Dear KW, whilst I appreciate your thorough technical and financial analysis, on this one, you are just off. The "cures" for cancer have been long known and practiced in the West - for over 100 years. Largely the methods are criminalized. See Gerson, Rick Simpson, G Edward Griffin, Massimo Mazzucco, William Donald Kelley, Burzynski, et alia. I even found that childhood cancer is perfectly and positively correlated with mass vaccination.
The costs of allopathic poison (think AZT) are not a function of cure, they are a function of desperation and disposable income. See Joel Wallach.
Putting byproducts of aluminum smelting in public water and calling that "sodium chloride" does little more than convince the public that cancer is fate. See the Fluoride Deception. Eric Coppolino demonstrated that dioxin and superfund clean up sites SPREAD cancer. In the 1950s, when America was radiating the skies and her own troops - cancer rates soared. Same in places like Australia. Conversely, antioxidants and clean water, and fresh air, and NO vaccines are negatively correlated with death rates and cancer. Go figure. The price of my cancer drugs is ZERO. I got my mom to abandon the idea of blasting her breasts with X-rays (qua mammograms) and AMAZING, 30 years later, NO lumps in her breasts.
Ironically, with a significant number of people using IVM as a prophylactic against Sars-Cov2 (Uttar Pradesh, Lima, and several Central American nations) it was only a matter of time before oncologists recognized its benefit to cancer patients.
There is no SARS-CoV-2. Obviously people have respiratory issues and or are even harmed by electronic radiation (e.g., 5G), but no one ever demonstrated a thing, commonly called SARS-CoV-2. Hence Covid is a bs diagnosis.
Granted, some people took Ivermectin and felt better, but is it an anti-oxidant? Does it stimulate healing? As we know, for the most part, cancer is a function of vax, or other toxicity, or malnutrition, or trauma.
Why would IVM help to prevent tumors, or oxygenate blood, or cleanse the liver, or reduce psychological trauma, or reverse vax damage?
Why would IVM help to prevent tumors, or oxygenate blood, or cleanse the liver, or reduce psychological trauma, or reverse vax damage?
Did I say it did all that? Where?
I guess you could read the research papers. There's plenty of them. I guess I should have read your bio first too, so my mistake.
As a scientist, I try to avoid making categorical statements, even if the evidence appears to support them. I also make a point of avoiding polemics, but unfortunately that seems to be the norm with the no-virus camp, at least the one's I've engaged. The argument does get the US govt. off the hook though. No virus, no pandemic, no bio-warfare program. Or was that the vaccine?
I think that you misread my comments. I was asking a genuine question. I presumed that in response to my comment about cancer, you alluded that IVM has properties to prevent or reduce / eliminate tumors.
As for so-called Covid pandemic, I live in China. Plenty of areas - like Wuhan and Beijing - had really bad air AND were subject to mass vaccination programs BEFORE Dec 2020. Various cities like Suzhou, Shanghai, Changzhou had cyclical lockdowns, whereas Nanjing never did. I was forced to submit to swabs - over 60 times - so I could travel. I was always "negative."
Off the hook? Hmm, Trump then Biden were pro-lockdown and pushed vax. As were many governors. I have friends who were injured by vax - one had paralysis and the other blood clots. A classmate of my wife went to a hospital - fearing he had "Covid" - they put him in a coma and after six week, executed him.
I did business in China and was shocked by the extremely poor quality of the air. I walked 2 blocks outside of my hotel in Shanghai and was hacking lung butter afterwards. This is beacuse cars and that most of the electricity is generated by coal plants.
I also note that us scientists and engineers on these trips were dissuaded by our PRC/company handlers from venturing too far off the beaten path and were monitored.
One day I was able to give them the slip and ventured out in the morning. 4 blocks off of the main tourist area I witnessed extreme poverty and highly unsanitary conditions.
Dear TC, depending on the time of year, air in Shanghai is relatively clear, other times have dust from the deserts. In Dec 2022, industrial pollution was high. Locals called it "Covid."
However, I must protest your implication that ALL bad air in Shanghai (or even Hangzhou) is due to coal-powered electricity generation. Where are the coal plants?
Now I live in Suzhou, the air is much dirtier than Shanghai - but I do a lot of bee pollen, water, and vitamin C ... my lungs and nose are clean. And I am not sick - ever.
I do see some poverty in China (I have seen 4 homeless in Wenzhou - pop about 7 million; and 7 homeless in Shanghai, population between 20-26 MM), but generally, life in China is MUCH better than what I see in America.
As for the vaccines, 29 year old nephew with myocarditis. Tried to warn friends and family and no one would listen. Lost two long term friendships as well. Not surprised, just disappointed, mainly by my own judgment. Family you can't choose, but I thought my friends were smarter than that.
To be clear, my discipline is epistemology, not medicine. As such, I always regard what people tell me as part of their belief system, not as a statement of fact. It may be an accurate system, it may not be, but a common flaw I detect in most arguments is that they tend to frame things in Hegelian terms, as a dialectic - a choice between only two variables. For example, allopathy vs homeopathy with both sides accusing the other of making unsupported claims. That's not science, just a futile polemic.
I would argue that both sides have merit in specific areas, so it's not a choice between one or the other, but of what works best for the given indications. That judgment can never be absolute though, because we don't know all there is to know about how the body operates, or what actually causes disease. We have specific knowledge in specific areas, a fairly broad spectrum in fact and growing as we speak, but we don't know everything, and as scientists the only reasonable position we can take is one of humility.
In the same sense that 'culture is upstream from politics' material reality is upstream from culture. This is why I reject the notion that ideology (any ideology) is sufficient to correct the ills of society and generate a lasting prosperity.
The reality I'm talking about is human nature, which nature has conditioned to be short-term self-seeking and not above cheating to achieve its goals. I would argue that any economic or political ideology is bound to fail that doesn't take this into account.
I'm not offering a solution (if there even is one) but to find one you have to first identify the problem.
This type of research will never be funded in the West because there's no profit in it - IVM has been off-patent for decades. Best illustration of this was the all out attack on IVM during the pandemic. There was plenty of evidence that IVM significantly reduced hospitalizations, and yet Big Pharma and the captive regulators went out of their way to discredit the treatment and push Remdesivir instead - a not only useless but life threatening product, and the likely cause of many of the deaths attributed to SARS-Cov2.
Speaking of which, don't you find it strange that most of the so-called species jumps of viruses seem to happen in China? Why not India, Indonesia, or the Philippines where conditions are similar? Not just human disease either, but plants and livestock as well.
My working theory is that the outbreaks seen in China can be attributed to a US biowarfare attack. Part of that involved inducting China into a research project in Wuhan that would later be blamed for the outbreak. This could explain the draconian measures China adopted as a matter of civil defence, as well as the fact that they developed their own conventional vaccines, avoiding the mRNA products on offer from western nations they couldn't trust.
It's worth noting that due to the fact that people self-treated with IVM, it was inevitable that its cancer fighting potential would be noticed as cancer patients who used the drug prophylactic showed clear signs of remission. This becomes all the more significant when you consider that among the various adverse events of the mRNA vaccines, such as heart disease and neurological disorders, a sharp rise in cancers among younger people has also appeared. Correlation is not causation, but the rise exactly matches the period after which the vaccines were introduced, and subsequent research confirms the actual mechanism - suppression of the p53 gene.
This illustrates the corruption of western medicine in the most profound way. Owing to the massive damage to public health caused by rushing an unproven product to market, public opinion of mRNA technology, and even conventional vaccines, has been seriously compromised. mRNA technology has a lot of promise in addressing all sorts of medical issues, but the reputational damage is so severe that it will be very hard to move that research forward now.
(sidebar) This substack editor is a POS. It doesn't even scroll properly, and where's the boldface and italics? We need to get on their case about this.
Another point worth mentioning. Wuhan is a major railway hub with trains to all parts of China, and the outbreak occurred just as the Chinese new year was getting started, a time when a lot of people are travelling. It's not proof of course, but if you wanted a good time and location to release an infectious agent, that was definitely it.
It is now a fact that the USA via Fauci and his buddies shell company EcoHealth Alliance funded gain of function research at the Wuhan Lab, as well as USAID.
Obama curtailed gain of function research, but Fauci pulled an end run on Obama's order.
Unfortunately, the Wuhan Lab had mediocre safety protocols and the virus escaped as early as 2019.
Please consider the findings of Virologist Jonathan Latham and molecular biologist Allison Wilson.
They discovered that in April 2012, six miners in the Mojiang mine in southwestern China’s Yunnan province fell ill after spending more than 14 days removing bat feces. Three eventually died.
They were basically bat guano collectors for the Bat Lady at the Wuhan Labs
These data and information were culled from a little known Chinese Masters thesis describes identical symptoms to COVID-19 from inhaling particles associated with the bat guano collection.
The PRC blocked access to this thesis and many other documents after the outbreak of Covid-19.
"The finding of 4 unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV, all of which have identity /similarity to amino acid residues in key structural proteins of HIV-1 is unlikely to be fortuitous in nature."
From the article you posted:
"Certainly, a lab origin has at least as much circumstantial evidence to support it as does any natural zoonotic origin theory (Piplani et al., 2020; Segreto and Deigin, 2020; Zhan et al., 2020)."
If it was manufactured as part of a bio-warfare program I doubt you'd advertise that fact. More likely you'd go out of your way to bury it, and one way to do that is to post a barrage of papers claiming zoonotic origin. The general public has no ability to understand the reasoning involved, they just accept it or not, depending on how much trust they place in the institutions reporting it.
So as a matter for debate it's probably a non-starter and comes down to who you trust, and IMO none of the agencies involved in the pandemic, the WHO, CDC and FDA are trustworthy.
