Health & Fitness

06/25/21

The cells of simple organisms, such as bacteria, as well as human cells are surrounded by a membrane, which fulfills various tasks including protecting the cell from stress. Researchers have now discovered that a membrane protein found in bacteria has a similar structure and function as a group of proteins that are responsible for remodeling and rebuilding the cell membrane in humans. No connection between the two protein groups was known before.

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How neurons get past 'no'

People with fibromyalgia are substituting CBD for opioids to manage pain

Potato and rice protein shakes may be a viable vegan alternative to whey protein shakes, research suggests

COVID-linked multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children diagnosed more in Black and Latino children

Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C) significantly affected more Black and Latino children than white children, with Black children at the highest risk, according to a new study. Researchers also found cardiac complications, including systolic myocardial dysfunction and valvular regurgitation, were more common in MIS-C patients who were critically ill.

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The Real Reason We Locked Down the Healthy

There are two prevailing theories about the origins of SARS-CoV-2. The first is that SARS-CoV-2 emerged naturally and jumped from wildlife to humans, with or without an intermediary host. The other is that the virus was being kept and/or studied in a lab, from which it escaped.

Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, is one of the most ardent supporters of the natural origins theory. He told The Associated Press in November 2020 that SARS-CoV-2 could have passed from a wildlife poacher to a trader who brought it to Wuhan.¹ Daszak also organized the publication of a scientific statement, published in The Lancet and signed by 26 additional scientists, condemning such inquiries as “conspiracy theory.”²

Daszak, however, is part of the World Health Organization team that investigated the origins of SARS-CoV-2 and has a long history of close ties to the Chinese laboratory in question — the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), from where it appears increasingly likely that the virus emerged.

The video above, “Deception in America Episode One: The Tale of Peter Daszak,” presents a succinct history of his involvement, as well as that of Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and who has also long backed dangerous coronavirus research, including that conducted by EcoHealth Alliance. According to the film:³

“From the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, said to have begun some time in December of 2019, the battle to control the narrative has been fought ferociously by global organizations, CEOs, billionaires and the programs at the center of the Wuhan Institute of Virology controversy … Despite his attempts to shift the blame to anyone else but himself and his team, all roads eventually lead back to Daszak.”

EcoHealth Alliance Is the Middleman for NIAID’s WIV Funding

EcoHealth Alliance is a nonprofit organization that receives millions in funding every year from NIAID, and then gives it to WIV. In fact, the film reveals that, since 2002, EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak have received over 32 grants worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from NIH, with most coming from NIAID:⁴

“Over the years, Peter Daszak and the Ecohealth Alliance have received $5,764,128 from the Fogarty International Center and $7,875,012 from the NIAID, for a grand total of $13,639,140.”

EcoHealth Alliance also has contracts with other government departments worth millions of dollars. The following contracts are among them:⁵

$4.5 million with the Department of Defense (DOD)
$2.9 million with DOD
$499,000 with the National Science Foundation
$566,000 with the Department of Homeland Security
$1.2 million with the Department of Commerce

There are many others as well. According to USASpending.gov, EcoHealth Alliance has 36 contracts with various government agencies.⁶ Over the years, the organization has been awarded $61.5 million, with DOD chief among its funders, giving them a total of $41.9 million. Overall, 91% of EcoHealth Alliance’s funding comes from government grants.⁷

Daszak Joins the Lancet Commission on COVID-19

Daszak has extensive connections, including having worked for the Center of Infection and Immunity at Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, alongside colleague Jeffrey Sachs, the former director of The Earth Institute at Columbia.⁸ Sachs, also an adviser to the United Nations, spearheaded the Millennium Villages project, which was an attempt to reduce extreme poverty in Africa, supporting a shift to self-sufficiency.

While the project claimed to be a success, an evaluation in 2012 revealed its goals were unrealistic and serious questions were raised about the project’s ability to create long-lasting impact, along with its cost-effectiveness.⁹

Sachs also wrote a number of articles in support of China, stating, for instance, that “the U.S., not China, is the real threat to international law,”¹⁰ and was named chair of the Lancet Commission on COVID-19. He then named Daszak as one of the commissioners.

“Peter Daszak’s constant involvement with people like Jeffrey Sachs and the World Economic Forum suggests that he could be another one of those types of men who are so disconnected with reality that they will do anything to shape the world, not realizing what they are doing,” the film noted.¹¹

In fact, in a Tweet from May 10, 2011, EcoHealth Alliance wrote, “Q for the crowd: is western style democracy, a la USA, compatible with sustainability? Or is eastern style (a la China) better?”¹² As further noted by the film:¹³

“Peter Daszak’s Ecohealth Alliance receives far more in funding from the U.S. government, including grants from the Department of Defense, among others. He is also closely associated with Jeffrey Sachs via Columbia, who frequently appears alongside George Soros in talks and seminars.

