Category: Corona

In mid-December 2022, Jesalyn Harper, a code enforcement officer for the city of Reedley, California, responded to a seemingly routine complaint about parked cars outside a run-down decades-old warehouse.

She got suspicious when she discovered a garden hose protruding through a rear wall, and a foul odor coming from a ventilation fan. 

Inside, she was met by three Chinese women wearing lab coats, plastic gloves and surgical masks. The company, Universal Meditech Inc. — which was operating without a state license or other required permits — was reportedly manufacturing a wide variety of test kits, including pregnancy tests, ovulation tests, COVID-19 test kits and various drug tests.^1,2 The company distributed the tests under the name Prestige Biotech Inc.

As reported by ABC News,³ when Harper conducted an impromptu inspection of the building, she found “dozens of refrigerators and ultralow-temperature freezers hooked to illegal wiring; vials of blood and jars of urine in shelves and plastic containers; and about 1,000 white lab mice being kept in crowded, soiled containers.”

Many of the mice were dead in their cages; others were in distress.⁴ The lab was later found to also be improperly storing at least 20 infectious agents, including E. coli, coronavirus, malaria, hepatitis B and C, dengue, chlamydia, herpes, rubella and HIV.^5,6,7

In broken English, the women told Harper the owner resided in China, and gave her a phone number and email address. Alarmed by what she’d found, Harper contacted Fresno County health officials and the FBI.

Investigators Claim There Was No Threat

Local, state and federal authorities all launched investigations, concluding there was no criminal activity going on at the lab, nor any evidence that the lab posed a threat to public health or national security.

The mice, said to have been genetically engineered to carry SARS-CoV-2, were inspected by a veterinarian associated with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

According to the vet, the mice had not been exposed to any kind of experimentation. They’d only been used to grow SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. The owner of the business told the Fresno health department that the mice were used to confirm their COVID test worked.

In March 2023, Reedley officials took legal action to shut the lab down.⁸ Working with the city of Reedley, the Fresno County Department of Public Health first got a court-issued warrant to inspect the property, where they discovered hazardous materials, chemicals and medical waste.

Photos⁹ show rows of dirty freezers and bare floors covered in dirt. To think this dilapidated, dirty-beyond-belief facility was producing medical tests, which need to be produced in controlled, sterile surroundings, is just shocking.

As of July 7, 2023, all biological agents have been cleaned out and destroyed by the Fresno health department.¹⁰ The property has since been declared abandoned and will be torn down.¹¹

FDA Warning for Reedley Lab Tests Has Been Issued

August 11, 2023, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a warning¹² about several of the test kits produced in the Reedley lab. Universal Meditech has also issued a recall of tests that have already been sent to distributors, but not for tests that have already reached consumers.

The tests are known to have been sold online under the brand names of the following four distributors, and they may not have identified Universal Meditech as the manufacturer. The tests may also have been sold by other distributors (and hence under other brand names) as well:¹³

• Prestige Biotech Inc.
• AC&C Distribution LLC
• HealthyWiser
• Home Health U.S. Inc.

The specific tests affected by the FDA’s warning are:¹⁴

One Step Pregnancy Test	DiagnosUS One Step Ovulation Test	HealthyWiser UriTest 10 Parameter Reagent Test Strips for Urinalysis
HealthyWiser UriTest UTI Test Strips	HealthyWiser KetoFast Ketone Test Strips	HealthyWiser pH-Aware pH Test Strips
To Life hCG Pregnancy Urine Test	Am I Pregnant Pregnancy Midstream Test	DeTec hCG Pregnancy Urine Test
PrestiBio Pregnancy Strips	PrestiBio Rapid Detection Pregnancy Test Midstream	PrestiBio Ovulation Strips
PrestiBio Urinalysis Test Strip 10 Parameters	PrestiBio Ketone Test Strips	PrestiBio Breast Milk Alcohol Test Strips

The FDA’s recommendations regarding these tests, are as follows:¹⁵

• Do not purchase or use any of these tests.
• If you’ve purchased any of these tests, throw them out.
• If you’ve used any of these tests, do not trust the results. Test again with a different test.
• If you’ve experienced a quality problem with any of these tests, contact the FDA’s MedWatch Adverse Event Reporting program.

State and Federal Officials Wanted It Kept Quiet

Reedley city manager Nicole Zieba told ABC News,¹⁶ “They were bad actors. They never came to the city and they moved in in the middle of the night. Those are pretty big elements that tell us they did not want us to know they were here.”

According to Zieba, the lab had been operating illegally in Reedley since October 2022. Before that, the company had operated — and been kicked out of — Canada; Texas; Fresno, California; Tulare, California; and Fresno again, before moving into Reedley.¹⁷

While the investigation into the illicit lab began in late December 2022, the public wasn’t informed about its existence until July 2023. According to Zieba and other local officials, state and federal agencies told them to keep quiet.¹⁸ Joe Prado, who works with the Fresno County Department of Public Health, told MSN:¹⁹

“As we were communicating with state and federal agencies, they’re making it very clear, we cannot speak on this. This is our protocol, this is what they adhered to and they’re not able to speak on an ongoing investigation. They’ve made that clear pretty much since day one.”

Zieba told ABC News she decided to heed their advice since the Department of Toxic Substances Control found no threats in the water, sewer system or air. “Had there been any hazard to their safety, we would have immediately notified the public,” she said.

While staying mum about an ongoing investigation might seem reasonable to those doing the investigating, considering public trust in government is at an all-time low, transparency would seem more prudent. As noted by the editor of Everything South City:²⁰

“Concerned residents cannot be dismissed as annoying ‘Gadflies’ by city officials or staff, they must be taken seriously and addressed. For each question posed, there are 50+ others seeking the same answers, although they might not articulate the questions themselves.

Our ‘gadflies’ are an important part of our societal ecosystem and we need to encourage the public to speak up and ask for clarity when they have questions and we must demand timely answers that aren’t CYA narrative from those sworn to protect us. Public servants must remember they are not rulers over us, as some might believe, but they are here to serve us all …”

No Medical Lab Oversight

Fears about bioweapons production in rural America aside, the discovery of the illegal lab in Reedley has also exposed another problem, which is that there’s no governmental agency in charge of overseeing private medical labs.²¹ As noted by Harper:²²

“We’re finding out that with these private labs, there really isn’t as much regulation as there is for publicly funded labs, labs that receive grants. There’s no one technically looking for them.”

The frightening reality is that no one knows how many other facilities like Universal Meditech there might be in the U.S. and elsewhere. According to ABC News:²³

“House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican who represents a Congressional district neighboring Reedley’s, said … he plans to raise concerns over the ‘very disturbing’ case with colleagues on the Select Committee on China and follow up with the FBI.

‘My concern is to get to the bottom of what happened here but to also look at where this is happening in other parts of this country as well,’ McCarthy said.”

Shoddy and unprofessional labs like Universal Meditech aren’t the only private facilities that can pose a threat to public health. Genentech, owned by Roche, was in August 2021 found to be in violation of hazardous waste management, including hazardous waste air emissions, at three different locations in South San Francisco.²⁴

Violations included storing hazardous medical waste without a permit, failing to meet requirements related to monitoring hazardous waste air emissions, failing to properly mark hazardous waste equipment, failing to perform required inspections of emissions control equipment, failing to maintain overfill protection controls for a hazardous waste tank, and not including necessary federal waste codes on hazardous waste manifests. In August 2023, Genentech was ordered to pay $158,208 in civil penalties as a result.²⁵

COVID Pandemic and Reedley Lab Are Stark Warnings

Between the COVID pandemic (which most likely was the result of a biolab accident in Wuhan, China), and the discovery of an illegal lab in Reedley (which haphazardly stored infectious pathogens in a facility deemed so dilapidated that it must now be torn down), I’d say there’s cause for concern.

How many more illegal labs are there in the U.S.? How many around the world? How many infectious pathogens are out there, stored in freezers with makeshift wiring and handled by workers wearing nothing but plastic gloves and surgical masks? How many seemingly “respectable” companies are cutting corners in their hazardous waste management and their biosecurity?

It seems clear that one of the greatest threats mankind currently faces is the proliferation of biolabs, from high-security laboratories to the kind run by Universal Meditech. It’s just a matter of time before something truly nasty gets out. This is why I believe we must push for a total ban on gain-of-function research that can make a pathogen more lethal.

Families Sue EcoHealth Alliance Over Coronavirus Research

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be sufficient political will to grapple with this threat. That would probably be the most effective strategy. Instead, people are forced to turn to lawsuits.

The families of four people who died from COVID-19 are now suing EcoHealth Alliance,²⁶ the National Institutes of Health-funded nonprofit that funneled research dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

The lawsuit, filed with the Manhattan Supreme Court, argues that EcoHealth Alliance funded coronavirus research at the WIV that led to the creation of SARS-CoV-2, and that president Peter Daszak knew the virus was dangerous and “capable of causing a worldwide pandemic.”

EcoHealth and Daszak are also being sued by four more families and three COVID survivors. Two of the lawsuits are filed in New York state and one in Pennsylvania. As reported by the New York Post, August 12, 2023:²⁷

“Despite partially-funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where the virus originated, EcoHealth failed to make sure critical safety measures were in place — then worked to cover up the origins of the outbreak, they claimed in court papers.

‘If we had known the source or origin of this virus and had not been misled that it was from a pangolin in a wet market, and rather we knew that it was a genetically manipulated virus, and that the scientists involved were concealing that from our clients, the outcome could have been very different,’ Patricia Finn, the victims’ attorney, told The Post …

‘[The families of the deceased] are … enraged because the truth of what really happened appears to be coming forward,’ Finn added …

In a June report, the Government Accountability Office said that EcoHealth Alliance — which doles out money given to them by the National Institutes of Health — gave $1,413,720 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, while a separate investigation found the government may have paid millions in duplicating grants to the Wuhan-based research institutions through EcoHealth.”

With any amount of luck, lawsuits against the companies, organizations and individuals involved in risky gain-of-function research on coronaviruses will make these mad scientists think twice. Still, we need a comprehensive worldwide ban, a solid international agreement, to safeguard the world from pandemics like COVID-19.

If viruses are being engineered to be more deadly, and if they’re stored in labs and shoddy warehouses around the world, something truly devastating will eventually get out. We don’t need One Health. We don’t need the World Health Organization’s pandemic treaty. Biosecurity calls, first and foremost, for a worldwide ban on risky gain-of-function research.

Originally published: July 19, 2020

Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., a former full professor of physics, is a researcher with the Ontario Civil Liberties Association in Canada. He’s held that volunteer position since 2014, which has given him the opportunity to dig into scientific issues that impact civil rights. He also did postdoctoral work in chemistry.

