Retail And Pharmaceutical Distribution Of Psychedelics Will Destroy Millions More Minds And Lives

caitlinjohnstone |   “Money has begun flowing into companies intending to monetize psychedelic therapy as new research has increasingly shown that blowing one’s mind can alter it for the better,” reads a new article for the Los Angeles Times titled “Money is pouring into psychedelics. Meet the mystical hedge fund investor bankrolling the boom.”

“This scientific and commercial excitement rests on research showing that psychedelics can supercharge mental health treatment for PTSD, depression, anxiety, addiction, and other chronic ailments of the mind, enabling patients to dive deep, confront their traumas and — a rarity for mental illnesses — return healed,” the article reads. “That goes for synthetic chemicals such as MDMA and ketamine as well as plant-derived drugs such as psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms), the South American plant brew ayahuasca, and the West African root-derived substance iboga.”

LA Times’ Sam Dean shares the personal journey of hedge fund investor Sa’ad Shah and his involvement in what has become a multibillion-dollar psychedelics industry long before even the legal infrastructure necessary for such companies to turn a profit is in place. We learn of Shah’s experience with ayahuasca, his interest in mystical traditions and personal growth, and his conviction in the shift that has for the last few years been known as the psychedelic renaissance.

And then, about halfway down the article, we get to the actual meat of the matter:

“Shah welcomes big pharma and big institutions to enter the fray in the interest of spreading the chemical gospel far and wide. He sees the financial and therapeutic potential for psychedelics not in the cannabis model, which would make psychedelics broadly available for retail purchase, but in the pharmaceutical mode — psychedelics as prescribed drugs, with patent rights, administered in medical settings.”

That “with patent rights” bit right there is behind the so-called psychedelic renaissance we’ve been hearing so much about: “favoring the FDA regulatory route over the Oregon route,” as a psychiatrist cited in the article put it. It’s being driven not by the need to free human consciousness from the prohibition-induced coma it’s been under since the sixties so that we can collectively navigate through the many existential hurdles our species is fast approaching with wisdom and insight, but by the agenda to make rich people even richer by forcefully controlling psychedelic substances via the pharmaceutical industry.

Why Is The Entire Western Media Lying About Ivermectin And Calling It "Horse Deworming Paste?"

Why is basically the entire media lying about what Ivermectin is and calling it a horse drug?

— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) September 2, 2021

Because Ivermectin has been chosen as a group membership indicator, independent of its own nature. If you advocate for Ivermectin then you must be an ignorant and expendable spreadneck extremist according to most of my Democrat friends. The media is signaling adherence to that group. This same group doesn't really care whether it works, only what tribe you belong to based on your attitude about it.  Quoth the great IMDoc:

The NIH current status on ivermectin is there is not enough data to recommend OR to discourage its use. The NIH changed this recommendation in December of 2020 as previously the NIH status on ivermectin usage was to discourage its use. Usually the status in which ivermectin is now placed would be accompanied with all kinds of funds to study the true efficacy of the drug, to see if it is successful. That of course is not being done at this time.

Interestingly, 2 of our other COVID modalities have exactly the same recommend/discourage status. That would be remdesevir and outpatient monoclonal antibodies. EXACTLY the same status on both of these as ivermectin currently. The NIH states there is not enough evidence to recommend or to discourage the use of either of these.

And yet we continue right on with both the others without a blink of an eye.

A little math –

An Ivermectin course for COVID is less than twenty dollars.

A course of REMDESEVIR is currently right at $8800.00 dollars.

An outpatient treatment with monoclonal antibodies is right at $23,000.00 – 25,000.00 dollars with all the infusion costs added.

Remdesevir is loaded with all kinds of safety problems that I have seen with my own eyes. And it has the extra benefit of obviously not working – it literally does not do a god damned thing. Multiple studies have hinted at this.

The monoclonal antibodies are reasonably safe, unless you are one of the unlucky 1-3 out of 200 who have a very significant allergic reaction. Sometimes quite bad. They do seem to help to some degree.
But it is my immunologist and virologist friends who are having seizures about their use like this in massive 100-200 daily infusion centers, and the very high likelihood of producing all kinds of mutant variants with this therapy.

Your bankrupt government that is in hawk already for tens of trillions of dollars is currently “paying” for the last 2 choices – but not sure how long that will last.

Facebook feeds are now filled with all kinds of memes and stories with horse paste and horse pictures. But not a word about the other 2 or how expensive they are. I have seen all kinds of pics lately of my fully vaccinated friends and family in a monoclonal infusion center. They seem to have no clue they are bankrupting their kids future for a medication with the same NIH recommendation as ivermectin – which they are just laughing out of the room. They go right on blaming the unvaccinated for the pandemic in their feeds, all the while the antibodies they have just been given may be leading to the next mutation that will come up snake-eyes. And to boot, that one dose of meds they are getting is more than a lot of people in this country make in a year.

Yet, I continue to use ivermectin and budesonide with statistically obvious effects to keep patients out of the hospital compared to my peers who are not using it.

I have never dreamed in my life that I would live to see the American people bamboozled this easily. But here we are. I just keep working – very hard lately – it keeps my mind in much better places.

I spoke with one of my old students who is now a medical missionary in Africa this week. How this is being handled in the West has been an eye-opener for all to see where he lives. At least they have perspective in Africa. We have lost 600K people in the USA to COVID. The world loses upwards of 1 to million a year from diarrhea. The only difference between the two is that the diarrhea deaths are almost completely avoidable with appropriate care that is freely available in the West but not so much in Africa. And that is just diarrhea. They see the immense COVID freak out in the West and just shake their heads. My poor student just stated that he has to pray every day for strength not to despise what his culture has become.

My mind has been reliving the story of Lot and Sodom & Gomorrah a lot lately. But also to the Book of Daniel and Balthazzar’s feast. MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSHIM. Written by a hand on the wall to leader of the most powerful country on earth at the time. NUMBERED NUMBERED WEIGHED AND DIVIDED. “Alas O Babylon, the Lord God Jehovah has weighed you in the balance and has found you wanting. Thy last day is upon you.”

