Search This Blog

Friday, March 1, 2024

Sen. Johnson's Senate Panel On The Vaccines Is The Red Pill We've All Been Waiting For

 by 'A Midwestern Doctor' via 'The Forgotten Side Of Medicine' substack,

This excellent presentation meticulously breaks down exactly what went awry throughout COVID-19. What everyone needs to know is summarized below...

Ron Johnson has gradually become one of my favorite senators in American history. In 2020, he repeatedly advocated for early COVID-19 treatments to be made available to Americans (which had they been made available would have ended the pandemic).

Throughout 2021, he spoke out against the vaccine mandates and in November hosted a panel at the Senate which scrutinized the federal vaccine mandates and exposed how poorly those who experienced severe COVID-19 vaccine injuries were being treated. In January 2022, he hosted a panel which scrutinized the entire COVID-19 response, and in December of 2022, he hosted a panel focusing on everything we now know about the vaccines.

Being one of the most outspoken critics of the vaccination program in American history got him a lot of pushback, and in 2022, he decided to postpone his retirement to go through a grueling re-election campaign so there would be someone in the government who could advocate for everyone whose lives had been ruined by the COVID vaccines.

Despite being public enemy number one of the pharmaceutical industry, Johnson narrowly won, becoming the first politician in America’s history to run on the vaccine safety issue and win. Since then Johnson has kept his promise and fought for the vaccine injured (along with taking a variety of other difficult but important positions such as giving one of the most poignant speeches I’ve heard on the Ukraine War when he tried to block the Senate from continuing to fund it).

A lot of work has gone into producing each of the vaccine panels he’s hosted. On Monday, he hosted “Federal Health Agencies and the COVID Cartel: What Are They Hiding?” When it was all said and done, I believe this panel was the most effective presentation I have seen for explaining what happened throughout COVID-19 and waking people up to how much they have been lied to. Because of this I strongly encourage you to watch or share his presentation with people who you think might be open to understanding exactly what was done to all of us. This article will begin with his entire panel:

Note: I have been struggling to find the best term for these criminals. The four I’ve used are listed below; I would appreciate knowing what you think is the best one.

What's the best term for the COVID criminals?

  • The COVID Cartel

  • The Pandemic Profiteers

  • The Pandemic Industrial Complex

  • The Biosecurity Agenda

Lastly, for those who prefer to read, a transcript of Johnson’s symposium can be found here.

Note: for each of the videos embedded within this article, I (or the Vigilant Fox) edited them down to their most important parts. A lot of time was put into this article because of the importance of what was presented.

Federal Health Agencies and the COVID Cartel: What Are They Hiding?

Since the entire panel was 4 hours long, I recognize that many of you will not be able to watch all of it. For that reason, I tried to highlight what I felt were it’s most important parts.

First, in Johnson’s opening statement, he discusses just how hard it has been over the last three years to get any of the information his office is legally entitled to from the government. For example with (Fauci’s) NIH:

We are down to the last 50 pages [of the 4000 he originally requested]. They will not release these. It's been now going close to 2 years. This is what has been provided to us. Do you think there might be some incriminating information in this?

Likewise, these agencies have completely brushed off all evidence something is wrong. For example, with the NIH:

Just like former NIH director Francis Collins Collins told me when I asked about all the deaths being reported on VAERS, [he said], “Senator, people die.” The fact that both of these statements are as true as they are callous highlights the challenge we face in exposing the truth.

While with the FDA:

I've written 4 [letters on hot-lots] starting in December of 2021. The first letter compared 25,000 lots of COVID vaccine to 22,000 lots of flu vaccine. One COVID lot had 5,297 adverse reactions associated with it. The worst flu lot had a 137. So 5,300 versus 137.

365 COVID lots had more than 100 adverse events. Only 10 flu lots had more than 100. And 80% of the serious adverse events, those with emergency room visits, hospitalization, or death were associated with only 5% of the lots. So, again, to me, I'm from manufacturing. That shows to me a manufacturing process out of control.

[It] took us a year to get some kind of response and, basically, response from the agencies was, “we don't see any variation in lots.”

Johnson then illustrates how the current political climate has undermined everything science once stood for:

Vaccine injuries are rare.” “The benefits outweigh the risk and that the science is clear and overwhelming.” “And anyone challenging this narrative is an is an anti science conspiracy theorist.” In other words, second opinions are not allowed. To me, this attitude is the antithesis of science.

I am amazed at the knowledge mankind has obtained over the millennia. But I would argue that what we don't know vastly exceeds what we do know. So as we pursue truth, we must pursue it with the humility that that reality demands.

Johnson’s opening statement was then followed by Robert Malone:

I'll be succinct. The SARS CoV 2 modified mRNA based vaccine products were deployed via emergency use authorization without adequate nonclinical and clinical testing and without full disclosure of known patient risk and efficacy data. This violated well established legislatively mandated patient informed consent requirements. The FDA and HHS justified these actions as necessary due to reliance on deeply flawed modeling data indicating that SARS CoV 2 was associated with an infection fatality rate of 3.4%.

Note: the IFR was subsequently shown to average between 0.018%-0.03% for everyone under 60 and was approximately 0.506% for those between 60-69 years of age.

Subsequent clinical research experience has revealed a number of problems with the genetic vaccine technology based SARS COV 2 products, which have been marketed as vaccines. In most cases, there has been an effort to obscure or deny facts in public communication by government and pharmaceutical industry representatives.

