The Application Of Machine Learning To Evidence Based Medicine

 

What if, bear with me now, what if the phase 3 clinical trials for mRNA therapeutics conducted on billions of unsuspecting, hoodwinked and bamboozled humans, was a new kind of research done to yield a new depth and breadth of clinical data exceptionally useful toward breaking up logjams in clinical terminology as well as experimental sample size? Vaxxed vs. Unvaxxed the subject of long term gubmint surveillance now. To what end?

Nature  | Recently, advances in wearable technologies, data science and machine learning have begun to transform evidence-based medicine, offering a tantalizing glimpse into a future of next-generation ‘deep’ medicine. Despite stunning advances in basic science and technology, clinical translations in major areas of medicine are lagging. While the COVID-19 pandemic exposed inherent systemic limitations of the clinical trial landscape, it also spurred some positive changes, including new trial designs and a shift toward a more patient-centric and intuitive evidence-generation system. In this Perspective, I share my heuristic vision of the future of clinical trials and evidence-based medicine.

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The last 30 years have witnessed breathtaking, unparalleled advancements in scientific research—from a better understanding of the pathophysiology of basic disease processes and unraveling the cellular machinery at atomic resolution to developing therapies that alter the course and outcome of diseases in all areas of medicine. Moreover, exponential gains in genomics, immunology, proteomics, metabolomics, gut microbiomes, epigenetics and virology in parallel with big data science, computational biology and artificial intelligence (AI) have propelled these advances. In addition, the dawn of CRISPR–Cas9 technologies has opened a tantalizing array of opportunities in personalized medicine.

Despite these advances, their rapid translation from bench to bedside is lagging in most areas of medicine and clinical research remains outpaced. The drug development and clinical trial landscape continues to be expensive for all stakeholders, with a very high failure rate. In particular, the attrition rate for early-stage developmental therapeutics is quite high, as more than two-thirds of compounds succumb in the ‘valley of death’ between bench and bedside^1,2. To bring a drug successfully through all phases of drug development into the clinic costs more than 1.5–2.5 billion dollars (refs. 3, 4). This, combined with the inherent inefficiencies and deficiencies that plague the healthcare system, is leading to a crisis in clinical research. Therefore, innovative strategies are needed to engage patients and generate the necessary evidence to propel new advances into the clinic, so that they may improve public health. To achieve this, traditional clinical research models should make way for avant-garde ideas and trial designs.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the conduct of clinical research had remained almost unchanged for 30 years and some of the trial conduct norms and rules, although archaic, were unquestioned. The pandemic exposed many of the inherent systemic limitations in the conduct of trials⁵ and forced the clinical trial research enterprise to reevaluate all processes—it has therefore disrupted, catalyzed and accelerated innovation in this domain^6,7. The lessons learned should help researchers to design and implement next-generation ‘patient-centric’ clinical trials.

Chronic diseases continue to impact millions of lives and cause major financial strain to society⁸, but research is hampered by the fact that most of the data reside in data silos. The subspecialization of the clinical profession has led to silos within and among specialties; every major disease area seems to work completely independently. However, the best clinical care is provided in a multidisciplinary manner with all relevant information available and accessible. Better clinical research should harness the knowledge gained from each of the specialties to achieve a collaborative model enabling multidisciplinary, high-quality care and continued innovation in medicine. Because many disciplines in medicine view the same diseases differently—for example, infectious disease specialists view COVID-19 as a viral disease while cardiology experts view it as an inflammatory one—cross-discipline approaches will need to respect the approaches of other disciplines. Although a single model may not be appropriate for all diseases, cross-disciplinary collaboration will make the system more efficient to generate the best evidence.

Over the next decade, the application of machine learning, deep neural networks and multimodal biomedical AI is poised to reinvigorate clinical research from all angles, including drug discovery, image interpretation, streamlining electronic health records, improving workflow and, over time, advancing public health (Fig. 1). In addition, innovations in wearables, sensor technology and Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) architectures offer many opportunities (and challenges) to acquire data⁹. In this Perspective, I share my heuristic vision of the future of clinical trials and evidence generation and deliberate on the main areas that need improvement in the domains of clinical trial design, clinical trial conduct and evidence generation.

Fig. 1: Timeline of drug development from the present to the future.

The figure represents the timeline from drug discovery to first-in-human phase 1 trials and ultimately FDA approval. Phase 4 studies occur after FDA approval and can go on for several years. There is an urgent need to reinvigorate clinical trials through drug discovery, interpreting imaging, streamlining electronic health records, and improving workflow, over time advancing public health. AI can aid in many of these aspects in all stages of drug development. DNN, deep neural network; EHR, electronic health records; IoMT, internet of medical things; ML, machine learning.

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Clinical trial design

Trial design is one of the most important steps in clinical research—better protocol designs lead to better clinical trial conduct and faster ‘go/no-go’ decisions. Moreover, losses from poorly designed, failed trials are not only financial but also societal.

