September 11, 2023, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced¹ it had approved reformulated monovalent COVID shots by Pfizer and Moderna for the fall for use in individuals 12 years of age and older. But don’t be fooled. The Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act liability shield for the COVID-19 vaccines will remain in place through Dec. 31, 2024.²

So, “approved” or not, the manufacturers, distributors and providers that administer the shots still won’t be liable for injuries. The agency has also issued emergency use authorization (EUA) for use of the reformulated jabs in children aged 6 months to 11 years.³

Reformulated Shots Are Obsolete Out of the Gate

The updated mRNA injections contain a single modified RNA said to correspond to the Omicron variant XBB.1.5., which was the dominant variant in the U.S. for most of 2023, but which has since been replaced by other variants.

According to cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough, XBB.1.5 accounted for just 3.1% of the circulating strains as of September 2, 2023, and is “expected to be extinct by the time any American is injected.”⁴

The dominant strains right now are EG.5 and FL.1.5.1, and “There are no randomized clinical trials demonstrating either Pfizer or Moderna XBB.1.5 boosters would work” against these newer strains, McCullough told The Defender.⁵

Physician and biochemist Dr. Robert Malone agrees, adding that the newer variants appear to “have evolved even further to escape the antibody pressure elicited by the globally deployed leaky ‘vaccines.’”^6,7

Linda Wastila, Ph.D., a professor of geriatric pharmacotherapy at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy and director of research for the Peter Lamy Center for Drug Therapy and Aging, also criticized the decision to roll out yet another obsolete booster:⁸

“I do not understand why public health and political leaders are advocating for a booster that is already obsolete. The approved and authorized boosters are like dogs chasing their tails — the mild variants they are supposed to help mitigate serious disease are already waning, already being overtaken by the next generation of mild, mutated viruses.”

Shot Recast as ‘Annual Vaccine’ to Counter ‘Booster Fatigue’

According to authorities, however, this strain is different enough from the strains in any of the previous shots to recommend everyone take it, regardless of your previous COVID jab history.⁹ Within days of the FDA’s announcement, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul warned New Yorkers that previous shots “will not help you” against the coming COVID wave.^10,11

“It doesn’t matter if you’ve already been vaccinated. Take no comfort in that. Thank you for getting vaccinated in the past, but that is not protecting you today. Tell everybody: don’t rely on the fact that you had a vaccine in the past, it will not help you this time around,” she said during a September 13, 2023, press briefing.

What she left out, of course, is that the new shots probably won’t help you either, and even if they do, the protection you get will wane within a handful of months and leave you even more vulnerable to infection,¹² hospitalization and death than you were before.¹³

Remarkably, they’re using the same bogus narratives as the first time, even though the facts are now on the table for everyone to see. We’re not speculating anymore when we say the shots are ineffective and cause more harm than good. We’re not speculating when we say they’re causing heart problems and injure immune function — and that these effects are far from rare.

It’s all documented in the scientific literature. Yet government leaders pretend as if those data don’t exist, and run through the same old arguments that have been debunked many times over. Time will tell whether Americans are foolish enough to fall for the same lies a second time.

As reported by The New York Times, Americans are, by and large, fed up with the COVID boosters, which is why federal officials “have been retreating from labeling the new formulation as boosters to previous shots, preferring to recast them as an annual immunization effort akin to the flu vaccine.”¹⁴

Chances are, this tactic will fail because the FDA has already announced that this new shot will require multiple doses for certain age groups, and you’d have to be really naïve to think that more boosters won’t follow after that.

Previously jabbed children between the ages of 6 months and 4 years, for example, are slated to get two doses (depending on the brand), and unjabbed children in this age group would get up to three doses.¹⁵ So, they’re just restarting the whole injection series all over again, but in much younger age groups.

COVID Jab Testing Has Been Far From Rigorous

Perhaps one of the most egregious lies is that the shots have undergone rigorous human testing. What they’re referring to here are the human trials conducted in 2020 which, notably, did not have a control group. They destroyed the control group by offering everyone the real shot mere months into the trial.

Even so, data released through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests show Pfizer documented^16,17 158,000 different “side effects of special interest” in its trials, all while claiming there were no safety concerns.

Documents also reveal Pfizer received 42,086 adverse event reports, including 1,223 deaths, in the first three months of the rollout of the shot (December 2020 through the end of February 2021).^18,19 The 1976 swine flu vaccine was pulled after only 25 deaths.

The bivalent boosters^20,21 that came next were only tested on mice, which tells you nothing about their safety. Moreover, their effectiveness was gauged based on antibody titers alone, which doesn’t tell you anything about effectiveness in the real world. This was true both for Pfizer and Moderna.

Pfizer’s New Shot Has Only Been Tested on Mice

As for the brand-new reformulated monovalent shot against XBB.1.5., Pfizer’s testing has again only involved mice — 10 mice, to be exact — while Moderna’s version has been tested on 50 adults.²²

Some have reported the trial had 100 participants,²³ but only 50 received the monovalent XBB.1.5 shot now being rolled out. Another 51 received a bivalent shot containing a mix of BA.4/5+XBB.1.5. So there was no control group.

One person in the XBB.1.5 treatment group reportedly experienced a serious adverse event, giving us a potential serious adverse event rate of 1 in 50. What’s more, they only reported side effects that occurred within 14 days of injection,²⁴ so we have no idea how bad it might be in the longer term. As reported by the New York Post, September 14, 2023:²⁵

“What if I told you one in 50 people who took a new medication had a ‘medically attended adverse event’ and the manufacturer refused to disclose what exactly the complication was — would you take it? And what if the theoretical benefit was only transient, lasting about three months, after which your susceptibility goes back to baseline?

And what if we told you the Food and Drug Administration cleared it without any human-outcomes data and European regulators are not universally recommending it as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is? That’s what we know about the new COVID vaccine the Biden administration is firmly recommending for every American 6 months old and up.

The push is so hard that former White House COVID coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha and CDC head Mandy Cohen are making unsupported claims the new vaccine reduces hospitalizations. long COVID and the likelihood you will spread COVID. None of those claims has a shred of scientific support …

The questions surrounding Moderna’s new COVID vaccine approved this week are still looming. Pfizer’s version, approved this week as well, also has zero efficacy data and has not been tested on humans at all. We only have data about antibody production from 10 mice.

The FDA, or Moderna (frankly, it’s hard to tell the difference sometimes), should disclose what happened to the patient who took the new vaccine and had a complication that required medical attention. The public has a right to know.”

What Does the Science Show?

The New York Post article, written by Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon and public policy researcher at Johns Hopkins University, and Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, an epidemiology and public health researcher at the University of California, goes on to review several of the studies and systematic meta-analyses published over the past couple of years, showing the shots:

Annual COVID Jab Recommendation Is Insane

Commenting on the U.S. government’s inexplicably lackadaisical attitude toward safety, Makary and Hoeg write:³⁵

“If public health officials get their way, a healthy 5-year-old boy will get 72 COVID vaccine shots over the course of his lifetime, if he has an average lifespan, with a risk of myocarditis after each one. Inexplicably and defying science, the CDC is saying even if a child had COVID three weeks ago, he or she should still get the new COVID shot.

Two of the FDA’s best vaccine experts are gone. Dr. Marion Gruber, who was director of the FDA’s vaccine office, and her deputy director, Dr. Philip Krause, both quit the agency in 2021 in protest over political pressure to authorize vaccine boosters for young people.

Ever since the loss of these two vaccine experts, the agency’s vaccine authorizations have been consistent with an overly cozy relationship between pharma and the White House.

Pushing a new COVID vaccine without human-outcomes data makes a mockery of the scientific method and our regulatory process. In fact, why have an FDA if White House doctors can simply declare a drug to be safe after discussing secret data in private meetings with pharma?

If public health officials don’t want a repeat disappointing turnout of Americans who get the COVID booster shot, they should require a proper clinical trial to show the American people the benefit. Public health leaders cannot afford to squander any more credibility and money on interventions with no scientific support.”

Unethical and Indefensible Decisions

Fortunately, the pushback against the FDA’s decision to approve and authorize (under EUA) the reformulated COVID shot without scientific support is widespread and growing. Wastila, for example, commented on the agency’s decision:³⁶

“It is unethical to continue to approve and authorize mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 when the pandemic has disappeared. It is unethical to promote these boosters as safe and effective when it is clear they are not, and the government is ignoring evidence that the vaccines can provide considerable harm.

The fact that these vaccines were authorized for children when a public health emergency no longer exists is unconscionable …

Both Moderna and Pfizer have failed to deliver on promised post-marketing studies [from prior COVID-19 vaccines]. We have yet to see the results from the bivalent vaccine safety studies in pregnant women; the myocarditis studies in young people also have not been completed nor have most results been shared.”

Dr. Pierre Kory, president and chief medical officer of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), issued a similar statement:³⁷

“It is unconscionable that the government can recommend this booster for 6-month-olds when the FDA has no data on how children might be affected. There is no need to vaccinate healthy children for COVID-19. To give them an untested booster goes against everything we are trained to do as physicians.”

Canadian physician Dr. William Makis agreed, stating:³⁸

“There is no ‘COVID-19 emergency’ for children, therefore there is no legitimate scientific basis for an ‘emergency authorization’ of a new COVID-19 booster in this age group. Any doctor still administering COVID-19 mRNA vaccines to children of any age is engaging in medical malpractice.”

DNA Contamination Confirmed

In April 2023, microbiologist Kevin McKernan reported his team had found simian virus 40 (SV40) promoters in Pfizer’s and Moderna’s bivalent mRNA COVID shots.^39,40,41,42 SV40 has for decades been suspected of causing cancer in humans,⁴³ so finding SV40 promoters in the shots was rather shocking.

But that’s not all. They also found DNA contaminants in the vials, which have the ability to alter the human genome. It’s been assumed that the COVID shots contained only RNA, but using genomic sequencing, McKernan discovered they contain DNA fragments as well, and there really should not be any. The RNA is basically copied, or “Xeroxed” off the DNA, and only the RNA should be in the final product. Several other labs have since confirmed McKernan’s findings.

September 13, 2023, University of South Carolina professor Phillip Buckhaults testified⁴⁴ before the South Carolina Senate Medical Affairs Ad-Hoc Committee on the Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC).

His testimony is featured in the video at the top of this article. Buckhaults is a molecular biologist and cancer geneticist with extensive experience in DNA sequencing, and he too has found foreign DNA plasmids in the COVID shots.

In his testimony, he explains why and how these DNA contaminants can integrate into your genome and disrupt the function of other genes, either long term or permanently. This risk has been known for decades,⁴⁵ and one potential result is the induction of cancer.

He stresses that it’s important to collect and analyze DNA from various tissues of those who have received the COVID jabs — at least a few hundred people — to determine whether genomic integration is taking place, and what changes are occurring.

Buckhaults also explains how the DNA contamination occurred in the first place, and reviews the bait and switch that allowed this to happen. In summary, the products used during the clinical trials and the commercial product were not made in the identical way. The commercial product grew modified RNA using DNA plasmid and E. coli, and the DNA were not properly filtered out — a clear sign of poor manufacturing processes.

Got the Jab? Take Action to Safeguard Your Health

If you already got one or more jabs and now have concerns about your health, what can you do? Well, first and foremost, never take another COVID booster, another mRNA gene therapy shot or regular vaccine. You need to end the assault on your system.

If you developed symptoms you didn’t have before your shot, I would encourage you to seek out expert help. At present, the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) seems to have one of the best treatment protocols for post-jab injuries. It’s called I-RECOVER and can be downloaded from covid19criticalcare.com.⁴⁶

Dr. Pierre Kory, who cofounded the FLCCC, has transitioned to treating the vaccine injured more or less exclusively. For more information, see DrPierreKory.com. Dr. Peter McCullough is also investigating post-jab treatments, which you can find on PeterMcCulloughMD.com.

The World Health Council has also published lists of remedies that can help inhibit, neutralize and eliminate spike protein, which most experts agree is the primary culprit. I covered these in my 2021 article, “World Council for Health Reveals Spike Protein Detox.”

Source: mercola rss

During the 1950s, the inactivated polio vaccine created by Jonas Salk was made using rhesus monkeys that were infected with simian virus 40 (SV40), a monkey virus¹ that was later linked to cancer in humans.²

From 1955 to 1963, hundreds of millions of people worldwide — in North and South America, Canada, Europe, Asia and Africa — received the vaccines,³ which at the time were heralded as a medical breakthrough. In the archived 1956 video above, you can see a propaganda piece from that era, showing just how the ill-fated vaccine was made.

“Few back then grasped that these vaccines might also be a huge, inadvertent, uncontrolled experiment in interspecies viral transmission,” a 2004 article in The Lancet noted.⁴

1950s’ Propaganda Reveals How Polio Vaccine Was Made

While Salk’s polio vaccine was considered a medical triumph of its time, its manufacturing process leaves much to be desired. “Welcome to modern vaccinology. A hilariously unscientific process predicated on insane barbarism, rife with fraud and immense hubris,” Inversionism wrote on X, formerly Twitter.⁵ The investigative journalist detailed the polio vaccine’s manufacturing process outlined in the video as follows:⁶

Paralyzed Children, Deaths Reported Following Vaccination

By 1954, a large-scale study of Salk’s polio vaccine, which included 1 million children, took place. April 12, 1955, Salk declared the shots to be safe and effective. In addition to being given widely throughout the U.S., by 1959, 90 countries were using it.⁸ But there were signs of problems from the start.

After mass vaccination began, some subjects became paralyzed in the limb where the vaccine was given. Recalls of 250 cases of the shots from two laboratories ensued following the reports of parasitic illness.

“There were also reports of paralysis and death in several children,” Singapore Medical Journal reported. “Investigations showed that improperly inactivated vaccine had released live virus into more than 100,000 doses of the vaccine.”⁹ As explained in The Lancet:¹⁰

“When Salk developed his vaccine, instead of using human tissues, as did the scientists who won a Nobel Prize for first growing poliovirus in tissue culture, he used minced-up rhesus macaque monkey kidneys, which were remarkably efficient poliovirus factories.

Those who sought to supplant Salk’s formaldehyde-inactivated vaccine with live, attenuated oral vaccine also used monkey kidney cultures. Despite a manufacturing problem that, at best, left six children who received the vaccine paralyzed in the arm, and despite concerns about wild simian viruses, Salk’s shots were declared safe and effective after 1954 field trials.

The next year, after grudging approval by skeptical government regulators, free Salk shots were made available throughout the USA. By 1960, scientists and vaccine manufacturers knew that monkey kidneys were sewers of simian viruses.”

Americans Kept in the Dark About Monkey Virus in Polio Shots

It was 1959 when the late Bernice Eddy, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health, conducted a study, injecting hamsters with the rhesus monkey kidney substrate used to make the polio vaccines. The majority of them developed tumors.¹¹

“Eddy’s superiors tried to keep the discovery quiet, but Eddy presented her data at a cancer conference in New York. She was eventually demoted, and lost her laboratory,” The Atlantic reported,¹² but soon after researchers with Merck pharmaceutical company identified the cancer-causing virus in rhesus monkey kidney cells, naming it SV40¹³ because it was the 40th monkey virus discovered.

According to Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center, in a presentation before the U.S. House of Representatives in 2003:¹⁴

“Sadly, the American people were not told the truth about this in 1960. The SV40 contaminated stocks of Salk polio vaccine were never withdrawn from the market but continued to be given to American children until early 1963 with full knowledge of federal health agencies.

Between 1955 and early 1963, nearly 100 million American children had been given polio vaccine contaminated with the monkey virus, SV40.”

Did SV40 in Vaccines Cause Cancer?

While there wasn’t an “epidemic” of cancers that followed the widespread administration of polio vaccines contaminated with SV40, which suggests the virus alone may not be causing the cancers, researchers noted “it seems possible that SV40 may act as a cofactor in the pathogenesis of some tumors.”¹⁵

As further reported in Oncogene, at least three independent scientific panels agreed “there is compelling evidence that SV40 is present in some human cancers and that SV40 could contribute to the pathogenesis of some of them.”¹⁶ Brain tumors and mesotheliomas appear to be the most common tumors associated with SV40, with some studies showing a positivity rate of up to 60%.¹⁷

For instance, research published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1992 revealed that half the choroid plexus tumors and most of the ependymomas studied contained a segment of T-antigen gene related to SV40. “These results suggest that SV40 or a closely related virus may have an etiologic role in the development of these neoplasms during childhood,” the researchers wrote.¹⁸

In 2002, meanwhile, The Lancet published evidence showing SV40 is significantly associated with some types of non-Hodgkin lymphoma after detecting it in 42% of non-Hodgkin lymphomas tested.¹⁹ And in a 2004 review of the then-available evidence, it’s noted:²⁰

“Persuasive evidence now indicates that SV40 is causing infections in humans today and represents an emerging pathogen.

A meta-analysis of molecular, pathological, and clinical data from 1,793 cancer patients indicates that there is a significant excess risk of SV40 associated with human primary brain cancers, primary bone cancers, malignant mesothelioma, and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.”

What Else Is Lurking in Vaccines?

While the SV40 polio vaccine contamination occurred decades ago, the controversy continues, as does the potential for present-day vaccines to be contaminated.

