Defining Away Vaccine Safety Signals

roundingtheearth |  What if it turns out that vaccines are killing and crippling millions of people around the world, but that those harmed are just well enough spread out that almost nobody saw sufficient signals to build an intuition about the problem? And what if the agency most responsible for examining safety signals defines their algorithm using a nonsensical mathematical formula that hides nearly all serious problems?

Last night I tried to go to sleep early in order to shift my exercise routine to a morning schedule. But I'd received a late phone call from a friend whom I work with researching vaccine safety/danger, just as I was brushing my teeth. He remains anonymous for now due to fear of job loss or reprisal. I let the phone call go, but I couldn't just let it go. I needed to know why he would call me that late, so after spending an hour in bed not sleeping, I checked my email. I understood immediately.

Definitions

To a mathematician, everything depends on definitions. Whatever we state mathematically, the definitions of the terms we use should be traceable back to the axioms of the field we're working in. Mathematics is an artfully woven tapestry of axiomatic structure, lit brightly by definitions. Often, we create new definitions for the task at hand, but make sure that these relate clearly to the pyramid of definitions that come before it---generally as standard as possible to language common within the field. This becomes both a habit and also a part of the self-reinforcing social structure of the mathematics community. We talk definitions that sound boring to untrained ears, but we recognize that definitions are our palettes. We port definitions to applied fields, and we create new ones to use where needed. No mathematician or statistician with a soul forgets the well from which they draw energy and meaning.

During the past few months, many people (including myself) have learned for the first time about the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) where health care workers and patients can submit adverse events (AEs) suffered post-vaccination. While the VAERS database is understood to record an often small subset of the AEs, the information can still be used for purposes of establishing safety signals. A new influenza vaccine can be compared to other influenza vaccines, for instance. If the old ones were safe enough, and the reported AEs of a new one are in line or better than for past vaccines, then the risk-benefit analysis for the new vaccine (assuming sufficient efficacy) either remains the same or improves.

As with a great deal of health care regulation during the declared pandemic, changes were made to the VAERS system and also to safety signal analysis leading up to the experimental mass vaccination program officially targeting COVID-19. Without much fanfare, the CDC published a document on January 29, 2021 entitled Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) Standard Operating Procedures for COVID-19. There is a lot to talk about in this document, but let us focus on Section 2.2, which begins on page 14. Here, the CDC states that, "A series of tables will be generated using the VAERS automated data," and that these, "will be refreshed daily for internal use," but "not for public release". One might wonder why the CDC would not want additional outside eyeballs on such data---particularly since it took them two full months to figure out that myocarditis was an issue with the vaccines despite Israel warning about it two full months before the CDCs scheduled, delayed, and finally held meeting in late June. Maybe the CDC should hire somebody to read the pertinent news?

We get to section 2.3, and this is where things get really crazy. This is where signals (for assessing safety/danger of the vaccines) get defined. Subsection 2.3.1 begins (emphasis mine),

CDC will perform PRR data mining on a weekly basis or as needed. PRRs compare the proportion of a specific AE following a specific vaccine versus the proportion of the same AE following receipt of another vaccine (see equation below Table 4). A safety signal is defined as a PRR of at least 2, chi-squared statistic of at least 4, and 3 or more cases of the AE following receipt of the specific vaccine of interest.  

Only a real dork would emphasize the word 'and', right? A logic dork, mind you, but we'll get to that...

 

The Breathtaking Coverup Of "Vaccine" Breakthrough Covid Cases

IMDoc on the Covid treatment frontline:

About the French Guyana paper from the CDC

This is how science – the actual process – not the Fauci version – should be working.

I have repeatedly stated that I am seeing much much more vaccinated positives than one would ever have expected. As I have stated, they seem to be much sicker (though not critically so) and they tend to happen in clusters. For the past two months, this has stuck out from the dominant media narrative. I have never had to fight the cognitive dissonance between the media and my own eyeballs in my life.

I belong to a large non-public alumni group of my residency program that has literally thousands of IM docs all over America. The first thing a scientist does is to confirm that your observations are general or something you are just seeing. It was quickly obvious from that group that I was far from alone despite the “minimal breakthrough cases” media narrative.

So, then you do everything you can to hypothesize reasons why you are seeing what you are. I have been a physician for 30 years and that experience plays a huge role as well. Having this gigantic number of breakthrough cases just simply does not happen. I continue to see more than half the cases in vaccinated patients and so do many others. UNHEARD OF IN VACCINES BEFORE NOW.

Part of hypothesizing why is looking to the literature for evidence. Seldom is this found in RCT at this stage. Case reports and series like this paper are critical. They are seeing the same breakthrough ratio. And they have done a lot more viral research than you can. This is a gold mine for my own questions.

Is there anything in the paper that could possibly explain what I am seeing. Lots of times, it is not in the headline part but in all the test results and discussion. And yes, there is a very important finding deep in the results.

Why would clustering and sicker patients be so much more common in the breakthrough patients – there must be a reason for that?

If you look at the brief discussion of cT or cycle threshold you will see that the vaccinated patients have a SIGNIFICANTLY lower cT than the unvaccinated. That is the way the PCR test works. It basically means the vaccinated have a much higher amount of viral active particles than the unvaccinated. That would account for the breakthroughs I and my colleagues are seeing being a bit more ill. And it would explain the clustering. THe vaccinated breakthroughs have much higher viral load so they are much more contagious and the higher viral load makes them more symptomatic.

So we now have a suggestion and strong evidence that the vaccinated population may be spreading much more virus than the unvaccinated. I would say that is a critical public health issue and must be further researched immediately.

This Certainly needs much more work. THis is not confirmatory of any conclusions. But it is consistent with observation on the ground – unlike most of what the media has been spewing to the American people. But this is how science works. This paper is about the gamma variant but a conference yesterday with experts discussed that similar findings were being found in delta and lambda. The suggestion in this paper is now on the front of my mind. I am even now thinking of ways to confirm or falsify these conclusions going forward. This is science.

Another issue. The writers make the point that the breakthrough rate is extremely divergent from the expected rate. The difference is this paper documents what is happening in REAL LIFE. So much of what we are hearing on our media about vaccine efficacy is research being done in vitro. It is presented as gospel truth. I just want to scream.

