The Administration Is Stockpiling Billions In Pfizer Jabs To Reboot The Jackpot This Fall

thehill |  The Biden administration announced Wednesday that is paying $3.2 billion for 105 million doses of an updated Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine for a fall campaign, pending Food and Drug Administration signoff on the new formula.  

The order is a major step in the administration’s efforts to move forward with a new vaccination push this fall, in a bid to blunt a renewed COVID-19 surge when the weather turns colder in much of the country.  

The updated vaccine is expected to target the omicron variant, with the goal of providing improved protection.  

The new doses are expected to begin to be delivered “as soon as late summer 2022 and continue into the fourth quarter of this year,” Pfizer said in a news release.  

The Biden administration is using money that it was forced to cut from other areas of its COVID-19 response after Congress did not act on the administration’s request for new funds.  

The administration warns that it has had to cut money from important areas like maintaining testing capacity and doing research on improved vaccines, such as “pan-coronavirus” shots that work on multiple variants.  

The White House is still pushing for more money from Congress, but prospects on Capitol Hill are not looking particularly hopeful amid a continued stalemate. Republicans have pushed back on the urgency for the funds.  

White House COVID-19 response coordinator Ashish Jha said that “despite months of warnings from the Administration on the consequences of a lack of funding,” due to Congress’s lack of action, Wednesday’s order “will not purchase enough vaccines to offer one of these new booster shots to every adult and unfortunately, comes at the expense of continued funding for other critical pandemic response needs like testing manufacturing and domestic vaccine manufacturing.”

The order placed on Wednesday, though, will ensure the country is not completely lacking in updated vaccines for the fall.  

“We look forward to taking delivery of these new variant-specific vaccines and working with state and local health departments, pharmacies, health care providers, federally qualified health centers, and other partners to make them available in communities around the country this fall,” said Dawn O’Connell, an assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services.  

A Food and Drug Administration advisory committee on Thursday gave the green light to updating vaccines for omicron, though there are still more steps in the approval process. 

Uptake of even a first booster dose, which is recommended for everyone aged 5 and older, has been lagging, an indication that not everyone will want an updated booster this fall.  

About 105 million people have received their first booster dose, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention figures. 

 

mRNA Jabs Interfere Too Deeply And Dangerously With Processes We Don't Understand

RNA Is The Embodied Information That Sets Causal Boundary Conditions

axial  |  Schrödinger won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933 and was exiled from his native home Austria after the nation was annexed by Nazi Germany. He moved to Ireland after he was invited to set up the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies. This follows the past history of Ireland acting as a storehouse of knowledge during the Dark Ages. After decades of work, biology was becoming more formalized around the 1940s. Better tools were emerging to perturb various organisms and samples and the increasing number of discoveries was building out the framework of life. With the rediscovery of Mendel’s work on genetics, scientists probably most importantly Thomas Hunt Morgan and his work on fruit flies (Drosophila) set up the rules of heredity - genes located on chromosomes with each cell containing a set of chromosomes. In 1927, a seminal discovery was made that irradiation by X-rays of fruits flies can induce mutations. Just the medium was not known where Schrödinger was thinking through his ideas on biology. At the same type, organic chemistry was improving and various macromolecules in the cell such as enzymes were being identified along with the various types of bonds made. For Schrödinger, there were no tools to characterized these macromolecules (i.e. proteins, nucleic acids) such as X-ray crystallography. Really the only tool useful at the time was centrifugation. At the time, many people expected proteins to be the store and transmitter of genetic information. Luckily, Oswald Avery published an incredible paper in 1944 that found DNA as probably the store instead of proteins.

With this knowledge base Schrödinger took a beginner’s mind to biology. In some ways his naivety was incredibly useful. Instead of being anchored to some widely-accepted premise that proteins transmitted genetic information (although he had a hunch some protein was responsible), the book thought from first principles and identified a few key concepts in biology that were not appreciated but became very important. Thankfully Schrödinger was curious - he enjoyed writing poetry and reading philosophy so jumped into biology somewhat fearlessly. At the beginning of the book, he sets the main question as:

“How can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry?”

Information

In the first chapter, Schrödinger argues that because organisms have orderly behavior they must follow the laws of physics. Because physics relies on statistics, life was follow the same rules. He then argues that because biological properties have some level of permanence the material that stores this information then must be stable. This material must have the ability to change from one stable state to another (i.e. mutations). Classical physics is not very useful here, but for Schrödinger his expertise in quantum mechanics helped determine that these stable states must be held together through covalent bonds (a quantum phenomena) within a macromolecule. In the early chapters, the book argues that the gene must be a stable macromolecule.

Through discussion around the stability of the gene, the book makes its most important breakthrough - an analogy between a gene and an aperiodic crystal (DNA is aperiodic but Schrödinger amazingly didn’t know that at the time): “the germ of a solid.” Simply, a periodic crystal can store a small amount of information with an infinite number of atoms and an aperiodic crystal has the ability to store a near infinite amount of information in a small number of atoms. The latter was more in line with what the current data suggested what a gene was. Max Delbrück had similar ideas along with J.B.S. Haldane, but the book was the first to connect this idea to heredity. But readers at the time and maybe even still overextended this framework to believe that genetic code contains all of the information to build an organism. This isn’t true, development requires an environment with some level of randomness.

GOD Must Be Small In Size And Permanent In Time

wikipedia |  In chapter I, Schrödinger explains that most physical laws on a large scale are due to chaos on a small scale. He calls this principle "order-from-disorder." As an example he mentions diffusion, which can be modeled as a highly ordered process, but which is caused by random movement of atoms or molecules. If the number of atoms is reduced, the behaviour of a system becomes more and more random. He states that life greatly depends on order and that a naïve physicist may assume that the master code of a living organism has to consist of a large number of atoms.

In chapter II and III, he summarizes what was known at this time about the hereditary mechanism. Most importantly, he elaborates the important role mutations play in evolution. He concludes that the carrier of hereditary information has to be both small in size and permanent in time, contradicting the naïve physicist's expectation. This contradiction cannot be resolved by classical physics.

In chapter IV, Schrödinger presents molecules, which are indeed stable even if they consist of only a few atoms, as the solution. Even though molecules were known before, their stability could not be explained by classical physics, but is due to the discrete nature of quantum mechanics. Furthermore, mutations are directly linked to quantum leaps.