Lord have mercy.

How Dare These Spreadneck Peckerwoods Kwestin Medical Authoriteh!!!

medpagetoday |   As hospitals continue to admit COVID-19 patients, some are contending with demands from family members to attempt to treat their loved ones with ivermectin.

Just last week, the CDC warned healthcare professionals to steer patients away from the drug. But that hasn't stopped the pressure on hospitals, and the outcomes of new legal cases to force hospitals to provide the drug to struggling, ventilated patients have been mixed.

In the case of Memorial Medical Center in Springfield, Illinois, a Sangamon County judge earlier this week ruled in favor of the hospital, the State Journal-Register reported.

Anita Clouse had sought to force Memorial Medical Center, part of Memorial Health System, to allow her husband, Randy Clouse, 61, to receive ivermectin, the State Journal-Register reported. Ralph Lorigo, a New York lawyer who represents Anita and has also taken on a bevy of other ivermectin cases, said in a court hearing that "she should have a right to try to save her husband."

However, Memorial Medical Center countered in court documents that Randy Clouse's condition was improving, and that he no longer had an active COVID infection, the State Journal-Register reported. The hospital further said that Clouse's physicians "believe administration of ivermectin will likely result in kidney and lung damage, which can lead to organ failure and death."

Randy and Anita Clouse were both unvaccinated and contracted COVID in July, the State Journal-Register reported. Anita had only mild symptoms, but Randy was admitted to the hospital shortly after he tested positive, and has since been placed on a ventilator and started on dialysis, the State Journal-Register reported, citing court documents.

Anita Clouse told the State Journal-Register that she and her husband knew about ivermectin before it was discussed by Fox News commentators because the couple bred German Shepherds and had given the drug to their dogs for parasites. She said that her husband previously told her he would want to receive the drug should he become sick with COVID.

Though the courts sided with the hospital in the Springfield case, a judge in Cincinnati, Ohio recently ruled in favor of a patient's family.

 

 

Joe Rogan Know He Not Posed To Publicly Rub Horse Deworming Paste In His Hiney For Covid

Success against #COVID19 will likely require both vaccines & treatments. We’re pleased to share we’ve started a Phase 2/3 study of our oral antiviral candidate—specifically designed to combat SARS-CoV-2—in non-hospitalized, low-risk adults: https://t.co/su5VtfbWPX

— AlbertBourla (@AlbertBourla) September 1, 2021

msdnc |   Podcast host Joe Rogan told his millions of followers Wednesday that he has Covid-19 and used ivermectin, a drug typically used on livestock that health experts have urged the public to avoid.

Rogan, host of the immensely popular Spotify podcast "The Joe Rogan Experience," posted a video to Instagram explaining he tested positive for the coronavirus following his return from a live show Saturday. He said he had “fevers and sweats” and that he “threw the kitchen sink” at the illness.

His treatments included monoclonal antibodies and ivermectin, Rogan said. Ivermectin, which is not an anti-viral drug, is generally used to treat or prevent parasites in animals such as horses.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration last month urged people to stop believing misinformation claiming the livestock treatment would help cure Covid, saying it saw multiple reports of patients who have been hospitalized after "self-medicating with ivermectin intended for horses.”

The agency clarified that FDA-approved ivermectin tablets meant to treat people with certain conditions caused by parasitic worms as well as topical formulations used for head lice and skin conditions like rosacea are different from the drug used on animals. Ivermectin tablets and topical formulations for humans have "very specific doses" that are significantly smaller than the doses meant for animals.

Patients who overdose with ivermectin can experience nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, low blood pressure, allergic reactions, dizziness, problems with balance, seizures, coma and even death, according to the FDA.

Rogan has more than 13 million followers on Instagram, and his podcast is the most-streamed program on Spotify.

 

NIH Being Effectively Sued For Deception With Regard To Ivermectin Efficacy...,

Trialsite  |  On August 25, NIH appeared in conference in federal court in the District of New Jersey. The purpose of the appearance was for resolution of Jin-Pyong Peter Yim v National Institutes of Health and for scheduling of “motion practice”, if necessary. I am the plaintiff in the case. Beneath the legal formalities, the case could reveal that NIH deceived the nation on a treatment for COVID-19.

NIH is alleged to have violated the Freedom of Information Act. NIH failed to respond to a document request made on January 28, 2021:

“All updates to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Treatment Guidelines that were endorsed by a vote of the Panel. (Date Range for Record Search: From 01/01/2021 To 01/28/2021)”

The purpose of the FOIA request was not to obtain the document. Rather, it was to know if a vote was held to endorse the NIH recommendation on ivermectin. NIH violated FOIA because it did not respond within the time defined by statute. A complaint was filed against the NIH on March 26, 2021 to appeal the non-response. NIH answered the complaint on June 30. The answer included an exhibit and testimony.

NIH was represented by Margaret Ann Mahoney. She stated that NIH had responded to the FOIA request. She was referring to the NIH FOIA response from April 23:

“You requested all updates to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Treatment Guidelines that were endorsed by a vote of the Panel (Date range for record search from 01/01/2021 to 01/28/2021). All approved updates to the guidelines are posted online and can be found here. The documents posted on this website respond to your request in full.”

I requested a change to the NIH response. The NIH response is ambiguous as to whether the requested document exists. I provided a URL that refers to a single document. I requested that that URL be given in the NIH FOIA response if that recommendation was endorsed by a vote.

The conference was presided over by Judge Lois H. Goodman. She gave her opinion following discussion between the plaintiff and defendant. She expressed skepticism of the legal basis for the complaint. However, she urged further negotiation and allowed for “motion practice” if no agreement was reached. Her concluding remarks are here.

Following the conference, Judge Goodman also issued the following order:

“TEXT ORDER directing parties to confer to attempt resolution to this dispute. Parties to report to the Court as to the results of those efforts to resolve by 9/8/2021. If, matter cannot be resolved, dispositive motions to be filed by 9/24/2021 and to be returnable on 10/18/2021. Ms. Mahoney is directed to provide pro se plaintiff with a copy of this text order. So Ordered by Magistrate Judge Lois H. Goodman on 8/26/2021 .”