Daszak is very well connected to many globalist enterprises and their organizers. His own organization touts the sustainable development goal model, originally devised by Jeffrey Sachs.

So, when Peter Daszak deflects and says his team and their research that are directly involved the Wuhan Virology Lab has nothing to do with the SARS coronavirus outbreak in 2019, it follows a pattern that the organizations he surrounds himself with do, wherein they blame a lack of funding, or other outside factors. It is never his fault.”

Daszak’s Gain-of-Function Research

Gain-of-function (GOF) research refers to studies that have the potential to enhance the ability of pathogens to cause disease, including enhancing either their pathogenicity or transmissibility.¹⁴ Such research is by its very nature controversial, since there are clear risks should the information be misused or the pathogens escape (or are maliciously released).

Jonathan Latham, Ph.D., a molecular biologist and virologist and Allison Wilson, Ph.D., a geneticist, are among those who believe gain-of-function research performed at WIV played "an essential causative role in the pandemic."¹⁵ However, Daszak continues to say emerging infectious diseases come from climate change and ecological drivers, ignoring the gain-of-function research that he and his organization are directly involved with.

For instance, as reported by Alexis Baden-Mayer, political director for the Organic Consumers Association, EcoHealth Alliance lists WIV and the Wuhan University School of Public Health as subcontractors under a $3.7-million NIH grant¹⁶ titled, “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.”

EcoHealth Alliance also used a sub-grant¹⁷ from the University of California at Davis to fund a gain-of-function experiment by Shi Zhengli, Ph.D., the director of WIV’s Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases, also known as “bat woman,” and colleague Ralph Baric from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, involving the use of genetic engineering to create a “new bat SARS-like virus ... that can jump directly from its bat hosts to humans.” According to Baden-Mayer (see hyperlinked article above):

“The work, ‘A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence,’¹⁸ published in Nature in 2015 during the NIH’s moratorium¹⁹ on gain-of-function research, was grandfathered in because it was initiated before the moratorium … and because the request by Shi and Baric to continue their research during the moratorium was approved by the NIH.

As a condition of publication, Nature, like most scientific journals, requires²⁰ authors to submit new DNA and RNA sequences to GenBank, the U.S. National Center for Biotechnology Information Database. Yet the new SARS-like virus Shi and Baric created wasn’t deposited²¹ in GenBank until May 2020.”

Unacceptable Risks of a Man-Made Pandemic

Daszak and WHO officials continue to state that safety guidelines make it very unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 could have escaped from a lab, but a paper published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists²² revealed in 2012 that it’s a matter of when, not if, a potential pandemic pathogen (PPP) escapes.

At the time, they noted that there were at least 42 facilities engaged in research on live PPPs, “and the actual number is likely higher.” Using a conservative estimate that the probability for escape from a lab in a year is 0.3%, they found:

“[This] translates to an 80 percent likelihood of escape from at least one of the 42 labs every 12.8 years, a time interval smaller than those that have separated influenza pandemics in the 20th century. This level of risk is clearly unacceptable.”

In fact, biosecurity breaches in high containment biological labs in the U.S. and around the world have occurred with surprising frequency,²³ and as the film noted:²⁴

“It is hardly reassuring that despite increased policy demands for rigorous biosecurity procedures, potentially high-consequence breaches occur nearly daily. In 2010, 244 unintended releases of bioweapon candidate ‘select agents’ were reported. Being practical, the question is not if such escapes will result in a major civilian outbreak, but what the pathogen will be and how well it can be contained, if it can be contained at all.”

WHO’s investigative commission, tasked with identifying the origin of SARS-CoV-2, announced the Wuhan Institute of Virology and two other biosafety level 4 laboratories in Wuhan, China, had nothing to do with the COVID-19 outbreak in February 2021. Since then, WIV deleted mentions of its collaboration with the NIAID/NIH and other U.S. research partners from its website.²⁵ It also deleted descriptions of gain-of-function research on the SARS virus.

Several members of the U.S. Congress have now vowed to launch their own investigation to explore the lab accident theory. The Energy and Commerce Committee has also requested extensive records from both the NIH and EcoHealth Alliance detailing research and collaborations with WIV.²⁶

If SARS-CoV-2 did, in fact, come from a lab, it shows clearly that gain-of-function research is the real threat and reason for locking down the healthy and highlights the disturbing truth that any such pathogen manufactured to infect humans can be designated as a biological weapon, even if it was created with non-nefarious intentions.

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Air Pollution Is Making Your Allergies Worse

With each passing year, more people are affected by seasonal allergies. In the quest to identify the mechanism behind the growing number of people experiencing allergies, scientists have identified several factors that play an important role. One of these is air pollution.¹^,2

According to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America,³ more than 50 million Americans have experienced a variety of types of allergies each year, and that number only continues to rise. The annual cost exceeds $18 billion for allergic rhinitis and $25 billion for food allergies.

