Health & Fitness

From dessert-style breakfasts to plant-based meats, Jaymie Hooper separates the food fads to try from those past their use-by dates. 

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Samantha Gash has run more kilometres than most of us have had hot dinners. Not only is this lawyer, and mother, a regular competitor in ultramarathons - but she now uses her running adventures to raise awareness for social causes. We asked the Australian Lululemon ambassador to share her top running tips for those of us who may not have as many kms on the board as she does. Yet. 

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Straight from Chris Hemsworth's Centr app, these chocolate matcha bliss balls make a healthy way to sweeten that mid-afternoon snack. Plus, they take only 20 minutes to make - from start to finish. 

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Dietitian Melissa Meier knows the secret to losing those last few kilograms to get to your goal weight. And more often that not, it all comes down to one little thing: consistency. She's devised a meal plan that will keep you on track, without feeling like you're missing out. 

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As every year during our annual Fluoride Awareness Week, Fluoride Action Network (FAN) founder Dr. Paul Connett is here to provide us with a progress update. FAN has been instrumental in reducing fluoride exposure in North America and in many countries throughout the world over the past 20 years.

As in previous years, we ask that you consider donating to this worthy organization that is spearheading the daunting task of eliminating water fluoridation around the world. As usual, Mercola.com will match your donation, dollar for dollar, up to $25,000 during Fluoride Awareness Week.

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Fluoride Lowers Children’s IQ

From the very beginning, one of Connett’s driving concerns was the possibility that fluoride might be lowering children’s IQ.

“Two Chinese studies were published in 1995 and 1996, in English. I was very concerned, and felt strongly that if there was any evidence that fluoride lowered intelligence of children, then there's no way you would put benefits to teeth above that and continue water fluoridation,” Connett says.

Ten years later, in 2006, the National Research Council looked at the toxicology of fluoride.¹ At that time, there were six IQ studies and, based on those six studies along with many animal studies, the NRC concluded that fluoride did in fact pose a threat to the brain. By 2008, there were 18 such studies.

In 2012, a distinguished team, partly from Harvard University, did a review² of 27 IQ studies; 25 from China and two from Iran. Strikingly, 26 of the studies showed children with higher fluoride exposure had lower IQ than the children with lower fluoride exposure.

“The bombshell came in 2017. Up to that point, we had about 60 studies that had shown a lowering of IQ, most of them from China, but also some from India, some from Iran, some from Mexico,” Connett says.

US-Funded Study Confirms Decades’ Long Suspicions

The bombshell study^3,4 Connett refers to, known as the “Bashash study” (named after the lead author, Morteza Bashash, Ph.D.), was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the Environmental Protection Agency.

It followed pregnant women and their babies for 12 years. They measured the fluoride in their urine, which reveals total exposure, regardless of the source or sources, and they found a strong relationship between the fluoride level in mothers’ urine and IQ scores in their children at the ages of 4, and between 6 and 12.

It’s important to realize that it’s not the concentration of fluoride in the water (measured in mg per liter) that is significant for health. What matters is the dose you get in milligrams per day, and the dosage (mg/day divided by the individual’s body weight), and these depend on a variety of fluctuating factors.

“The NIH is a parent of the Public Health Service, so they've been promoting fluoride for years and years (since 1950). So, I believe they put a lot of money into this study thinking that it would prove, once and for all, that crazy people like me and others were absolutely wrong about the notion that fluoride lowers IQ in children.

But lo and behold, they gave us very, very strong evidence that it is. And that the most susceptible age, as far as fluoride's impact on the brain, is during fetal development.

It turns out the placenta does not protect the fetus from fluoride, and, as you know, up to about six months of age, the blood-brain barrier is not fully formed in the baby. So, the fetus is very susceptible to this impact of fluoride.”

The first response of the American Dental Association was that the findings didn’t apply to the United States, since it was done in Mexico City. However, this ignored the fact that human beings are human beings, by measuring fluoride in the urine they had a measure of total exposure, regardless of the source. It really doesn’t matter if the fluoride comes from water, other beverages, food or toothpaste.