Arkansas Karenwaffen Justice Of The Peace BIG MAD About MD Prescribing Ivermectin For Covid

dailymail  |  A jail doctor in Washington County, Arkansas, has been using an animal deworming drug to treat inmates with Covid-19 even though the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has specifically warned against it.

Ivermectin is often used as a dewormer in animals including cows and horses, and is not recommended for treating the virus. The FDA said it 'can cause serious harm'.

During a finance and budget committee meeting for Washington County on Tuesday night the jail's physician Dr Rob Karas asked for a 10 per cent increase in the medical services contract, even after the county sheriff confirmed that the jail health provider had been prescribing the drug. 

Dr Karas has faced calls to resign over the revelation.  

County-elected Justice of the Peace Eva Madison brought the issue back up towards the end of the meeting after jail officials presented their 2022 budget. 'I learned today that Dr Karas is giving ivermectin - cow dewormer - to the inmates at the jail,' she said.

Madison told members of the Washington County quorum court - the county's governing body - that a jail official and county employee, who asked to stay anonymous, told her they had been sent to the jail's clinic to get tested for Covid-19. 

When the unidentified person tested negative they told Madison they were given a $76 prescription for ivermectin, as reported by CBS News.

'They were concerned about the prescription, asked their primary care physician about it and the doctor told him to 'throw that in the trash,' she said.

'(The person) tested negative, was given a prescription for ivermectin, was told to go to Dr Karas's pharmacy just off campus to have it filled,' Madison told the committee. 

She added: 'He's out $76 because of Dr Karas prescribing dewormer to a county employee for treatment of a condition that he didn't have.

'The employee had the good fortune to have a physician that he could go to and ask for a second opinion. Our inmates do not have that choice.'

Washington County Sheriff Tim Helder did not say how many inmates at the 710-bed facility had been given ivermectin and defended Dr Karas, who has been prescribing the medication.

 

Now Is The Time To Use Ivermectin

yomiuri shimbun  |  During the Tokyo Olympics, Delta strains originating in India raged and the number of infected people continues to increase. Why is Japan not trying to use ivermectin, which has few reports of side effects and has been reported to be effective in clinical trials in other countries? On August 5, we had an urgent interview with Mr. Ozaki, chairman of the Tokyo Metropolitan Medical Association, who had been proposing effective uses of ivermectin from early on.

The peak of infection spread that is not yet visible

――It seems that the explosive spread of infection, which is also called the 5th wave, is still rising. The number of people waiting at home and receiving medical treatment is increasing rapidly. How is the Tokyo Metropolitan Medical Association responding?

　"When the number of people waiting at home and receiving medical treatment increased sharply in the third wave of January, this was no good, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Medical Association and the Tokyo Metropolitan Medical Association worked together to build a system with the goal of 24-hour support. We have been able to handle up to 37 of the 47 district medical associations. However, the current situation where more than 1000 home caregivers are piled up every day is beyond the limit. , Vaccination, medical examination, home visit, etc. are not available. Now, the health center is coordinating hospitalization. There is also a hospitalization coordinating center in Tokyo, but there is a system that can quickly accept and treat suddenly changed corona patients. I haven't gotten to the point of being established. "

Many clinical trial results are "effective for prevention and treatment"

--If you read the papers on clinical trials of ivermectin that have been published around the world, there are many examples that are effective for both prevention and treatment.

　"I am aware that there are many papers that ivermectin is effective in the prevention and treatment of corona, mainly in Central and South America and Asia. There is no effective therapeutic drug, although it is necessary to deal with patients who develop it one after another. The vaccine is not in time. At such an imminent time, there is a paper that ivermectin is effective for corona, so it is a natural response for clinicians to try using it. Doctor-led clinical practice That's why many test papers came out. "

--Usually, pharmaceutical companies conduct large-scale clinical trials to see the effects, but ivermectin has been selected by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a silver bullet for tropical diseases such as onchocerciasis (river blindness) and lymphatic filariasis. It is a drug approved by countries around the world more than 20 years ago. If it is effective for the new corona, it is not applicable, but it is unavoidable that we decided to use it in a pandemic.

　"That's right. The medical field of a pandemic is a battlefield. It's the same as a field hospital. Patients are brought in and their condition deteriorates one after another and they die. So I can understand the feelings of the doctor who clings to this and administers it. "

　"The other day, a research group at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences / AIIMS, which sets guidelines for the treatment of corona infections in India, has published a paper investigating the preventive effects of ivermectin. According to the report, about 3,900 medical workers (staff and students) were given 0.3 mg / kg of ivermectin twice at 3-day intervals, only once, and then. As a result of conducting clinical trials divided into three groups of those who did not, it is said that those who received ivermectin twice reduced the new corona infection by 83%. It was the first time in the world to publish a paper. It's a class research group, so it's very reliable. "

 

How Did India Abruptly Stop Being Ground Zero Of The Coronapocalypse?

Why is no one interested in India anymore with respect to the Coronapocalypse? Can a couple of weeks really make such an incredible difference? The contrast from July to August is really stark. When the news was bad you couldn't turn to a news outlet that wasn’t reporting about the continuous megadeath in India. Now, not nary a peep...,

Speaks volumes how reporting is being used to gin up fear beyond what is suggested by the "science". Since the Indian coronapocalypse has fallen off the official narrative radar, I went over to the Times of India to have a look. They have a “Covid Tracker” that says that there were 382 deaths on Aug 22 related to Covid-21. New Cases are down 30%, to 25,320.

Now if you do the math, India has ~1.4 billion people. These Covid-21 figures don't even amount to rounding errors. Given that Ivermectin is in the Indian Covid-21 treatment protocol - AS ACROSS PARTS OF THE AFRICAN CONTINENT - maybe the 1.4 billion horse-paste eating Indian animals are getting some type of prophylactic and curative benefit from their veterinary medicine?

This site is another good place to watch and keep track of the numbers. I follow Uttar Pradesh. Their deaths from Covid today (with a population above 500 million) were …. zero, niente, rien, zed. aka none. 