The most common types of seasonal allergies are reactions to tree, grass and weed pollen. Allergic rhinitis, which is also called hay fever, affects 5.2 million children and 19.2 million adults. Although these numbers are staggering, scientists expect them to continue to rise as increasing levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) have affected plant growth and pollen production.

The most common symptoms of allergic rhinitis include sneezing, stuffy, runny nose, watery and itchy eyes and itching in your nose, throat or mouth. A sizable number of allergy sufferers experience noticeable brain fog as well. Food and seasonal allergies are your body's reactions to particles it considers foreign.

The first time your body meets a protein allergen, plasma cells release immunoglobulin E (IgE).⁴ This attaches to the surface of mast cells, which are found in great numbers in your surface tissue such as skin and nasal mucus membranes. Mast cells release important chemical mediators, one of which is histamine.

The next time your body encounters this allergen, your mast cells become activated within minutes and release a powerful cocktail of histamines, leukotrienes and prostaglandins. This triggers the cascade of symptoms that you associate with allergies.

Rising Levels of CO2 Feed Flowering Plants

One of the major components of air pollution is carbon dioxide. According to the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions,⁵ carbon dioxide makes up 76% of all greenhouse gas emissions. Trees and other plants use carbon dioxide for photosynthesis. You might think rising levels of carbon dioxide may be good for plant life, but like most things, plants need a balance.

Gilles Oliver is an engineer from the National Aerobiological Surveillance Network, which tracks pollen throughout France. He spoke with a reporter from Vice France about the interaction between CO2 and plant life, saying,⁶ “But when the proportion of this CO2 in the air increases, plants grow faster and produce more pollen.”

An increase in pollen production raises your exposure to pollen, and thus produces more severe seasonal allergies. Changes in temperature and CO2 have also extended the frost-free season and thus lengthened pollen season.⁷ However, the pollen being produced by these plants may be contributing to the collapse of the bee population.

Scientists have found that increases in CO2 produce more pollen, but the pollen has lower protein levels.⁸ When bees harvest from flowers they first drink the nectar and then collect the pollen. Nectar is high in carbohydrates, while pollen offers long-term nutrition and provides the bees’ only natural source of protein.

When scientists compared flowers from Canada Goldenrod collected from 1842 to the present, they found the percentage of protein dropped by 33%.⁹ Over the same number of years, CO2 levels have risen by 30%. This increased the carbohydrates in the pollen making it essentially junk food for bees.¹⁰

The researchers confirmed the CO2 change in the environment played a role in dropping protein levels through testing published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.¹¹

More than 100 past studies have demonstrated the change in atmospheric carbon dioxide reduces the nutritional value of plants, but this study was the first to examine the effects on bees. Mathilde Renard, an agricultural engineer at the Environmental Department of the Paris City Hall, also spoke with the Vice France reporter about the rising pollen counts in Paris.¹²

She attributes some of the urban pollen to the city's planting efforts. One of the main strategies Paris is now using is to diversify the species to reduce the pollen concentration for each plant, in the hope of reducing citizens’ allergic response.

Other gardening choices that affect pollen count include preferentially planting male trees.¹³ Female trees shed more seeds and fruit, which need to be cleaned, but male trees tend to produce more allergic pollen. Some city planners have also chosen species based on their aesthetic value. For instance, birch trees are pretty, but birch tree pollen is one of the largest allergic triggers in the northern hemisphere.¹⁴

Pollution and Allergens Interact in Rising Allergies

Oliver attributes the increase in allergies in France to air pollution, saying,¹⁵ “It does two things. If you have allergies, it weakens your respiratory tract so you can get ill more easily. It also breaks up the pollen particles in the air, which allows them to penetrate deeper in our respiratory systems.”

The effect of air pollution on your body is insidious. The World Health Organization¹⁶ determined 92% of the global population is breathing polluted air. Most people associate air pollution with respiratory conditions since it has a significant impact on your pulmonary health.

However, while the damage to your lungs is significant, it's important to remember air pollution affects more than your pulmonary system. For example, a study¹⁷ published in Environmental Health found a link between living close to busy roads and developing non-Alzheimer’s dementia and Parkinson's disease.

According to the WHO, by 2016 air pollution was already responsible for respiratory diseases that killed 543,000 children aged 5 years and younger every year.¹⁸ Air pollution is also responsible for asthma in 14% of children around the globe. In April 2019, London launched an ultra-low emissions zone in central London in an attempt to reduce emissions by 45%.¹⁹

Researchers found that children living in these areas had a reduction in lung capacity by about 5% when pollution rose above legal levels.²⁰ Dr. Ben Barrett commented on studies evaluating the effect air pollution has on pulmonary health in children, saying:²¹

“Air pollution has been found to restrict lung growth in children. Low lung function in childhood can persist into adulthood and is often associated with other health problems including chronic obstructive lung disease in later life.”