Canadian Researchers Confirm ‘Bombshell’ Results

In 2019, the NIH study was replicated in Canada,⁵ and they too found that higher fluoride levels in maternal urine were associated with lower IQ in their offspring. The only major difference was that based on maternal urine levels only boys appeared to be affected, not the girls. But when the mothers’ fluoride exposure was calculated from ingestion (i.e. from food and beverages) there was a relationship between that and the children’s IQ for both boys and girls,

“Now, this study, unlike the first one, the Bashash study, got a certain amount of coverage,” Connett says. “[It] was published in the journal of the American Medical Association, Pediatrics. That's one of the major pediatrics journals in the world, and the editors of this journal went to extreme lengths.

They knew this was controversial. Hats off for them to take it on. They knew it was going to be consequential, so they doubled up on the peer review process, they double checked the statistics, so they were confident when they launched it. They even ran an editorial saying the steps they'd taken.

They had two of their editors, the editor of JAMA in total and the editor of JAMA Pediatrics did a 20-minute podcast explaining how astounding the results were. They said, ‘Oh, we had no idea that fluoride caused any problems to health.’ I don't know what they'd been reading. But anyway … it was a bombshell for them to suddenly find that fluoride could be damaging the brain of the fetus.

They also ran an editorial from David Bellinger, one of the world's experts on lead's neurotoxicity, and he said ‘The measurements here are akin to what's happening with lead.’ In other words, it’s very, very serious, and that got a lot of coverage around the world.

But the other side was organized and they quickly got some ‘experts’ — none of them actually experts on fluoride or toxicology or neurotoxicity — who said all the right things to dampen people's concern about this study.”

Two Other Important Studies

“There are four studies that people need to know about,” Connett says. To learn more about each, see Connett’s video commentaries on FluorideALERT.org FAN.tv page. Aside from the two already mentioned, the two other ones are:

• The Riddell study, published in 2019, found a nearly 300% increase in ADHD prevalence in adolescents in Canadian communities with fluoridated water supplies, compared to those living in non-fluoridated communities. “Science never stops,” Connett says. “You have to entertain the notion that an ugly fact can destroy a beautiful theory, in this particular case, we got a lot of ugly facts, but the big one is the fact that fluoride could damage children's brains.”
• The Till study, which compared the IQ of children who had been bottle fed as babies in fluoridated communities (and thus would have gotten fluoridated water in their formula) versus non-fluoridated communities. Here, they found a large IQ difference.

FAN Lawsuit Against EPA on Fluoride Underway

November 22, 2016, a coalition including FAN, Food & Water Watch, Organic Consumers Association, American Academy of Environmental Medicine, International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology, Moms Against Fluoridation and several individuals, filed a petition^6,7 calling on the EPA to ban the deliberate addition of fluoridating chemicals to U.S. drinking water under Section 21 of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). 

As explained by Connett, the TSCA allows citizens and nongovernmental organizations to petition the EPA to remove toxic substances found to pose a threat (an unreasonable risk) either to the general population or a subset of that population.

The petition was made on the grounds that a large body of research demonstrates fluoride is neurotoxic at doses within the range now seen in fluoridated communities, and included over 2,500 pages of scientific documentation detailing these health risks. 

The EPA denied the petition⁸ February 27, 2017, on the grounds that it had failed to present “a scientifically defensible basis” to conclude that anyone had in fact suffered neurotoxic harm as a result of fluoride exposure. In response, FAN and its coalition partners filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, legally challenging the EPA’s denial of their petition.

This interview was taped June 2, 2020. FAN was scheduled to begin arguments in front of a judge June 8. FAN will explain the neurotoxicity of fluoride shown in these and other studies, and then the EPA’s industry experts, paid consultants who have also defended glyphosate and other toxins, will present their evidence. (see FAN’s web site FluorideAlert.org for a summary of the trial)

“But we have, for our lawsuit … some of the leading experts on neurotoxicity in the world,” Connett says, “including a couple that were involved in the studies I've been talking about.” That includes Bruce Lanphear, the EPA’s go-to person for information about the neurotoxicity of lead. Lanphear worked with Till on the JAMA Pediatrics article and the bottle feeding study listed above. Howard Hu, lead author of the Bashash study, is another expert FAN witness, as is Philippe Grandjean.