Malone then listed the key issues with the vaccines, to which Johnson replied:

Doctor Malone, I think one of the things that always bothers me is [that] so much of what we're learning in terms of harms of these vaccine was clearly known before they were rolled out.

Jessica Rose spoke next. After concisely summarizing all of the issues that had been found within VAERS, she concluded with:

Standard operating procedures for analysis of safety signals emergent from VAERS when utilized reveal causal links between the COVID 19 injectable products and the adverse events investigated. Standard operating procedures are not being followed by the owners of the data, namely CDC, HHS, and FDA, and this equates to hiding the millions of people reporting not only adverse events but injuries in the context of the COVID 19 injectable products.

Note: Rose also reviews the science behind why vaccinated individuals keep on catching COVID-19.

Edward Dowd then concisely presented the years of work his team has done to quantify just how devastating the vaccines have been for the world.

To quote part of Dowd’s testimony:

When analyzing the excess death human cost…in 2020, there were approximately 458,000 excess deaths, of which 73% were aged 65 and older and 15 to 64 comprising just 27%. However, in 2021, with the rollout of the “safe and effective vaccine,” there were approximately another 500,000 excess deaths, but a mix shift had occurred from older to younger. In 2021, the 65 plus age category was [only] 57…while the 15 to 64 cohort increased to 43%.

The absolute excess death increase from 2020 to 2021 for the productive working age 15 to 64 was 73% [124,000 to 215,000].

The total excess death since the rollout of the vaccine in the US, including 21, 22, and 23 is approximately 1,100,000. We estimate the economic cost, productive working age people dying at $15,600,000,000 When analyzing disabilities, it's interesting to note that there were no excess disabilities in 2020.

Using the civilian labor force, we have calculated an increase of 2,300,000 individuals with disabilities costing the economy an estimated $77,000,000,000. When analyzing lost work time, which we call injuries, we estimate 28,400,000 individuals are chronically absent resulting in an estimated economic cost of a $135,000,000,000 since 2021…Obviously, the policy cure was undeniably worse than the illness.

Kevin McKernan then discussed his groundbreaking discovery that there was widespread DNA plasmid contamination of the COVID vaccines and how horrendously the drug regulators have responded to that discovery.

This work has been replicated by many labs around the world, and now the FDA, the EMA, and even Health Canada, have admitted to this. The regulatory agents have admitted that Pfizer also omitted the SV40 sequences that are in their vaccine. They've deemed this contamination to be of little consequence, claiming the DNA is of too little concentration to matter or to be containing DNA of no functional consequence. These statements are false and are not supported by any independent testing by these regulators.

After the regulators have admitted to being deceived, they asked the opinion of the party that deceived them how bad was the deception. They shockingly believe the answer they were given, which is that these sequences have no relevance to plasmid manufacturing. As someone who has worked on the Human Genome Project manufacturing millions of plasmids, I can assure you that this is an overt lie. DNA contamination can lead to insertional mutagenesis. This is actually declared in Moderna's own patent regarding the mRNA vaccines.

This is also supported by Lim et al, which speaks to the rate of spontaneous integration in the genome during transfection. We are using transfection after all with LMPs. The SV40 DNA is in fact functional. It is published as a potent gene therapy tool in a nuclear targeting sequence as described by David Dean et al.

The SV40 promoter DNA is also known to bind to the tumor suppressor gene known as p53.

Note: p53 defects are commonly linked to cancers.

We've applied these vaccine system cancer cell lines and have evidence that it enters the cell and can survive several cell divisions. We have preliminary evidence, although this requires replication in other labs, that this DNA can integrate into the genome. We found 2 spike sequence integration events in ovarian cancer cell lines of CAR 3 into chromosome 12 and 19 very recently. Since these vaccines were expected to only contain mRNA, they were never assessed for genotoxicity studies. These studies were therefore being conducted as guinea pig US citizens as we witnessed an unprecedented rise in cancer drug sales since the vaccines rolled out.

It is time for our representatives to repeal or review the PDUFA Act of 1992.  This act allows regulators to defray the cost of regulation by accepting payments directly from the companies they regulate. Over half of the FDA's budget is sourced through this act.

Note: I discussed the significance of the vaccine plasmid contamination in more detail here.

Dr. David Gortler (who previously served as a senior advisor at the FDA) then explains why the contamination and widespread variability we are seeing in the vaccines (e.g., the hot lots) being completely ignored is so unprecedented:

Federal rules requiring ingredient transparency date all the way back, believe it or not, to 1862 [and] it's the whole reason the FDA was started in 1906. Prior to COVIDsRNA injections, the FDA had approved 4 different RNA based products. Onpattro, shown here, was the 1st RNA product approved back in 2018…as you can see by looking at this label, Onpattro prominently details the exact structure, milligram strength, and molecular weight. Highlighted in green at the very top, you'll see it specifies [what its] lipid nanoparticles are engineered for.

In contrast to the previous labels I've shown, here is the official FDA label for COVID RNA injections. As you can see just looking at it, it details a lot less information. We don't [even] have the structure.

Of note, in pharmacology, even very minor deviations in any molecular structure can mean the difference between a drug and a poison…The lack of transparency means that scientists can't use modeling to test lipid nanoparticles for safety receptor specificity or analyze inequality [in batches of those products].

Unfortunately, around 70% of the 127 page document that explains the methodology to perform quality control on RNA injections are redacted much like the document I've shown here.

Next Dr. Harvey Risch discusses the “crushingly obsessive push to COVID vaccinate every living person on the planet” and provides a concise overview of the horrific bioweapons industry which gave birth to COVID-19 and then tried to pivot to vaccinating everyone rather than accept responsibility for what it had done.

