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gotta-get-back-to-hatchetfield · 3 years ago

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The Gang Peddles Horse Pills

It was a quiet morning in Paddy’s Pub when Dee, Charlie and Mac found themselves sat round the bar chatting, while Dennis poured them out shots as a reward for their hard labours of scaring off any potential customers.

Just as he was beginning to pour out another round of some forgotten, nasty liqueur they had ordered for Halloween several years back, Frank Reynolds walked into the bar with a wide grin on his face and a literal skip in his step.

"What are you so happy about?" asked Dee, as he dragged round a stool to sit with them.

"I just came up with a brilliant scheme that's gonna make us a boat load of cash!” Frank announced expecting excited faces and rapturous applause, but instead was met with sighs and eye rolls.

“So I accidentally bought a bunch of these pills called Ivermectin off my friend Duncan,” he began to explain, undeterred by their scepticism, “I was trying to buy cocaine, it’s a long story, but anyway there I am thinking what the hell am I gonna do with all this crap, and then it hit me. You see I’ve been going around on all the local news stations and ‘free thinking’ podcasts, you know the sort, telling them that this shit cures covid but the liberal yahoos and deep state don’t want you to know about it, and people have started buying it like crazy. So, I bought up all the supply in town, now I control the prices and I am making big, big money off this thing.”

"Okay Frank, and what is this Ivermectin actually?" Dennis asked pointedly.

"Horse dewormer!” Frank answered as he helped himself to a shot from the bottle on the table, “yeh, you give it to horses to make them shit themselves. It’s really nasty stuff actually.”

"Frank, no one’s going to want to take a literal horse shit pill to cure coronavirus, when the vaccines are literally free,” Dee exclaimed turning back to her drink.

"Oh yeh wanna bet?” Frank turned to Charlie, who seemed more open to the concept than Dee and Dennis, largely because he’d been struggling to follow the conversation. “Hey Charlie, you wanna try some Ivermectin?” Frank asked.

"The horse stuff? Nah you're good man, I've already got a ton back home, I’m actually struggling to get through it all."

Dennis did a double take, as he was once again blown away by the state of his friends. "This is insane, Charlie do not take that stuff it doesn't cure covid and it’s almost certainly bad for you."

"Nah it’s fine man, I've been taking it for years now and once you get over the chest pain and excessive bleeding it’s actually a very positive experience."

"I'm sorry, you've been taking horse dewormer for years?!" Dennis snapped back, as Frank began to do a little jig and rub his hands with glee.

"Well yeh!” Charlie answered as if it was the most obvious thing in the world, “You know how like ketamin is horse tranquiliser and that works really well on humans, I thought hey why not try out other horse medicine, and so far it’s worked out pretty well for me.” He looked at the ceiling with his brow furrowed in concentration before concluding, “you know maybe man is horse."

"Man is horse? What the fuck are you talking about Charlie!” Dennis retorted before taking a deep sigh to try and calm the rage of the golden god that was burning within him. “Okay just as long as we're all vaccinated and none of the rest of us are drinking horse dewormer," he looked pointedly at Charlie who simply shrugged, "then we should be fine, you are all vaccinated right?"

"No dude what the fuck of course I'm not," Mac answered looking disgusted at the very thought, causing Dee, who has been sitting next to him, to move over a stool to distance herself from him.

"What do you mean you're not vaccinated?" Dennis asked incredulously.

"Dude those things are really dangerous!"

"What are you talking about?” Dennis snapped back, “Is this about 5G because you definitely don't even know what that means."

“No they literally give you covid," Mac answered defiantly.

Dennis rolled his eyes, as he began to explain the very basic premise on which a vaccine operates. "Yes that is literally the whole point, they give you a weakened form of the virus so your immune system can learn how to fight it off, that's why I make a point to take every vaccine I can. The golden god must always have a perfect immune system, and thus I must consume that which would seek to destroy me so I may absorb its strength."

"No dude," Mac said shaking his head, "Vaccines give you covid because when you get a vaccine you are telling the lord you no longer trust his almighty power, thus incurring his wrath so that he may well see fit to smite you down with covid.”

Even Charlie seemed confused at this point as Dee responded, "well I don't even know where to begin with that one."

Frank sensed an opportunity to peddle his horse pills, so put his hand on Macs shoulder in order to exploit his weakness for fatherly affection. "Listen if you're worried about covid you can always take some Ivermectin to help make sure you're protected from God's wrath. Plus, I'll give you a discount if you can sign up a friend too.”

"So this is a pyramid scheme too now! Great!" Dennis exclaimed sarcastically.

"I don't know is that stuff safe?” Mac asked, “It is supposed to be for horses."

"Anything that's safe for horses is also safe for humans,” Frank reassured Mac “I used to have a friend who was a top lawyer, and he always used to say to me 'you know Frank, man is horse'." Mac still looked sceptical, so Frank added "Also, I heard it helps you build muscle.”

"Oh really, where can I sign up?" Mac responded instantly, looking around for a clipboard.

"Oh come on Frank that's my trick," Dennis declared smashing his hand against the table.

"You know what Mac?” Frank asked, ignoring Dennis and massaging Mac’s shoulder with his hand, “How would you feel about becoming a social media star?"

Mac, who craved validation from father figures above all else, grinned at the prospect as he excitedly confirmed his interest.

"Oh Mac come on, he's obviously just going to make you peddle his horse laxatives for him. And seriously Frank? The people don't want to see someone hideous like Mac, they want someone handsome and charismatic like me!"

"He'll play well with the evangelicals. Come on Mac, I've got us a 2pm slot, we better go and get ready,” Frank said as he dragged a very excited looking Mac out the door.

Dee moved back to her original seat, feeling relieved Mac and any germs he may have been carrying were now gone, as Dennis stared at the door they had left through with his lips pursed in anger.

"Okay whatever, and you two?” he asked turning his attention back to Dee and Charlie, “You two better be vaccinated, because I cannot have unvaccinated people running around threatening the golden god's immune system."

"Yeh of course I’m vaccinated," Dee said sounding affronted.

“Okay well I'm surprised the needle wasn't snapped by your stupid pointy bird bones. And what about you Charlie are you vaccinated?"

"Against what?" he asked innocently.

“I'm sorry, 'against what'?” Dee asked incredulously, “Charlie why do you think you’ve had to spend a year locked in the house with Frank?"

"I'm not sure, I saw something about people were trying to inject us with bleach so we had to stay inside so they couldn't get us, and maybe the nightman was behind it all or something."

"Charlie please tell me you have at some point this whole entire year watched the news?!" Dee asked in abject horror, as Dennis looked seconds away from giving up.

"Listen a lot of things happen on the news, I can't be expected to keep track of it all. Besides, it literally changes every day, so there’s not really any point watching it because tomorrow it’ll be about something different"

They both starred back at him blankly for a while, as Dee wondered why the hell she still hung out with these guys and several options for ways to graphically murder him passed through Dennis’ mind.

"You are going to get vaccinated now, and I don't want to see you back here until you've done it." Dennis declared, as Charlie began to walk towards the door.

He paused looking back in confusion, so Dennis said, “Go on, shoo!” as he and Dee mimed shooing gestures, and Charlie tentatively made his way out of Paddy’s Pub in search of a vaccine.

#iasip #its always sunny in philadelphia #ivermectin #(real talk tho this is just banter and if you live in a country where you're lucky enough to be able to get the vaccine holy shit do)#I have more parts to this but it's a thing on its own

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tinyshe · 5 years ago

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Systems Biologist Speaks Out About COVID-19 Response

Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola

[this is a long read but well worth the time, food for thought]

Download Interview Transcript Download my FREE Podcast

Story at-a-glance

According to systems biologist Shiva Ayyadurai, Ph.D., the COVID-19 pandemic is being used to shift global wealth

Systems biology deciphers the synergies within living systems to understand how to diagnose, assess and identify the underlying problem, and how to administer the most appropriate remedy

The economic collapse is a result of precisely engineered governmental policies, even though those policies, superficially, appear to be in the public’s best interest

Systems biology informs us one size does not fit all. Yet this knowledge is being ignored in this pandemic. Instead, everyone is told they must take the same precautions as those who are at high risk

Fearmongering is being used to suppress antigovernment dissent, to crash the economy and issue medical mandates that could generate trillions of dollars in ongoing revenue in years to come

Today, we continue to provide you information about the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time of this recording, April 6, 2020, there are more than 1.4 million cases worldwide and 370,000 confirmed cases in the U.S., with New York City being one of the hotspots.1,2 Here, I interview Shiva Ayyadurai, who has a Ph.D. in systems biology from MIT.