“I am very optimistic. [The EPA] doesn’t have the science. We do. And not only do we have the science, but we have some of the world's best experts testifying for us. So, unless these crafty lawyers for the EPA are able to muddy the waters, I think we'll have no trouble in demonstrating three things: One, that the preponderance of evidence that fluoride is neurotoxic is overwhelming.

Second, that it is a risk at the levels at which we add fluoride to the water. And thirdly, it's an unreasonable risk. Because even if your number one focus was reducing tooth decay, there are other ways of delivering fluoride, instead of this ridiculous notion of putting it in the drinking water and forcing it on your whole population.

I think we can demonstrate those three things. And I'm happy to tell you that my son, who started our webpage in 2000 and developed the largest health database in the world, bigger than other fluoridating governments, by the way, is going to be the lawyer fighting this case,” Connett says.

You can now view the transcript of Michael Connett's brilliant summary statement

The End of Water Fluoridation Is Inevitable

If victorious, the EPA will likely appeal, as this is a classic stall tactic. “There's no agency in the United States that is better at dragging its feet on controversial issues,” Connett says.

“They dragged their feet for over 18 years on the reassessment of dioxin, an issue I was very close to, and they still didn't resolve the issue. They're very subject to industry pressure, and their way of resolving issues is just delay, delay, delay.

But, I do believe that if a federal court, having heard both sides, declares that fluoride poses an unnecessary risk, an unreasonable risk to the developing brain of our children, that that news will ricochet around the fluoridating world — Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Canada, Israel, Malaysia, and a few other countries where they still fluoridate. It's going to have a huge impact.

And I think the citizens will be able to use this as ammunition to say to their health departments, ‘Come on. Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this when you've got this scientific information … done by top notch scientists. Why on earth would you continue this practice when you know that if you want fluoride, you can simply brush it on your teeth and spit it out. What is your rationale for continuing this?

By the same token, to the professional bodies, to the AMA, the ADA, the APHA and all those other organizations that have endorsed fluoridation for years and years and years, why would you continue to support this? Why would you reveal to the public that you have no scientific credibility?

That you don't read the science, that you don't keep up with the science on an issue like this? When you're going to the public and saying again and again and again that fluoridation is safe and effective, when you've got this evidence right there in front of you?

One more thing … Possibly the most important agency for reviewing the toxicology of toxic substances is the National Toxicology Program (NTP). Back in 2016, FAN asked the NTP to do a systematic review of the neurotoxicity of fluoride. This was before the court case and before we went to court.

After three and a half years they came back, having reviewed all the animal data and the human data, and in their draft they said, ‘Based upon the literature, the presumption is that fluoride is a neurotoxic substance. Based upon studies done on children in several different countries, the presumption is that it is neurotoxic.’

Not that it's definite; but you would have to presume, based upon all the literature, that this is a neurotoxic substance. So, that’s a huge vindication for our case. But, because it's a draft and not a final version, we can't actually use it in the court case. Still, this is very useful for us going forward, in addition to whatever the court rules.”

Ending Water Fluoridation Still Met With Strong Resistance

While FAN has successfully ended water fluoridation in many areas, it’s still very difficult. One of the reasons for this is because those who want it to continue always point to reviews by government agencies “which, as bogus as they are and unscientific as they are, carry a lot of weight,” Connett says.

In Ireland, they refer to the expert committee. In New Zealand, they refer to the ministry of health and in Australia to the National Health and Medical Research Council. In the United States, they refer to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention.