That version of events is likely a cover story. It's true to a point, which helps the narrative, but there's no evidence that the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute. None that I've seen anyway. Also, first rule of journalism is consider the source, and the source in this case has every reason to want to throw us off the trail.
There's another narrative that has some evidence behind it, albeit circumstantial. China hosted the World Military Games in Oct. 2019 just before the outbreak, and there are credible reports of some participants becoming ill with symptoms similar to CV19 and having to return home. So basically an opportunity to introduce the virus.
Then there's the outbreak in Iran which killed some of their top people, the argument being that there wasn't enough time between the Wuhan outbreak and Iran for it to have travelled there via an infected person. Funny how both China and Iran got hit first. Italy also got hit hard, but in that case you had a lot of Chinese garment workers in Italy, so that was likely the cause. Also, as I mentioned, not the first time China had an outbreak which caused major damage to their economy. Bird flu, Swine flu, Sars1, to mention a few.
There's something I've heard about called Castle Keep Theory" which uses the defensive structure of castles as an analogy to multiple layered narratives. Recall, first it was bats and pangolins, then it was an accidental lab leak, then it was a collaboration between the US and China. I think it's just as likely China was set up as they were the guilty party. Not like the US hasn't done that sort of thing before. Operation Gladio springs to mind.
Kevin Walmsley, Sir, I enjoyed watching your excellent video reports from China. Just wanted to say THANK YOU for the outstanding TRUTHFUL reporting. You are doing a tremendous job (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️) to INFORM, EDUCATE, AND ENLIGHTEN the citizenry of the world.
It will be interesting to see if China can compete with Thailand's international medical services. My experiences were excellent. My father, an academic working in public health visited Thailand often as part of an exchange program when Thailand was starting. He said that the Thai hospitals looked to the hotel/tourism sector for their best practices for customer service, and you can tell - met by a staff member at the entrance who guides you, very short waiting times, wifi and other entertainment available, and menus and room service equal to a five staff hotel from long term care.
You cannot „steal IP“. People learn from each other since the beginning of history. Everybody is welcome to learn at a university as much as they can. If education has suffered in the West in the last fifty years, this is not Asia‘s fault.
You edited and changed your initial reply to my post. That is not in the spirit of constructive discourse. That is on you. Nonetheless, I am not anti-Asia at all, and never implied that.
However, I am anti fraud, deception, and avarice. Sadly, there is plenty to go around in this world.
Turnier I have just circled back and gave your comment further thought.
May I be so bold as to propose this:
IP theft: I do not agree that it is everyones free information for the taking and to be exploited. That is unethical and terribly destructive to the inventors or the companies.
This is because they invest money and resources to develop a material or process that is unique and non-obvious and wish to use that patent or trade secret to their lawful favor. They have that right under the laws and rules of the WTO and USA and World Patent Offices.
If another company likes or wants a patented process enough, they can license it for use in a lawful and proper manner. That is normal ethical business.
I feel sorry for anyone who gets swept up in this debacle. Many years ago I dated a Chinese chemist who was studying at UBC. China sent her here to study waste management, a pressing problem at the time with a population that large, and then along came Tiananmen and she defected. So China lost their investment in her, while she lost a potential career in China. I doubt very much that she stole any trade secrets though, and I suspect that applies to a lot of Chinese students, probably a majority.
This again, as I keep harping on, is human nature - in this case to paint everyone with the same brush simply because of who they are or where they're from. Been a victim of it myself actually. Not that I'm accusing you, but it's easy enough to fall into that trap.
Thank you for your thoughtful response, and your points have good merit. Your friend was indeed an upstanding individual, and I know that there are many. When I was at Cornell, one of my closest collaborators and a friend was a Chinese chemist, and based on his hard work we published an article in the journal Science. However, there were many who hoodwinked the system, only to be discovered later, and who did much damage as the confidential technology had national security implications.
In my 30 + years as an industrial chemist, the IP and trade secret theft was more the rule than the exception - but only because of those caught or suspected of espionage or we knew of. These bad actors were not caucasian little old ladies, but rather Chinese nationals.
With regards to the idea of IP theft, some say it is everyones free information for the taking and to be exploited. That is unethical and terribly destructive to the inventors or the companies. This is because they invest money and resources to develop a material or process that is unique and non-obvious and wish to use that patent or trade secret to their lawful favor. They have that right under the laws and rules of the WTO and USA and World Patent Offices.
Who is to blame? It is a combination of Western Capitalists and the PRC in my humble opinion. A healthy lawful collaboration and lawful ethical business deals are preferred for everyones benefit.
China only steals the intellectual property while the US and USSR post WWII stole the actual scientists <g>.
My story is anecdotal of course, and not being on the inside I have no way of gauging the extent of Chinese espionage. I'd simply point out that the CIA does exactly the same thing. If they're less successful it's not for lack of trying.
I lived in Vancouver from 1981 to 2018, so I saw the entire real estate bubble from the beginning. I got tired of hearing people carp about Chinese buying up all the homes instead of placing the blame where it belonged, on the politicians and their pals who profited from it. I would have done the same thing if I were Chinese, in fact I'm doing that with Russia where RE is still comparatively cheap, even on the Black Sea coast. Looking at Georgia as well, now that they're mending fences with Russia. The basic difference is we intend to live there, not simply hold the property as speculation.
Established in 1983 (!) I tried to buy shares when they first went public about 25 years ago. I was a trader at the time, and I consider Apollo to be the biggest fish that got away, since share purchase was only open to Indian citizens and no mutual fund I could find had any serious exposure. They're up to some 20 odd hospitals at last count and still a major player in that market. Frankly, Apollo was what traders call a no-brainer, as you only had to look at the state of health care in the USA to understand the potential.
I think China should keep the drugs and other medical developments to itself and restrict such exports to the USA.
Trump has managed to convince a good portion of the Americans that China has been ripping them off, producing cheap toxic crap, can't innovate and, thus, resorts to IP theft or copy USA products (to produce a cheaper and crappier goods for sale to the unwitting Americans), etc. A lot of Americans celebrate the direct imposition of Trump's egregious tariffs on China for the above reasons.
It is time for the USA and China to mutually decouple from one another.
The idea that China makes inferior products is largely a myth. My wife and I buy clothes whenever we're in Japan (her home) and the quality is always first rate. For some time now Japan has been sourcing clothing from China. The difference is that Japanese will pay for quality, whereas westerners want cheap prices. The old adage "you only get what you pay for" applies here. When I was a kid, 'made in Japan' was synonymous with cheap and shoddy. How times have changed!
Turner, thanks for the interesting reply....ahem! I noticed that you edited out some inflammatory portions, thank you.
I witnessed the theft of IP and particular trade secrets in multiple companies I worked at and in academia.
The FBI showed up for a couple of the issues, as the Chinese chemists disappeared and went back to China, documents and flash drives in hand.
Sadly, in grad school, many careless professors hired Chinese grad students who loaded up their flash drives, even on DARPA projects, got their PhDs and went back to China or infiltrated USA companies, then went back.
It is interesting: suddenly factories in China pop up running chemical processes and making products, much of the technology stolen from USA companies such as Dow and many others.
Taking what you said as fact (for the sake of argument) then what we must ask ourselves is why did those students keep being welcomed. To me that's the most important question, to that I could write a lot but in the end it all boils down to this: the US is capitalist society, what matters is for capital to keep reproducing itself and this is what the whole country is optimized for.
Given that (as in I am exposing my axioms), then it follows that if it kept happening, it happened because it made profit. If you look at the whole characterization on how pharmaceutical companies make money in the original post, then not only did US companies profit from it, they're profiting from it 'till today. The IP theft you say happened then, was nothing more than an enabler, angel intelectual investment for US companies to eventually offshore not only the manufacturing or material supply chain but also the whole process except for FDA approval and dealing with selling and marketing processes and bureaucracies - as exposed in the original post.
You might argue that it should have been taken more seriously, I could argue that China just outplayed the US, studied their adversary, found out their weak spots and exploited their addiction to keep doing what every capitalist country in some degree does: reproduce capital in the name of its bourgeois class. You might want to have adverse reactions to that, like most politicians and economists and elites in most capitalist societies would today, which is exactly why they are failing against China, a country that actually understood what must be done in order to win as a socialist country in the 20th and 21st century. Of course, one can understand how things happened and what things are like today but to change it? To do that with discipline and self-reflexivity one needs in order to ensure that their actions are actually aligned with their goals? Now that's another level. In my analysis the US didn't even have the ability to see what was happening, let alone the discipline and reflexivity to actually do something about it. Unfortunately for them (again in my informed opinion) a lot of key people drank their own propaganda, and they're doing that to this day.
Just to be transparent, I welcome all of these events, but I live in the global south and have no interest in western success.
RM, thank you for the thoughtful reply, and you may be pleasantly surprised that I agree.
The capitalist West made a series of egregious mistakes that started with the creation of the Bretton Woods System agreement after WW2 and the WTO agreements that ultimately enabled the birth of the PRC predator economic and military adversary.
This was of course greatly fueled by USA and other nations and corporate greed to gain access to the PRC markets and cheap labor, in exchange for technology transfer and other goodies to the PRC.
Do I blame the PRC for taking every advantage? No.
The tragedy here is the human suffering, the destruction of the environment, and the cruel avarice of the PRC. I have traveled to China on business and have witnessed this firsthand.
Also, on the personal side of things, I can attest that there were many companies and individuals who involuntarily lost much to PRC industrial espionage, and who did not necessarily want to engage with predatory China. I had fellow chemists who devoted 35 years to a company and who had their crown jewel inventions stolen, not voluntarily transferred.
Do I blame the PRC for taking every advantage? Not at all. The tragedy here is the human suffering, the destruction of the environment, and the cruel avarice of the PRC.