*****

And this type of wide variation is to be expected in the real world – that is the way it goes. And another very severe confounding issue is the absolute gigantic chasm of numbers between these two data sets. I am in a very small area with a very small N. LA is gigantic. So theoretically, the LA numbers would have a much higher statistical power. However, there are an infinite number of confounding variables that must be taken into account in a side to side comparison. I have chills when I hear the media making all these god-like pronouncements about this place or the other. It is just very difficult to compare apples to oranges and they really should not be making blanket statements about every locality based on numbers coming from just one. This habit has been yet another bad side effect of our sterilization of the local health departments and the dependence on one centralized center.

The other issue left off your calculations is the number of people who are very ill and suffering at home. This is not a small number. I know this for a fact because there are about 10 patients on our call list that are COVID positive and very sick and we call them twice daily. They refuse to be in the hospital, largely for financial reasons. That is almost certainly an issue in LA as well.

Another possible confounding issue is if there is a much larger group of younger people who are not nearly as likely to be admitted whether vaccinated or not in either LA or here. The demographics and the attitudes of different age groups vary widely between different parts of the country.

The vaccine efficacy of 61% in my area is much closer to what is being experienced in Israel right now for what it is worth.

And thank you for the efforts to do these numbers – you should be a medical student.

One other little pearl to think about. ANYTIME anyone in medicine reports a 100% rate of anything – assume they are lying until proven otherwise. I would assume that to be the case in every field. There is no such thing as perfection.

When the LA report came out last week that their hospital admissions were 399 and all 399 were unvaccinated, I knew right off the bat that they were lying. That just does not happen in medicine. These people need to find better liars. For instance, if they had said 356 were unvaccinated, which is still a respectable number, I would not have raised an eyebrow. But they went for the gold, and earned hundreds of hilarious comments in my doctor’s forum that evening. The average physician in America who is hip deep into these tragedies is really getting tired of all the shenanigans.

*****

For several weeks – dating back to mid May – I was seeing groups of fully vaccinated patients becoming positive – but asymptomatic. Most of these situations arose because one member of the family or group was found to be positive because of foreign travel – or having surgery or whatever.

As this became more and more common – I began to be very concerned about what the future may hold. And the Health Department and CDC were just ambivalent.

The guidance of the local health department was to ignore this – “they are vaccinated – there is no way they can spread, etc.”. Just as the CDC guidance was telling them to do. I do not much like to have armed nuclear warheads sitting around, and I am very persistent – so I ordered the contact tracing on my own – every close family member or close contact was checked. And to my absolute horror – large clusters of them were positive. But at that time, they were asymptomatic- almost every single one. I have been dutifully reporting these numbers to Yves and Lambert for weeks.

Then about a month ago – something changed. People were then starting to become ill – and come to clinical attention that way. There were no longer just the asymptomatic patients. And again – on my own – ordered the contact tracing – and found the same thing. Multiple vaccinated family members positive. Multiple bridge group members positive. Multiple church members positive, etc etc. And lately – socials around the July 4th weekend were also clustered. At that point in time – there was no one sick enough to be in the hospital. But the vaccinated positives were clearly more ill than the unvaccinated positives. Heavier coughs, more SOB, more febrile. This included even the younger ones among them. But again – no one sick enough to be hospitalized.

And then – this week – we have had a seismic shift. We have admitted multiple very ill vaccinated patients – two of which were critically ill. At the same time – we are admitting unvaccinated patients as well. Some of them too are now very ill. We have had deaths this week – all of those patients were unvaccinated. But I am not holding my breath – we now have two critically ill vaccinated patients that I am not sure are going to make it. I do not have the best handle on these situations this week because I am in quarantine. But right at this minute – we have more COVID patients in the hospital since January – and it is right at 50/50 vaccinated/unvaccinated – and I would say they are equally ill.

It has been fascinating to watch this very orderly step up in severity over time. And then this week the bottom dropped out. And I live in a very vaccinated county – the paper reported this AM a 72% vaccination rate. The only stragglers were the 12-18 group which is below 50. The “herd immunity” concept is certainly not working here. And the local medical folks are just horrified that this is getting this bad after working so hard for this really good vaccination rate. It is reminding me greatly of the ramp up we had last summer – it is almost the same in every way – except it got much worse much quicker. I am hoping it will burn out – but not looking like that so far.

I will share something else. I have a very small limited patient size – I am in a small town. But I am very attentive to media reports of numbers from other locations. Big cities and big sample sizes give perspective. When I heard last weekend that there were ZERO vaccinated patients in the hospitals in LA – I grew immediately concerned – because that was not our experience at all – It is basically a WHAT HAVE WE DONE WRONG MOMENT….So I called three of my old students who are now on the front lines in the LA area – to the one – the response was “I have not a clue what they are talking about – that is just not true…”. Among the three of them the averages they were seeing were about 75% – 85% unvaccinated in the hospital – and all had had very ill vaccinated patients. I did not feel so bad then. But My God, the media cannot be trusted with a single god-damn thing. I have never seen such a bunch of liars in my lifetime. It is a real tragedy – when we need them the most they are doing propaganda. And do not even get me started on the Health Dept people who are misleading the population like this.

With Benefit Of Hindsight Dr. Walter Freeman Couldn't Hold A Candle To Dr. Anthony Fauci...,

undark |  Walter Freeman was itching for a shortcut. Since the 1930s, the Washington, D.C. neurologist had been drilling through the skulls of psychiatric patients to scoop out brain chunks in the hopes of calming their mental torment. But Freeman decided he wanted something simpler than a bone drill — he wanted a rod-like implement that could pass directly through the eye socket to penetrate the brain. He’d then swirl the rod around to scramble the patient’s frontal lobes, the brain regions that control higher-level thinking and judgment.

Rummaging in his kitchen drawer, Freeman found the perfect tool: a sharp pick of the sort used to shear ice from large blocks. He knew his close colleague, surgeon James Watts, wouldn’t sanction his new approach, so he closed the office door and did his “ice-pick lobotomies” — more formally, transorbital lobotomies — without Watts’ knowledge. 

Though the amoral scientist has been a familiar trope since Victor Frankenstein, we seldom consider what sets these technicians on the path to iniquity. Journalist Sam Kean’s “The Icepick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science,” helps fill that void, describing how dozens of promising scientists broke bad throughout history — and arguing that the better we understand their moral decay, the more prepared we’ll be to quash the next Freeman. “Understanding what good and evil look like in science — and the path from one to the other — is more vital than ever,” Kean writes. “Science has its own sins to answer for.”  