He continues to explain, in chapter V, that true solids, which are also permanent, are crystals. The stability of molecules and crystals is due to the same principles and a molecule might be called "the germ of a solid." On the other hand, an amorphous solid, without crystalline structure, should be regarded as a liquid with a very high viscosity. Schrödinger believes the heredity material to be a molecule, which unlike a crystal does not repeat itself. He calls this an aperiodic crystal. Its aperiodic nature allows it to encode an almost infinite number of possibilities with a small number of atoms. He finally compares this picture with the known facts and finds it in accordance with them.

In chapter VI Schrödinger states:

...living matter, while not eluding the "laws of physics" as established up to date, is likely to involve "other laws of physics" hitherto unknown, which however, once they have been revealed, will form just as integral a part of science as the former.

He knows that this statement is open to misconception and tries to clarify it. The main principle involved with "order-from-disorder" is the second law of thermodynamics, according to which entropy only increases in a closed system (such as the universe). Schrödinger explains that living matter evades the decay to thermodynamical equilibrium by homeostatically maintaining negative entropy in an open system.

In chapter VII, he maintains that "order-from-order" is not absolutely new to physics; in fact, it is even simpler and more plausible. But nature follows "order-from-disorder", with some exceptions as the movement of the celestial bodies and the behaviour of mechanical devices such as clocks. But even those are influenced by thermal and frictional forces. The degree to which a system functions mechanically or statistically depends on the temperature. If heated, a clock ceases to function, because it melts. Conversely, if the temperature approaches absolute zero, any system behaves more and more mechanically. Some systems approach this mechanical behaviour rather fast with room temperature already being practically equivalent to absolute zero.

Schrödinger concludes this chapter and the book with philosophical speculations on determinism, free will, and the mystery of human consciousness. He attempts to "see whether we cannot draw the correct non-contradictory conclusion from the following two premises: (1) My body functions as a pure mechanism according to Laws of Nature; and (2) Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, of which I foresee the effects, that may be fateful and all-important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility for them. The only possible inference from these two facts is, I think, that I – I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt 'I' – am the person, if any, who controls the 'motion of the atoms' according to the Laws of Nature". Schrödinger then states that this insight is not new and that Upanishads considered this insight of "ATHMAN = BRAHMAN" to "represent quintessence of deepest insights into the happenings of the world." Schrödinger rejects the idea that the source of consciousness should perish with the body because he finds the idea "distasteful". He also rejects the idea that there are multiple immortal souls that can exist without the body because he believes that consciousness is nevertheless highly dependent on the body. Schrödinger writes that, to reconcile the two premises,

The only possible alternative is simply to keep to the immediate experience that consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown; that there is only one thing and that what seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing…

Any intuitions that consciousness is plural, he says, are illusions. Schrödinger is sympathetic to the Hindu concept of Brahman, by which each individual's consciousness is only a manifestation of a unitary consciousness pervading the universe — which corresponds to the Hindu concept of God. Schrödinger concludes that "...'I' am the person, if any, who controls the 'motion of the atoms' according to the Laws of Nature." However, he also qualifies the conclusion as "necessarily subjective" in its "philosophical implications". In the final paragraph, he points out that what is meant by "I" is not the collection of experienced events but "namely the canvas upon which they are collected." If a hypnotist succeeds in blotting out all earlier reminiscences, he writes, there would be no loss of personal existence — "Nor will there ever be."^[8]

Last Year Under Mandate - I Started Getting Worked Up About The mRNA Jabs

Fugg Around With Sheeple Quantum Biology, But You Not Gonna Phug With Mine...,

medical-net  |  Quantum biology is an emerging field of science, established in the 1920s, which looks at whether the subatomic world of quantum mechanics plays a role in living cells. Quantum mechanics is an interdisciplinary field by nature, bringing together nuclear physicists, biochemists and molecular biologists.

In a research paper published by the journal Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, a team from Surrey's Leverhulme Quantum Biology Doctoral Training Centre used state-of-the-art computer simulations and quantum mechanical methods to determine the role proton tunneling, a purely quantum phenomenon, plays in spontaneous mutations inside DNA.

Proton tunneling involves the spontaneous disappearance of a proton from one location and the same proton's re-appearance nearby.

The research team found that atoms of hydrogen, which are very light, provide the bonds that hold the two strands of the DNA's double helix together and can, under certain conditions, behave like spread-out waves that can exist in multiple locations at once, thanks to proton tunneling. This leads to these atoms occasionally being found on the wrong strand of DNA, leading to mutations.

Although these mutations' lifetime is short, the team from Surrey has revealed that they can still survive the DNA replication mechanism inside cells and could potentially have health consequences.

Dr Marco Sacchi, the project lead and Royal Society University Research Fellow at the University of Surrey, said: "Many have long suspected that the quantum world - which is weird, counter-intuitive and wonderful - plays a role in life as we know it. While the idea that something can be present in two places at the same time might be absurd to many of us, this happens all the time in the quantum world, and our study confirms that quantum tunneling also happens in DNA at room temperature."

There is still a long and exciting road ahead of us to understand how biological processes work on the subatomic level, but our study - and countless others over the recent years - have confirmed quantum mechanics are at play. In the future, we are hoping to investigate how tautomers produced by quantum tunneling can propagate and generate genetic mutations."

Louie Slocombe, PhD Student, Leverhulme Quantum Biology Doctoral Training Centre and Study Co-Author

Jim Al-Khalili, a co-author of the study and Co-Director of the Leverhulme Quantum Biology Doctoral Training Centre at the University of Surrey, said: "It has been thrilling to work with this group of young, diverse and talented thinkers - made up of a broad coalition of the scientific world. This work cements quantum biology as the most exciting field of scientific research in the 21st century."

mRNA Neo-Vaccinoids Are An ABOMINATION To The Root Of Life Itself

discovermagazine |  With photosynthesis, scientists show for the first time that there are quantum effects in living systems. This could lead to better solar panels, energy storage or even quantum computers. (Credit: Shutterstock) We all probably learned about photosynthesis, how plants turn sunlight into energy, in school. It might seem, therefore, that we figured out this bit of the world. But scientists are still learning new things about even the most basic stuff (see also the sun and moon), and photosynthesis is no different. In particular, according to a study released Monday in Nature Chemistry, an international team of scientists showed that molecules involved in photosynthesis display quantum mechanical behavior. Even though we’d suspected as much before, this is the first time we’ve seen quantum effects in living systems. Not only will it help us better understand plants, sunlight and everything in between, but it could also mean cool new tech in the future.