Air Pollution May Also Drive Pollen Deeper Into Your Lungs

As Oliver commented, air pollution increases the ability of pollen to penetrate your lungs. This can happen through several mechanisms.²² These include the facilitation of pollen release, stimulating the IgE-mediated response and enhancing the expression of allergens within pollen grains.

Grains of pollen do not only carry allergens, but can also elicit allergic responses in individuals who are sensitized. Pollen grains are too large to penetrate deep into the respiratory tract, so symptoms observed with patients who are allergic to pollen are more likely due to particles that are smaller than pollen grains. According to researchers:²³

“Interestingly, air pollutants bind to these particles and exacerbate allergic disorders. Moreover, pollen grains release biologically active lipids, which activate immune cells in vitro.”

Researchers postulate that the interaction between air pollution and pollen grains outside the body may increase the amount of allergen released into the environment. This may happen through a variety of mechanisms that researchers have been studying in the lab and with human participants.²⁴

They found that allergic reactions to grass pollen are greater in cities than in rural areas. Several types of air pollutants act “as adjuvants through binding to allergens and stimulating IgE synthesis, resulting in exacerbation of asthma symptoms.”²⁵

A Clean Society May Increase Risk of Food Allergies

The number of people experiencing food allergies is also on the rise. One paper²⁶ published by Yale University²⁷ proposed the rising number may be the result of an exaggerated activation of the system that protects you against eating toxic foods. As many as 8% of children²⁸ have a potentially deadly response to the major eight food allergens, often referred to as the “Big 8.”²⁹

These include milk, eggs, wheat, soybeans, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts and peanuts. Your body uses multiple sensory mechanisms to monitor what you eat, including chemosensory processes in the gut. The Yale University scientists argue that the body has a food quality control system in which an allergic response plays a significant role.

One prevailing theory for this rise in food allergies is living in a too-clean environment. This is also called the hygiene hypothesis, which some scientists have expanded to include processed foods, dishwashing detergent and other environmental chemicals.

In a paper³⁰ written in Clinical and Experimental Immunology, the researchers argue these factors also play a role in disrupting your internal food quality control system.

There is a difference between a food sensitivity, intolerance and a food allergy.³¹ A true allergy is mediated by the immune system and triggered by a reaction to proteins found in your food or drink. Food intolerances are also called food sensitivities. These are usually an unpleasant gastrointestinal reaction, but the reaction is not mediated by your immune system.

Although most food allergies develop in childhood, it's not unheard of for adults to develop a food allergy. Data³² gathered from October 2015 to September 2016 suggest 10.8% of adults are allergic to food. Scientists believe this contradicts the long-held belief that most allergies develop in childhood.

In a survey of 40,443 adults, 38.3% had food allergies that sent them to the emergency room and 48% had at least one triggered after the age of 18. Your gut microbiome is vital to the functioning of your immune system, which mediates an allergic response to food. You'll find suggestions on how to optimize your gut microbiome in “How Your Gut Health Impacts Your Disease Risk.”

Vitamin D — Links to Seasonal and Food Allergies

One physiological biomarker tied to the risk of seasonal and food allergies is vitamin D. Researchers have found there is both experimental and clinical evidence that vitamin D is linked to allergic rhinitis.³³

One double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trial³⁴ evaluated the combined effect of vitamin D supplementation with an antihistamine medication. The study found that the people who received vitamin D and the medication had a significant decrease in their symptoms as compared to those who only received the medication.

The researchers measured vitamin D levels after eight weeks, finding those who received the supplement had a mean serum level of 24 nanograms per milliliter (ng/mL) and the level in the group who did not get vitamin D supplementation was 15 ng/mL.

It is important to note that the researchers did not use the supplement as a basis for concluding the vitamin D had a positive effect, but rather the serum level of vitamin D. The rising level of food allergies also corresponds to the increasing number of people with vitamin D deficiency. Vitamin D plays a significant role in the regulation of IgE, important in the development of food allergies.

The link between vitamin D deficiency, which has almost doubled in just over 10 years in the U.S.,³⁵ and poor regulation of IgE responses, may be a significant factor. Both play a role in the development, severity and course of allergic diseases and may help explain, at least in part, why so many adults are developing food allergies.

Vitamin D deficiency has become so widespread it's been called a pandemic by a Harvard Medical School researcher.³⁶ The short list of health benefits attributed to vitamin D optimization include improving your immune system, strengthening muscles, bones and teeth and improving your cardiovascular health.