Expert at spinning historical science yarns — his last book, “The Bastard Brigade,” was about the failed Nazi atom bomb — Kean presents a scientific rogues’ gallery that’s both entertaining and chilling. Naturalist William Dampier, who influenced Charles Darwin’s work, resorted to piracy to fund his fieldwork in the 17th century. He joined a band of buccaneers that seized gems, scads of valuable silk, and stocks of perfume in raids throughout Central and South America.

A century later, celebrated Scottish surgeon John Hunter worked with grave robbers to obtain bodies so he could study human anatomy. His colleagues emulated his approach, and the pipeline from corpse-snatchers to anatomists continued for decades. The practice was tacitly accepted because it could yield valuable insights — Hunter discovered the tear ducts and the olfactory nerve, among other things — but the human toll was horrifying nonetheless. At public hangings, so-called sack-‘em-up men “sometimes even yanked people off the gibbet who weren’t quite dead yet,” Kean writes. “They’d merely passed out from lack of air — only to pop awake later on the dissection table.”

In a way, though, the gruesome endpoints Kean describes — the scrambled brains, the ransacked ships, the deathbeds — are the least interesting part of his story. They mostly confirm philosopher Simone Weil’s impression that real-world evil is “gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.”

What’s more compelling is Kean’s take on how the scientists justified their actions. They pushed aside thoughts of collateral damage — the lives they disrespected and damaged — by rationalizing that their contributions outweighed any harm they were doing. Freeman’s work at an early 20th-century psychiatric asylum convinced him of the unalloyed good of calming agitated patients via lobotomy. “The ward could be brightened when curtains and flowerpots were no longer in danger of being used as weapons,” Freeman observed.

Next Up Pissants - CRISPR crRNA Therapeutic "Vaccinations"

nature |  The recent dramatic appearance of variants of concern of SARS-coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) highlights the need for innovative approaches that simultaneously suppress viral replication and circumvent viral escape from host immunity and antiviral therapeutics. Here, we employ genome-wide computational prediction and single-nucleotide resolution screening to reprogram CRISPR-Cas13b against SARS-CoV-2 genomic and subgenomic RNAs. Reprogrammed Cas13b effectors targeting accessible regions of Spike and Nucleocapsid transcripts achieved >98% silencing efficiency in virus-free models. Further, optimized and multiplexed Cas13b CRISPR RNAs (crRNAs) suppress viral replication in mammalian cells infected with replication-competent SARS-CoV-2, including the recently emerging dominant variant of concern B.1.1.7. The comprehensive mutagenesis of guide-target interaction demonstrated that single-nucleotide mismatches does not impair the capacity of a potent single crRNA to simultaneously suppress ancestral and mutated SARS-CoV-2 strains in infected mammalian cells, including the Spike D614G mutant. The specificity, efficiency and rapid deployment properties of reprogrammed Cas13b described here provide a molecular blueprint for antiviral drug development to suppress and prevent a wide range of SARS-CoV-2 mutants, and is readily adaptable to other emerging pathogenic viruses.

The remarkable capability of RNA viruses to adapt to selective host and environmental pressure is highly dependent on their ability to generate genomic diversity through the occurrence of de novo mutations⁴⁶. Mutation-driven viral evolution can generate drug resistance, immune escape, and increased efficiency of transmission and pathogenicity, all of which are detrimental to the host. Although our understanding of SARS-CoV-2 mutation-driven escape mechanisms remains limited, the emergence of new variants, which possess increased infective potential⁸ or are resistant to recombinant monoclonal antibodies and antibodies in the sera of convalescent patients and vaccinated individuals^7,8,17,18,36 are of major global concern. In this study, we leveraged an innovative CRISPR-pspCas13b technology and employed two key strategies to silence SARS-CoV-2 RNA and counteract its intrinsic ability to escape standard therapies through the generation of de novo mutations.

Yet It's The Unvaccinated Being Blamed For This Conspicuous Gain Of Function

 

Something really odd is going on: In Europe we are seeing surges at many places where most of the population has already been vaccinated. At the same time, the 15 least vaccinated countries don‘t seem to face any problem. At some point, denying this problem will get painful.

this is worrying me quite a bit.https://t.co/c3uwlLAeCr

— Robert W Malone, MD (@RWMaloneMD) July 17, 2021

 

Mass vaccination with vaccines narrowly targeted at the S-protein, that prevent disease & death, but not infection & transmission, in the midst of a pandemic caused by a rapidly mutating virus that spreads asymptomatically, will lead to fully resistant variants.

 

@GVDBossche: mass vaccination with vaccines narrowly targeted at the S-protein, that prevent disease & death, but not infection & transmission, in the midst of a pandemic caused by a rapidly mutating virus that spreads asymptomatically, will lead to fully resistant variants. https://t.co/tLZWB6gqP1 pic.twitter.com/9ZmnEz6HDB

— David Windt (@DavidLWindt) July 9, 2021

Having Weathered Gilets Jaune, Macron Knows He Can Force mRNA Compliance

Guardian |  Within 72 hours of the French learning they would soon need to be vaccinated or tested to go to the cafe, more than 3 million had booked appointments and France had broken its vaccination record, administering 800,000 shots in a single day.

At the same time, daily infections, driven by the more contagious Delta variant, continued to climb, reaching nearly 9,000 on Wednesday – and on Bastille Day, about 20,000 demonstrators nationwide protested against what some called a “dictatorship”.

Polls show more than 65% public support for the range of measures unveiled by Emmanuel Macron on Monday, aimed, in the president’s words, not at “making vaccination immediately obligatory for everyone … but at pushing a maximum of you to go and get vaccinated”.

Critics, however, accuse the government of discriminating against vaccine sceptics and those who will not be fully inoculated before the rules come into effect, while others say the government is effectively imposing general vaccination by stealth, trampling on individual rights and freedoms.

Macron announced that from 21 July, anyone visiting a theatre, cinema, sports venue or festival with an audience of more than 50 people would need a health pass proving they were either fully vaccinated, had tested negative or were immune.

The same requirement will be extended to bars, cafes, restaurants, shopping centres (though not supermarkets), hospitals, long-distance trains, coaches and planes from 1 August, he said – including for children aged between 12 and 17 from 1 September.

People unable to present a valid health pass risk up to six months in prison and a fine of up to €10,000 (£8,500), according to the draft text of the law, while owners of “establishments welcoming the public” who fail to check patrons’ passes could go to jail for a year and be hit with a €45,000 fine.