Note: This catastrophic industry is discussed in more detail here (e.g., I highlighted how numerous modern diseases are the results of lab leaks).

Next, Barbara Loe Fisher, an activist who has spent decades fighting for vaccine safety shared the broader context of what we are now dealing with.

I worked with parents in congress to secure safety and informed consent provisions in the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. It was an historic law, the first official acknowledgment by government that federally licensed and state mandated vaccines can and do injure and kill some children. In January, my eyewitness perspective of how and why child vaccine victims and their parents were betrayed after that law was passed 38 years ago, was featured in a 2 hour conversation I had on the Highwire.

I encourage everyone to watch it and learn how parents trusted that the 5 years of work we put into that 1986 act to successfully secure life saving, informing, recording, reporting, and research provisions in it, and to protect the legal right of vaccine victims to sue vaccine manufacturers for product design defects, and to sue negligent doctors for medical malpractice, and to create an expedited, more just, less traumatic federal vaccine injury compensation system alternative to a lawsuit were all destroyed by congressional amendments, by federal health agencies, and the US Supreme Court after that law was passed. Following that betrayal of trust, Congress directed federal agencies to create lucrative public private business partnerships with the pharmaceutical industry, a business deal that has broken America's public health system.

Note: I previously wrote about how the 1986 Vaccine Injury Act forced the government to create VAERS (as parents had no way to report vaccine injuries) and ever since that time, the government has done everything it could to undermine VAERS.

Johnson then shares a poignant observation with Fisher that illustrates how effectively the pharmaceutical industry has bought out our media:

By the way,I became aware of you from that excellent documentary which I would also recommend. What struck me about [it] is back then in 1982 through 1986, you could talk about these things. You could advocate for your child who's vaccine injured.  You weren't ostracized. You were actually welcomed here in the senate by people like Senator Hatch and Senator Kennedy and you got this [law] signed by Ronald Reagan.

To which Fisher replies:

I never imagined when I began this work in 1982 that the day would come when I would not be able to exercise freedom of thought and conscience in the country I love. And I thank you for allowing me to exercise that right today.

Next, Bryan Hooker, the parent of a severely vaccine injured adult son shares his 23 years of work (e.g., 15 peer-reviewed papers) to get the data on vaccine injury the CDC has been hiding for decades.

In 1962, children received 5 vaccine doses, and in 1986, the schedule expanded to 25 doses of 5 different vaccine formulations. Shortly after the passage of the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, the law was amended to essentially erect a liability shield protecting vaccine manufacturers, and the schedule expanded dramatically. By 2023, 73 doses of 16 different vaccine formulations were given to children up to age 18. [As we discovered through lawsuits] the FDA approved these formulations individually only with minimal and inadequate safety testing, and the CDC has never tested the cumulative effect of the vaccine schedule on childhood health outcomes.

Since [proper trials] are really the only way to establish that a pharmaceutical product is safe, it is misinformation to state that the vaccines are safe.

However, independent researchers have assessed the outcomes of vaccinated versus unvaccinated children.

This [study] demonstrates that vaccinated children were at least twice as likely to be diagnosed with developmental delays, ear infections, and gastrointestinal disorders.

[In this study] a control group of over 1800 unvaccinated children recruited from 46 different states in the US were compared to the national average rates of the listed disorders…For each of the autoimmune, neurodevelopmental, and other disorders considered, the unvaccinated group fares much better with incidence rates between 4-20 times lower than their vaccinated counterparts.

The CDC has a database called the vaccine safety data link. It's over 10,000,000 individuals with 2,000,000 children from 10 participating HMOs.  I would say that within that database, there were at least 10,000 unvaccinated children that can be studied.

Neither do they they publish the results [discovered from that data], nor do they let any independent scientist in to look at that information. [That’s] because [they know] the bloated vaccination schedule is responsible is in part responsible for the epidemic of chronic disorders that we see in children in the United States.

Note: Hooker also discusses the evidence the COVID-19 vaccine harms children (e.g., that it appears to kill 30 children for each child it saves from COVID and has given many of our children myocarditis).

Next, Del Bigtree discusses the decade of work he and the non-profit ICAN have conducted to get that data from the government:

In his talk, he puts the results of a recent study which monitored 99 million people for 45 days post vaccination into context. It found that their risk for a variety of severe conditions increased by 2-7 times, something which quickly adds up as you when consider how many of those “rare” conditions exist (that often take more than 45 days to appear) and how many vaccines they’ve received. These results is turn sheds a light on exactly what’s been happening to our children.

Every one of the childhood vaccines has a similar [lengthy] list of [severe] side effects. Though they are considered rare, how rare is it when you multiply roughly 50 potential side effects 72 times, which is the total number of doses given to a child by the time they're 18. The revelations from the recent study of the COVID vaccine explains what we have been saying for years. Vaccines are not completely safe, and [though] those side effects are rare. What happens when you add them altogether?

Bigtree then shows this slide (which references this study and this study):

Next, Dr. Sabine Hazan shared how her [self-funded] research to evaluate the use of existing therapies to treat COVID-19 was blocked by the FDA, her discovery that the severity of COVID-19 was directly linked to a loss of bifidobacteria in the gut and that the vaccine also caused a loss of bifidobacteria in the gut.  She then contrasted this to how previous research she did (which supported the pharmaceutical industry) never ran into similar road blocks.
Note: I synopsized that research here.