Research by cellular and molecular biologist Judy Mikovits, Ph.D., showed that many of our vaccines are contaminated with gammaretroviruses.²¹ How did this happen? In short, vaccine viruses were replicated and grown in animal cell cultures that were already contaminated with retroviruses. In other words, the root of the problem stems from the use of contaminated cell culture lines, similar to the problems with the original polio vaccine.

Meanwhile, microbiologist Kevin McKernan — a former researcher and team leader for the MIT Human Genome project²² — assessed the nucleic acid composition of four expired vials of the Moderna and Pfizer mRNA COVID-19 shots. “DNA contamination that exceeds the European Medicines Agency (EMA) 330ng/mg requirement and the FDAs 10ng/dose requirements” was found.²³

In addition to the spike protein and mRNA in COVID-19 shots, McKernan’s team discovered SV40 promotors.²⁴ McKernan explains that in many cases, when tumors are sequenced they’re found to contain sequences from SV40 and other viruses, which can integrate into your genome, causing disruptions and instability that can trigger the cell line to grow out of control.²⁵

In the case of COVID-19 shots, he says, “The concern is if this DNA integrates the genome, one portion of the SV40 sequence is an SV40 promoter, a very strong promoter, which means it drives transcription wherever it lands in the genome.

If this happens to drop itself in front of a proto-oncogene [a gene that has the potential to cause cancer] and drives a lot of expression off of a gene that’s known, if you hyper-express it and turn the cell cancerous, then we have a concern that DNA is in fact doing that.”²⁶

McKernan and colleagues have tried to spread the word about SV40 promotor and components in COVID-19 shots, but the media continue to try to discredit their findings,²⁷ much like occurred with SV40 in the original polio vaccines. Further, as for why the SV40 promoter and enhancer are in COVID-19 shots in the first place, it’s again related to the plasmid growth medium, which in this case is E. coli.²⁸

Since many types of cells continue to be used as growth mediums during vaccine production, including animal cell strains²⁹ from chickens, dogs, monkeys, hamsters³⁰ and insects,³¹ as well as cells from bacteria or yeast, and vaccines continue to be fast-tracked to market, it’s more important than ever for scientists and manufacturers to ensure that the treatment or preventative isn’t causing more harm than good.

Source: mercola rss

Ever felt like you’re running on empty and just need a quick ‘me-time’ recharge? We’ve all been there! Self-care isn’t just a trendy hashtag; it’s the sweet little stuff we do to keep our spirits singing and our vibes vibrating. Whether you’re a self-care superstar or a newbie looking for fresh ideas, this list is your go-to guide. Dive in and nurture your soul with these easy 25 self-care ideas.

1. Morning Meditation: Start your day with a short meditation session to set a positive tone.
2. Aromatherapy: Use essential oils or scented candles to create a calming atmosphere.
3. Nature Walk: Spend time outdoors, taking in the beauty of nature and getting some fresh air.
4. Journaling: Write down your thoughts, feelings, and goals to gain clarity and reduce stress.
5. Bubble Bath: Treat yourself to a relaxing bubble bath with soothing essential oils.
6. Healthy Snack Prep: Prepare a nutritious snack like cut fruits or veggies to keep your energy up.
7. Digital Detox: Disconnect from screens for an hour and engage in analog activities.
8. Gratitude Practice: List three things you’re grateful for to cultivate a positive mindset.
9. DIY Spa Day: Create a spa-like atmosphere at home with facials, manicures, and relaxation.
10. Breathing Exercises: Practice deep breathing techniques to calm your mind and reduce anxiety.
11. Yoga Stretching: Incorporate gentle yoga stretches into your day to improve flexibility and posture.
12. Mindful Eating: Eat slowly and savor each bite, focusing on the sensory experience of eating.
13. Read for Pleasure: Dive into a book or article that interests you, away from work-related material.
14. Dance Break: Put on your favorite music and dance like nobody’s watching.
15. Artistic Expression: Engage in creative activities like drawing, painting, or coloring.
16. Social Connection: Reach out to a friend or family member for a heartfelt conversation.
17. Mindful Walking: Take a leisurely walk, paying attention to each step and your surroundings.
18. Hydration Reminder: Drink water throughout the day to stay hydrated and maintain focus.
19. Power Nap: Rest for 15-20 minutes to recharge and boost your productivity.
20. Stretch Breaks: Stand up and stretch your body every hour to prevent stiffness.
21. Affirmations: Repeat positive affirmations to boost your self-esteem and confidence.
22. Cook a Nourishing Meal: Prepare a balanced, home-cooked meal using wholesome ingredients.
23. Hobby Pursuit: Dedicate time to a hobby you enjoy, whether it’s playing an instrument or gardening.
24. Laugh Therapy: Watch a comedy show or read something funny to lighten your mood.
25. Bedtime Ritual: Wind down with a relaxing bedtime routine, such as reading or gentle stretching.

Remember, self-care is about finding activities that resonate with you and nourish your mind, body, and soul.

Source: plant therapy Blog

According to recent research,^1,2 nicotinamide³ (also known as niacinamide), a form of niacin (vitamin B3), enhances natural killer (NK) cells’ ability to defeat blood cancers.

Scientists have previously tried to use infusions of monoclonal antibodies mixed with NK cells as a novel treatment for blood cancers, with limited success. Now, researchers at the University of Minnesota have discovered that the ability of NK cells to destroy cancer cells can be significantly augmented by pretreating them with niacinamide.

Doing so upregulated a lymphocyte homing molecule called CD26L, which improved the antitumor functions of the NK cells in several ways. Unfortunately, the paper doesn’t specify the dose used to achieve these beneficial effects.

Niacinamide Boosts NK Cells’ Ability to Kill Cancer

As reported by Medical Xpress:⁴

“‘Allogeneic natural killer cell adoptive transfer has shown the potential to induce remissions in relapsed or refractory leukemias and lymphomas,’ writes Dr. Frank Cichocki and colleagues in the journal.

‘Strategies to enhance natural killer cell survival and function are needed to improve clinical efficacy. We demonstrated that natural killer cells cultured ex vivo with interleukin-15 — IL-15 — and nicotinamide exhibited stable induction of l-selectin, a lymphocyte adhesion molecule important for lymph node homing’ …

In the small preliminary study, Cichocki and collaborators found that nicotinamide not only enhances the activity of natural killer cells but boosts their persistence in the blood and bolsters the capability of these cells not only to hunt down cancer cells, but to handily destroy them.

The combination of nicotinamide-enhanced natural killer cells and monoclonal antibody treatment was safe in 30 patients, including 20 with relapsed or difficult-to-treat non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Among 19 patients with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, 11 demonstrated a complete response and three had a partial response within 28 days of treatment.⁵ Nicotinamide appears to protect the natural killer cells from oxidative stress, while enhancing their ability to home in on lymph nodes, the team found …

Natural killer cells treated with nicotinamide in the lab also demonstrated an increased ability to generate an inflammatory and toxic response against cancer cells.”

Niacinamide Restores NAD+ Levels

Another mechanism that can help explain how niacinamide improves the anticancer functions of NK cells is that it boosts the NAD+ (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide) level in the cells. As explained in the featured study:⁶

“Elevated NAD+ in NK cells cultured with NAM [niacinamide] may also account for their enhanced function. Recent work has shown that NAD+ concentrations are low in tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes relative to peripheral blood T cells, and NAD+ modulates human T cell function by regulating cellular energy metabolism.

In these studies, reduced NAD+ resulted in attenuated maximal respiratory capacity of mitochondria and concomitant decreases in adenosine 5′-diphosphate (ADP) and ATP.

In agreement with this work, we observed elevated ATP and increased mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation in NK cells cultured with NAM. These metabolic alterations correlated with enhanced natural cytotoxicity, ADCC, and inflammatory cytokine production.”

Niacinamide to the Rescue After Cardiac Arrest

That niacinamide boosts NAD+ has also been demonstrated in other studies. For example, a September 2023 animal study in PLOS ONE found that niacinamide improves survival after cardiac arrest, primarily by restoring tissue NAD+. As explained in the abstract:⁷

“Metabolic suppression in the ischemic heart is characterized by reduced levels of NAD+ and ATP. Since NAD+ is required for most metabolic processes that generate ATP, we hypothesized that nicotinamide restores ischemic tissue NAD+ and improves cardiac function in cardiomyocytes and isolated hearts and enhances survival in a mouse model of cardiac arrest.

Mouse cardiomyocytes were exposed to 30 min simulated ischemia and 90 min reperfusion. NAD+ content dropped 40% by the end of ischemia compared to pre-ischemia.

Treatment with 100 μM nicotinamide (NAM) at the start of reperfusion completely restored the cellular level of NAD+ at 15 min of reperfusion. This rescue of NAD+ depletion was associated with improved contractile recovery as early as 10 min post-reperfusion.

In a mouse model of cardiac arrest, 100 mg/kg NAM administered IV immediately after cardiopulmonary resuscitation resulted in 100% survival at 4 h as compared to 50% in the saline group.

In an isolated rat heart model, the effect of NAM on cardiac function was measured for 20 min following 18 min global ischemia. Rate pressure product was reduced by 26% in the control group following arrest.

Cardiac contractile function was completely recovered with NAM treatment given at the start of reperfusion. NAM restored tissue NAD+ and enhanced production of lactate and ATP, while reducing glucose diversion to sorbitol in the heart.

We conclude that NAM can rapidly restore cardiac NAD+ following ischemia and enhance glycolysis and contractile recovery, with improved survival in a mouse model of cardiac arrest.”

The 100 micromolar niacinamide solution used at the start of reperfusion equates to just 12.2 milligrams of niacinamide. But this was in an in-vitro cell study, not a human, and the key point is that this is still a very low dose and in line with the dose I have been recommending to optimize health, of 50 mg of niacinamide up to three times a day.

NAD+ Is Crucial for Optimal Health and Longevity

As detailed in “The Crucial Role of NAD+ in Optimal Health,” which features my interview with Nichola Conlon, Ph.D., a molecular biologist and antiaging specialist, NAD+ is one of the most important biomolecules in your body.

It’s involved in the conversion of food to energy, maintaining DNA integrity and ensuring proper cell function, including the maintenance and repair of cells.

Your NAD+ level declines with age, which is thought to be a major contributor to aging and age-related disease. The good news is there’s a simple and inexpensive way to boost your NAD+ level, namely niacinamide supplementation.

While other NAD+ precursors are typically recommended, like NR or NMN, they’re hundreds of times more expensive, and may be less effective. The reason I’m convinced niacinamide is the best NAD+ precursor is because it’s the immediate breakdown product of NAD+.

The rate limiting enzyme in the salvage pathway to restore niacinamide back to NAD+ is NAMPT. As you can see in the graphic below, niacinamide is first converted to NMN before NAD+. This is likely why many promote NMN.

However, the enzyme NMNAT1-3 that converts NMN to NAD+ is not the rate limiting enzyme. NAMPT controls how much NAD+ you make, so flooding your body with NMN is not going to be as useful as using small amounts of niacinamide and activating NAMPT.

Recent animal research⁸ demonstrated that a low dose of 2.5 mg per kilo of body weight daily for three weeks — which is about 170 mg a day for a 150-pound person — increased cellular NAD+ by 30%. So, taking 50 mg of niacinamide three times a day appears ideal for most.

Niacinamide for Heart Failure Prevention

Niacinamide may also act as a preventive against heart failure⁹ — again because heart failure is a localized symptom of energy deficiency and mitochondrial dysfunction. When your NAD+ level drops, your ATP level also drops, and this puts stress on the cardiomyocytes in your heart.

Cardiomyocytes are specialized cells in your heart that generate contractive force. Thusly stressed, the cardiomyocytes release pro-fibrotic mediators that further suppress mitochondrial function. Over time, this leads to cell death, collagen deposition and fibrosis, which are hallmarks of heart failure.

Research¹⁰ published in February 2023 found that replenishing NAD+ prevented this energetic dysfunction, and therefore the subsequent development of heart failure. Here, the human-equivalent of 3.5 mg per kilo of bodyweight was administered via daily injection for two months, but I believe that oral niacinamide might be just as effective, although you might have to use it for a longer period of time.

Niacinamide in Skin Cancer

Getting back to niacinamide’s potential role in cancer treatment, a 2015 study¹¹ found it helps protect your skin against ultraviolet radiation damage from the sun, thereby reducing your risk of skin cancer.

Three hundred eighty-six participants who’d had two or more nonmelanoma skin cancers in the previous five years were divided into two groups. The treatment group received 500 mg of niacinamide twice a day for 12 months while controls received a placebo.

The participants were evaluated by dermatologists at three-month intervals for 18 months. The primary end point was the number of new nonmelanoma skin cancers (i.e., basal-cell carcinomas plus squamous-cell carcinomas) during the 12-month intervention period.

At 12 months, the rate of new nonmelanoma skin cancers in the treatment group was 23% lower than among controls. They also had a 20% lower rate of new basal-cell carcinomas, and a 30% lower rate of new squamous-cell carcinomas. As a result, the authors concluded:

“Oral nicotinamide was safe and effective in reducing the rates of new nonmelanoma skin cancers and actinic keratoses in high-risk patients.”

A 2020 safety and efficacy review of niacinamide also pointed out that:¹²

“Nicotinamide (or niacinamide), a form of vitamin B3 that is often confused with its precursor nicotinic acid (or niacin), is a low-cost, evidence-based oral treatment option for actinic keratosis, squamous cell carcinomas, basal cell carcinomas, and bullous pemphigoid.”

General Niacinamide Recommendations

As a blanket recommendation for optimal health, I recommend taking 50 mg of niacinamide three times per day. Niacinamide will only cost you about 25 cents a month if you get it as a powder. Typically, one sixty-fourth of a teaspoon of niacinamide powder is about 50 mg.

The reason I recommend getting it in powder form is because in most supplement brands, the lowest available dose is 500 mg, and that will decrease NAD+ due to negative feedback on NAMPT, which is the opposite of what you’re looking for.

Also note that although niacinamide and niacin are both classified as vitamin B3, niacin will not activate NAMPT like niacinamide, so it is best to use niacinamide. Additionally, niacinamide, unlike niacin, will not cause flushing which is due to a large release of histamine.

Source: mercola rss

A healthy head of hair is widely regarded as a sign of beauty and vitality. So, for the significant number of men and women who experience hair loss and hair thinning, negative psychological consequences, including low self-esteem, anger and depression,¹ are common.

Hair also serves some important biological purposes, including cushioning your head against blows, keeping your scalp warm and providing a natural cover from excess sun. Heavy metals, including arsenic, mercury and zinc, are also excreted in your hair, serving as a detoxification aid.

With hair loss having effects that are more than skin deep, researchers have been on the hunt for products to stimulate hair growth. Here nature once again provides, with lavender oil coming out on top against the hair loss drug minoxidil (Rogaine).

Researchers Pit Lavender Oil Against FDA-Approved Hair Drug

In a study on mice, researchers from Korea set out to determine lavender oil’s effects as a hair growth stimulant compared to minoxidil, a drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that’s the most common treatment for androgenetic alopecia, a common form of hair loss.

There are three cycles of hair growth.² The anagen phase is the growth phase in which the matrix cells of the hair follicle are fully pigmented and undergoing vigorous growth activities. Catagen is the resting phase, when activity decreases.

In the third phase, telogen, the hair detaches from the follicle and falls out. During normal hair cycles, about 90% of hair follicles are in the anagen phase, 1% are in the catagen phase and 9% are in the telogen phase.

In the case of pattern hair loss, “There appears to be a dysfunction and imbalance in hair cycling, resulting in a reduced length of anagen phase, increased proportion of hair in catagen/telogen phase and a shift toward the production of fine, short hairs,” researchers explained in Clinical, Cosmetic and Investigational Dermatology.³

Topical minoxidil works by inducing resting hair follicles into the anagen phase, shortening the telogen phase and prolonging the anagen phase. This leads to an increase in hair follicle volume.⁴

Lavender oil, meanwhile, also has a number of active effects, due to compounds including linalyl acetate — which relaxes nerves — linalool, an antifungal, and geraniol. Traditionally, lavender oil is used for stress relief and fatigue, and evidence suggests it may be effective for cellular growth, skin reproduction and alopecia areata, an autoimmune disease that causes hair loss.⁵

Lavender Oil Works Better Than Rogaine for Hair Growth

For the Korean study, researchers applied lavender oil at concentrations of 3% or 5%, with minoxidil or jojoba oil as a control to the fur of mice five times a week for four weeks. Both lavender oil groups as well as the minoxidil group had a significantly increased number of hair follicles, deepened hair follicle depth and thickened dermal layer.⁶

“These results indicated that LO [lavender oil] has a marked hair growth-promoting effect, as observed morphologically and histologically … Thus, LO could be practically applied as a hair growth-promoting agent,” the researchers noted.⁷

Past research has found aromatherapy using lavender oil increased hair growth rates in people with alopecia areata.⁸ Massaging a mixture of essential oils, including lavender, into the scalp daily led to improvements in 44% of alopecia areata patients, compared to 15% of those in the control group.

“Treatment with these essential oils was significantly more effective than treatment with the carrier oil alone,” researchers wrote in Archives of Dermatology.⁹

Peppermint Oil Also Promotes Hair Growth

Treatments for hair loss are limited and those that are available are saddled with risks. Minoxidil, which was originally created as a drug for high blood pressure, may cause increased heart rate, difficulty breathing, weight gain, edema and dermatitis, itching and scaling of the scalp.¹⁰

Nontoxic support for hair loss is therefore urgently needed, and, along with lavender oil, peppermint oil is one such option. In a similar study on mice, researchers applied minoxidil, jojoba oil, saline or 3% peppermint oil to mice for four weeks.

