RFK for Secretary of Health? One Picture Is Worth 1,000 Words
RFK's confirmation will come up soon. Other than Hegseth, he's the most dangerous of Trump's seriously destructive Cabinet picks. Call your Senators.
In the image above, BOTH boys have smallpox. The boy on the right was vaccinated; the boy on the left was not vaccinated. Vaccines don’t prevent bacterial and viral infections—but fatefully, a vaccinated person who contracts a disease spreads many fewer of the disease spores, has a staggeringly better chance of surviving it, has less damage from it (as you can see), and will be healthier for life in many cases. Because people often spread disease before they are aware of having it—for example, people with AIDS unknowingly spread the disease most contagiously in the first 60 days of their infection, a full 10 months before their own first symptoms will appear. Vaccinated people can spread disease, but the spore level they are emitting is so low that their chances of infecting others are much, much lower than those of an unvaccinated person who is infected. Most people reading this will not remember what an iron lung is. We’ll get to that later this week.
In 1796, Dr. Edward Jenner, expanding on a discovery by Dr. Benjamin Jesty (and possibly from an earlier Turkish physician), created the world’s first successful vaccine. He noticed that milkmaids always had beautiful skin. Not only that, he noticed that they were always getting cowpox—which created lesions like smallpox, but with smaller lesions that always healed without the least scarring. Milkmaids were also NEVER—that’s NEVER—getting smallpox. So, he just very slightly and gently took a tiny scraping from a lesion of cowpox, put it in solution, and inoculated 8-year-old James Phipps. Then he exposed him to smallpox. And the results were pretty much what you see above. Little Phipps’ immune system jumped all over the disease, and the results were pretty much what you see in the image above.
By 1806, the results of Jenner’s smallpox vaccination were clear. President Thomas Jefferson and French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte both endorsed mass vaccinations. Thomas Jefferson called smallpox the worst scourge in the history of the species. In the last century before its eradication—the 20th century—smallpox killed half a billion people (out of 1.666 billion cases worldwide). If you contrast this with 7 million dead in 2023 from COVID, that makes smallpox 71 times more deadly than humanity’s latest incarnation of SARS.
Smallpox was an epidemic (the correct word) that lasted 3,000 years. And it was wiped out by a vaccine.
It is hard to know how deeply mentally damaged RFK, Jr. really is. A brain worm may have done more damage than he believes, but he certainly is an absolute NUTJOB on the subject of vaccines.
Now, I can hear some of this anti-VAX case. Babies are inoculated with as many as 126 vaccines in the first week of their lives. That seems very reckless to me. And the mercury in vaccines in the early days very likely did kill some people, and may have been a contributing factor in autism—but it definitely was not the cause. What likely is the cause of autism, according to MIT research, is glyphosate (Round-up) which is banned in the EU but still poisoning ALL Americans as it blows from field to field, so all the food we eat, organic or not, is contaminated. And all the farmers who have tried to protect their fields from neighbors pesticides and toxic substances like glyphosate have lost in court.
RFK, Jr. has also backed Ivermectin—a HUGE racket.
THE IVERMECTIN RACKET
First, the bottom line: the CDC, in multiple communications, warned people not to take Ivermectin. I agree. There have been a few in vitro studies that seem to imply that ivermectin inhibits transmission. But these are Petri dish tests, not human trials, but in vitro tests seem to be saying that at a certain concentration ivermectin has antiviral properties. For it to inhibit transmission, it would have to be affecting the cells in the nasal passages where SAR2 proliferates wildly.
Now, before I tell you how this racket got started, I want to just briefly outline what a clinical trial is and isn't.
A real clinical trial is interventional. A drug is given to a group of people--first small groups, then larger groups.
Phase 1 Clinical Trials last a week, and the drug is given to 20-100 healthy people to see how it affects metabolism. This is the test that just says, these little lab rats didn’t die of this drug.
Phase 2 Clinical Trials last 1-2 years and involve several hundred people. What is happening here is the first administration in a small group of subjects with a certain disease or condition. Verification of the active mechanism in patients and safety when used for a short period of time including monitoring of all potential side effects. Phase 2a are the proof of concept studies and Phase 2b are the definite dose-finding studies.
Phase 3 Clinical Trials involve several hundred to several thousand subjects and last 1-4 years. These are tests to determine final dosage in real-world medical practical practice. Both short- and long-term effectiveness, usability, and safety are the primary concerns. At the end of this trial phase, authorization to use the drug is normally given and the general medical population may use the drug for specific purposes, although doctors cheat on this one all the time, prescribing, for example, the anti-diabetes drug metformin as a longevity supplement.
Phase 4 Clinical Trials involve thousands of people and are the fine-tuning mechanism for use of the drug. This phase lasts about a year. The drug is already approved, but now the pharma company is trying to find out exactly how the drug affects different populations and how to tweak dosages to work best.
Now, that's science. It’s incredibly strict, and closely followed. Experiments are double-blind, and both the procedures and the results are peer-reviewed. Now the kicker in here is that pharma companies fund almost 80% of all clinical trials. It’s not proof of a deliberate attempt to sway results, but if a double-blind experiment is carried out by a researcher who knows who's paying the bill, it can hardly be said to be perfectly double-blind anymore.
A word of caution: some trials aren't clinical trials at all. One is the observational trial in which individuals are observed or certain outcomes are measured. No attempt is made to affect the outcome (for example, no treatment is given). Real clinical trials are always interventional and conform to one of the phases outlined above.
What is Ivermectin?