Pierre Kory then discussed the lengthy number of mechanisms which are in place to ensure that repurposed (off-patent) drugs can never have enough evidence to be acknowledged as treatments for a disease someone is profiting off of.

Note: this talk has already been seen by over 1.6 million people on Twitter.

Next, Christian Perron MD PhD (former chairman of the WHO’s committee on vaccines and communicable diseases) recounted how early in the pandemic, he completed a study which showed hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin dramatically lowered the death rate from COVID-19. A political backlash forced the withdraw of his study and he was fired from his 26 year professorship.

Before long France then banned the use of hydroxychloroquine and began enacting harsher and harsher sanctions against French dissidents like Perron who tried to tell the truth—eventually forcing Perron to publish in a French newspaper which had originally been created to defy the Nazis (as every other publication censored him).

Perron was followed by Raphael Lataster PhD, who is one of the leading researchers working with the BMJ (one of the top 5 medical journals) to expose the fraud within the COVID vaccine trials:

These [abhorrent] policies [e.g., the vaccine mandates] were justified via claims about the vaccine’s effectiveness and safety. Now recent research published in major medical journals reveals that these claims were highly exaggerated…we have found in the studies varying definitions of fully vaccinated and unvaccinated. And, generally, what we find with the term fully vaccinated is that they are ignoring COVID cases, COVID infections, in the partially vaccinated…that effect was found to be up to 48% using data from Pfizer's trial as an example.

We can't be sure what the actual exaggeration is because we aren't supplied with all the data. So it's impossible to actually know. But it looks like there are huge exaggerations of effectiveness because of what you could call manipulation of the data. So if these [omitted COVID cases] were included, or if even just some of these were included, we could have an effectiveness of the vaccines of around 10%...[which]is well below the 50% required for approval. Furthermore, looking to safety in the clinical trials, adverse effect counting windows are again incredibly short.

Note: Lataster also discusses many of the safety issues with the vaccines that were demonstrated within the trial data but hidden from the public (e.g., that the vaccines have a significant risk of myocarditis) and states “now Pfizer also admits that they're still trying, this is a quote ‘to determine if Cominati is safe and effective and if there is a myocarditispericarditis association that should be noted’. That's on clinicaltrials.gov still right now. They're trying to find out if it's safe and effective right now.”

Award winning investigative journalist Lara Logan then provides a poignant summary of how her profession has been hijacked by the government and how a variety of shadowy organizations now enforce this vast propaganda apparatus.  This was the most compelling part of her talk:

Note: Her testimony was followed by one from Jason Christoff, a propaganda expert, who explained why flooding the population with a single narrative and way of thinking has caused many people to adopt completely dysfunctional beliefs at odds with everything they’d held dear

They were then followed by Rodney Palmer, who was a Canadian journalist for 20 years, sharing his perspectives on the current state of the media.

If the news reporters did their jobs instead of reporting propaganda, this fraud would have been exposed from the outset.

Censorship is what actually caused these deaths. It was the lie that assured us it was safe when it wasn't, and it still isn't

In America, it's much worse. The vaccine companies are allowed to sponsor the news directly…To a visiting Canadian, the news here looks like one big ad for pharmaceutical products. It's a bit of a culture shock when you turn on the TV. There wouldn't even be a US newscast without Pharma ads. So the reporters on your newscasts are all conflicted.

They can't bite the hand that feeds them. They can't possibly investigate the most important stories of our time.

It appears that the reporters are actually colluding with their sponsors to break FDA advertising laws.  FDA law requires them to conspicuously describe the known risks of any pharmaceutical product [which news anchors promoting vaccines never do.

The good news is no one believes the TV news anymore. Only 15% of Canadians, 15%, are getting the boosters.

[The media has] now canceled lunchtime news hours. It's canceled weekend newscasts. After these reporters are laid off, we'll only be left with the trusted favor of the trusted faces of our favorite news anchors, delivering the propaganda of the day, instead of the news of the day. But when those trusted faces are telling us lies, they're like a super weapon aimed directly at us. The news anchors are now the finger on the trigger in that game of Russian roulette.

When the news is poisoned, so is Democracy…most every other country is letting this happen, but where goes America, so goes the world. You have a unique role in setting the moral tone for Western democracies.

So I respectfully recommend that the senate investigate the role of American television news networks, including with pharmaceutical advertisers to skirt the FDA laws that require them to declare the known risks of a pharmaceutical product. This investigation should extend to any reporters, news anchors, editors, and executives who lied to their audience about the safety of the COVID vaccines.

Note: Palmer also describes how he gradually saw the corrupting influence of the pharmaceutical industry enter Canada’s media over the last decade. One of the most compelling observations he shared was that during the pandemic, the doctors who spoke on television didn’t talk like doctors but instead appeared to have corporate media training, which he took as an early sign a lengthy PR campaign was being enacted to sell as many vaccines as possible.

Next, Matthias Desmet provided a concise summary of the crowd psychology which explained how it was possible for so many people to refuse to see what was being hidden from them, even thing after thing happened which made it clear we were all being lied to:

Note: I recently completed an article relating Desmet’s work on crowd psychology to how individuals commonly become trapped in cults and dangerous spiritual practices.

Brett Weinstein then describes the institutional breakdown gripping our society and the malicious forces which are taking away each thing we had previously depended upon for truth and justice (e.g., our premier scientific apparatus).  I wanted to quote one exchange he had with Johnson:

[Johnson] Now I kind of want to ask you, I describe my eyes being opened up, certainly during COVID to a number of things…Can you just describe your [red pill] journey here?