Meanwhile, non-essential free coronavirus testing will also end in September, “to further encourage vaccination”, and healthcare professionals and retirement home workers who have not been vaccinated by 15 September will be suspended for a month to allow them to do so. Thereafter, they risk dismissal.

The big stick approach to vaccination, which goes further than that adopted by most governments, has had an immediate impact on take-up.

 

The Emergence Of Murcomycosis Represents Catastrophic Immune Failure Induced By Covid Reinfection

 

Since the first reports about murcomycosis black fungus infection started coming out of the vast south asian gain of function human petri dish, it has been conspicuously clear - to even the most casual observer - that something very strange is going on.

 

The organism causing Mucormycosis is actually everywhere. 

 

We humans are exposed to black fungus daily, the level of exposure depending on where you are in the world and your location’s climate. Normal immune hosts dispatch black fungus infection immediately upon contact.

 

The only times you clinically observe black fungus infection in humans is with catastrophically immunosuppressed individuals. Most notably AIDS and diabetics with chronic A1C levels above 12.

 

Murcomycosis black fungus infection is horrible. It cannot be remedied by antifungals, and to the extent that it can be remedied, it requires drastic exculpatory extraction. That means it has to be cut out. It has a predilection for the sinuses. That means that the patient gets half their face cut out often with eyes included. 

 

As you might imagine, when you become nutrient media for black fungus, that's that ass. You're over, done, kaput, DEAD-ASS...,

The immunsuppression required for this to get started normally requires years to develop. Even in the chemo related scenarios - months are required.

 

The humans conducting this vast in vitro gain of function experiment are still in the early stages of their experiment with the sars-cov2 bioweapon. 

 

This black fungus fork is screaming something about how sars-cov2 goes mob deep on the human immune system. It is obviously very important. 

 

What living memory history involves a retrovirus that directly attacked the immune system?  These types of observations are instrumental in understanding the motivations of those behind this very curious epidemic.

Reuters Says That Pfizer Says That Its mRNA Jab Is Effective Against The Delta Variant

reuters  |   The Pfizer-BioNTech >PFE.N< vaccine is highly effective against the Delta variant of COVID-19, a Pfizer official in Israel said on Thursday.

First identified in India, Delta is becoming the globally dominant variant of the coronavirus, according to the World Health Organization.

"The data we have today, accumulating from research we are conducting at the lab and including data from those places where the Indian variant, Delta, has replaced the British variant as the common variant, point to our vaccine being very effective, around 90%, in preventing the coronavirus disease, COVID-19," Alon Rappaport, Pfizer's medical director in Israel, told local broadcaster Army Radio.

A study by researchers from the University of Texas together with Pfizer and BioNtech and published this month by Nature journal found that antibodies elicited by the vaccine were still able to neutralize all tested variants, including Delta, albeit at reduced strength.

"We continue to synthesize viruses in our labs and with collaborators as we see new variants emerge so we can conduct testing to obtain the most information we can about our vaccine’s impact on neutralisation of emerging strains," a Pfizer spokesperson said in an email to Reuters.

Other recent studies have also shown the vaccine is likely to provide high protection against the variant. read more

Israel has one of the world's most advanced vaccination campaigns largely based on the Pfizer-BioNTech shot. Sharon Alroy-Preis, head of public health at Israel's Health Ministry, said that Israel still lacks enough data to provide insight into vaccine effectiveness against the Delta variant.

"We are collecting the data now. We are only now seeing the first cases of the Delta variant in Israel - about 200 of those - so we will know more soon," she told reporters on Wednesday.

Machine Learning For New Materials Design And Performance Testing

 mit  |  Materials called perovskites are widely heralded as a likely replacement for silicon as the material of choice for solar cells, but their greatest drawback is their tendency to degrade relatively rapidly. Over recent years, the usable lifetime of perovskite-based cells has gradually improved from minutes to months, but it still lags far behind the decades expected from silicon, the material currently used for virtually all commercial solar panels.

Now, an international interdisciplinary team led by MIT has come up with a new approach to narrowing the search for the best candidates for long-lasting perovskite formulations, out of a vast number of potential combinations. Already, their system has zeroed in on one composition that in the lab has improved on existing versions more than tenfold. Even under real-world conditions at full solar cell level, beyond just a small sample in a lab, this type of perovskite has performed three times better than the state-of-the-art formulations.

The findings appear in the journal Matter, in a paper by MIT research scientist Shijing Sun, MIT professors, Moungi Bawendi,  John Fisher, and Tonio Buonassisi, who is also a principal investigator at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), and 16 others from MIT, Germany, Singapore, Colorado, and New York.

Perovskites are a broad class of materials characterized by the way atoms are arranged in their layered crystal lattice. These layers, described by convention as A, B, and X, can each consist of a variety of different atoms or compounds. So, searching through the entire universe of such combinations to find the best candidates to meet specific goals — longevity, efficiency, manufacturability, and availability of source materials — is a slow and painstaking process, and largely one without any map for guidance.

“If you consider even just three elements, the most common ones in perovskites that people sub in and out are on the A site of the perovskite crystal structure,” which can each easily be varied by 1-percent increments in their relative composition, Buonassisi says. “The number of steps becomes just preposterous. It becomes very, very large” and thus impractical to search through systematically. Each step involves the complex synthesis process of creating a new material and then testing its degradation, which even under accelerated aging conditions is a time-consuming process.

The key to the team’s success is what they describe as a data fusion approach. This iterative method uses an automated system to guide the production and testing of a variety of formulations, then uses machine learning to go through the results of those tests, combined again with first-principles physical modeling, to guide the next round of experiments. The system keeps repeating that process, refining the results each time.

Buonassisi likes to compare the vast realm of possible compositions to an ocean, and he says most researchers have stayed very close to the shores of known formulations that have achieved high efficiencies, for example, by tinkering just slightly with those atomic configurations. However, “once in a while, somebody makes a mistake or has a stroke of genius and departs from that and lands somewhere else in composition space, and hey, it works better! A happy bit of serendipity, and then everybody moves over there” in their research. “But it's not usually a structured thought process.”

This new approach, he says, provides a way to explore far offshore areas in search of better properties, in a more systematic and efficient way. In their work so far, by synthesizing and testing less than 2 percent of the possible combinations among three components, the researchers were able to zero in on what seems to be the most durable formulation of a perovskite solar cell material found to date.