Challenges with randomized controlled trials

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have been the gold standard for evidence generation across all areas of medicine, as they allow unbiased estimates of treatment effect without confounders. Ideally, every medical treatment or intervention should be tested via a well-powered and well-controlled RCT. However, conducting RCTs is not always feasible owing to challenges in generating evidence in a timely manner, cost, design on narrow populations precluding generalizability, ethical barriers and the time taken to conduct these trials. By the time they are completed and published, RCTs become quickly outdated and, in some cases, irrelevant to the current context. In the field of cardiology alone, 30,000 RCTs have not been completed owing to recruitment challenges¹⁰. Moreover, trials are being designed in isolation and within silos, with many clinical questions remaining unanswered. Thus, traditional trial design paradigms must adapt to contemporary rapid advances in genomics, immunology and precision medicine¹¹.

The Application Of Machine Learning To Osgood's Affect Control Theory

Over the weekend, I chatted with an AI specialist and got to thinking A LOT about possible applications of Large Language Models and their potential specialized uses for governance. The CIA studied Language very extensively under MKUltra as part of its larger Human Ecology project. Charles E. Osgood was a long term recipient of considerable CIA largesse. This topic was a priority for the Agency. It boggles the mind to consider what kind of clandestine leaps have taken place in this speciality through the use of contemporary computational methods.

Look at all these programs funded by the CIA's Human Ecology fund under MKULTRA. None of these scholars knew they were working for the CIA. pic.twitter.com/vTXel920Du

— Jim Garrison Keillor (@books_rum) February 7, 2023

wikipedia |  In control theory, affect control theory proposes that individuals maintain affective meanings through their actions and interpretations of events. The activity of social institutions occurs through maintenance of culturally based affective meanings.

Affective meaning

Besides a denotative meaning, every concept has an affective meaning, or connotation, that varies along three dimensions:^[1] evaluation – goodness versus badness, potency – powerfulness versus powerlessness, and activity – liveliness versus torpidity. Affective meanings can be measured with semantic differentials yielding a three-number profile indicating how the concept is positioned on evaluation, potency, and activity (EPA). Osgood^[2] demonstrated that an elementary concept conveyed by a word or idiom has a normative affective meaning within a particular culture.

A stable affective meaning derived either from personal experience or from cultural inculcation is called a sentiment, or fundamental affective meaning, in affect control theory. Affect control theory has inspired assembly of dictionaries of EPA sentiments for thousands of concepts involved in social life – identities, behaviours, settings, personal attributes, and emotions. Sentiment dictionaries have been constructed with ratings of respondents from the US, Canada, Northern Ireland, Germany, Japan, China and Taiwan.^[3]

Impression formation

Main article: Impression formation

Each concept that is in play in a situation has a transient affective meaning in addition to an associated sentiment. The transient corresponds to an impression created by recent events.^[4]

Events modify impressions on all three EPA dimensions in complex ways that are described with non-linear equations obtained through empirical studies.^[5]

Here are two examples of impression-formation processes.

• An actor who behaves disagreeably seems less good, especially if the object of the behavior is innocent and powerless, like a child.
• A powerful person seems desperate when performing extremely forceful acts on another, and the object person may seem invincible.

A social action creates impressions of the actor, the object person, the behavior, and the setting.^[6]

Deflections

Deflections are the distances in the EPA space between transient and fundamental affective meanings. For example, a mother complimented by a stranger feels that the unknown individual is much nicer than a stranger is supposed to be, and a bit too potent and active as well – thus there is a moderate distance between the impression created and the mother's sentiment about strangers. High deflections in a situation produce an aura of unlikeliness or uncanniness.^[7] It is theorized that high deflections maintained over time generate psychological stress.^[8]

The basic cybernetic idea of affect control theory can be stated in terms of deflections. An individual selects a behavior that produces the minimum deflections for concepts involved in the action. Minimization of deflections is described by equations derived with calculus from empirical impression-formation equations.^[9]

Action

On entering a scene an individual defines the situation by assigning identities to each participant, frequently in accord with an encompassing social institution.^[10] While defining the situation, the individual tries to maintain the affective meaning of self through adoption of an identity whose sentiment serves as a surrogate for the individual's self-sentiment.^[11] The identities assembled in the definition of the situation determine the sentiments that the individual tries to maintain behaviorally.

Confirming sentiments associated with institutional identities – like doctor–patient, lawyer–client, or professor–student – creates institutionally relevant role behavior.^[12]

Confirming sentiments associated with negatively evaluated identities – like bully, glutton, loafer, or scatterbrain – generates deviant behavior.^[13] Affect control theory's sentiment databases and mathematical model are combined in a computer simulation program^[14] for analyzing social interaction in various cultures.