Here, we discuss the controversial topic of face masks. Should you wear one? When and where? Does it protect you or not? There’s a wide range of opinions on this even within the natural health community.

Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, I endorsed the use of face masks based on the experience of some of the Eastern European countries. The rationale of it seemed to make sense at the time. Since then, however, I’ve started to question their use.

Unfortunately, the mainstream propaganda and government orders in many states reverted back toward mask wearing just about everywhere. You’re not allowed into stores; you cannot fly or take a cab, Uber or Lyft without one; you must wear one everywhere you go, even outdoors, and if you don’t you’re vilified, sometimes aggressively attacked.

There’s No Scientific Support for Mask-Wearing

Rancourt’s investigation into mask wearing was part of his research for the Ontario Civil Liberties Association. He did a thorough study of the scientific literature on masks, concentrating on evidence showing masks can reduce infection risk, especially viral respiratory diseases.

“What I found when I looked at all the randomized controlled trials with verified outcome, meaning you actually measure whether or not the person was infected … NONE of these well-designed studies that are intended to remove observational bias … found there was a statistically significant advantage of wearing a mask versus not wearing a mask.

Likewise, there was no detectable difference between respirators and surgical masks. That to me was a clear sign that the science was telling us they could not detect a positive utility of masks in this application.

We’re talking many really [high-]quality trials. What this means — and this is very important — is that if there was any significant advantage to wearing a mask to reduce this [infection] risk, then you would have detected that in at least one of these trials, [yet] there’s no sign of it.

That to me is a firm scientific conclusion: There is no evidence that masks are of any utility either preventing the aerosol particles from coming out or from going in. You’re not helping the people around you by wearing a mask, and you’re not helping yourself preventing the disease by wearing a mask.

This science is unambiguous in that such a positive effect cannot be detected. So, that was the first thing I publicized. I wrote a large review^1,2 of the scientific literature about that.

But then I asked myself, as a physicist and as a scientist, why would that be? Why would masks not work at all? And so, I looked into the biology and physics of how these diseases are transmitted.”

The Importance of All-Cause Mortality Statistics

When trying to tease out whether an intervention works against COVID-19 or not, it’s important to look at death statistics. The number of deaths is really what’s important, not the number of infected individuals, as many may not even exhibit symptoms.

The problem is that assigning the cause of death in a situation where a viral infection taxes the immune system and is confounded by comorbidities is tricky business. As noted by Rancourt, epidemiologists have long known that you cannot reliably assign cause of death during a viral pandemic such as this. There’s tremendous bias involved.

To get around those problems, you have to look at all-cause mortality. The reason for this is because all-cause mortality data are not affected by reporting bias.

So, Rancourt did a detailed study of the current data of all-cause mortality, showing that the all-cause mortality this past winter was no different, statistically, from previous decades. In other words, COVID-19 is not a killer disease, and this pandemic has not brought anything out of the ordinary in terms of death toll.

Government Lockdown Orders Fueled Death Toll

He published this data in the paper,³ “All-Cause Mortality During COVID-19: No Plague and a Likely Signature of Mass Homicide by Government Response.” Rancourt explains:

“It turns out that these curves, which show the winter burden deaths as humps every winter, some of them, in some jurisdictions, have an additional very sharp peak. It doesn’t represent a … huge amount of deaths by comparison to the total winter burden because it’s a very sharp peak, but it’s an anomalous peak. It’s not a natural peak.

And it happened in exact coincidence and time everywhere. In every jurisdiction that sees this anomalous, unnatural peak … the peak started exactly when the pandemic was declared by the World Health Organization. And the World Health Organization at that time recommended states prepare their hospitals for a huge influx of people with critical conditions.

So, the government response to that World Health Organization recommendation is what killed people, what accelerated the deaths. You can see that in the data, and you can also understand it in terms of how immune-vulnerable people are affected by these kinds of diseases.

What they did is they closed people into their institutional places of residence, they didn’t allow visitors. So, they isolated the most vulnerable parts of society that already had comorbidity conditions who were in a fragile state.

So, they ensured that many people that were locked into these institutions would die from this particular seasonal virus that causes the respiratory disease.

But the virus itself is not more virulent than other viruses. The total winter burden deaths is not greater, but there is a signature of a sharp feature that lasts the full width at half maximum. This feature is three or four or five weeks, which is extraordinarily rapid, never been seen before. And it happens very late in the winter burdens season.

A sharp peak like this has never been seen this late in the season before, and it’s happening [synchronistically] everywhere, on every continent, at the same time in direct immediacy after the declaration of the pandemic. To my eye, there is no doubt that there was an acceleration of deaths of vulnerable people due to government responses …

What really matters is the hard data, and the hard data is all-cause mortality in any jurisdiction that you want to look at. And it has not been anomalous, statistically speaking, no matter how you slice it.”

The two graphs below show the number of deaths from all causes from 1972 until 1993, and 2014 until present time in 2020.

Why Government Response Was Ill Advised

Rancourt goes on to qualify some of this data based on the mechanism of viral transmission, which also helps explain why government responses have been ill advised, as they actually worsen transmission rather than inhibit it. Infectious respiratory diseases primarily spread via very fine aerosol particles that are in suspension in the air.

“We’re talking about the small size fraction of aerosols, so typically smaller than 2 micrometers,” Rancourt explains. “There are water droplets that bear these virions, the virus particles, and there can be dozens or hundreds of these virions per very small droplet of this size.

Those are the droplets we’re talking about. When you get down to those sizes, gravitational outtake is very inefficient and they basically stay in suspension. And, as soon as you have currents or flow of air, [the particles] are carried.”

The aerosol particles stay in suspension when the absolute humidity is low. This is why influenza outbreaks occur during the winter. Once absolute humidity rises, the aerosol particles become unstable. They agglomerate, drop out of suspension and cease to be transmissible. “This is well known,” Rancourt says. “It’s been known for a decade. It’s been extraordinarily well-demonstrated by top scientists.”

The mid-latitude band is where you find the dry weather and the temperature ideal for transmitting viral respiratory diseases. Viral infections typically spread during the winter in the northern hemisphere, and in the summer in the southern hemisphere.

“You see it in both hemispheres, but inverted,” Rancourt says. “That is why, when you move down towards the equator, transmission drops. You don’t get transmission.

Likewise, if you go too far North, it also does not transmit, and that is not well understood. I’m an expert in environmental nanoparticles and how they charge and what they do, so I have some ideas about why that is, but it hasn’t been studied in detail.

The point is the transmission band is very narrow. It’s across Europe and North America where you have temperatures between about zero and 10 degrees Celsius, and you have low absolute humidity. That’s where these aerosol particles that are the vector of transmission are completely suspended as part of the fluid air.

They’re really part of the fluid air, so any air that gets through, [the viral particles are also] going to come through. That’s why masks don’t work. And these particles are in suspension in the air and get trapped indoors.

That’s why centers where you have sick people and you’re not controlling the air environment are centers of transmission. We’re talking about old folks’ homes, hospitals, even people’s homes. This entire class of diseases, this is how they’re transmitted.”

Why Masks Are Used During Surgery

Many firmly believe wearing a mask in public will protect themselves and/or others, and one of the reasons for this is because they appear to work in some circumstances, such as operating rooms. If they don’t work, why do surgical staff and many health care workers use them on a regular basis?

As explained by Rancourt, the reason surgical masks are worn in the operating room is to prevent spittle from accidentally falling into an open wound, which could lead to infection. Surgical masks have been shown to be important in that respect.

Preventing microbes and bacteria from falling into an open wound is very different from preventing the spread of viral particles, however. Not only are viruses much smaller than bacteria and many other microbes found in saliva, they are, again, airborne. They’re aerosolized and part of the fluid air. Therefore, if air can penetrate the mask, these aerosol particles can also get through.

“The best randomized controlled trials with verified outcome — in other words, the only scientifically designed studies that remove observational bias and that are valid and rigorous — are [done] in clinical environments.

So, they’re looking at health care workers treating people that potentially have a viral respiratory infection, or treating people they know have such an infection and they’re doing something that will potentially generate a lot of aerosol particles by the treatment. Many, many trials have been done in that environment and none of them find any advantage to the health care workers,” Rancourt says.

Mask Wearing Does Not Protect Others Either

The video below is from Patrick Bet David, who has a very popular YouTube channel that I enjoy watching. His message below is broken down into very simple terms and he presents valid arguments and good questions. I encourage you to view it if you believe in wearing masks.

Now, one view is that, even though a mask may not protect the wearer against contracting an infection, it will still protect others that the mask-wearer comes into contact with. But that’s not what the science shows. The measured outcome in most rigorous studies on this is the infection rate. Did anyone involved get infected?

Comparisons are made between health care workers wearing masks, respirators or nothing at all. While this does not allow you to discern who is being protected — the mask wearer or others — the studies show mask wearing does neither.

Since everyone is in close proximity to each other, and no differences in infection rates are found regardless of what type of mask is worn, or none at all, it tells us that mask wearing protects no one from viral infections.

“It makes no difference if everybody in your team is wearing a mask; it makes no difference if one is and others aren’t,” Rancourt says. “Wearing a mask or being in an environment where masks are being worn or not worn, there’s no difference in terms of your risk of being infected by the viral respiratory disease.

There’s no reduction, period. There are no exceptions. All the studies that have been tabulated, looked at, published, I was not able to find any exceptions, if you constrain yourself to verified outcomes.”

What’s more, the results are the same for both N95 respirators and surgical masks. Respirators offer no protective advantage when it comes to viral infections.

“In one of the randomized control trials, a big one that compared masks and N95 respirators among health care workers, the only statistically significant outcome they discovered and reported on was that the health care workers who wore the N95 respirators were much more likely to suffer from headaches,” Rancourt says.

“Now, if you’ve got a bunch of health care workers, which you’re forcing to get headaches, how good is the healthcare going to be?”

Why Masks Don’t Prevent Viral Infections

As noted by Rancourt, it’s important to separate scientific findings from possible mechanics that might explain a certain outcome. Studies have conclusively proven masks do not prevent viral infections. Why, is another question.

“I think it’s important to recognize that no matter how clever your explanation is, it may not be right,” he says. That said, one commonsense explanation put forth by Rancourt is that masks don’t work for this application for the simple fact that they allow airflow:

“I’ve come to the conclusion that the most prominent vector of transmission is these fine aerosol particles. Those fine aerosol particles will follow the fluid air. In a surgical mask, there is no way you’re blocking the fluid air. When you breathe wearing a surgical mask, the lowest impedance of airflow is through the sides and tops and bottoms of the mask.

In other words, very little of the airflow is going to be through the actual mask. The mask is only designed and intended to stop your spitballs from coming out and hitting someone … If the flow of air is through the sides, whatever molecules or small particles are carried in the air, are going to flow that way as well, and that’s how you get infected.