I recommend you get your vitamin D level tested twice each year — once when the level is likely to be at its lowest (midwinter) and once when it’s at its highest (midsummer). Grassroots Health offers vitamin D testing through its D*Action Study and has an online vitamin D calculator you can use to estimate your vitamin D requirements.

To read more about the interaction between vitamin D deficiency and allergies, how to optimize your vitamin D and the synergy between vitamin D3, magnesium, calcium and vitamin K2, see “Vitamin D Deficiency Can Lead to Increased Allergies.”

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Virus that causes COVID-19 can find alternate route to infect cells

The virus that causes COVID-19 normally gets inside cells by attaching to a protein called ACE2. Researchers have found that a single mutation confers the ability to enter cells through another route, which may threaten the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics designed to block the standard route of entry.

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Proof of Bats at Wuhan Lab

World Health Organization investigators, including Peter Daszak, EcoHealth Alliance president, claimed the suggestion of live bats inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China was a conspiracy theory.¹ The dismissal was part of the rationale used to bolster the idea that SARS-CoV-2 is a natural virus that jumped from animals to humans, possibly due to a wet market in Wuhan, China.

Anyone who suggested otherwise — including that the virus may actually be a manmade product that escaped from a lab — was censored, discredited and called a conspiracy theorist.

Now, however, evidence continues to accumulate that COVID-19 likely emerged from a laboratory in China after having undergone some sort of manipulation to encourage infectiousness and pathology in humans, known as gain-of-function (GOF) research.

Australian investigative journalist Sharri Markson revealed another bombshell in the video above — proof via video footage taken inside the facility that WIV kept live bats in cages.² The live bats at WIV directly contradict statements by Daszak and others, who insisted no bats were housed in the lab. “It is not a conspiracy to state there were live bats at the lab,” Markson says. “It is a fact.”³

Video Footage Shows Live Bats at WIV

Footage from WIV, shown in the video above, shows live bats in cages, a researcher feeding bats and a bat hanging off a researcher’s hat in the field, along with hundreds of mouse cages. Shi Zhengli, Ph.D., the director of WIV’s Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases, also known as “bat woman,” has been studying bat-borne viruses since 2004, including SARS-like coronaviruses.

According to the World Society for Virology, “One of her great contributions is to uncover genetically diverse SARS-like coronaviruses in bats with her international collaborators and provide unequivocal evidence that bats are natural reservoirs of SARS-CoV.”⁴

Part of WIV’s GOF research involved using humanized mice for experiments to determine which coronaviruses could infect humans, as well as research to make viruses that weren’t able to infect humans do just that.⁵

Other reports also claimed that WIV was carrying out research infecting humanized mice with novel bat SARS coronaviruses in 2019, and years earlier video was released showing WIV scientists working with little or no protective gear while working with live viruses.⁶

Daszak Denied Bats Were Kept at WIV

Daszak has close ties to WIV and Zhengli, which is why his participation in the WHO investigation into COVID-19’s origins was highly conflicted from the start. Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance has long funded controversial GOF research at WIV. Further, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, gave funding to the EcoHealth Alliance, which in turn funneled it to WIV.⁷

In case there were any doubt of their close ties, The Sun,⁸ a tabloid paper in the U.K., featured a Twitter conversation in which Daszak “appears to say he is looking forward to an alcohol-fueled karaoke party in a bat cave with Shi Zhengli,” GM watch noted.⁹

Daszak tweets, “Looking forward to that special moment when we hit the baiju and the karaoke with Zhengli & Linfa [likely referring to Wang Linfa, aka ‘batman,’ another bat researcher and WIV’s chairman of a scientific advisory board¹⁰].” He adds, “Right now a party in a bat cave sounds just right to me!!”¹¹

Daszak has also publicly denied there were bats kept at WIV. According to Markson, in December 2020, Daszak tweeted:¹²

“No BATS were “sent to Wuhan lab for genetic analyses of viruses collected in the field” That’s now how this science works. We collect bat samples, send them to the lab. We RELEASE bats where we catch them!”

In a second December 2020 tweet, Daszak repeats:¹³

“This is a widely circulated conspiracy theory. This piece describes work I’m the lead on & labs I’ve collaborated w/ for 15 yrs. They DO NOT Have live or dead bats in them. There is no evidence anywhere that this happened. It’s an error that I hope will be corrected.”

But months later, in June 2021, Daszak starts to backpedal, tweeting:¹⁴

“We didn’t ask them if they had bats. I wouldn’t be surprised if, like many other virology labs, they were trying to set up a bat colony. I know it’s happening in labs here and in other countries.”