What Is Systems Biology?

His academic background gives Ayyadurai a slightly different perspective on this outbreak, as it focuses on the foundational causes of disease rather than the conventional medical paradigm that tends to focus on pharmaceutical remedies. Ayyadurai explains:

“The MIT department of biological engineering was created in 2003. The notion was … that you needed an engineering approach to biology as new advances or new discoveries were coming out in biology. That created the department of biological engineering …

One of the big things that took place in 2003 that led to the formation of that department was, in an ironic way, what occurred with the human genome project starting in 1993. We went into the genome project with a reductionist view of biology.

Biologists essentially thought that the number of parts meant complexity. We knew in 1993, a worm had around 20,000 genes. So, we said, OK, we're going to start mapping out the human genome. We were at least 25 times more complex. The notion was we had about a half a million genes.

By 2003, they only found 20,000 protein coding genes. That flipped biology on its head because it said, wait a minute, we have the same number of parts, and they thought genes were a reflection of complexity. That led to systems biology starting around 2003, which said, look, genes create proteins and these proteins interact. So, it's about all these interactions …

Today, that has led to this field called epigenetics, in which we know that the external environment, what we interact with, can turn on and turn off genes. I came back to MIT in 2003. I did four degrees at MIT in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering. My Master's was in design, but I always was fascinated with medicine.”

The Cytosol Platform

The project Ayyadurai took on for his Ph.D. thesis was to mathematically model the whole human cell. His work led to the creation of a platform called CytoSolve “cyto” standing for “cell.” This approach is different from biology, computer science and chemistry.

“Biologists are essentially distributed knowledge engineers,” he says, “and the thing they're trying to understand is this thing called the body. No different than aeronautical engineers trying to build the airplane. The difference is when we build an airplane, we actually know what we want to build. And we know the parts in biology, we're finding the parts, that's what they're doing.

Some biologists can win a Nobel prize just for looking at how two proteins interact. So, they're very focused on understanding these parts. So, imagine if we could create a technology where we could take those parts, integrate them, and then essentially let them be sort of focused in their silos.

But there wouldn't be this framework that you could integrate, where you could integrate these molecular pathways. And that really created cytosol. To me, it was a big circling back because I grew up in India where my grandmother practiced traditional systems of medicine.

In that system of medicine, they had diagnosis methods, they looked at you, they figured out your body type and they would figure out the right types of foods and medicines, herbs or even body work to get you back into balance. That was always seen as a ‘black art’ from a Western medicine [perspective].

[CytoSolve] lets us decipher what they were doing and actually understand these synergies. So that's what systems biology is about. It's taking an engineering systems approach to the body … It's literally understanding how to diagnose and assess and identify what the problem is, and then how to administer a prescription within a few minutes. It’s essentially an ‘AI’-type model.”

COVID-19 — Health and Economic Perspectives

As noted by Ayyadurai, the COVID-19 pandemic is not only highlighting our immune health but also our economic health. We're seeing the integration of medical policy and economic policy.

“I had a very interesting discussion with a leading economist,” Ayyadurai says, “and he had a serious concern about the fact that economists are being forced to backfill in a misguided health policy, which is occurring. What he meant by that is, [they’re being told to] just use quantitative easing, which is basically printing money, and that will solve the problem.

Now that entire process does two things. First of all, we have I think 10 million unemployment claims in March alone. In addition to that, you have the fact that we're going to print money, which … if you look, since 2008 and 2009, when quantitative easing started … that has essentially been the biggest transfer of wealth — to the 0.01%, again.

It is essentially a weakened earning power and the [weakened value] of the dollar. So that's what's occurred. Now we have this COVID-19, and we have this economic overreaction, in my opinion, from the fear-mongering. In many ways, it reflects the immune system.

The immune system fundamentally wants to operate well for you and maintain homeostasis, and it's the overreaction of a weakened and dysfunctional immune system that causes harm. Similarly, when you look at it from the economic standpoint, we have this unbridled overreaction, in my view. [We’re] not looking at what modern medicine is saying — that we should take a personalized medicine approach, right?

One size doesn't fit all. This is basically flatten the curve: Kick the can down the street. We're just going to wait until, when? Until the vaccine is produced or until a drug comes out. The assumption is that the immune system of all of us is equally weak. That's what this is based on. The assumption is that all of us are going to get it and all of us will suffer from it.

It's a very interesting model. Look at the person leading this health policy, Dr. Fauci. His background is from the pharmaceutical world … [and] when you look at the NIH and the CDC, these organizations are heavily, heavily influenced by pharmaceutical companies.

In that environment, the model has always been never to discuss immune health, what we can do to support the immune system. It's always under the assumption that there's this big boogeyman, that the virus harms your body. Most medical doctors, again, they're victims of this education.

Many of them are taught the virus literally comes and attacks your body, and that a vaccine or a pharmaceutical intervention blocks it. It's not taught broadly that [the problem is that] the dysfunctional, weakened immune system is not running on all cylinders.

One part of it can overreact, and that overreaction is what goes in and attacks your own tissues. So, the issue is, we're not having a discussion at all in the media about ‘How do you modulate that overreaction and support people's immune health?’”

Similarly, Ayyadurai notes, the economic collapse is “a result of precisely engineered governmental policies,” even though those policies, superficially, appear to be in the public’s best interest.

Is COVID-19 a Real Pandemic?

COVID-19 meets the technical definition of a pandemic, and the World Health Organization did declare it a pandemic. However, the death toll is nowhere near that of earlier serious pandemics that would legitimately justify the extraordinary measures being deployed by the U.S. government.

The Spanish flu in 1918 infected 500 million people worldwide, killing between 20 million and 50 million. The bubonic plague also killed 50 million people, wiping out a shocking 60% of the European population. This is typically what people think of when they hear the word “pandemic.”

COVID-19 presently affects a tiny fraction of the global population — about 1.4 million cases out of a global population of 7.78 billion3 — and even with a death toll of 81,000 worldwide,4 COVID-19 has had a miniscule impact, having killed a mere 0.00001% of the population.

Don’t get me wrong. Any death is tragic. But any given individual’s risk of dying from the epidemics of diabetes, heart disease or cancer, for example, is greater than their risk of dying from COVID-19. Why is death from lifestyle-induced disease and environmental toxicity more preferable and acceptable than death from an infectious disease?

Dying from a preventable medical mistake is also a greater risk, as that kills up to 440,000 Americans every year. Where’s the panic about that? Isn’t the idea that conventional medicine kills 440,000 people a year terrifying?! 1 in 5 elderly patients are also injured by medical care. Where are the calls to protect our aging loved ones from this threat?

Were health policies more aligned with truth, we wouldn’t have these chronic disease epidemics and far fewer people would die from preventable medical mistakes. More people would lead healthy lives were they properly informed about what’s harmful and what’s healthy.

Similarly, when it comes to COVID-19, there are simple strategies with which we can address this infection that does not require collapsing the global economy, creating unheard of unemployment and isolating everyone from human contact for weeks on end. You can find many articles detailing such strategies on my Coronavirus Resource Page.

As noted by Ayyadurai, systems biology tells us that one size does not fit all. “We need to move to the right medicine for the right person at the right time,” he says. But this knowledge has not been applied in this pandemic. Instead, everyone is being treated as though they’re high risk for severe infection and death and therefore need to take identical precautions. So, what’s really going on here?

“We have not said, ‘Hey, let's shut down the economy to address the fact that we have skyrocketing obesity taking place, skyrocketing diabetes,” Ayyadurai says. “So, the level of contradiction, the level of hypocrisy should wake up everyone to understand that there is another agenda.

There is another agenda afoot. I repeat what my mentor said: ‘When things don't add up, take a step back and ask, what is the other agenda?’ And the only thing in a common-sense way that reveals itself to me is power, profit and control. Power, profit and control.”

The Power, Profit and Control Agenda

Like Ayyadurai, I believe the fearmongering is being used to suppress dissent, to crash the economy and to issue medical mandates. “If you look broadly, there were massive uprisings, antiestablishment uprisings [in different countries]. Well, they're all gone now. We don't even hear anything about them,” Ayyadurai says.