[Weinstein] Well, I think we are all on a similar journey. I did not think that I was naive 7 years ago, and then I learned that I had been very naive and I keep learning that lesson. Each new discovery reveals that I was missing something that was right in front of me, and I think that's actually the hallmark of the exact pattern I'm describing.

Canadian Randy Hillier served in Ontario’s parliament for 15 years and was the first member to publicly oppose his government's response to COVID. Like Canada’s citizens, Hillier was targeted by the government for doing so, and argues we are at the tip of a slippery slope with this.  In this part of his testimony, he shares how Ontario’s leadership told him they made the decision to continually coverup the damage of the COVID policies because they felt the political consequences would be too severe if they admitted their mistakes:

Next, Dr. Sorin Titus Muncaciu shared his experience as a Romanian member of parliament who watched the central authorities use every tool at their disposal to forcefully vaccinate Romania.

We are a party having probably 10% of the votes we got in the parliament in 2020, and we, from the very beginning of this pandemic, we decided that the rights of the people to decide if they accept, or [do not accept receiving] an experimental drug should be respected.

When the European Union started behaving like the USSR with those commissars coming to us and mister Barnier came to Romania. This gentleman was the commissioner for internal affairs of the European Union and pushed us, pushed the Romanian parliament to vote [for COVID vaccine mandates].

But in Romania the problem they face is that we are 40 years after a communist dictatorship, 30, 34 years after a communist dictatorship. And it's in our genes to distrust the government because we knew every time a communist government is saying anything or is directing anything, we knew that's a lie, that's something that we should not trust or we should not follow.

We did everything in the book that we could to stop that and we stopped it. And, as a consequence to that, the Romanian rate of vaccination was probably less than half of what the other European countries experienced or United States, Canada and Australia [experienced]. And, therefore we can compare now the low rate and the excess mortality. And that's the best proof I can bring to the table is the fact that having a relationship between a low rate of vaccination and low excess mortality, which is right there you see it on the, Romania is the last country on the right which means we have negative excess mortality while all the other countries in Europe have positive excess mortality.

Rob Roos (a European member of Parliament) and Phillip Kruse (a lawyer) then discussed who actually funds the WHO and the disastrous treaty it is trying to sneak through which will force everyone to comply with the pandemic cartel and silence anyone who challenges their next pandemic response.

Note: I discussed this treaty and the grass roots effort to stop it in more detail here. I consider that article to be one of the most important articles I’ve published on Substack.

Finally, Ryan Cole concluded the talk by discussing how he was punished for speaking out, how everything which happened throughout the pandemic has violated our fundamental constitutional rights and how critical it is for us to reclaim what our Founding Fathers fought for.

Note: for anyone considering being a whistleblower, Johnson requested for you to contact his office here.

Conclusion

Since Johnson packed this presentation with so many impactful points, it was quite hard to decide which was the best one to conclude it with. Eventually however, I settled on this one, which while brief, I believe is the critically important message all Americans can agree with:

It is remarkable how much each successive panel Johnson has hosted has improved upon the one which preceded it. I consider this to be both a product of how dedicated each participant has been to fixing this mess and how much the alternative media has facilitated the production of high quality information that has rapidly unravelled the immensely complex web we were trapped within.

Without each of your supporting the wonderful community of dissident authors on Substack, much of this would likely have never happened, and I thank each of you from the bottom of my heart for giving me the opportunity to be part of it.

Lastly, if you have anyone close to you who is on the fence about the vaccines, please consider sharing this article or a video of Johnson’s panel with them; it’s something than can persuade people who are at last beginning to become open to hearing the truth and we have reached the moment where it is critical for the truth to reach as many people as possible.

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/sen-johnsons-senate-panel-vaccines-red-pill-weve-all-been-waiting

Links between chronic opioid use and brain cell, DNA changes

 A study led by Ryan W. Logan, Ph.D., professor of psychiatry and neurobiology, has found mutations in key brain cells among individuals with chronic opioid use that could shift how we think about treatment strategies for opioid use disorder.

"One thing we've been trying to think about is how can we heal the brain?" said Dr. Logan. "To be able to do that, you've got to understand what's occurring in the . And the onus is on us then to figure out what is a cause or consequence to opioid use and other disorders."

The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, was conducted by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Boston University Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine, Harvard Medical School and University of Rochester School of Medicine, in addition to UMass Chan.

Logan said opioid replacement treatments such as methadone and buprenorphine, which reduce cravings, can be very helpful for treating . But still, 90 to 95% of people relapse. And with widespread presence of powerful drugs like fentanyl, a relapse could be fatal.

"I don't want to take anything away from those mainstream treatments, but it's not necessarily getting at the causal pathology, the thing that's really driving the subsequent relapse, in the context of stress or environmental instability, and the biology," he said.

The researchers in the current study looked at human postmortem brain tissue from people with opioid use disorder and compared those with brain tissue from people without chronic opioid use, as well as to animal models. They started with the dorsal striatum region of the brain, which Logan said was critical for the transition between occasional drug use to habitual or compulsive drug use.

Using a new approach called single nucleus RNA sequencing, researchers isolated nuclei from the individuals with opioid use disorder and the control individuals. They then did large-scale sequencing or gene expression arrays on the  to figure out what had changed.

Among the highlights Logan cited were pro-inflammatory changes that occurred in the striatum of individuals with opioid use disorder that were not only in the microglia, or immune cells of the brain, but also in neurons.

"We have specific hypotheses and questions we're developing as to how these inflammatory signals could spread from  to neurons, and what that might mean for overall functional changes in the cells and circuits, and how we might be able to target them for treatment," said Logan.