I mostly agree with a lot of what you said but I have some to say on 2 points you made:
1st - "I can attest that there were many companies and individuals who involuntarily lost much to PRC industrial espionage, and who did not necessarily want to engage with predatory China. I had fellow chemists who devoted 35 years to a company and who had their crown jewel inventions stolen, not voluntarily transferred." here I want to make more clear that my point wasn't about individuals or that it isn't a personal drama to have such things happen to someone. I understand you could have just wanted to point out that you saw things happen to people that didn't deserve it, to me capitalism kind of maximizes that as it's incredibly unjust and unequal, if it wasn't Chinese espionage it could have been so many other things. I tend to be less personal and emotional and humane sometimes when I approach comment sections and the internet, I'm not like that in person, but do know that I empathize with the suffering you mentioned, I just probably have a very different way or interpreting the cause and the cure of such injustices - as a cost that wasn't inflicted by China directly, as if (let's say this is all in the US) any US company or the country as whole was actually worried about anything other than just maximizing corporate bottom lines, quarterly reports, stock markets and thus making billionaires more billionairy (here you can read do the job the government was created to do and is tasked with doing since the beginning: serve the bourgeois class). Got a bit messy in the writing, but if the US society/government/corporations didn't have bourgeois class interests as their maximum priority, they would have done something to stop such injustice and suffering. My point is that those things, even it they were unjust and bad, they were so in individual terms, in localized realities, not for the society as a whole, I can imagine some big shot people just saying "What do you want me to do? Not do business with them?" as to justify that it's just increases profits and bottom lines to much to actually go after them in any legally binding way that could actually punish them enough to stop doing it, which would then cut relations with the Chinese and thus making things way less lucrative in the bigger corporate and bourgeois point of view. They don't care about the suffering or anyone, they just care about capitalist society goal: reproduce capital infinitely, for capitalist society is a society that maximizes that, it was created by them to do that for them so they can be leeches just living off of the surplus value working people create. And no I don't think you need to be a socialist to see that as the truth, Keynes would probably say something very close to that. You only turn into a socialist if you then think that the answer is revolution and a dictatorship lead by the working class that oppresses bourgeoisie into having to actually work for a living and not oppress people so they can have/keep their decadent way of life.
My second divergent interpretation is about this: "Do I blame the PRC for taking every advantage? Not at all. The tragedy here is the human suffering, the destruction of the environment, and the cruel avarice of the PRC." I don't think that whatever cost it had outbalances bringing 800 million people out of poverty, enabling the global south to face capitalist imperialism and have a taste of actual sovereignty, plus a ton of other things. This is due to 2 main things that I feel must be acknowledged about my perspective: first I am sociologist that concerns himself with anticolonial thought and research. Thus my main focus and point of view is anti imperial and anti colonial. I concern myself with the sovereignty of oppressed people's to have their own culture, their own knowledge systems, their own politics and economic/social structures. European imperialism and capitalism have for 500 years oppressed the whole world and taken advantage, I could make this comment a whole lot bigger by proving my point but just know I have very thoroughly studied this with academic rigor and dedication, with lost and lost of self deconstruction and reflexivity, doing my best to understand how I as someone that was born a white male in europe would have for my lived experience and perspective have been biased basically since birth into a certain perspective. We are all biased, our lived experiences inform said biases, our place in society cements them foundationally inside ourselves.
To the best of my knowledge, the kind of horrors and suffering that europeans and their dependents have imposed upon the world are just incalculable. I could go into slavery as I've studied it and its foundations, and I just don't think most people understand how horrible and psychopathic it was, the multiple genocides, both physical and cultural. Like, the mustache guy only did in europe a small fraction of what europeans and also the US was already doing, in Africa and the US's southern border. I don't mean that the mustache guy wasn't horrible and did unspeakable things, I just mean to open people's eyes to that it was happening before he did it, it just wasn't with white people. Anyway, I do say all of this to try and contextualize that I see the costs, human, environmental, etc. as the cost of stopping 500 years of European people's oppression and psychopathic world hegemony. Were there mistakes? Yes, but you can try as much as you want to try and not hurt people accidentally, you'll always fail, it's just about trying to fail as less often and less badly as you can. This leads me to the second part of this second divergent thing: I don't take whatever western narrative about Mao's "mistakes" with lots of people suffering part as being anything close to the truth of things. Mistakes happened, but I have studied how western organizations counted the numbers and it's just methodologically malicious, it's propaganda as someone that is concerned with getting to the truth I reject most western popular narratives about Mao and in fact most of what they say about China since the revolution, you can add the reality about USSR, Cuba, N.Korea into that as well.
Lastly, I changed my whole life by moving to South America as I didn't want to contribute a penny to any global north society's tax income. Since coming to live here my views have only radicalized more: you talk about whatever environmental and human cost Chinese government actions had, but I can tell you that where I live whole cities were covered in toxic mining water because western companies just care about digging holes and getting the minerals here, destroying people's sources of some of the purest cleanest water on earth? F that. What about people's lands and livelihoods and suffering and their actual lives? I mean they were saving a couple million dollars in their multi billion dollar operation so can you really blame them for doing things that lead to thousands of deaths? This isn't some artisanal mining, no, this is what humane and environmentally friendly mining looks like on the ground floor. I'm not kidding, they are to this day spreading propaganda in Europe and elsewhere (even here paying radio adverts, internet, tv, etc) talking about how they are restoring biomes and people's traditional ways of living and bringing development and whatever when they are literally killing people, when they literally pay to have some guys with guns come into an affected community gathering and almost having a bloodbath which I barely avoided. But hey, they're just black quilombola people that are the living decedents and proof that enslaved people fought every second they lived under colonial oppression right, they don't matter, what matters is that some white people in the global north get their metals cheaply to be silent while being exploited every day by the bourgeois that actually benefits the most from this whole perverse and psychopathic world order. This isn't hundreds, this is millions of people I'm talking about here. It's whole countries, hundreds of millions of people, billions and billions that thanks to chinese socialism might have a chance at actually being able to dictate their fates. It's not just china, it's the whole BRICS+ fighting against a world order that oppressed billions to get millions to stay quiet (read sustaining a middle class that defuses class struggle) while lining the pockets of a few decadent psychopaths.
Thus, I think that you can understand why I understand the, as an example, environmental cost China took, bringing in dollars, to then fund universities, have an actual nationalistic plan of development, so they could for example own 90% of rare earths's refining, with its nationalized banking system plus other nationalized industries and the way power relations work there, they took advantage of capitalist greed to upstart and then leapfrog global north's manufacturing, science and innovation capabilities. Just like the last Inside China Business article/video said, they were playing Go, using their cultural and intelectual heritage to corner the western empire into submission, not as act of war or aggression, this isn't chess, it's just about liberties, and the global north must be contained in order for it to not keeping its oppressive, psychopathic, unspeakable barbaric tendencies from poisoning all of humanity.
One of the best kept trade secrets in western pharma is that the product doesn't work, and is in fact dangerous. Look what it took to pry the mRNA data out of Pfizer's sweaty hands, and of course no one will ever be held accountable for that. 75 years they wanted before releasing the data! That tells you everything you need to know.
"That tells you everything you need to know." No it doesn't, it doesn't tell basically anything in fact. That kind of thinking isn't scientific or exact or anything, and look I'm a sociologist, so I'm not an all our exact sciences guy, but because I'm a sociologist I'm a really big methodology epistemology and self reflexivity guy. That comment doesn't really tell me anything at all, but let me try and point out how I read it so maybe you can better get your idea across:
I have no context to whatever mRNA data you're mentioning other than guessing that they wanted to keep whatever data they had on such technology because it was valuable in some way, like giving them an edge over the competition. From what I know mRNA is an incredibly promising technology that might be incredible useful for medicine.
75 years is I guess some kind of protection from patents or something? Also them wanting not to release it really only tells me that for some reason they didn't want to release it but as I said maybe it's because they wanted to keep the data to keep competitive advantage which is the most simple and thus probably answer, but I did say probable.
Next: "best kept trade secrets in western pharma is that the product doesn't work, and is in fact dangerous" that's just delirious, like, the dose really does make the poison here, but you can't just say that because studies are financed by the industry that it's all bad, plus it's not like all studies are financed by big pharma. If we have any intention of making things better or informing people better or anything like that we need to be data based, we need to have unwavering compromise with material reality, which includes being incredibly methodologically thorough.
A study can be financed by whomever you want, if you want to say it's bad you need more than just looking at who paid for it, looking at basic methodology, at how they chose people or designed the study, etc. that matters, if you have a double blind placebo controlled trial with data that proves that it was actually well done with as much confounding factors being taken into account and then replicated like 3 or more times then you can pretty much trust that whatever that study says is at the very least the best information and data that we have on said subject. Then we turn to how the data was interpreted and whatever else, but it's science, so you must prove whatever you're talking about. And I know that doesn't happen all the time, I do know that, and we shouldn't just blindly believe everything, but a lot of times the fault isn't even in the study itself but science communication around it which can be misleading and just sensationalized for clicks. To me when it comes to most people trying to understand certain subjects by trying to study things themselves the biggest problem is science communication which is horribly done most of the time. Plus you also have the classical Nobel syndrome when you have a respected physicist or whatever start to analyze and talk about things outside their expertise and just spew a bunch of nonsense that people believe because said person has a PhD in physics so they must be smart.
Western medicine works (most of the time), its saved god knows how many millions of people, and that kind of discussion is nonsensical, it was already like that for me because I actually studied science from philosophy of science, epistemology, methodologies of science and self reflexivity to the ground as any sociologist should, because our field need to be even more careful and thorough as to actually do work that is useful and reflects reality. But then I moved to the global south, and it just got way way more nonsensical. It wasn't just moving here, but actually absorbing the scientific and cultural approaches to these things that changed this for me even more. But whatever this is a long enough essay as it is in a comment section, I just got tired or writing.