Of course there were likely a few, but I challenge anyone to prove that India’s numbers are as through the roof as the U.S. There are no funeral pyres burning, floating bodies in the Ganges, hospitals overflowing, shortages of O2 canisters, etc.

Ivermectin use? High.

Vaccination rate? Still in the single digits.

Florida? Under reporting did you say? 

Texas? Pediatric wards packed. 

Oregon? Sending children to hospital in Seattle due to lack of beds?

India? Passez moi l’ ivermectin stp dégolas!

The Mechanisms Of Action Of Ivermectin Against SARS-CoV-2: An Evidence-based Clinical Review

nature | Considering the urgency of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, detection of various new mutant strains and future potential re-emergence of novel coronaviruses, repurposing of approved drugs such as Ivermectin could be worthy of attention. This evidence-based review article aims to discuss the mechanism of action of ivermectin against SARS-CoV-2 and summarizing the available literature over the years. A schematic of the key cellular and biomolecular interactions between Ivermectin, host cell, and SARS-CoV-2 in COVID-19 pathogenesis and prevention of complications have been proposed.

Introduction

A relatively recent surge in zoonotic diseases has been noted over the past few decades. Several reasons could be responsible for this “spill-over” of disease-causing agents from animals to humans. These include an exponential rise in the global population causing man to encroach new ecological habitats in search of space, food, and resources as well as improved opportunities for rampant wildlife trade causing inter-species pathogen jumps. The 1980s was known for HIV/AIDS crisis that originated from the great apes, while the Avian flu pandemic in 2004-07 came from the birds. The pigs lead to the Swine flu pandemic in 2009 and bats were the original hosts of Ebola, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (MERS), and probably Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) outbreak as well.

COVID-19 has already caused millions of deaths worldwide and has paralyzed not only the world’s healthcare system but also the political and economic relations between countries [1]. The fact that the SARS-CoV-2 virus has been thought to have originated from wildlife and may have “jumped” into humans, not only highlights future risks from animal-borne diseases but also provides an important clue to its resolution.

You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y'all. Stop it. https://t.co/TWb75xYEY4

— U.S. FDA (@US_FDA) August 21, 2021

In such a scenario, where this “jump” has been made from animal to human, it seems only logical to review a drug that has worked efficiently against a disease-causing agent and is available in a form that is safe for human consumption since the early 1980 s.

Ivermectin belongs to a group of avermectins (AVM), which is a group of 16 membered macrocyclic lactone compounds discovered at the Japanese Kitasato institute in 1967 during actinomycetes cultures with the fungus Streptomyces avermitilis [2]. This drug radically lowered the incidence of river blindness and lymphatic filariasis and was discovered and developed by William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura for which they received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2015 [3, 4]. Ivermectin is enlisted in the World Health Organization’s Model List of Essential Medicines [5].

Drug repurposing, drug redirecting, or drug reprofiling is defined as the identification of novel usages for existing drugs. The development risks, costs as well as safety-related failure, are reduced with this approach since these drugs have a well-established formulation development, in vitro and in vivo screening, as well as pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic profiles. Moreover, the first clinical trial phases of many such drugs have been completed and can be bypassed to reduce several years of development. Therefore, drug repurposing has the potential to reduce the time frame for the whole process by up to 3–12 years and carries great potential [6].

Although several drugs received Emergency Use Authorization for COVID-19 treatment with unsatisfactory supportive data, Ivermectin, on the other hand, has been sidelined irrespective of sufficient convincing data supporting its use. Nevertheless, many countries adopted ivermectin as one of the first-line treatment options for COVID-19.

With the ongoing vaccine roll-out programs in full swing across the globe, the longevity of the immunity offered by these vaccines or their role in offering protection against new mutant strains is still a matter of debate. The adoption of Ivermectin as a “safety bridge” by some sections of the population that are still waiting for their turn for vaccination could be considered as a “logical” option.

Several doctor-initiated clinical trial protocols that aimed to evaluate outcomes, such as reduction in mortality figures, shortened length of intensive care unit stay and/or hospital stay and elimination of the virus with ivermectin use have been registered at the US ClinicalTrials.gov [7]. Real-time data is also available with a meta-analysis of 55 studies to date. As per data available on 16 May 2021, 100% of 36 early treatment and prophylaxis studies report positive effects (96% of all 55 studies). Of these, 26 studies show statistically significant improvements in isolation. Random effects meta-analysis with pooled effects using the most serious outcome reported 79% and 85% improvement for early treatment and prophylaxis respectively (RR 0.21 [0.11–0.37] and 0.15 [0.09–0.25]). The results were similar after exclusion based sensitivity analysis: 81% and 87% (RR 0.19 [0.14–0.26] and 0.13 [0.07–0.25]), and after restriction to 29 peer-reviewed studies: 82% and 88% (RR 0.18 [0.11–0.31] and 0.12 [0.05–0.30]). Statistically significant improvements were seen for mortality, ventilation, hospitalization, cases, and viral clearance. 100% of the 17 Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) for early treatment and prophylaxis report positive effects, with an estimated improvement of 73% and 83% respectively (RR 0.27 [0.18–0.41] and 0.17 [0.05–0.61]), and 93% of all 28 RCTs. These studies are tabulated in Table 1. The probability that an ineffective treatment generated results as positive for the 55 studies to date is estimated to be 1 in 23 trillion (p = 0.000000000000043). The consistency of positive results across a wide variety of cases has been remarkable. It is extremely unlikely that the observed results could have occurred by chance [8].