All of these agencies have promoted water fluoridation and are not good judges of whether there are problems or not. Hopefully, a court win against the EPA will facilitate and speed up the process of getting fluoride out of drinking water. A win would also set another important precedent:

“We've been able to bring this to court under the Toxic Substances and Control Act, which has a clause [stating] that any group or individual can petition the EPA to remove, to ban, any particular use of a particular chemical in the United States if they can show it's an unreasonable risk to the population, or even a subset of the population.

We … along with Food & Water Watch are the first groups to ever do this. So, it's establishing a very important precedent, which is really worrying the chemical industry. It’s a big concern of ours, because behind the scenes I'm sure they're trying to muddy the waters in every way they can. But it's a huge precedent. I hope that our victory will also shoot adrenaline into the veins of all these other [health safety] groups …”

Another Fluoride-Related Issue To Be Tackled

In our interview, Connett also discusses the fluoride pollution released during recycling of lithium ion batteries, such as those used in electric cars. Lithium ion batteries contain fluorinated polymers like polyvinylidene difluoride (PVDF) and an electrolyte called lithium hexafluorophosphate (LiPF₆).

When heated during the recycling process, these fluorinated compounds break down to produce hydrogen fluoride, and many fluorinated byproducts which are toxic and difficult to capture. Like PFOS, these chemicals stick around for so long they’re known as “forever chemicals.”

As it happens, a lithium ion battery incinerator is being built near Connett’s home, across the road from a residential area and adjacent to a little league baseball field. “It is an absolutely insane, unethical siting,” Connett says, noting that there really is no safe place for such facilities. It’s the recycling process itself that needs to be modified, which is what Connett is fighting for now.  

“What this has done is fortuitous. It has brought together nearly all the strands of our activism. I've had 35 years fighting incineration and dioxins [and] 24 years fighting fluoridation. Now we're meeting hydrogen fluoride and fluorinated by-products in spades. At the very least the problem will be: What do you do with the sodium fluoride that's left over in the effluent, the waste water?

I hope someone doesn't suggest putting it in the drinking water. Because also in that waste water you'll have a PFAS, a polyfluorinated alkyl substance (used in some of the batteries), and my wife has spent many, many years maintaining a database on these PFAS … She's been concerned with that for a long time. So, we've been able to draw on three different strands of our activism to help our local community.”

Avoid Fluoride to Optimize Your Health

Eliminating water fluoridation will go a long way toward protecting the health of all people, but especially children. Sacrificing children’s brain function for a theoretical benefit of less tooth decay is unconscionable.

Aside from making sure you do not drink fluoridated water, or use fluoridated water to mix infant formula, to reduce your exposure, avoid drinking excessive amounts of tea, which tends to be high in fluoride.

“Mix it up,” Connett says. “If you must drink tea, then drink tea, drink coffee, drink herbal tea. Mix it around. Not too much tea. Also, avoid animal bones. Don't eat the bones from sardines and pilchards. Don't eat the bones from chicken. Avoid mechanically deboned meat.”

Call to Action — Donate Today!

Again, for more details on the four studies Connett highlights in this interview, see his video commentaries on FAN.tv page. There you can also find a webinar lecture by FAN’s senior scientist, Chris Neurath, in which he explains the neurotoxicity of fluoride. To help spread the word, you can print out a FAN pamphlet to share with family, friends and local community bulletin boards.

In closing, if you’re concerned about the health effects of fluoride, please support FAN with your tax-deductible donation today. Mercola.com will match your donation, dollar for dollar, up to $25,000 during Fluoride Awareness Week.

>>>>> Click Here <<<<<

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Jonathan Latham, Ph.D., is a molecular biologist and a virologist, which is a great skillset to help us understand the origins of SARS-CoV-2. Latham reviews some really intriguing evidence in this interview. He’s also the editor of Independent Science News.

By and large, the mainstream media are still protecting the narrative that SARS-CoV-2 is a zoonotically transmitted virus originating in bats. Much of the evidence for this comes from Shi Zhengli, a researcher at the biosafety 4 laboratory in Wuhan, China.

As the leading Chinese bat coronavirus researcher, her career has been focused on studying bat coronaviruses for over a decade. In a recent article,¹ Latham and Allison Wilson, Ph.D., dissect research showing this theory simply doesn’t hold water.