"If we have any intention of making things better or informing people better or anything like that we need to be data based, we need to have unwavering compromise with material reality, which includes being incredibly methodologically thorough."
You don't seem to have brought much data to this discourse, and may I point out that calling me delirous when I'm simply being sarcastic (and have every reason to be) is probably not a good start.
I have every intention of making things as good as I can, which includes calling out fraud when I see it. If you want to defend Pfizer et al at least bring some evidence to the table, not a lecture on the scientific method which has been my discipline for over 40 years.
Sorry for not spending hours of my valuable and little time I have with decent intelectual capacity due to burn out to bring data that is publicly available and reproduced time after time throughout scientific literature.
Also if the scientific method is your discipline for over40 years I would have expected much better opening argument but oh well. In your other comment you bring no science at all, just CNBC, ABC News, Justice department and the bjm which seems to be more credible and a far better reference than the other links. So I mean... You don't bring extraordinary data or arguments or anything to back up extraordinary claims to which there's little evidence to skew the argument in your favor. If you'd like to actually have proper and sound arguments with proper data and stuff like that then I'm happy to change my stance on any and all subjects. I did so before on many things. But you can prove a lot of things and I can still disagree on the conclusion for I'll probably still use a public healthcare policy point of view. I think it'd be very very difficult if not impossible for you to have enough evidence that vaccination was worse than the alternatives when we do a wholesome analysis but I do guarantee that I do not have 100% certainties about anything in my life. I can have 90%, 99%, 99,999% but never 100.
Hey, so that all also doesn't prove anything of what you said or pointed out in the original comment. What you just referenced is the following:
1. They wanted excessive patent or data protection. To me in a capitalist society to me that feels like more of the same. Companies try and that's why there's laws and patent regulations etc.
2. Yup, but that doesn't prove that anything went or was going to go wrong. It just says that the vaccines were were very quickly made and since they were going to be massively distributed and applied they didn't want repercussions from it. If you only think about yourself it might not seem very reasonable but there's a whole scientific field of study that's concerned with public health policies. I'm a sociologist and as such I've come to contact with such field, when you have a pandemic that can cost society a huge amount of pain, suffering and loss, then you take more risks. The FDA took a bit more risk (but not by that much) by liberating those vaccines, which is usually very acceptable. This is about risk and reward in a society grand scale of things, there were tradeoffs, on one side you have a possibly riskier vaccine, on the other you get millions of deaths from covid and economic devastation which will lead to immense suffering and more deaths, it's not difficult to understand their decision. Plus it's not like there wasn't anything they could do to track secondary effects from the vaccine, and they did, and we know about those secondary effects because they did their job. Those secondary effects could be the cause great personal pain and loss for families, but those same families could have been entirely under the ground or suffering overall a lot more if those vaccines weren't distributed. I'm not denying that there was a cost and suffering possibly cause by vaccines, I'm just saying that it's not like those people would be fine it vaccines weren't liberated by the FDA, they probably could all be death by now, which would've been a egregious error when it comes to public health policy science. You might not like it, but it's basic trolly problem dilema stuff. I rather we as a species do things to try and make everyone on average way better than just leave it to nature. Sure when you leave it to nature no one is at fault, kind of, but I think that we should take responsibility for not only the actions we take, but the ones we can take, for the tasks we can bring upon ourselves to do to make things better.
3 - Read the article it says "autumn, speed may have come at the cost of data integrity and patient safety" first it read *MAY* have come at a cost, it might have or not, it's a probability. Second I think you need to read the above paragraph on number 2. Plus if there were actual wide spread issues that would be worse than the alternative (which would be to let covid loose and not do anything) it could never be silenced or whatever. Plus people act like you could just get covid die or be cured and those are the 2 outcomes. But there's long covid and a some other problems that catching it but not dying have cause to millions and millions of people worldwide, which would be far worse without vaccines. I personally know a family that had stroke problems which were probably to do with the vaccines, they are all fine, it was a couple of really bad months, but no one has any complications from dealing with it and it they didn't vaccinate they'd all be dead, because even with vaccines a lot of people in the family almost died. I think they rather have taken the vaccine and then have a couple bad months dealing with medicine to thin out the blood and stuff to deal with the stroke thing than just having died on mass. (They have told me that as well).
4 - Sure, history about other kinds of drugs, they don't have a history on vaccines. Plus that's from 2009, the fine might have made them more careful if it was effective, which is the point of making them pay. Plus read the number 2 on this reply again. Plus look at Bayer's history it's also messed up. Plus look at who actually developed the technology for the vaccines and who paid for it! It was working people's tax money that went into public universities. They socialize the cost and privatize the profit. Plus all drug companies in the US are scammy, come on you have a whole opioid epidemic because of them. All of that doesn't mean that the vaccine was good or bad, it proves only that Pfizer has a scammy past, it's conspiracy to just connect dots that have no actual proven connection, you might have a suspicion but it doesn't prove anything. In fact when you do models that calculate how it would have been without vaccines, and when you look at the real world data of how vaccination changed outcomes it's very very clear that vaccination even with all the proven side effects, was clearly and without a shadow of a doubt the right health policy decision for any government or public institution to make. This is the truth that we can ascertain to the best of our scientific knowledge base and data collection and interpretation capabilities as a species. The end.
I take that to mean you do not wish to pursue this further. Fine by me. As a sociologist you're probably familiar with Koryzbski's concept of 'belief systems.' You have yours, I have mine. As far as possible I base mine on evidence provided by qualified researchers and clinicians. You appear to believe the official narrative. Bit of an impasse I would say. I do have couple of more points to add though:
1. Early in the pandemic there was a search for repurposed drugs. This is standard procedure when faced with a novel pathogen. Several effective pharmaceuticals were found and small scale early trials were conducted. The most promising were Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin that had very good observational data (Uttar Pradesh and Lima) on preventing hospitalizations, which is where the majority of deaths occurred.
However, Instead of allowing doctors to prescribe them, a full court press went into effect to discredit both the drugs and the doctor's prescribing them. They went as far as suspending medical licences, or threatening to do so. I should point out that both drugs have very long safety records and are safer even than aspirin.
So why were these drugs suppressed in most nations, and why were doctors prescribing them threatened? I can't think of an example where this has ever been done before. Maybe on an individual basis - admittedly there are some quacks in the medical profession, but on that scale, and in the face of supporting evidence of effectiveness, and most importantly, very low risk? Bear in mind, the vaccines were still a year away. So why?
2. China was the only nation to develop a conventional vaccine (Russia did much later). They didn't seem to have any trouble producing it quickly and in quantity, which was the only argument I saw for preferring an mRNA approach, which is NOT a vaccine by the standard definition - it's a gene therapy. Why was it so important that the only available treatment be a product that actually hijacked your cellular mechanism to produce a single epitope (the S2 protein) and where the safety data made no reference to when that process would stop? Bear in mind, no viral vectored gene therapy using an mRNA approach had shown any signs of success up to that point, and yet It was forced on the public under threat of loss of employment, restrictions on travel, and even detention, as occurred in Australia.
Just to be clear, I'm not alone in my views. This document was published in Oct 2020, after the basic facts of transmission and mortality were known.
The truth is, there's a large community of highly qualified clinicians and researchers who disagree with the official narrative. That doesn't mean they're right, but when large numbers of qualified professionals express objections I think it's a good idea to pay attention. I did and that's where my opinions were formed - not from some conspiracy website but from experts in the field.
As for the argument that the vaccines prevented more harm than they incurred, the jury is still out on that. Large scale application of the alternative measures I've described were denounced and denied, which skews the data, and the incident of cancers and myocarditis that correlate with the introduction of mRNA products continue as we speak.
Summary: The data supports the contention that the SARS-Cov2 virus presented a limited threat to the vast majority of people, the most likely to be affected being the elderly and people with comorbidities and/or compromised immune systems. The correct response, as indicated by qualified people who signed the GBD, was ignored and instead a campaign to suppress people's right to chose, and doctor's right to practice medicine as they saw fit was enacted across most western nations. People who objected lost their jobs, their businesses, their professional standing, personal and family relationships were destroyed, and most importantly, trust in the medical profession was seriously compromised.
The argument that these measures were justified holds no water, because there are counter examples from nations that didn't follow these practices (in some cases they simply couldn't) that did prescribe alternative therapies and that had outcomes no different or even better that nations where draconian measures were enforced.
That pretty much sums up my argument. If you want to refute go ahead, but I don't expect you to change my view anymore than I'll change yours, and as a rule I try to avoid polemics, so I'm done here.
Dear KW, whilst I appreciate your thorough technical and financial analysis, on this one, you are just off. The "cures" for cancer have been long known and practiced in the West - for over 100 years. Largely the methods are criminalized. See Gerson, Rick Simpson, G Edward Griffin, Massimo Mazzucco, William Donald Kelley, Burzynski, et alia. I even found that childhood cancer is perfectly and positively correlated with mass vaccination.
The costs of allopathic poison (think AZT) are not a function of cure, they are a function of desperation and disposable income. See Joel Wallach.
Putting byproducts of aluminum smelting in public water and calling that "sodium chloride" does little more than convince the public that cancer is fate. See the Fluoride Deception. Eric Coppolino demonstrated that dioxin and superfund clean up sites SPREAD cancer. In the 1950s, when America was radiating the skies and her own troops - cancer rates soared. Same in places like Australia. Conversely, antioxidants and clean water, and fresh air, and NO vaccines are negatively correlated with death rates and cancer. Go figure. The price of my cancer drugs is ZERO. I got my mom to abandon the idea of blasting her breasts with X-rays (qua mammograms) and AMAZING, 30 years later, NO lumps in her breasts.
I could continue, but ...