The Human Use Of Ivermectin

nih.gov |  Ivermectin has continually proved to be astonishingly safe for human use. Indeed, it is such a safe drug, with minimal side effects, that it can be administered by non-medical staff and even illiterate individuals in remote rural communities, provided that they have had some very basic, appropriate training. This fact has helped contribute to the unsurpassed beneficial impact that the drug has had on human health and welfare around the globe, especially with regard to the campaign to fight Onchocerciasis.⁵⁷⁾

Today, ivermectin is being increasingly used worldwide to combat other diseases in humans, such as Strongyloidiasis (which infects some 35 million each year), scabies (which causes 300 million cases annually), Pediculosis, Gnathostomiasis and Myiasis—and new and promising properties and uses for ivermectin and other avermectin derivatives are continuing to be found.⁵⁸⁾ These include activity against another neglected tropical disease, Leishmaniasis.^59,60) Of perhaps even greater significance is the evidence that the use of ivermectin has both direct and indirect beneficial impact on improving community health. Studies of long-term treatment with ivermectin to control Onchocerciasis have shown that use of the drug is additionally associated with significant reduction in the prevalence of infection with any soil-transmitted helminth parasites (including Ascaris, Trichuris and hookworm), most or all of which are deemed to be major causes of the morbidity arising from poor childhood nutrition and growth.⁶¹⁾ It is also known that the prevalence of head lice is markedly reduced in children taking ivermectin tablets⁶²⁾ and that scabies is markedly reduced in populations taking the drug regularly.⁶³⁾ Above all, ivermectin has proved to be a medicine of choice for the world’s rural poor. In many underprivileged communities throughout the tropics, intestinal worms and parasitic skin diseases are extremely common and associated with significant morbidity. They usually co-exist, with many individuals infected with both ecto- and endoparasites.^64,65) Mass treatment of poly-parasitized populations is deemed to be the best means of control and ivermectin is the ideal drug for such interventions. A recent study in Brazil, using locally produced ivermectin, looked at the impact on internal helminthes and parasitic skin diseases. The researchers concluded that “mass treatment with ivermectin was an effective and safe means of reducing the prevalence of most of the parasitic diseases prevalent in a poor community in North-East Brazil. The effects of treatment lasted for a prolonged period of time”. This study also represented the first published report of human medical intervention using ivermectin that had not been produced by the hitherto traditional manufacturer, Merck & Co. Inc., the patent on the drug expiring in 1997.⁶⁶⁾

In reality, the renewed interest in fighting tropical diseases, including the involvement of the pharmaceutical industry, which has become increasingly evident over the past three decades, and which has saved lives and improved the welfare of billions of people, notably the poor and disadvantaged in the topics, can be traced back to the 1987 introduction of ivermectin for use in humans. According to a recent report, International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations (IFPMA) data show that the global pharmaceutical industry provided over $9.2 billion in health interventions (medicines and equipment) between 2000–2007 alone, benefitting 1.75 billion people worldwide.⁶⁷⁾ The hitherto unprecedented donation of ivermectin in 1987 can rightly be seen to be the origin of this philanthropic outpouring.

Since the inception of the Mectizan Donation Programme, Merck has donated well over 2.5 billion Mectizan^® tablets for Onchocerciasis treatment, with in excess of 700 million treatments authorised. Currently, some 80–90 million people are taking the drug annually through MDA in Africa, Latin America and Yemen. A further 300 million total treatments have been approved for lymphatic filariasis, with around 90 million treatments being administered annually (Fig. ​(Fig.8 ).8 ). At present 33 countries are receiving ivermectin for Onchocerciasis and 15 for Lymphatic filariasis. Consequently, around US$4 billion worth of ivermectin tablets have been donated to date. In 2010, Ecuador became the second country in the Americas to halt River Blindness transmission. It is hoped that transmission of the disease in the Western hemisphere will be stopped by 2012—a goal that will have been achieved thanks to twice-yearly MDA with ivermectin. Lymphatic filariasis is targeted for global elimination by 2020, and, if all goes well, Onchocerciasis may well be eliminated from Africa soon thereafter.

The Story Of Ivermectin

isglobal  |   What do penicillin, aspirin and ivermectin have in common? Apart from the fact that they rhyme, all three belong to a very select group of drugs that can claim to have had the “greatest beneficial impact on the health and well-being of humanity”.

They have at least two other things in common: all three were found in nature and all three led to a Nobel prize. Aspirin is derived from salicin, a compound found in a variety of plants such as willow trees. Its use was first mentioned by Hippocrates in 400 BC, but was isolated only in 1829 as salicylic acid and synthesised some years later as acetylsalicylic acid. The discovery of the mechanisms underlying aspirin’s effects gave Sir John Vane the Nobel prize in 1982. Penicillin was isolated from mold that grew by accident on a Petri dish in Alexander Fleming’s laboratory. Its discovery changed the course of medicine, and earned Fleming the Nobel prize in 1945, which he shared with Howard Florey and Ernst Chain.

And this brings us to ivermectin- not likely a drug you will have in your first-aid kit, like aspirin or penicillin, but definitely a drug that has improved the lives of millions of people since its discovery in 1975.

The story of how ivermectin was discovered is quite incredible. In the late 1960s, Satoshi Ōmura, a microbiologist at Tokyo’s Kitasako Institute, was hunting for new antibacterial compounds and started to collect thousands of soil samples from around Japan. He cultured bacteria from the samples, screened the cultures for medicinal potential, and sent them 10,000 km away to Merck Research Labs in New Jersey, where his collaborator, William Campbell, tested their effect against parasitic worms affecting livestock and other animals. One culture, derived from a soil sample collected near a golf course southwest of Tokyo, was remarkably effective against worms. The bacterium in the culture was a new species, and was baptised Streptomyces avermictilis. The active component, named avermectin, was chemically modified to increase its activity and its safety. The new compound, called ivermectin, was commercialised as a product for animal health in 1981 and soon became a top-selling veterinary drug in the world. Remarkably, despite decades of searching, S. avermictilis remains the only source of avermectin ever found.

This Is A Fool's Errand - But That's Not Going To Stop Them From Trying

robbreport |  It might be an exaggeration to say BioViva CEO Liz Parrish believes death is optional, but for her, Asprey’s goal of living to 180 shows a distinct lack of ambition. “If you can reach homeostasis in the body,” Parrish says, “where it’s regenerating itself just a little bit faster than it’s degrading, then what do you die of? An accident or natural disaster, probably. There’s no expiration date at 90 or 100 years old.”