If you’re not stopping [the viral particles] coming in, you’re not stopping them from coming out either. They follow the flow, period. That’s the way it is. So that’s why there’s an equivalence between ‘It doesn’t protect you and it doesn’t protect anyone else either.’”

Ironically, some masks are even designed with out-vents, to facilitate breathing, which completely negate the claim that mask-wearers are protecting others.

Why Masks Have No Impact on Viral Load

Rancourt also dismisses the argument that masks can reduce the total viral load by catching your spit. The theory is that by minimizing the viral load someone is exposed to, their chances of the infection taking hold are minimized.

“The large droplets drop to the floor immediately and are not breathed in. So, they’re not part of the transmission mechanism. You can do a scientific study that demonstrates that viruses survive a fairly long time on a surface … These are called fomites, these surfaces where viruses can live and stay active.

That does not mean that transmission occurs through surfaces. It only means that a scientist was able to establish that a virus can survive a long time on a surface. It doesn’t tell you anything about the likely transmission mechanism of the disease. So, there are a lot of studies like this that are basically irrelevant in terms of transmission mechanism.

[Infectious respiratory diseases] are transmitted by these fine aerosol particles that are in suspension in the air. In a case like that, will a mask, will something that is preventing spitballs from coming out, protect you or protect others? And the answer is no, it makes no measurable difference.

There are many studies that show how difficult it is to actually infect someone when you’re just trying to put something like a fluid or something you know is bearing the virus into their eye or into their nose. It’s hard to do this. That’s what the studies show.

But if you take a fine aerosol and you breathe it in deeply, that’s where the infection starts and that’s where the virus has evolved to be most effective. So, by breathing in aerosols laden with these viruses, you’re going to be infected. Try to do anything else, and it’s going to be difficult [to spread infection].

The most recent randomized controlled trial [published] this year basically concluded they could find no evidence that masks, hand-washing and distancing, in terms of reducing the risk of these types of diseases, were of any use. [They] didn’t help.

So, there’s this dissonance between what the science actually tells you when you measure correctly, and what the health authorities tell you to do. They want you to be convinced that you’re in this dangerous environment and that if you follow their directives, you’ll be safe.

Their purpose is to control your life and to give you directives, and you’re going to accept that. That’s part of how they convince you that you absolutely need the state to save your life. I think that’s what’s going on.”

Mask-Wearing Is Not Without Its Risks

We’ve already mentioned that certain masks can increase your likelihood of headaches. Others believe masks can cause lower partial pressure of oxygen, which could cause serious health problems. In the video above, Peggy Hall with TheHealthyAmerican.org claims certain masks can result in low oxygen levels, thus violating OSHA rules on oxygen requirements.

“There are many admitted dangers to wearing masks,” Rancourt says. “The World Health Organization in its June 5 memo,⁴ where they reversed their position and decided that it was a good idea to recommend mask use in the general population, in that document, they actually say you have to consider the potential harms, and they list what they consider are all the potential harms.

They missed a lot. But one of the top ones is you’re concentrating the pathogen laden material onto this material near your face, nose, eyes and so on. And you’re touching the mask all the time, you’re touching yourself, you’re touching others.

It’s not a controlled clinical environment, so there’s potential for transmission in that way. You might wear the mask more than once, you might store it at home and then wear it again. You might do all kinds of things …

What I find extraordinary is that they also have a list of what they call potential advantages. And when I compare the two lists, the potential dangers far outweigh the potential advantages. So, you have to ask yourself, what the heck are you doing?

How can you make these two columns and compare the advantages and disadvantages and have one clearly outweigh the other and then conclude that therefore we recommend masks? This is just nonsense. It’s irrational. So, my association added our list⁵ of things that they weren’t even considering.

We went into the civil liberties aspect of it as well, because I think this is very important. One of the fundamental aspects of a free and democratic society is that the individual is entitled to evaluate the personal risk to themselves when they act in the world.”

As noted by Rancourt, risk evaluation is a very personal thing. It involves your personality, your judgment, your knowledge, your experience and your culture. It’s a very personal thing that you’re entitled to do for yourself. If the state is forcing you to accept their evaluation of risk, then this fundamental precept is violated. What’s worse, they’re forcing you to accept an evaluation of risk that cannot be scientifically justified.

Mask Mandates Are Indicative of Rising Totalitarianism

In its letter⁶ to the WHO, the Ontario Civil Liberties Association also addressed the issue of mask mandates as an instrument of totalitarianism.

“In our letter, we put it this way. There’s a recent scientific study⁷ that came out in 2019. The first author is the executive director of the Ontario Civil Liberties Association that I do research for, and he’s a physicist also. He wrote an article with another physicist.

They looked at the conditions under which a society will gradually degrade towards a more totalitarian state. What they found was that there were two major control parameters that characterize the society that will tell you if that is likely to happen or not.

One of those control parameters is authoritarianism in the society. What they mean by that is, how successful can an individual be to refuse something, like to refuse to wear a mask if they protest? What is the chance that they’ll succeed if they refuse? That would be related to the degree of authoritarianism.

The other important parameter is the degree of violence in the society. How violent is the repression if you disobey? So how big is the fine? Can you go to jail? How much punishment will you be subjected to if you disobey a particular rule, for example, wearing of a mask?

Those two parameters, they were able to establish what we call a phase diagram of societies … And what they found is that in present society, if you would estimate the average value of those two parameters for United States or Canada, we’re in a state right now where the society is very gradually evolving towards totalitarianism.

The way to slow that and prevent it is for people to object and to scale it back. As soon as you agree with an irrational order, an irrational command that is not science-based, then you are doing nothing to bring back society towards the free and democratic society that we should have. You are allowing this slow march towards totalitarianism. That’s how I would explain the importance of objecting to this.”

Mask Mandates Allow Government to Shirk Responsibility

Rancourt also points out that when government and health institutions convince people that masks are the solution, they are effectively removing their duty of care toward you, because they’re saying all you need to do is wear a mask. This allows them to avoid the responsibility of actually preventing transmission in the primary centers of transmission, such as hospitals, nursing homes and elsewhere.⁸

“We don’t have to manage the air in such a way that immune-vulnerable in this establishment will not be at risk of dying and so on. They remove their duty of care responsibilities by saying, ‘Well, we’re just not going to allow visitors, and we’re going to force everyone to wear masks.’

You need to look at, scientifically, what is happening here. Why are people at risk? What is immune-vulnerability due to? What can you do about it? And then you have to do something about it if you’re serious about your duty of care towards these people. So it has that side effect of letting them get away with not taking care of the people that they’re responsible for.”

Calls for Peaceful Civil Disobedience Are Growing

The Ontario Civil Liberties Association has issued a press release⁹ calling for peaceful civil disobedience against mandatory masking. The U.S. nonprofit Stand for Health Freedom is also calling for civil disobedience, and has a widget you can use to contact your government representatives to let them know wearing a mask must be a personal choice.

“In the memo that was put out, we explain how best to perform that civil disobedience. We explain that you should be calm and confident and not get into arguments and not try to convince the authorities.

Just express your disobedience regarding this rule. And then we explain that they may want to trespass you, they may want to give you a fine, that you can anticipate fighting that fine in court. We go through the steps so that people can visualize how to do this.

We explain that some of their core shoppers or core citizens will be angry and aggressive, and to not get into a fight and not to get into a war of words. Do not try to convince them. Just stick to that you are not going to comply. Be very calm. This kind of civil disobedience has been successful at various times in North American history.

There are risks involved, but it’s often worth it to the individual to have that civil disobedience because there are many individuals that don’t know what to do that are very angry because they’re being forced to wear masks and they see it as absurd and a constraint. So, we try to give them a view of a venue on how to resist this …

We also recommend when people are practicing this kind of civil disobedience that they not be isolated, that they try to form a grassroots group of support and that they don’t do it alone. Try to bring at least one person, one supporter, with them. Record the interaction with the authorities and report back on social media and to their groups with details of what happened and so on.

We hope to create kind of a smoother messaging that a lot of people, or at least some people, do not believe this mask story and do not believe that they are at risk and are willing to practice civil disobedience to make that point.”

Intelligence agencies have a long history of using propaganda as a tool of war, and the effectiveness of information warfare radically improved with the emergence of the internet, to say nothing of artificial intelligence and social media.

If you’re over 50, you can probably remember a time when your family had a row of encyclopedias on the bookshelf — usually obtained at considerable cost — which were perused whenever you needed to learn more about a particular topic.

Today, you can’t even give a complete set of encyclopedias away because, well, we have Wikipedia. However, Wikipedia has also become a favored propaganda tool, so to call it unreliable would be an understatement.

According to Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger — who left Wikipedia in 2002, the year after its inception — U.S. intelligence has been manipulating the online encyclopedia since at least 2008, if not longer. Sanger recently sat down to speak with independent journalist Glenn Greenwald (video above) about the subversion of the site he helped create.¹

The Blatant Bias of Wikipedia

Sanger says he noticed a bias creeping in around 2006, particularly in areas of science and medicine. Around 2010, he started noticing that articles about Eastern Medicine were being changed to reflect blatantly biased positions, using “dismissive epithets” to paint this ancient tradition as quackery.

In 2012, evidence also emerged revealing a Wikipedia trustee and “Wikipedian in Residence” were being paid to edit pages on behalf of their clients and secure their placement on Wikipedia’s front page in the “Did You Know” section,² which publicizes new or expanded articles³ — a clear violation of Wikipedia rules.

“It really got over the top … between 2013 and 2018,” Sanger says, “and by by at the time Trump became president, it was almost as bad as it is now. It’s amazing, you know, no encyclopedia, to my knowledge, has ever been as biased as Wikipedia has been …

I remember being mad about Encyclopedia Britannica and The World Book not mentioning my favorite topics, [and] presenting only certain points of view in a way that establishment sources generally do. But this is something else. This is entirely different. It’s over the top.”

Greenwald agrees, highlighting some recent examples of the “over the top” kind of establishment bias, such as Wikipedia simply declaring that the Ukraine-Biden scandal is a conspiracy theory designed to undermine Biden:

“The very first sentence reads: ‘The Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory is a series of false allegations that Joe Biden, while he was Vice President of the United States, engaged in corrupt activities relating to his son, Hunter Biden, who was on the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma.’

‘As part of efforts by Donald Trump and his campaign in the Trump–Ukraine scandal, which led to Trump’s first impeachment, these falsehoods were spread in an attempt to damage Joe Biden’s reputation and chances during the 2020 presidential campaign,’ the Wikipedia entry still reads.

So, notice: The Biden-Ukraine scandal is — according to Wikipedia — the ‘Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory’ but the Trump controversy involving Ukraine is ‘the Trump–Ukraine scandal’. Everything is written to comport with the liberal world view and the Democratic Party talking points.”