Best wishes, from Shanghai
Look into Ivermectin if you haven't already.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7505114/
https://substack.com/@makismd
https://www.onedaymd.com/2024/07/ivermectin-articles-and-protocols-for.html
Ironically, with a significant number of people using IVM as a prophylactic against Sars-Cov2 (Uttar Pradesh, Lima, and several Central American nations) it was only a matter of time before oncologists recognized its benefit to cancer patients.
Dear ebear,
There is no SARS-CoV-2. Obviously people have respiratory issues and or are even harmed by electronic radiation (e.g., 5G), but no one ever demonstrated a thing, commonly called SARS-CoV-2. Hence Covid is a bs diagnosis.
Granted, some people took Ivermectin and felt better, but is it an anti-oxidant? Does it stimulate healing? As we know, for the most part, cancer is a function of vax, or other toxicity, or malnutrition, or trauma.
Why would IVM help to prevent tumors, or oxygenate blood, or cleanse the liver, or reduce psychological trauma, or reverse vax damage?
Thanks
Why would IVM help to prevent tumors, or oxygenate blood, or cleanse the liver, or reduce psychological trauma, or reverse vax damage?
Did I say it did all that? Where?
I guess you could read the research papers. There's plenty of them. I guess I should have read your bio first too, so my mistake.
As a scientist, I try to avoid making categorical statements, even if the evidence appears to support them. I also make a point of avoiding polemics, but unfortunately that seems to be the norm with the no-virus camp, at least the one's I've engaged. The argument does get the US govt. off the hook though. No virus, no pandemic, no bio-warfare program. Or was that the vaccine?
Dear ebear,
I think that you misread my comments. I was asking a genuine question. I presumed that in response to my comment about cancer, you alluded that IVM has properties to prevent or reduce / eliminate tumors.
As for so-called Covid pandemic, I live in China. Plenty of areas - like Wuhan and Beijing - had really bad air AND were subject to mass vaccination programs BEFORE Dec 2020. Various cities like Suzhou, Shanghai, Changzhou had cyclical lockdowns, whereas Nanjing never did. I was forced to submit to swabs - over 60 times - so I could travel. I was always "negative."
Off the hook? Hmm, Trump then Biden were pro-lockdown and pushed vax. As were many governors. I have friends who were injured by vax - one had paralysis and the other blood clots. A classmate of my wife went to a hospital - fearing he had "Covid" - they put him in a coma and after six week, executed him.
Any way, I hope you remain unvaxxed. Best
I did business in China and was shocked by the extremely poor quality of the air. I walked 2 blocks outside of my hotel in Shanghai and was hacking lung butter afterwards. This is beacuse cars and that most of the electricity is generated by coal plants.
I also note that us scientists and engineers on these trips were dissuaded by our PRC/company handlers from venturing too far off the beaten path and were monitored.
One day I was able to give them the slip and ventured out in the morning. 4 blocks off of the main tourist area I witnessed extreme poverty and highly unsanitary conditions.
My heart goes out to the Chinese people.
Dear TC, depending on the time of year, air in Shanghai is relatively clear, other times have dust from the deserts. In Dec 2022, industrial pollution was high. Locals called it "Covid."
However, I must protest your implication that ALL bad air in Shanghai (or even Hangzhou) is due to coal-powered electricity generation. Where are the coal plants?
Now I live in Suzhou, the air is much dirtier than Shanghai - but I do a lot of bee pollen, water, and vitamin C ... my lungs and nose are clean. And I am not sick - ever.
I do see some poverty in China (I have seen 4 homeless in Wenzhou - pop about 7 million; and 7 homeless in Shanghai, population between 20-26 MM), but generally, life in China is MUCH better than what I see in America.
Best
If you live in China you should be aware of this research:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jcmm.15195
As for the vaccines, 29 year old nephew with myocarditis. Tried to warn friends and family and no one would listen. Lost two long term friendships as well. Not surprised, just disappointed, mainly by my own judgment. Family you can't choose, but I thought my friends were smarter than that.
To be clear, my discipline is epistemology, not medicine. As such, I always regard what people tell me as part of their belief system, not as a statement of fact. It may be an accurate system, it may not be, but a common flaw I detect in most arguments is that they tend to frame things in Hegelian terms, as a dialectic - a choice between only two variables. For example, allopathy vs homeopathy with both sides accusing the other of making unsupported claims. That's not science, just a futile polemic.
I would argue that both sides have merit in specific areas, so it's not a choice between one or the other, but of what works best for the given indications. That judgment can never be absolute though, because we don't know all there is to know about how the body operates, or what actually causes disease. We have specific knowledge in specific areas, a fairly broad spectrum in fact and growing as we speak, but we don't know everything, and as scientists the only reasonable position we can take is one of humility.
In the same sense that 'culture is upstream from politics' material reality is upstream from culture. This is why I reject the notion that ideology (any ideology) is sufficient to correct the ills of society and generate a lasting prosperity.
The reality I'm talking about is human nature, which nature has conditioned to be short-term self-seeking and not above cheating to achieve its goals. I would argue that any economic or political ideology is bound to fail that doesn't take this into account.
I'm not offering a solution (if there even is one) but to find one you have to first identify the problem.
I'm surprised that you didn't mention this:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7505114/
This type of research will never be funded in the West because there's no profit in it - IVM has been off-patent for decades. Best illustration of this was the all out attack on IVM during the pandemic. There was plenty of evidence that IVM significantly reduced hospitalizations, and yet Big Pharma and the captive regulators went out of their way to discredit the treatment and push Remdesivir instead - a not only useless but life threatening product, and the likely cause of many of the deaths attributed to SARS-Cov2.
Speaking of which, don't you find it strange that most of the so-called species jumps of viruses seem to happen in China? Why not India, Indonesia, or the Philippines where conditions are similar? Not just human disease either, but plants and livestock as well.
My working theory is that the outbreaks seen in China can be attributed to a US biowarfare attack. Part of that involved inducting China into a research project in Wuhan that would later be blamed for the outbreak. This could explain the draconian measures China adopted as a matter of civil defence, as well as the fact that they developed their own conventional vaccines, avoiding the mRNA products on offer from western nations they couldn't trust.
It's worth noting that due to the fact that people self-treated with IVM, it was inevitable that its cancer fighting potential would be noticed as cancer patients who used the drug prophylactic showed clear signs of remission. This becomes all the more significant when you consider that among the various adverse events of the mRNA vaccines, such as heart disease and neurological disorders, a sharp rise in cancers among younger people has also appeared. Correlation is not causation, but the rise exactly matches the period after which the vaccines were introduced, and subsequent research confirms the actual mechanism - suppression of the p53 gene.
This illustrates the corruption of western medicine in the most profound way. Owing to the massive damage to public health caused by rushing an unproven product to market, public opinion of mRNA technology, and even conventional vaccines, has been seriously compromised. mRNA technology has a lot of promise in addressing all sorts of medical issues, but the reputational damage is so severe that it will be very hard to move that research forward now.
(sidebar) This substack editor is a POS. It doesn't even scroll properly, and where's the boldface and italics? We need to get on their case about this.
compromised.
Another point worth mentioning. Wuhan is a major railway hub with trains to all parts of China, and the outbreak occurred just as the Chinese new year was getting started, a time when a lot of people are travelling. It's not proof of course, but if you wanted a good time and location to release an infectious agent, that was definitely it.
USA and China both involved with COVID-19:
It is now a fact that the USA via Fauci and his buddies shell company EcoHealth Alliance funded gain of function research at the Wuhan Lab, as well as USAID.
Obama curtailed gain of function research, but Fauci pulled an end run on Obama's order.
Unfortunately, the Wuhan Lab had mediocre safety protocols and the virus escaped as early as 2019.
The whole Fiasco was covered up by USA and China.
An alternate narrative well worth reading:
https://www.unz.com/runz/five-years-and-thirty-million-deaths/
Orgins of COVID-19
Please consider the findings of Virologist Jonathan Latham and molecular biologist Allison Wilson.
They discovered that in April 2012, six miners in the Mojiang mine in southwestern China’s Yunnan province fell ill after spending more than 14 days removing bat feces. Three eventually died.
They were basically bat guano collectors for the Bat Lady at the Wuhan Labs
These data and information were culled from a little known Chinese Masters thesis describes identical symptoms to COVID-19 from inhaling particles associated with the bat guano collection.
The PRC blocked access to this thesis and many other documents after the outbreak of Covid-19.
https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/a-proposed-origin-for-sars-cov-2-and-the-covid-19-pandemic/
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v1
"The finding of 4 unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV, all of which have identity /similarity to amino acid residues in key structural proteins of HIV-1 is unlikely to be fortuitous in nature."
From the article you posted:
"Certainly, a lab origin has at least as much circumstantial evidence to support it as does any natural zoonotic origin theory (Piplani et al., 2020; Segreto and Deigin, 2020; Zhan et al., 2020)."
If it was manufactured as part of a bio-warfare program I doubt you'd advertise that fact. More likely you'd go out of your way to bury it, and one way to do that is to post a barrage of papers claiming zoonotic origin. The general public has no ability to understand the reasoning involved, they just accept it or not, depending on how much trust they place in the institutions reporting it.
So as a matter for debate it's probably a non-starter and comes down to who you trust, and IMO none of the agencies involved in the pandemic, the WHO, CDC and FDA are trustworthy.
The article on the bat guano miners was posted quite awhile ago. Since then, the authors have revised their opinions based on more data.
Nonetheless, the best guano miners were exposed to large amounts of bat feces, but obviously not the Wuhan Lab Turbo Version (TM)
Identical symptoms and death in some cases.
That version of events is likely a cover story. It's true to a point, which helps the narrative, but there's no evidence that the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute. None that I've seen anyway. Also, first rule of journalism is consider the source, and the source in this case has every reason to want to throw us off the trail.