The second major finding was that many of the genes reflected changes in brain cell health. Those genes were enriched in pathways involved in DNA damage, Logan said. DNA damage can lead to structural changes in our DNA that ultimately impacts gene function and may be involved in disease. Higher occurrences of DNA damage were found in certain cell types in the striatum, particularly in neurons among individuals with opioid use disorder.

The same type of single nucleus RNA sequencing was performed on animal models that had been exposed to high levels of chronic morphine. Researchers found similar changes in DNA damage markers in animal models that had chronic opioid exposure, which Logan said suggested that chronic opioid administration led to the accumulation of these DNA damage markers.

Logan said this research also offers insight into potentially teasing apart what's happening with genes and proteins in other neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's.

More information: BaDoi N. Phan et al, Single nuclei transcriptomics in human and non-human primate striatum in opioid use disorder, Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-45165-7


https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-03-links-chronic-opioid-brain-cell.html

How virus causes cancer, pointing to potential treatment

 Cleveland Clinic researchers have discovered a key mechanism used by Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV), also known as human herpesvirus 8 (HHV8), to induce cancer. The research points to effective new treatment options for KSHV-associated cancers, including Kaposi's sarcoma, primary effusion lymphoma, and HHV8-associated multicentric Castleman disease.

"Our findings have significant implications: viruses cause between 10% to 20% of cancers worldwide, a number that is constantly increasing as new discoveries are made. Treating virus-induced cancers with standard  therapies can help shrink tumors that are already there, but it doesn't fix the underlying problem of the virus," said Jun Zhao, Ph.D., of Cleveland Clinic Florida Research & Innovation Center.

"Understanding how pathogens transform a healthy cell into a cancer cell uncovers exploitable vulnerabilities and allows us to make and repurpose existing drugs that can effectively treat virus-associated malignancies."

The Nature Communications study, led by Dr. Zhao, reveals that KSHV manipulates two human enzymes called CDK6 and CAD to reshape the way  produce new nucleotides—the building blocks of DNA and RNA—and process glucose. The changes to how infected cells grow and how KSHV persists put cells at a much higher risk of forming tumors and play a crucial role in causing cancer.

The team showed the virus activates a specific pathway driving cell metabolism and proliferation. Inhibiting this process with existing FDA-approved breast cancer drugs reduced KSHV replication, blocked lymphoma progression, and shrunk existing tumors in preclinical models.

Like other herpesviruses, KSHV often has no symptoms initially and remains in the body after primary infection. The virus stays dormant, suppressed by the immune system. However, KSHV can reactivate when immunity is weakened—as in , those with HIV/AIDS, and transplant recipients. In these high-risk groups, the now active virus can trigger aggressive cancers.

KSHV-induced cancers are fast-acting, aggressive, and difficult to treat. An estimated 10% of people in North America and Northern Europe have KSHV, but this ranges throughout the globe. More than 50% of individuals in parts of Northern Africa are estimated to have the virus. Experts estimate these rates are higher, as KSHV often goes undiagnosed because of a lack of symptoms. These findings have implications that reach past KSHV; researchers can apply knowledge about KSHV to other cancer-associated viruses that might use the same process to cause cancer.

Dr. Zhao collaborated with Michaela Gack, Ph.D., Scientific Director of the Florida Research & Innovation Center, to understand the cells' metabolic processes to uncover the virus's vulnerabilities.

Rapidly replicating cancer cells reprogram metabolism to fuel growth. Meanwhile, most viruses cannot produce energy or necessary molecules on their own, so they rely on human cells to do the work for them. The team found that the virus takes over the host protein CDK6 and CAD, causing the  to produce extra metabolites, which allows faster replication of the virus and an uncontrolled proliferation of the cells.

The research team treated pre-clinical models with a CDK6-blocking drug, Palbociclib, an FDA-approved breast cancer medication, as well as a compound targeting CAD. They saw significant decreases in tumor size and increases in cancer survival rates: most tumors virtually disappeared after about a month of treatment, and the remaining tumors shrank by around 80%. Survival increased to 100% for selected lymphoma cell lines.

Dr. Zhao and his team are working to better understand the connections among KSHV, CDK6/CAD pathway, and cancer formation. With the knowledge they obtain, they plan to implement and refine their experimental drug combinations for clinical trials.

"Both viruses and cancers could hijack cellular metabolism for pathogenesis," said Dr. Zhao. "By investigating these metabolic rewiring mechanisms, we aim to find the Achilles' heel of cancer-causing viruses and non-viral cancers. I'm excited to see what the future of this work holds."

More information: Quanyuan Wan et al, Hijacking of nucleotide biosynthesis and deamidation-mediated glycolysis by an oncogenic herpesvirus, Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-45852-5


https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-03-uncover-virus-cancer-potential-treatment.html

Early vocabulary size linked to ADHD, literacy, and cognition

 Early language development is an important predictor of children's later language, reading and learning skills. Moreover, language learning difficulties are related to neurodevelopmental conditions such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Children typically start to utter their first words between 10 and 15 months of age. At around two years of age, they may produce between 100–600 words, and understand many more. Each child embarks on its own developmental path of language learning, resulting in large individual differences. "Some variation in  can be related to variation in the  stored in our cells," says senior researcher Beate St Pourcain, lead scientist on the study.

Word production and understanding

To understand how genetics plays a role in the development of children's word production and understanding, the team carried out a genome-wide meta-analysis study (GWAS) of infant (15–18 months) and toddler (24–38 months) vocabulary size. In early measures of vocabulary size, parents report which words their children say and/or understand from a given word list.