He also believes this fearmongering and social isolation mandates will be used as a way to acclimatize people to accept state wants or what a few people deem is good for everyone. “That, I think, is the milieu being set up,” he says. “That's being teed up.” Indeed, it simply doesn’t add up when you look at mortality rates.

“There's another agenda,” Ayyadurai says. “That's what I see, because it doesn't make any rational sense [to crash the economy over COVID-19]. I think that's why a number of the videos, the tweets I've done have gone viral, because to everyday working people, it doesn't make sense either. They're trying to sort this out.”

Interestingly, this epidemic is taking place just a few months after Google began censoring holistic health news. So, people searching for sound nutritional strategies can no longer find them. Instead, they’re directed to Big Pharma-backed sites promoting conventional medicine.

The censorship isn’t even about squashing nonscientific views anymore. Educated health professionals are being banned left and right simply for posting peer-reviewed studies showing nutraceuticals work, or that drugs or vaccines don’t work — including Ayyadurai himself, who got kicked off Twitter the day this interview was recorded over a vitamin D post.

“It has essentially moved to a model of a finite set of people serving the interests of another finite set of people,” Ayyadurai says. “That's what's fundamentally going on. When we really look back at the history of ‘infectious diseases,’ what actually caused the real decline in infectious disease? …

That came from sanitation, vitamin A, nutrition, elimination of child labor, refrigeration [and] infrastructure at the political level … Well, how did we get that? This is one layer people need to understand from a human standpoint. It came about because in the late 1800s, there was a massive force of the American working class who were militant, and they fought for those rights.

People lived in squalor. No one cared for them. It was the uprising of those people and very, very powerful independently self-organizing systems, all over this country, that forced the elites to give them these basic infrastructures …

So, what I see is the ability for people to organize and demand their rights and get them. That is what occurred in the late 1900s, and we got massive gains. Now look at infrastructure today. Dirty water, dirty air, dirty food … and we look at them in synergy, how they affect our body. None of that's discussed, none of that.

I think the United States has a D+ in infrastructure. The roads, the bridges and the water systems [are all crumbling]. And when you don't fix these things in time, they affect all types of environmental things. The elite in this country do not want to address that. They want to always create a fake problem and a fake solution to consolidate power.

And that's why when you look at this [COVID-19] phenomenon that's taking place, it's a penultimate of it … You create massive amounts of fear so people will be willing — because they're under economic stress, under what they think is a health [threat] — to give up their rights.

And that's where I see this headed. So, this is an interesting convergence of … economic attack, attack on people's health, [and attack on] people's autonomy and freedom. Truth, freedom and health are all under attack …

They do not want any discussion about indigenous people's medicines that have worked for centuries. They don't want to talk about simple solutions … so, they suppress discourse, suppress debate, suppress freedom, and move everything away from the scientific method — which is a process where you actually have to prove stuff, which is what they claim they want to do to scientific consensus.

Freedom gets suppressed and now you can move truth to scientific consensus. So, you go from suppression of freedom to fake science or outdated science at best. And then that is used to create a fake problem and a fake solution.

And then, if you go to the health part, what that means is you diminish people's health, you control people's health, and now you have a populace which is so controlled, they don't have the strength to fight for their freedom. So, you have the attack on freedom, the attack on truth, and the attack on health.

All of those are interconnected. They too are a system from a systems perspective. Without freedom, you can't have truth. Without truth, you can’t have health. And without health we don't have the strength to fight for our freedom. And the way that truth actually is discovered should be through the scientific method. That's what's really been compromised, starting, I would say, in the late ‘50s.”

Postal Service Could Be Used to Protect Free Communications

To summarize, the three-pronged agenda is: Power, profit and control. To counteract that three-pronged threat, we need academic freedom and the freedom to discourse and debate.

From that freedom, we get truth, and from truth, we’re able to understand health, not only physical health but also in the broadest sense the health of our systems, our infrastructure and environment. With health, we gain the strength to fight for even more freedoms.

“For each one of those, there's a solution. For example, when you go to freedom, if you look at communication, right now we are heavily relying on Google, Facebook and three major telecom companies. So, basically, five CEOs control our communication. One phone call to them, and you can essentially shut down communication ...

What is the solution? Well, it's going to sound weird, but … the founding fathers of this country created an institution called the United States Postal Service. Why did they create that? Because the crown was not allowing each individual to communicate. So, the notion of ‘the press’ was all of us. There was no New York Times. Each one of us were supposed to be the press ...

If anyone interfered with your communications, [they got a] 20-year prison sentence. It was criminal. So, the entire postal service system was a decentralized environment enabling every American to communicate for pennies …

In 1997 is when email volume overtook postal mail volume. I met with the executives of the postal service. I said, look, you guys should be living up to what you were chartered to do, which is to protect free communications. Why don't you offer a public email service and public social media services … that would be protected by the laws of the Constitution? No one, including the government, could interfere.

They thought it was a ridiculous idea … In 2011, the postal services were going out of business. Why? Because all the best parts of the postal service were privatized into DHL and FedEx. So, I again hit them really hard. The inspector general, Dave Williams, called me up.

He goes, ‘Shiva, why are you attacking us?’ I said, ‘Look, you guys are not doing your job. You're not in the postal mail business. You were supposed to be in the communications business. You are set up as a quasi-organization to protect our rights. So anyway, I did two chartered reports for them.

My point is we need a digital rights act, and there is an institution [that can supply us with that]. It is the postal service, in my view. All these postal service locations could be converted to a mesh network. So, there is an opportunity to have a network by the people for the people. Now if someone wants to go use Google and Facebook and you can, but there needs to be a public common.

Those few elite would object to this and have the power and control to prevent that from being implemented. Definitely. That's why I believe we need to have a mass movement. Nothing has ever been given to us. People think slavery ends one day and we have freedom the next. Every point in human history has always been people chipping away at slavery to get freedom from the elite."

Decentralization Is the Name of the Game

Ayyadurai discusses many additional issues and goes far deeper than I can summarize here, so please, listen to the interview in its entirety. He has many fascinating insights, ideas and solutions. For example, about 50 minutes in, he discusses how federally funded research systems can be improved to ensure scientific integrity and prevent scientific fraud.

“We need to take power away from the academics,” he says, “and one way to do that is to force decentralization. That's a common theme here.” He also analyzes the health care model, and discusses how health care, as a system, can be improved while simultaneously being made far less expensive.

“Broadly, we need to decentralize health care. The concept of centralized health care — which is what the purpose of this [COVID-19 pandemic is] — is that next year everyone's going to be mandated vaccines,” he says.

“For them to crash the economy, to drive it into a depression, for them it's a relatively great return on investment. You make the fed print $6 trillion, but you're going to make $7 trillion to $8 trillion recurring revenue [by way of mandated, annual vaccinations] … So, we have to do whatever it takes to decentralize health care …

When you look at these things I've said, it comes down to one word: Decentralization … I think the opportunity here is to start educating people. It is supposed to be We the People, and this does not mean it's going to happen without struggle.

We may have to rise up and fight in ways that we haven't done before, just like those people did in the late 1800s, and the idea is to compel the thing. We need to build a broad-based movement bottom-up … And I think it begins with taking care of your health.”

#covid-19 #pandemic

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kramlabs · 4 years ago

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Fitness Is…Getting sick. And recovering.

Via Blair Morrison April 2020

- - -

A while ago I interviewed a doctor who posed me a singular question to help me understand the body and its immune system.

“What happens,” he asked, “when you get a splinter in your finger and you don’t pull it out?”

“It gets infected,” I responded.

“Right,” he said. “The skin gets red and the body produces puss. Why do you think it does that?”

“To… get rid of the splinter,” I answered, cautiously.

“Exactly. It produces the puss to extricate the splinter. Now, the important question. Which is the illness… the puss or the splinter?”

The point he had so elegantly made was that most of us think about sickness completely backwards. We see someone wipe their nose or have diarrhea, and we think those are the elements that need to be fixed in order to regain health. In reality, those symptoms are the body’s way of FIGHTING whatever it is that infiltrated it. A fever is the body raising the temperature to kill an infection. A cough is the body expelling foreign chemicals or toxins from the lungs. If the splinter is the cause of the infection, why spend our time trying to stop the puss. Or the cough. Or the fever.