Emotions

According to affect control theory, an event generates emotions for the individuals involved in the event by changing impressions of the individuals. The emotion is a function of the impression created of the individual and of the difference between that impression and the sentiment attached to the individual's identity^[15] Thus, for example, an event that creates a negative impression of an individual generates unpleasant emotion for that person, and the unpleasantness is worse if the individual believes she has a highly valued identity. Similarly, an event creating a positive impression generates a pleasant emotion, all the more pleasant if the individual believes he has a disvalued identity in the situation.

Non-linear equations describing how transients and fundamentals combine to produce emotions have been derived in empirical studies^[16] Affect control theory's computer simulation program^[17] uses these equations to predict emotions that arise in social interaction, and displays the predictions via facial expressions that are computer drawn,^[18] as well as in terms of emotion words.

Based on cybernetic studies by Pavloski^[19] and Goldstein,^[20] that utilise perceptual control theory, Heise^[21] hypothesizes that emotion is distinct from stress. For example, a parent enjoying intensely pleasant emotions while interacting with an offspring suffers no stress. A homeowner attending to a sponging house guest may feel no emotion and yet be experiencing substantial stress.

Interpretations

Others' behaviors are interpreted so as to minimize the deflections they cause.^[22] For example, a man turning away from another and exiting through a doorway could be engaged in several different actions, like departing from, deserting, or escaping from the other. Observers choose among the alternatives so as to minimize deflections associated with their definitions of the situation. Observers who assigned different identities to the observed individuals could have different interpretations of the behavior.

Re-definition of the situation may follow an event that causes large deflections which cannot be resolved by reinterpreting the behavior. In this case, observers assign new identities that are confirmed by the behavior.^[23] For example, seeing a father slap a son, one might re-define the father as an abusive parent, or perhaps as a strict disciplinarian; or one might re-define the son as an arrogant brat. Affect control theory's computer program predicts the plausible re-identifications, thereby providing a formal model for labeling theory.

The sentiment associated with an identity can change to befit the kinds of events in which that identity is involved, when situations keep arising where the identity is deflected in the same way, especially when identities are informal and non-institutionalized.^[24]

Applications

Affect control theory has been used in research on emotions, gender, social structure, politics, deviance and law, the arts, and business. Affect Control Theory was analyzed through the use of Quantitative Methods in research, using mathematics to look at data and interpret their findings. However, recent applications of this theory have explored the concept of Affect Control Theory through Qualitative Research Methods. This process involves obtaining data through the use of interviews, observations, and questionnaires. Affect Control Theory has been explored through Qualitative measures in interviewing the family, friends, and loved ones of individuals who were murdered, looking at how the idea of forgiveness changes based on their interpretation of the situation.^[25] Computer programs have also been an important part of understanding Affect Control Theory, beginning with the use of "Interact," a computer program designed to create social situations with the user to understand how an individual will react based on what is happening within the moment. "Interact" has been an essential tool in research, using it to understand social interaction and the maintenance of affect between individuals.^[26] The use of interviews and observations have improved the understanding of Affect Control Theory through Qualitative research methods. A bibliography of research studies in these areas is provided by David R. Heise^[27] and at the research program's website.

How Did The Official Response To Covid Affect YOU?

michaelpsenger  |  The scars that have been left on all of us by the response to COVID are incomprehensibly varied and deep. For most, there hasn’t been enough time to mentally process the significance of the initial lockdowns, let alone the years-long slog of mandates, terror, propaganda, social stigmatization and censorship that followed. And this psychological trauma affects us in myriad ways that leave us wondering what it is about life that just feels so off versus how it felt in 2019.

For those who were following the real data, the statistics were always horrifying. Trillions of dollars rapidly transferred from the world’s poorest to the richest. Hundreds of millions hungry. Countless years of educational attainment lost. An entire generation of children and adolescents robbed of some of their brightest years. A mental health crisis affecting more than a quarter of the population. Drug overdoses. Hospital abuse. Elder abuse. Domestic abuse. Millions of excess deaths among young people which couldn’t be attributed to the virus.

But underneath these statistics lie billions of individual human stories, each unique in its details and perspectives. These individual stories and anecdotes are only just beginning to surface, and I believe that hearing them is a vital step in processing everything that we’ve experienced over the past three years.

I recently sent out a query on Twitter as to how people had been affected by the response to COVID at an individual level. The conversation that emerged is a luminating and haunting reflection of what each of us experienced over the past three years.

Which aspect of the response to COVID affected you most at a personal level?

— Michael P Senger (@MichaelPSenger) February 3, 2023

Forget About That Amnesty Shit, I Want To Get Even!!!

amidwesterndoctor  |  One of the things I have come to appreciate as the years have gone by is how much of what people say are not their own thoughts. The current structure of our educational system (discussed here) is largely about replacing critical thinking with the illusion of intelligence, where you are seen as smart if you copy what the most authoritative sources or voices say instead of formulating your own opinion.

Because of this, whenever I hear someone proudly share an argument or train of logic I have already seen numerous times, one of the most common replies I give is “are you sure those ideas are your own?”