There's another narrative that has some evidence behind it, albeit circumstantial. China hosted the World Military Games in Oct. 2019 just before the outbreak, and there are credible reports of some participants becoming ill with symptoms similar to CV19 and having to return home. So basically an opportunity to introduce the virus.
Then there's the outbreak in Iran which killed some of their top people, the argument being that there wasn't enough time between the Wuhan outbreak and Iran for it to have travelled there via an infected person. Funny how both China and Iran got hit first. Italy also got hit hard, but in that case you had a lot of Chinese garment workers in Italy, so that was likely the cause. Also, as I mentioned, not the first time China had an outbreak which caused major damage to their economy. Bird flu, Swine flu, Sars1, to mention a few.
There's something I've heard about called Castle Keep Theory" which uses the defensive structure of castles as an analogy to multiple layered narratives. Recall, first it was bats and pangolins, then it was an accidental lab leak, then it was a collaboration between the US and China. I think it's just as likely China was set up as they were the guilty party. Not like the US hasn't done that sort of thing before. Operation Gladio springs to mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio
Kevin Walmsley, Sir, I enjoyed watching your excellent video reports from China. Just wanted to say THANK YOU for the outstanding TRUTHFUL reporting. You are doing a tremendous job (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️) to INFORM, EDUCATE, AND ENLIGHTEN the citizenry of the world.
Highest regards ✨️
Don Kelley
It will be interesting to see if China can compete with Thailand's international medical services. My experiences were excellent. My father, an academic working in public health visited Thailand often as part of an exchange program when Thailand was starting. He said that the Thai hospitals looked to the hotel/tourism sector for their best practices for customer service, and you can tell - met by a staff member at the entrance who guides you, very short waiting times, wifi and other entertainment available, and menus and room service equal to a five staff hotel from long term care.
https://www.apollohospitals.com/
Since 1983! Talk about prescient.
I am a retired chemist.
I remember the many Chinese PhD students who milked our universities and stole IP.
Then they learned to innovate vs. copy.
A real disaster for USA industry ultimately.
You cannot „steal IP“. People learn from each other since the beginning of history. Everybody is welcome to learn at a university as much as they can. If education has suffered in the West in the last fifty years, this is not Asia‘s fault.
Turnier,
You edited and changed your initial reply to my post. That is not in the spirit of constructive discourse. That is on you. Nonetheless, I am not anti-Asia at all, and never implied that.
However, I am anti fraud, deception, and avarice. Sadly, there is plenty to go around in this world.
I corrected a typo. I did not assume you were „anti-Asia“.
Turnier I have just circled back and gave your comment further thought.
May I be so bold as to propose this:
IP theft: I do not agree that it is everyones free information for the taking and to be exploited. That is unethical and terribly destructive to the inventors or the companies.
This is because they invest money and resources to develop a material or process that is unique and non-obvious and wish to use that patent or trade secret to their lawful favor. They have that right under the laws and rules of the WTO and USA and World Patent Offices.
If another company likes or wants a patented process enough, they can license it for use in a lawful and proper manner. That is normal ethical business.
Otherwise, it is a free for all for outlaws.
I feel sorry for anyone who gets swept up in this debacle. Many years ago I dated a Chinese chemist who was studying at UBC. China sent her here to study waste management, a pressing problem at the time with a population that large, and then along came Tiananmen and she defected. So China lost their investment in her, while she lost a potential career in China. I doubt very much that she stole any trade secrets though, and I suspect that applies to a lot of Chinese students, probably a majority.
This again, as I keep harping on, is human nature - in this case to paint everyone with the same brush simply because of who they are or where they're from. Been a victim of it myself actually. Not that I'm accusing you, but it's easy enough to fall into that trap.
Thank you for your thoughtful response, and your points have good merit. Your friend was indeed an upstanding individual, and I know that there are many. When I was at Cornell, one of my closest collaborators and a friend was a Chinese chemist, and based on his hard work we published an article in the journal Science. However, there were many who hoodwinked the system, only to be discovered later, and who did much damage as the confidential technology had national security implications.
In my 30 + years as an industrial chemist, the IP and trade secret theft was more the rule than the exception - but only because of those caught or suspected of espionage or we knew of. These bad actors were not caucasian little old ladies, but rather Chinese nationals.
With regards to the idea of IP theft, some say it is everyones free information for the taking and to be exploited. That is unethical and terribly destructive to the inventors or the companies. This is because they invest money and resources to develop a material or process that is unique and non-obvious and wish to use that patent or trade secret to their lawful favor. They have that right under the laws and rules of the WTO and USA and World Patent Offices.
Who is to blame? It is a combination of Western Capitalists and the PRC in my humble opinion. A healthy lawful collaboration and lawful ethical business deals are preferred for everyones benefit.
I would
With regards
China only steals the intellectual property while the US and USSR post WWII stole the actual scientists <g>.
My story is anecdotal of course, and not being on the inside I have no way of gauging the extent of Chinese espionage. I'd simply point out that the CIA does exactly the same thing. If they're less successful it's not for lack of trying.
I lived in Vancouver from 1981 to 2018, so I saw the entire real estate bubble from the beginning. I got tired of hearing people carp about Chinese buying up all the homes instead of placing the blame where it belonged, on the politicians and their pals who profited from it. I would have done the same thing if I were Chinese, in fact I'm doing that with Russia where RE is still comparatively cheap, even on the Black Sea coast. Looking at Georgia as well, now that they're mending fences with Russia. The basic difference is we intend to live there, not simply hold the property as speculation.
"But China is opening up its hospital systems and medical tourism zones to foreigners."
They're late to this game:
https://www.apollohospitals.com/
Established in 1983 (!) I tried to buy shares when they first went public about 25 years ago. I was a trader at the time, and I consider Apollo to be the biggest fish that got away, since share purchase was only open to Indian citizens and no mutual fund I could find had any serious exposure. They're up to some 20 odd hospitals at last count and still a major player in that market. Frankly, Apollo was what traders call a no-brainer, as you only had to look at the state of health care in the USA to understand the potential.
I think China should keep the drugs and other medical developments to itself and restrict such exports to the USA.
Trump has managed to convince a good portion of the Americans that China has been ripping them off, producing cheap toxic crap, can't innovate and, thus, resorts to IP theft or copy USA products (to produce a cheaper and crappier goods for sale to the unwitting Americans), etc. A lot of Americans celebrate the direct imposition of Trump's egregious tariffs on China for the above reasons.
It is time for the USA and China to mutually decouple from one another.
The idea that China makes inferior products is largely a myth. My wife and I buy clothes whenever we're in Japan (her home) and the quality is always first rate. For some time now Japan has been sourcing clothing from China. The difference is that Japanese will pay for quality, whereas westerners want cheap prices. The old adage "you only get what you pay for" applies here. When I was a kid, 'made in Japan' was synonymous with cheap and shoddy. How times have changed!
Turner, thanks for the interesting reply....ahem! I noticed that you edited out some inflammatory portions, thank you.
I witnessed the theft of IP and particular trade secrets in multiple companies I worked at and in academia.
The FBI showed up for a couple of the issues, as the Chinese chemists disappeared and went back to China, documents and flash drives in hand.
Sadly, in grad school, many careless professors hired Chinese grad students who loaded up their flash drives, even on DARPA projects, got their PhDs and went back to China or infiltrated USA companies, then went back.
It is interesting: suddenly factories in China pop up running chemical processes and making products, much of the technology stolen from USA companies such as Dow and many others.
Have a great day and thanks for the comment.
Taking what you said as fact (for the sake of argument) then what we must ask ourselves is why did those students keep being welcomed. To me that's the most important question, to that I could write a lot but in the end it all boils down to this: the US is capitalist society, what matters is for capital to keep reproducing itself and this is what the whole country is optimized for.
Given that (as in I am exposing my axioms), then it follows that if it kept happening, it happened because it made profit. If you look at the whole characterization on how pharmaceutical companies make money in the original post, then not only did US companies profit from it, they're profiting from it 'till today. The IP theft you say happened then, was nothing more than an enabler, angel intelectual investment for US companies to eventually offshore not only the manufacturing or material supply chain but also the whole process except for FDA approval and dealing with selling and marketing processes and bureaucracies - as exposed in the original post.
You might argue that it should have been taken more seriously, I could argue that China just outplayed the US, studied their adversary, found out their weak spots and exploited their addiction to keep doing what every capitalist country in some degree does: reproduce capital in the name of its bourgeois class. You might want to have adverse reactions to that, like most politicians and economists and elites in most capitalist societies would today, which is exactly why they are failing against China, a country that actually understood what must be done in order to win as a socialist country in the 20th and 21st century. Of course, one can understand how things happened and what things are like today but to change it? To do that with discipline and self-reflexivity one needs in order to ensure that their actions are actually aligned with their goals? Now that's another level. In my analysis the US didn't even have the ability to see what was happening, let alone the discipline and reflexivity to actually do something about it. Unfortunately for them (again in my informed opinion) a lot of key people drank their own propaganda, and they're doing that to this day.
Just to be transparent, I welcome all of these events, but I live in the global south and have no interest in western success.
RM, thank you for the thoughtful reply, and you may be pleasantly surprised that I agree.
The capitalist West made a series of egregious mistakes that started with the creation of the Bretton Woods System agreement after WW2 and the WTO agreements that ultimately enabled the birth of the PRC predator economic and military adversary.
This was of course greatly fueled by USA and other nations and corporate greed to gain access to the PRC markets and cheap labor, in exchange for technology transfer and other goodies to the PRC.
Do I blame the PRC for taking every advantage? No.
The tragedy here is the human suffering, the destruction of the environment, and the cruel avarice of the PRC. I have traveled to China on business and have witnessed this firsthand.
Also, on the personal side of things, I can attest that there were many companies and individuals who involuntarily lost much to PRC industrial espionage, and who did not necessarily want to engage with predatory China. I had fellow chemists who devoted 35 years to a company and who had their crown jewel inventions stolen, not voluntarily transferred.