Wikipedia’s treatment of all things COVID-related is equally skewed. It presents only the establishment’s “truth” across the board, no matter how much evidence there is to refute it.

‘Truth’ Has Been Married to Ideology

“Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia devoted to truth,” Greenwald says. The problem is that “The premise seems to be that you don’t have truth anymore independent of ideological outlook.”

Indeed, Sanger points out that Wikipedia’s official policy even declares that 80% of Right-wing media is unreliable, and “that really, really colors the articles and what the editors allow the articles to say,” he says. Just how did we get to a point where “truth” is tied to a particular ideology? Common sense tells you it simply cannot be so.

Intel Agencies Control Wikipedia

One explanation for why this ideological bias has taken over Wikipedia is that it’s intentionally being used as a propaganda tool by intelligence agencies and the globalist establishment that is seeking to implement a new global governance, a New World Order/One World Government.

To succeed in that Herculean effort, they can’t allow a multitude of dissenting viewpoints to proliferate, and intelligence agencies are working together to disseminate and uphold the Deep State’s narratives worldwide. Sanger puts it this way:

“I think that the Left … very, very deliberately seeks out to take control. Except it isn’t just the Left. We’re learning that now, aren’t we? No, it’s the establishment, and they have their own agenda.

I’m not going to try to offer any opinions — because it’s not something that I study — as to how they bring that about. But it’s clear that between 2005 and 2015 … Wikipedia moved onto the establishment’s radar, and we … have evidence that … even as early as … 2008 … CIA and FBI computers were used to edit Wikipedia. Think they stopped doing that? No.

And not just them. We know that a great part of intelligence and information warfare is conducted online, and where, if not on websites like Wikipedia?

They pay off the most influential people to push their agendas, which they’re already mostly in line with, or they just develop their own talent within the [intelligence] community. [They] learn the Wikipedia game and then push what they want to say with their own people. So, that’s my take on that.”

Google and Social Media Are Controlled Too

As noted by Greenwald, Google has played a significant role in Wikipedia’s growth and success by algorithmically placing Wikipedia answers at the top of most searches, and, of course — while they don’t discuss this in the interview — Google also has deep and longstanding ties to the military-intelligence-industrial complex and the globalist Deep State.

The same can be said for social media companies like Twitter and Facebook. As reported by Jimmy Dore in the video above, in early 2023, Elon Musk released documents showing Twitter’s former executives censored content at the request of the FBI and assisted the U.S. military’s online propaganda campaigns.

Twitter also censored anti-Ukraine narratives on behalf of several U.S. intelligence agencies. Similarly, Facebook censored accurate information that was damaging to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign at the direct request of the FBI. There’s simply no doubt that intelligence agencies are directly involved in controlling and directing public information flow, and Wikipedia is invaluable in that respect.

Anonymous Writers Have No Credibility

Now, I’d be remiss if I didn’t stress a key feature of Wikipedia that makes it unreliable, no matter what, and that is the fact that contributing authors and editors are all anonymous.

Clearly, the credibility of an author, regardless of the media format, is of importance when trying to determine the veracity of a given topic, keeping in mind that even experts in the same field will often reach different (and perhaps opposing) conclusions.

Not every expert will have read and evaluated the exact same evidence, for example, leading to differences in interpretation of data. This is normal and unlikely to change, as it is human nature to draw conclusions based on our own breadth of experience and knowledge.

It’s then up to the reader to make up their mind about which of the two or more experts they believe is most correct — a choice that in turn is dependent on the reader’s own prejudices and knowledge base. That said, it should be obvious that no one individual, or even group of individuals, can be the final arbiter of which expert opinion is “the truth.”

However, that’s exactly the position that Wikipedia has inserted itself into. They now decide who they think is right and which position is the correct one, and they simply censor opposing views.

Google Must Have Known They Were Promoting Unreliable Info

Considering that one of the primary factors that come into play when determining the credibility of an author is his or her credentials, affiliations and previous writings,⁴ how is it that Google promotes Wikipedia as an authority for every possible type of information by listing them at the top of its search results?

And how can Google use Wikipedia as a primary tool for its quality raters to establish credibility of other online material?^5,6 It doesn’t make sense, unless you realize that neither Google nor Wikipedia are about giving people accurate and unbiased information. Their function is to facilitate the programming of people with a certain set of narratives and viewpoints.

As early as 2011, the fact that Wikipedia editors were being paid by corporations to remove and suppress unwanted information was well known and had been declared scandalous.⁷ Yet nothing changed. At least not for the better.

A 2014 paper⁸ titled, “Do Experts or Collective Intelligence Write with More Bias? Evidence from Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia” by Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu, compared 4,000 articles that appear in both encyclopedias and found 73% of Wikipedia’s articles contained political buzz words, compared to 34% in Britannica, and in nearly all cases, Wikipedia was more left-leaning than the Britannica.

Wikipedia Used to Smear and Defame Truthtellers

A key take-home from all this is that Wikipedia is not a reliable source. It’s a propaganda tool, and relying on it will frequently leave you wearing the dunce hat. Articles on science and medicine are definitely corrupted and biased in favor of establishment views and should never be used to make medical decisions.

According to a 2014 study,^9,10 which assessed the veracity of medical claims made on Wikipedia by cross-checking them with the latest peer-reviewed research, reported finding “many errors” in articles concerning the 10 costliest medical conditions. In fact, 9 out of 10 entries — 90%! — contained assertions that were contradicted by published research.

“Health care professionals, trainees, and patients should use caution when using Wikipedia to answer questions regarding patient care,” the authors warned.

That said, articles about historical events, current geopolitical issues and the biographies of public figures are not much better. Greenwald himself has seen his personal page transform from a neutral listing of his work history and accomplishments to an “ideological war” description that paints him in a bad light.

Many excellent scientists and doctors who veered from the establishment narrative on COVID have also been shamefully smeared and defamed by Wikipedia, and anyone who tries to clarify or clear up inaccuracies on the site is simply blocked.

Investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson, for example, has repeatedly tried to “correct provably false facts” about her background on Wikipedia, only to be told she’s “not a reliable source” and having her edits overridden by anonymous editors that guard her page, making sure her award-winning work is kept hushed and her character portrait tarnished.¹¹ Other examples of “sanitizing” certain pages and tarnishing others can be found in a June 28, 2015, article¹² in The Epoch Times.

Ditch Wikipedia and Use Other Online Encyclopedias

If you’re interested in learning more about Wikipedia, its history and inner workings, pick up a copy of Andrew Lih’s book, “The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia.”¹³ In it, Lih asks, “If Wikipedia is a minefield of inaccuracies, should one even be tiptoeing through this information garden?” It’s a fair question, for sure.

Similarly, in a 2005 blog post critiquing Wikipedia, Nicholas Carr, author of “What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” noted:¹⁴

“[A]n encyclopedia can’t just have a small percentage of good entries and be considered a success. I would argue, in fact, that the overall quality of an encyclopedia is best judged by its weakest entries rather than its best. What’s the worth of an unreliable reference work?”

The good news is there are dozens of other online encyclopedias, many of which do not suffer from this entrenched ideological bias. Two great resources are encyclosearch.org and encycloreader.org, which allow you to search for answers across dozens of encyclopedias, including Wikipedia, at once. This way, you can compare a multitude of sources.

Examples of more specialized encyclopedias include Ballotpedia (an explicitly neutral encyclopedia of American politics), Scholarpedia, EduTechWiki, MedlinePlus (a medical encyclopedia), Encyclopedia Mythica (religion, folklore and mythology) and HandWiki (computing, science, technology and general).

Sanger is involved in the creation of encyclosearch.org, which he describes as an effort to “strike a blow against censorship and control of information by simply making it easier to find the all the other encyclopedias that are out there.”

Truth be told, Wikipedia is dependent on your lack of knowledge about how they really operate. Taking advantage of your desire for quick information, their goal is to shuttle your thoughts, opinions and knowledge into a silo that doesn’t allow anything in except what they put in there. And what they’re putting on their site is some of the most biased information you’ll find anywhere in media today.

The video above features Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s mini-documentary “Midnight At the Border,” in which he travels to the U.S.-Mexico border in Yuma, Arizona, to investigate the illegal immigration issue firsthand.

What he discovers, and reveals in this video, is a humanitarian crisis of shocking magnitude and a border security system crippled by politics and corruption. Along the way, Kennedy also gathers ideas for how to solve the problem.

“I witnessed this dystopian nightmare of this uncontrolled flow of desperate humanity crossing the border and converging here because of misbegotten policies by high leadership of the United States,” Kennedy says.

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, some 1.7 million illegals flowed across the southern border into the U.S. in 2021, another 2.4 million in 2022, and nearly 1.8 million so far in 2023.¹ 2022 was an all-time record, and the total for 2023 will likely break it.

Biden Has Outsourced US Immigration to the Cartels

A major take-home from Kennedy’s exposé of the border crisis is that the Biden administration has effectively outsourced U.S. immigration to the cartels. Several cartels are in fact now fighting for supremacy.

According to Jonathan Lines, Yuma County, Arizona, supervisor for District 2, there have been 300 assassinations in the past 18 months, as the cartels fight for control of the human trafficking business.

On the night that Kennedy visited Yuma, some 150 people from all over the world crossed the border. And, as noted by Lines, that’s a new phenomenon. In the past, most of the border-jumpers came from Mexico and South America. Now, most of those entering the U.S. illegally are from China, Africa and Eastern Europe.

People are also coming from Russia, Syria, Ukraine, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Bangladesh. They’ve heard there’s no border control, so they make their way to Mexico first, and then cross over from there.

Some are here for asylum. Some are hoping for a better life — the “American dream” — not yet realizing that that dream is being actively undermined with each passing day. Some are hard-core criminals. None are vetted either way.

Once they’re on the U.S. side, FEMA pays to fly them wherever they want to go, anywhere in the United States. In other words, U.S. taxpayers are footing the bill for this cartel-led invasion.

Biden’s 180 on the Border Wall

Ironically, in 2006, then-Sen. Biden supported the construction of 700 miles of border wall, 40 stories high, to prevent the influx of methamphetamine, cocaine, and heroin from Mexico.

In a Q-and-A session at a Columbia, South Carolina, Rotary Club meeting (video above), Biden also said American employers must be punished for “knowingly violating the law” by hiring illegals. “Unless you do those two things,” he said, “all the rest is window dressing.”

But once he entered the Oval Office, he blocked the completion of the wall, begun under President Trump, and is now selling off $300 million’ worth of unused wall material for pennies on the dollar, in what the New York Post calls “an apparent end-run around pending legislation in Congress” aimed at forcing Biden to finish the wall.²

“The Finish It Act will make the feds use those materials on new wall construction — or hand the remaining stock over to states like Texas for use in their own border defense projects,” the New York Post writes.³

“Now, the Biden administration is rushing to get rid of the wall leftovers before the GOP-led House can pass a matching version of the bill and make it law, critics told The Post.