If you look at this article within the context of Oster’s previous plea and its response (both of these articles are essentially trying to do the same thing), I believe a strong case can be made that these were tests to see what narrative needs to be pivoted to. Likewise, Germany’s minister of health (and a well-credentialed scientist) finally made a limited apology for the disastrous policies he pushed on the German people without acknowledging the worst mistakes while simultaneously shifting the blame for his decisions to unnamed scientists who gave him bad advice.

Similarly, let’s consider Malcom Kendrick’s recent commentary on another leading advocate of this insanity:

With the resignation of Jacinda Ardern [two weeks ago], my thoughts were dragged back to Covid once more. Jacinda, as Prime Minster of New Zealand was the ultimate lockdown enforcer. She was feted round the world for her iron will, but I was not a fan, to put it mildly. Whenever I heard her speak, it brought to mind one of my most favourite quotes:

‘Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.’  C.S. Lewis

At one point she actually said the following:

“We will continue to be your single source of truth” “Unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth.’

Yet, there are still many who believe her to have been a great and caring leader. She certainly hugged a lot of people with that well rehearsed pained/caring expression on her face.

In many ways it’s remarkable that we have been able to move the dialogue this far in just a few months, and to be honest, I would have given almost anything for a compromise like what this article presented to have been made any time in 2020 or early in 2021. However, any time a negotiation occurs, you must keep in mind that whatever is initially offered is much less than the party is willing to agree to, and the fact that something like this is being openly offered means we are in a very strong bargaining position.

Any type of promise or apology (especially disingenuous ones) will not prevent what we saw happen over the last few years from happening again. Laws, and ideally constitutional amendments (initially at the state level and ideally at the national level) can prevent such tragedies, and many people I have spoken to feel we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to correct many of the systemic issues within medicine that have poisoned our culture.

In my own opinion, if these people are actually sorry for what they did to us, they would be willing to relinquish some of their power so it could not happen again and I believe moving forward it is critical for us to hold them to that. Anything less should not be considered acceptable for them to be granted amnesty.

Meryl Nass On Kevin Bass-No-No Eugenics Man - These Interwebs Are FOREVER!!!

merylnass  |  It seems he used to tweet about eugenics. He liked it.

 

And it seems he remains intrigued with it.

Meryl’s COVID Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

But he was not impressed with the talks by me, Aseem Malhotra, Robert Malone, Sasha Latypova. Guess what? This was not a science conference in Stockholm. It was a conference about what has really been going on these past three years. He likes the straw man argument.

So who is this Kevin Bass, who some commenters to my last post described as a twitter troll regarding nutrition and low carb diets. Why is he apologizing for mistakes that the system made? Like, he admitted to LOTS of mistakes?

He had to explain to his followers that with the Newsweek piece he has reinvented himself. He has decided to stop being an attack dog and instead bring us sweetness and light. Oops. He forgot his new persona, however, when he attacked the Stockholm conference. Who will he be tomorrow?

Too Late Kevin Bass-Your Big Potatohead Needs To Get Curbstomped Too!!!

newsweek  |  Our emotional response and ingrained partisanship prevented us from seeing the full impact of our actions on the people we are supposed to serve. We systematically minimized the downsides of the interventions we imposed—imposed without the input, consent, and recognition of those forced to live with them. In so doing, we violated the autonomy of those who would be most negatively impacted by our policies: the poor, the working class, small business owners, Blacks and Latinos, and children. These populations were overlooked because they were made invisible to us by their systematic exclusion from the dominant, corporatized media machine that presumed omniscience.

Most of us did not speak up in support of alternative views, and many of us tried to suppress them. When strong scientific voices like world-renowned Stanford professors John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya, and Scott Atlas, or University of California San Francisco professors Vinay Prasad and Monica Gandhi, sounded the alarm on behalf of vulnerable communities, they faced severe censure by relentless mobs of critics and detractors in the scientific community—often not on the basis of fact but solely on the basis of differences in scientific opinion.

When former President Trump pointed out the downsides of intervention, he was dismissed publicly as a buffoon. And when Dr. Antony Fauci opposed Trump and became the hero of the public health community, we gave him our support to do and say what he wanted, even when he was wrong.

Trump was not remotely perfect, nor were the academic critics of consensus policy. But the scorn that we laid on them was a disaster for public trust in the pandemic response. Our approach alienated large segments of the population from what should have been a national, collaborative project.

And we paid the price. The rage of the those marginalized by the expert class exploded onto and dominated social media. Lacking the scientific lexicon to express their disagreement, many dissidents turned to conspiracy theories and a cottage industry of scientific contortionists to make their case against the expert class consensus that dominated the pandemic mainstream. Labeling this speech "misinformation" and blaming it on "scientific illiteracy" and "ignorance," the government conspired with Big Tech to aggressively suppress it, erasing the valid political concerns of the government's opponents.