Ivermectin is a semi-synthetic lactone derivative used in veterinary medicine to treat heartworm disease and other intestinal parasitic diseases. In the equatorial belt and sub-Saharan Africa, where parasitic infections are practically endemic, people have used it to control internal bacterial infections. It is not known that it is an effective antiviral, and part of the CDC's concern is that the dosage level at which it may present antiviral properties might actually just kill the patient.
Now to the racket. To the dismay of conspiracy theorists everywhere, the U.S. government provides a database of all real clinical trials.
For Ivermectin, there have been exactly five double-blind clinical trials which have been completed and which have delivered verified, peer-reviewed, published results. These trials involved a total of 946 people worldwide and were conducted under excellent conditions in Turkey, Iraq, Bangladesh, Spain, and Egypt. There are 40 other trials that are mostly all just beginning.
Now the major problem here is that all five trials mixed Ivermectin with other drugs -- largely because the placebo groups for these tests were already sick with COVID-19.
And in a case like this, the researchers can’t just take the placebo people off all medication and hope they don’t just croak. In the Turkish, Bangladeshi, Spanish, and Iraqi trials, totalling 606 people, the placebo groups were given a cocktail of hydroxychloroquine (which doesn't work, either) and azithromycin. The control group was given the cocktail plus Ivermectin. Adjusting for drug interaction, it would have been difficult for researchers to determine any real effect for Ivermectin unless there was a HUGE difference between the regular cocktail and the one with the cute little umbrella.
So the racket’s assertion that “a 75% decrease in mortality in clinical trials involving around 2,500 hospitalized COVID-19 patients” is a patently false statement. There have not been a total of 2,500 patients in any clinical trial on Ivermectin on this planet. There haven’t even been one thousand people in trials that produced a result.
This is absolute TOTALLY BS “INFORMATION.” And I know where people got it.
There is a doctor named Pierre Kory, who runs an outfit named FLCCC—Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance. This charlatan has done a HUGE number on a bunch of people.
First, he duped Representative Jim Jordan—Trump’s chief (and vicious) defender at his impeachment hearings—into letting him speak on Ivermectin—calling it “effectively a miracle cure”—while other witch doctors droned on about the thoroughly discredited hydroxychloroquine.
Then Kory got the journal Frontiers in Pharmacology to provisionally pre-publish an article on Ivermectin that was not peer-reviewed. It was accessed 85,000 times.
Now all hell has broken loose because Frontiers, after receiving a raft of complaints, sent the article to independent peer-review, and then rejected it out of hand. Here's what they said:
Frontiers takes no position on the efficacy of Ivermectin as a treatment of patients with COVID-19; however, we do take a very firm stance against unbalanced or unsupported scientific conclusions.
Further, the authors promoted their own specific Ivermectin-based treatment which is inappropriate for a review article and against our editorial policies. In our view, this paper does not offer an objective nor balanced scientific contribution to the evaluation of Ivermectin as a potential treatment for COVID-19.
Kory is not the only bad apple over at FLCCC. Founder Paul Marik had a similar paper pulled off the SSRN preprint server for the same racket, which he made up with Surgisphere, which was completely discredited for faking data. How evil that is during a pandemic is ungraspable.
They want to sell their cure.
Illegally, FLCCC published a “fact sheet” on Ivermectin. The number 2,500 in there. But essentially, there haven't been 16 completed trials with 2,500 people. There've been five, with 946 people, and one of them (the Egyptian) was a prophylactic study of 300 people, with no placebo group.
A profound problem here is the fairly recent, very dangerous habit of scientific journals engaging in provisional preprints of unreviewed data in an attempt to scoop each other, as if they were tabloids. When you think that 85,000 people read Kory’s false advertising paper, it’s just staggering. These people can go out in places like Mexico and buy Ivermectin over the counter. It won’t do any good. At most it will shorten a tough case of the coronavirus; it won’t affect a light case at all; and for most people, taking Ivermectin presents a real potential danger because there is insufficient testing in human beings, and in only two of the five trials I have mentioned were scientists in Stage 3.
The Pfizer vaccine was tested on 70,000 people in the United States before the CDC gave them emergency authorization. Subsequent to that, trial data poured in on 1,500,000 Israelis that verified what the CDC already knew.
A final note: In a number of Ivermectin “trials,” Ivermectin was mixed with Vitamin D3. If there was any improvement in patients’ COVID response, that’s why.
The Oak Ridge Experiments
The Summit Supercomputer at the Oak Ridge national lab is the second largest, fastest in the world, and does quadrillions of calculations per second. Billions of points of data were fed into the computer on COVID. It took the supercomputer a week to run the numbers against pathways, genetics, patient data, and the like.
The bottom line: COVID’s deadly lung congestion was NOT a cytokine storm—it was a Bradykinin storm. In fact, the Bradykinin storm accounts for ALL the symptoms of COVID right down to brain fog and COVID toes. And, the computer said, the best preventative and treatment was Vitamin D3. A major reason why the computer drew this conclusion is that most of the people who had severe cases of COVID and died from it were Vitamin D deficient when they got it.
Now, you’ll note that three paragraphs up, Ivermectin “investigators” had mixed Ivermectin with Vitamin D3. If there was anything in their cocktail at all that worked, it was the D3.
The bottom line is that we’re about to have a very, very big fight over this, and we mustn’t lose this one. Trump hesitated before, and half a million died, and the pandemic took hold in every part of America and the world, while he was suggesting that people drink bleach. But when Trump got COVID, he didn’t drink bleach. He had the best treatment available on this planet.
RFK, Jr. is not mentally all there, and he believes and touts conspiracy theories that are dangerous and will get people killed. And no one has the right to deny any American a vaccine for themselves or their children, especially not denied them by the worst anti-VAX crackpot in this country.
Fight.
Again… what a detailed article!! As a retire RN I applaud you!!