The team used vocabulary and  from 17,298 English-, Danish- or Dutch-speaking children. The number of spoken words was available for both infants and toddlers. The number of understood words was only available for toddlers. Later-life outcomes were mostly studied with genetic summary information from large independent consortia.

These included literacy (spelling, reading, and phoneme awareness), cognition ( and number of years of education), and neurodevelopmental conditions (genetic risk of ADHD and ASD, as well as directly observed ADHD-related symptoms in some of the studied children).

'Learning to speak' and 'speaking to learn'

The researchers identified multiple genetic factors underlying vocabulary size in infancy and toddlerhood. Consistently, genetic associations with later-life literacy, cognition, and ADHD-related measures varied during development. Both infant and toddler word production were related to literacy abilities such as spelling, but associations with general cognition were only found for toddler vocabulary scores.

Toddlers have mastered some language fluency and may "speak to learn," involving higher-level cognitive processing, while the development of verbal abilities may start earlier.

The team also found that in infancy, a larger number of spoken words was genetically associated with both an increased risk for ADHD and more ADHD symptoms. However, this genetic relationship was reversed in toddlerhood: there, a smaller number of understood words was associated with more ADHD symptoms. It is possible that in infancy when children are "learning to speak," the number of spoken words captures speech-related processes.

Also, children with a higher genetic risk of ADHD may be inclined to express themselves more. In contrast, during the phase of "speaking to learn," when vocabulary size is linked to cognition, higher genetic ADHD risk may be associated with lower verbal and cognitive abilities.

According to St Pourcain, "Genetic influences underlying vocabulary size rapidly change across less than two years during infancy and toddlerhood. Adopting a developmental perspective, our findings provide a better understanding of early speech- and language-related etiological processes in health and disorder."

First author Ellen Verhoef adds, "This research indicates the relevance of  size assessed during the first few years in life for future behavior and cognition, emphasizing the need for more data collection efforts during infancy and toddlerhood."

The research is published in the journal Biological Psychiatry.

More information: Ellen Verhoef et al, Genome-wide Analyses of Vocabulary Size in Infancy and Toddlerhood: Associations With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Literacy, and Cognition-Related Traits, Biological Psychiatry (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2023.11.025


https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-03-early-vocabulary-size-genetically-linked.html

Overgrowth of nerve cells appears to cause lingering symptoms after recurrent UTIs

 A perplexing problem for people with recurring urinary tract infections (UTIs) is persistent pain, even after antibiotics have successfully cleared the bacteria.

Now Duke Health researchers have identified the likely cause—an overgrowth of nerve cells in the bladder.

The finding, appearing March 1 in the journal Science Immunology, provides a potential new approach to managing symptoms of recurring UTIs that would more effectively target the problem and reduce unnecessary antibiotic usage.

"Urinary tract infections account for almost 25% of infections in women," said senior author Soman Abraham, Ph.D., professor in the departments of Pathology, Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, Integrative Immunobiology, and Cell Biology at Duke University School of Medicine.

"Many are recurrent UTIs, with patients frequently complaining of chronic pelvic pain and urinary frequency, even after a round of antibiotics," Abraham said. "Our study, for the first time, describes an underlying cause and identifies a potential new treatment strategy."

Abraham and colleagues collected bladder biopsies from recurrent UTI patients who were experiencing pain despite no culturable bacteria in their urine. Using biopsies from people without UTIs as a comparison, they found evidence that  were highly activated in the UTI patients, explaining the persistent sense of pain and urinary frequency.

Further studies in mice revealed the underlying events, with unique conditions in the bladder that prompt activated nerves in the lining to bloom and grow with each infection.

"Typically, during every bout of UTI,  laden with bacteria are sloughed off, and significant destruction of nearby nerve tissue occurs," said Byron Hayes, lead author of the study and previously a postdoctoral fellow in Duke's Department of Pathology. "These events trigger a rapid repair program in the damaged bladder involving massive regrowth of destroyed nerve cells."

This , including repair activities, is led by —which are immune cells that fight infection and allergens. Mast cells release chemicals called nerve growth factor, which drive overgrowth and increase sensitivity of nerves. The result is pain and urgency.

The researchers were able to address these symptoms by treating study mice with molecules that suppress production of the mast-cell generated nerve growth factor.

"This work helps illuminate a puzzling clinical condition that drives  and affects the quality of life of millions of people, primarily women," Abraham said. "Understanding the crosstalk between mast cells and nerves is an essential step toward effective treatments for people suffering repeat ."

More information: Byron Hayes et al, Recurrent infections drive persistent bladder dysfunction and pain via sensory nerve sprouting and mast cell activity, Science Immunology (2024). DOI: 10.1126/sciimmunol.adi5578www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciimmunol.adi5578


https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-03-overgrowth-nerve-cells-lingering-symptoms.html

Integrity Blockers

 The trans problem is a collective action problem.

For doctors and healthcare workers, “gender-affirming care” has become an enormous and high-stakes purity test. The apparent “consensus” among medical establishmentarians is actually a fiction that relies on participants to outsource their own morality and submit to mid-level forced teaming. But recent events have shown that this façade may be starting to crack.

The famous Milgram experiment, in which participants were commanded by a supposed expert to administer what they thought were fatal electric shocks to a test subject, revealed the extent to which most people will hand over their ethical autonomy to self-appointed authorities. Something similar has been going on in hospitals and doctors’ offices, as all but a few silence their own reservations about the sterilization and surgical deformation of minors.