The Quantum Conundrum

First, let’s back up. While photosynthesis may be taught in classrooms the world over, quantum mechanics is a bit less popular, in part because it’s so weird. Nobel Prize-winning quantum physicist Richard Feynman once said, "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics." It’s so impenetrable to non-experts that the same metaphors come up whenever someone tries to explain it. You might have heard of Schrödinger's Cat, which is both alive and dead at the same time thanks to quantum weirdness — in particular, because electrons can be in two states at the same time. It’s only when we observe the system that the weirdness collapses and reality “picks” one state: the cat’s actually alive (or dead), the electron’s actually at this end of the room (or that end). But quantum effects are typically limited to the very small, and only really observable in perfect, laboratory conditions. A living being, with its wet, messy systems, would be a tough place to find some quantum weirdness lurking — and yet we have. 

Molecular Madness

Scientists zoomed in on the Fenna-Matthews-Olson (FMO) complex, a key component of green sulfur bacteria's machinery for photosynthesis. It’s been a historical favorite for such research because we’ve long known its structure and it's fairly easy to work with. Previous experiments had seemed to show light-sensitive molecules in this area in two different states at the same time — that’s quantum weirdness — but the effect lasted more than 1 picosecond, which is much longer than expected. This new study shows that it was really just regular vibrations in the molecules, nothing quantum about it. But researchers have been excited about the possibilities of quantum biology for years, so having disproved the earlier experiments, the authors wanted to find some new evidence of their own. “We wondered if we might be able to observe that Schrödinger cat situation,” says co-author Thomas la Cour Jansen in a press release. And observe it they did! With a technique called two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy, researchers saw molecules in simultaneous excited states — quantum weirdness akin to a cat being alive and dead at the same time. What’s more, the effect lasted exactly as long as theories predicted it, suggesting this evidence of quantum biology will last. As the authors succinctly put it, “Thus, our measurements provide an unambiguous experimental observation of excited-state vibronic coherence in the FMO complex.” What could be simpler? The results shed light (haha) on how to harvest energy from light, and the team thinks they’re “generally applicable” to a variety of systems, living and non-living alike. This means it could result in engineering benefits such as better solar panels, energy storage or even quantum computers. And, of course, updated textbooks for tomorrow’s lessons on photosynthesis.

 

I Don't Think Of Quantum Biology As A Metaphor...,

quantamagazine  |   It’s not surprising that quantum physics has a reputation for being weird and counterintuitive. The world we’re living in sure doesn’t feel quantum mechanical. And until the 20th century, everyone assumed that the classical laws of physics devised by Isaac Newton and others — according to which objects have well-defined positions and properties at all times — would work at every scale. But Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and their contemporaries discovered that down among atoms and subatomic particles, this concreteness dissolves into a soup of possibilities. An atom typically can’t be assigned a definite position, for example — we can merely calculate the probability of finding it in various places. The vexing question then becomes: How do quantum probabilities coalesce into the sharp focus of the classical world?

Physicists sometimes talk about this changeover as the “quantum-classical transition.” But in fact there’s no reason to think that the large and the small have fundamentally different rules, or that there’s a sudden switch between them. Over the past several decades, researchers have achieved a greater understanding of how quantum mechanics inevitably becomes classical mechanics through an interaction between a particle or other microscopic system and its surrounding environment.

One of the most remarkable ideas in this theoretical framework is that the definite properties of objects that we associate with classical physics — position and speed, say — are selected from a menu of quantum possibilities in a process loosely analogous to natural selection in evolution: The properties that survive are in some sense the “fittest.” As in natural selection, the survivors are those that make the most copies of themselves. This means that many independent observers can make measurements of a quantum system and agree on the outcome — a hallmark of classical behavior.

This idea, called quantum Darwinism (QD), explains a lot about why we experience the world the way we do rather than in the peculiar way it manifests at the scale of atoms and fundamental particles. Although aspects of the puzzle remain unresolved, QD helps heal the apparent rift between quantum and classical physics.

Only recently, however, has quantum Darwinism been put to the experimental test. Three research groups, working independently in Italy, China and Germany, have looked for the telltale signature of the natural selection process by which information about a quantum system gets repeatedly imprinted on various controlled environments. These tests are rudimentary, and experts say there’s still much more to be done before we can feel sure that QD provides the right picture of how our concrete reality condenses from the multiple options that quantum mechanics offers. Yet so far, the theory checks out.

 

 

 

Quantum Physics And Engineered Viruses

MIT  | Nature has had billions of years to perfect photosynthesis, which directly or indirectly supports virtually all life on Earth. In that time, the process has achieved almost 100 percent efficiency in transporting the energy of sunlight from receptors to reaction centers where it can be harnessed — a performance vastly better than even the best solar cells.

One way plants achieve this efficiency is by making use of the exotic effects of quantum mechanics — effects sometimes known as “quantum weirdness.” These effects, which include the ability of a particle to exist in more than one place at a time, have now been used by engineers at MIT to achieve a significant efficiency boost in a light-harvesting system.

Surprisingly, the researchers at MIT and Eni, the Italian energy company, achieved this new approach to solar energy not with high-tech materials or microchips — but by using genetically engineered viruses.

This achievement in coupling quantum research and genetic manipulation, described this week in the journal Nature Materials, was the work of MIT professors Angela Belcher, an expert on engineering viruses to carry out energy-related tasks, and Seth Lloyd, an expert on quantum theory and its potential applications; research associate Heechul Park; and 14 collaborators at MIT, Eni, and Italian universities.

Lloyd, the Nam Pyo Suh Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, explains that in photosynthesis, a photon hits a receptor called a chromophore, which in turn produces an exciton — a quantum particle of energy. This exciton jumps from one chromophore to another until it reaches a reaction center, where that energy is harnessed to build the molecules that support life.

But the hopping pathway is random and inefficient unless it takes advantage of quantum effects that allow it, in effect, to take multiple pathways at once and select the best ones, behaving more like a wave than a particle.

This efficient movement of excitons has one key requirement: The chromophores have to be arranged just right, with exactly the right amount of space between them. This, Lloyd explains, is known as the “Quantum Goldilocks Effect.”

That’s where the virus comes in. By engineering a virus that Belcher has worked with for years, the team was able to get it to bond with multiple synthetic chromophores — or, in this case, organic dyes. The researchers were then able to produce many varieties of the virus, with slightly different spacings between those synthetic chromophores, and select the ones that performed best.

In the end, they were able to more than double excitons’ speed, increasing the distance they traveled before dissipating — a significant improvement in the efficiency of the process.

 

Random Mutation And Natural Selection Have Minimal Explanatory Usefulness

theguardian  |  Strange as it sounds, scientists still do not know the answers to some of the most basic questions about how life on Earth evolved. Take eyes, for instance. Where do they come from, exactly? The usual explanation of how we got these stupendously complex organs rests upon the theory of natural selection.