Out of all the treatments, peppermint oil worked best, leading to the “most prominent hair growth effects.” This included a significant increase in dermal thickness, follicle number and follicle depth. Two biomarkers for enhanced hair growth — alkaline phosphatase and gene expression of insulin-like growth factor-1 — also significantly increased.

Not only did peppermint oil “remarkably” promote hair growth compared to saline and jojoba oil, but it did so “even faster than” minoxidil.¹¹ “These results suggest that PEO [peppermint oil] induces a rapid anagen stage and could be used for a practical agent for hair growth,” the team explained.¹² One way it works to promote hair growth is by relaxing vascular muscle, promoting blood circulation.¹³

Onion Juice Reverses Thinning Hair

Hair loss has complex underlying causes. It can occur with age and genetic factors, but stress and nutritional imbalances also play a role.¹⁴ In the case of alopecia areata, however, the immune system attacks healthy hair follicles, leading to varying degrees of hair loss.

Both genetics and environmental factors play a role in this autoimmune condition, but in the early stage, alopecia areata is associated with inflammation in the upper dermis skin layer.¹⁵ As such, topical garlic¹⁶ and onion juice may help. In one study, 23 people with alopecia areata applied onion juice twice daily for two months.

A control group of 15 people applied tap water over the same period. Significant differences were found, with onion juice leading to regrowth of terminal coarse hairs — the type that grows on your scalp and forms your eyelashes and eyebrows — after just two weeks.

By four weeks, 73.9% of those applying onion juice had hair re-growth, which increased to 86.9% by week six. Significantly more men (93.7%) experienced hair regrowth than women (71.4%). For comparison, only 13% of those in the tap water group had hair regrowth.¹⁷

“The present study showed that the use of crude onion juice gave significantly higher results with regard to hair regrowth than did tap water (P<0.0001), and that it can be an effective topical therapy for patchy alopecia areata,” the researchers concluded.¹⁸

Onion juice’s effectiveness of 86.9% is better than that of commonly used topical and systemic therapies for alopecia areata, including BCG immunotherapy, which has an effectiveness rate of 69%, and topical immunotherapy, which is 58% effective.¹⁹

Onions are rich in anti-inflammatory quercetin, which also enhances the expression of the antioxidant enzyme catalase²⁰ in your scalp. This helps break down hydrogen peroxide that contributes to cell damage and thinning hair.²¹ Antigenic competition — the inhibition of the immune system’s response to one antigen when another antigen is administered — may also help explain onion’s hair growth-stimulating effects. According to the team:²²

“Previous reports have stated that onion can induce allergic contact dermatitis in some individuals; however, more recent studies showed that onion extract can inhibit skin allergic reactions, suggesting that onion juice may induce an immunological reaction, possibly as a mild form of dermatitis that can stimulate hair re-growth through antigenic competition.

… If there were a relative lack of T-suppressor cells in the lymphocytic infiltrate of alopecia areata, the generation of non-specific T-suppressor cells might inhibit the ongoing autoimmune reaction. Another possible mechanism, is that onions belong to the genus Allium, which is rich in sulphur and phenolic compounds, both of which are known skin irritants. Onion may cause an irritant contact dermatitis.”

Three More Natural Options for Hair Loss

Applying potentially toxic topical drugs to your scalp is not the only option to stimulate hair growth. Other nontoxic options include:

1. Ginseng — This herb and its active compounds ginsenosides are known to promote hair growth.²³ They help regulate the expression and activity of proteins involved in hair-cycling phases, including the induction of anagen and delaying of catagen phases.²⁴
2. Pine bark extract — This natural compound is heralded for its ability to improve hair density. A double blind, randomized, placebo‐controlled study revealed pine park extract increased hair density by 30% among postmenopausal women after two months of treatment, and 23% after six months, with researchers suggesting it “might have the potential to reduce hair loss in postmenopausal women.”²⁵
3. Scalp massage — The relaxing stretching of skin on your scalp is a form of mechanical stress that may lead to increased hair thickness.²⁶ Adding diluted rosemary oil to your scalp massage may improve results even more, with research showing it also works as well as minoxidil to increase hair count in people with hair loss.²⁷ If you prefer, lavender oil or peppermint oil can also be used.

Nutritional factors should also be considered. When researchers assessed patients from the Center for Dermatology and Hair Diseases who arrived with complaints of hair loss, they found that 38% of the women had a biotin deficiency.²⁸ Biotin is a cofactor for an enzyme that is crucial in the metabolism of glucose, fatty acids and amino acids. It’s also used in the production of hormones and cholesterol.²⁹

You can find biotin in spinach, broccoli and sweet potatoes, as well as egg yolks, organ meats and dairy products. Malnutrition, iron deficiency anemia and thyroid disease are also linked to hair loss, as is telogen effluvium, which is when hair falls out after a major body stress. Side effects from some drugs, medical illness and a fungal infection of the scalp can also cause hair loss.

So, while applying lavender and peppermint oils, and onion juice, topically may help to support hair regrowth, it’s important to assess the underlying reasons why your hair is falling out, and seek a comprehensive lifestyle strategy to resolve it.

Source: mercola rss

In this interview, Dr. Nasha Winters, a naturopathic physician who specializes in supporting patients with cancer, discusses the importance of optimizing your metabolic health because, as she notes:

“All the diseases affecting us today — cardiovascular disease, dementias and Alzheimer’s, obesity, diabetes, cancer — all of these things have a common denominator, which is metabolic [dysfunction].”

In July 2022, a study¹ in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology from Tufts showed that 14 out 15 Americans, over 93% of the population, are metabolically inflexible. While this is bad news, for sure, current statistics are likely even worse.

The study used data from 2018, prior to the pandemic, which radically worsened metabolic health, so, in all likelihood, well over 95%, or 19 out of 20 people, are now metabolically unfit.

Needless to say, the health care costs associated with metabolic dysfunction will eventually bankrupt us, both individually and nationally, if we don’t begin to address metabolic health in earnest.

October 10 Is Metabolic Health Day

To raise awareness about the importance of metabolic health, Winters has launched an International Metabolic Health Day initiative to be held October 10, 2023,² and hopefully every year hereafter. The campaign has been joined by dozens of organizations, including research organizations, hospitals, health-focused foundations and companies.

“We hope it’s the first of a grand movement,” Winters says, “and we’re very proud to be partnered with so many people like yourself in getting this information out there because we’re in trouble if we don’t. We hope within the next few weeks or months, this does become an officially adopted day internationally that we can come back to again and again.

October 10 also happens to be Mental Health Day, and we didn’t realize that, but it’s actually a beautiful merge of these two because we’re finding [that] the underpinnings of even our mental health relates to metabolic health.”

What Is Metabolic Health Really About?

As noted by Winters, conventional medicine pays lip service to metabolic health, but so many of the guidelines are misguided and miss the mark. The five conventional factors of metabolic health are blood sugar, cholesterol, triglycerides, waist circumference and blood pressure,³ but what conventional medicine considers “normal” is often far from optimal.

“The ranges that our standard of care is giving are just too lax. They’re still saying it’s normal to have a blood glucose of 100. But that’s kind of the highway to the next step of things. They’re focused more on the overall cholesterol and overall LDL, but really the issues we want to look at are more the triglycerides and the HDL.”

Most doctors and laymen are also completely unaware of how linoleic acid (LA), an omega-6 fat found in seed oils and most processed foods, decimate mitochondrial function and metabolic health.

I suspect less than 0.5% of Americans have optimally healthy LA levels, and simply getting people to dramatically reduce their LA intake could go a long way toward improving metabolic health and lowering our chronic disease burden. So, we have a way to go when it comes to educating people on how to become metabolically healthy.

Key Metabolic Health Tests

One of the best ways to identify metabolic flexibility and health is a fasting insulin test. Ideally, you want it to be below 3. My last fasting insulin test was 1.9. I’ve been educating people on how to resolve their insulin resistance with diet and exercise for several decades now, but what do you do if you’re already eating a healthy diet, exercising, and all of your metabolic parameters look good, yet you have an insulin level of 7 or 8?

In this case, the core culprit may be stress, because when cortisol goes up, insulin rises with it. Cortisol release is actually a rescue mechanism to ensure you don’t die from low blood sugar.

To identify tease out if stress is a culprit, Winters typically starts with a complete blood count (CBC) test, because chronically depleted white blood cells is often a sign of chronic stress and high cortisol.

She also recommends getting an AM cortisol test after fasting for 12 to 16 hours. You don’t want to fast longer than that, because after 16 hours of fasting, cortisol will naturally start to rise.

“That morning cortisol and that fasted state is going to tell us a lot,” she says. “[AM cortisol of] 15 to 17 is my happy place range. There is a problem if it’s lower … If somebody has low [cortisol, i.e., below 15, fasting], that could elude they’ve been in a long-term stress response … I often see that.

I see that in folks who’ve really been through the wringer with a lot of conventional oncology therapies, for instance. It really wipes them out over time. In the beginning, cortisol will be elevated. If people are revving above the 17 mark, they’re kind of in a ‘run from the saber-tooth tiger’ [mode] on a pretty regular basis.

[Using] an adrenal stress index (ASI) test, where you’re checking [your cortisol] first thing in the morning, mid-morning, mid-afternoon and right before bed, you can see the pattern of the circadian rhythm, and a lot of people in our world today have what we call a switched circadian rhythm.

Cortisol and their insulin are actually really high at night, which makes it difficult to fall asleep and stay asleep … The other thing that can happen is the diurnal rhythm starts to spike early.

That 3 a.m. wake up call, when you’re waking with a busy brain, that’s going to shoot up your cortisol and insulin levels as well and create this dawn effect with elevations in your blood glucose and insulin levels. So we can get a little bit detective-like with this and really understand the pattern of the individual so we know where to best support them.”

Carbs Help Normalize Cortisol

Importantly, if you’ve been on a strict low-carb diet long term, you’re much more likely to have elevated cortisol. Low-carb is technically anything under 150 grams of carbs a day, but some people take it below 50 grams or even 20 grams.

Provided you’re generally healthy, you need carbs to minimize your cortisol response. I detailed the reasons for this in “Important Information About Low Carb, Cortisol and Glucose.”

As mentioned, most people are metabolically inflexible and could definitely benefit from a temporary low-carb approach. The key word there is “temporary.” Provided you don’t have cancer, once you’ve regained your metabolic flexibility, I recommend raising your carb intake to about 55% or so, and lowering your fat intake to 30% or less of your daily calories.

“If you have dealt with a cancer diagnosis and you have a different metabolic process than you do in a non-cancer environment, you may need to restrict carbs in that window,” she says.

“People like myself and the folks that I train, we know to watch for when we need to alter the diet to the individual’s needs. I recognize the differences in the metabolism of somebody who’s dealing with cancer and the metabolism of somebody who’s not. And so when you get yourself flexible in the healthy state, you have and should be able to tolerate carbohydrates.”

Should You Stay on Low-Carb, or Transition Out?

That said, certain cancer patients may benefit from staying on a low-carb diet relatively long term to avoid recurrence and/or metastasis. Winters explains:

“There is biochemical individuality, epigenetic individuality. So for instance, some of the phenotypes such as the ADIPOQ gene, the ACSL1 gene, those basically wire you to be diabetic …

In the oncology world, if we see PIK3CA 3-kinase issues, that is 100% pushed by glycolytic [metabolism] and it’s in 70% of cancer types. It also makes for a much more aggressive and progressing cancer and a much higher recurrence rate. So we’re very, very careful with folks [who have] that …

You can also retest, because over time, when you’re treating that body, it may no longer express that in its tissues. So we check that periodically … A lot of people think that it is static and forever, but you can change that with whatever therapies you’re introducing into the system. And if that changes, then you can obviously change the way you’re going to feed it or not feed it …

My husband has a lot of those SNIPS around the diabetes. Everyone in his family dies of diabetes, complications of diabetes and cancer. He loves protein. He is incredibly active. He’s incredibly fit. But if he gets too much red meat, his insulin goes sky high. So he has the genes for that.

We have this belief system that, ‘I’m not taking any carbs in [so my insulin will be low]’ but gluconeogenesis can come from even too much protein in certain phenotypes …

I would love to be a vegetarian, that’s what my palate wants, but my body says no way. And as I’m moving into perimenopause, my body needs different things. I know I need more protein now … my body then uses the gluconeogenesis of the protein to fuel me versus that of the simple carbs.”

So are there any signs to look for that might indicate it’s appropriate to add more carbs back in? Winters suggests checking your heart rate variability (HRV), “because that’s going to show you the interplay between stress and insulin.”

“If it starts to drop below 70, you’ve got some issues. You really want it above 70 to show that you’ve got optimal regulation of your nervous system and of your metabolic system. It’s a very elegant, simple [test] …

One other clue is, if you have a difficult time falling asleep, that’s a metabolic insulin issue more often than not. And if you have a hard time staying asleep, if you wake often after you’ve gone deep into sleep, that often suggests a cortisol problem.

So, that’s where we start to go, OK, your cortisol is spiking, you might need a little more carbohydrate into your evening meal to help you keep that cortisol down throughout the night.”

How to Improve Your HRV

As for how to improve your HRV, Winters offers the following suggestions:

Eat your last meal at least two hours before bed.	Take a walk after each meal, even if it’s only for 10 minutes, to help your body process the food.
Optimize your sleep — Sleep in pitch darkness and eliminate all electronic devices from your bedroom.	Watch the sunrise and sunset.
Turn the Wi-Fi off at night.	If you’re exposed to electronic screens before sunrise or after sunset, mitigate the blue light by wearing blue blocking glasses or install blue blocker software like IRIS.

Linoleic Acid Is a Metabolic Saboteur

In July 2023, I published a peer-reviewed paper on LA. In the process of getting it published, one of the peer-reviewers brought up a really good point. Initially, my coauthor and I suggested the reason why LA is so inflammatory is because it’s converted into arachidonic acid, which is a classic proinflammatory omega-6 fat.

As it turns out, that’s not the case, and the reviewer supplied good data showing that. Now, LA does cause inflammation, but not by way of arachidonic acid. LA has two double bonds, and these double bonds are highly perishable and susceptible to oxidative damage, and when those double bonds are damaged, they produce oxidative metabolites and toxic reactive aldehydes that damage the tissues.

So, that’s one mechanism. But there’s an even more fundamental component, and that is that PUFAs, LA in particular, are antimetabolic. The fat gets integrated into your cellular machinery and decimates your mitochondrial function through reductive stress.

Yet another mechanism is that PUFAs increase intracellular calcium concentrations, which in turn increases superoxide and nitric oxide, which when combined forms into peroxynitrite — one of the most damaging free radicals we know of. So, I believe excessive LA consumption is a primary driver of chronic disease, including cancer.

The main source of LA is processed food, which is probably why sugar got the blame, as processed foods are notoriously high in both sugar and PUFAs. Sugar is not the culprit, however. LA is. So, cutting out LA is, I believe, one of the most effective ways to improve your metabolic health.

Keep in mind that this can take years, as the half-life of LA is in your body is 650 days. That said, you’ll likely start feeling better within a few weeks or months. If you are diligent about limiting your LA intake to 5 grams or less a day (mine is below 2 grams), you could in less than three years get your LA to a healthy level.

Ambitious Goals

Winters has several ambitious goals, one of which is to develop a sophisticated commercial assay to assess mitochondrial function, because we really don’t have a good tool for that as of yet.

“We’ve got some good surrogates, but we think we’re on the right track to get something more tangible … that can really help elucidate what’s happening with the patient, to actually show us if we’re being effective with whatever therapies we’re using, and also give us an early warning sign if we need to change gears,” Winters says.

“I think that’s one of the big things, especially in the oncology world. By the time it’s big enough and loud enough to capture our attention, that can be life-taking for many people. So, we want to be ahead of that.”

Winters suspects mitochondria are nonhomogenous, in that they may be tissue specific, and some of the novel delivery systems they’re investigating can, in fact, target mitochondria in specific tissues.

“I think we’re going to get to a very intricate and specific approach here,” she says. “We’ve got a lot of interest and passion to get some answers to know how to individuate the therapies in a way that’s meaningful, and stop that confusion of ‘Why does it work in this person, not in this person, and why does this diet work here and not here?’ I think we’re going to get much closer to those answers.”

Winters is also building a research institute in Arizona, which will be funded entirely by private donations and research grants. It’ll be housed in an Arizona State University complex. They’ve also acquired a 1,200-acre piece of land an hour and a half further south, which will be the home of a regenerative farming project and the Metabolic Terrain Institute of Health, which will be both a hospital and a research center.

“It’ll be the first of its kind — a truly residential, truly integrative oncology hospital and research institute,” Winters says. “There are places where you can go and stay and get ‘alternative therapy,’ but most of them are separated out.

You cannot also get your metronomic chemo, your biopsy, your tissue assays, along with your hyperbarics, hyperthermia, mistletoe, along with dietary interventions that are specific to your [case].

You have to go to multiple places to get all of that taken care of today, and maybe even multiple countries, because we’re limited in some of the things we can access here in the United States. So, we want to have a place where people can come, do a deep dive assessment and actually start their treatment, and then be able to go back home.