And this despite the fact that pandemic policy was created by a razor-thin sliver of American society who anointed themselves to preside over the working class—members of academia, government, medicine, journalism, tech, and public health, who are highly educated and privileged. From the comfort of their privilege, this elite prizes paternalism, as opposed to average Americans who laud self-reliance and whose daily lives routinely demand that they reckon with risk. That many of our leaders neglected to consider the lived experience of those across the class divide is unconscionable.

Incomprehensible to us due to this class divide, we severely judged lockdown critics as lazy, backwards, even evil. We dismissed as "grifters" those who represented their interests. We believed "misinformation" energized the ignorant, and we refused to accept that such people simply had a different, valid point of view.

We crafted policy for the people without consulting them. If our public health officials had led with less hubris, the course of the pandemic in the United States might have had a very different outcome, with far fewer lost lives.

Instead, we have witnessed a massive and ongoing loss of life in America due to distrust of vaccines and the healthcare system; a massive concentration in wealth by already wealthy elites; a rise in suicides and gun violence especially among the poor; a near-doubling of the rate of depression and anxiety disorders especially among the young; a catastrophic loss of educational attainment among already disadvantaged children; and among those most vulnerable, a massive loss of trust in healthcare, science, scientific authorities, and political leaders more broadly.

My motivation for writing this is simple: It's clear to me that for public trust to be restored in science, scientists should publicly discuss what went right and what went wrong during the pandemic, and where we could have done better.

It's OK to be wrong and admit where one was wrong and what one learned. That's a central part of the way science works. Yet I fear that many are too entrenched in groupthink—and too afraid to publicly take responsibility—to do this.

Solving these problems in the long term requires a greater commitment to pluralism and tolerance in our institutions, including the inclusion of critical if unpopular voices.

Intellectual elitism, credentialism, and classism must end. Restoring trust in public health—and our democracy—depends on it.

 

 

"Dr.: Peter Hotez: "Anti-Science Aggression" Is Racist Violent Extremism (Anti-Semitism)

stevekirsch  |  Science used to be about data and what the data shows. Sadly, today, science is about what the CDC says, even if there is no data in support of the recommendation whatsoever.

The most stunning example of this is the “six foot rule.” Did you know that it was entirely fabricated out of thin air? From Presidential Takedown page 49:

What is even more stunning is that the CDC has never admitted this publicly. This is evidence that they are a corrupt organization and the corruption goes to the very top of the organization.

We have over two years of data. Why not make it public?

We now have over two years worth of death and vaccination data for people who died after getting a COVID shot, yet nobody wants to see the record level data tied to the vaccination dates?!?!

Let me be perfectly clear:

This is an abject failure of the entire medical community for not demanding to see this data.

People paid for us to see this data with their lives. Why is it being hidden from us?

In the US, hundreds of millions of people participated in a massive clinical trial and have data to share with people. At least 500,000 of the participants paid the ultimate price: they sacrificed their lives to send a message to America about the vaccines. It is extremely disrespectful to these people to ignore their death data and not share it with the public. Why are we not allowing these people to share their data?

Do you think if we could ask those people right before they died, “Do you want to let others know what killed you?” Do you think they would all say, “No! Don’t let anyone know. Please keep it a secret!”?

Every institution in the world that is recommending or requiring COVID vaccination should be DEMANDING to see this data made public

John Beaudoin and I have been calling for the death data to be set free and made public. We have been ignored.

Why aren’t any of these organizations calling for data transparency here so we can learn the truth?

1. The mainstream medical community

2. Heads of state throughout the world

3. The CDC

4. The FDA

5. The White House

6. Congress

7. The mainstream media

8. Public health authorities

9. Any doctor or nurse who recommends the jab to patients

10. Universities who mandate the vaccines for students, staff, or faculty

11. Any organization that supports COVID vaccines for their members, employees, or visitors

The data exists in VSD as well. But the CDC won’t allow anyone to see it.

The data exists in every state health department. But you can’t FOIA it because it requires a join to avoid PII problems and FOIA requests are not allowed if they generate effort like that. So FOIA requests won’t work.

It’s time for everyone to demand that our health authorities “Show us the data!”

We should all refuse to comply until they produce it.

Jordan Trishton Walker : Grindr-Mediated Pfizer Gain Of Function Research Disclosures

brianoshea  |  Project Veritas recently released a video featuring "Jordon Trishton Walker," Pfizer executive who revealed shocking new info. But finding anything about him is tough. Here is what I've found so far.

thedailybeast  |  The Daily Mail took down a digital article last week that promoted Project Veritas’ latest sting operation alleging that a Pfizer executive admitted the pharmaceutical giant was making a “more potent” version of COVID in order to create new vaccines for sale.

Following days of anti-vaxxers and right-wing media outlets complaining about the article’s quiet deletion, and hours after The Daily Beast reached out to the tabloid, the piece was back online—and was completely changed.