Tall, blond and fit, Parrish cuts a strikingly youthful figure at 49—one that might convince you to order whatever she’s having. But, like Asprey, she has received criticism from the longevity research community for becoming “patient zero” in her own experimental drug trial, aimed at halting aging at the cellular level. In 2015, Parrish underwent telomerase and follistatin gene therapies in Bogotá, Colombia. The procedures involved receiving around a hundred injections of a cocktail of genes and a virus modified to deliver those new genes into her body’s cells. The objective was to prevent age-related muscle loss and lengthen her telomeres: the “caps” at the end of our chromosomes. Scientists have identified their unraveling as not only a marker of aging but also a potential cause of age-related decline.

Parrish told the media about her clandestine experiment and has published periodic updates on her condition in the five years since, and she reports that she has indeed increased her muscle mass and lengthened her telomeres. Parrish’s punk-rock approach stems from her conviction that the medical-research community—both the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and researchers who aren’t business-minded—is moving too slowly, with too much red tape, when it comes to advancing aging therapeutics. But gene therapy is a relatively new area of medicine that brings with it a host of new risks, including cancer, severe immune reactions and infections caused by the viral vector used to deliver the drug.

Parrish downplays such worries. “There may be risks,” she tells Robb Report. “But the known risk is that you’re 100 percent likely to die. So you have to decide for yourself if the potential benefit outweighs that.”

Humans have always aspired to find the fountain of youth, so people might be skeptical about the fact that anti-aging technologies are working now,” says British investor and businessman Jim Mellon. “But the fact is that this is finally happening, and we need to seize the moment.” Mellon cofounded Juvenescence, a three-year-old pharmaceutical company that’s investing in multiple technologies simultaneously to increase the odds of bringing winning products to market.

Mellon, 63, has made his fortune betting on well-timed investment opportunities, and he predicts that a new “stock-market mania” for life extension is just around the corner. “This is like the internet dial-up phase of longevity biotech,” he enthuses. “If you’d invested in the internet in the very early days, you’d be one of the richest people on the planet. We’re at that stage now, so the opportunity for investors is huge.” According to a report by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, he’s not wrong: The market for technologies to increase human life span is projected to grow sixfold to $610 billion in just the next five years.

 

If Livestock Had ANY IDEA What's In Store For Them....,

newsweek  |  The Spanish firm Grifols helped set off a kerfuffle last year when it, along with other firms, offered nearly double the going price for blood donations for a COVID-19 treatment trial. Brigham Young University in Idaho had to threaten some enterprising students with suspension to keep them from intentionally trying to contract COVID-19. The trial failed, however, and now the Barcelona-based firm is hoping to extract something far more valuable from the plasma of young volunteers: a set of microscopic molecules that could reverse the process of aging itself.

Earlier this year, Grifols closed on a $146 million-deal to buy Alkahest, a company founded by Stanford University neuroscientist Tony Wyss-Coray, who, along with Saul Villeda, revealed in scientific papers published in 2011 and 2014 that the blood from young mice had seemingly miraculous restorative effects on the brains of elderly mice. The discovery adds to a hot area of inquiry called geroscience that "seeks to understand molecular and cellular mechanisms that make aging a major risk factor and driver of common chronic conditions and diseases of older adulthood," according to the National Institutes of Health. In the last six years, Alkahest has identified more than 8,000 proteins in the blood that show potential promise as therapies. Its efforts and those of Grifols have resulted in at least six phase 2 trials completed or underway to treat a wide range of age-related diseases, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Alkahest and a growing number of other geroscience health startups signal a change in thinking about some of the most intractable diseases facing humankind. Rather than focusing solely on the etiology of individual diseases like heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's and arthritis—or, for that matter, COVID-19—geroscientists are trying to understand how these diseases relate to the single largest risk factor of all: human aging. Their goal is to hack the process of aging itself and, in the process, delay or stave off the onset of many of the diseases most associated with growing old.

The idea that aging and illness go hand and hand is, of course, nothing new. What's new is the newfound confidence of scientists that "aging" can be measured, reverse-engineered and controlled.

Until recently, "people working on diseases did not think that aging was modifiable," says Felipe Sierra, who recently retired as director of the Division of Aging Biology at the National Institute on Aging, a part of the NIH. "That is actually what many medical books say: The main risk factor for cardiovascular disease is aging, but we cannot change aging so let's talk about cholesterol and obesity. For Alzheimer's, aging is the main risk factor—but let's talk about the buildup in the brain of beta-amyloid proteins. Now that is beginning to change."

 

Quiet As It's Kept The Kochtopus Is A Reservoir Of Managerial Intellect And Unified Cultural Vision

state.gov |  Last year, I announced that I would give a series of speeches on China, and this is part of that. It’s the context in which state and local government officials ought to think about the way they lead with respect to our relationship. It’s important. China matters.

It’s been part of my mission at the State Department to mobilize all parts of the United States Government. I was out in Silicon Valley a couple weeks ago to talk to America’s leading tech companies about this very set of issues.

And I need your help, too.

What China does in Topeka and Sacramento reverberates in Washington, in Beijing, and far beyond. Competition with China is happening. It’s happening in your state.

In fact, I would be surprised if most of you in the audience have not been lobbied by the Chinese Communist Party directly.

Chinese Communist Party friendship organizations like the one that I referenced earlier are in Richmond; Minneapolis; Portland; Jupiter, Florida; and many other cities around the country.

But sometimes China’s activities aren’t quite that public, and I want to talk about some of that today. 

Let me read you an excerpt of a letter from a Chinese diplomat. It was China’s Consul General in New York sent a letter last month to the speaker of one of your state legislatures.

Here’s what the letter said in part. It said, quote, “As we all know, Taiwan is part of China… avoid engaging in any official contact with Taiwan, including sending congratulatory messages to the electeds, introducing bills and proclamations for the election, sending officials and representatives to attend the inauguration ceremony, and inviting officials in Taiwan to visit the United States.” End of quote from the letter.

Think about that. You had a diplomat from China assigned here to the United States, a representative of the Chinese Communist Party in New York City, sending an official letter urging that an American elected official shouldn’t exercise his right to freedom of speech.

Let that sink in for just a minute.