‘This sale is a wasteful and ludicrous decision by the Biden administration that only serves as further proof they have no shame,’ Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), the bill’s sponsor, told The Post — denouncing the move as ‘outrageous, behind-the-scenes maneuvering.’

‘Leaving the border open to terrorists while selling border security materials at a loss is Bidenomics in a nutshell,’ said Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), a co-sponsor.

‘The pennies made from selling the border wall will not be enough to pay the families who suffer from a criminal act committed by someone who crossed our open borders during the Biden administration,’ railed Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) called the fire sale ‘reckless.’ ‘Our borders continue to be overrun by an unprecedented number of illegal immigrants, turning every district into a border district, and compromising our national security,’ Stefanik said …

Rep. Juan Ciscomani (R-Ariz.), who represents the border district where the auctioned wall components have been sitting idle, slammed Biden for his ‘refusal to act.’

‘The federal government needs to be utilizing every tool in the toolbox to secure our border,’ Ciscomani said. ‘Instead of putting these materials to their intended use, they have been squandered, first collecting dust in the desert and now being auctioned off.’”

Open Border Policy Is the Antithesis of Humanitarianism

Those who argue that an open border policy is somehow a humanitarian policy clearly do not understand how this policy works and impacts people in the real world. Migrants face violence, sexual assault, extortion and robbery along their journey.

An unknown number of children are also being trafficked into the U.S. and sold into slavery and the sex trade. The estimated revenues from human trafficking in 2022 alone was $13 billion.⁴

The uncontrolled influx of illegals also puts an enormous strain on local communities, all of which have limited resources. In New York City, for example, more than 10,000 illegal migrants arrive each month, demanding shelter, meals, social services and education.^5,6

In May 2023, NYC Mayor Eric Adams announced that nearly half of all NYC hotel rooms were occupied by illegal immigrants,⁷ and according to news reports, rooms were being trashed in “free-for-alls” involving drugs, sex and violence.^8,9,10

The city is reportedly reimbursing hotels more than $300 a night per room,¹¹ and taxpayers are, of course, paying for that too, while the city is slashing services in an effort to balance the budget.

In July, migrants started setting up a tent city under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway,¹² and in mid-August, a tent city large enough to shelter 1,000 people was set up on the grounds of the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens.¹³

Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-SI/Brooklyn, who is trying to prevent migrant shelters from being erected in the city’s parks and military sites, told the New York Post,¹⁴ “President Biden has no regard for taxpayer dollars — or how his open border is bankrupting communities across the country that are footing the bill for his failures.”

Lack of work, housing and food, in turn, end up fueling crime and make American communities less safe and more inhospitable.¹⁵

Open Border Policy Enables Human Trafficking and Slavery

The trafficking of children is perhaps the most disturbing part of this crisis. As of April 2023, the U.S. Office of Refugee Settlement had lost track of a staggering 85,000 unaccompanied migrant children who entered the U.S. in the previous two years.¹⁶ Where are they? What happened to them? Who has them?

As Yuma County Sheriff L.N. Wilmot told Kennedy, children are being exploited because of this open border policy, and there is absolutely nothing humane about that. Sponsors or recipients of these children are not even vetted to make sure the children are not being funneled directly into some pedophile ring or illicit business.

Many migrants also die along the way. According to Jeff Ruby, director and security officer of the Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma, the annual average of dead migrants found on the Western Barry Goldwater Range, which is right next to the border, was between five and 15. In 2022, there were 50 — the highest ever.

Yuma Mayor Douglas Nicholls explains how the cartels will intentionally direct large groups of migrants to make this treacherous multiday journey through the desert to distract border patrol from drug smugglers making their way to the border using another route.

In 2022 alone, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) seized 379 million doses of fentanyl being smuggled across the border. Cartels also use this diversion technique when smuggling in gang members and terrorists.

Illegal Migrant City Being Erected in Texas

To learn more about the reality at the southern border, check out the work of war correspondent and former Green Beret Michael Yon on cis.org, X/Twitter and Substack. Yon has spent the better part of this year investigating, recording and reporting on the border crisis.

Yon is one of the few who is reporting on the private construction of a 55,000-acre “Colonia” (colony) to house 200,000 illegals near Plum Grove, Texas.^17,18 He discusses this in the Redacted interview above.

Yon’s investigation has also revealed that the U.S. government and the United Nations are funding, facilitating and encouraging the illegal immigration, handing out rape kits and maps showing the best routes and crossing areas.

How to Solve This Humanitarian Crisis

Can a President solve this problem and put an end to this humanitarian crisis? Absolutely. Key solutions gathered by Kennedy include:

• Finish key sections of the border wall
• Technology to secure the border and aid in border agent response to illegal incursions
• A legal pathway for asylum seekers

Kennedy envisions an immigration policy of “tall walls and wide gates.” Meaning, illegal border crossings are eliminated, while those who want to come here have a legal and expeditious way to seek and be granted work permits, residency or citizenship. In closing, Kennedy says:

“I’ve come to understand that the open border policy is just a way of funding a multi-billion dollar drug and human trafficking operation for the Mexican drug cartels.

When I’m president, I will secure the border, which will end the cartels’ drug-trafficking economy, and I will build wide doors for those who wish to enter legally so that the United States can continue to be a beacon to the world …”

As if the ChatGPT craze weren’t bad enough, the $$$$$ winds are blowing in the direction of trying to build a similar engine for biology — and on a large scale. Highly perched individuals with a technocratic vision are betting on AI that would surveil every nook and cranny in the body and then generate … well, something useful to them, they hope. On my end, I am afraid to think what kind of Frankenstein such AI can generate.

The idea, as usual, is to feed the AI as much data as possible (biological data, in this case), and hope that it will “understand” the “language of biology” — properties of different elements and the connections between them — and then “intelligently” build wondrous biological structures from scratch. Mommy, no.

A Few Thoughts About ChatGPT

Is generative AI’s current ability to mimic natural language and spit out perfect English sentences on demand impressive? Yes, it’s a cute inanimate parrot and information retriever, that generative AI.

But is it a reliable source of information? Nope! It makes things up unpredictably. It’s a machine. An automaton. A Lego brick assembler. It does not think. It doesn’t feel. It doesn’t “know” anything. It doesn’t “know” the meaning of the ones and zeros that it spits out.

It is prone to the so called “hallucinations,” where the robot produces text that looks plausible — but the “facts” are simply made up. And I am not talking about intentional “lying” due to being programmed to propagandize — it does that, too — what I am talking about here is “lying” for no reason, with no benefit to anyone, just generating smooth-sounding “facts” that are made up and packing them alongside the statements that are factually correct.

Now let’s imagine how it would work in biology. I think they’ve made horror films about this kind of thing, no?

Large Language Models for Biology

In July of this year, Forbes magazine published an article that provides some insight into the trend:

“As DeepMind CEO/cofounder Demis Hassabis put it: “At its most fundamental level, I think biology can be thought of as an information processing system, albeit an extraordinarily complex and dynamic one. Just as mathematics turned out to be the right description language for physics, biology may turn out to be the perfect type of regime for the application of AI.”

Large language models are at their most powerful when they can feast on vast volumes of signal-rich data, inferring latent patterns and deep structure that go well beyond the capacity of any human to absorb. They can then use this intricate understanding of the subject matter to generate novel, breathtakingly sophisticated output.

By ingesting all of the text on the internet, for instance, tools like ChatGPT have learned to converse with thoughtfulness and nuance on any imaginable topic. By ingesting billions of images, text-to-image models like Midjourney have learned to produce creative original imagery on demand.

Pointing large language models at biological data — enabling them to learn the language of life — will unlock possibilities that will make natural language and images seem almost trivial by comparison … In the near term, the most compelling opportunity to apply large language models in the life sciences is to design novel proteins.”

AI for Proteins

In late 2020, Alphabet’s AI system called AlphaFold produced an alleged “solution to the protein folding problem.” AlphaFold is said to have “correctly predicted proteins’ three-dimensional shapes to within the width of about one atom, far outperforming any other method that humans had ever devised.”

AlphaFold was not based on large language models but on an “older bioinformatics construct called multiple sequence alignment (MSA), in which a protein’s sequence is compared to evolutionarily similar proteins in order to deduce its structure.”

Recently, scientist started to explore using LLMs to predict protein structures. According to Forbes, “protein language models (LLMs trained on protein sequences) have demonstrated an astonishing ability to intuit [emphasis mine] the complex patterns and interrelationships between protein sequence, structure and function: say, how changing certain amino acids in certain parts of a protein’s sequence will affect the shape that the protein folds into …

The idea of a protein language model dates back to the 2019 UniRep work out of George Church’s lab at Harvard.” Let’s look at George Church and his work.

A Remarkable 2016 World Science Festival Panel

Remember the recently resurfaced short video clip from 2016 about “editing” humans to be intolerant to meat? The panel was from the 2016 World Science Festival. It featured a couple of renowned geneticists and bioethicists (George Church, Drew Endy, Gregory E. Kaebnick, S. Matthew Liao) and Amy Harmon, a journalist from the New York Times. (I wrote about it in detail here.)

The panelists talked about “manufacturing human DNA and whole new orphans people from scratch, about germline editing (introducing heritable genetic changes, which, they say, is already being done), about genetically editing people to be more compliant with the current thing empathetic, or to be allergic to meat and smaller in size ‘for the planet,’ etc.”

George Church, now, is a very famous geneticist who has worked on age reversal, barcoding mammalian cells (see his work on barcoding the whole mouse), recreating the woolly mammoth, and “printing” DNA (with an implication of potentially “manufacturing” human beings) from scratch.

He is “Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Director of PersonalGenomes.org, which provides the world’s only open-access information on human Genomic, Environmental & Trait data (GET). His 1984 Harvard PhD included the first methods for direct genome sequencing, molecular multiplexing & barcoding.

These led to the first genome sequence (pathogen, Helicobacter pylori) in 1994. His innovations have contributed to nearly all “next generation” DNA sequencing methods and companies (CGI-BGI, Life, Illumina, Nanopore).

This plus his lab’s work on chip-DNA-synthesis, gene editing and stem cell engineering resulted in founding additional application-based companies spanning fields of medical diagnostics (Knome/PierianDx, Alacris, Nebula, Veritas) & synthetic biology / therapeutics (AbVitro/Juno, Gen9/enEvolv/Zymergen/Warpdrive/Gingko, Editas, Egenesis).