He went on to explain to me that the body actually has two immune systems. The first, known as the cell-mediated system, is the one responsible for fighting the infection on the front lines. This is where the body sends white blood cells to the affected area to consume infected cells and expel them via snot, puss, mucus, whatever. The second, and far more flashy system, is the antibody system. This is where our body creates an imprint or memory of a specific illness in certain cells, to more efficiently fight that illness in the future. This is how we develop long term immunity.

“The trick,” he said with a smile, “is that these things are intended to work in tandem. Without the cell-mediated response, the body isn’t capable of developing the exact antibodies it will need in the future. This is why vaccines don’t produce the same level of immunity as contracting the actual disease… the body didn’t go through the entire process of fighting off the infection.”

The realization for me at that moment was major. What I had previously understood as “sickness” (meaning the symptoms) was not only natural, it was necessary. Without going through the process of fevers, congestion, etc, my body wouldn’t get the “reps” it needed to build a robust and intelligent immune system. I had been demonizing my body’s natural defense mechanism against the billions of pathogens, microbes, and bacteria that exist in the world. What good was all the organic, gluten free food I was eating to fill my body with the vitamins and nutrients it needs if every time my temperature went above 100 I took a pill. That’s like mobilizing for an hour every day but never lifting a weight. Technically you’re always ready, but you’ll never be strong.

The cost of this misunderstanding is enormous, and twofold.

First, when we strip ourselves of the opportunity to defend against a whole host of maladies, we increase the likelihood of sustained toxicity or infection in the body. Remember that every fever, cough, and runny nose is the cell mediated system trying to rid your body of some abnormal or toxic element. If it is no longer allowed to do this because we took some anti-symptomatic medicine, we may be trapping the toxic element inside our cells.

For example, the worst thing you can give a smoker is a cough suppressant… you’re removing the best chance they have to get the tar out of their lungs. Such blunting of the cell mediated system over the course of a lifetime leads to a) an unpracticed response team living in b) a perpetually toxic environment. Combine that scenario with a medical establishment that loves doling out antibiotics and antivirals like Halloween candy, and it’s like putting a rookie SWAT team in the yard of a maximum security prison… not a great recipe for long term health and sustainability. In cases of extreme toxicity, the body will resort to quarantining certain areas of abnormal cells, barricading them off from the healthy tissues while it figures out what to do next. This is called cancer.

Granted, smoking is an extreme case of acute toxic poisoning. There are a host of other instances where the outcome isn’t so obviously harmful because our body is pretty ingenious at finding ways around the obstacles we present it. But we also need to remember that we live in a world where even our most basic interactions with the environment are growing increasingly toxic. The air we breath, the food we eat, the radio waves we live amongst; all of it is consumed, filtered, and dealt with on the cellular level. When we establish a practice of blunting our body’s most basic defense mechanism against these things, the garbage is going to start piling up. Enter a malignant bacteria or a novel coronavirus, and you might find yourself in a dumpster fire.

The second cost of misunderstanding sickness is cultural. Rather than viewing symptoms for what they are (natural and necessary), we see them as something to avoid. Something to fear. Think of the old NyQuil slogan: “the nighttime, sniffling, sneezing, aching, coughing, stuffy-head, fever, so you can rest medicine.” It shifts your focus away from what’s happening in your body (fighting something off) to what those symptoms are preventing you from doing (getting sleep). Pretty clever marketing, but we eat it up. We dread the common cold, we scamper to CVS every fall to get the latest flu shot. Why? Because, heaven forbid we get sick. Heaven forbid we miss work or school, or have to lay in bed for a few days while our friends are at the gym. It speaks to the broader impatience that has infiltrated every aspect of our lives, where we expect immediate relief from annoyance, disturbance, and discomfort. We are spoiled. We are soft.

Instead, we rely on medicine to control symptoms and upon a sterile world to prevent infections. A world, I will remind you, that is less sterile than it has ever been, regardless of the gallons of hand sanitizer we bathe it in. We are progressively unequipping ourselves to handle even mild infections, and, more generally, we are off-loading the responsibility for our health. We demand a treatment for everything, a vaccine for everything. We grow unacquainted with illness, and begin to fear it in all forms. There is no perceived risk to chronic lack of self care, because it’s no longer a personal responsibility. Health is now a collective responsibility. We think that by preventing people from feeling symptoms we are protecting them, but really we are weakening them. Day after day, year after year, we are giving them fish. But where are the fishermen?

There has never been a better example of this phenomenon than the Coronavirus pandemic. The models from every country experiencing this thing have shown, more or less, the same result: it is HIGHLY contagious and RARELY fatal. The CDC has published findings that only about 20% of the exposed population show symptoms that would prompt them to go to the hospital and get tested. That means that the 646,000 confirmed cases in the United States actually reflects closer to 3.2 million exposures. That means the 28,000 total deaths equates to a fatality rate of about 0.007, or a little more than half a percent. The same calculation applied to New York (the worst area of infection) puts the local death rate at exactly 1%.

Now, in gross numbers that’s still a lot of people dying... hence the response from world leaders and public health officials. In viral terms, it’s about 7 times as deadly as what we deal with every year during cold and flu season when massive amounts of people get sick. In the United States alone, the CDC estimates that influenza has resulted in between 9 million – 45 million illnesses, 140,000 – 810,000 hospitalizations, and 12,000 – 61,000 deaths annually since 2010. That’s a death rate of 0.001, or about a tenth of a percent.

In an effort to save lives, infectious disease experts around the world immediately honed in on who COVID-19 was killing and discovered that the disease seemed to predominantly attack the elderly and infirm. 99% of fatalities in Italy had 2 or more pre-existing conditions, or comorbidities. These are chronic conditions like diabetes, obesity, hypertension, emphysema, age, etc. The same criteria has applied to 95% of deaths in New York. What does this mean? It means that, while the illness is not harmless to the young and healthy population, it usually is not deadly. But it is extremely deadly to the sick, frail, and elderly. Do we know what else is extremely deadly to the sick, frail, and elderly? Not to sound callous... but almost everything. Any sort of trauma. Complications from surgery. The flu. These are high risk populations living in a world full of risks. This shouldn’t be news to anyone.

This information is critical to understand because it highlights how we, as a society, naturally function. In so many cases, it’s the role of the strong to shield the weak from many of the risks they might otherwise encounter. This is no exception, but the way we’ve been directed to do so in this case is misguided. The way the strong can protect the weak from something like the coronavirus is by going out, getting sick, and getting better. Period. Those with pre-existing conditions quarantine at home while the rest of the population goes out and lets their immune systems do the work of establishing herd immunity. Hospitals should cancel elective procedures to prepare for a surge of cases, but since the population that would ultimately need the intensive care is locked up in their houses, those beds will remain largely empty. We know this works because it’s the way respiratory viruses work every year. The virus runs its course when enough of the population has encountered it, dealt with it, and developed immunity. By sheltering the entire population in place we are preventing the strong from encountering the virus and prolonging the life-cycle of the pandemic. This increase in time duration actually raises the likelihood that it will eventually run across someone in the at risk population before it’s done.

So, how would this have looked if we hadn’t sheltered everyone? Look at the five US states who didn’t do so: Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. If you compare them with other states that have a comparable population density (Oklahoma, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Montana) you’ll see increased growth rates for the disease in the non-shelter states (Iowa 9% vs Colorado 6%, Nebraska 10% vs Nevada 6%, for example). However, the average death rate of confirmed cases in those 5 non shelter states is 2%, compared to almost 4% in the sheltered states. That means that the disease is infecting people at a higher rate in the states that are not sheltering, but killing people at a lower rate. This is because the increase in infections is almost certainly born by the healthier population. People that know they are at risk are going to stay sheltered regardless of the order. These states are not reporting any issues with their hospitals being overrun and their economy hasn’t skipped a beat. What they are achieving, is a fast track toward herd immunity.