“Our article doesn't dispute that it came from a bat at some point, I think that is the strongest data, but what we do dispute is the mechanism by which it came from the bat,” Latham says.

Lab Origin Theory No. 1

Latham’s article lays out several different lab origin hypotheses. The simplest one is that researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology or another virology BSL-2 lab that's even closer to the wet market speculated to be the origin of SARS-CoV-2. In that process, one of them got infected and then passed it on to coworkers or family, either because they didn’t properly quarantine or didn’t realize they were infected.

This is not the most likely of hypotheses for the simple reason that few naturally occurring bat coronaviruses identified have the ability to bind to human ACE2 receptors, which is what allows them to infect human cells in the first place. In order for this theory to work, the virus would have to circulate among many people, evolving slightly with each pass.

Lab Origin Theory No. 2

Another theory is that the researchers were cloning a bat virus similar to SARS-CoV-2 in the lab in an effort to make a more infectious clone. Perhaps they placed the virus in monkey cells, humanized mice cells or human cells with an ACE-2 receptor expressed in them. A researcher may then have been accidentally infected.

“There have been lab escapes of viruses in which people fail to decontaminate samples and then they give the samples to someone else, or they throw them out with the trash, or some mishap arises,” Latham says.

“So, the virus is either identical to the one that was collected from the wild or very little altered by the lab, but then it escapes because there's some failure in the lab. That would be a second possibility.”

Lab Origin Theory No. 3

A third possibility is that they were collecting samples and looking at genetic sequences in order to find a virus they could then alter, giving it more interesting properties. Perhaps they found some with the spike protein that had a greater affinity for the ACE2 receptor. By combining it with another virus, they may have been able to create — through genetic engineering — a more infectious virus.

The reason for mixing and matching viruses in the lab in this way is to identify potential pandemic pathogens (PPP). Meaning, two wild viruses, if they come in contact with another, might mutate into something deadly to humans.

“For example, we will swap spike proteins and see if the viruses that we have circulating in bats, really all they need to do is evolve better spike protein and all of a sudden, they can become pandemic pathogens,” Latham says.

Genetic Engineering Doesn’t Necessarily Leave Marks

Many who defend the all-natural zoonotic origin story justify their stance by saying there are no signs of genetic manipulation. Like several other scientists, Latham points out there are ways you can manipulate a virus without leaving telltale markers. He explains the basics of the genetic engineering process:

“The standard thing, historically, was you find a restriction site in two different viruses, or you may manufacture a restriction site. That gives you a cutting place in the genome … Let's say you start with virus A and you cut a bit out and you put that into virus B. Of course, you've got to remove the bit from virus B that it already has.

So, you're basically swapping things and you're using restriction enzymes, which are basically enzymes that cut DNA in specific places. That's kind of the old-fashioned way.

There are newer methods with PCR and so forth that are slightly more complicated. It means you're not restricted to restriction sites to do that. There are very simple cutting and pasting [methods], but it doesn't necessarily leave a scar or a mark. This is the really important point here.

There are also passaging experiments. Passaging experiments are when you take a virus — say, for example, you take a virus that originally came from a bat and you put that into monkey cells, or human cells … What you normally observe with that virus is that it doesn't work too well in those cells because it's not adapted to them. It's a bat virus, so it doesn't work too well.

But what virologists have learned to do is to, essentially as the viral infection is failing, take a little sample of what is inside the cell and put that into another cell. Then, when that infection builds up … you take another sample.

This is called passaging. It allows the virus to evolve into a more pathogenic form against the cells that you are now putting into. So, you're always putting into the same species of cell. You can also do this with whole organisms.”

The Most Likely Scenario

As noted by Latham, until the passaged virus has been genetically sequenced, there’s no telling exactly what it looks like, or how it might act. It’s fairly random in that sense. Latham explains:

“It may have recombined, it may have mutated; there's been a genetic change, but you don't know what it is until you research it, clone it and make a new infectious clone. And so, you have the possibility that what escaped from the lab is actually not known to the people in the lab. They don't actually know what it was that they evolved.