If Your Profession Is "Lying For Billionaires" You're In Trouble When The People Catch On...,

statnews  |  To understand why billionaires are a sign of moral and economic failure, look no further than the Covid-19 pandemic.

Drug corporations could earn $190 billion from Covid-19 vaccine sales this year. Pharmaceutical profits have minted nine new pandemic billionaires, and helped eight existing billionaires enlarge their fortunes. Several of these are founders and private investors in three pharmaceutical corporations — Moderna, BioNTech, and CureVac — whose vaccines use mRNA technology that was largely developed from publicly funded research.

Their financial bonanzas provide a disturbing contrast with vaccine apartheid. By the end of May, only 0.3% of all vaccine doses worldwide had been administered in low-income countries.

Facing condemnation for hoarding doses, the G-7 countries, which are meeting this weekend in England, are under pressure to launch a new plan to expand Covid-19 immunization globally. One hotly contested issue is whether they will call for mandatory sharing of mRNA vaccine technologies, including a proposed waiver of intellectual property rights for Covid-19 technologies.

Pandemic billionaires are speaking out against government intervention, warning it would undermine innovation and claiming that their firms can satisfy global demand for Covid-19 vaccines.

Because the public sector was largely responsible for developing mRNA technology and sharing it with corporations, the pandemic fortunes of these founders and investors stands in stark and repugnant contrast to billions of unvaccinated people.

Moderna, BioNTech, and CureVac are each led by founders or longtime executives with a key role in company decision-making: Stéphane Bancel is Moderna’s CEO, Özlem Türeci and Ugur Sahin are BioNTech’s co-founders, and Franz-Werner Haas is CureVac’s CEO. In addition to getting head starts from publicly funded research, these companies also relied on private investment provided through venture capital or family offices (privately held companies that handle investment and wealth management for wealthy families). Venture capital investors include Flagship Pioneering, a Boston-based firm whose founder, Noubar Afeyan, also serves as Moderna’s chair, and MIG AG, a German venture capital firm that made early investments in BioNTech. Other large investors in BioNTech and CureVac were German family offices, including investments by Dietmar Hopp in CureVac and the Struengmann brothers in BioNTech.

Founders, executives, venture capitalists, and family offices all held substantial ownership stakes in the three mRNA companies heading into the pandemic. All of them had a choice at the start of the pandemic: maximize profits or maximize low-cost, global production of vaccines.

The three firms chose profit maximization, partnering with multinational companies or forging partnerships with a few contract manufacturers. This year, these companies will have sold nearly all their limited supply of vaccines to wealthy countries at high prices.

They could have instead chosen to avoid scarcity and hoarding by sharing technology, know-how, and intellectual property with other manufacturers, thereby expanding and decentralizing production. It wouldn’t be like they were giving away their intellectual property for free: sharing would allow these companies to earn royalties — and profits.

 

Only In America Can You Go To School For 20 Years To Earn Minimum Wage

Fauci knows exactly how much the losers who work in the labs are worth - trust and believe - you can’t make this s*#@ up. Do YOU want fresh students/technicians living in their cars and working in the BioSafetyLevel 3 BSL-3 labs?

 

The payscale of NIH funded positions is set by these jokers - after 20 years of schooling and a masters degree, you get to earn minimum wage doing the hands-on part of gain of function research.

 

Full-time, $32,697/year. OK.

32697 / 52 weeks / 40 hours = $15.71 / hr.

wisc.edu |

Position Summary:	The Influenza Research Institute (IRI) is an active and growing influenza research laboratory supporting cutting-edge research on negative-strand RNA viruses including influenza, SARS-CoV-2, and replication-deficient ebolavirus. The research group numbers over 30 including scientists, post-docs, technicians and grad students. We are looking for a Research Specialist who will characterize influenza and SARS-CoV-2 viruses and support other laboratory operations.
Position Duties:	List of Duties
Institutional Statement on Diversity:	Diversity is a source of strength, creativity, and innovation for UW-Madison. We value the contributions of each person and respect the profound ways their identity, culture, background, experience, status, abilities, and opinion enrich the university community. We commit ourselves to the pursuit of excellence in teaching, research, outreach, and diversity as inextricably linked goals.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison fulfills its public mission by creating a welcoming and inclusive community for people from every background - people who as students, faculty, and staff serve Wisconsin and the world.

For more information on diversity and inclusion on campus, please visit: Diversity and Inclusion
Degree and Area of Specialization:	Bachelors or Masters degree in biological sciences
Minimum Years and Type of Relevant Work Experience:	Minimum two years of laboratory experience. A moderate to strong knowledge and experience in molecular biology is required. In addition, animal experience and/or NGS experience is required.

Cell culture experience is important. Animal experience and biological safety level-3 (BSL-3) experience is desirable, but not required. Candidates with Illumina miSeq and ONT sequencing are encouraged to apply. Top candidates will be trained in biosafety, animal, and infectious disease research. Excellent verbal and written communication skills are required.

Additional Information:

The successful candidate must pass a background check and be approved by the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under 42 CFR 73.8 and the Criminal Justice Information Security Risk Assessment. Ability to undergo and maintain a favorable background investigation and National Select Agent Registration security risk assessment. In addition, the ability to maintain a driver's license is required.

Annual seasonal influenza vaccination.

A criminal background check will be conducted prior to hiring.

A period of evaluation will be required.
Department(s):	A873100-SCHOOL OF VET MEDICINE/PATHOBIOLOGICAL SCIENCES

Believe The Science: SARS-CoV2 Was Lab Synthesized

WSJ  |  A genome is a blueprint for the factory of a cell to make proteins. The language is made up of three-letter “words,” 64 in total, that represent the 20 different amino acids. For example, there are six different words for the amino acid arginine, the one that is often used in supercharging viruses. Every cell has a different preference for which word it likes to use most.

In the case of the gain-of-function supercharge, other sequences could have been spliced into this same site. Instead of a CGG-CGG (known as “double CGG”) that tells the protein factory to make two arginine amino acids in a row, you’ll obtain equal lethality by splicing any one of 35 of the other two-word combinations for double arginine. If the insertion takes place naturally, say through recombination, then one of those 35 other sequences is far more likely to appear; CGG is rarely used in the class of coronaviruses that can recombine with CoV-2.

In fact, in the entire class of coronaviruses that includes CoV-2, the CGG-CGG combination has never been found naturally. That means the common method of viruses picking up new skills, called recombination, cannot operate here. A virus simply cannot pick up a sequence from another virus if that sequence isn’t present in any other virus.