You may recall the gist from school biology lessons. If a creature with poor eyesight happens to produce offspring with slightly better eyesight, thanks to random mutations, then that tiny bit more vision gives them more chance of survival. The longer they survive, the more chance they have to reproduce and pass on the genes that equipped them with slightly better eyesight. Some of their offspring might, in turn, have better eyesight than their parents, making it likelier that they, too, will reproduce. And so on. Generation by generation, over unfathomably long periods of time, tiny advantages add up. Eventually, after a few hundred million years, you have creatures who can see as well as humans, or cats, or owls.

This is the basic story of evolution, as recounted in countless textbooks and pop-science bestsellers. The problem, according to a growing number of scientists, is that it is absurdly crude and misleading.

For one thing, it starts midway through the story, taking for granted the existence of light-sensitive cells, lenses and irises, without explaining where they came from in the first place. Nor does it adequately explain how such delicate and easily disrupted components meshed together to form a single organ. And it isn’t just eyes that the traditional theory struggles with. “The first eye, the first wing, the first placenta. How they emerge. Explaining these is the foundational motivation of evolutionary biology,” says Armin Moczek, a biologist at Indiana University. “And yet, we still do not have a good answer. This classic idea of gradual change, one happy accident at a time, has so far fallen flat.”

There are certain core evolutionary principles that no scientist seriously questions. Everyone agrees that natural selection plays a role, as does mutation and random chance. But how exactly these processes interact – and whether other forces might also be at work – has become the subject of bitter dispute. “If we cannot explain things with the tools we have right now,” the Yale University biologist Günter Wagner told me, “we must find new ways of explaining.”

In 2014, eight scientists took up this challenge, publishing an article in the leading journal Nature that asked “Does evolutionary theory need a rethink?” Their answer was: “Yes, urgently.” Each of the authors came from cutting-edge scientific subfields, from the study of the way organisms alter their environment in order to reduce the normal pressure of natural selection – think of beavers building dams – to new research showing that chemical modifications added to DNA during our lifetimes can be passed on to our offspring. The authors called for a new understanding of evolution that could make room for such discoveries. The name they gave this new framework was rather bland – the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) – but their proposals were, to many fellow scientists, incendiary.

 

The Quantum Future Of Biology

royalsocietypublishing |  Biological systems are dynamical, constantly exchanging energy and matter with the environment in order to maintain the non-equilibrium state synonymous with living. Developments in observational techniques have allowed us to study biological dynamics on increasingly small scales. Such studies have revealed evidence of quantum mechanical effects, which cannot be accounted for by classical physics, in a range of biological processes. Quantum biology is the study of such processes, and here we provide an outline of the current state of the field, as well as insights into future directions.

1. Introduction

Quantum mechanics is the fundamental theory that describes the properties of subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, molecular assemblies and possibly beyond. Quantum mechanics operates on the nanometre and sub-nanometre scales and is at the basis of fundamental life processes such as photosynthesis, respiration and vision. In quantum mechanics, all objects have wave-like properties, and when they interact, quantum coherence describes the correlations between the physical quantities describing such objects due to this wave-like nature.

In photosynthesis, respiration and vision, the models that have been developed in the past are fundamentally quantum mechanical. They describe energy transfer and electron transfer in a framework based on surface hopping. The dynamics described by these models are often ‘exponential’ and follow from the application of Fermi’s Golden Rule [1,2]. As a consequence of averaging the rate of transfer over a large and quasi-continuous distribution of final states the calculated dynamics no longer display coherences and interference phenomena. In photosynthetic reaction centres and light-harvesting complexes, oscillatory phenomena were observed in numerous studies performed in the 1990s and were typically ascribed to the formation of vibrational or mixed electronic–vibrational wavepackets. The reported detection of the remarkably long-lived (660 fs and longer) electronic quantum coherence during excitation energy transfer in a photosynthetic system revived interest in the role of ‘non-trivial’ quantum mechanics to explain the fundamental life processes of living organisms [3]. However, the idea that quantum phenomena—like coherence—may play a functional role in macroscopic living systems is not new. In 1932, 10 years after quantum physicist Niels Bohr was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on the atomic structure, he delivered a lecture entitled ‘Light and Life’ at the International Congress on Light Therapy in Copenhagen [4]. This raised the question of whether quantum theory could contribute to a scientific understanding of living systems. In attendance was an intrigued Max Delbrück, a young physicist who later helped to establish the field of molecular biology and won a Nobel Prize in 1969 for his discoveries in genetics [5].

All living systems are made up of molecules, and fundamentally all molecules are described by quantum mechanics. Traditionally, however, the vast separation of scales between systems described by quantum mechanics and those studied in biology, as well as the seemingly different properties of inanimate and animate matter, has maintained some separation between the two bodies of knowledge. Recently, developments in experimental techniques such as ultrafast spectroscopy [6], single molecule spectroscopy [7–11], time-resolved microscopy [12–14] and single particle imaging [15–18] have enabled us to study biological dynamics on increasingly small length and time scales, revealing a variety of processes necessary for the function of the living system that depend on a delicate interplay between quantum and classical physical effects.

Quantum biology is the application of quantum theory to aspects of biology for which classical physics fails to give an accurate description. In spite of this simple definition, there remains debate over the aims and role of the field in the scientific community. This article offers a perspective on where quantum biology stands today, and identifies potential avenues for further progress in the field.

2. What is quantum biology?

Biology, in its current paradigm, has had wide success in applying classical models to living systems. In most cases, subtle quantum effects on (inter)molecular scales do not play a determining role in overall biological function. Here, ‘function’ is a broad concept. For example: How do vision and photosynthesis work on a molecular level and on an ultrafast time scale? How does DNA, with stacked nucleotides separated by about 0.3 nm, deal with UV photons? How does an enzyme catalyse an essential biochemical reaction? How does our brain with neurons organized on a sub-nanometre scale deal with such an amazing amount of information? How do DNA replication and expression work? All these biological functions should, of course, be considered in the context of evolutionary fitness. The differences between a classical approximation and a quantum-mechanical model are generally thought to be negligible in these cases, even though at the basis every process is entirely governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. What happens at the ill-defined border between the quantum and classical regimes? More importantly, are there essential biological functions that ‘appear’ classical but in reality are not? The role of quantum biology is precisely to expose and unravel this connection.