We are envisioning folks staying with us two to three weeks to get the full workup, initiate the program, and then getting them sent back home to the growing number of clinicians we are training worldwide in how to support patients with this metabolic approach.

So it’s more than just a hospital or a clinic. It’s more than just a lab. It’s a movement. It’s about changing health care as we know it, and it’s about impacting oncology outcomes in a way that we’ve never been able to do before.”

Once the funding is secured, they expect to be up and running in as little as 18 months. The institute will not accept any kind of insurance. Instead, they are fundraising for patient grants so that patients who don’t have the financial means can still get the care they need.

As noted by Winters, “Right now, truly integrative oncology care is only available to those with resources, and that shouldn’t be the case.” If you feel so inclined, consider making a donation to the Metabolic Terrain Institute of Health instead of throwing your money away at Pink Ribbon fundraisers.

How to Celebrate Metabolic Health Day

So, in closing, mark your calendars, and get prepared to assess your metabolic health October 10. If you don’t have a doctor who can order the needed tests, there are many direct-to-consumer labs you can use.

Tests to start with include vitamin D, CBC, comprehensive metabolic panel (CMP) and fasting insulin. For a deeper look, add on C-reactive protein high-sensitivity (hs-CRP) to get a sense of your inflammatory response and assess your risk of coronary artery disease. What else can you do on Metabolic Health Day?

“Be conscious of what you’re putting into your body,” Winters says. “Read the labels on your food and see how much of that linoleic acid is sneaking in. See how much processed food is still hiding out in your fridge, freezer and pantry and get rid of it.

Going back to what your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents were eating is a simple strategy to start weeding things out of your life so you can really impact change in your mitochondria.”

More Information

You can learn more about Winters’ approaches in her 2017 book, “The Metabolic Approach to Cancer: Integrating Deep Nutrition, the Ketogenic Diet and Nontoxic Bio-Individualized Therapies.”

If you would like to engage her services, or more specifically, have your clinician consult with her, visit website, drnasha.com. At the bottom of the homepage, you’ll find a patient resource section with free tools. Go ahead and download the free guide describing the five steps to take when diagnosed with cancer.

Your clinician will need to go to the doctor section to sign up for a consultation. Should your doctor refuse to consider a consultation to learn about some of the options, Winters may be able to help you find a local physician that is receptive to collaboration.

Source: mercola rss

Editor’s Note: This article is a reprint. It was originally published October 15, 2017.

Eating real, nonprocessed food is the key to sustaining good health, but even when it comes to whole food, its quality is largely determined by how it was grown. Certified organic food is recommended to avoid toxic contaminants such as pesticides. But even organic foods may be lacking in important nutrients if grown in nutrient-poor soils.

To truly build good topsoil, you have to implement regenerative farming methods, many of which are not automatically required by organic standards.

Biodynamic certification, which is a step above organic, is the topic of today’s discussion with Elizabeth Candelario, managing director for Demeter,¹ a global Biodynamic certification agency. Candelario spent most of her career in the wine industry. While she was working as a marketing director for a winery in Sonoma County, the winery decided to transition from conventional to Biodynamic farming, which is how her interest in Biodynamics began.

“Here in the United States, the wine industry was the early adopter in Biodynamic,” Candelario says. “The reason for that was really twofold. One is winemakers couldn’t help but notice that the best wines in the world were coming from Biodynamic vineyards, wineries like Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and Zind-Humbrecht. Another reason is that a lot of wineries, at least back in the day, were family-owned …

You had winery families that were interested in passing that winery down from one generation to the next. The best example of that is the Frey Vineyards up in Mendocino County, where they literally have four generations of family living [there] … They were really thinking about the ecological aspect of what they were doing and how they were farming. So, it wasn’t unique that the winery I worked at chose [Biodynamic] …

That experience — I not only witnessed the transformation of the estate, but I also witnessed a transformation in the people we were working with — was, for me, emerging between my career [in] the wine industry and my interest in social mission … I joined Demeter about almost 10 years ago.”

The History of Biodynamic Farming

Organic is well-known in the U.S. market. Biodynamic is a fairly unknown concept, although its history spans back nearly nine decades. Biodynamic farming is a spiritual-ethical-ecological approach to agriculture initially developed by Austrian scholar Rudolf Steiner,² Ph.D. (1861-1925).

It’s an approach that can provide far superior harvests compared to conventional chemical-based agriculture, while simultaneously healing the Earth. As organic farming, the concept of biodynamic emerged in response to the industrialization of agriculture. Candelario explains:

“Steiner was a polyglot. He was a very smart man. He was interested in economics and social systems. He’s most known here in the U.S. as the founder of Waldorf education. Toward the end of his life, he was approached by a group of farmers that were very concerned about what they were seeing on their farms. This was back in the 1920s …

After World War I, chemical companies got very crafty repurposing nitrogen that had been used to make bombs as fertilizer, and nerve gas as synthetic pesticides. They had stockpiles of these chemicals and realized they had application on farms. This was around the time of the industrialization of the manufacturing model. The idea was that you wanted to produce the highest output at the lowest cost.

It’s not surprising that that kind of industrial view also influenced the way people started thinking about their farms. This idea of importing things from the outside, these natural resources, to increase production really mirrored that industrial model. But what was happening was that farmers were really beginning to notice that their seeds weren’t germinating.

Their animals weren’t as healthy. The food wasn’t as good. Because of that, they approached Steiner and asked him for his perspective on what was happening on their farms. He answered them in what is now referred to as ‘The Agriculture Course or The Foundations for a Renewal of Agriculture’ — a series of lectures he delivered.”

The Farm as a Living Organism

Steiner’s view was as simple as it was revolutionary. He said, “You need to stop thinking of your farms as factories and envision them as living organisms — self-contained, self-sustaining, following the cycles of nature, and able to create their own health and vitality out of the living dynamics of the farm.” Seventeen years later, Lord Northbourne coined the term “organic” based on Steiner’s view of the farm as an organism. So, Biodynamic is really the origin of organic farming.

Both focus on bringing life back to the soil and avoiding the decimation of the topsoil with synthetic fertilizers, which are toxic to microbial life. Demeter was started by a small number of farmers who attended Steiner’s agriculture course. “They decided that what he had talked about was so important that they wanted to codify it in an agricultural standard,” Candelario says.

To ensure the standard would maintain its integrity in the marketplace, they decided to develop a strict certification program. Demeter was formed in 1928 in Germany and remains the oldest ecological certification organization in the world.

Even back then, they had a formal certification process and a certification label, Candelario explains. While largely unknown in the U.S., Demeter is well-recognized within Central Europe. In Germany, 10% of the organic farmland is Biodynamic. There are even Demeter stores.

I’ve fully embraced the Biodynamic concept and am converting the Mercola line of products from organic to Biodynamic certified and locating sources of raw materials to do that. Many are still not available within the U.S., but we’re in the slow process of conversion. One of the Biodynamic products we’ll release this fall comes from an Egyptian farm called SEKEM.

“SEKEM just celebrated their 40th anniversary and their commitment to social mission is incredible,” Candelario notes. “Because of the values implicit in Biodynamic agriculture, you see lots of examples of projects that have a huge social mission component.”

Organic Versus Biodynamic

One of the easiest ways to grasp the concept of biodynamic is to think of it in the context of organic standards. While similar, there are distinct differences between the two standards. Organic standards are set by the National Organic Program (NOP); Demeter sets the standards for Biodynamic. Candelario explains:

“Organic is really about what you don’t do. In organic, you don’t use synthetic fertilizers or pesticides. You don’t use genetically modified organism (GMO) seed. You do everything you can to avoid GMO contamination; no sewer sludge on the farm and no irradiation of products.

What’s happening with the burgeoning interest in organic, which is a really good thing, is there’s a lot of pressure on that standard, so you have products coming into the market that do the minimum of what is required, sitting right next to another product that’s also labeled organic that does much more.

Biodynamics fundamentally maintains the core principle that the farm is a living organism. We start by saying that the organic standard is the base to the Demeter standard. If a farm is Demeter certified, it means that it’s met the organic standard, even if it’s not certified organic.

But then, the standard is much broader, maintaining that idea of the farm as a closed system. You look for solutions to disease, pest and weed control to come out of the farm system itself.”

Biodynamic Standards Require Entire Farm to Qualify

In organic, a 10,000-acre conventional farm that does not use prohibited materials on 1,000 of its acres can get organic certification for those 1,000 acres. To qualify for Biodynamic certification, the entire farm must meet the standard, as the whole farm is viewed as an integrated living organism.

Ten percent of that farmland must also be set aside for cultivation of biodiversity. This can be accomplished by leaving natural oak groves or waterways, or it could be created through insectaries and hedgerows.

“If a farmer is having a fertility issue, in conventional farming, a conventional farmer might say, ‘Let’s just bring in those synthetic fertilizers.’ An organic farmer might say, ‘Let me look and see what organic fertilizers I can bring into the farm.’

That’s a step better, but you’re still mining a natural resource and importing it to the farm. A biodynamic farmer’s going to say, ‘What is it about my farm system that isn’t capable of delivering the fertility that my crops need?’

They answer that from a biodynamic toolbox, which may be green manures, composting, cover cropping and incorporating animals. The mindset is quite different. There are eight Biodynamic preparations. They’re made from materials a farmer can find on the farm. They’re used as compost amendments, foliar sprays and soil amendments.

In organic, there’s just one processing standard for all products. In Biodynamic, there are 16 processing standards. The intention is to allow the integrity of the agricultural ingredients to define the finished product, so you have high content of Biodynamic ingredients with minimal processing. It’s a real foodie standard.”

Having animals integrated on the farm is a core principle of Biodynamic farming, but it doesn’t end there. Great focus is also placed on animal welfare. While it’s possible to gain Biodynamic certification for a farm that does not raise livestock, it’s actually quite difficult to achieve optimal soil health without the integration of herbivores. They’re really an integral part of a self-sustaining system.

The Certification Process

The certification process itself is very similar to organic. There is a base standard that needs to be met, regardless of size (and there is no size limitation). A farm or brand that wants to get a product certified submits an application. There is an inspection of the farm or the processing facility to ensure that the standard is met, and each farm or facility is re-inspected on an annual basis.

The certification cost is also very similar to organic, ranging from $250 to $750. Annual inspection costs are minimized to the extent that it’s possible by pooling inspections in one geographic area, allowing members to share the cost of an inspector.

Moving Forward

A catch-22 preventing Biodynamic from spreading faster is the shortage of certified products in the national marketplace. Most Demeter members are small family farms that only sell locally or regionally.

“We realized we really needed to focus on getting some national brands to get products in the market so that we could use those products to educate consumers,” Candelario says. Five years ago, Demeter started working with Whole Foods to select companies and brands whose values aligned with Biodynamic.

“[We’d] approach them to say, ‘Would you consider bringing these Biodynamic products into the market before consumers even know what it is?’

It’s a wonderful story because we now have 25, some of the leading national brands — soon to be joined by you as well — like Lundberg Family Farms, Lakewood Juice, The Republic of Tea, that have worked really hard and invested a lot to bring these products into the market.

I would say the supply chain understands Biodynamic — the brands we’ve talked to, the retailers and other important players. But we’re just on the verge of really doing the consumer education that we need to do.”

The key, and the intention of this interview, is to help you understand and recognize the importance of the Demeter certification label. That’s really going to be the new platinum standard for high-quality, nutrient-dense food. While many Biodynamic ingredients must currently be sourced overseas, from communities like SEKEM in Egypt, the goal is to grow most of these ingredients right here in the U.S. for American-based brands.

Healing the Planet Through Agriculture

As noted by Candelario, the vision of Demeter is to heal the planet through agriculture, and we can do that by transitioning farming from conventional to organic and, ultimately, to Biodynamic. At present, the marketplace is being used to drive the adoption of Biodynamics on the farm, which is why it’s so important for consumers to understand its principles, its benefits and to start asking for certified products. Demand is ultimately what drives change the fastest.

In the case of Biodynamic, there are many reasons to support it. Foodists and those seeking optimal health will want it because it’s a mark of superior quality and nutrition. Animal rights activists would be wise to support it as it places strong emphasis on animal welfare. Environmentalists will want it because of its healing impact on the Earth and normalizing effect on weather.

“Paul Hawkin just wrote a book called ‘Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming.’ I really recommend it. In that book, he talks about how, in order to address climate change, we need to do two things. We need to address emissions.

That is the burning of fossil fuels, the agricultural activities that actually release carbon into the air. The other half of the equation is we have to sequester carbon. We have to pull that excess carbon that’s in the air back down and into the soil.

Guess what happens when we pull carbon out of the air? It happens every day when the sun is shining. That’s what photosynthesis does. It takes that carbon from the air and pushes it down into the soil. Not only are we sequestering carbon, we’re making more healthy and nutritious food.

In conventional [farming], sequestering carbon doesn’t happen because conventional fertilizers stop that process where the plant is basically rewarded by the microbiota in the soil to pull that carbon out of the air.

Synthetic fertilizers kill the microbiota in the soil. You don’t have that carbon drawdown that you’re looking for in conventional agriculture. By definition, the more carbon you put in the soil, the more you’re building a resilient soil. You’re building a water conservative soil. You’re building the potential to have incredibly healthy food.”

Soil Is an Incredibly Efficient Carbon Sink

Measuring the organic content of soil is an easy way to assess soil health. Most conventional farms have an organic content below 2%. Virgin Midwestern prairie used to be 7 to 8%. Good soil has a deep black color, because carbon is black; it’s rich and actually smells good.

As noted by Candelario, a French initiative called the 4 Per 1,000 Initiative³ found that if we were to increase the carbon (the organic matter) in all agricultural land around the world by a mere 0.4% per year, the annual increase of CO2 in the atmosphere would be halted, because so much carbon would be drawn from the atmosphere.

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Source: 4p1000.org

Steiner’s Soil Amendments

One facet of Biodynamic farming that might raise a few eyebrows is Steiner’s soil amendments, some of which may sound fairly mystical at first. For example, one involves packing dung into a cow’s horn that is then buried during a specific moon phase.

The use of these kinds of Biodynamic preparations is a requirement of the Demeter standard, and while they may sound strange, there’s solid support for their use. (Farmers who for whatever reason cannot make these preparations can purchase them from Josephine Porter Institute⁴ or Biodynamic Source.⁵)

“You can understand the preparations on a very practical level,” Candelario says. “There is preparation 500, which is taking cow manure, putting it in a cow horn and burying it over the winter. There is preparation 501, which is taking silica, putting that in a cow horn and burying it over the summer. And then preparation 502 through 508, which are basically herbs — chamomile and valerian — those are used as compost amendment.

[The] analogy I like to use is to think about a sourdough starter … It’s a catalyst. And when you think about the idea of the farmer not being dependent on chemicals … and saying, ‘How can I affect the fertility of my farm, the health of my compost pile, just from the materials I can find on my farm?’ These materials were things that farmers already had on their farms.

[Let’s] talk about the 500 — First of all, putting it under the ground in the winter creates a constant temperature. It’s the refrigerator where that cow manure can age. When you pull it up and you pull that out on the counter, it smells like chocolate. It’s this beautiful material.

It’s put in water. It’s dynamitized by creating a vortex; really stirring it, and then it’s spread on the soil. It’s sprayed as a tea. [You use] one cow horn’s worth of manure per acre. We have research on our website that shows increased microbial life in the soil based on that. That’s really not surprising when you think about it. The silica is used as a foliar spray.”

More Information

As organic standards are becoming increasingly watered down, there’s an intensifying need for a more robust standard that cannot easily be bastardized. The USDA Organic label simply does not represent regenerative agriculture, and it’s important to realize this. Many organic farms are not even using cover crops, let alone integrating holistic herd management. Biodynamic certification fills this need, and really surpasses even the most stringent organic standards ever devised.

Again, key features of Biodynamic are the facts that the entire farm must qualify; it must operate as a self-sustaining whole; a portion of the land must be set aside for biodiversity; and animal welfare is addressed. I am actually in the process of converting the vacant lot next to my home to become certified Biodynamic.

For more details, please see Demeter-USA.org. You’ll find the standards listed in the “For Farmers” section. The website also provides a directory of certified farms and brands. This directory can also be found on BiodynamicFood.org.

Demeter’s U.S.-based sister organization, the Biodynamic Association, provides a lot of educational material as well, including an interactive Biodynamic webinar series, video and audio lectures and a quarterly Biodynamics Journal. There’s also an international Biodynamic Association.

I really think there’s a clarion call right now, especially for the natural food industry, to focus on regenerative and Biodynamic agriculture. Because at the end of the day, Biodynamic farms are uniquely suited to address carbon sequestration in a way that other industries are not.

The good news is that consumers have tremendous power when it comes to driving this change. Every time you shop for food, you’re voting for one agricultural system or another, so make deliberate, intentional choices.

Source: mercola rss

Two of the themes I’ve repeatedly tried to illustrate in my writings are the widespread lack of critical thinking in medicine and the pervasive propaganda apparatus that in many ways has taken its place. I believe both of these are particularly relevant to the current attempts to revive the COVID response.

For example, when someone (thanks to effective propaganda) has a monopoly over the truth, it shields their actions from scrutiny because no one will be able to question if what’s being done makes any sense. Since many of the COVID mitigation policies made no sense, those who became aware of their nonsensical nature in turn refused to follow them, but since many others were shielded from that information, they happily complied with everything.