And this isn’t a one-off event. It’s happening all across the country.

Chinese consulates in New York, in Illinois, in Texas, and two in California, bound by the diplomatic responsibilities and rights of the Vienna Convention, are very politically active at the state level, as is the embassy right here in Washington, D.C.

Maybe some of you have heard about the time when the Chinese consulate paid the UC-San Diego students to protest the Dalai Lama.

Or last August, when former governor Phil Bryant of Mississippi received a letter from a diplomat in the consul’s office in Houston, threatening to cancel a Chinese investment if the governor chose to travel to Taiwan. Phil went anyway.

On Second Thought, Propagation of the Faith May Be Even More Fundamental...,

vanityfair |  When I first came out to L.A. [in 1968], my friend [photographer] Joel Bernstein found an old book in a flea market that said: Ask anyone in America where the craziest people live and they’ll tell you California. Ask anyone in California where the craziest people live and they’ll say Los Angeles. Ask anyone in Los Angeles where the craziest people live and they’ll tell you Hollywood. Ask anyone in Hollywood where the craziest people live and they’ll say Laurel Canyon. And ask anyone in Laurel Canyon where the craziest people live and they’ll say Lookout Mountain. So I bought a house on Lookout Mountain. —Joni Mitchell

jaysanalysis |  It seems more and more as if we are living in a bad B movie, replete with cheesy set pieces and a Casio keyboard score – and the reason for that is because we are.  We have focused on Hollywood and propaganda often at JaysAnalysis, but we have not looked at the music industry, aside from brief mentions and a few shows.  When it comes to the score for that B movie we all live in, the best analysis I’ve read in a good while is none other than recently deceased Dave McGowan’s excellent work, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream.  I also have the honor of Amazon classing my book, Esoteric Hollywood, with McGowan’s, in the “readers also purchased” section.  I get emails on  daily basis requesting book recommendations (which is much harder to choose than you’d expect), so I think for the spirit of my site, no better book could be suggested for a reading list than Weird Scenes (aside from my own book, of course).

McGowan’s thesis is simple: The 1960s counter-culture movement was not what it appeared to be.  In a purple haze of pot smoke, free love, booze and LSD tabs, the fog of the 60s is believed by most baby-boomers to be a genuine (monstrous for faux conservatives) reaction against the system.  From student protests to politically active musicians, the anti-war, anti-establishment ethos of the 60s was, so the story goes, a natural, organic reaction to a hawkish, greedy corporate demon, embodied in “the man,” opposed by all those revolutionaries who love freedom, expressing themselves in the “arts.”  After reading McGowan’s analysis (a self-confessed fan of this era), it would appear the mainstream view is only slightly correct – some artists were political and genuinely anti-establishment, but the big names, and the movements as a whole, were promoted and directed by design, for large-scale social engineering.

McGowan begins his argumentation by pointing to Jim Morrison’s father, Navy Admiral George Stephen Morrison, who played a central role in the Gulf of Tonkin’s false flag event.  Morrison, curiously, avoided this association, stating his parents were dead, adding fuel to his mythical narrative of having no musical training and supposedly becoming a musical shaman following ghostly encounters and hallucinogenic trips.  While some of that may have been the case (such as the trips and witchcraft initiation, for example, as shown in Oliver Stone’s The Doors), the real story is likely much closer to McGowan’s analysis – Morrison was promoted and made into an icon by the system because of these high level connections.  However, being well-connected was not the only explanation – the establishment had a specific motive of derailing any legitimate anti-war activism or artwork, as well as moving the culture into a more degenerate state for social engineering.

We Know A Little About What Matter Does, But Nothing About What It Is....,

qz |  Interest in panpsychism has grown in part thanks to the increased academic focus on consciousness itself following on from Chalmers’ “hard problem” paper. Philosophers at NYU, home to one of the leading philosophy-of-mind departments, have made panpsychism a feature of serious study. There have been several credible academic books on the subject in recent years, and popular articles taking panpsychism seriously.

One of the most popular and credible contemporary neuroscience theories on consciousness, Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory, further lends credence to panpsychism. Tononi argues that something will have a form of “consciousness” if the information contained within the structure is sufficiently “integrated,” or unified, and so the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Because it applies to all structures—not just the human brain—Integrated Information Theory shares the panpsychist view that physical matter has innate conscious experience.

Goff, who has written an academic book on consciousness and is working on another that approaches the subject from a more popular-science perspective, notes that there were credible theories on the subject dating back to the 1920s. Thinkers including philosopher Bertrand Russell and physicist Arthur Eddington made a serious case for panpsychism, but the field lost momentum after World War II, when philosophy became largely focused on analytic philosophical questions of language and logic. Interest picked up again in the 2000s, thanks both to recognition of the “hard problem” and to increased adoption of the structural-realist approach in physics, explains Chalmers. This approach views physics as describing structure, and not the underlying nonstructural elements.

“Physical science tells us a lot less about the nature of matter than we tend to assume,” says Goff. “Eddington”—the English scientist who experimentally confirmed Einstein’s theory of general relativity in the early 20th century—“argued there’s a gap in our picture of the universe. We know what matter does but not what it is. We can put consciousness into this gap.”  Fist tap Dale.