Daszak Desperately Pushed Natural Origin Theory

Not surprisingly, given his involvement in the GOF research on bat coronaviruses at WIV, Daszak has fervently supported the natural origin theory of SARS-CoV-2 from the beginning. While investigating her book, “What Really Happened in Wuhan?” Markson discovered that Daszak was invited to brief the FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on February 3, 2020, during the early days of the pandemic.

Ironically, misinformation was a key topic at the meeting, Markson said. Not long after, on April 30, 2020, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a statement saying that SARS-CoV-2 was of natural origin: “The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified.”¹⁵

This statement is false, Markson pointed out, as there was no scientific consensus that the virus had a natural origin. Nonetheless, it was the official narrative being spewed from mainstream media and health officials alike. In an April 17, 2020, White House press briefing, Fauci said the science was "totally consistent with a jump from an animal to a human."¹⁶

Two days after this press briefing, Daszak wrote to Fauci thanking him for his help in deflecting the lab origin theory. The email reads:

"As the PI of the R01 grant publicly targeted by Fox News reporters at the Presidential press briefing last night, I just wanted to say a personal thankyou on behalf of our staff and collaborators, for publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19 from a bat-to-human spillover, not a lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology."

Daszak was also the mastermind behind the publication of a scientific statement published in The Lancet in March 2020¹⁷ condemning such inquiries as "conspiracy theory,"¹⁸ which was then relied on by the media to "debunk" theories and evidence showing the pandemic virus most likely originated from a laboratory. Daszak then ended up on both the WHO investigation into COVID-19s origins and The Lancet's COVID-19 commission,¹⁹ despite the glaring conflict of interest.

What Happened to WIV’s Virus Database?

In Markson’s report, it’s stated that, over more than a decade, Zhengli’s research team collected more than 15,000 bat samples in China and Africa, “searching for the origins of SARS, as well as isolating and characterizing many new viruses.”²⁰

But WIV’s online virus databases disappeared from the internet beginning September 12, 2019. Zhengli has claimed that they were the victim of hacking attempts, but as Markson noted, the databases were not reuploaded or made available to investigative agencies.

A reasonable starting point of WHO experts investigating the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic would certainly have been access to those databases, but they didn’t even ask for them. In the video, you can see Daszak stating that Zhengli’s claims that the database was taken down by hackers are “absolutely reasonable” and confirm they did not ask for access.²¹

Safety Risks Were Well-Known

There were red flags at WIV, a biosafety level 4 laboratory, from the start. In Markson’s report, you can see deputy director Song Donglin state, “Back in 2004 when we began work on this lab, China had no prior experience designing or constructing BSL-4 laboratories. There was no prior experience in using and managing autoclave sterilizers nor life-support systems for personnel. The specifications for standards in these areas were still under development.”

This is an admission that the lab had no prior experiences dealing with the deadly pathogens of a biosafety level 4 lab, yet they were genetically manipulating bat viruses nonetheless. They also relied on French experts to build the laboratory, which was supposed to be a center of international collaboration.

However, France has no role in running the facility²² and, according to Markson, “the French were immediately kicked out” of the lab after it was built, raising alarm bells with French intelligence.²³ A video from WIV director Yuan Zhiming also states, “Staff in our central control room remain in constant contact with staff in our laboratory, providing necessary technical support for their experiments as well as for any accidents.”²⁴

This is another admission that not only do accidents happen, but they have cameras set up monitoring for this purpose. It also doesn’t appear that WHO investigators asked to review this security footage in their COVID-19 investigation. Daszak was also well aware of the risks of GOF research.

In 2015, he spoke at a National Academies of Science seminar on reducing risk from emerging infectious diseases, warning of the danger of experimenting on "humanized mice,"²⁵ meaning lab mice that have been genetically altered to carry human genes, cells or tissues.

He also published a paper in which he warned a global pandemic might occur from a laboratory incident and that "the risks were greater with the sort of virus manipulation research being carried out in Wuhan."²⁶

The Truth Will Be Revealed

Nikolai Petrovsky, professor of endocrinology at Flinders University College of Medicine in Adelaide, Australia, is among those who has stated SARS-CoV-2 appears to be optimally designed to infect humans.²⁷

His team sought to identify a way by which animals might have comingled to give rise to SARS-CoV-2, but concluded that it could not be a naturally occurring virus. Petrovsky has previously stated it appears far more likely that the virus was created in a laboratory.²⁸

The U.S. has recently redoubled its efforts to look into the real origins of COVID-19, with the Energy and Commerce Committee requesting extensive records from both the NIH and EcoHealth Alliance detailing research and collaborations with WIV.²⁹

The Senate also passed an amendment to ban U.S. funding to WIV going forward, while another banned U.S. funding for any GOF research in China.³⁰

This is a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough and will in no way prevent another manmade pandemic because this type of research is being done all around the world, not just in China. Ultimately, however, the truth will prevail as the long-censored lab-leak theory and evidence in support of it — like live bats at WIV — go mainstream.