He has also pioneered new privacy, biosafety, ELSI, environmental & biosecurity policies. He was director of an IARPA BRAIN Project and 3 NIH Centers for Excellence in Genomic Science (2004-2020). His honors include election to NAS & NAE & Franklin Bower Laureate for Achievement in Science. He has coauthored 650 papers, 156 patent publications & a book (Regenesis).”

George Church has been working with DAPRA on various projects. For example, he has been a part of Safe Genes initiative, seeking to “develop systems to safeguard genomes by detecting, preventing, and ultimately reversing mutations that may arise from exposure to radiation.”

That work was said to “involve creation of novel computational and molecular tools to enable the development of precise editors that can distinguish between highly similar genetic sequences. The team also plans to screen the effectiveness of natural and synthetic drugs to inhibit gene editing activity [emphasis mine].” Additionally, he was allegedly involved in DARPA’s BRAIN Initiative.

As a side note, in 2019, he apologized for working with Epstein after the latter pleaded guilty, citing “nerd tunnel vision.” Now, before we look at another notable World Science Festival panelist, S. Mathew Liao, let’s go back to large language models in biology and see what we got there.

Inventing New Proteins

“All the proteins that exist in the world today represent but an infinitesimally tiny fraction of all the proteins that could theoretically exist. Herein lies the opportunity,” says Forbes.

I have one word for them: plastic. It was a wonderful invention at one time, and it sure changed our lives and added a lot of convenience to it — but then it turned out that it was not so great for our health, and now plastic can be found everywhere.

It can be found in the human brain, in placenta, and deep in the ocean — not to mention mountains of it at landfills. And that’s just good ol’ plastic, something that was invented during the “ancient times” of technological development, by the standards of today. But back to Forbes:

“The total set of proteins that exist in the human body — the so-called ‘human proteome’ — is estimated to number somewhere between 80,000 and 400,000 proteins. Meanwhile, the number of proteins that could theoretically exist is in the neighborhood of 10^1,300 — an unfathomably large number, many times greater than the number of atoms in the universe …

An opportunity exists for us to improve upon nature. After all, as powerful of a force as it is, evolution by natural selection is not all-seeing; it does not plan ahead; it does not reason or optimize in top-down fashion. It unfolds randomly and opportunistically, propagating combinations that happen to work …

Using AI, we can for the first time systematically and comprehensively explore the vast uncharted realms of protein space in order to design proteins unlike anything that has ever existed in nature, purpose-built for our medical and commercial needs.”

What arrogance, dear God, just stop! The marketing brochure talks about curing diseases and “creating new classes of proteins with transformative applications in agriculture, industrials, materials science, environmental remediation and beyond.” Methinks, it is going to be “transformative” alright but in what way, and for whose benefit? Not ours!

“The first work to use transformer-based LLMs to design de novo proteins was ProGen, published by Salesforce Research in 2020. The original ProGen model was 1.2 billion parameters …

Another intriguing early-stage startup applying LLMs to design novel protein therapeutics is Nabla Bio. Spun out of George Church’s lab at Harvard and led by the team behind UniRep, Nabla is focused specifically on antibodies.

Given that 60% of all protein therapeutics today are antibodies and that the two highest-selling drugs in the world are antibody therapeutics, it is hardly a surprising choice Nabla has decided not to develop its own therapeutics but rather to offer its cutting-edge technology to biopharma partners as a tool to help them develop their own drugs.”

“The Road Ahead”

Still Forbes:

“In her acceptance speech for the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Frances Arnold said: ‘Today we can for all practical purposes read, write, and edit any sequence of DNA, but we cannot compose it. The code of life is a symphony, guiding intricate and beautiful parts performed by an untold number of players and instruments.

Maybe we can cut and paste pieces from nature’s compositions, but we do not know how to write the bars for a single enzymic passage.’

As recently as five years ago, this was true. But AI may give us the ability, for the first time in the history of life, to actually compose entirely new proteins (and their associated genetic code) from scratch, purpose-built for our needs. It is an awe-inspiring possibility.”

Mommy, no!!

“Yet over the long run, few market applications of AI hold greater promise … Language models can be used to generate other classes of biomolecules, notably nucleic acids. A buzzy startup named Inceptive, for example, is applying LLMs to generate novel RNA therapeutics.

Other groups have even broader aspirations, aiming to build generalized “foundation models for biology” that can fuse diverse data types spanning genomics, protein sequences, cellular structures, epigenetic states, cell images, mass spectrometry, spatial transcriptomics and beyond.

The ultimate goal is to move beyond modeling an individual molecule like a protein to modeling proteins’ interactions with other molecules, then to modeling whole cells, then tissues, then organs — and eventually entire organisms. [Emphasis mine.]”

The crazies are truly running the asylum at the moment. How many times do the arrogant scientists have to hurt the world in order to wake up? What will it take for them to wake up? When they personally grow a third leg?!

S. Matthew Liao, the Bioethicist

Now let’s talk about the ambitions to engineer people on order to make them smaller and allergic to meat — and to erase undesirable memories. Meet the renowned bioethicist, a strange person, S. Matthew Liao.

S. Matthew Liao “holds the Arthur Zitrin Chair in Bioethics and is the Director for The Center for Bioethics at New York University. From 2006 to 2009, he was the Deputy Director and James Martin Senior Research Fellow in the Program on the Ethics of the New Biosciences in the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University.

He was the Harold T. Shapiro Research Fellow in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University in 2003–2004, and a Greenwall Research Fellow at Johns Hopkins University and a Visiting Researcher at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University from 2004–2006. In May 2007, he founded Ethics Etc, a group blog for discussing contemporary philosophical issues in ethics and related areas.”

His scholarly works make me wonder about his life. I certainly wish him well but the topics make me wonder. Here’s one, “The Right to Be Loved”:

“S. Matthew Liao argues here that children have a right to be loved … His proposal is that all human beings have rights to the fundamental conditions for pursuing a good life; therefore, as human beings, children have human rights to the fundamental conditions for pursuing a good life. Since being loved is one of those fundamental conditions, children thus have a right to be loved.”

Here’s another: “The normativity of memory modification”

“We first point out that those developing desirable memory modifying technologies should keep in mind certain technical and user-limitation issues. We next discuss certain normative issues that the use of these technologies can raise such as truthfulness, appropriate moral reaction, self-knowledge, agency, and moral obligations.

Finally, we propose that as long as individuals using these technologies do not harm others and themselves in certain ways, and as long as there is no prima facie duty to retain particular memories, it is up to individuals to determine the permissibility of particular uses of these technologies.”

Speaking of, here is his talk about memory modification:

And just as I was wrapping this article up, I got a newsletter from Open to Debate, titled, “Should we erase bad memories?” featuring Nita Farahany, “agenda contributor” at the WEF. (My answer to that question, by the way, is a resounding NO.)

Conclusion

I will end this story with a short quote from my recent article:

“They are trying. They are likely going to create a lot of unnecessary, stupid, cruel suffering. But in the end, they are not even going to end up with “I am afraid I can’t do it, Dave.” They are going to end up with this.”

About the Author

To find more of Tessa Lena’s work, be sure to check out her bio, Tessa Fights Robots.

As the COVID pandemic wore on, with potential treatments supposedly unknown, New York pulmonologist Dr. Pierre Kory and others tried to get the word out about ivermectin. A widely used antiparasitic drug that’s listed on the World Health Organization’s essential medicines list¹ and approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, ivermectin is widely available, inexpensive and has a long history of safe usage.

In fact, since 1987, 3.7 billion doses of ivermectin have been used among humans worldwide,² but it was quickly vilified — as were those who dared to prescribe it. Now, the tables have turned. Not only did ivermectin work against COVID-19, it was remarkably effective, resulting in a 74% reduction in excess deaths in the 10 states where it was used most intensively.³

Ivermectin Dramatically Slashed COVID Deaths

Kory and other physicians with the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Working Group (FLCCC) had success early on treating patients with ivermectin and other therapies during the pandemic. His efforts to get the word out on this treatment protocol were stifled by censorship, ridicule and colleagues brainwashed by the official narrative and unwilling to accept the science.

A preprint paper showing ivermectin’s effectiveness against COVID-19 in Peru “was the final piece of evidence which convinced me, Paul [Marik] and the FLCCC that widespread ivermectin distribution could end the pandemic in Oct of 2020,” Kory tweeted.⁴ “Took 2 years but now peer-reviewed & published in a major journal.”

That study, published in Cureus,⁵ vindicates ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19. “Reductions in excess deaths over a period of 30 days after peak deaths averaged 74% in the 10 states with the most intensive IVM [ivermectin] use,” the study found.⁶ It used Peruvian national health data from Peru’s 25 states to evaluate ivermectin’s effects.

A natural experiment was set in motion in May 2020, when Peru authorized ivermectin for COVID-19. The significant reduction in excess deaths noted “correlated closely with the extent of IVM use,” the researchers noted.

Global Success Stories Highlight Ivermectin’s Potential

Few have heard about the astonishing success of ivermectin in Uttar Pradesh, India, which embraced large-scale prophylactic and therapeutic use of ivermectin for COVID-19 patients, close contacts of patients and health care workers.⁷

“The possibility of both preventative and treatment efficacies of IVM was raised by outcomes in another world region in which IVM was distributed to the population at risk for COVID-19 on a mass scale. This IVM distribution occurred in Uttar Pradesh, the largest state in India, having a population of 229 million,” the study added.⁸

There, widespread ivermectin distribution likely resulted in significantly lower COVID-19 deaths compared to areas not using the drug:⁹

“The cumulative total of COVID-19 deaths per million in population from July 7, 2021 through April 1, 2023 was 4.3 in Uttar Pradesh, as compared with 70.4 in all of India and 1,596.3 in the United States … The much lower number of COVID-19 deaths per population in all of India versus the United States in that period may reflect the use of these same home treatment kits containing IVM, doxycycline, and zinc in some other states of India.”

A similar series of events occurred in Itajai, Brazil, a city of 220,000 people. In June 2020, they implemented a prophylaxis program using ivermectin. The program was advertised throughout local media, and people were encouraged to participate and take ivermectin four times a month, on days 1, 2, 15 and 16.

On the appropriate days, they set up tents and centers where people could get the drug, and the entire program was carefully logged in an electronic database. In all, 159,000 Brazilians participated, of those 113,000 elected to take the ivermectin.