Senior reporter Andrea Cavallier, the article’s original author, was originally removed from the byline but has since reappeared. The updated article, which came back online Monday afternoon, now largely focuses on Pfizer’s response to Project Veritas’ video and the far-right activist group’s suggestion that the company is practicing “gain-of-function” research. In addition to Cavallier, the byline now features health editor Connor Boyd and health reporter Caitlin Tilley.

“Our original story did not carry a response from Pfizer. We temporarily took the story down while we vigorously pursued answers,” a Daily Mail spokesperson told Confider. “Now Pfizer has responded, we are able to report that they have confirmed they manipulated the covid virus—although they insist there was no gain of function. This updated story is now fully live again.”

In a video that went viral in right-wing social media circles, a person Project Veritas claims is Pfizer’s director of research and development tells an undercover journalist that the company is “exploring” the possibility of “mutating” viruses in monkeys so as to “preemptively develop new vaccines.”

“You’re not supposed to do gain-of-function research with viruses,” the man, whom Project Veritas claims is named Jordon Trishton Walker, added. “Regularly not. We can do these selected structure mutations to make them more potent. There is research ongoing about that. I don't know how that is going to work. There better not be any more outbreaks because Jesus Christ.”

The video blew up among conservatives, especially vaccine skeptics. Fox News’ Tucker Carlson fumed about the “near-total media blackout of this story” about how Pfizer was conducting “Frankenstein science.” GOP lawmakers soon began sending letters to the company’s CEO asking him to confirm whether Pfizer was taking part in gain-of-function research, citing Project Veritas’ “investigative report.” (Conservatives have latched onto the theory that Dr. Anthony Fauci funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan, largely blaming the “lab leak theory” for possibly creating COVID-19.)

The Mail’s initial piece on the video essentially gives a play-by-play of Project Veritas’ video while noting the outlet reached out to Pfizer for comment. Shortly after it went up on Thursday, however, the article was nowhere to be found on the website. And its disappearance soon drew notice.

“Hi, @MailOnline can you clarify why you have appeared to remove this story from your website?” British parliament member Andrew Bridgen tweeted on Thursday. Bridgen was recently suspended by his own Conservative Party for peddling conspiracy theories about vaccines and comparing the side effects of COVID shots to the Holocaust.

After the Mail piece was pulled offline, Pfizer released an online statement responding to the allegations made about the company following the publication of Project Veritas’ video.

“In the ongoing development of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, Pfizer has not conducted gain of function or directed evolution research,” the statement, released Friday night, said. “Working with collaborators, we have conducted research where the original SARS-CoV-2 virus has been used to express the spike protein from new variants of concern.”

The statement also added that “in a limited number of cases when a full virus does not contain any known gain of function mutations, such virus may be engineered to enable the assessment of antiviral activity in cells.” The Mail’s updated article, which went back up on Monday afternoon, now largely focuses on Pfizer’s response to the undercover video.

The Secret Sauce Of Neoliberal Capitalism Is Public Debt Backing Private Wealth

Fin d’siecle American imperial capitalism in a nutshell: At what point do we realize that the only function of our psychopathic elites is the creation of the debt that the banks need to back all of their  notational value? The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth. 

For decades by a concerted effort, financial capitalists have been undermining the security of this country, undermining democracy, dimming the light of freedom, capturing our politicians and perverting the constitution to the benefit of themselves, creating a free market (free for the rentiers instead of free from the rentiers). 

For example, our elites have created brittle companies while saying they were making companies more resilient. Leveraging profits into the service of debt to create ‘shareholder value’. Creating Just in Time supply chains that are also brittle and ripe for exploitation and manipulation in the cause of efficiency. Imposing an unjust tax revenue system that raised the cost of living and the cost of doing business for most people – relative to their income - and - which decreased taxes for exploitive financial rentierism. We have Bernie Sanders saying that there should be no billionaires…as if the legislation and tax favoritism that enables the extraction of these billions did not come from his own votes for legislation and tax laws.

Instead of America leading the world and promoting democracy and freedom by example, we have a ruling elite (yes, we elected most of these sell-outs via the heavily moneyed election process – even politicians who want others to not buy their elected office complain and beg for cash but never mention the corruption evident in our campaign finance laws or the necessity of raising so much bribe money) — this elite that feels the only way to defend and secure democracy is through financial coercion and brute force that, in fact makes us less secure and less a democracy.

Those who would give up essential liberty and embedding the desire for the basic human rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” the ideal that no one is to be ruled by another without their consent…to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.  

Americans Will Suffer Devastation And Hell Because Of Our Failure To Hold Anyone Accountable

kunstler  |   “The White House has taken the entire West in such a direction and speed of triumphalism, arrogance and “egregious” imbecility that there is no going back or reversal possible without a total defeat of the official narrative and the consequent eternal shame.” — Hugo Dionisio

The New York Times — indicted this week as a chronic purveyer of untruths by no less than their supposed ally, The Columbia Journalism Review — is lying to you again this morning.