And, if they were doing those kinds of experiments, putting the live bat viruses into cells of different species — and historically we know that they were doing those kinds of experiments — then they could also develop a new virus.

You can also have a combination of those experiments. So, you can have researchers who passage recombined molecules, they did the cutting and pasting part, and then they put back the cut and pasted virus into novel cells like human cells, and then they passage back, and then you evolve an infectious clone in that way.”

In this way, you can create a virus with high affinity for human cells, even though it wasn’t infectious to humans in the beginning. One of the key features of SARS-CoV-2 is its spike protein has high affinity for the human ACE2 receptor. The question is, how did this affinity arise?

“One of the obvious answers to that question is that it was being passaged inside these human cells or that somebody cut and pasted a spike protein bound to these human receptors that they already knew worked particularly well.

So, my hypothesis is that either they were cutting and pasting, or they were passaging, or they were doing some combination of both, and then that basically led to somebody in the lab becoming infected through some kind of careless event,” Latham says.

Leaks Have Caused Other Global Pandemics

The wild H1N1 virus that caused the 1918 flu pandemic was extinct for decades. However, in 1977, there appears to have been a biosafety lab leak in China or Russia in which that virus escaped, causing a global pandemic.

“Essentially what happened is the virus went extinct and then a new version of the virus appeared in 1977 in China, and it was basically identical to one that had existed 20 years before … No one can explain how a virus could appear — it was basically identical — but had been somehow hidden.

There was a theory that it had been in the permafrost and somebody had dug up a person from the permafrost who had died with H1N1 flu, but that was the best theory people had until they realized that it probably came from a lab that was making a vaccine.”

The H1N1 virus was temperature sensitive, and one of the things you use when you're making vaccine is a temperature-sensitive virus — a partially disabled virus.

“Basically, there is no other explanation than that this came from a lab and that there were labs who had stored stocks of it, but no lab has really come forward and said, ‘It was us.’ So, this has been kind of deduced from sequence information from the location in which it appears and so forth, but it's widely accepted by virologists,” Latham says.

Naturally, the notion that a biosafety lab leak would be responsible for a lethal pandemic is an uncomfortable one, especially for virologists doing that kind of work. An outbreak of equine encephalitis in Venezuela has also been traced back to a laboratory leak. Then there’s the H1N1 swine flu pandemic of 2009. Latham says:

“There's a scientific paper by a friend of mine, Adrian Gibbs ... written with two other virologists. He's a famous virologist and he says, ‘This came from a vaccine. The swine flu is actually not readily accountable by the specific circulating viruses that happened to be in North American and European and South American pigs at that time.’

Basically you can't explain it by that method, but you can explain it perfectly well by the idea that there was a manufacturer who was making bits of H1N1, one from European sequences and North American sequences, and South American sequences, and stuck them all together to make a universal vaccine, and somehow they failed to inactivate it.

So, they gave it to pigs in Mexico and that became the swine flu, the second H1N1 pandemic, and that second pandemic killed probably close to 300,000 people. We have a whole series of examples of lab escapes of viruses, so when people treat the lab escape thesis as being somehow ridiculous or outrageous or improbable, to me it just demonstrates their ignorance of the history of virology.”

Latham also addresses suspicions that HIV AIDS came from a polio vaccine, so for more details, listen to the interview. This was described in the book “The River: A Journey Back to the Source of HIV and AIDS,” by Edward Hooper, and reviewed in a British Medical Journal article that you can read for free.²

SIV from infected monkey kidney cells that were used to create polio vaccines and used on hundreds of thousands of Africans are also suspected of being the cause of certain cancers.

Safety Breaches at Wuhan Lab

Many safety breaches have been documented at biosafety labs around the world, including the Wuhan lab. Several were documented by U.S. Embassy officials who visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2018.