Fundamentally, all matter—animate or inanimate—is quantum mechanical, being constituted of ions, atoms and/or molecules whose equilibrium properties are accurately determined by quantum theory. As a result, it could be claimed that all of biology is quantum mechanical. However, this definition does not address the dynamical nature of biological processes, or the fact that a classical description of intermolecular dynamics seems often sufficient. Quantum biology should, therefore, be defined in terms of the physical ‘correctness’ of the models used and the consistency in the explanatory capabilities of classical versus quantum mechanical models of a particular biological process.

As we investigate biological systems on nanoscales and larger, we find that there exist processes in biological organisms, detailed in this article, for which it is currently thought that a quantum mechanical description is necessary to fully characterize the behaviour of the relevant subsystem. While quantum effects are difficult to observe on macroscopic time and length scales, processes necessary for the overall function and therefore survival of the organism seem to rely on dynamical quantum-mechanical effects at the intermolecular scale. It is precisely the interplay between these time and length scales that quantum biology investigates with the aim to build a consistent physical picture.

Grand hopes for quantum biology may include a contribution to a definition and understanding of life, or to an understanding of the brain and consciousness. However, these problems are as old as science itself, and a better approach is to ask whether quantum biology can contribute to a framework in which we can repose these questions in such a way as to get new answers. The study of biological processes operating efficiently at the boundary between the realms of quantum and classical physics is already contributing to improved physical descriptions of this quantum-to-classical transition.

More immediately, quantum biology promises to give rise to design principles for biologically inspired quantum nanotechnologies, with the ability to perform efficiently at a fundamental level in noisy environments at room temperature and even make use of these ‘noisy environments’ to preserve or even enhance the quantum properties [19,20]. Through engineering such systems, it may be possible to test and quantify the extent to which quantum effects can enhance processes and functions found in biology, and ultimately answer whether these quantum effects may have been purposefully selected in the design of the systems. Importantly, however, quantum bioinspired technologies can also be intrinsically useful independently from the organisms that inspired them.

Ancient Viruses And The Origins Of Complex Life On Earth

scitechdaily |  The first discovery of viruses infecting a group of microbes that may include the ancestors of all complex life has been found, scientists at The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) report in Nature Microbiology. The incredible discovery offers tantalizing clues about the origins of complex life and suggests new directions for investigating the hypothesis that viruses were essential to the evolution of humans and other complex life forms.

There is a well-supported hypothesis that all complex life forms such as humans, starfish, and trees — which feature cells with a nucleus and are called eukaryotes — originated when archaea and bacteria merged to form a hybrid organism. Recent research suggests the first eukaryotes are direct descendants of so-called Asgard archaea. The latest research, by Ian Rambo (a former doctoral student at UT Austin) and other members of Brett Baker’s lab, sheds light on how viruses, too, may have played a role in this billions-year-old history.

 

Comparison of all known virus genomes. Those viruses with similar genomes are grouped together including those that infect bacteria (on the left), eukaryotes (on the right and bottom center). The viruses that infect Asgard archaea are unique from those that have been described before. Credit: University of Texas at Austin

“This study is opening a door to better resolving the origin of eukaryotes and understanding the role of viruses in the ecology and evolution of Asgard archaea,” Rambo said. “There is a hypothesis that viruses may have contributed to the emergence of complex cellular life.”

Rambo is referring to a hotly debated hypothesis called viral eukaryogenesis. It suggests that, in addition to bacteria and archaea, viruses might have contributed some genetic component to the development of eukaryotes. While this latest discovery does not settle that debate, it does offer some interesting clues.

The newly discovered viruses that infect currently living Asgard archaea do have some features similar to viruses that infect eukaryotes, including the ability to copy their own DNA and hijack protein modification systems of their hosts. The fact that these recovered Asgard viruses display characteristics of both viruses that infect eukaryotes and prokaryotes, which have cells without a nucleus, makes them unique since they are not exactly like those that infect other archaea or complex life forms.

“The most exciting thing is they are completely new types of viruses that are different from those that we’ve seen before in archaea and eukaryotes, infecting our microbial relatives,” said Baker, associate professor of marine science and integrative biology and corresponding author of the study.

The Asgard archaea, which probably evolved more than 2 billion years ago and whose descendants are still living, have been discovered in deep-sea sediments and hot springs around the world, but so far only one strain has been successfully grown in the lab. To identify them, scientists collect their genetic material from the environment and then piece together their genomes. In this latest study, the researchers scanned the Asgard genomes for repeating DNA regions known as CRISPR arrays, which contain small pieces of viral DNA that can be precisely matched to viruses that previously infected these microbes. These genetic “fingerprints” allowed them to identify these stealthy viral invaders that infect organisms with key roles in the complex origin story of eukaryotes.

Canadian Military In Ukraine Pursuing A "Great White Reset"

johnhelmer  |   “Freeland is not acting alone,” comments the Canadian source. “She’s tried hard to bring everyone into her project [to succeed to the prime ministry], but she can’t get the neo-Confederates to settle down and wait for the project to come to fruition , with her at helm, of course.  They’re impatient for the Great White Reset; she needs the Galician dream fulfilled… The military is fine with Canadians, including active and retired service members fighting over there. They are not even pitching a fit about Canadian weapons stocks being emptied in order to be sent over there.”

“If you talk to any of them, they all pretty much have the same mentality. Whatever the West, as they define it, says — white, Christian, capitalist, Anglo, pro-US — goes. The can only see themselves, their career advancement, their ideas of what the country is fighting for within that framework. So they are increasingly upset by even the shallowest semblance of ‘multi-culturalism’ as represented in Ottawa by [Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau and to a degree, Freeland.”

“From what I’ve seen, the evidence of mutiny became apparent when the ‘trucker protest/ freedom convoy’ came up against the government’s activation of the Emergencies Act this winter.  From what I’ve heard, the military chiefs flat-out refused to back [Minister of Public Safety Marco] Mendicino, [Justice Minister and Attorney-General David]  Lametti, and [Minister of Emergency Preparedness Bill] Blair, and Freeland, while active and retired  officers openly sided with the  neo-Confederates who were getting support from the US. It seems that the contradiction here is that the officer corps, heavily committed to the anti-Russia track that cuts across Canadian party lines, is heavily politicized and infected by the neo-Confederate faction in the US. They don’t appreciate what they see as Trudeau’s ‘communism’, and believe that the charges against Cadieu are an expression of it.”

“This is deeply concerning as there can be no doubt that these people know, or strongly believe, that they have the full backing of at least some elements of the US security state, not to mention ‘thin blue line’ law enforcement, militia groups, etc. It’s fascism versus fascism.”