In this article, I would like to examine some of the major deficits in critical thinking I observed throughout the COVID response in the hope we can avoid making those mistakes again.

Foundational Epidemiology

When COVID first started, there were a variety of unknowns about the virus. One of the most important ones was if it had a droplet or aerosol spread. Some viruses, like influenza (the flu) spread through being attached to water droplets, and for those viruses, “targeting” water droplet spread to varying degrees mitigates their transmission.

For example, while viruses are infinitely smaller than the gaps in a cloth mask, water droplets are not, so if someone wears a cloth mask, the cloth fiber will inhibit the expulsion of water droplets from the mask wearer, and by extension the degree to which they spread influenza. Likewise, the distance water droplets can travel is limited to around 6 feet, as the droplets quickly fall to the ground, so maintaining distance between people reduces the spread of those viruses.

Finally, droplet with viruses will attach to surfaces, after which point, they can be picked up by someone physically touching the surface.

Conversely, if a virus is aerosolized (meaning it freely floats in and travels through the air), none of the above applies. Instead it will spread everywhere, hang around in the air long after someone has left, and penetrates most of the barriers designed to block it.

Aerosolized pathogens are thus known to be much more contagious and the hospitals have much stricter isolation protocols to prevent their spread within the hospital (tuberculosis and measles are the two classic pathogens known for this).

As it so happened, from the start of the pandemic, there was very strong evidence COVID-19 spread through aerosols — for example at the end of January 2020, the Diamond Princess cruise ship experienced one of the earliest COVID outbreaks and was quarantined. The outbreak on the ship was closely studied by experts around the world as it had inadvertently provided the perfect experimental conditions to study how COVID-19 was transmitted.

One of the many observations made was that people who remained in their rooms caught COVID-19, which suggested the virus was spreading through the ventilation system and was thus aerosolized.

Subsequently, numerous other observations also emerged suggesting aerosolized transmission, such as outbreaks occurring where individual indoors were 18 times more likely to catch the virus indoors than those outdoors along with numerous cases of individuals catching COVID-19 from people they were far over 6 feet away from.

By the time the Diamond Princess outbreak happened, I was relatively certain aerosols were a key route of transmission. Yet, despite numerous parties petitioning the WHO with evidence of aerosol transmission, the WHO insisted that only droplet transmission was occurring, and sent out numerous statements dismissing the aerosol hypothesis. Eventually, two years later, the WHO changed their position and quietly announced that aerosol transmission also was occurring.

This monumental mistake prompted Nature (a premier scientific journal) to conduct an investigation to determine exactly how this happened and confirmed that the WHO had ignored an overwhelming volume of evidence for aerosol transmission during that period.

Note: For those of you who cannot view the full article, a summary by Mercola can be viewed here.

This is very similar to many of the other profound lapses of judgement we saw throughout COVID-19 (we will cover throughout this article) where longstanding scientific principles and clear scientific evidence were thrown out the window so a COVID-19 response at odds with the actual science could be conducted.

In short, had aerosol transmission have been recognized, there would have been no justification for either masking or social distancing.

Note: In a 3/21/21 editorial by Scott Gottlieb (one of Trump’s FDA commissioners) stated that no one knew where the arbitrary 6 foot recommendation came from and Gottlieb’s best guess was that it originated from the mistaken assumption that SARS-CoV-2 spread through water droplets.

My best guess is that social distancing originated from a high school sophomore’s 2006 science fair project, and like many things to come in the pandemic industry, was based off of wildly inaccurate computer models.

Critical Thinking and Diagnostic Tests

Within medicine, much of a doctor’s education has shifted to being trained to follow clinical algorithms, standardized protocols, and authoritative guidelines (all of which often but not always improve patient outcomes) rather than doctors using their critical thinking to independently decide what the best approach is for each patient they see.

As the previous example illustrates, being told to have everyone wear cloth masks and socially distance should have raised some red flags, but rather than ask if the recommendations made sense, the majority of doctors instead simply pushed the guidelines they were given onto their patients and community.

One longstanding area that highlights the issues with robotically following protocols is the way diagnostic testing is utilized. When doctors aren’t sure what to do, they typically order standard diagnostic tests to help their guide their approach. While this seems reasonable, the problem is that they often don’t think two steps ahead and ask any of the following before ordering the test:

• Will the possible results of this test in any way change how I treat this patient?
• How likely is this test to harm the patient and does that potential harm outweigh the benefits of the test?
• How likely is this test to tell me something I don’t already know?
• Could an appropriate physical examination tell me what I am trying to figure out with this test?

Note: The last point is a huge issue in medicine, as medical training has gradually shifted away from performing a detailed physical examination (which is often the most useful way to evaluate someone) to ordering lots of expensive tests, which has led to much of the physical examination becoming a lost art in the richer nations. I can’t prove this, but I have always thought this shift occurred to help make money for the medical industry.

Because of all of this, I continually see patients who receive lots of unnecessary tests. For instance, any time a patient is sent to a specialist, the specialist will typically order the bread and butter tests of their specialty even if there is no good justification for doing so.

In many cases, I’ve referred a patient to an appropriate specialist, told the specialist on the phone what I think the patient needs done, why I would caution against using their standard tests for the patient’s specific circumstances, tell the same to my patient, and then inevitably find out that the specialist successfully pushed them to do the test, and in many cases didn’t do anything else.

Eventually, I realized the most effective way to prevent this happening to my patients was to tell them:

The doctor I’m sending you to may want to order this test. If they do, ask them to tell you what possible results could come up from the test, roughly how likely each one is, and how each result would change their management of your case. You can also ask them if there are any potential risks from the test and how much the test will cost, but try to focus on if there is any point to the test in the first place.

The area where I most commonly encounter this issue is with MRIs, which neurologists typically default to using, particularly if they can’t make sense of what’s happening. Whenever an MRI (or CT) is done, you have the option of injecting a contrast agent which makes it easier to see all the details present. With MRIs, the primary contras agent utilized is gadolinium, a metal that due to its magnetic properties, becomes illuminated on MRIs.

Gadolinium is a toxic heavy metal that has the unfortunate side effect of sometimes causing severe permanent illnesses (e.g., neurological disabilities) in those who receive contrast agents containing it. For example, Maddie DeGaray was a child enrolled in Pfizer’s small trial that tested their vaccine in children.

She had a bad reaction which the investigators tried to cover up (as her injury alone would have made the vaccine too dangerous to approve for children), eventually got a gadolinium MRI, at which point she immediately and permanently lost the ability to walk.

In short, because of how many people I’ve run into that developed gadolinium illnesses, I try to avoid those MRIs if at all possible (especially for sensitive patients). In doing so, I have learned that in the majority of cases where neurologists insist on a gadolinium MRI, there is no real net benefit compared to performing a normal MRI (e.g., the final test result will still be ambiguous, or nothing can do done for the most likely diagnosis the gadolinium MRI will detect).

Despite this, and the fact that enough evidence of gadolinium harm has accumulated that many large groups now recommend against it unless absolutely necessary, almost all doctors I meet still push these MRIs.

Note: Manganese is a much safer metal which also has the magnetic properties necessary to functions as a contrast agent. Despite decades of research and data showing it is both safe and effective, it is still not available to patients.

To provide an example that puts all of this into context, many COVID-19 vaccine injured patients I know have seen dozens of doctors (including specialists at premier institutions).

Those doctors have ordered countless (not necessarily safe) tests which cost insane amounts (e.g., one of my patients has seen over 30 specialists, had received almost 100 tests — many which required nuclear isotopes being injection, and their insurance has now paid well over $300,000.00 for those tests), but all failed to detect anything that could be diagnosed (frequently leading to the patient’s being referred to psychiatry).

In many cases, I’ve found this issue emerged because the conditions the vaccine injured have are things the standard tests and labs are simply not designed to detect.

For example, when microclotting occurs throughout the body due to strong positive charges (like those found on the spike protein) shifting the zeta potential to one which causes red blood cells to clump together (explained here), a myriad of different complex issues emerge throughout the body, many of which are due to nerves not getting the blood they need to function.

Those microclots are too small for MRIs to detect, so all MRI’s are “normal.” However in these same patients, when I’ve looked for the microclotting with tests designed to detect it (e.g., by examining the blood vessels of the eyes with a stereomicroscopes) the systemic microclotting can be easily seen.

One of largest failures in critical thinking I observed during COVID-19 came from the infamous PCR tests — the mass adoption of which was justified by the unscientific (and largely proven to be false) assumption that SARS-CoV-2 spread from asymptomatic individuals. These tests had two major issues:

Later, antigen tests were introduced which were much more useful because they could be done immediately (rather than you having to wait to get a PCR result from a lab) and more importantly, did not constantly get false positives.

To illustrate the ridiculousness of all of this, at my hospital, when a patient came in my colleagues did not think needed to be hospitalized, they gave the patient an antigen test (which typically came up negative — and thus did not require them to hospitalize the patient), whereas when a patient came in they felt needed to be admitted, that patient always received a PCR test that invariably came up positive.

Note: A few people I know believe they either got COVID from a nasal swab or suffered a significant injury to their nose as the result of a quick forceful swab at a testing site (which definitely has happened). In many of the cases I came across where the individual caught COVID after a swab, the timeline of events strongly argued for the two being connected.

However, I know Ryan Cole tested numerous swabs and was never able to find SARS-CoV-2 on one Because of this, I think those infections most likely resulted from individuals who were not ill being in close proximity to those who were when they went to get tested and an aerosolized SARS-CoV-2 then infecting everyone there.

Masking

When COVID-19 started in late 2019, I became very worried about it and concluded that I needed to find an effective way to treat it as soon as possible. At the same time, I also recognized that if the HIV response was anything to go off of, it was unlikely an effective treatment would ever see the light of day, especially given that Fauci (who was directly responsible for this happening with HIV) was still in charge — and as you all know, this is exactly what ended up happening.

My thought process in turn was that given the danger the virus posed (based on what I’d seen in China and Italy), I could not risk getting COVID until I felt confident I could treat it. For this reason, I fully admit I was one of the first people in the United States to mask with a fitted N-95 (specifically doing so at work, conferences and when traveling in airports), something many of my colleagues actively made fun of me for doing.

Note: For pathogens with an aerosol spread, N-95’s don’t really work unless they are fitted to the wearer as otherwise they just get in from the gaps between the mask and your face.

Additionally, for many infectious illnesses, the route of infection is often through the eyes or ears, something people rarely consider protecting (e.g., by not touching them), and frequently clearing out the ears (e.g., with hydrogen peroxide) can make a huge difference if done early in the course of a viral upper respiratory illness.

By May of 2020, I felt confident that I could treat COVID-19 and stopped masking entirely except when I was around a patient with COVID or legally required to — at which point those same colleagues were hostile towards me for not (cloth) masking in public.

In short, masking was not something I at all wanted to do, but I felt given all the unknowns at the start, it made sense to mask while I was figuring out how to treat COVID-19. In contrast, most of my colleagues did the exact opposite and did not listen to any of my warnings (which for example resulted in me needing to supply them with PPE I’d stocked up before it ran out).

I believe the difference in our thought processes came about because I always thought two steps ahead, whereas in each case, like I highlighted in the previous section with diagnostic testing, they did not and instead simply did whatever the current guidelines were.

This was particularly frustrating because after my warnings about COVID and then the need to acquire PPE were ignored, no one was interested in the treatments I put forward for treating COVID-19 (as they were not in the guidelines) even when the protocols I found had saved patients otherwise expected to die.

Once the masking kicked into gear, there were a few major points that argued against their mass adoption:

Fauci and Masks

In a recent article, I put forward the argument that people in power will typically lie if it’s possible for propaganda to convince the public they are telling the truth. Fauci’s duplicity during COVID-19 is an excellent example of this, as it can be proven he lied continually, and the manner in which he lied employed many of the classic propaganda techniques.

Consider this February 5, 2020 email Fauci wrote (which essentially matches what I believed at the time):

“Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection.

The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keep out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you.

I do not recommend that you wear a mask, particularly since you are going to a very low risk location.”

However, as we all know, Fauci instead became one of the leading cheerleaders for the masks, even after more and more evidence accumulated showing it made no sense at all. Many other politicians followed in his footsteps with equally ridiculous demonstrations:

Note: I suspect they did not do this at home.

As time went on, public opinion turned more and more against the masks. Eventually a Cochrane review (the most definitive form of evidence) was published that determined there was no benefit from cloth masking, a small benefit may occur from N-95 masking (depending on how it was assessed, compared to cloth masking, a -10%, 14% or 30% improvement was observed).

It should be noted that this review also included viruses like influenza which have a droplet spread, which means any of the benefits found for COVID-19 were likely smaller than stated. Given all of that, it’s remarkable to see how Fauci still makes non-sensical lies to defends their use — which even CNN is now calling him out on:

Note: What I find particularly frustrating about the useless approaches we used was that in tandem highly effective ones were never utilized. For example, since COVID-19 was known spread by aerosols and much more severely affected people indoors (since the SARS-CoV-2 aerosols floated in place rather than going away), increasing ventilation (e.g., by opening windows) was a simple and highly impactful approach no one ever used.

Likewise, numerous groups were able to show that safe ultraviolet light frequencies could rapidly neutralize the virus and prevent it from infecting individuals where those affordable (and non-disruptive) UV lamps were deployed.

Compulsive Handwashing

The CDC and many other organizations regularly released guidelines advocating for as much hand-washing as possible. The problem with this is that COVID-19 was never shown to spread through hands contacting contaminated surfaces (not unlike how its transmission was erroneously assumed to be through droplets).

A few physicians pointed this out from the get-go, and by early 2021, Nature one of the top scientific journals had admitted there was no point in repeatedly sanitizing surfaces. Likewise, the recent Cochrane review found regular hand washing at best can cause an 11% – 14% reduction in acute respiratory infections.

Nonetheless, compulsive handwashing became a fixture of the pandemic response. Reminders to wash your hands were everywhere. Individuals were regularly chastised or reprimanded for failing to continually wash their hands for 20 seconds, and before long every surface was being regularly disinfected with toxic chemicals.

As I watched all of this, I could not help but recall that a common feature of obsessive-compulsive disorder is a tendency to compulsively wash one’s hands (sometimes to the point the skin is damaged).

Since individuals with similar neurotic conditions became one of the demographics most committed to the pandemic response, I have often wondered if the mass hand-washing campaign was partly chosen to recruit neurotic members of society to fight for the pandemic policies.

This in turn touches upon a broader point. As I am trying to show in this article, virtually every approach we used to address COVID in 2020 was a hassle for everyone involved and known to have no real benefit in preventing COVID. This argues that the primary purpose of the campaigns was not to reduce deaths, but rather to have each member of the populace do the work necessary to comply with those approaches.

I would argue this actually makes a lot of sense because it is well known in psychology that the more work someone engages in relating to an idea, the more invested they become in supporting the idea.

This principle in turn has been repeatedly exploited by groups seeking to control others all throughout history, including within the United States (e.g., children going door to door collecting scrap metal to be turned into munitions to fight the Nazis — even though the metal was ultimately never used).

Lockdowns

Prior to the vaccines, without question, the most damaging COVID policy were the lockdowns — something I believe was made possible by having the public already be habituated to all of this due to the continual hand washing, social isolation and mask wearing they had already done.

Since those rituals were not sufficient to overcome much of the public’s resistant to these measures, we watched other sneaky tactics be used such as moving the goal posts. For instance, do you remember how long the “Two weeks to slow the spread” ended up lasting for?

Once you got past all the propaganda, the lockdowns made no sense. For example let’s consider what the WHO had to say about all of this in 2019:

“The evidence base on the effectiveness of NPIs (non-pharmaceutical interventions) in community settings is limited, and the overall quality of evidence was very low for most interventions.

There have been a number of high-quality randomized controlled trials (RCTs) demonstrating that personal protective measures such as hand hygiene and face masks have, at best, a small effect on influenza transmission. However, there are few RCTs for other NPIs, and much of the evidence base is from observational studies and computer simulations.

School closures can reduce influenza transmission but would need to be carefully timed in order to achieve mitigation objectives. Travel-related measures are unlikely to be successful in most locations … and travel restrictions and travel bans are likely to have prohibitive economic consequences.

The most effective strategy to mitigate the impact of a pandemic is to reduce contacts between infected and uninfected persons, thereby reducing the spread of infection, the peak demand for hospital beds, and the total number of infections, hospitalizations and deaths.

However, social distancing measures (e.g. contact tracing, isolation, quarantine, school and workplace measures and closures, and avoiding crowding) can be highly disruptive, and the cost of these measures must be weighed against their potential impact.”

Unfortunately, all of this went out the window after a hysteria was whipped up about COVID-19. Shortly before the lockdowns, a model was put forward asserting that a global catastrophe would occur if strict lockdowns were not immediately implemented, and that model was largely responsible for convincing leaders around the world they had no choice but to enact them. To give you an idea of just how “accurate” the model was:

Note: Much of the existing evidence suggests lockdowns increased rather than decreased the COVID-19 death rate.

Many things should have called the Imperial model’s predictions into question (e.g., its author had for decades repeatedly made extreme overestimations of the severity of previous infectious disease outbreaks, and the model itself made no sense).

Yet despite its repeated failures to accurately predict COVID-19, it was never challenged nor updated as data became available showing its core assumptions were wrong. Instead leaders (with a few exceptions like Ron DeSantis) didn’t think the argument through and simply took the most trustable experts at their word.