Although the double CGG is suppressed naturally, the opposite is true in laboratory work. The insertion sequence of choice is the double CGG. That’s because it is readily available and convenient, and scientists have a great deal of experience inserting it. An additional advantage of the double CGG sequence compared with the other 35 possible choices: It creates a useful beacon that permits the scientists to track the insertion in the laboratory.

Now the damning fact. It was this exact sequence that appears in CoV-2. Proponents of zoonotic origin must explain why the novel coronavirus, when it mutated or recombined, happened to pick its least favorite combination, the double CGG. Why did it replicate the choice the lab’s gain-of-function researchers would have made?

Yes, it could have happened randomly, through mutations. But do you believe that? At the minimum, this fact—that the coronavirus, with all its random possibilities, took the rare and unnatural combination used by human researchers—implies that the leading theory for the origin of the coronavirus must be laboratory escape.

When the lab’s Shi Zhengli and colleagues published a paper in February 2020 with the virus’s partial genome, they omitted any mention of the special sequence that supercharges the virus or the rare double CGG section. Yet the fingerprint is easily identified in the data that accompanied the paper. Was it omitted in the hope that nobody would notice this evidence of the gain-of-function origin?

Anthony Fauci And Kristian Andersen SMDH....,

politico |  At the heart of the current broadside against Fauci is reporting around — and the investigation into — the Wuhan lab leak theory, which holds that the virus leaked, accidentally or intentionally, from a virology lab in the city where it was first found. Republicans and right-wing media outlets have circulated such theories since the beginning of the pandemic even as scientists, including Fauci, insisted that problematic coronaviruses, from the SARS and MERS epidemics to Covid-19, were becoming increasingly common.

The pressure to probe Wuhan lab leak theories continued to mount, leading Trump’s White House to demand in April 2020 that the National Institutes of Health abruptly cancel a multimillion-dollar grant to EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit studying coronavirus origins that had worked with the Wuhan viral lab in the past. April emails between EcoHealth Alliance CEO Peter Daszak and Fauci, published as part of the recent FOIA, have become a new touchstone for conspiracy theorists, after Daszak thanked the NIAID director for dismissing lab leak theories early in the pandemic.

“I just wanted to say a personal thank you on behalf of our staff and collaborators, for publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19 from a bat-to-human spillover, not a lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Daszak wrote to Fauci on April 18, 2020.

“Many thanks for your kind note,” Fauci responded the next day, just over a week before POLITICO first reported that NIH canceled the EcoHealth grant. Daszak did not respond to a POLITICO request for comment.

Theories about a leak from the Wuhan virology lab became a consistent line of questioning for Republican lawmakers by last spring and soon turned into a mainstay of congressional hearings and increasingly contentious exchanges between Fauci and Paul, who sits on the Senate health committee. The longtime NIAID director and Kentucky doctor have exchanged barbs on television after Senate hearings where Paul accused Fauci of moving the goalposts on coronavirus science while the infectious disease scientist has told Paul that “with all due respect,” he was “entirely and completely incorrect.”

Paul was swift to accuse Fauci on Wednesday of knowledge of the Wuhan lab allegedly carrying out controversial “gain-of-function” studies, a field of research that alters viruses in a way that can make them more transmissible or help them hop to new hosts, such as humans.

A senior NIH official insisted to POLITICO that detractors such as Paul are taking Fauci’s emails “out of context.” But the prevailing posture, like that of the White House, was to downplay rather than engage.

“The FOIA articles are discussed like any other issues and then we move on,” the official said. “We're taking it seriously, of course, but it's not changing how we do business or our focus.”

 

 

 

The Fight To Uncover The Origin Of Covid-19

vanityfair |  Since December 1, 2019, the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 has infected more than 170 million people around the world and killed more than 3.5 million. To this day, we don’t know how or why this novel coronavirus suddenly appeared in the human population. Answering that question is more than an academic pursuit: Without knowing where it came from, we can’t be sure we’re taking the right steps to prevent a recurrence.

And yet, in the wake of the Lancet statement and under the cloud of Donald Trump’s toxic racism, which contributed to an alarming wave of anti-Asian violence in the U.S., one possible answer to this all-important question remained largely off-limits until the spring of 2021.

Behind closed doors, however, national security and public health experts and officials across a range of departments in the executive branch were locked in high-stakes battles over what could and couldn’t be investigated and made public.

A months long Vanity Fair investigation, interviews with more than 40 people, and a review of hundreds of pages of U.S. government documents, including internal memos, meeting minutes, and email correspondence, found that conflicts of interest, stemming in part from large government grants supporting controversial virology research, hampered the U.S. investigation into COVID-19’s origin at every step. In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it.

In an internal memo obtained by Vanity Fair, Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote that staff from two bureaus, his own and the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, “warned” leaders within his bureau “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19” because it would “‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.”

There are reasons to doubt the lab-leak hypothesis. There is a long, well-documented history of natural spillovers leading to outbreaks, even when the initial and intermediate host animals have remained a mystery for months and years, and some expert virologists say the supposed oddities of the SARS-CoV-2 sequence have been found in nature.

But for most of the past year, the lab-leak scenario was treated not simply as unlikely or even inaccurate but as morally out-of-bounds. In late March, former Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN that he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab. “I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis,” Redfield told Vanity Fair. “I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science.”

With President Trump out of office, it should be possible to reject his xenophobic agenda and still ask why, in all places in the world, did the outbreak begin in the city with a laboratory housing one of the world’s most extensive collection of bat viruses, doing some of the most aggressive research?

Why The Narrative Shift On The Lab-Leak Hypothesis?

 CJR |  What changed? There’s still no direct evidence to validate the lab-leak theory. There has been fresh contextual reporting: the Journal recently revealed the existence of a US intelligence document claiming that three researchers at the Wuhan lab were hospitalized in November 2019. (The Trump administration previously issued a fuzzier version of this claim; the Journal’s sources disagreed as to the strength of the intelligence.) Eighteen scientists wrote in Science that an investigation conducted by the World Health Organization and China failed to give “balanced consideration” to the natural-origin and lab-leak hypotheses. Nicholas Wade, a former Times science journalist, wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that, as things stand, “proponents of lab escape can explain all the available facts about SARS2 considerably more easily than can those who favor natural emergence,” and Donald G. McNeil, Jr., another former Times reporter (who recently left the paper following an allegation of racism), wrote on Medium essentially backing Wade up. Dr. Anthony Fauci suggested that he’s not as confident as he was in the natural-origin theory. President Biden revealed that the intelligence community is split on the question, and ordered a further investigation to report back within ninety days.