 

Ukraine Is Crawling With Western Special Forces And Spies

caitlinjohnstone | "American intelligence agencies have less information than they would like about Ukraine’s operations and possess a far better picture of Russia’s military, its planned operations and its successes and failures," NYT told us earlier this month. "U.S. officials said the Ukrainian government gave them few classified briefings or details about their operational plans, and Ukrainian officials acknowledged that they did not tell the Americans everything."

It seems a bit unlikely that US intelligence agencies would have a hard time getting information about what's happening in a country where they themselves are physically located. Moon of Alabama theorized at the time that this ridiculous "We don't know what's happening in our own proxy war" line was being pushed to give the US plausible deniability about Ukraine's failures on the battlefield, which have only gotten worse since then.

So why are they telling us all this now? Well, it could be that we're being paced into accepting an increasingly direct role of the US and its allies in Ukraine.

The other day Antiwar's Daniel Larison tweeted, "Hawks in April: Don't call it a proxy war! Hawks in May: Of course it's a proxy war! Hawks in June: It's not their war, it's our war!"

This is indeed exactly how it happened. Back in April President Biden told the press the idea that this is a proxy war between the US and Russia was "not true" and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said "It's not, this is clearly Ukraine's fight" when asked if this is a proxy war. The mainstream media were still framing this claim as merely an "accusation" by the Russian government, and empire spinmeisters were regularly admonishing anyone who used that term on the grounds that it deprives Ukrainians of their "agency".

Then May rolled around and all of a sudden we had The New Yorker unequivocally telling us that the US is in "a full proxy war with Russia" and hawks like US congressman Seth Moulton saying things like, "We’re not just at war to support the Ukrainians. We’re fundamentally at war, although somewhat through a proxy, with Russia, and it’s important that we win.”

And now here in June we've got war hawks like Max Boot coming right out and saying that this is actually America's war, and it is therefore important for the US to drastically escalate the war in order to hand the Russians "devastating losses".

So the previously unthinkable idea that the US is at war with Russia has been gradually normalized, with the heat turned up so slowly that the frog doesn't notice it's being boiled alive. If that idea can be sufficiently normalized, public consent for greater escalations will likely be forthcoming, even if those escalations are extremely psychotic. 

Back in March when I said the only "agency" Ukraine has in this conflict is the Central Intelligence kind, empire loyalists jumped down my throat. They couldn't believe I was saying something so evil and wrong. Now they've been told that the Central Intelligence Agency is indeed conducting operations and directing intelligence on the ground in Ukraine, but I somehow doubt that this will stir any self-reflection on their part.

 

Near Peer Warfare Requires Technically Advanced, Mass Scale, Industrial-age Production Capability

rusi  | The war in Ukraine has proven that the age of industrial warfare is still here. The massive consumption of equipment, vehicles and ammunition requires a large-scale industrial base for resupply – quantity still has a quality of its own. The mass scale combat has pitted 250,000 Ukrainian soldiers, together with 450,000 recently mobilised citizen soldiers against about 200,000 Russian and separatist troops. The effort to arm, feed and supply these armies is a monumental task. Ammunition resupply is particularly onerous. For Ukraine, compounding this task are Russian deep fires capabilities, which target Ukrainian military industry and transportation networks throughout the depth of the country. The Russian army has also suffered from Ukrainian cross-border attacks and acts of sabotage, but at a smaller scale. The rate of ammunition and equipment consumption in Ukraine can only be sustained by a large-scale industrial base.

This reality should be a concrete warning to Western countries, who have scaled down military industrial capacity and sacrificed scale and effectiveness for efficiency. This strategy relies on flawed assumptions about the future of war, and has been influenced by both the bureaucratic culture in Western governments and the legacy of low-intensity conflicts. Currently, the West may not have the industrial capacity to fight a large-scale war. If the US government is planning to once again become the arsenal of democracy, then the existing capabilities of the US military-industrial base and the core assumptions that have driven its development need to be re-examined.

Estimating Ammo Consumption

There is no exact ammunition consumption data available for the Russia–Ukraine conflict. Neither government publishes data, but an estimate of Russian ammunition consumption can be calculated using the official fire missions data provided by the Russian Ministry of Defense during its daily briefing.

Number of Russian Daily Fire Missions, 19–31 May

Although these numbers mix tactical rockets with conventional, hard-shell artillery, it is not unreasonable to assume that a third of these missions were fired by rocket troops because they form a third of a motorised rifle brigade’s artillery force, with two other battalions being tube artillery. This suggests 390 daily missions fired by tube artillery. Each tube artillery strike is conducted by a battery of six guns total. However, combat and maintenance breakdowns are likely to reduce this number to four. With four guns per battery and four rounds per gun, the tube artillery fires about 6,240 rounds per day. We can estimate an additional 15% wastage for rounds that were set on the ground but abandoned when the battery moved in a hurry, rounds destroyed by Ukrainian strikes on ammunition dumps, or rounds fired but not reported to higher command levels. This number comes up to 7,176 artillery rounds a day. It should be noted that the Russian Ministry of Defense only reports fire missions by forces of the Russian Federation. These do not include formations from the Donetsk and Luhansk separatist republics, which are treated as different countries. The numbers are not perfect, but even if they are off by 50%, it still does not change the overall logistics challenge.

The Capacity of the West’s Industrial Base

The winner in a prolonged war between two near-peer powers is still based on which side has the strongest industrial base. A country must either have the manufacturing capacity to build massive quantities of ammunition or have other manufacturing industries that can be rapidly converted to ammunition production. Unfortunately, the West no longer seems to have either.

Presently, the US is decreasing its artillery ammunition stockpiles. In 2020, artillery ammunition purchases decreased by 36% to $425 million. In 2022, the plan is to reduce expenditure on 155mm artillery rounds to $174 million. This is equivalent to 75,357 M795 basic ‘dumb’ rounds for regular artillery, 1,400 XM1113 rounds for the M777, and 1,046 XM1113 rounds for Extended Round Artillery Cannons. Finally, there are $75 million dedicated for Excalibur precision-guided munitions that costs $176K per round, thus totaling 426 rounds. In short, US annual artillery production would at best only last for 10 days to two weeks of combat in Ukraine. If the initial estimate of Russian shells fired is over by 50%, it would only extend the artillery supplied for three weeks.

The US is not the only country facing this challenge. In a recent war game involving US, UK and French forces, UK forces exhausted national stockpiles of critical ammunition after eight days.