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Vandana Shiva: A New Wave of Colonization, Carbon Slavery

Vandana Shiva is a brilliant mind calling for inhabitants of the Earth to unite against forces that are threatening to destroy the planet, in part via a new wave of colonization in the name of sustainability.

Tech billionaire Bill Gates, now the largest owner of farmland in the U.S.,¹ is at the root of the problem, pushing technology as the only mechanism to save the world, and in so doing denying real solutions. This path is not accidental but carefully orchestrated to amass wealth, power and control, while making all but the elite subservient.

In my interview with Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., she spoke about Gates Ag One,² which is headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, where Monsanto is also headquartered.

“Gates Ag One is one [type of] agriculture for the whole world, organized top down. He's written about it. We have a whole section on it in our new report,³ 'Gates to a Global Empire,'" she said. This includes digital farming, in which farmers are surveilled and mined for their agricultural data, which is then repackaged and sold back to them.

Bill Gates’ New Book Is ‘Rubbish’

In the above Under the Skin podcast with Russel Brand, Shiva takes aim at Gates’ book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need,” which was released in February 2021⁴ — calling it “rubbish:”⁵

“Just by chance I was reading the rubbish in Bill Gates’ new book. I normally don't read rubbish but when they want to be rulers through rubbish, I read it. And it's lovely because he says the greenhouse gases from factory farms are not because of factory farms and putting animals in prisons … it's because the cows were the problem. They had four stomachs and the four stomachs make the methane.”

The reason cows in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) emit methane that smells is because they're fed an unnatural diet of grains and placed in crowded quarters. It's not a natural phenomenon. It's a man-made one. “You walk behind a good cow on a grazing pasture, she's not stinking,” Shiva said.⁶

The strong recommendation to replace beef with fake meat is also made in Gates’ book⁷ — another example of replacing a whole, natural food with something engineered, heavily processed and fake. It all stems from an overreaching theme of arrogance and the desire for recolonization and a global empire.

The idea is to imply, or create the environment in which, survival isn’t possible without technology. “It is a denial of the richness of agroecological knowledges and practices that are resurging around the world,” according to one of Navdanya’s reports.⁸

Shiva founded Navdanya, a nonprofit organization promoting biodiversity, organic farming and seed saving, in 1994. She has also travelled the globe to warn other countries, including Africa, about plans to displace rural farmers so investors can turn the land into industrial farms to export the commodities.

Gates’ book talks about eliminating age-old farming traditions, which Shiva believes must be protected. Speaking with Brand, Shiva said:⁹

“He [Gates] has put the Indian plow that has existed for 10,000 years and says this primitive technology must go. I call this, as the future technology, a partnership between our bodies, the body of the Earth, and the body of the animals — realizing that we are not masters but we are there to serve through what Gandhi called bread labor, the labor of our body in the service of the Earth, in the service of community.

So we are for sure at an epic moment where everything wrong is being given a new life just at the time when the world was waking up … I think this is happening … because of arrogance … we've destroyed every international law, we've destroyed all democracy, we have locked people into fear … you know, the British empire had that arrogance.”

Breaking the Sacred Relationship With Food

Industrialization started the process of severing humans’ age-old connections to their food and the land on which it’s grown. “Now, with digitalization,” Shiva said, “they would like to end it forever.”¹⁰ Tech giants, in an effort to drive home digital agriculture, are working to reduce life to software¹¹ while advancing digital surveillance systems.

So far, Shiva's organization has managed to prevent Gates from introducing a seed surveillance startup, where farmers would not be allowed to grow seeds unless approved by Gates’ surveillance system. The data mining, Shiva says, is needed because they don't actually know agriculture.

This is why Gates finances the policing of farmers. He needs to mine their data to learn how farming is actually done. In countering the tech giants’ attempts to remove humans’ sacred relationship to food, Shiva states we can fight back by remembering and focusing on a few essential principles:¹²

Food is the currency of life
The highest duty is to grow and give food in abundance
The worst sin is to let someone go hungry in your neighborhood, not grow food and, worse, sell bad food

“We’ve got to bring to the center of our everyday life the rituals that make life sacred,” Shiva said. “Our breath … breath is what connects us to the world … water connects us to the world. Food connects us to the world.”¹³

‘Net Zero’ Nonsense

Gates has been vocal that achieving “net zero” emissions will be the “most amazing thing humanity has ever done.”¹⁴ By 2030, he’s pushing for drastic, fundamental changes, including widespread consumption of fake meat, adoption of next generation nuclear energy and growing a fugus as a new type of nutritional protein.¹⁵

The deadline Gates has given to reach net zero emissions is 2050,¹⁶ likely because he wants to realize his global vision during his lifetime. But according to Shiva, in order to force the world to accept this new food and agricultural system, new conditionalities are being created through net zero “nature-based” solutions. Navdanya’s report, “Earth Democracy: Connecting Rights of Mother Earth to Human Rights and Well-Being of All,” explains:¹⁷

“If ‘feeding the world’ through chemicals and dwarf varieties bred for chemicals was the false narrative created to impose the Green Revolution, the new false narrative is ‘sustainability’ and ‘saving the planet.’ In the new ‘net zero’ world, farmers will not be respected and rewarded as custodians of the land and caregivers, as Annadatas, the providers of our food and health.