Another example of how a non-shelter plan might’ve looked could be found right here in California if we rewind the tape a few months. A new study being conducted at Stanford University is investigating the possibility that an early wave of coronavirus hit the state back in November, December, and January when many residents reported harsh flu symptoms. "Given the state's unprecedented direct air access to China, and given its large expatriate and tourist Chinese communities, especially in its huge denser metropolitan corridors in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, it could be that what thousands of Californians experienced as an unusually "early" and "bad" flu season might have also reflected an early coronavirus epidemic, suggesting that many more Californians per capita than in other states may have acquired immunity to the virus." It might explain why California, a state with 40 million people, has seen the same number of cases as states nearly a quarter its size in Pennsylvania and Illinois. If this turns out to be true, California would have unwittingly developed a level of herd immunity without a noticeable uptick in deaths, hospitalizations, or demand for protective equipment. It did so, however, with a noticeable lack of hysteria, facemasks, and social awkwardness.

But you need to have a population that is willing and able to be sick in order for this to work. Going back to our cultural fear of discomfort, we know that if given the choice, no one is going to sign up for that job. 2 weeks of symptoms for a lifetime of immunity? We’d rather hunker down for 12 months and wait for a vaccine to shield the strong and the weak all at once. Nevermind that this disease is something that nature is already proving it can manage. Nevermind that doctors have found effective ways to treat critical cases with drugs and methods we already have on hand. Even the strong and healthy would rather take the risk of bankrupting businesses and increasing personal debt than they would of getting sick.

On the other hand, there’s the possibility that our population is already so sick and frail that we wouldn’t be able to handle it even if we were willing to try. It’s true that California also happens to be one of the fitter populations in the country on average, and the natural method of combating viral infections works best when you have a population that is made up of healthy people. If we look at just one of the pre-existing conditions that negatively impacts outcomes from the coronavirus (obesity) we see that, as a whole, we may have a problem. According to the most recent Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) data from September 2019, adult obesity rates now exceed 35% in nine states, 30% in 31 states and 25% in 48 states. Mississippi and West Virginia have the highest adult obesity rates at 39.5% and Colorado has the lowest at 23%. That’s right, the LOWEST obesity rate in any of the 50 states is 23%.

A study done in 2014, conducted by an international consortium of researchers led by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, looked at obesity AND overweight populations (BMI of 30+ or 25-30) and estimated 160 million Americans fall into one of those two categories. Nearly three-quarters of American men and more than 60% of women qualify. Sadly, it’s not just the adult population – nearly 30% of boys and girls under age 20 are either obese or overweight, up from 19% in 1980. Now, we all know BMI is an imperfect measuring tool, but 160 million people is a disgustingly high number, no matter how you slice it. And that’s data from 6 years ago.

This means that the percentage of people we have walking around this country that would qualify as “low risk” is somewhere around 70%. And that’s only if we consider obesity. Add in the non-obese who have conditions like diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, those coming off cancer treatments, and anyone who smokes cigarettes, and you see where this goes. The “strong” among us who would be tasked with taking on the virus and developing immunity are woefully outnumbered by the “weak.”

The sad part is that so many of these conditions are magnified by our own sedentary and malnutritious choices. In his “Five Buckets of Death” lecture, CrossFit CEO Greg Glassman shows that chronic diseases like the ones mentioned above account for 80% of deaths annually in the U.S., whereas microbial, genetic, traumatic, and toxic events combined account for a mere 20%. The difference between the bucket holding the 80% and the ones holding the 20% is that we have a measure of daily control over our risk level. He calls it “the willful divide.”

Through our own actions and ignorance, we have built a society incapable of dealing with even a mild public health crisis, let alone a major one. We progressively poison ourselves with genetically modified foods, trap ourselves indoors staring at computer screens, suppress our immune system’s natural efforts to expel every toxin, and demand that our medical community come up with a solution for the mess we’ve made. We think that bacteria and viruses are monsters that viciously attack us and our way of life. The truth is that our way of life invites destruction. Louis Pasteur, the father of germ theory, said, “The microbe is nothing, the terrain is everything.” Fix the terrain and you fix the problem. Build a society of strong, healthy people and you have an army of well equipped immune systems to handle almost anything nature produces. Continue to sit at home, eating empty food, and suppressing symptoms; you have a herd waiting for a plague to strike it down.

In spite of everything we are doing to undermine the natural process of health and immunity, nature is still finding a way. We are still beating this pandemic, even in places where no stringent mitigation strategy is in place. After all, the body wants to heal. It adapts, learns, and overcomes better than anything ever grown in a lab. In most cases, we just need to get out of its way. If we start embracing sickness as part of the adaptive process and stop trying to skirt the momentary discomfort it entails, we put ourselves in a far better position to protect our society long term. Combine that philosophy with exercising regularly, spending copious time outside, and eating real food, and you produce a population that will experience life in a natural rhythm rather than a state of constant fear.

http://crossfitmobile.blogspot.com/2020/04/fitness-is-getting-sick.html

#Blair Morrison #philosophy #immunity #immune system #t cells #NADS #chronic disease #Greg glassman #we are all going to get it

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cardamomoespeciado · 4 years ago

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Angle: Is the new coronavirus a trigger for diabetes?

Chad Terhune

[Reuters] --Mario Buerna (28) was a healthy man with children. It was June this year that he suffered from dyspnea due to fever. Soon after, he was diagnosed as positive for COVID-19 (coronavirus disease).

A few weeks later, Buerna, who appeared to be in the process of recovery, felt weak and began to vomit. At 3:00 am on August 1, he lost consciousness at his home in Mesa, Arizona, and fell to the floor.

An ambulance rushed him to a nearby hospital, and doctors took him to the intensive care unit after the coma had disappeared. The name of the diagnosed disease is "type 1 diabetes". Buerna was astonished and trembled. This is because he had no history of diabetes.

The doctor said, "COVID-19 is the cause," says Buerna.

As seen in the crisis that struck Buerna and similar cases, new concerns have arisen about the dangerous relationship between diabetes and COVID-19, and doctors and scientists around the world are rushing to unravel it. Many experts are convinced that COVID-19 can trigger the onset of diabetes, and even some adults and children who were unrelated to traditional risk factors are no exception.

It has already been well reported that when diabetic patients suffer from COVID-19, the risk of aggravation and death is significantly increased. In July, US health officials revealed that nearly 40% of COVID-19 deaths were diabetic. At this point, cases like Mr. Buerna suggest that the relationship between the two diseases is bidirectional.

"COVID-19 can cause diabetes from scratch," said Dr. Francesco Rubino, a diabetes researcher who heads the Department of Metabolic Disorders and Obesity at King's College London.

Dr. Rubino leads an international team collecting cases on a global scale. The purpose is to unravel one of the biggest mysteries of this pandemic. He said more than 300 doctors initially offered to provide cases for verification, but expect more doctors to work with as the number of infected cases surges again.

"These cases (which cause diabetes) come from all over the world and every continent," Dr. Rubino told Reuters.

In addition to this global case collection project, the National Institutes of Health is also funding research into how the new coronavirus causes hyperglycemia and diabetes.

Symptoms can progress rapidly and be life-threatening in these situations. Symptoms may surface months after the onset of COVID-19, and the full picture of the problem and its long-term effects are likely to be well after the beginning of the year.

Not only sporadic evidence, but more intensive research is needed before COVID-19 can be conclusively proven to trigger diabetes in a wide range.

"For now, there are more questions than answers," said Dr. Robert Eckel, director of the American Diabetes Association's Medical and Science Division. "We may be working on a whole new form of diabetes right now," he explained.

<"Terrible and scary" diagnosis>

Type 1 diabetes develops when the human immune system accidentally destroys insulin-secreting cells in the pancreas, blocking the regulation of blood sugar levels. There are about 1.6 million patients in the United States.

More widespread is type 2 diabetes, which affects about 30 million Americans. Although insulin secretion continues in this patient, cells acquire insulin resistance over the years, making it impossible to suppress the rise in blood sugar levels.

There have been cases of type 1 diabetes associated with infectious diseases such as influenza and known coronaviruses. It is known that the infection puts stress on the human body and raises blood sugar levels. However, this was a common symptom in people with a predisposition to diabetes. Only a limited number of people will eventually develop diabetes, and scientists do not yet fully understand why.

This year, doctors are seeing people who do not have risk factors for type 2 diabetes, such as aging and obesity, but develop acute symptoms of diabetes after COVID-19.

In the case of type 1 diabetes, the initial symptoms include extreme thirst, pollakiuria, and weight loss. Arthur Simis had no idea that these were signs of diabetes.