“I mean I think they're important data points but … we think it's more important that people from within China have raised questions about the bio security of this lab. Firstly, it's newly opened, so that's automatically a bit of a red flag. Secondly, there were violations cited by the internal overseeing agency in China of the kind of standards they would expect from a BSL facility.

They've been trying to set up the certification systems and so forth for their labs because they're trying to set up a whole network — a whole system of animal experiments and collection stations and so forth … So, they're setting up the certification schemes and they've already been cited, according to these reports, as having violations …

In the end, let me add something: One of the basics should be that you don't site these labs in the middle of a big city. So, we already have what I would say a violation to the basics. They should be in a desert or something like that, they should be in Antarctica, in remote areas.”

BSLs Promote High-Tech Solutions Rather Than Hygiene Basics

There can be no doubt that biosafety level 4 labs pose a tremendous threat to public health, seeing how they house the most dangerous pathogens in the world, and leaks are inevitable. The question is, are these risks worth it?

As noted by Latham, the existence of these laboratories drive the vaccine agenda while old-fashioned commonsense hygiene strategies such as hand-washing and protective gear fall by the wayside. The risks posed by these labs also fit right into the surveillance capitalism now getting a hard push through the roll-out of disease tracking and tracing mechanisms.

“An interesting thing happened the other day. Seventy-seven Nobel laureates, most of them molecular biologists, wrote a letter to the president protesting the cutting of the grants to the Wuhan lab that were emanating from the NIH. Well the man leading this effort [is] Richard Roberts. What is his scientific position?

He is on the board of directors of New England Biolabs, one of the biggest suppliers of molecular biology equipment. So, they're corralling together all these Nobel Prize winners to support all this molecular biology research that costs big bucks — hundreds of millions of dollars a year to do this kind of research, money that could be going to PPE and so forth.”

That money could also go to more basic strategies such as vitamin D supplements to build up the population’s immune system.

Cover-Up at Wuhan Institute of Virology Exposed

Latham and Wilson are also planning to write about what they believe is a cover-up at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The nearest living ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 is a viral sequence currently stored in the Wuhan lab. It’s said to have been kept frozen for the past seven years and nothing has been done with it.

This sequence came from bats living in a mine, and people who have worked in the mine have died of viral infections. In other words, they’ve had a strong reason to look into that virus sequence, and that one also happens to be the closest relative to SARS-CoV-2. Shi published one of the first viral sequences of SARS-CoV-2.

“Three papers came out in three days, all saying this is ‘The sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus,’” Latham notes. Yet “her paper makes no reference to this longstanding sequence that they'd had in her lab. Zero reference. Instead, they say they've taken a sample from that freezer and they've sequenced it, and this is the nearest living relative.

But this obscures the fact that for seven years they'd had another virus, which basically came from the same tube … But it looks like when you go searching the DNA databases, it makes it look like this virus has just been with us since December.

It really hasn't, it's been sitting in that lab, supposedly unresearched. So, the question is, what were they doing with this viral sequence for seven years that may have killed three miners back in 2013?”

In a nutshell, SARS-CoV-2 is quite possibly not a new virus. A highly conserved close ancestor was already in the database under the name BtCoV/4991. It was already in the published literature. However, when the Wuhan Lab resequenced the mineshaft sample following the COVID-19 outbreak, they simply renamed that old virus that’s been on ice for seven years.

“Giving it a new name basically obscures the old history. They don't even acknowledge that it came from the same tube, which they now have been forced to acknowledge … It’s the same virus. The sequence identity between the two samples is 100%.

So, if there were one base pair different, you could maybe make a scientific argument that we should give them a different name, but there's no difference between them whatsoever. It's the same virus from the same tube, collected from the same place — the mine where the miners died … from a viral infection of pneumonia.”

Shi’s genetic sequencing paper basically pretends the 4991 sequence never existed. “They've forgotten all about it; that would be the interpretation of reading their paper,” Latham says. A second paper released within that three-day span identifies 4991 as the nearest living relative, and states that it comes from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The third sequence paper does a complicated phylogenetic analysis of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, yet it too fails to mention that the nearest living relative is 4991 and held in the Wuhan lab.