Do I blame the PRC for taking every advantage? Not at all. The tragedy here is the human suffering, the destruction of the environment, and the cruel avarice of the PRC.
Be Well,
TC
I mostly agree with a lot of what you said but I have some to say on 2 points you made:
1st - "I can attest that there were many companies and individuals who involuntarily lost much to PRC industrial espionage, and who did not necessarily want to engage with predatory China. I had fellow chemists who devoted 35 years to a company and who had their crown jewel inventions stolen, not voluntarily transferred." here I want to make more clear that my point wasn't about individuals or that it isn't a personal drama to have such things happen to someone. I understand you could have just wanted to point out that you saw things happen to people that didn't deserve it, to me capitalism kind of maximizes that as it's incredibly unjust and unequal, if it wasn't Chinese espionage it could have been so many other things. I tend to be less personal and emotional and humane sometimes when I approach comment sections and the internet, I'm not like that in person, but do know that I empathize with the suffering you mentioned, I just probably have a very different way or interpreting the cause and the cure of such injustices - as a cost that wasn't inflicted by China directly, as if (let's say this is all in the US) any US company or the country as whole was actually worried about anything other than just maximizing corporate bottom lines, quarterly reports, stock markets and thus making billionaires more billionairy (here you can read do the job the government was created to do and is tasked with doing since the beginning: serve the bourgeois class). Got a bit messy in the writing, but if the US society/government/corporations didn't have bourgeois class interests as their maximum priority, they would have done something to stop such injustice and suffering. My point is that those things, even it they were unjust and bad, they were so in individual terms, in localized realities, not for the society as a whole, I can imagine some big shot people just saying "What do you want me to do? Not do business with them?" as to justify that it's just increases profits and bottom lines to much to actually go after them in any legally binding way that could actually punish them enough to stop doing it, which would then cut relations with the Chinese and thus making things way less lucrative in the bigger corporate and bourgeois point of view. They don't care about the suffering or anyone, they just care about capitalist society goal: reproduce capital infinitely, for capitalist society is a society that maximizes that, it was created by them to do that for them so they can be leeches just living off of the surplus value working people create. And no I don't think you need to be a socialist to see that as the truth, Keynes would probably say something very close to that. You only turn into a socialist if you then think that the answer is revolution and a dictatorship lead by the working class that oppresses bourgeoisie into having to actually work for a living and not oppress people so they can have/keep their decadent way of life.
My second divergent interpretation is about this: "Do I blame the PRC for taking every advantage? Not at all. The tragedy here is the human suffering, the destruction of the environment, and the cruel avarice of the PRC." I don't think that whatever cost it had outbalances bringing 800 million people out of poverty, enabling the global south to face capitalist imperialism and have a taste of actual sovereignty, plus a ton of other things. This is due to 2 main things that I feel must be acknowledged about my perspective: first I am sociologist that concerns himself with anticolonial thought and research. Thus my main focus and point of view is anti imperial and anti colonial. I concern myself with the sovereignty of oppressed people's to have their own culture, their own knowledge systems, their own politics and economic/social structures. European imperialism and capitalism have for 500 years oppressed the whole world and taken advantage, I could make this comment a whole lot bigger by proving my point but just know I have very thoroughly studied this with academic rigor and dedication, with lost and lost of self deconstruction and reflexivity, doing my best to understand how I as someone that was born a white male in europe would have for my lived experience and perspective have been biased basically since birth into a certain perspective. We are all biased, our lived experiences inform said biases, our place in society cements them foundationally inside ourselves.
To the best of my knowledge, the kind of horrors and suffering that europeans and their dependents have imposed upon the world are just incalculable. I could go into slavery as I've studied it and its foundations, and I just don't think most people understand how horrible and psychopathic it was, the multiple genocides, both physical and cultural. Like, the mustache guy only did in europe a small fraction of what europeans and also the US was already doing, in Africa and the US's southern border. I don't mean that the mustache guy wasn't horrible and did unspeakable things, I just mean to open people's eyes to that it was happening before he did it, it just wasn't with white people. Anyway, I do say all of this to try and contextualize that I see the costs, human, environmental, etc. as the cost of stopping 500 years of European people's oppression and psychopathic world hegemony. Were there mistakes? Yes, but you can try as much as you want to try and not hurt people accidentally, you'll always fail, it's just about trying to fail as less often and less badly as you can. This leads me to the second part of this second divergent thing: I don't take whatever western narrative about Mao's "mistakes" with lots of people suffering part as being anything close to the truth of things. Mistakes happened, but I have studied how western organizations counted the numbers and it's just methodologically malicious, it's propaganda as someone that is concerned with getting to the truth I reject most western popular narratives about Mao and in fact most of what they say about China since the revolution, you can add the reality about USSR, Cuba, N.Korea into that as well.
Lastly, I changed my whole life by moving to South America as I didn't want to contribute a penny to any global north society's tax income. Since coming to live here my views have only radicalized more: you talk about whatever environmental and human cost Chinese government actions had, but I can tell you that where I live whole cities were covered in toxic mining water because western companies just care about digging holes and getting the minerals here, destroying people's sources of some of the purest cleanest water on earth? F that. What about people's lands and livelihoods and suffering and their actual lives? I mean they were saving a couple million dollars in their multi billion dollar operation so can you really blame them for doing things that lead to thousands of deaths? This isn't some artisanal mining, no, this is what humane and environmentally friendly mining looks like on the ground floor. I'm not kidding, they are to this day spreading propaganda in Europe and elsewhere (even here paying radio adverts, internet, tv, etc) talking about how they are restoring biomes and people's traditional ways of living and bringing development and whatever when they are literally killing people, when they literally pay to have some guys with guns come into an affected community gathering and almost having a bloodbath which I barely avoided. But hey, they're just black quilombola people that are the living decedents and proof that enslaved people fought every second they lived under colonial oppression right, they don't matter, what matters is that some white people in the global north get their metals cheaply to be silent while being exploited every day by the bourgeois that actually benefits the most from this whole perverse and psychopathic world order. This isn't hundreds, this is millions of people I'm talking about here. It's whole countries, hundreds of millions of people, billions and billions that thanks to chinese socialism might have a chance at actually being able to dictate their fates. It's not just china, it's the whole BRICS+ fighting against a world order that oppressed billions to get millions to stay quiet (read sustaining a middle class that defuses class struggle) while lining the pockets of a few decadent psychopaths.
Thus, I think that you can understand why I understand the, as an example, environmental cost China took, bringing in dollars, to then fund universities, have an actual nationalistic plan of development, so they could for example own 90% of rare earths's refining, with its nationalized banking system plus other nationalized industries and the way power relations work there, they took advantage of capitalist greed to upstart and then leapfrog global north's manufacturing, science and innovation capabilities. Just like the last Inside China Business article/video said, they were playing Go, using their cultural and intelectual heritage to corner the western empire into submission, not as act of war or aggression, this isn't chess, it's just about liberties, and the global north must be contained in order for it to not keeping its oppressive, psychopathic, unspeakable barbaric tendencies from poisoning all of humanity.
Is this AI written?
No, actually never even tried to have AI write anything for me. I find it really weird.
One of the best kept trade secrets in western pharma is that the product doesn't work, and is in fact dangerous. Look what it took to pry the mRNA data out of Pfizer's sweaty hands, and of course no one will ever be held accountable for that. 75 years they wanted before releasing the data! That tells you everything you need to know.
"That tells you everything you need to know." No it doesn't, it doesn't tell basically anything in fact. That kind of thinking isn't scientific or exact or anything, and look I'm a sociologist, so I'm not an all our exact sciences guy, but because I'm a sociologist I'm a really big methodology epistemology and self reflexivity guy. That comment doesn't really tell me anything at all, but let me try and point out how I read it so maybe you can better get your idea across:
I have no context to whatever mRNA data you're mentioning other than guessing that they wanted to keep whatever data they had on such technology because it was valuable in some way, like giving them an edge over the competition. From what I know mRNA is an incredibly promising technology that might be incredible useful for medicine.
75 years is I guess some kind of protection from patents or something? Also them wanting not to release it really only tells me that for some reason they didn't want to release it but as I said maybe it's because they wanted to keep the data to keep competitive advantage which is the most simple and thus probably answer, but I did say probable.
Next: "best kept trade secrets in western pharma is that the product doesn't work, and is in fact dangerous" that's just delirious, like, the dose really does make the poison here, but you can't just say that because studies are financed by the industry that it's all bad, plus it's not like all studies are financed by big pharma. If we have any intention of making things better or informing people better or anything like that we need to be data based, we need to have unwavering compromise with material reality, which includes being incredibly methodologically thorough.
A study can be financed by whomever you want, if you want to say it's bad you need more than just looking at who paid for it, looking at basic methodology, at how they chose people or designed the study, etc. that matters, if you have a double blind placebo controlled trial with data that proves that it was actually well done with as much confounding factors being taken into account and then replicated like 3 or more times then you can pretty much trust that whatever that study says is at the very least the best information and data that we have on said subject. Then we turn to how the data was interpreted and whatever else, but it's science, so you must prove whatever you're talking about. And I know that doesn't happen all the time, I do know that, and we shouldn't just blindly believe everything, but a lot of times the fault isn't even in the study itself but science communication around it which can be misleading and just sensationalized for clicks. To me when it comes to most people trying to understand certain subjects by trying to study things themselves the biggest problem is science communication which is horribly done most of the time. Plus you also have the classical Nobel syndrome when you have a respected physicist or whatever start to analyze and talk about things outside their expertise and just spew a bunch of nonsense that people believe because said person has a PhD in physics so they must be smart.