        This whopper is an artful diversion from the reality on-the-ground that Ukraine is just about finished in this tragic and idiotic conflict staged by the geniuses behind their play-thing President “Joe Biden.” By the way, it’s not a coincidence that Ukraine and “JB” are going down at the same time. The two organisms are symbionts: a matched pair of mutual parasites feeding off each other, swapping each other’s toxic exudations, and growing delirious on their glide path to a late winter crash.

      The point of the war, you recall, is “to weaken Russia” (so said DoD Sec’y Lloyd Austin), even to bust it up into little geographic tatters to our country’s advantage — that is, to retain America’s dominance in global affairs, and especially the supremacy of the US dollar in global trade settlements.

     The result of the war so far has been the opposite of that objective. US sanctions made Russia stronger by shifting its oil exports to more reliable Asian customers. Kicking Russia out of the SWIFT global payments system prompted the BRIC countries to build their own alternative trade settlement system. Cutting off Russia from trade with Western Civ has stimulated the process of import replacement (i.e., Russia making more of the stuff it used to buy from Europe). Confiscating Russia’s off-shore dollar assets has alerted the rest of the world to dump their dollar assets (especially US Treasury bonds) before they, too, get mugged. Nice going, Victoria Nuland, Tony Blinken, and the rest of the gang at the Foggy Bottom genius factory.

      All of which raises the question: who is liable to bust up into tatters first, the USA or Russia? I commend to you Dmitry Orlov’s seminal work, Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects, Revised & Updated. For anyone out there not paying attention the past thirty-odd years, Russia, incorporated as the Soviet Union, collapsed in 1991. The USSR was a bold experiment based on the peculiar and novel ill-effects of industrialism, especially gross economic inequality. Alas, the putative remedy for that, advanced by Karl Marx, was a despotic system of pretending that individual humans had no personal aspirations of their own.

    The Soviet / Marxist business model was eventually reduced to the comic aphorism: We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. It failed and the USSR gurgled down history’s drain. Russia reemerged from the dust, minus many of its Eurasian outlands. Remarkably little blood was shed in the process. Mr. Orlov’s book points to some very interesting set-ups that softened the landing. There was no private property in the USSR, so when it collapsed, nobody was evicted or foreclosed from where they lived. Very few people had cars in the USSR, so the city centers were still intact and people could get around on buses, trams, and trains. The food system had been botched for decades by low-incentive collectivism, but the Russian people were used to planting family gardens — even city dwellers, who had plots out-of-town — and it tided them over during the years of hardship before the country managed to reorganize.

      Compare that to America’s prospects. In an economic crisis, Americans will have their homes foreclosed out from under them, or will be subject to eviction from rentals. The USA has been tragically built-out on a suburban sprawl template that will be useless without cars and with little public transport. Cars, of course, are subject to repossession for non-payment of contracted loans. The American food system is based on manufactured microwavable cheese snacks, chicken nuggets, and frozen pizzas produced by giant companies. These items can’t be grown in home gardens. Many Americans don’t know the first thing about growing their own food, or what to do with it after it’s harvested.

      There’s another difference between the fall of the USSR and the collapse underway in the USA. Underneath all the economic perversities of Soviet life, Russia still had a national identity and a coherent culture. The USA has tossed its national identity on the garbage barge of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” which is actually just a hustle aimed at extracting what remains from the diminishing stock of productive activity showering the plunder on a mob of “intersectional” complainers — e.g., the City of San Francisco’s preposterous new plan to award $5-million “reparation” payments to African-American denizens of the city, where slavery never existed.

      As for culture, consider that the two biggest cultural producers in this land are the pornography and video game industries. The drug business might be a close third, but most of that action is off-the-books, so it’s hard to tell. So much for the so-called “arts.” Our political culture verges on totally degenerate, but that is too self-evident to belabor, and the generalized management failures of our polity are a big part of what’s bringing us down — most particularly the failure to hold anyone in power accountable for their blunders and turpitudes.

      This unearned immunity  might change, at least a little bit, as the oppositional House of Representatives commences hearings on an array of disturbing matters. Meanwhile, be wary of claims in The New York Times and other propaganda organs that our Ukraine project is a coming up a big win, and that the racketeering operations of the Biden family amount to an extreme right-wing, white supremacist conspiracy theory. These two pieces of the conundrum known as Reality are blowing up in our country’s face. It will be hard not to notice.

 

Deeply Offended That A 3rd World Cheese Dick Controls The POTUS

kanekoa  |   The real person who was the benefactor to, and the boss of, Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, at the Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings, was not the CEO of Burisma Holdings, Mykola Zlochevsky, but it was instead Ihor Kolomoysky, who was part of the newly installed Ukrainian Government, which the Obama Administration itself had actually just installed in Ukraine, in what the head of the “private CIA” firm Stratfor correctly called “the most blatant coup in history.”