“What's really interesting is that everyone who sequence [SARS-CoV-2] — there was a bunch of labs that sequenced the virus around the same time — they all would have searched the database and come up with this 4991 sequence … They all would have done that.

What you have to imagine is that they just get on the phone with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and say, ‘Oh, the virus broke out in your town just down the road from you, walking distance, and you are the keepers of the nearest known viral sequence. Have you had a lab accident?’ You can imagine dozens of labs phoning them up and say, ‘How do you handle a lab accident?’ …

What I'm offering is evidence of a cover-up, but we don't know exactly what they were covering up. They could have been covering up something a little different, but the very obvious thing to be covering up is simply that you are researching a virus that looks uncomfortably like SARS-CoV-2 …

We only have a partial sequence [of 4991]. We don't have the whole genome of this original sample. They only provided a sequence of 370 base pairs, but it is 98.7% identical to SARS-CoV-2 on nucleotides and the 370 base pairs.

This is considered the most conserved part of the genome, so it doesn't necessarily extrapolate to the whole thing. What is quite possible is that, that sample comes from something that is way closer than anything we've been told about.”

Public Health Rethink Is in Order

Even if 4991 isn’t a 100% match to SARS-CoV-2 (which sequencing of the whole genome would reveal), it could be close enough that you wouldn’t even need a whole lot of gain-of-function experiments to end up with a highly transmissible virus. According to Latham, “That's exactly the kind of thing that could have happened.”

In closing, as noted by Latham, the big picture question is, do we really want to be spending taxpayer money on all of these public health models that rely on biosafety/bioweapons research?

The justification for doing this kind of research on viruses is to prepare us for potentially devastating outbreaks, should the viruses evolve and mutate in the wild. Yet, that same research ends up being the source of our most dangerous outbreaks. As noted by Latham:

“These people have not managed to predict anything so far. What they've done is these incredibly dangerous experiments and then find out that the next virus comes from somewhere they didn't anticipate, or certainly didn't warn us about …

This research is not really predictive, but if enough virologists get together and say that this is how we predict the next pandemic, what is the government to do? If they all say, ‘That's how we should do it,’ then who's going to contradict them? …

I mean, you want to continue gainful employment, so why not push an agenda that's going to keep you employed, even though it doesn't serve the public good necessarily …

What [should] we spend our public health money on? Do we target these individual diseases and make New England Biolabs and the Gates Foundations investors rich, or do we invest in public health in a sense that benefits everybody — prevention and nutrition?

Also, the big issue too that we haven't really touched on is, why are we blaming the wildlife trade here? This is a really important question to ask because Peter Daszak, head of the EcoHealth Alliance, has been in all the media; he's been on Democracy Now!, the New York Times, Scientific American, Science Magazine, all these different outlets, basically ubiquitously blaming the wildlife trade, saying categorically it's not a lab escape.

Well, he is an interested party, right? His nonprofit is funding this research. The media cannot go and ask the person who's funding it whether it came from their lab or not. It's ridiculous. But that's what they're doing and they're treating us like idiots.”

As Latham points out, the reason some wild viruses emerge is because we’re destroying rainforest and building roads into remote areas. People end up catching the viruses because animals are fleeing the destruction of the forest.

So, why are we blaming the wildlife trade? If anything, we need to address the destruction of the animals’ native habitats. That, however, would be very bad for Daszak’s business because the EcoHealth Alliance is in partnership with the palm oil industry.

“We find that science — if you understand the science well enough — really helps you understand who's lying,” Latham says. “When you understand that part, you got a really strong anchor to base in analysis of what's really going on in the bigger picture.

If you can see that a very obvious thing — the possibility here is a lab escape —and then you've got one or a few people wandering around the media saying, ‘A lab escape is an impossibility, it never happened, there's no chance of it at all’ — you know that they're not speaking science, that they have some kind of ax to grind. And then you see who else repeats the message, who supports them and who doesn't and so forth.”

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