Fauci (emphases in bold mine):
… notice how the MSM and Cabal, including Fauci, FIGHT against Hydroxychloroquine + Azithromycin + Zinc SO vigorously? Then at the same time, they HAIL, Remdisivir, after ONE study, which, was NOT as effective as HAZ (91% effective AFTER infected, preventing further damage AND hospitalization) Remdisivir, was made FOR Ebola. It did NOT work.
In fact, it KILLED far more than it SAVED in Africa. Gee, is that not what they tried to project on Hydroxychloroquine? Why YES, yes, it is.
Want MORE? Guess, WHO funded the Ebola research into Remdisivir? The NIH. Guess who is the HEAD of the NIH? Dr Fauci. Guess who signed OFF on the drug for Ebola? Dr Fauci. Guess who funded the Covid 19 research in NC? Fauci and the NIH. Guess who used 3.7 MILLION taxpayer dollars to move it to CHINA and the Wuhan BSL4? The NIH and Fauci.
Want MORE? Guess who was the head of the AIDS taskforce in the 80’s and 90’s? Dr Fauci. A vaccine was NEVER found, despite HUNDREDS of BILLIONS spent. Guess who is AGAINST Hydroxychloroquine? Dr Fauci. Guess who had the VA put out that SHAM Hydroxychloroquine study the media tried to pass off to scare people from using HAZ? The NIH and Dr Fauci. Guess WHO advised Trump to do the shutdown and social distancing mitigation crap to flatten the curve? Dr Fauci. Who wants the shutdown to CONTINUE and is almost guaranteeing no herd immunity and a second wave? Dr Fauci.
See a pattern? Guess WHO, pun intended, advised Dr Fauci? Tedros and the World Health Organization. Guess WHO, pun intended they enable? CHINA. Guess WHO, funds the WHO? The NIH and Dr Fauci. Getting a CLEARER picture yet?
Remember Event 201. The mock by Johns Hopkins that was almost dead on to Covid 19? Funded by Bill and Melinda Gates’ Foundation…AND…the NIH and Dr Fauci. Why do you THINK Fauci so readily took in the WHO and IHME models? HE had ALREADY seen them at Event 201. In October of 2019.
Want ICING? WHO does the WHO defend? China. WHO owns GILEAD, the makers of Remdisivir? CHINA. Who bought Gilead and used the drug in their country? China. Who would BENEFIT from that EXPENSIVE drug being used here in the US? CHINA. Who is PUSHING the NEW, expensive, hard to scale,limited effectiveness against Covid 19, and DANGEROUS drug in favor of the CHEAP, well known, easily scalable, safe, and PROVEN 91% effective against Covid 19 drug? Dr Fauci. WHO benefits from that? CHINA.
Now, ask yourself this. WHY would Fauci, who KNOWS EXACTLY where this virus came from, who did it, and who enabled it, PUSH something that was MORE expensive, LESS well KNOWN, LESS effective, LESS available and scalable, and MORE deadly than Hydroxychloroquine? Why would he push something that would BENEFIT China after THEY released the pandemic, hid it, and then enabled it to spread by hiding all info on it?
WHY would a member of Trump’s Coronavirus task force do ANY of that? WHY is Fauci there? WHAT is his REAL purpose? Who does he REALLY work for? My bet is CHINA. Fauci is either a MOLE, and OR he is so deep in all this he is trying to mislead to cover up HIS complicity.
I am putting this on my blog Church, feel free to link it or spread it. I hope all is well in the UK. Our shutdown begins to end May 11th. I hope yours is sooner or not much later than that. Take care my friend!
It makes sense. All of it.
Martin Geddes agrees that the medical establishment is downplaying — if not damning — the use of hydroxychloroquine and similar drugs in treating COVID-19:
The medical establishment knows that it has been withholding cures, and that this is now an existential threat to its legitimacy. We have seen unprecedented action by regulators in multiple countries to prevent the off-label use of HCQ for COVID-19. If there is a cheap and immediate cure, it removes the market for expensive patented drugs, and exposes the con.
For example, in the USA the FDA has restricted its use to official clinical trials. To bring this to life, here is a quote from one American emergency room doctor:
[Dr] Dopko said in his 17 years of being a medical doctor, he has never seen the FDA issue restrictions on a drug like they have with hydroxychloroquine. “We’ve been told we’re not supposed to prescribe hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19 unless the person is in the hospital and it’s part of a clinical trial.”
“I’ve never seen this before. Doctors prescribe drugs for off-label use all the time,” he said.
The same has happened in France, where HCQ was suspiciously reclassified as a “poisonous substance” on 13th January, despite decades of safe use and being listed by WHO as an “essential medicine”. Remember, denying people essential medical care is a crime against humanity: this was done by the same Macron government that has used illegal LBD40 ammunition against civilian protestors in breach of the Geneva Convention.
The same also applies in the UK, where HCQ is not being promoted by the NHS as standard protocol; this means many are dying on ventilators or in nursing homes for no good reason. “Do not resuscitate” orders are being widely signed by the elderly, who are effectively being culled to pad the COVID-19 numbers and hide the overreaction. Yes, it’s that bad.
We also hear awful stories coming out of New York from whistle-blower nurses saying patients are being left to rot and die, since they lack family as advocates due to isolation of COVID-19 wards. The CDC has been caught reclassifying deaths, as the scam becomes too obvious. What happened to all the people dying of other causes, including old age? Where did they go? Where’s the public outcry at the obvious massaging of the death toll numbers?
Conclusion
Regardless of what the media say, the total deaths worldwide (population: 7.7 bn) will be small.
More deaths, unrelated to COVID-19, because of severe hardship will be experienced by countless millions as a result of Prof Ferguson and Dr Fauci who live in their own little scientific bubbles yet ruin the world. I won’t even go into Bill Gates. He disgusts me that much.
Martin Geddes says that individuals must be brought to justice for this:
A corrupt media has covered up for a corrupt government, and neither could be brought to account (until now) due to a corrupt justice system. Many people — including Bill Gates and Dr Fauci — need to answer for their actions in court. Those in the media who have knowingly connived to hype the threat, yet withheld information about a cure, should face prison.
We do not know whether COVID-19 is natural or manmade, and if the latter whether its release is accidental or deliberate. To the extent that we have a good enough cure, it doesn’t matter at this point; indeed we may never know, as the truth could trigger WW3. COVID-19 is already the defining economic and social event of our lives, and Coronagate promises to be the defining governance scandal of modern history.
If we bring people to justice, and truly learn the lessons from it, it will trigger a deep reform our medical, media, and government institutions. If those reforms are successful, Coronagate could be the scandal to end all scandals. That is the only worthy legacy of the unnecessary death tolls of both COVID-19 and lockdown.
I couldn’t agree more.
We need to insist that our legislators, whether in the UK or the US, shine a very bright light on all of this now and afterwards.