For Washington State therapist Tamara Pietzke, who worked for the MultiCare health system’s pediatric hospital, the affirm-or-else work environment became untenable. Amber Rolfe, a therapist who oversees MultiCare’s gender program, where Pietzke worked, served as her teacher in a real life reenactment of the Milgram experiment. Pietzke’s responded to her colleague’s requirement that she approve a client’s highly questionable request for gender medicine: “My professional judgment tells me that my patient’s problems did not arise because of gender and will not be resolved through hormone therapy.”

Decision makers like Amber Rolfe at the clinic management level have long been able to externalize the negative consequences of their policies by invoking the authority of 25 or so high-profile medical organizations. But many of these organizations in turn base their recommendations on the illegitimate so-called authority of the World Professional Association of Transgender Health, WPATH. WPATH, which has recently suffered a significant drop in membership (60 percent), is rapidly losing professional standing and credibility in light of its well-known bias and conflicts of interest. WPATH recently removed all age limits from its standards, and systematic reviews completed outside America showed by comparison it had also removed all caution. WPATH is thus increasingly seen as a false authority wielding unearned reputational cred.

Leaning on the shoddy WPATH edifice, Rolfe dismisses as politically motivated the many critical reviews done outside the States. Nonetheless, in countries where national healthcare requires a standard collection of health statistics, the resulting data is less politicized than in America. It is Rolfe’s own affirm-only stance that resembles a winner-takes all political push, moving gender questioning youth to the front of the line for all-cleared gender medicine: according to Leo Sapir at City Journal, “In a training session on ‘gender-affirming care’ she led a few weeks before receiving Pietzke’s e-mail, Rolfe had made it clear that therapists must always ‘affirm’ their client’s ‘gender identity.’” 

Pressure to Conform

This is not just happening in hospitals. A board certified doctor in emergency medicine with 30 years of experience was recently threatened with job loss for resisting the roll out of pronoun policies. This doctor also recognized telemedicine’s inadequacy for assessing critical hormone levels, writing: “Cross-sex hormone treatment is neither ‘simple’ nor ‘routine.’ It’s the province of a few ‘specialists’ and many grifters.” This is not just consumer-driven medicine, but fraud.

DEI is the human resource form of workplace coercion. For example, employees at the U.K.’s pre-eminent department store, John Lewis, were recently faced with what writer Gareth Roberts calls a “dominance display.” The department store published an in-house magazine, Identity, filled from cover to cover with overbearing LGBTQ+ advice and an obvious subtext: go along, or get out. The magazine, exposed by independent reporter James Esses, announced that “wearing a badge showing your pronouns can contribute to creating an inclusive and respectful environment.” Though doing so is not mandatory, it “serves as a powerful way to promote empathy, respect and understanding.” Esses elaborates: “Given that nobody would want to be labelled as disrespectful or unempathetic, it is easy to see how powerful this subtle peer pressure is.” Social pressure is harnessed as a blatant situational cue that compliance is mandatory.

Formerly, only those who were same-sex attracted got force teamed with LGBTQ+. Now it is the general workforce of large corporations and hospitals. For a company to capitalize on the relative vulnerability of employees, whose survival depends on participating in the labor force, screams of an ethics violation: “We’re in this together”—or else.

But the stakes go even higher than employment security. As midwife Lucy Leader observes, people need to believe in the legitimacy of some authority figure. But in our corrupt society, this programming is ever more damaging to everyone participating. A policy backed by vapid commercial interests and higher-ups conveys the veneer of authority, so that lower-level functionaries can ignore the consequences of affirming pronouns.

Yet, the workers—and the wider public generally—are increasingly tasked with carrying out the actual procedure of “affirmation,” and shouldering the actual costs. For instance, pronoun swapping involves a psychic reorientation that’s very hard to walk back. All who partake become responsible, even if they are only functionaries relative to the bigger gender medical program. As Leader writes, “Many adults (and even worse, children) are now placed in the position where we have to play pretend or chance losing our jobs, volunteer positions and our very communities and social networks.” Everyone is required to play-act.

Pulling Back the Curtain

Society as a whole has been stuck in a giant Milgram experiment. But we may yet be able to pry ourselves loose. More definitive evidence emerges daily that gender medicine is a sham. For instance, a British medical journal just published an “unusually comprehensive and rigorous study” showing that, as journalist Bernard Lane summarizes it, “‘gender-affirming’ hormonal and surgical interventions do not reduce the risk of suicide for transgender-identifying adolescents.”

Findings like these are why gender clinics rush to pull the bed curtain back around the patients receiving so-called affirming treatments. Otherwise, as Colin Wright asks, why would the hospital system where Pietzke worked repeat the pattern witnessed at other hospitals, scrambling to scrub information about their gender clinic?

Perhaps most tellingly, at the level of popular culture, Dr. Phil recently told Joe Rogan that schools are over-stepping their professional roles by practicing medical diagnosis and shepherding kids to clinics. Those with a wide reach are beginning to embody dissent and are willing to speak up alongside the common person against this zero-sum prisoner’s dilemma. Instead of acting from individualized self-interest, people are beginning to speak up together against illegitimate authority. This is the only way out of the cognitive dissonance everyone increasingly encounters: social solidarity is the key. Only by standing together can we break the spell.

 is a retired Assistant Professor of English. Kuzma has written for Salvo, The Federalist, The Canadian Patriot, American Spectator, Psych Reg, and Mercator Net, among others. Find her at @faithkuz.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/integrity-blockers/