This was a shame because it should have been obvious the lockdowns (which lacked evidence to support their use) didn’t make even sense once you thought more than one step ahead. Consider each of the following:

• Lockdowns are extremely costly to society, so they cannot be maintained indefinitely.
• Once lockdowns are broken, all the cases that would have been prevented will occur anyways. So at best, they can only delay the inevitable.
• The only way lockdowns can make sense is if they are done within a strategic context such as buying time for an emergency therapy or to ensure individuals are exposed at a later time when they will be the most likely to survive an infection.

Instead, once the lockdowns were pushed forward, every strategically valid follow-up was disparaged. For example:

• Each (non-patentable) COVID-19 therapy that independent researchers discovered was blacklisted — even simple things like encouraging people to take vitamin D or throat and nasal washes (which I now believe, provided xylitol and a disinfectant are used, was the most accessible and effective way to treat early COVID-19 due to the virus initially entering through those routes before it got to the lungs).
• People were encouraged to stay indoors and socially distance over the summer (which for numerous reasons predictably set them up for a bad COVID season right before the election and throughout the following winter).
• The proposal to have those at the lowest risk from COVID go back to their normal lives and develop a natural immunity that could then protect the most vulnerable members of society (both due to their natural immunity slowing the spread and because COVID would, following the laws of virology, mutate to less dangerous strains) was relentlessly attacked — for example FOIA’d emails showed that Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins conspired to torpedo that proposal, and shortly after the national media did.

Unfortunately, since the medical profession once again did not think two steps ahead, the inevitable (and later proven) failures of the lockdowns were never considered. Conversely, the costs of the lockdowns were immense. For instance:

According to the WHO, in the first year of the pandemic, global prevalence of anxiety and depression increased by a massive 25%.

Domestic abuse rose by 8.1% during the lockdowns.

There was a general worsening of health. For example to quantify the lockdown’s effects on metabolic health, one study found people gained an average of 2 pounds per month of lockdowns.

Critically important evaluations and treatments (e.g., for cancer) were skipped. Note: There was also an unprecedented drop in sudden infant deaths during the lockdowns, something many people in the vaccine safety community accurately predicted would occur as a result of infants skipping their routine vaccination appointments during the lockdowns.

School closures (which were completely unjustified as children had no risk for COVID-19) had devastating effects on the educational development of students across America — particularly for the poorest children. For example, researchers who had monitored children for years identified a drop from 100 to 78 in the average IQ of children born during the pandemic (which was most likely due to their social isolation and facial expressions being concealed by masking). To quantify the impact of a 22-point drop: An IQ of 70-85 is the threshold for borderline intellectual functioning and is technically a cognitive impairment, but the deficit is not as severe as intellectual disability and this group may hence not be sufficiently mentally disabled to be eligible for specialized services. During school years, these individuals are often “slow learners” and a large percentage of this group fails to complete high school. As a result, many can often achieve only a low socioeconomic status, and most adults in this group blend in with the rest of the population.

The lockdowns caused a “historically unprecedented increase in global poverty” of close to 100 million people, and a 11.6% global increase of extreme poverty.

150 million people no longer had the food they needed. The magnitude of this wave of global starvation in another thing that is almost impossible to put into words.

One third of American’s small businesses closed. These were often sources of generational wealth and more importantly, a way to escape from poverty.

We witnessed the largest transfer of wealth in history. From 2020 to 2021, billionaires went from owning slightly over 2% of the global household wealth to 3.5% of it.

All of the points I made above were entirely predictable, and many of them were explicitly warned against as reasons for not enacting the lockdowns. I would argue that a really good reason would be needed to justify inflicting a single one of these points upon society — yet instead we did all of them (and more) for the lockdowns, which were a speculative measure that ultimately had no benefit.

Had I not subsequently witnessed the COVID vaccine campaign, I would have argued the COVID lockdowns were in contention for the biggest public health mistake in history.

COVID Vaccines

In my opinion, the best argument for the lockdowns was that if they could have been instituted prior to COVID-19 entering a community, that in theory could have permanently prevented a lot of people from getting the infection (although as the WHO’s 2019 report stated, it was unclear if even this was a good idea).

A similar issue existed with vaccinating for COVID-19. If it was somehow possible to vaccinate the entire community for COVID prior to it entering the population and there were relatively few people the vaccines failed for (e.g., the immune suppressed individuals), it might have been possible to make COVID disappear.

However, if that did not happen and only some people were vaccinated once the virus was already there, the virus would simply infect those not immune to it, and then within those infected patients, rapidly mutate to strains not covered by the vaccine and then infect the vaccinated.

Since the vaccines were not available until a year into the pandemic it was essentially a forgone conclusion that all they could do was trigger the evolution of variants the vaccines would not be effective against. Furthermore, from an efficacy perspective, there were three major problems with the vaccines.

First, coronaviruses, and particularly SARS-CoV-2, are known for rapidly mutating. Because of how rapidly they mutate, it had long been considered an immensely challenging task to make a vaccine against them.

Second, the vaccine design chosen only made one antigen (the toxic spike protein). Since this was one of the most rapidly mutating part of the virus, it was a forgone conclusion that the vaccine would rapidly stop working on the currently circulating strains of COVID. Ryan Cole has aptly summarized this as “why are we mandating a vaccine for an extinct virus?”

Third, the immunity the injected vaccine created only existed in the blood (something which the virus enters much later in the infection), meaning that it did not protected against infection and thus transmission — a problem well-known for vaccines that do not create mucosal immunity.

Third, because of how fast SARS-CoV-2 mutates, it is almost impossible to identify an existing strain, produce a matching vaccine to it, and then get it to the population before that variant is already on the way to extinction.

When you consider that the vaccine was also highly experimental and had a huge number of known potential risks, like the lockdowns (provided one thought two steps ahead), it was very difficult to provide a justifiable argument for why it could possibly be a good idea to inject the entire world with this technology — especially if doing so required unparalleled ethical violations.

As it so happens, not only were the vaccines a mistake from the start, we essentially saw the worst case scenario happen with them:

Note: Uganda has less people than America, while the total number of deaths is much larger on the USA graph. To illustrate the deaths proportional to the population, the USA graph should have been about 7 times larger than it was.

Because of how rapidly SARS-CoV-2 mutated, many of us believed from the start that the only way to address it was by allowing people to get the infections, provide treatments to mitigate the danger of their infections and then allow them to develop natural immunity (which is much harder for the virus to evolve resistance to). As we all know, this was not what happened.

Instead, we are now seeing the toxic vaccine become normalized as an annual required product. Sadder still, the goal posts have moved to the point not only our top public officials, but even a Pfizer executive (the previously mentioned former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb) is promoting it on national television.

Who Was Responsible for the Pandemic Policies?

Joe Navarro and Scott Atlas M.D., in each of their White House memoirs provided the best summaries I have come across of what went awry during the COVID-19 response.

Joe Navarro

Navarro recognized early on that COVID-19 would turn into a huge problem, but when he tried to initiate something being done, the rest of the administration shut him down because they didn’t agree with his dire forecasts. Eventually, Navarro was able to convince Trump to go against the experts (e.g., Fauci) and initiate a travel ban from China (which was widely decried in the media).

Later, once the pandemic started, he observed that the pandemic response was dysfunctional and kept on (unsuccessfully) trying to push for viable treatments like hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) to be used to treat the virus. The roadblocks he ran into were quite illuminating:

“On March 23, four days after President Trump had promised that the FDA would expedite the use of HCQ, [HHS Secretary] Azar and his deputy at HHS, Bob Kadlec, gave several FDA bureaucrats very clear and explicit instructions to make hydroxychloroquine widely available to the American public as an early CCP Virus treatment on an outpatient basis.

Nonetheless, five days later, those very same FDA bureaucrats — including FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn and his eventual replacement, Janet Woodcock — completely countermanded the POTUS-Azar-Kadlec order. Instead, on March 28, the FDA issued a rogue directive restricting the use of HCQ to the late treatment of hospitalized patients.

With its rogue directive, the FDA effectively ensured that HCQ would be diverted from its best possible use as an early treatment for outpatients [where it worked and save lives] to its worst possible use as a late-treatment medicine for hospitalized patients. At least in the court of public opinion, that single decision was tantamount if not to murder, then certainly to negligent homicide.

Yet there would be even more blood on Anthony Fauci’s hands … when it was Fauci’s turn [at the COVID task force], right on cue, he immediately played his “there’s only anecdotal evidence card. Just as immediately, I stood up from my backbench chair just behind Vice President Pence and walked straight toward Fauci.”

As I approached him, I saw fear in his eyes. I’m sure it crossed his mind that I might physically assault him. Instead, I dumped my large dossier of studies onto the table in front of him and said to Fauci as much as to everyone else in the room — especially VPOTUS — “Tony, these are not anecdotes. That’s more than fifty scientific studies in support of HCQ.

Fifty! So stop spouting your crap about there only being anecdotal evidence because not only is it counterfactual. You are going to kill people just like you did during the AIDS crisis when you refused to approve medicines that everybody but you knew worked.”

As if all that weren’t bad enough, on April 23, FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn took yet another rogue and inexplicable action that would blow even more fetid air into Hydroxy Hysteria’s billowing sails.

Under Hahn’s signature, the FDA issued a “Drug Safety Communication” that warned of “abnormal heart rhythms and possible death” associated with HCQ [which was due to one study that deliberately gave toxic doses to patients]. The FDA also warned practicing physicians that the drug should be used only in hospital settings and not with outpatients.

The ludicrous new “Fauci-Hahn-Woodcock National Pandemic Strategy” would keep early-stage infected patients quarantined at home and without hydroxychloroquine treatment until they became so ill that they had to be admitted to a hospital.

Once in hospital, they would finally be given hydroxychloroquine, which, in that late-treatment use, would not work very well. It can’t be said too forcefully: what the FDA did was flat-out Grim Reaper ridiculous.”

As a result of the FDA’s warning, demand dried up for HCQ, doctors became scared to prescribe it, facilities stopped allowing it to be prescribed, and it became impossible for doctors to recruit patients for further HCQ trials. Navarro found this particularly frustrating as he had had the foresight to stockpile enough HCQ to treat COVID-19 throughout America, but instead no treatment for COVID was ever made available and hundreds of thousands of Americans died.

However, no bad deed goes unrewarded, and roughly a year later, Commissioner Hahn, left his position and became the Chief Medical Officer for Moderna’s parent company.

Not long after in June, despite highly questionable evidence of safety or efficacy, Azar signed a deal to buy the entire supply of remdesivir (approximately 500,000 doses) for roughly 3200.00 per treatment course. It was estimated the fair price for each course of treatment was around 310.00 (while the production cost was approximately 10.00).

Typically, when the government makes an investment of this scale (e.g., both in the development and acquisition of remdesivir), it will always do everything it can to utilize the investment regardless of how dangerous and ineffective the product turns out to be (this likewise is one reason there has been such a push to “use” all the vaccines the government already paid for).

Almost everything Navarro described in the HCQ saga was identical to what my colleague and friend Pierre Kory experienced with the agencies conspiring to block Ivermectin from being used to treat COVID, so I can deeply empathize with how frustrating all of this must have been for Navarro.

Scott Atlas M.D.

Once the lockdowns began, Atlas (a highly regarded academic physician) became an outspoken critic of the lockdowns as he realized they had no benefit and were causing massive harms to the country. Trump eventually reached out to him and asked him to join the White House’s COVID task force as he felt Atlas’s approach was correct for America.

Once there, Atlas realized that everyone in the White House was deferring to the expertise of the three doctors on the COVID-19 task force, and that Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, and Robert Redfield (the CDC director) were effectively directing the entire COVID response. Later it was discovered they shared a questionable past together and all three had made a pact to quit if Trump dismissed any one of them from the task force.

For example, in the early 1990s, Redfield and Birx, both army medical officers, worked together on a HIV vaccine and published fraudulent data suggesting it worked. They were investigated by the military and charged with deliberate scientific misconduct and fraud which Redfield confessed to.

Nonetheless, Redfield then lied to congress, claiming his vaccine worked (it didn’t) and was able to secure a 20 million dollar grant to the military for his vaccine, which in turn led to all the charges being dropped and kickstarted Redfield and Birx’s advancement through the Federal bureaucracy.

Note: Fauci was also heavily involved in the HIV vaccine research, but like his colleagues never found an effective vaccine.

During his time on the task force, Atlas was struck by the gross incompetence he witnessed, particularly in Fauci and Birx, as they frequently demonstrated an inability to grasp simple concepts in scientific publications to such a severe degree Atlas was doubtful either of them could have completed a medical residency now.

Many of the examples he observed were almost surreal and he came to refer to the COVID task force as the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party (I personally felt Atlas’s account most closely matched the presidential cabinet meeting in Idiocracy).

The central issue with the task force was that from the start Birx became convinced the only solution for the pandemic was to conduct as much testing as possible and then use the positive cases those tests yielded to justify mask mandates and scaring governors into locking down their states (leading to many Republican governors to complain to Atlas about the useless advice Birx was continually giving them).

Regardless of the arguments or data Atlas raised (e.g., that COVID was not dangerous to children so there was no reason to lockdown schools), he could not get Birx to change her mind, and in the cases where he gained any type of momentum against her policies, she would demonstrate remarkable demonstrations of emotional immaturity.

In the rare cases where Atlas was able to make progress with convincing the rest of the task force to move away from endorsing lockdowns, and instead towards targeted protection of the most vulnerable groups (particularly the elderly), someone would leak what happened on the task force to the national media.

A hysteria would then immediately flood the airwaves (often bolstered by statements Fauci gave to the press) alleging the herd immunity strategy sacrificed large numbers of American lives for the economy, which in turn led to Atlas’s proposals being rolled back to avoid the political backlash the strategy they would cause prior to the election.

A quotation from a review of Atlas’s memoir perfectly summarizes much of the what happened within the White House during the pandemic response:

“When he resigned from the Task Force in a telephone call to Trump, Atlas writes, the president told him, “You were right about everything, all along the way. And you know what? You were also right about something else. Fauci wasn’t the biggest problem of all of them. It really wasn’t him.”

Trump meant that it was Birx, and Atlas couldn’t resist a parting shot at the aides who had been so afraid of her. Knowing that they were listening on the speakerphone in the Oval Office, Atlas said, “Well, Mr. President, I will say this. You have balls. I have balls. But the closest people around you — they didn’t. They had no balls. They let you down.” They let down the rest of the country, too.”

Note: One of the most telling examples of Birx’s conduct occurred in July 2022 after she left the COVID task force (she ironically is the chief medical officer for a private company that uses UV light to disinfect an area from things like COVID-19). In the July 2022 interview, she admits they overplayed the vaccines and that she knew they would not protect against infection:

Conclusion

I believe you can argue many of the immense errors we witnessed during the COVID-19 response occurred due to it being entirely unscientific.

For example, the most appropriate way to have scientifically decided how to handle the pandemic would have been for an international team of experts is each relevant field (e.g., economics, epidemiology, virology, immunology, vaccinology, molecular biology, and evolutionary biology) to have been convened and vigorously debated which approach made the most sense.

Instead, because the media covered for them, a small number of doctors who were entirely incompetent within those fields were able to become public health dictators with absolute control over everything that happened. As a result, we all paid the price for their terrible decisions (e.g., their single minded focus on trying to free up hospital beds in the short term by isolating everyone), while many of them (e.g., the two FDA commissioners) got paid off for selling out America.

Consider for a moment how the WHO’s 2019 guidance for handling a respiratory pandemic compared to what was actually enacted throughout 2020 and 2021:

After I began to hear reports over the last month along with more and more signs that many of these measures may be brought back this fall I felt I need to write this article and review the historical context behind what happened.

For instance, because of absurdity of mask mandates, Trump blocked the CDC from implementing one, but less than a month after Biden became president, the CDC instituted a nationwide mandate which affected all airline passengers in the United States.

A few months later, a lawsuit was filed against the Biden Administration alleging that the CDC had exceeded its statutory authority by implementing the mandate, and as many of you might remember (everyone on my plane broke out in applause), on April 18th 2022, a federal judge sided with the plaintiffs and overturned the mask mandate.

The CDC requested for the Department of Justice to overturn this ruling, which caused 23 states concerned about the CDC’s illegal overreach to have their Attorney Generals file an amicus brief in August 2022 opposing the ruling ever being appealed (17 congressmen also did the same). As the illegality of the CDC’s national mask mandate was quite clear, it took a year for Biden’s DOJ to come up a creative way to overcome the initial ruling.

In May 2023, the Biden administration ended the COVID-19 emergency and then moved to have lawsuits filed against their conduct throughout the pandemic be declared moot and dismissed. For masks, the moot point argument won, leading the 11th Circuit Court to eventually rule on 6-22-23 that:

“Here, the government has carried its burden: there is no reasonable basis to expect the Mandate will be reinstated if this case is rendered moot … and there is not a grain of evidence that the CDC has any plans to promulgate an identical mandate.

We find Appellees’ contention that there is a reasonable expectation that the CDC will issue another nationwide mask mandate for all conveyances and transportation hubs to be speculative at best.

Accordingly, the order and judgment of the district court are VACATED, and the district court is instructed to DISMISS the case as MOOT.”

As legal resources are limited, even at the DOJ, I assumed the Biden administration was putting so much work into appealing the judge’s ruling because they wanted to reinstate unpopular national mandates in the future. Given that, it is something to behold that promising there would be no future mask mandates was the tactic ultimately used to remove the barriers to bringing the mask mandates back.