Others say that, actually, nothing has really changed—a position that seems to unite observers who think the lab-leak theory was always credible and those who continue to doubt it. “The theory has always been the same,” Josh Rogin, a Post columnist who reported over a year ago on US safety concerns around the Wuhan lab, tweeted. “The people who got it wrong changed their minds.” Striking a different note, Angela Rasmussen, a prominent virologist, argued that “the media has chosen to dress up old speculation as new information and claim that it’s evidence. It’s not. It’s speculative, and all origin hypotheses remain possible.”

There is an awful lot to unpack here. The nub of the media criticism is, in my view, justified. Last April, I wrote, responding to Rogin’s reporting, that the press should “isolate legitimate questions” from conspiratorial noise “and try and report out the answers”; numerous journalists took this approach to the lab-leak theory, but many others did indeed dismiss it as an illegitimate line of inquiry. Such stories channeled familiar broader problems with pandemic coverage—principally, the contriving of scientific certainty in the absence of expert consensus, exacerbated by the urgent political stakes of all the conspiratorial noise. We are now seeing scientists argue in good faith about what the evidence shows—indeed, what the evidence is. This was always desirable; too often, however, argument itself was tarred as a bad-faith act.

Lil'Fauci Has ALWAYS Been A Gain Of Function Proponent

theaustralian |  America’s top medical adviser for the coronavirus, Anthony Fauci, argued that the benefits of experimenting on contagious viruses – manipulating and heightening their infectious potency – was worth the risk of a laboratory accident sparking a pandemic.

In previously unreported remarks, Dr Fauci supported the contentious gain-of-­function experiments that some now fear might have led to an escape from a Wuhan laboratory causing the Covid-19 pandemic, calling them “important work”.

An investigation by The Weekend Australian has also confirmed Dr Fauci, the director of the Nat­ional Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, did not alert senior White House officials before lifting the ban on gain-of-function research in 2017.

Writing in the American Society for Microbiology in October 2012, Dr Fauci acknowledged the controversial scientific research could spark a pandemic.

“In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic?” he wrote. “Many ask reasonable questions: given the possibility of such a scenario – however remote – should the initial experiments have been performed and/or published in the first place, and what were the processes involved in this decision?

“Scientists working in this field might say – as indeed I have said – that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks.

 

 

So, If Covid WAS Manmade, What You Gonna Do About It?!?!

WaPo |  The mainstream media is engaged in some very warranted soul-searching when it comes to the possibility that the coronavirus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, rather than occurring naturally. Reporters often wrote about the theory dismissively, citing scientists who backed that up. There is still no real proof the theory is true, but scientists now regard it as increasingly plausible, as The Post’s Glenn Kessler detailed this week. And the Biden administration says it’s redoubling efforts to get to the truth.

But beyond media accountability, it’s valid to ask: What’s really at stake here? If the theory were somehow proved, what would it change, including for the U.S. government, its top officials, including the current and former presidents, and China?

A big part of the appeal of the theory right now — beyond the chance to apply egg to the face of the popular boogeyman (particularly on the right) that is the media — lies in how intriguing it is. A deadly worldwide pandemic originating from a lab accident — or worse — is basically a Hollywood script. That it would involve a nefarious and powerful foreign government that also happens to be communist is almost a bit too over the top.

As for what it would mean for China’s culpability? We already know the virus came from China and that the Chinese government has been anything but transparent. This began on its watch, and its lack of transparency cost the world valuable time in preparing for and combating the spread of the virus.

If the virus came from one of its labs, that would mean China was even more negligent (at best) than previously known and that its coverup was even worse. It’s possible that even the Chinese government might not truly know what happened. But regardless, it has balked at admitting outside scientists who might be able to shed light on this and many other subjects.

Some have wagered that if such a theory proves true, it might turn China into something of a pariah state, given how angry other countries would be. There would be calls for extensive sanctions, particularly from the United States. But much of the world, including this country, relies upon trade with China, making such efforts fraught.

It would also raise questions about just how it leaked from the lab. We know scientists engage in sometimes-controversial “gain of function” experiments on viruses, but the most severe theories go quite a bit further: They involve the idea that China was engaging in even more dangerous conduct and possibly experimenting with a deliberate bioweapon. Proving such a thing would be even more difficult than proving a lab leak, and there are many more reasons to doubt the bioweapon theory than the lab leak theory. But it would force some very tough conversations — and pressure — to determine just how it leaked from the lab and how negligent or potentially nefarious China’s actions were.

David Asher "To Say Covid Came Out Of A Zoonotic Situation, It's Ridiculous"

Foxnews |  A government probe last year into the origins of the coronavirus found practically no evidence COVID-19 originated from nature, former State Department official David Asher told Fox News on Thursday.

"We were finding that despite the claims of our scientific community, including the National Institutes of Health and Dr. Fauci's NIAID organization, there was almost no evidence that supported a natural, zoonotic evolution or source of COVID-19," he told "America Reports."

The probe was led out of the State Department’s arms control and verification (AVC) bureau and initially launched at the request of former Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo before ending this year.

Asher, the lead contractor on the subject, said the team investigated the two chief hypotheses for the virus' origins, the other being the lab-leak theory that has gained credence after widespread media dismissal over the past year.

"The data disproportionately stacked up as we investigated that it was coming out of a lab or some supernatural source," he said.

Asher has a history of investigative work tracking money for the AQ Khan network, North Korea's nuclear program, and top Al Qaeda leaders, but has fallen under scrutiny from former State Department officials.

Asher was critical Thursday of former Assistant Secretary of State Chris Ford, who expressed reservations about the investigation's findings and cautioned against the lab theory. Ford told Fox News that the AVC probe had been kept secret from him and bypassed department and intelligence community biological experts, although adding the lab origin theory was "very possible."

The Wuhan Institute of Virology has become a central focus of investigators looking into the virus' origins, in part due to its known research on bat coronaviruses.

"That was the epicenter of synthetic biology in the People's Republic of China, and they were up to some very hairy stuff with synthetic biology and so-called gain-of-function techniques," Asher said, later saying the odds of natural origin were extremely long.