Kory and eight coauthors published a paper on the results, which showed “regular use of ivermectin as a prophylactic agent was associated with significantly reduced COVID-19 infection, hospitalization, and mortality rates.”¹⁰

Those who used ivermectin had a 44% reduction in COVID-19 infection rate, a 68% reduction in COVID-19 mortality and a 56% reduction in hospitalization rate compared to those who did not.¹¹

Meanwhile, a study from Japan demonstrated that just 12 days after doctors were allowed to legally prescribe ivermectin to their COVID-19 patients, cases dropped dramatically.¹² The chairman of the Tokyo Medical Association¹³ noticed the low number of infections and deaths in Africa, where many use ivermectin prophylactically and as the core strategy to treat river blindness.¹⁴

Government’s Ivermectin Restrictions Increased Deaths

In a striking revelation, ivermectin was used against COVID-19 in Peru for four months, before the new president put restrictions on its use. During that time, “there was a 14-fold reduction in nationwide excess deaths and then a 13-fold increase in the two months following the restriction of IVM use.”¹⁵

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has towed the anti-ivermectin narrative all along, with its infamous tweet reading, “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”¹⁶ While commanding the U.S. public and physicians not to use ivermectin for an off-label use, the irony stands that close to 40% of U.S. prescriptions are for off-label uses.¹⁷

But now, after years of vilification, it had no choice but to admit what’s been right all along — doctors have the authority to prescribe ivermectin for COVID-19. Attorney Jared Kelson of Boyden Gray & Associates, who is representing physicians who have sued the FDA for interfering with their practice of medicine, including relating to ivermectin for COVID-19, explained:¹⁸

“The fundamental issue is straightforward. After the FDA approves a human drug for sale, does it then have the authority to influence or interfere with how that drug is used within the doctor-patient relationship? The answer is no.”

The FDA did just that, nonetheless, but finally admitted the truth on August 16, 2023, tweeting, “Health care professionals generally may choose to prescribe an approved human drug for an unapproved use when they judge that the unapproved use is medically appropriate for an individual patient.”¹⁹

In September 2021, the American Medical Association also told doctors to stop prescribing ivermectin for COVID-19. In a statement, AMA, along with the American Pharmacists Association (APhA) and American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP), warned:²⁰

“We are alarmed by reports that outpatient prescribing for and dispensing of ivermectin have increased 24-fold since before the pandemic and increased exponentially over the past few months. As such, we are calling for an immediate end to the prescribing, dispensing, and use of ivermectin for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 outside of a clinical trial.

In addition, we are urging physicians, pharmacists, and other prescribers — trusted health care professionals in their communities — to warn patients against the use of ivermectin outside of FDA-approved indications and guidance, whether intended for use in humans or animals, as well as purchasing ivermectin from online stores.”

How many died unnecessarily as a result of these commands? As noted by journalist Kim Iversen, even the FDA’s move advising doctors that they’re allowed to prescribe ivermectin for COVID-19 is too little, too late. “Now, two, three years later, too little, too late… ultimately, we now get this study that has been officially peer reviewed and published, and it shows significant, significant, significant reduction [of mortality] in COVID-19.”²¹

How Does Ivermectin Work Against COVID?

Ivermectin binds to SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein, limiting the virus’ morbidity and infectivity.²² The drug, while best known for its antiparasitic effects, also has demonstrated antiviral and anti-inflammatory properties. An in vitro study demonstrated that a single treatment with ivermectin effectively reduced viral load 5,000 times in 48 hours in cell culture.²³

Studies have shown that ivermectin helps to lower the viral load by inhibiting replication.²⁴ A single dose of ivermectin can kill 99.8% of the virus within 48 hours.²⁵ A meta-analysis in the American Journal of Therapeutics also showed the drug reduced infection by an average of 86% when used preventively.²⁶

Ivermectin has also been shown to speed recovery, in part by inhibiting inflammation and protecting against organ damage.²⁷ This pathway also lowers the risk of hospitalization and death. Meta analyses have shown an average reduction in mortality that ranges from 75%²⁸ to 83%.^29,30

Additionally, the drug also prevents transmission of SARS-CoV-2 when taken before or after exposure.³¹ As the Cureus study noted, the latest data only adds further evidence that ivermectin has an important place in COVID-19 treatment:³²

“These encouraging results from IVM treatments in Peru and similar positive indications from Uttar Pradesh, India, which have populations of 33 million and 229 million, respectively, offer promising models for further mass deployments of IVM, as needs may arise, for both the treatment and prevention of COVID-19.”

It’s worth noting, too, that ivermectin has notable antitumor effects, which include inhibiting proliferation, metastasis and angiogenic activity in cancer cells.³³ It appears to inhibit tumor cells by regulating multiple signaling pathways, which researchers explained in the Pharmacological Research journal, “suggests that ivermectin may be an anticancer drug with great potential.”³⁴

Why Was Ivermectin Suppressed?

The average treatment cost for ivermectin is $58.³⁵ Do you think this has anything to do with ivermectin’s vilification? The authors of the Cureus study certainly do:³⁶

“The exceptional safety profile and low cost of IVM certainly support its use as in Peru’s operation MOT [Mega-Operación Tayta] and in Uttar Pradesh as an attractive national policy for COVID-19 mitigation. These significant reductions in mortality as achieved in Peru and Uttar Pradesh suggest that the impact of such a national IVM deployment would be observable within a relatively short period.

However, generic drugs have often fared poorly in competition with patented offerings in past decades, based upon the unfortunate vulnerability of science to commodification and regulatory capture … Such a potential bias against IVM was suggested by a February 4, 2021 press release from Merck, which was then developing its own patented COVID-19 therapeutic, claiming that there was ‘a concerning lack of safety data’ for IVM.

However, IVM is Merck’s own drug, found safe at doses considerably higher than its standard dose in several studies, as cited in the section on the background on IVM treatments of COVID-19, and the Nobel Prize committee specifically noted IVM’s safety record in honoring the discovery of this drug in its 2015 prize for medicine.”

If you’d like to learn more about ivermectin’s potential uses for COVID-19, FLCCC’s I-CARE protocol can be downloaded in full,³⁷ giving you step-by-step instructions on how to prevent and treat the early symptoms of COVID-19.

One of the largest studies¹ to draw attention to the declining nutrient value in fruits and vegetables was published in 2004 in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition. The researchers used data gathered from 1950 to 1999 and found that out of 43 foods evaluated, there were reliable declines in six nutrients. Those nutrients include protein, riboflavin, vitamin C, calcium, iron and phosphorus.

The researchers evaluated data on seven other nutrients for which they found no statistically reliable changes. The team concluded that the declines were easily explained by changes in cultivated varieties and these declines may be a trade-off between cultivation to raise yield and an impact on nutrient content.

Your body depends on essential nutrients for growth and development, and to maintain optimal health. When you experience deficiencies, it can have a significant impact on immunity, wound healing, bone health and much more. Your body uses protein to build muscles, manufacture hormones and create antibodies. Vitamin C is an integral part of your immune system, and riboflavin, which is one of the eight B vitamins, helps convert food into energy.^2,3,4

Deficiencies in any of these nutrients have a fundamental impact on overall health and wellness. Nutrient-dense foods provide your body with more of what it needs to support good health. Nutrient density considers both macronutrients, such as protein, fats, and carbohydrates, and micronutrients, which include vitamins and minerals necessary for normal physiological functioning.

Declining Nutritional Values Affect Produce and Meat

Research within the last five years has also demonstrated a decline in nutrients, including iron content in vegetables grown in Australia.⁵ The researchers looked at the iron content of vegetables and legumes and noted a decrease of 30% to 50% in sweet corn, redskin potatoes, cauliflower and green beans, and pronounced reductions in legumes. The researchers warned that as plant-based diets become more popular, monitoring nutrient composition is “strongly recommended.”⁶

Another study noted a 23% decline in protein content in wheat⁷ and notable reductions in manganese, zinc, magnesium and iron. The impact of declining nutrient density in produce and grain affects not only vegetarians but also meat eaters. Livestock are fed less nutritious grasses and grains, which in turn has an impact on many animal-derived products that are not produced on biodynamic or regenerative farms, including meat, dairy and eggs.

These studies demonstrate that it turns out you can simultaneously gain weight and be starved of vital nutrients essential to good health. Donald R. Davis of the University of Texas at Austin was the lead author of the 2004 study and worked on subsequent papers on the same subject. He commented:⁸

“Efforts to breed new varieties of crops that provide greater yield, pest resistance and climate adaptability have allowed crops to grow bigger and more rapidly but their ability to manufacture or uptake nutrients has not kept pace with their rapid growth.”

In addition to declining nutrient value, world crises are making a bad problem worse. Ukraine has been called “the breadbasket” of Europe⁹ as the country is responsible for producing and exporting roughly 12% of all food calories traded on the international market. Russia is also a major exporter, and the two countries together account for nearly 30% of global wheat exports, nearly 20% of the world’s corn and more than 80% of the sunflower oil.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture projected that wheat exports from Russia and Ukraine would be down by more than 7 million metric tons in 2022. According to a report in January 2023,¹⁰ the exports from Ukraine had reached 23.6 million metric tons of grain, which had fallen from 33.5 million recorded at the same time in the previous season.

Ukraine’s government reported that the grain harvest would reach 51 million metric tons, a decline from the record 86 million in 2021 because of a loss of land and lower yields. By July 2022,¹¹ the UN had brokered the Black Sea Grain Initiative between Russia and Ukraine. This allowed Ukraine to export grain through the Black Sea from ports that had been blocked since mid-February.

While the initiative helped facilitate exports from Ukraine, price volatility for wheat had reached its highest level in more than 10 years. International markets adjusted and adapted, resulting in higher-priced foods that nearly everyone has experienced at the grocery store.

According to data from the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), the change in wheat exports from 2021 to 2022 dropped by 5.3 million metric tons in Ukraine, 8.5 million metric tons in Argentina and rose by 10.5 million metric tons in Russia.¹²

Perfect Storm Threatens Public Health

As crop nutrient density declines, so does public health. Nutritional deficiencies are linked to a higher incidence of viral illness,¹³ gluten sensitivity,¹⁴ autism,¹⁵ dementia¹⁶ and depression¹⁷ to name a few. Multiple challenges have arisen that appear to be contributing to this issue of food insecurity.

As Davis noted, high-yield plants have resulted in lower nutrient density. National Geographic explains¹⁸ that crops with higher yields are grown in fields with finite resources. This means that the nutrients must be distributed across a greater volume of produce, which in effect, dilutes the nutrient value.

Another challenge to growing nutrient-dense crops is soil damage from high-yield practices, such as tilling, monocropping and GMO seeds. Most crops benefit from partnerships with soil fungi as it improves the plant’s ability to absorb nutrients and water.¹⁹ Yet these high-yield practices hurt beneficial fungal growth.

Growing just one crop species, also called monocropping or monocultures, increases the farmers’ efficiency in the short-term but it also increases the risk of disease and pests, and leads to soil exhaustion.²⁰ Using genetically modified crops gained widespread commercial use by 1996 and today, most corn, soybean, cotton and canola are genetically modified.²¹

While some continue to promote genetically modified seeds and the subsequent high-dose herbicides and pesticides used to control weeds and pests, further study reveals how this damages soil microbes, and subsequently our food supply. Glyphosate is one of the most widely applied broad-spectrum herbicides in agriculture.