A Note From Dr. Mercola About the Author

A Midwestern Doctor (AMD) is a board-certified physician in the Midwest and a longtime reader of Mercola.com. I appreciate his exceptional insight on a wide range of topics and I’m grateful to share them. I also respect his desire to remain anonymous as he is still on the front lines treating patients. To find more of AMD’s work, be sure to check out The Forgotten Side of Medicine on Substack.

Source: mercola rss

In the “GET LEAN Eat Clean” podcast above, personal health and wellness coach Brian Gryn interviews Jay Feldman — a health coach and independent health researcher who is extremely knowledgeable in the work of the late Ray Peat — about the underlying causes of obesity and how to optimize mitochondrial energy. I am also scheduled to interview Jay in the near future.

Feldman is the founder of Jay Feldman Wellness and hosts the Energy Balance podcast. A key concept he presents is that when the fuel from your food you eat cannot be efficiently metabolized and converted to energy (ATP), it’s instead typically diverted and stored as fat. In my view, he is the best teacher of Ray Peat’s work. You can view the first seven episodes of his podcast to develop a foundational understanding of bioenergetic medicine.

Another key concept is that high energy production equates to high metabolism, so part of the solution for obesity is to raise your metabolic rate. Unlike conventional wisdom which suggests calorie restriction is associated with longevity, a high metabolic rate slows aging and helps you remain more youthful — at least biologically speaking — as you age.

Lack of Energy Is a Foundational Problem in Obesity

The inefficient burning of fuel (metabolizing of food) is why people who are obese typically also struggle with other health issues, such as low energy, fatigue, an inability to maintain focus, digestive problems and poor immune function.

As noted by Feldman, these all result from a lack of energy production in your mitochondria. So, the primary problem in obesity is that your body cannot efficiently convert the food you eat into energy. Instead, it gets converted into fat. As a result, you end up with obesity, low energy and perpetual hunger, which leads to overeating. Feldman explains:

“I … come from the bioenergetic view of health … the idea that energy, the energy that’s produced in our mitochondria, is the main driver of our health, and a lack of that energy is what leads to dysfunction …

I would say obesity is an energy problem, and endocrine problems are superimposed, happening on the energetic front. So, it’s really helpful to look at hormones … like cortisol … thyroid hormones … the reproductive hormones …

Those things are really helpful when we’re trying to get a gauge on where somebody’s at because you can’t always see what’s happening in the cells and the mitochondria. So, we can look at hormones as a proxy there, but those hormones are just signals and messengers that are being produced or inhibited in response to what’s going on in terms of the energetic state.”

Glucose Metabolism Is Easily Hindered

As noted by Feldman, your metabolism is a sensitive system, especially when it comes to glucose metabolism. Things like mitochondrial dysfunction, psychological stress, oxidative stress (reductive stress), heavy metals, endotoxin, lack of sleep and certain nutritional deficiencies can flip your metabolism into fat burning, which then impedes the metabolism of glucose and converts the glucose into fat rather than energy.

“This is why we want to be looking at food choices in terms of how they affect our energy production,” Feldman says. The conventional view is that fuel equates to energy, which is why obesity is thought of as an energy excess and all you need to do is eat less and exercise more. But that’s not accurate.

“That is something I think we definitely want to work ourselves away from and instead focus on how well we’re using the food that’s coming in, and what types of foods are better used, considering our human physiology,” Feldman says. “That’s really where we want to focus, as opposed to eating less or exercising more.”

Lack of Fat Burning Is Not the Problem

Many, myself included, used to believe that optimizing fat burning was the solution not only to obesity but most other health problems as well, but we’re now starting to realize that this is borne out of a misconception. As explained by Feldman:

“I think what’s happened is we’ve come into this with preconceived notions that people are overweight and have excess body fat, so there must be a fat burning problem. And that is an assumption that I would say is definitely not true …

There have been clear metabolic studies where they see that you can be on a low-carb diet and you can be burning more fat with lower insulin, and having more fat released from the fat stores, and still be losing less body fat because there’s also more fat coming into the fat stores.

And on the flip side, you can be on a higher carb diet, burning less body fat, and still losing more body fat because in that case you’re storing less body fat. So, we’ve just focused in on this one piece of the equation — how much fat are we burning — when it doesn’t acknowledge the whole flow in and out of of the fat stores …

I used to think that … everyone was oxidizing carbs and the problem was that we needed to become better fat burners, but when you actually look at what’s going on in these states, fat burning is part of the problem. That is what happens when things are problematic.

There is one caveat here that’s important, which is that burning carbohydrates doesn’t always mean the same thing. We can oxidize glucose through oxidative processes, meaning we go through glycolysis, and then we go through the Krebs cycle, and then we go through the electron transport chain …

The glucose gets oxidized and we end up with a decent amount of energy. When we are in a degenerated state, in addition to burning more fat, we also run through glycolysis more, and glycolysis is the first step … of glucose burning.

Because there are blocks farther down, we can’t use the glucose all the way, and that’s a problem … but that is not caused by the sugar, it’s not caused by the carbohydrates, it’s not caused by carb burning.

That’s caused by mitochondrial dysfunction caused by our ability to produce energy. So, we’re stuck in a very inefficient glucose burning along with fat burning, and that’s not a great state to be in. But that is not the same thing as fully oxidizing glucose in a healthy metabolic state.”

How Your Body Produces Energy

I like to use graphics when explaining this, so let me restate what Feldman is saying, along with a couple of images. In summary, your body can use two fuels for energy: glucose and fat. If you eat any type of sugar or complex carbohydrate, it’s metabolized to glucose. Glucose is then broken down to pyruvate.

At that point in the process, there’s a “switch,” known as the Randle Cycle. The pyruvate can either enter the glycolysis pathway and turn into lactate, or it can be metabolized into acetyl-CoA through aerobic respiration, as shown in the image below.

Provided your fat intake is below 30% or so (this is merely a best-guess at this point, as no one knows exactly what the threshold is), the glucose you consume will be shuttled into acetyl-CoA. When it goes to acetyl-CoA, it goes into the electron transport chain in the mitochondria.

Free fatty acids can also be metabolized into acetyl-CoA through beta-oxidation in the mitochondria, and there’s a competition that occurs there with glucose, which is why your fat intake needs to be low enough for glucose to enter this pathway.

Aerobic respiration uses oxygen in the mitochondria, whereas glycolysis, which occurs in the cytosol, does not use oxygen and is very inefficient. Glycolysis only generates two ATP molecules for each molecule of glucose, whereas aerobic respiration, which occurs in the mitochondria, generates 36 to 38 ATPs per molecule of glucose.

Ultimately, you want to burn glucose in your mitochondria. That’s the most efficient, allowing you to generate the most energy, while simultaneously producing the least amount of harmful “exhaust” in the form of reactive oxygen species (ROS).

And, again, the only way to ensure that is to keep your dietary fat content below 30% of your total calories. If you’re insulin resistant, which means you’re metabolically inflexible, that threshold may be closer to 20% or even 10%. So, if you’re insulin resistant, you’ll want to significantly lower your fat intake until your insulin resistance is resolved. Then you can increase it to 30%.

Endotoxin and PUFAs Decimate Mitochondrial Energy Production

Next, Feldman discusses a key strategy to optimize your mitochondrial energy production, which is to remove blocks in the electron transport chain so that electrons can move smoothly forward, without accumulating and backing up.

“We don’t need to focus on doing extra things to stimulate [mitochondrial energy production],” Feldman says. “Our mitochondria will work perfectly well if they have the right fuel and nutrients, and they aren’t being inhibited or blocked.”

According to Feldman, endotoxin (lipopolysaccharide or LPS) and other bacterial toxins are among the biggest culprits when it comes to things that hinder mitochondrial energy production. These toxins can directly impair electron transport through the complexes of the electron transport chain. They can also impair certain enzymes in the Krebs cycle.

Poor digestion is frequently associated with negative gram bacteria in your gut that produce endotoxin, and this will inhibit your ability to convert food to energy, resulting in increased body fat. So, it’s important to reduce your endotoxin load. Aside from poor digestion, excess endotoxin is also a common culprit in degenerative conditions, metabolic syndrome, diabetes and fatty liver. To reduce your endotoxin load:

• Rebalance your gut microbiome by reintroducing beneficial bacteria (probiotics and prebiotics). One of the best and least expensive ways to do this is to eat a serving of fermented vegetables each day.
• Temporarily go on a low-fiber diet and avoid fiber supplements as it can feed undesirable bacteria. Cook your vegetables thoroughly rather than eating them raw, and if your condition is serious, limit fruits for a time too.
• Eat a low-carb ketogenic diet and/or fast until the problem is resolved. As noted by Feldman, “This is one of the main places where low-carb diets, ketogenic diets, fasting, carnivore [diets] are really helpful, as they provide relief from the feeding of bacteria that are producing a lot of endotoxin.” Foods to avoid include most grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds.
• Avoid resistant starches, as they feed LPS-producing bacteria.

Once your microbiome is balanced and symptoms of poor gut function have resolved, you can slowly reintroduce whole fruits, vegetables, roots and tubers, and other foods. Another effective blocker of mitochondrial energy production is polyunsaturated fat (PUFA).

These are your processed seed oils, canola oil being among the worst of the worst. Seed oils are loaded with linoleic acid, an omega-6 PUFA, which appears to be one of the primary drivers of chronic diseases, in part due to its detrimental impact on your mitochondrial function and energy production.

The Expensive Tissue Hypothesis

After a short discussion about ancestral diets and the likelihood that such diets were generally high in carbs, Feldman and Gryn review the “expensive tissue hypothesis,” which is the idea that the less energy you waste on hard to digest, fibrous foods, the more energy is available for your brain.

“… that’s also a reason to be consuming a lot of carbohydrates and not excess protein, because the conversion from protein to glucose and then to energy is very inefficient,” Feldman says.

“It’s about 30% less efficient than just using glucose. So, if we consider the … expensive tissue hypothesis, we shouldn’t be consuming excess protein beyond our needs and trying to use that for energy, because … that leaves less energy for our immune function, our brain function, for reproductive function and and on …

Coming back to weight loss, there’s the constrained model of energy expenditure, which is very related here, which basically says that you can’t just expend more and more calories from, let’s say, exercise, without it coming at a cost.

So, if you exercise 1,000 calories’ worth and before you were burning 2,000 calories, that doesn’t mean that you just burned 3,000. What actually happens is, you start to cut into your own basal metabolic rate, and you start to cut into your bodily function.

So, your reproduction is turned down, your immune function is turned down … Extrapolated, it really also gets at the problem with the ‘eat less exercise more’ advice for weight loss.”

Endotoxin, Not Fructose, Causes Fatty Liver Disease

Feldman also debunks the argument that fructose, unlike what is being promoted by Drs, Robert Lustig, Richard Johnson and David Perlmutter, causes nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). He reminds listeners that both dietary fat and fructose can be converted into fat, and fructose isn’t automatically destined to end up as liver fat.

“In fact, very little fructose gets converted to fat,” he says, because “there are all sorts of of routes for it to go before it’s getting converted to fat … Fructose does go to the liver and it gets picked up by the liver immediately, whereas glucose will go out into the bloodstream and can be picked up by the muscles.

But our livers have developed to handle massive amounts of fructose. Most of the research that is looking at what happens to fructose … is going on in rats. And there are a few differences, there are a few problems there. One is that rat livers are very different from human livers in their capacity for fructose handling.

Our livers have an incredible capacity for handling fructose. Hundreds and hundreds of grams can be stored as glycogen, can be converted to glucose or lactate and sent out to be stored elsewhere, or used elsewhere, and then can also be oxidized.

So, when we consume excess fructose in a normal context, in a healthy liver, very little is going to be going to fat. It takes huge amounts of carbohydrates before you’re … producing much fat in the liver through de novo lipogenesis. And that’s because our livers have this incredible capacity for handling it …”

Feldman also remarks that many fructose studies are flawed in that they’re looking at fructose-only sources, which rarely ever exists in our food supply as it is virtually always accompanied with glucose. Results from such studies therefore do not tell you much about how natural, whole food-based fructose, say from fruit or honey, acts in the body.

“Whether you’re consuming fruit or honey or anything else, the fructose to glucose ratio is always near 1-to-1,” he says. “Sometimes there’s a slight bit more fructose [than] glucose, but even in high fructose corn syrup … it’s about 55% fructose and 45% glucose. We’re really not talking about major differences here.

And that’s important because our intestines don’t absorb pure fructose. If there’s glucose present, we absorb it very well. But if there’s no glucose present … you can’t really absorb it very well.

So, what happens is a lot of it doesn’t get absorbed in our small intestine. [It] continues down to the large intestine where it feeds bacteria. Those bacteria produce endotoxin, and that is what leads to things like fatty liver production [and] fatty liver disease.”

How to Gauge Your Metabolic Rate

According to the rate-of-living theory, the higher your metabolic rate — which means the quicker the electrons move from food toward oxygen, which is the final acceptor of electrons — the faster you’ll age because there’ll be higher oxidative stress.

However, deeper analysis reveals the exact opposite. The truth is, the higher your metabolic rate, the slower you age, because a high metabolism creates fewer ROS that can damage your tissues.

Your metabolism is high when electrons move rapidly and easily through the mitochondrial electron transport chain, which results in optimal energy production. When electrons are impeded from moving forward, they can back up, leak through the mitochondrial membrane and start moving backward, where they combine with oxygen to create excessive ROS.

So, for optimal health, you want high energy production and that means a high metabolic rate. As explained by Feldman, you can gauge your metabolic rate using your pulse and body temperature.

“If you’re not hitting 98.6 [degrees Fahrenheit] later in the day, if you’re not hitting 97.8 or 98.0°F when you’re waking up, that can be a sign of a hypometabolic state,” he says.

“If your [resting] pulse [first thing in the morning] is particularly low, if you’re not getting into the mid-70s or potentially low-80s, depending on your fitness state, that can also be a sign of a low metabolic rate.

The caveat is that the more cardiovascularly fit you are, the lower your pulse rate will be, independent of metabolic state. That’s because your stroke volume increases. The stroke volume is the amount of blood your heart pumps with each beat. So you can have fewer beats and still pump the same amount of blood … You can also look at temperature and pulse before and after a meal.

If … somebody wakes up at temperature 98.4°F. and then they have their breakfast and it drops to 97.5°F., that is a situation of a drop in stress hormones, where someone was waking up in a stress state, their sleep’s probably not optimal, they’re probably not optimal metabolically, then they’re consuming some carbohydrates and their stress hormones drop.

If you’re seeing that happen after a meal, it’s a pretty good sign that that’s what’s happening.

Another good way to do it is just seeing how many calories you can consume while maintaining your weight … If, with your activity and everything else, you should be burning 3,000 calories a day, but you’re maintaining your weight on 2,200 calories a day, that’s a sign that you’re pretty hypometabolic.”

Conversely, if you can maintain your weight when you add more calories, your metabolic rate is likely high, and the extra food will oftentimes improve your sleep, relaxation, energy and recovery.

Methylene Blue — A Useful Rescue Remedy

While there are no magic pills to fix slow metabolism or low energy production, there are some that can help. I’ve previously written about the usefulness of niacinamide, for example. Another helpful one is methylene blue. As explained by Feldman:

“As a supplement, it’s got a number of interesting effects. For one, it’s antimicrobial … but it also has some pretty interesting mitochondrial or energetic effects, where it is able to work as an electron acceptor and donor.

So, if things are not working well in the electron transport chain, the main site where we produce ATP, [if] something’s blocked, let’s say by endotoxin or polyunsaturated fats, whatever it is, methyl blue can help us bypass those issues and allow us to continue to produce energy despite those things.

It also lowers nitric oxide, which is another inhibitor of mitochondrial respiration. So, it’s got a number of benefits. I will say, like any other supplement, there’s a place for it and there’s also a place where it can be problematic, and it’s never the first thing I would go to.

We always want to work at those foundations first — get diet on point, eat consistently, get enough carbs and fats in, make sure we’re getting the nutrients we need, trying to work on our sleep hygiene, our movement …

But I do think there’s a place for methylene blue to help with either those microbial issues or for getting the metabolism going in certain instances. It also, in particular, has some benefits neurologically, because of these stimulating effects on respiration … So, yeah, I like it. Again, it’s not magic in that it is going to fix the problems, but it can be helpful along the way.”

Constructing the Ideal Diet to Maximize Energy

While it’s nearly impossible to come up with a diet that is ideal for everyone, general guidelines can be provided. After that, it’s up to you to experiment and note what works and what doesn’t. For example, some are outfitted with genes that can handle dietary fats better than others, while some may have had their gallbladder removed and can’t handle much fat at all. Following are some general principles for devising your ideal diet:

If you’ve been on a low-carb, high-fat diet, slowly add in more carbs while simultaneously lowering your fat intake. As mentioned earlier, your fat intake probably needs to be somewhere around 30% or lower to allow for efficient glucose metabolism.

Feldman typically recommends a range of 20% to 40%, with the upper limit being for more physically active people with greater muscle mass. With fats at 30%, carbs would then be in the range of 55% to 60%, with protein making up the remaining 10% to 15%.