Your Elites Are Like A Parasite About To Kill Its Host

oxforduniversitypress |  At the centre of the modern theory of credit rationing, as observed at the macro level, are banks—a critical institution which was missing from DSGE models. This was a particularly peculiar omission because, without banks, there presumably would be no central banks, and it is the central bank’s conduct of monetary policy that is central in those models. The fact that credit is allocated by institutions (banks), rather than through conventional markets (auctions) is an important distinction lost in the DSGE framework. Greenwald and Stiglitz (2003) model banks as firms, which take others’ capital, in combination with their own, obtaining and processing information, making decisions about which loans to make. They too are by and large equity constrained, but in addition face a large number of regulatory constraints. Shocks to their balance sheets, changes in the available set of loans and their expectations about returns, and alterations in regulations lead to large changes in loan supply and the terms at which loans are made available. Variations in regulations and circumstances of banks across states in the US are helping validate the importance of variation in the supply conditions in banking in the 2008 crisis and its aftermath.³⁸

Given how long it takes balance sheets to be restored when confronted with a shock of the size of that of 2008, it is not surprising that the effects persisted.³⁹ But they seem to have persisted even after the restoration of bank and firm balance sheets. That suggests that this crisis (like the Great Depression) is more than a balance sheet crisis. It is part of a structural transformation, in the advanced countries, the most notable aspects of which are a shift from manufacturing to a service-sector economy and an outsourcing of unskilled production to emerging markets; for developing countries, the structural transformation involves industrialization and globalization. Not surprisingly, such structural transformations have large macroeconomic consequences and are an essential part of growth processes. DSGE models are particularly unsuited to address their implications for several reasons: (a) the assumption of rational expectations, and even more importantly, common knowledge, might be relevant in the context of understanding fluctuations and growth in an agricultural environment with well-defined weather shocks described by a stationary distribution,⁴⁰ but it cannot describe changes, like these, that happen rarely;⁴¹ (b) studying these changes requires at least a two-sector model; and (c) a key market failure is the free mobility of resources, especially labour, across sectors. Again, simple models have been constructed investigating how structural transformation can lead to a persistent high level of unemployment, and how, even then, standard Keynesian policies can restore full employment, but by contrast, increasing wage flexibility can increase unemployment (see Delli Gatti et al., 2012a,b).

Religion and Money

gurdjieffclub |  To reflect on the relationship of religion to money, there is no better starting-point than "to go beyond time." In returning to the origin of the question, we may find a grain of truth and thus turn towards the remedy for an otherwise intractable problem. Countless volumes have appeared about the Church's attitude to war and sex but very little has been written about money.

William Desmonde shows1 that in some ancient cultures money was used as a symbol to replace food in sacrificial communion rituals. Participation in the meal implied a bond of loyalty with other members of the group and signified also entering into a covenant with the deity. Each communicant received a particular portion of the sacrificial flesh corresponding to his standing in the community. When money of different denominations began to be used in place of the portions of food, the establishment of a contractual; relationship between two individuals at first retained traces of the original bond of religious loyalty among participants in the same communion, with impersonal bargaining replacing the patriarchal redistribution of foods among the brotherhood.

In any case, there is good reason to suppose that money was originally a sacred device created by religious authority to facilitate the exchange of necessities in an expanding society. It was intended to be a means of recognizing that human beings have individual property rights and at the same time that no human being or family is self- sufficient. In support of this theory, Rene Guenon states2 that coins of the ancient Celts are covered with symbols taken from Druid doctrine, implying direct intervention of the Druid priests in the monetary system.

Given the sacred origin of money, solutions to the problem of religion and money on this level can never be found. A solution is achievable only through reinstating the individual's relationship to money within the whole scale of his spiritual studies and strivings, that is, through re-educating him to regard money transactions as a measure of his individual human relationships. For, like everything existing, money is a vital part of life on the planet and is worthy of respect, of course at its proper level. True religion views everything, including money, in relation to universal laws. In showing us our dependence on each other, money acts to remind us of these laws. The only thing wrong with money is our present view of it. This is what needs to be studied and understood.

Where to begin? It stands to reason that such a program of re-education cannot begin with the masses, who, in the last analysis, are not concerned with human values except in terms of physical survival.

Nor can much be expected from the many studies of money that are being made on the psychological level, although these may serve as useful shocks to our customary unconscious attitudes towards accumulation and waste. For example, Freud noted that in the modern Western world, the language of people of different nationalities is a mirror of their typical attitude to money. Germans earn money, Italians find it, the French gain or win it, the English have it or possess it, Americans make it. Freud pointed out also a common tendency among the clergy of his time to look on money as dirty, you mustn't touch it. He detected here some similarity to their attitude to sexual relations and even hinted at a direct connection between the problems of money and sex.

Open Thread IQ Test REDUX: Is This About The Money Power?

Fist tap Dale

Decision Neuroscience (REDUX Originally Posted 11/24/08)

This will not be the first time you've heard this from me, I've variously addressed it hereabouts under the rubrics neuroeconomics or dopamine hegemony - but this morning my very good friend Arnach hit me up back channel with a morsel supportive of the theory that global human governance boils down to the science of stimulating and controlling dopaminergy in the individual brain.

From the Stanford Storybank we have This is Your Brain on Bargains.

Scientific inspiration can derive from the most mundane experience. Archimedes was said to have figured out how to compute volume in his bathtub. When Uzma Khan had her eureka moment, she was sprawled on her couch, just back from a shopping mall where she had gone to avoid working on her dissertation.

Khan—then at Yale, now an assistant professor of marketing at the Graduate School of Business—knew all about the supposed levers of consumer behavior: supply, demand, advertising, discounting. Traditionally, business theorists described consumer behavior as being based on rational decisions about value and price. But as Khan looked at the shopping bags strewn around her apartment she realized that the conventional wisdom was, well, bankrupt. She was sure that her buying decisions had much less to do with price than they did her frayed nerves. She had gone shopping to feel better. Once home, the thrill was gone. “I looked at all that stuff, all those bags, and I thought, 'I don't need this stuff. I'm going to take most of it back. What was I thinking?'”

Khan's professional focus today is answering that question—what are we thinking when we go shopping? She is one of a growing number of researchers at Stanford and elsewhere working on consumer mysteries: Why are our needs and wants so disconnected? Why do people dig themselves into debt from foolish spending? Why do our brains perceive expensive products as superior? And what are the biological bases for the pleasures that shopping or even the anticipation of shopping can unleash?

So simple, elegant, and obvious. Selective governance via the natural tendency of the brain's neuronal circuits to Do What They Do..., what could be easier, more powerful, and more durable than that? The basic fact is that humans are routinely exploited by those with the wherewithal to "engineer" values in the outside world and a little knowledge of the workings of the "inside" world. - This takes us then to the meatus of the economic beatus - which isn't quantum mechanics - but a depth psychology informed by an expansive understanding fractal unfolding and the poised realm what that knowledge is and where exactly it came from.