From The Very Outset LET HER RIP!!! Has Been The U.S. Covid Mitigation Strategy...,

nakedcapitalism | The question that I have no answer to is when exactly was it decided to not contain it. If you remember, some information came out about early and mid-February 2020 closed Senate meetings, after which senators were selling their shares in hotels and airlines, i.e. what was going to happen in late March was known at that time. But it was not in fact too late to contain it in early February, it could have been done with test-trace-isolate. So maybe it was perceived at the time that it could not be, assuming the decision was made as late as possible within that timeline. But the earlier that decision happened, the more nefarious motivations one would have to suspect were involved, because why would you not at least try to contain it when it was eminently doable? After all SARS-1 was contained even though it reached hundreds of cases in Canada and the US. And then what followed was the outright sabotage of testing and detection by the CDC,¹ the CDC allowing strongly suspected to be infected people to just get off their flight and walk right back into the community, and a rather long list of other such absurd actions. Maybe one day internal information will leak and we will learn the truth, who knows…

Also, this all becomes even more gruesome when one realizes that the decision of the US to allow it to become endemic meant the same decision was imposed on most of the rest of the world, as the US controls it. As I said above, Eastern Europe (except for Belarus and Russia) took it very seriously early on and locked down before it had gotten out of hand, and was in fact very close to elimination. Montenegro, which eventually ended up being one of the worst affected countries, actually did eliminate it in May 2020.

But once it became clear the US will not eliminate and the EU will not eliminate, those countries had no choice, although they could have at least held out for vaccines instead of letting it rip. There was never going to be a world in which the EU and Latin America have indefinitely banned travel out of the US, not with US military bases stationed all over Europe. And there was never going to be a world in which Bulgaria and Romania ban travel from Germany.

The really sad part is that a country like Russia supposedly does have that independence, and could have gone for elimination and closed borders and a bubble with China. But modern Russia is not the USSR, it’s just as, if not more neoliberal than the US, so they let it rip too, for the same reasons as in the US…

And now some the countries that did the right thing — Taiwan, Vietnam, and Laos — are encircled and battling their worst outbreaks since the start, which is heartbreaking to watch. 

The combination of infection level and vaccine effectiveness lead toward viral evolutionary selection:

 Unfortunately, with many respected scientists jumping on board of the optimism hype train (it was quite noticeable how the mood shifted on purely scientific matters that had absolutely nothing to do with politics a few months ago), the wrong message has already been once again sent to the public, and we can expect disaster in the future.

Non-sterilizing vaccines mean the virus will not only get the chance to evolve complete escape but will be channeled in that direction. But it also may be channeled in the direction of being much more virulent as a side effect of its fight with the vaccines (this can get quite detailed on a molecular level so I will not go into it right now).

The math does not look good — the unmitigated-spread R_0 in February 2020 was much closer to 6.0 than to the usually cited 2.0. But the current variants have undergone adaptation and are much more contagious. Let’s say we have R_0 = 6. And let’s say we reach 70% vaccination (it’s hard to see how we will get higher), and that transmission is cut by 80% (this, however, is simplistic — it is quite likely that transmission is cut by 80% in the first couple months after vaccination, but then the first thing that will wear off is protection from infection, with protection from severe disease going away last). That’s 56% effective vaccination. But the herd immunity threshold for R_0=6 is 85%, a lot higher, i.e. it will continue to spread. It might in fact continue to spread even with 100% vaccination with a full return to 2019 in terms of lack of social distancing.

So we should absolutely never have gone down the path of “solving” this crisis with vaccines and not doing anything to stop transmission. The vaccines should have been used as one of the tools to eliminate the virus, but in combination with NPIs.

If evolution featured in the thinking of our overlords, they would not have settled on this as the “solution” to the problem. But either it does not, or they just don’t care.

P.S. Some more sobering simple math. Let’s say the vaccine is 90% protective against severe disease over a period of two years. Then one can expect to have on average three serious COVID episodes by the time he is 60 even if he is always up-to-date with his biannual vaccinations (and there is no knowing how much more virulent to young people it will have become in the future with all the serial passaging). We now see what round #1 of mass reinfections looks like in India. So that is the “solution” being offered right now. However, it will probably not happen as one giant apocalyptic wave so it can be pushed to the background as a non-problem.

Adversary Drones Are Toying With The Homeland And "We're" Helpless To Stop It...,

thedrive |  We may not know the identities of all the mysterious craft that American military personnel and others have been seeing in the skies as of late, but I have seen more than enough to tell you that it is clear that a very terrestrial adversary is toying with us in our own backyard using relatively simple technologies—drones and balloons—and making off with what could be the biggest intelligence haul of a generation. While that may disappoint some who hope the origins of all these events are far more exotic in nature, the strategic implications of these bold operations, which have been happening for years, undeterred, are absolutely massive.

Our team here at The War Zone has spent the last two years indirectly laying out a case for the hypothesis that many of the events involving supposed UFOs, or unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), as they are now often called, over the last decade are actually the manifestation of foreign adversaries harnessing advances in lower-end unmanned aerial vehicle technology, and even simpler platforms, to gather intelligence of extreme fidelity on some of America's most sensitive warfighting capabilities. Now, considering all the news on this topic in recent weeks, including our own major story on a series of bizarre incidents involving U.S. Navy destroyers and 'UAP' off the Southern California coast in 2019, it's time to not only sum up our case, but to discuss the broader implications of these revelations, what needs to be done about them, and the Pentagon's fledgling 'UAP Task Force' as a whole.

Yes, I realize that the idea that an adversary is penetrating U.S. military training areas unmolested, and has been for years, using lowly drone technology and balloons, is a big pill to swallow, but as one of the people who have repeatedly warned about the threat posed by lower-end drones for a decade—warnings that largely were dismissed by the Pentagon until drones made or altered in ramshackle ISIS workshops in a war zone were literally raining down bomblets on U.S. and allied forces in Iraq—it isn't really surprising at all. Nor is the fact that the Defense Department is still playing catch-up when it comes to the realities surrounding the drone threat, and not just to its forces abroad, but also to the homeland overall. The utter lack of vision and early robust interest in regards to this emerging threat will go down as one of the Pentagon's biggest strategic missteps of our time.

The gross inaction and the stigma surrounding unexplained aerial phenomena as a whole has led to what appears to be the paralyzation of the systems designed to protect us and our most critical military technologies, pointing to a massive failure in U.S. military intelligence. This is a blind spot we ourselves literally created out of cultural taboos and a military-industrial complex that is ill-suited to foresee and counter a lower-end threat that is very hard to defend against.