Increase Your Metabolism to Slow Your Aging

As mentioned earlier, high metabolism is the key to slowing down aging. And the slower you age, the more youthful and resilient you’ll be. As noted by Feldman:

“When we’re in our 20s, let’s say, or late teens, we can kind of eat whatever, our metabolic rate’s really, [we have] high libido’s, sleep is never an issue … digestion is really good; things don’t bother you. That’s the state … we want to be getting to. And I would say the key difference there is, where is our metabolic rate at?

Over time, metabolic rate slows, mitochondrial respiration slows. If you take aged mitochondria from someone who’s above the age of let’s say 60 or 70, there’s a dramatic reduction in energy production … So, the solution is to get back to that young metabolism. And I think it’s totally doable.

It’s just a matter of eating the things that are designed for optimal function, that allow for maximal energy production, [and] avoiding the things that interfere with that — avoiding the polyunsaturated fats, lowering endotoxin, having good, consistent sleep, consistent movement.

It’s a complex, right? It’s never as simple as ‘Just eat this one thing,’ or ‘just take this one pill.’ [It’s] having that perspective of trying to think of speeding things up, as opposed to slowing things down.”

Source: mercola rss

From the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, health experts have been unable to unify around a cohesive message about face masks. A virtuoso of contradiction, Dr. Anthony Fauci — then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and a prominent face of the White House COVID-19 response team — publicly flip-flopped on the usefulness and need for masks multiple times.

The First Recommendation Was the Correct One

In January 2020, he said “Americans shouldn’t be wearing masks because they don’t work.” This stance was reiterated in March 2020, when he stated¹ that “people should not be walking around with masks” because “it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is.”

At the time, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services agreed, as did Dr. Amesh Adalja, a Johns Hopkins Public Health expert,² and Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who took to Twitter urging Americans to stop buying masks, saying they are “NOT effective,”³ and that if worn or handled improperly, face masks might actually increase your risk of infection.⁴

Logically, only symptomatic individuals and health care workers were urged to wear them. However, by June 2020, universal mask mandates had become the norm and we were told we had to wear them because there may be “asymptomatic super-spreaders” among us — another lie.

By July 2020, Fauci claimed his initial dismissal of face masks had been in error and that he’d downplayed their importance simply to ensure there would be a sufficient supply for health care workers, who need them most.⁵

Triple Masking and Other IQ Tests

Fast-forward a few weeks, and by the end of July 2020, Fauci went to the next extreme, flouting the recommendation to wear goggles and full face shields in addition to a mask, ostensibly because the mucous membranes of your eyes could potentially serve as entryways for viruses as well.⁶

This, even though a March 31, 2020, report⁷ in JAMA Ophthalmology found SARS-CoV-2-positive conjunctival specimens (specimens taken from the eye) in just 5.2% of confirmed COVID-19 patients (two out of 28).

Toward the end of November 2020, the asymptomatic spread narrative was effectively destroyed by the publication of a Chinese study⁸ involving nearly 9.9 million individuals. It revealed not a single case of COVID-19 could be traced to an asymptomatic individual who had tested positive. Still, the propaganda machine churned on, ignoring the evidence at hand.

Around December 2020, recommendations for double-masking emerged,⁹ and this trend gained momentum through extensive media coverage as we moved into the first weeks of 2021.¹⁰ That two masks would be more effective than one is just “common sense,” Fauci told CNBC in January 2021.¹¹

Undeterred by scientific evidence and logic, by the end of January 2021, “experts” started promoting the use of three^12,13 or even four¹⁴ masks, whether you were symptomatic or not.

The suggestion to self-asphyxiate turned out to be one step too far, however. In the face of public ridicule, other experts encouraged the return to common sense, as impaired respiration can worsen any number of health conditions.

True to form, while promoting the concept of double-masking as recently as January 29, 2021,¹⁵ by February 1 that year, Fauci conceded, “There is no data that indicates double-masking is effective,” but that “There are many people who feel … if you really want to have an extra little bit of protection, ‘maybe I should put two masks on.’”¹⁶ In other words, the suggestion is based on emotion, not actual science.

Fauci also went from promising a mask-free existence once the vaccine rolled out, to insisting that mask-wearing was still necessary after vaccination because vaccine-resistant variants might pop up, to proposing we might need to wear masks every flu season in perpetuity.

The fact is, Fauci knew masks cannot block viruses and that claiming otherwise was unscientific. He told the truth in a private email to a colleague back in February 2020, in which he stated that masks are “not really effective in keeping out viral particles, which are small enough to pass through material.”¹⁷ Masking people up reinforced the idea that we were living in dangerous times though. It fed people’s fears, and that’s the effect they were after.

Fauci Hopes People Will Mask Up Again

As we head into fall, Fauci is now making the media rounds again, saying he hopes people will comply if mask recommendations return. Why media still believe that people will listen to Fauci is a mystery of its own. In a September 2, 2023, CNN interview, Fauci said:¹⁸

“I would hope that if we get to the point that the volume of cases is such and organizations like the CDC recommends — CDC does not mandate anything — recommends that people wear masks, I would hope that people abide by that recommendation …”

Funny he should say that. Recall the CDC not only mandated but ORDERED the wearing of masks on public transportation in January 2021. However, as noted on the CDC’s website,¹⁹ the order became unenforceable due to a court order, issued in mid-April 2022.

Remember that when the CDC renews its mask recommendations. They can’t mandate or order you to do anything. Also remember that Fauci just confirmed the CDC has no authority to do anything but make recommendations.

Gold Standard Science Review Found No Benefit

Cochrane Reviews have long been recognized as the gold standard in evidence-based health care as their analyses look at the whole body of published science, and every few years, reviews are updated to include the latest research findings.

For example, reports on “Physical Interventions to Interrupt or Reduce the Spread of Respiratory Viruses” — which includes mask wearing — were published in 2009,²⁰ 2010,²¹ 2011,²² 2020²³ and January 2023.²⁴

During 2020 and most of 2021, mask proponents tried to cast doubt on studies showing that masks had no impact on the spread of respiratory viruses because they weren’t specific to COVID-19.²⁵

This was actually irrelevant because masks cannot block viruses that are much smaller than the gaps in the fabric, and SARS-CoV-2 is even smaller than the flu virus. Still, the lack of COVID-specific trials kept the counterarguments going. That all changed in January 2023 however. By then, COVID-specific mask trials had been conducted, and all were included in the Cochrane Library’s systematic review.²⁶

In all, the 2023 update added 11 new randomized controlled trials (RTCs) and cluster-RCTs to their previous 2020 analysis, bringing the total number of RCTs to 78. Six of the 11 were conducted during the COVID pandemic, and three looked at the spread of COVID-19 specifically.

Yet, as in previous reviews, there was no evidence to support mask wearing. The SARS-CoV-2 virus, it turns out, behaves just like other influenza viruses and easily penetrates these barriers. As noted by the authors:²⁷

“Medical or surgical masks — Ten studies took place in the community, and two studies in healthcare workers.

Compared with wearing no mask in the community studies only, wearing a mask may make little to no difference in how many people caught a flu-like illness/COVID-like illness (9 studies; 276,917 people); and probably makes little or no difference in how many people have flu/COVID confirmed by a laboratory test (6 studies; 13,919 people).”

Type of Mask Makes No Difference

In summary, the 2023 Cochrane review found that surgical masks did not significantly reduce the risk of flu-like/COVID-like symptoms in the general population. Surgical masks also did not affect the risk of laboratory-confirmed influenza and COVID.

So, masking had no effect on confirmed infection rates (which are more important than self-reported symptoms). The review also found no difference between medical/surgical masks and N95/P2 respirators. So, none of the new studies changed anything. Masks failed to prevent influenza transmission before the pandemic, and they still fail to prevent respiratory infections, including COVID.

By late February 2023, The New York Times even allowed the publication of an opinion piece by conservative columnist Bret Stephens titled, “The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned?”

“When it comes to the population-level benefits of masking, the verdict is in: Mask mandates were a bust,” Stephens wrote. “Those skeptics who were furiously mocked as cranks and occasionally censored as ‘misinformers’ for opposing mandates were right. The mainstream experts and pundits who supported mandates were wrong.

In a better world, it would behoove the latter group to acknowledge their error, along with its considerable physical,²⁸ psychological,²⁹ pedagogical³⁰ and political³¹ costs … The Cochrane report ought to be the final nail in this particular coffin.”

CDC Director Made False Statements About Cochrane Review

It has not become the final nail in the coffin, though. In her February 2023 congressional testimony, then-director of the CDC Dr. Rochelle Walensky doubled down on the CDC’s mask orders, arguing that the Cochrane analysis only relied on a “small number” of COVID-specific trials — as if more would somehow change the results.

It’s rare to be able to say that science has conclusively shown something to be true, but we’re as close as we can get to absolutes when it comes to mask wearing. On top of that lame argument, she falsely claimed the Cochrane Library editor-in-chief had “retracted the summary of that review,”³² which never happened.³³

The editor, Karla Soares-Weiser, did however add a comment to the review stating, “The original Plain Language Summary for this review stated that ‘We are uncertain whether wearing masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses based on the studies we assessed.’ This wording was open to misinterpretation, for which we apologize.”³⁴

But nothing was retracted. The plain language summary states that to this day. Moreover, while Soares-Weiser claimed that interpreting the results as “masks don’t work” was an “inaccurate interpretation,” and that an accurate interpretation would be that “the results were inconclusive,” the lead author, Dr. Tom Jefferson, insists the findings were unequivocal.

“There is just no evidence that they (masks) make any difference. Full stop,” he told investigative journalist Maryanne Demasi.³⁵ And N95 masks are no better. “Makes no difference,” Jefferson said.

Did Cochrane Library Editor Succumb to Pressure?

Soares-Weiser added her “apology” to the review after being contacted by New York Times columnist, Zeynep Tufekci, who’d rebuked Jefferson’s statements in a March 10, 2023, article titled “Here’s Why the Science Is Clear that Masks Work.”³⁶

“Tufekci argued that despite no high-quality data, we could conclude, based on poor evidence, that masks DO work,” Demasi wrote.³⁷ In a September 8, 2023, Substack article, science journalist Paul Thacker added:³⁸

“In my own communication with Cochrane scientists, they find Tufekci’s behavior boorish and unprofessional.³⁹ In retrospect, it’s clear that Tufekci colluded with Cochrane’s Soares-Weiser, who runs the organization, but was not involved in the mask review.

After the two canoodled earlier this year, Soares-Weiser rushed out a public statement to please Tufekci and New York Times editors, but has had to hire the pricey consulting firm Envoy to deal with the fallout and scientists’ concerns over her leadership style.

Scientists have demanded that Soares-Weiser explain why she talked to Tufekci about their review, and published a statement criticizing it, without first consulting them …

It’s obviously embarrassing to Cochrane that they are now spending money on a consulting firm to clean up the mess Soares-Weiser created with review scientists. Her actions have even caught the attention of Johns Hopkins researcher Marty Makary, who tweeted⁴⁰ that Cochrane is now caving to political pressure from partisans who want the science to conclude that masks work …

At the time that Tufekci published her essay, Jefferson sent her editors a letter pointing out numerous errors. The paper chose to ignore this. But Jefferson set the record straight yesterday during an interview with Michael Smerconish, who hosted Jefferson on his radio program.⁴¹

Jefferson pointed out in the interview that powerful people in public health, like Anthony Fauci, could have ended all the controversy over mask use by funding large studies to draw more conclusive results on masks.

‘The whole story of the pandemic, since 2020, is that nobody (or very few people) have stepped forward and filled that gap,’ Jefferson said.

Institutions in the United States are now starting to implement mask policies, Jefferson noted, without offering any proof to people that they work. ‘How are they going to justify this?’… ‘We could find no evidence that masks make a difference,’ Jefferson told Smerconish …”

More Likely Than Not That Masks Don’t Work

Smerconish also interviewed Jefferson in a CNN segment (video above), September 9, 2023, asking him point blank, “Do masks work, in your opinion, in stopping the spread of COVID?”

Jefferson pointed out that none of the three COVID-specific trials found a beneficial effect of masking. “It is impossible to show that something DOESN’T work,” he added. The science of masking looks at “is it more likely than not” for it to work, “and at the moment, there’s no evidence of that being the case” Jefferson said, adding:

“I can’t tell you if they work or not, but it’s more likely than not that they don’t work.”

Fauci, the Science Denier

Smerconish also interviewed Fauci,⁴² asking him to comment on the Cochrane review’s findings, and Jefferson’s comment to Demasi, that policymakers were basing their mask recommendations on “nonrandomized studies, flawed observational studies.”⁴³

Indeed, the primary piece of “evidence” for the CDC’s original mask recommendation was an anecdotal story about two symptomatic hair stylists who interacted with clients while wearing masks in the salon. Of the 67 clients who agreed to be interviewed and tested, none tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, which according to the CDC was evidence that the masks prevented spread of infection in a real-world setting.⁴⁴

“How do we get beyond the finding of that [2023 Cochrane] review?” Smerconish asked Fauci. Fauci’s response? There are “other studies” that show masks work “at an individual level,” Fauci said, adding, “When you’re talking about the effect on the epidemic … as a whole, the data are less strong.”

Of course, Fauci didn’t cite any of the “individual level” studies he’s referring to, but with that comment he basically confirmed Jefferson’s conclusion that decisions were indeed based on nonrandomized studies and flawed observational studies — like the anecdotal hair salon “study” — not gold-standard RTCs.

Despite that, Fauci again doubled down, telling Smerconish “There is no doubt masks work. Different studies give different percentages of advantage of wearing it, but there’s no doubt that the weight of the studies … indicate the benefit of wearing masks.”⁴⁵

Jefferson Responds to Fauci’s Comments

At Demasi’s request, Jefferson responded to Fauci’s comments:⁴⁶

“So, Fauci is saying that masks work for individuals but not at a population level? That simply doesn’t make sense. And he says there are ‘other studies,’ but what studies? He doesn’t name them so I cannot interpret his remarks without knowing what he is referring to.

It might be that Fauci is relying on trash studies. Many of them are observational, some are cross-sectional, and some actually use modelling. That is not strong evidence. Once we excluded such low-quality studies from the review, we concluded there was no evidence that masks reduced transmission.”

As mentioned earlier, Fauci went from disparaging mask wearing in January through March 2020, only to make an abrupt about-face weeks later. At the time, he defended his flip-flopping saying, “When facts change, I change my mind.” But as Jefferson told Demasi, none of the facts had changed:⁴⁷

“There were no randomized studies, no new evidence to justify his flip-flop. That’s simply not true … What Fauci doesn’t understand is that cloth and surgical masks cannot stop viruses because viruses are too small and they still get through.”^48,49,50

In conclusion, Demasi writes:⁵¹

“As it stands, the Cochrane review will continue to be the subject of attacks because it presents a major roadblock for implementing masking policies. Jefferson says he doesn’t know what motivates people to ignore the facts.

‘Could it be part of this whole agenda to control people’s behavior? Perhaps,’ he speculated. ‘What I do know … is that Fauci was in a position to run a trial, he could have randomized two regions to wear masks or not. But he didn’t and that’s unforgivable.”

Mask Harms Revealed

While we have no evidence showing masks prevent the spread of COVID, we do have evidence showing mask wearing can cause harm. For example, in its December 2020 interim guidance on masks,⁵² the WHO noted that mask disadvantages included “a false sense of security,” and that:

“Several studies have demonstrated statistically significant deleterious effects [of masks] on various cardiopulmonary physiologic parameters during mild to moderate exercise in healthy subjects and in those with underlying respiratory diseases.”

A German registry of reported effects among children found 68% experienced some sort of impairment, such as irritability, headache, poor concentration, reduced happiness, reluctance to go to school, general malaise, impaired learning and fatigue.⁵³

Other investigations have revealed children are exposed to potentially dangerous elevations in carbon dioxide when wearing a face mask,⁵⁴ and health care workers who wear masks for six or more hours have been found to be at higher risk of respiratory infections due to mask contamination.⁵⁵ A dozen different volatile and potentially hazardous chemicals have also been identified in medical masks.⁵⁶

Research⁵⁷ by German physician Dr. Zacharias Fögen has also linked mask mandates to significantly higher COVID-19 case fatality rates. “These findings suggest that mask use might pose a yet unknown threat to the user instead of protecting them, making mask mandates a debatable epidemiologic intervention,” he concluded.

He proposed this as-yet unidentified threat might be related to a phenomenon called the “Foegen effect.” The general idea is that breathing through a face mask forces deep re-inhalation of virions, which might make COVID-19 infection more likely and/or more severe. He suspects mask wearing may also exacerbate the effects of long-COVID for the same reason. In addition to the above, prolonged mask wearing has been linked to:⁵⁸

Facial alkalinization, dehydration and enhanced skin barrier breakdown, which can increase your risk of bacterial infections	Increase in headaches and sweating
Decreased cognitive precision	Medical errors
Interference with social learning in children	Obscured nonverbal communication
Distorted verbal speech	Removal of visual cues, which is detrimental to people with hearing loss

Do Not Comply

In closing, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has already vowed to not enforce any federal mask mandates that might come down the pike, and hopefully, other states will follow suit.

But even if they don’t, remember that CDC can only make recommendations. They cannot order you to do anything. At this point, it’s imperative that everyone simply say “no” and peacefully refuse to comply with mask wearing, because it’s impossibly to comply your way out of tyranny, which is what the COVID spectacle has always been about.

Source: mercola rss