Unfortunately, this is not only the case with artillery. Anti-tank Javelins and air-defence Stingers are in the same boat. The US shipped 7,000 Javelin missiles to Ukraine – roughly one-third of its stockpile – with more shipments to come. Lockheed Martin produces about 2,100 missiles a year, though this number might ramp up to 4,000 in a few years. Ukraine claims to use 500 Javelin missiles every day.

U.S. And NATO Running Out Of Weapons - And - Lack The Industrial Capacity To Make What's Needed

asiatimes |    The long and short of it is that, while the US and NATO can fight a short conflict, neither can support a long war because there’s insufficient equipment in the now-depleted inventory and the timelines to build replacement hardware are long.

Despite a history of having done so before, starting in 1939, there is little chance that the US today can put in place a surge capacity, or that it any longer knows how to do so if it is even feasible.

Based on those circumstances alone – and there are additional, compelling reasons – the US and NATO should be thinking about how to end the war in Ukraine rather than sticking with the declared policy of trying to bleed Russia.

Let’s start by looking back at a time when the United States did know how to plan for surge weapons-building capacity.

WW2 precedent

In 1939 the Roosevelt administration, with Congressional support, passed the Protective Mobilization Act.  Ultimately this would lead to the creation of a War Production Board, the Office of Production Management and the marshaling of US industry to fight the Nazis and Japanese

In 1941 the President declared an unlimited national emergency, giving the administration the power to shift industrial production to military requirements. Between 1940 and 1945, the US supplied almost two-thirds of all war supplies to the allies (including the USSR and China) and for US forces – producing some 297,000 aircraft, 193,000 artillery pieces (all types) and 86,000 tanks (light, medium and heavy).

Russia faced an altogether more difficult challenge because after Nazi Germany attacked the USSR in June 1941 much of Russia’s defense industrial infrastructure was threatened.  Russia evacuated 1,500 factories either to the Ural Mountains or to Soviet Central Asia.  Even Lenin’s body was moved from Moscow to Tyumen, 2,500 km from Moscow.

Notably, Stalin Tank Factory 183 would be moved from Kharkiv, now a contested city in the Ukraine war, to the Urals, rebranded as Uralvagonzavod and situated in Nizhny Tagil. The facility had been a railroad car maker, so it was suitable for tank manufacturing. The tank factory relocation was managed by Isaac Zaltzman. 

At that factory the Soviets produced a massive number of tanks (light, medium and heavy), most notably the T-34, the world’s most successful tank design (based on the Christie tank chassis from the United States). Altogether the Soviets produced almost 78,000 tanks and self-propelled guns mounted on tank chassis.

This is now 

It is noteworthy that today Russia as well as the US and America’s NATO partners all face supply problems as the war in Ukraine grinds on. While the US and Europe maintain a significant commercial industrial base, needed to supply key components for defense equipment, Russia lacks an in-depth civilian manufacturing infrastructure – especially in advanced electronics, sensors and electro-optics. 

The US and Europe face a risk because they are increasingly dependent on high-tech supplies from Asia. Today there are severe supply bottlenecks, shortages and risk dependencies. Even China, which has a huge commercial manufacturing infrastructure, faces difficulties in obtaining the most sophisticated integrated circuits, manufactured only in Taiwan by Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC).

Procurement of defense goods in the US and Europe is episodic, not continuous. Funds are allocated to purchase a certain quantity of defense equipment. When the contract is completed and there are no immediate follow-on purchases, production lines are shut down and second- and third-tier component suppliers also stop production – or they shift to work on other projects (and in some cases go out of business). 

This means that if a new order comes in later, the supplier network and the production lines will have to be started almost from scratch. In addition to the loss of infrastructure for certain types of weapons, there is the related loss of skilled factory workers and engineers.

 

Valodya Warned Davos Degenerates About The Coming War "Of All Against All"

journal-neo  |  Sadly, the Fed and other central bankers lie. Raising interest rates is not to cure inflation. It is to force a global reset in control over the world’s assets, it’s wealth, whether real estate, farmland, commodity production, industry, even water. The Fed knows very well that Inflation is only beginning to rip across the global economy. What is unique is that now Green Energy mandates across the industrial world are driving this inflation crisis for the first time, something deliberately ignored by Washington or Brussels or Berlin.

The global shortages of fertilizers, soaring prices of natural gas, and grain supply losses from global draught or exploding costs of fertilizers and fuel or the war in Ukraine, guarantee that, at latest this September-October harvest time, we will undergo a global additional food and energy price explosion. Those shortages all are a result of deliberate policies.

Moreover, far worse inflation is certain, due to the pathological insistence of the world’s leading industrial economies led by the Biden Administration’s anti-hydrocarbon agenda. That agenda is typified by the astonishing nonsense of the US Energy Secretary stating, “buy E-autos instead” as the answer to exploding gasoline prices.

Similarly, the European Union has decided to phase out Russian oil and gas with no viable substitute as its leading economy, Germany, moves to shut its last nuclear reactor and close more coal plants. Germany and other EU economies as a result will see power blackouts this winter and natural gas prices will continue to soar. In the second week of June in Germany gas prices rose another 60% alone. Both the Green-controlled German government and the Green Agenda “Fit for 55” by the EU Commission continue to push unreliable and costly wind and solar at the expense of far cheaper and reliable hydrocarbons, insuring an unprecedented energy-led inflation.

Fed has pulled the plug

With the 0.75% Fed rate hike, largest in almost 30 years, and promise of more to come, the US central bank has now guaranteed a collapse of not merely the US debt bubble, but also much of the post-2008 global debt of $303 trillion. Rising interest rates after almost 15 years mean collapsing bond values. Bonds, not stocks, are the heart of the global financial system.

US mortgage rates have now doubled in just 5 months to above 6%, and home sales were already plunging before the latest rate hike. US corporations took on record debt owing to the years of ultra-low rates. Some 70% of that debt is rated just above “junk” status. That corporate non-financial debt totaled $9 trillion in 2006. Today it exceeds $18 trillion. Now a large number of those marginal companies will not be able to rollover the old debt with new, and bankruptcies will follow in coming months. The cosmetics giant Revlon just declared bankruptcy.

The highly-speculative, unregulated Crypto market, led by Bitcoin, is collapsing as investors realize there is no bailout there. Last November the Crypto world had a $3 trillion valuation. Today it is less than half, and with more collapse underway. Even before the latest Fed rate hike the stock value of the US megabanks had lost some $300 billion. Now with stock market further panic selling guaranteed as a global economic collapse grows, those banks are pre-programmed for a new severe bank crisis over the coming months.