This summer, Arthur and his wife, Sarah, noticed that their 12-year-old son, Atticus, seemed thin and was sleeping all the time. The couple attributed it to the stress of staying home because of a pandemic, or to a growing season.

On July 9, Arthur took his son to an emergency medical center near his home in Gardnerville, Nevada, as Atticus's symptoms persisted. Medical staff have noticed dangerously high blood sugar and urinary ketone levels. Both showed that Atticus had diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA).

Doctors told Simis that immediate hospital treatment was needed to avoid the coma caused by the newly diagnosed type 1 diabetes. The father and son were taken by ambulance for 50 miles to the nearest hospital in Reno.

At that time, Arthur said he asked the doctors, "Why my son has diabetes." "It was terribly scary."

Arthur believes his son was infected with the new coronavirus. This spring, I had symptoms with my wife Sarah. The couple visited the emergency medical center, but were not tested for the new coronavirus due to stricter testing standards at the time. According to the medical record, Atticus was diagnosed as negative for the new corona by examination in the intensive care unit (ICU). However, he has never had an antibody test to determine if he had taken the virus into his body weeks ago.

Even if one survives the acute symptoms of diabetes, the lives of newly diagnosed patients will change drastically. Medications and other medical supplies to manage diabetes cost hundreds of dollars each month, and in many areas it is common to wait long to see an endocrinologist.

In the case of Arizona's patient, Buerna, more than two months have passed since she was diagnosed, but her ongoing Medicaid insurance coverage is still awaiting approval. He couldn't go to work for weeks because of his illness, and his household was in dire straits. His wife, Erica, is eight months pregnant and has a three-year-old daughter, Catalina. On August 2, when Buerna was still in the ICU, the family was notified of the eviction. Sometimes they rely on food banks for their meals.

Buerna is said to have been depressed during her hospital stay due to restricted family visits. It was a phone call from her sister that cheered her up.

"I want to be healthy so that I can watch the growth of my children," he says. "I can't die yet," he said.

(Translation: Acrelen)

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jennymanrique · 4 years ago

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COVID-19 vaccine will not arrive until 2021; experts expect a mental health social epidemic

With the prospect of an effective vaccine in the second half of next year, difficult times are to come in terms of infections, but also hopeful times if disparities exacerbated by the pandemic are taken on.

With a total of 39 vaccines in different phases of development worldwide, the rest of this year promises to be a time of scientific experimentation in the battle against COVID-19. However, for the testing to be reliable, at least 30,000 volunteers prone to the coronavirus are needed, and racial disparities and side effects must be taken into account.

As Dr. Nirav R. Shah, head researcher at Stanford University’s Clinical Excellence Research Center explained in a Zoom video conference organized by Ethnic Media Services, “Science is moving rapidly, but a vaccine will not be generally available until the latter part of next year, because these tests are difficult to coordinate.”

The vaccine testing done on a few dozen healthy adult volunteers don’t say anything about their effectiveness on large vulnerable populations, “which are the ones we need to protect first,” said Shah, who is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine. Then it will be necessary to solve the shortage of doses in a pandemic situation.

Faced with the lack of an effective quarantine and isolation policy, Shah said there are a number of applicable strategies to control the pandemic and a “false dilemma” has been established in this country between life and the means for living, because “people can still be saved and kept working.” As he sees it, the solution is not the so-called “herd immunity” applied in countries like Brazil and Sweden, where the virus has been allowed to expand uncontrollably, because that will only increase the number of deaths.

A practical early detection system is the distribution of 1.5 million smart thermometers equipped to predict whether the fever is a flu or is related to other symptoms of COVID, data for immediately identifying high fever hotspots in the country. “While people are dying because they have to wait up to 18 days for their test results, this would be a leading indicator that could identify the communities where there is COVID before people end up in intensive care units and die,” assured Shah.

These molecular COVID tests that are used today in the United States are not only costly (up to $100), but also the results take weeks, time when the virus has already spread. A more efficient test would be the antigen test that has a lower cost (between $5 and $15), a very low risk of false positives, and results are available in 15 minutes, the expert explained.

To date 169 treatments in various stages of development have been identified, and there are some, like steroids, that have shown to be economic and effective even reducing the number of deaths by up to 50% in certain sectors of the population.

But despite the availability of this scientific knowledge, Shah noted the discrepancy in the statistics between the Center for Disease Control and the Department of Health and Human Services has made it impossible to have a proper strategy. “The number of daily cases, rates of infection, positive cases, and hospitalizations are the minimums needed to make decisions,” he asserted.

Worse than less developed countries

This data is relevant in this time when the United States is the country most affected by the pandemic in the world, dangerously close to 200,000 deaths, and almost 5.5 million infections that have gone up by 66% in the last few weeks, according to CDC data. The states of California, Texas and Florida have all surpassed 500,000 cases, while 295 counties are considered hotspots but only 79 of them have racial statistics. Hispanics are the most affected in 59 of those hotspots.

These rates of infection are higher than less developed countries in Eastern Europe and South Asia.

And even though there is the theory that the authoritarianism of certain countries (strict controls and quarantines) or the culture (for example, the extensive use of face masks in Asian countries) are sufficient reasons to explain why some countries have had better control of the pandemic, it is not so clear as to those being the motives.

“While political leaders refuse to use science as a guide and ignore biology or mathematics, it is not going to go well,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute and Professor of Global Health at that university.

“There are four or five ways to deal with the virus and if countries decide to use one very effectively and the others as a supplement, there will be success. In the United States simply using a face mask has become a political issue, and here public policies are not based on science,” he insisted.

In poor countries like Vietnam, for example, it has gone better because they limited trips to China at an early stage, monitored visitors and tracked contacts. In South Korea they test massively, in Japan they have set up the universal use of face masks and in New Zealand there are strict quarantines.

By comparison, in the U.S. there are 50 different responses to the pandemic amid a global crisis since the free movement over internal borders has made governors battle with 50 “inadequate responses”.

“We have been underfunding the public health infrastructure… it is a model in which the state decides and the federal government supports, but with an absent federal government, the state response has been very weak,” said Jha.

Suicidal thoughts

As if that were not enough, the repercussions of the pandemic on the mental health of people in the United States are alarming. In a survey by the CDC among 5,000 participants in June, 40% of them reported mental health problems. Among young people age 18 to 24, that rate was much higher, reaching 75%.

In the same survey, 52% of the Latinos reported between one and four major mental health problems, 18% had suicidal thoughts and 21% starting using some substance to deal with the stress and anxiety caused by the pandemic. Twenty-two per cent of the essential workers also thought about taking their own lives.

“This shows us that the COVID-19 pandemic is more than a simple illness caused by only one virus,” said Dr. Tung Nguyen, Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and Director of the Asian American Research Center on Health.

“We are seeing the beginning of a social mental health epidemic and a terrible effect on the social determinants of health, like income, employment and housing.”

For Nguyen the U.S. health system has failed to produce enough face masks, ventilators and personal protection equipment (PPE) accentuating the disparities. “Since we will not have an effective vaccine until 2021, people will continue to suffer unnecessarily,” he observed.

Despite the numbers and the dark outlook, experts assure that there is a ray of hope in the future. “At times like these people cannot pretend things are fine. We will have a cultural change and I’m sure a variety of dynamics will change and we will come out of this even stronger,” said Nguyen.

For Shah even if “we never go back to normal, with any luck we will have learned about infection rates and how to do things in a future pandemic.”

Dr. Jha showed the most optimism. He said that the protests of the Black Lives Matter movement and the COVID-19 pandemic are not disconnected phenomena, but rather have magnified systemic racism that reflect how African Americans are the most affected by the virus, next to Hispanics.

“I think we will come out of this pandemic with a strong desire to take on these racial inequalities to move ahead… I hope we progress because it is a long-standing debt,” he concluded.

Originally published here

Want to read this piece in Spanish? Click here

#English #COVID-19 #vaccine #mental health #Black Lives Matter #suicidal thoughts #pandemic #coronavirus #United States

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womenofcolor15 · 5 years ago

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XXXTentacion’s Alleged Killer Begs Judge To Get Out Of Jail Due To COVID-19 + R. Kelly & Kodak Black Also Try It

One of the alleged killers of rapper XXXTentacion is pleading a judge for a get out of jail free card due to the Coronavirus pandemic. And he isn’t the only one. R. Kelly and Kodak Black are trying to use the same excuse to get from behind bars. More inside…

One of the men who allegedly killed 20-year-old rapper XXXTentacion wants out of jail!