Western medicine works (most of the time), its saved god knows how many millions of people, and that kind of discussion is nonsensical, it was already like that for me because I actually studied science from philosophy of science, epistemology, methodologies of science and self reflexivity to the ground as any sociologist should, because our field need to be even more careful and thorough as to actually do work that is useful and reflects reality. But then I moved to the global south, and it just got way way more nonsensical. It wasn't just moving here, but actually absorbing the scientific and cultural approaches to these things that changed this for me even more. But whatever this is a long enough essay as it is in a comment section, I just got tired or writing.
"If we have any intention of making things better or informing people better or anything like that we need to be data based, we need to have unwavering compromise with material reality, which includes being incredibly methodologically thorough."
You don't seem to have brought much data to this discourse, and may I point out that calling me delirous when I'm simply being sarcastic (and have every reason to be) is probably not a good start.
I have every intention of making things as good as I can, which includes calling out fraud when I see it. If you want to defend Pfizer et al at least bring some evidence to the table, not a lecture on the scientific method which has been my discipline for over 40 years.
"that's just delirious" as in the argument.
Sorry for not spending hours of my valuable and little time I have with decent intelectual capacity due to burn out to bring data that is publicly available and reproduced time after time throughout scientific literature.
Also if the scientific method is your discipline for over40 years I would have expected much better opening argument but oh well. In your other comment you bring no science at all, just CNBC, ABC News, Justice department and the bjm which seems to be more credible and a far better reference than the other links. So I mean... You don't bring extraordinary data or arguments or anything to back up extraordinary claims to which there's little evidence to skew the argument in your favor. If you'd like to actually have proper and sound arguments with proper data and stuff like that then I'm happy to change my stance on any and all subjects. I did so before on many things. But you can prove a lot of things and I can still disagree on the conclusion for I'll probably still use a public healthcare policy point of view. I think it'd be very very difficult if not impossible for you to have enough evidence that vaccination was worse than the alternatives when we do a wholesome analysis but I do guarantee that I do not have 100% certainties about anything in my life. I can have 90%, 99%, 99,999% but never 100.
"That tells you everything you need to know." No it doesn't, it doesn't tell basically anything in fact.
colloquialism: noun
Colloquial style or quality. A colloquial expression, not employed in formal discourse or writing.
Sorry, but I just assumed you knew something about the subject.
1. 75 years is excessive. In the USA patents on pharmaceuticals expire in 20 years.
2. The federal government granted companies Pfizer and Moderna immunity from liability if something unintentionally goes wrong with their "vaccines."
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/16/covid-vaccine-side-effects-compensation-lawsuit.html
3. The "vaccines" were not properly tested.
https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635
4. Pfizer has a very sketchy history:
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/pfizer-fined-23-billion-illegal-marketing-off-label/story?id=8477617
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-largest-health-care-fraud-settlement-its-history
Hey, so that all also doesn't prove anything of what you said or pointed out in the original comment. What you just referenced is the following:
1. They wanted excessive patent or data protection. To me in a capitalist society to me that feels like more of the same. Companies try and that's why there's laws and patent regulations etc.
2. Yup, but that doesn't prove that anything went or was going to go wrong. It just says that the vaccines were were very quickly made and since they were going to be massively distributed and applied they didn't want repercussions from it. If you only think about yourself it might not seem very reasonable but there's a whole scientific field of study that's concerned with public health policies. I'm a sociologist and as such I've come to contact with such field, when you have a pandemic that can cost society a huge amount of pain, suffering and loss, then you take more risks. The FDA took a bit more risk (but not by that much) by liberating those vaccines, which is usually very acceptable. This is about risk and reward in a society grand scale of things, there were tradeoffs, on one side you have a possibly riskier vaccine, on the other you get millions of deaths from covid and economic devastation which will lead to immense suffering and more deaths, it's not difficult to understand their decision. Plus it's not like there wasn't anything they could do to track secondary effects from the vaccine, and they did, and we know about those secondary effects because they did their job. Those secondary effects could be the cause great personal pain and loss for families, but those same families could have been entirely under the ground or suffering overall a lot more if those vaccines weren't distributed. I'm not denying that there was a cost and suffering possibly cause by vaccines, I'm just saying that it's not like those people would be fine it vaccines weren't liberated by the FDA, they probably could all be death by now, which would've been a egregious error when it comes to public health policy science. You might not like it, but it's basic trolly problem dilema stuff. I rather we as a species do things to try and make everyone on average way better than just leave it to nature. Sure when you leave it to nature no one is at fault, kind of, but I think that we should take responsibility for not only the actions we take, but the ones we can take, for the tasks we can bring upon ourselves to do to make things better.
3 - Read the article it says "autumn, speed may have come at the cost of data integrity and patient safety" first it read *MAY* have come at a cost, it might have or not, it's a probability. Second I think you need to read the above paragraph on number 2. Plus if there were actual wide spread issues that would be worse than the alternative (which would be to let covid loose and not do anything) it could never be silenced or whatever. Plus people act like you could just get covid die or be cured and those are the 2 outcomes. But there's long covid and a some other problems that catching it but not dying have cause to millions and millions of people worldwide, which would be far worse without vaccines. I personally know a family that had stroke problems which were probably to do with the vaccines, they are all fine, it was a couple of really bad months, but no one has any complications from dealing with it and it they didn't vaccinate they'd all be dead, because even with vaccines a lot of people in the family almost died. I think they rather have taken the vaccine and then have a couple bad months dealing with medicine to thin out the blood and stuff to deal with the stroke thing than just having died on mass. (They have told me that as well).
4 - Sure, history about other kinds of drugs, they don't have a history on vaccines. Plus that's from 2009, the fine might have made them more careful if it was effective, which is the point of making them pay. Plus read the number 2 on this reply again. Plus look at Bayer's history it's also messed up. Plus look at who actually developed the technology for the vaccines and who paid for it! It was working people's tax money that went into public universities. They socialize the cost and privatize the profit. Plus all drug companies in the US are scammy, come on you have a whole opioid epidemic because of them. All of that doesn't mean that the vaccine was good or bad, it proves only that Pfizer has a scammy past, it's conspiracy to just connect dots that have no actual proven connection, you might have a suspicion but it doesn't prove anything. In fact when you do models that calculate how it would have been without vaccines, and when you look at the real world data of how vaccination changed outcomes it's very very clear that vaccination even with all the proven side effects, was clearly and without a shadow of a doubt the right health policy decision for any government or public institution to make. This is the truth that we can ascertain to the best of our scientific knowledge base and data collection and interpretation capabilities as a species. The end.
"The end."
I take that to mean you do not wish to pursue this further. Fine by me. As a sociologist you're probably familiar with Koryzbski's concept of 'belief systems.' You have yours, I have mine. As far as possible I base mine on evidence provided by qualified researchers and clinicians. You appear to believe the official narrative. Bit of an impasse I would say. I do have couple of more points to add though:
1. Early in the pandemic there was a search for repurposed drugs. This is standard procedure when faced with a novel pathogen. Several effective pharmaceuticals were found and small scale early trials were conducted. The most promising were Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin that had very good observational data (Uttar Pradesh and Lima) on preventing hospitalizations, which is where the majority of deaths occurred.
However, Instead of allowing doctors to prescribe them, a full court press went into effect to discredit both the drugs and the doctor's prescribing them. They went as far as suspending medical licences, or threatening to do so. I should point out that both drugs have very long safety records and are safer even than aspirin.
So why were these drugs suppressed in most nations, and why were doctors prescribing them threatened? I can't think of an example where this has ever been done before. Maybe on an individual basis - admittedly there are some quacks in the medical profession, but on that scale, and in the face of supporting evidence of effectiveness, and most importantly, very low risk? Bear in mind, the vaccines were still a year away. So why?
2. China was the only nation to develop a conventional vaccine (Russia did much later). They didn't seem to have any trouble producing it quickly and in quantity, which was the only argument I saw for preferring an mRNA approach, which is NOT a vaccine by the standard definition - it's a gene therapy. Why was it so important that the only available treatment be a product that actually hijacked your cellular mechanism to produce a single epitope (the S2 protein) and where the safety data made no reference to when that process would stop? Bear in mind, no viral vectored gene therapy using an mRNA approach had shown any signs of success up to that point, and yet It was forced on the public under threat of loss of employment, restrictions on travel, and even detention, as occurred in Australia.
Just to be clear, I'm not alone in my views. This document was published in Oct 2020, after the basic facts of transmission and mortality were known.
https://gbdeclaration.org/
The truth is, there's a large community of highly qualified clinicians and researchers who disagree with the official narrative. That doesn't mean they're right, but when large numbers of qualified professionals express objections I think it's a good idea to pay attention. I did and that's where my opinions were formed - not from some conspiracy website but from experts in the field.
As for the argument that the vaccines prevented more harm than they incurred, the jury is still out on that. Large scale application of the alternative measures I've described were denounced and denied, which skews the data, and the incident of cancers and myocarditis that correlate with the introduction of mRNA products continue as we speak.
Summary: The data supports the contention that the SARS-Cov2 virus presented a limited threat to the vast majority of people, the most likely to be affected being the elderly and people with comorbidities and/or compromised immune systems. The correct response, as indicated by qualified people who signed the GBD, was ignored and instead a campaign to suppress people's right to chose, and doctor's right to practice medicine as they saw fit was enacted across most western nations. People who objected lost their jobs, their businesses, their professional standing, personal and family relationships were destroyed, and most importantly, trust in the medical profession was seriously compromised.
The argument that these measures were justified holds no water, because there are counter examples from nations that didn't follow these practices (in some cases they simply couldn't) that did prescribe alternative therapies and that had outcomes no different or even better that nations where draconian measures were enforced.
That pretty much sums up my argument. If you want to refute go ahead, but I don't expect you to change my view anymore than I'll change yours, and as a rule I try to avoid polemics, so I'm done here.