Shortly after the Obama Administration’s Ukrainian coup, on March 2, 2014, Kolomoysky, who supported Yanukovych’s overthrow, was appointed the governor of Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. Hunter Biden, with no experience in the industry or region, would join Kolomoysky’s Burisma Holdings two months later, on May 12, 2014.

A 2012 study of Burisma Holdings done in Ukraine by the AntiCorruption Action Centre (ANTAC), an investigative nonprofit co-funded by American billionaire George Soros and the U.S. State Department, found that the true owner of Burisma Holdings was none other than Ukrainian billionaire-oligarch Ihor Kolomoysky.

The study, which was funded to dig up the corruption of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, instead found that Ihor Kolomoysky “managed to seize the largest reserves of natural gas in Ukraine.”

Burisma Holdings changed owners in 2011 when it was taken over by an off-shore Cyprus enterprise called Brociti Investments Ltd, and subsequently, moved addresses under the same roof as Ukrnaftoburinnya and Esko-Pivnich, two Ukrainian gas companies which happened to be also owned by Kolomoysky through off-shore entities in the British Virgin Islands.

Oleh Kanivets, who worked as CEO of Ukrnaftoburinnya, confirmed Kolomoysky as the owner of Burisma Holding in the 2012 report saying, “The Privat Group is the immediate owner. This company was founded by Mykola Zlochevsky some time ago, but he later sold his shares to the Privat Group.”

In other words, Hunter Biden’s boss and benefactor at Burisma Holdings is the same Ukrainian billionaire-oligarch who also claimed the position of boss and benefactor over Volodymyr Zelensky before he became Ukraine’s president.

Kolomoysky Owns 1+1 Media Group

Kolmoysky, who currently holds a net worth of $1.8 billion, making him the 1750th richest person in the world, owns holdings in metal, petroleum, and the media sector, where he has had a long history with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

For years, Zelensky’s company produced shows for Kolmoysky’s TV network, 1+1 Media Group, one of the largest media conglomerates in Ukraine. Zelensky achieved national fame, portraying a president on a hit television sitcom called Servant of the People, which was broadcasted on a channel owned by Kolmoysky.

In 2019, Kolmoysky’s media channels gave a big boost to Zelensky’s presidential campaign, while Kolmoysky even provided security, lawyers, and vehicles for Zelensky during his campaign. Kolmoysky’s bodyguard and lawyer accompanied Zelensky on the campaign trail as Zelensky was chauffeured around in a Range Rover owned by one of Kolmoysky’s companies.

The Pandora Papers showed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his TV production partners were beneficiaries of a web of offshore firms created in 2012, the same year Zelensky’s production company entered into a deal with Kolomoysky’s media group, which allegedly received $41 million in funds from Kolomoysky’s Privatbank.

Zelensky’s political rival, President Petro Poroshenko, commented on their connection during the campaign trail, “Fate intended to put me together with Kolomoyskiy’s puppet in the second round of the elections.”

After Zelensky’s victory, Kolomoysky, who had spent the last few years living between Israel and Switzerland, returned to Ukraine to keep up his relationship with the new president, nominating over 30-lawmakers to Zelensky’s newly established party and maintaining influence with many of them in parliament.

The Plan To Takedown Russia Via A Zombie Ukraine Was Hatched 30 Years Ago...,

thepostil  |  “We are fighting a war against Russia and not against each other,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Strasbourg, January 24, 2023.

(For an unauthorised biography of Baerbock, see here).

On July 27, 1993, the US Department of Defense (DoD) and the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense (MoD) signed a Memorandum of Understanding and Cooperation on Defense and Military Relations, establishing a programme of defence cooperation at the Department-Ministry-level, with “substantive activities” between those offices being launched in July 1994 (Cf. Lt. Col. Frank Morgese, US-Ukraine Security Cooperation 1993-2001: A Case History). Since that date, the Ukraine has teemed with US military advisors of every stripe.

The Morgese case study is a blow-by-blow review of the US military activity in the Ukraine between 1993 and 2001, designed to set up the Ukraine for her destruction. So detailed a review, that it would swamp the layman. Accordingly, we propose another document dating from 1994, readable by the laymen amongst us, and which spells out thirty years in advance, the full-blown War Plan for a zombie Ukraine.

Its author, Barry R. Posen (Rand, CFR, MIT, Woodrow Wilson Foundation), belongs to the leather-armchair school of strategy the US so excels in: arranging for others to die for the US living standard.

For obvious reasons, only Posen’s assessment of Russian military strength is dated. The remainder of his study predicts with such ghastly exactitude both events in the Ukraine over the last 20 years and the expected, indeed hoped for, Russian response, that one readily perceives that this is no prediction, but rather a fully-formed proposal for War—complete with Posen’s dismay, very faintly-veiled, at Operation Barbarossa’s failure, and his pleasure at the “high cost” Barbarossa exacted on Russia.

To give our readers the flavour of Posen’s text, we have selected a few, notable paragraphs from this Must-Read, one which Russia surely cannot have missed. All quotations are so marked and in italics.