They will not be paid a fair and just price for growing healthy food through ecological processes, which protect and regenerate the farming systems as a whole.

They will be paid for linear extraction of fragments of the ecological functions of the system, which can be tied to the new ‘net zero’ false climate solution based on a fake calculus, fake science allowing continued emissions while taking control over the land of indigenous people and small farmers.

‘Net Zero’ is a new strategy to get rid of small farmers in first through ‘digital farming’ and ‘farming without farmers’ and then through the burden of fake carbon accounting.

Carbon offsets and the new accounting trick of ‘net zero’ does not mean zero emissions. It means the rich polluters will continue to pollute and also grab the land and resources of those who have not polluted — indigenous people and small farmers — for carbon offsets.”

Gates already alluded to this double-standard in responding to those who criticized him for the hypocrisy of being a serious polluter himself, with a 66,000 square-foot mansion, a private jet, 242,000 acres of farmland and investments in fossil fuel-dependent industries such as airlines, heavy machinery and cars.¹⁸

This pollution is acceptable, Gates said, because, "I am offsetting my carbon emissions by buying clean aviation fuel, and funding carbon capture and funding low-cost housing projects to use electricity instead of natural gas.”¹⁹

Carbon Colonization and Carbon Slavery

Carbon colonization and carbon slavery are two terms being used to explain the reality behind carbon trade, which is being regarded by Big Tech as the next big opportunity, Shiva says.²⁰ Carbon trade refers to the buying and selling of credits that allow a company to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide,²¹ but by buying up credits from nonpolluters, industry can continue to pollute.

Technocracy is also a resource-based economic system, which is why the World Economic Forum talks about the creation of “sustainable digital finance,”²² a carbon-based economy and carbon credit trading.²³ As explained on its website:²⁴

“Digital finance refers to the integration of big data, artificial intelligence (AI), mobile platforms, blockchain and the Internet of things (IoT) in the provision of financial services. Sustainable finance refers to financial services integrating environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria into the business or investment decisions.

When combined, sustainable digital finance can take advantage of emerging technologies to analyze data, power investment decisions and grow jobs in sectors supporting a transition to a low-carbon economy.”

As Navdanya’s report explains, however, this will ultimately further remove the rights of small farmers, who will be forced into a new form of data slavery:²⁵

“A global ‘seal’ of approval based on fake science, fake economics of maximizing profits through extraction will create new data slavery for farmers. Instead of using their own heads and cocreating with the Earth, they will be forced to buy ‘Big Data.’ Instead of obeying the laws of Mother Earth, they will be forced to obey algorithms created by Big Tech and Big Ag.”

Focusing solely on carbon reductionism also misses the point that “forests, lands, ecosystems are so much more than the carbon stored in them,” and putting conditionalities on small farmers will only make environmental injustices worse. The report adds:²⁶

“Conditionalities under any condition violate democratic principles and human rights. Farmers are guided by Earth care. The culture of Earth care needs to be respected and rewarded because it is centered on rights of the Earth and rights of all her children … Conditionalities put on the nonpolluters by the polluters who want to continue to pollute is unjust and ecologically, morally and ethically bankrupt.”

‘The Universe Is Divine’

According to the ancient Vedas, the universe is divine, and everything therein — even the smallest grass — is an expression of the divine. “When I go to villages,” Shiva told Brand, “women will do sacred ceremonies with indigenous seed. They will never use a hybrid seed for a sacred ceremony … It’s quite amazing. No one told them, but they have that understanding of integrity and what the sacred means. It means to treat without violation.”²⁷

The universe exists for the well-being of all, but her gifts must be enjoyed without greed, Shiva explained. Taking more than your share is theft, and will only backfire. The solution to true sustainability doesn’t lie with new technology, but in relying on the natural “technology” that is the universe:²⁸

“It is by learning from the Earth that we can regenerate the Earth. We have to become students of Mother Earth, not try and dominate her. When we practice agriculture in unison with the Earth’s ecological processes aligned with the ecological laws of nature and the Earth, we evolve an agriculture of care for the land, for the soil. We participate in the process of regenerating the seed and biodiversity, soil and water.”

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