Dedrick Williams of Pompano Beach – the first of four men charged with the murder of the “SAD!” rapper in 2018 - is behind bars putting in pen work. He wrote a letter to Judge Michael A. Usan asking to be released from jail because he’s afraid he’ll catch the deadly COVID-19 virus. Apparently, he has a “very weak immune system.”

The 24-year-old, who has been charged with first degree murder, asked if he could be released on “bond and have house arrest until this disease blows over.”

He wrote he was sending the judge this letter to save his life. He claims a Broward County deputy infected an inmate with the virus and an said nobody’s being tested at the jail.

The plea comes a few weeks after a Broward County inmate died from the virus. 64-year-old convicted sex offender Alan Pollock reportedly passed away from complications of the virus at Northwest Medical Center. At least five Broward County inmates have tested positive for COVD-19. Several states have began releasing non-violent, elderly, and disable inmates due to how the virus is spreading in jails.

In the letter, Dedrick noted he hasn’t been in any trouble the 21 months he has been in jail. He also tried to use his history with the judge to argue why he should be released.

“Since the age of 17 I’ve had you as a judge. I am now 24. Never have I missed court or failed a drug test since being in your courtroom," he wrote.

Four men in total were arrested and charged with first degree murder, including Dedrick, Michael Boatwright, Trayvon Newsome and Robert Allen. They also copped armed robbery charges.

"I hope that you and your family are safe as well,” Dedrick concluded his letter.

You can can red the full letter here. No word from the judge yet.

Another inmate is trying to get out of jail...

Embattled R&B singer R. Kelly is trying his hand at getting out of jail due to the Coronavirus pandemic. This isn't his first time the singer has petitioned the court to release him since he was locked up on a slew of felony racketeering and sex abuse charges last summer. And likely won't be his last.

Prosecutors made arguments to Kelly's previous requests that he would be a flight risk if released from the Chicago prison system. In response, the "I Believe I Can Fly" singer said not so. He said he owes almost $2 million in back taxes and then he explained where a large sum of money that was given to him earlier this year went. Apparently, the singer received $200,000, but Kelly said that money went to agents and managers. Hmph.

Billboard reports:

“The monies the Government claims Mr. Kelly has access to are not the kind of funds that would present an opportunity to flee, let alone live a life covertly in exile,” Kelly’s attorney Michael Leonard states in a letter submitted to the court April 19. “It similarly ignores the fact that the current environment of restricted traveling commercial activities would make it that much more difficult than before, and albeit impossible for a celebrity like Mr. Kelly, to flee from prosecution.”

Kelly’s attorney filed this letter with the court after the government submitted a motion (April 17) that R. Kelly is a flight risk and a danger to the community. U.S. Department of Justice attorneys are asking the federal judge overseeing his case to keep the singer in prison pending trial. Prosecutors filed their motion after Kelly made a second emergency plea to the New York court on April 16th to release him from prison to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The singer’s latest bid came 10 days after the NY Federal Court shot down his previous request to be released pending trial.

In opposing Kelly’s release, U.S. Attorney Richard P. Donoghue says that not only does the singer not have any underlying medical conditions, but also that he is a flight risk and a danger to the community. In his memo to the court, Donoghue reminds the court that the charges against Kelly in Chicago include that he participated in a long-running conspiracy to obstruct justice and a conspiracy to receive child pornography including during the years he was on bail awaiting trial. Donoghue argues that there is probable cause to believe that Kelly committed at least five serious crimes while out on bail.

The court has yet to rule on his petition.

Also...

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@lawronin @realdonaldtrump

A post shared by KILL BILL (@kodakblack) on Apr 26, 2020 at 1:11pm PDT

Rapper Kodak Black - who's behind bars for allegedly lying on a firearm application - was recently transferred to another jail in an effort to reduce his chances of catching the deadly virus.

This Where I’m At Until This Corona shit Ova Wit

Niagara County Jail P.O. Box 496 5526 Niagara Street ext. Lockport, NY 14094

— Kodak Black (@KodakBlack1k) March 25, 2020

A few days ago, Kodak's lawyer, Bradford Cohen, revealed that his client was denied early release or being moved to a detention center closer to his family as per the First Step Act.

“It’s amazing how the Federal [Bureau of Prison] works. Here’s a guy that still has over a 1.5 years left on his sentence and no signs of corona, in a min security club fed, the judge denies his request to be released, and Bop goes ahead and decides he is a candidate to be released. Meanwhile, @kodakblack sits in a penitentiary where i cannot have any meaningful legal discussions on any of his cases, 1100 miles away from his family, where there are cases of corona, for a paperwork offense, and they wont even agree to transfer him closer to his family, like the First Step Act suggested. The you have @6ix9ine0fficial who was accused of violent offenses, has prior history and is sent to a private prison and then released early as well. If you think there isn’t a 2 tiered system of justice you are dreaming. #justiceforkodak“

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Bradford Cohen (@lawronin) on Apr 8, 2020 at 11:07am PDT

Now, Kodak wants Trump to "pull up on him" so he can tell him about his "brilliant idea."

View this post on Instagram

@lawronin @realdonaldtrump

A post shared by KILL BILL (@kodakblack) on Apr 26, 2020 at 1:11pm PDT

THIS guy...

Photos: Instar/Broward Sheriff's Office/AP

[Read More ...] source http://theybf.com/2020/04/28/xxxtentacion%E2%80%99s-alleged-killer-begs-judge-to-out-of-jail-due-to-covid-19-r-kelly-kodak-bla

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iol247 · 5 years ago

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The drivers of President Ramaphosa’s big lockdown decision

Opinionista • Dirk De Vos

Each one of us is an important data point in the largest and most expensive experiment of all time.

On Monday 23 March, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that from midnight on Thursday, the country would go into lockdown for 21 days. This was done in an effort to halt the spread of the runaway SARS-CoV-2 virus which causes the respiratory disease known as Covid-19.

Essentially, during that period, the whole country, other than essential services, will come to a stop. The cost of the decision is impossible to calculate and the damage to an already weak economy will take decades to recover from, if the country makes the right decisions.

Hundreds, if not thousands of firms, the good and bad, will go out of business and with it an already dire unemployment rate will go up. Whole swathes of the economy, including those that had enormous job creation potential, like tourism, might never fully recover.

In making this decision, South Africa joins a raft of other countries, mostly in Europe, doing some version of the same thing. The US is presently under a 15-day lockdown.

South Africa is different in one respect: it implemented its lockdown far earlier into the trajectory of infection than other countries did. Indeed, Boris Johnson, the UK prime minister, announced his government’s measures just hours after Ramaphosa’s announcement, but did so after 6,650 people had tested positive for the virus and after 335 patients, who had also tested positive, had died.

In South Africa, with 402 testing positive as of 23 May, (see: South Africa’s confirmed coronavirus cases jump by 128 to 402) no deaths have yet been recorded.

The UK government’s decision is a departure from its earlier policy of attempting to slow the spread of the virus, do more to isolate the vulnerable (older people or those with compromised immune systems), but then to allow the majority (around 60%) of the population to become infected, get sick, recover and by doing so become immune and thereby halt the further spread of the disease (so-called “herd immunity”). That approach would have also allowed the UK economy to largely continue as before.

The UK and the US approach was radically changed following the publication of the so-called Imperial College paper Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID- 19 mortality and healthcare demand. It pointed to the danger that mere mitigation would result in health systems being overrun at around the same time by serious and critically ill patients, particularly those requiring intensive care unit (ICU) treatment.

The paper predicted that the result of mere mitigation efforts there would be as many as 250,000 deaths in the UK and 1.1-1.2 million in the US. In addition, it is not clear whether having been infected does provide immunity. Clearly, this horrifying prediction was completely unpalatable, and it forced a reversal of existing policy in both countries. The impact of the Imperial College paper has gone far beyond just the UK and US. It would almost certainly have been a key factor behind the Ramaphosa government’s decision on Monday.

Something about the SARS-CoV-2 virus: It is a coronavirus – a relatively simple RNA virus (as opposed to a DNA virus). Chinese scientists were able to publish the virus’s genetic sequence less than a week after they isolated it. (Read: The race to produce a vaccine for the latest coronavirus) Just six other coronaviruses are known to infect humans, causing normal colds, but two of them, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (Mers) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars), cause severe diseases. (See: What We Know So Far About SARS-CoV-2.)