As US economist Doug Noland recently noted, “Today, there’s a massive “periphery” loaded with “subprime” junk bonds, leveraged loans, buy-now-pay-later, auto, credit card, housing, and solar securitizations, franchise loans, private Credit, crypto Credit, DeFi, and on and on. A massive infrastructure has evolved over this long cycle to spur consumption for tens of millions, while financing thousands of uneconomic enterprises. The “periphery” has become systemic like never before. And things have started to Break.”

The Federal Government will now find its interest cost of carrying a record $30 trillion in Federal debt far more costly. Unlike the 1930s Great Depression when Federal debt was near nothing, today the Government, especially since the Biden budget measures, is at the limits. The US is becoming a Third World economy. If the Fed no longer buys trillions of US debt, who will? China? Japan? Not likely.

Elites Have Cannibalized The System So Thoroughly There's Nothing Left To Exploit Or Steal

oftwominds |   Many other dynamics changed around the same time: social, cultural, political. These charts reflect the end of the postwar era and the ushering in of a new era.

Again in broad-brush, the key economic dynamic was the decline of labor's share of the economy in favor of capital. Those who had only their labor to sell lost purchasing power, while those who could borrow or access capital benefited enormously. The charts below tell the story: labor's share of the national income has stairstepped lower for 50 years (since 1970) while the super-wealthy's share has outpaced everyone else 15-fold.

The dominance of financial capital is visible in the third chart, as private-sector financial assets are now 6 times the nation's GDP, double the percentage of the postwar era.

This capital-friendly era was rocket-boosted by financialization in the 1980s, technology in the 1990s and globalization in the early 21st century. You can see each advance of capital's top tier--the top 0.1%--in the chart below: the top 0.1% first pulled away in the 1980s financialization, stutter-stepped in the early 1990s and then exploded higher as technology fueled capital's leverage and exposure to the gains reaped by computers and the Internet.

Alas, these extremes are not stable or sustainable, and so each wave ends in a devastating crash. The income of the top 0.1% took a hit as the dotcom bubble burst, but then China's entry into the WTO saved the day as rampant globalization and additional extremes of financial leverage and fraud boosted their fortunes in the 2000s.

The dual extremes of financialization and globalization created the 2008 bubble, and its collapse almost took down the entire global capital house of cards. Central banks, ultimately financed by the Fed to the tune of $29 trillion, twice the size of America's entire GDP, instituted The Great Reset under the usual guise of "emergency measures" which then became permanent policies.

The Great Reset led to the hyper-centralization of control over the global economy's money as central banks coordinated unprecedented money-printing and financial repression, which includes zero-interest rate policies (ZIRP), as the debt-bubble would pop if rates aren't nailed down to zero.

All the PR being spewed about The Great Reset is the final frantic flailing of a system that's drowning in its own excesses. The 50-year long era of the few enriching themselves as the expense of the many has ended, for the same reason eras of extreme exploitation always end--the elites got too greedy and overshot the economy's ability to sustain their rapidly expanding share of the income and wealth.

Put another way: the elites have cannibalized the system so thoroughly that there's nothing left to steal, exploit or cannibalize. The hyper-centralized global money control has run out of rope as the cheap oil is gone, debts have ballooned to the point there is no way they'll ever be paid down, and the only thing staving off collapse is money-printing, which holds the seeds of its own demise.

Allow me to summarize the only way The Great Reset envisioned by global elites can actually manifest: The Martians arrive towing huge meteorites of pure lithium and gold, and rather than incinerating the global elites, they hand the global elites the meteorites to further their concentration of wealth and power.

Short of that science fiction, this sucker's going down. The Great Reset has already run its course after 12 long years of artifice, fraud and trickery. So global elite shills, lackeys, factotums, toadies and apparatchiks--prepare for your Wil-E-Coyote moment of truth.

Karens - How's That Vaccine Mandate Political Payback Working Out For You?

amidwesterndoctor  |  One of the tremendously frustrating experiences I have had during my lifetime has been watching an amazing candidate run for president, be widely liked by the voting base because of their excellent track record in standing up for the working class, and then watch the media systematically torpedo each and every one of their campaigns. 

The only person I have ever seen who was able to address this dilemma was Donald Trump, as he took a rather unorthodox approach where he campaigned on the basis of the media being evil.  As a result, each time the media gave him negative attention it helped rather than hindered his campaign, and before long he was able to pull the mass media into a symbiotic relationship where it could not help but continually provide oxygen to Trump’s campaign.  

The upside of this approach was that it provided Trump with the freedom to advance populist positions that went against the vested interests of the financiers of the corporate media, something very few other presidents have done.  The downside of this approach was that it was incredibly polarizing, and divided the country to the point that the left was willing to force through vaccine mandates as a way of getting back at the right.  While it is important to advance populist positions that go against entrenched interests (and to expose the systemic corruption within the media), there was a tremendous cost to the political polarization this approach created we will likely be stuck with for years to come.

Something that is often not appreciated about the media is that their business model is based upon getting as much viewership as possible and to provide content that appeases their advertisers. For this reason, content that is critical of any sponsor is never allowed to air.  As a result most media programming is meaningless stories that do not challenge any vested interest and are emotionally hyped up as much as possible to antagonize the audience so that the audience is drawn into caring about them.

Given that the largest sponsor of the mainstream media is the pharmaceutical industry, it is not surprising that all news content aggressively promotes the pharmaceutical party line (the only occasional exceptions I know of are Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham).  One of the ethical journalists who has spoken out the most on this issue is Sharyl Atkinson, who in one interview specifically noted that she observed a variety of major changes occur in the media that coincided with her suddenly being forbidden from ever discussing vaccine safety concerns on air.

It is difficult to assign blame for the botched pandemic response to any single party. However, if I have to identify the key culprit, I would argue that the rigid censorship by the mainstream media, big tech and the academic publishing institutions was what allowed the insane pandemic policy is to march forward despite being clearly in opposition to most existing scientific evidence. In the same way that pharmaceutical corruption has gradually taken over the legacy media (the Gates Foundation for example frequently gives media grants to ensure their massages dominate the airwaves), these other media venues are likewise highly susceptible to pernicious influence, which is why independent media platforms are so critical moving forward.

If They Don't Charge You For The Product (mRNA Therapeutics) YOU ARE THE PRODUCT!!!

 

Study from Senior Editor of the British Medical Journal Peter Doshi, et al, finds the absolute risk of serious AE from mRNA vaccines exceeds the absolute risk reduction of serious covid-19 infection.https://t.co/6JxOyIZVEH pic.twitter.com/PHhODa2dYt

— PLC (@Humble_Analysis) June 22, 2022