It is not clear why some coronaviruses are relatively harmless and others dangerous. An up-to-date and accessible summary of what is known about the SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19 is hosted by Our World In Data here: Coronavirus Disease (Covid-19) – Statistics and Research which, in turn, uses data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control here: Covid-19. At present, gigantic amounts of research and data are being generated all over the world, from appropriate policies to prevent the spread of the virus, to potential drug treatments and of course, the potential of a vaccine. (Novel Coronavirus Information Center). The World Health Organisation (WHO) has also put together an excellent video of the disease: The Coronavirus Explained & What You Should Do, and its public health implications.

In the absence of proven drug treatments or a vaccine, the following related issues are important: how and how quickly does it spread; and how sick do people get (and what is the mortality rate) across different classification criteria? It is these that drive policy or, as we see, dramatic interventions of nationwide lockdowns.

We know that SARS-CoV-2 is highly infectious and more so because carriers are asymptomatic (they don’t show symptoms) for about 5-6 days before they get sick [Report of the WHO-China Joint Mission on Coronavirus Disease 2019 (Covid-19)], but this can be as long as 14 days or perhaps longer. To be safe on this metric, the South African government has given itself 21 days. It is possible that some carriers don’t get sick at all. Key measures used here are related measures, namely the “doubling rate” and the basic reproduction rate (represented as R0).

The doubling rate or exponential growth is introduced to children by the (mythical) story of the man who once got the emperor of India to pay him in rice with the formula that he would start with one grain of rice and double the number for each block on a chess board. An online maths game for kids demonstrates the point: The Rice And Chessboard Story — Learning How Doubling Makes Numbers Grow (useful for parents trying to get their children to learn something during the lockdown).

Without intervention, the virus’s reproduction rate (ie, how many people are infected by one carrier) is very high. An R0 below one means that an infected person infects less than one other and the disease, therefore, dies out. Anything above one means that the infection rate grows. Using data from China, the Imperial College paper used a base assumption of 2.4 (range 2-2.6).

Regarding how sick people get, an assumption based on the Chinese experience and especially the city of Wuhan, 81% of those diagnosed with Covid-19 have mild cases that can be managed at home. About 14% have serious cases needing hospital treatment and 5% were critical cases of patients who suffered from respiratory failure, septic shock, and/or multiple organ dysfunction or failure. Almost half of the critical cases (2.3%) died.

It is the 19% of serious and critical cases combined with the high reproductive rate that looks to overwhelm public health systems.

Unfortunately, the above numbers are not very useful. There are wide discrepancies within China (Estimating Risk for Death from 2019 Novel Coronavirus Disease, China, January–February 2020), between China and the epicentre of the current outbreak, northern Italy, and between these and the data from the Covid-19 afflicted cruise ship, the Diamond Princess (Cruise ship outbreak helps pin down how deadly the new coronavirus is). More information here.

There are significant differences between age groups, and gender, but especially where there is any other underlying disease. The recent data from Italy is especially interesting. The fatality rate was very strongly weighted towards those with underlying health conditions. (Characteristics of Covid-19 patients dying in Italy Report based on available data on March 20th, 2020)

In Italy, the median age of those who succumbed was 80. About 41% of all those who died were aged between 80-89, with the 70-79 age group accounting for a further 35%. The other significant detail from Italy was the presence of pre-existing conditions. Approximately 75% of the dead had two or more pre-existing conditions, 50% had three or more pre-existing conditions, in particular heart disease, diabetes and cancer. Of the five who died who were between 31 and 39 years old, each of them had serious pre-existing health conditions. But whether it is age or the underlying conditions which in Italy are associated with older people that have driven these outcomes is not yet clear.

For Ramaphosa then, the decision to implement the lockdown must have been extremely difficult. We rightly expect our governments to make evidence-based policy, but in this case, there is not sufficient evidence. The highly respected Stanford University Professor John Ioannidis (In the coronavirus pandemic, we’re making decisions without reliable data) in a 17 March piece entitled A fiasco in the making? argues that as the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data.

However, the absence of evidence is certainly not the same as the evidence of absence. The government would have taken note that the fatality rate of Covid-19 is strongly correlated to people with existing diseases of the type that are particularly prevalent in South Africa, including tuberculosis (TB), diabetes and those with weakened immune systems from the very high HIV infection rate. (Graphs that tell the story of HIV in South Africa’s provinces)

While some countries are focused on flattening the curve (How to flatten the curve of coronavirus, a mathematician explains) to give health systems breathing space, South Africa already operates beyond the curve. There is no scope for additional patients needing life-saving ventilators.

In 2015, 460,236 South Africans died. More than half (55.5%) of deaths were attributed to the group of non-communicable diseases, and communicable diseases accounted for 33.4% of deaths, while injuries were responsible for 11.1% of deaths. Other research shows that a total of 63,000 people died of tuberculosis in 2018 and two-thirds of those were HIV-positive. However, as many as 400,000 fell ill with TB in that year. TB, being a respiratory disease, could very well make sufferers particularly susceptible to Covid-19.

Even with just a 1% fatality rate and a R0 of 2.5, Covid-19 would rip through South Africa and reach the 60% infection rate predicted by Health Minister Mhkize within a year. Based on a population of around 57 million, this could amount to as many as 342,000 dead South Africans. This is just a fraction of the numbers that would need hospitalisation. Here is an epidemic calculator allowing for anyone to input their own data. None of this is even a prospect worth contemplating and this is the best case. A 4% fatality rate increases the number of dead to around 1.4 million.

In a well-argued piece, Harry Crane of Rutgers University’s Department of Statistics and Biostatistics makes the point that Professor Ioannidis sought to treat the Covid-19 pandemic as an academic exercise and not a global crisis. Crane argues that for dynamic and complex problems like the pandemic, we cannot avoid uncertainty and we can’t delay action waiting for more evidence. Once the evidence arrives, it will be far too late to do anything about it.

This is exactly the approach taken by Professor Yaneer Bar-Yam of the New England Complexity Institute who has led a global initiative, End Coronavirus, that seeks to minimise the impact of Covid-19 by providing useful data and guidelines for action. They make the point that if everyone got tested for Covid-19, we could temporarily separate the infected from the uninfected and then help reduce the spread of the virus and return society to a semblance of normality as soon as possible.

As far as evidence is concerned, we know that lockdowns do work. (See Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance – Tomas Pueyo) In Wuhan, R0 moved from 3.9 before the lockdown there to around 0.32 immediately afterwards. (See: Evolving Epidemiology and Impact of Non-pharmaceutical Interventions on the Outbreak of Coronavirus Disease 2019 in Wuhan, China.) As of 19 March, there have been no new cases of coronavirus in the entire region of the province of Hubei where Wuhan is situated. Italy too, after its belated lockdown, is seeing the beginnings of a fall-off in new cases and deaths. (See Italy Coronavirus: 69,176 Cases and 6,820 Deaths)

There is, of course, the risk that after the lockdown we simply continue as before, which would see another exponential increase in new cases. Obviously, we cannot even think about another lockdown. We must insist that the lockdown is followed up with the identification of all possible infections and widespread but focused testing of all likely infections. Because there will be a relatively small number (compared to Europe and the US), this should not be that difficult to do. The lockdown gives the country some breathing space, including to develop testing protocols and to see whether any prospective drug treatments are effective.

What we can say is that each one of us is an important data point in the largest and most expensive experiment of all time. Closing the country down for 21 days to locate a few thousand people among 57 million of us might seem like overkill but we all have a direct stake, even just as data points, in making sure that the experiment runs smoothly and renders useful information. Think about this before you ask whether whatever you want to do in the 21 days might make the data less certain.

If we make the effort a success, whatever your own views of it are, there is an additional free bonus for us all. South Africa re-establishes itself at the top table of countries that can make the right decisions, a country where things can get done. We haven’t had that spirit since 1994.

As a final point, the lesson we need to learn from this pandemic is that the next one is already evolving. It might emerge tomorrow, a hundred years hence or any point in-between. Next time, we need to be much better prepared. (See: Bill Gates: The next outbreak? We’re not ready) DM

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2020-03-25-the-drivers-of-president-ramaphosas-big-lockdown-decision/

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