However, as the Soil Association notes,²² glyphosate negatively affects soil bacteria and harms beneficial fungi that live near plant roots. In past years, glyphosate has increased the severity of crop diseases, possibly by altering the balance of soil microbes. It also has had a negative impact on the activity of several earthworm species.

Another factor that plays a role in reducing crop nutrient density is the use of nitrogen fertilizers. These fertilizers consistently favor the growth of pathogenic fungi²³ while harming beneficial fungi necessary for strong plant growth. Yet corporate farmers have grown reliant on nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers.

The combination of the breakdown in logistics during the pandemic and the later conflict in Russia and Ukraine led experts to predict fertilizer prices could double in the following growing seasons.

Nearly 40% of the global export of potash, a key fertilizer ingredient, and 48% of ammonium nitrate is exported from Russia.²⁴ Prices rose in 2022 but dropped in the first quarter of 2023. However, experts believe this trend may not continue and likely is giving farmers false hope, as experts anticipate price reductions could be temporary.²⁵

Improving Soil Health Can’t Make Junk Food Healthy

As more consumers are looking for organic products, more manufacturers of snacks and junk foods are seeking to capitalize on the trend. For example, Annie’s, a division of General Mills, advertises “advancing regenerative farming practices”²⁶ in their limited-edition Organic Mac & Cheese and Organic Bunny Grahams.

However, there is a range of practices that could be referred to as regenerative, even though they’re only slightly different from conventional, chemical farming. The fact that General Mills is partnering with Ben & Jerry’s to promote their brands with regenerative agriculture for highly processed junk food like mac and cheese, cookies and CAFO ice cream is another strange path forward.²⁷

While it will take farmers, businesses and consumers to advance regenerative practices, you have to be skeptical of this odd alliance of junk food products to promote regenerative agriculture.

The falling nutrient density in produce is especially concerning if consumers follow manufacturers’ push for a primarily plant-based diet. Much, but not all, of the fake food promoted by globalists is plant-based. The rest is a combination of lab-grown slurry altered using advanced technology to increase consumer appeal.²⁸

The underlying truth is that improving soil health and raising plants’ nutrient density cannot make junk food healthy. Instead, most Americans need to start eating real food to save the planet and improve their health. Eating organically produced foods is important, but when these are processed foods, it doesn’t matter if they’re organic and regeneratively grown, your health still suffers from nutritional imbalances.

Biodynamic and Regenerative Farming Choices Offer Hope

Chemical-based agriculture has destroyed rural economies, raised air and water pollution, destroyed pollinators and biodiversity, increased soil erosion and lost fertility. The U.S. spends $4.3 trillion on health care each year,²⁹ which is more than any other nation and yet public health just keeps getting worse.³⁰

It’s clear that we live in an increasingly toxic environment, eating cheap junk-filled foods, while nearly half of all Americans live with one or more chronic diseases that even the government admits “many of which are related to poor quality eating patterns.”³¹ In 2010,³² over 90% of Americans did not eat the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s recommended intakes of the most important vitamins and minerals necessary for health and the number didn’t change in 2020.³³

And it’s apparent from mounting evidence that lower nutrient density means it will take more food to achieve the same nutritional goals. Research consistently demonstrates that organically produced foods are significantly higher in antioxidants, especially in no-till regenerative systems.³⁴ While there are separate efforts to create certifications for regenerative agriculture, it’s worth noting that the “gold standard” certification already exists.

Biodynamic farming is a holistic approach that focuses on the natural use of the soil. It was first introduced by Austrian scholar Rudolf Steiner,³⁵ and is an approach that provides far superior harvests when compared to conventional chemical-based agriculture. Yet at the same time, it also helps to heal the soil damage caused by conventional growers.

Biodynamic farming provides a higher volume of crops with increased nutrient density and biodynamic farms are completely self-sustaining. For example, most of the feed for the livestock originates on the farm. Organic certifications are not nearly as stringent as biodynamic certification.

For example, a farmer can section off part of the farm for organic goods,³⁶ but 100% of a biodynamic farm must be compliant. The best hope for the future of the world’s food supply is for farmers to embrace biodynamic certification in greater numbers rather than trying to invent new regenerative standards to compete with organic certifications.

Censorship is ramping up at a rapid clip, and much of it is clearly directed by the U.S. federal government, despite a federal judge’s order prohibiting federal agencies and officials from communicating with social media companies about content moderation.¹

In recent days, several news stories have highlighted governments’ and Big Tech’s intent to increase censorship. There’s even a rumor that Google will ban independent media from its search results altogether.² I’ve not been able to confirm this, but considering everything else going on, would anyone really be surprised if it were true?

Google, Meta Ban News in Canada

For example, Canada has enacted a new law called the Online News Act that forces social media companies to compensate domestic news organizations for content shared on their platforms. While that may not sound like censorship, it has the same effect, as social media companies are now automatically removing all news links.³

To comply with the new law, Meta banned all news — both national and international news stories — from appearing in Facebook and Instagram feeds in Canada as of June 1, 2023.⁴

Google is also blocking all Canadian news from its search, news and discover products in Canada as of June 29, 2023.⁵ In other words, if you live in Canada, you cannot get any news whatsoever unless you subscribe or go to the news source in question directly.

X/Twitter Colludes With Anti-Defamation League to Censor

In other news, X (formerly Twitter) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) are working together to censor X users, according to citizen journalist Kyle Clifton (his X account is Kyle Undercover).⁶

In a series of five videos⁷ (which you can view here), ADL director of development Courtney Kravitz and the ADL community manager for Arizona, Sarah Kader, discuss a variety of tactics the ADL is using to suppress and censor online speech.

In video No. 1, Kravitz explains that outright bans are not ideal, as it forces people to seek out alternative platforms. Hence a “balance” must be struck between preventing them from “run[ning] to this dark place where they are just with like-minded people” and preventing them from “spewing hate and disinformation.”

It appears the ADL prefers tactics like shadow-banning instead, where the reach of an account or post is severely limited. “Everyone should have freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach,” Kravitz tells Kyle. Interestingly enough, Musk himself used that same line in the summer of 2022.⁸

In video No. 2, Kravitz admits the ADL has urged Elon Musk to not reverse the ban on certain users, and in video No. 3, Kader explains how the ADL is using novel artificial intelligence software to comb through podcasts and video-game streams for “extremist” keywords.

As noted by Life Site News,⁹ the admission that ADL is scouring the audio streams of online gamers “suggests ADL has … interest in combing through the online activities of private citizens not involved in political and social causes …” Is that really something the ADL should be doing?

In video No. 4, Kravitz admits the ADL has also been influencing crowdfunding platforms like GoFundMe to deplatform certain users, telling them that “extremists” are using their payment processing services to “fund their evil stuff.”

And, in video No. 5, Kader explains how the Arizona ADL has set up a Law Enforcement Advisory Council to identify and address online “hate.” The Advisory Council is made up of “local police departments and other law enforcement agencies all around the state.” Some key questions here, of course, are: What is hateful speech, and who decides what words are considered hateful?

In recent years, we’ve seen how this “anti-hate” narrative has been used to justify the removal of people providing truthful information about COVID and the COVID jabs, for example. Somehow, medical information was deemed “hateful.”

X Censorship Squad Are Anything but Free-Speech Minded

While Musk has called himself a “free speech absolutist” and promised X would be a free speech platform, the people he’s hired are not freedom-loving free speech advocates. Quite the contrary.

X CEO Linda Yaccarino is the chairman of the World Economic Forum’s Taskforce on Future of Work. She’s also part of the WEF’s Media, Entertainment and Culture Industry Governors Steering Committee.

Yaccarino has publicly asserted that she has autonomy from Musk.¹⁰ A more important question is, does she have autonomy from the WEF, or is she using X to further the WEF’s agenda?

Either way, Yaccarino has stated that “lawful but awful” posts will be “deamplified,” read, shadow banned and demonetized.¹¹ And, like Musk, she has stressed that the company policy is one of “freedom of speech, not reach” to protect “brand safety” for advertisers. And, indeed, under Yaccarino’s watch, big advertisers are once again returning to the platform.

X Is Gearing Up for Election Censorship

X is also actively recruiting applicants for various censorship positions,¹² including an “Elections Team Lead,” which flies in the face of Musk’s statement that “Free speech is essential for a functioning democracy.”¹³

X censorship recruiter Aaron Rodericks is also working against Musk’s stated vision by promoting Kate Starbird,¹⁴ a former Twitter employee and chief architect of the 2020 election censorship campaign in which 100% of the top “repeat misinformation spreaders” were Conservatives.¹⁵

As noted in Michael Shellenberger’s testimony before the House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government in March 2023:¹⁶

“Kate Starbird, who runs the University of Washington disinformation lab, has for years been funded primarily by U.S. government agencies to do social media narrative analytics of political groups, or insurgency movements, of interest or concern to U.S. military intelligence or diplomatic equities.

Starbird acknowledged that the censorship focus of CISA and EIP [Election Integrity Partnership] moved from ‘foreign, inauthentic’ social media users to ‘domestic, authentic’ social media users between 2016 to 2020.”

Starbird is also one of the 23 members of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) Cybersecurity Advisory Committee, launched in December 1, 2021.¹⁷

European Union Tightens Censorship Nose

In related news, X has also rolled out a new feature that allows users to report posts that violate the European Union’s new law (the Digital Services Act or DSA) against expression of political dissent, pro-Russian propaganda and other “fake news.”¹⁸ The new EU law took effect August 25, 2023.¹⁹

Other online platforms required to meet DSA requirements for content moderation or risk heavy fines include Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, Amazon, Booking, AliExpress, Google Shopping, Zalando, Apple, Google’s app stores, Google Maps, Wikipedia, Google Search and Bing.²⁰ As reported by Politico:²¹

“These large platforms will have to stop displaying ads to users based on sensitive data like religion and political opinions. AI-generated content like manipulated videos and photos, known as deepfakes, will have to be labeled.

Companies will also have to conduct yearly assessments of the risks their platforms pose on a range of issues like public health, kids’ safety and freedom of expression. They will be required to lay out their measures for how they are tackling such risks.

‘These 19 very large online platforms and search engines will have to redesign completely their systems to ensure a high level of privacy, security and safety of minors with age verification and parental control tools,’ said [EU’s Internal Market Commissioner Thierry] Breton.

External firms will audit their plans. The enforcement team in the Commission will access their data and algorithms to check whether they are promoting a range of harmful content — for example, content endangering public health or during elections. Fines can go up to 6 percent of their global annual turnover and very serious cases of infringement could result in platforms facing temporary bans.”

The key words there are “content endangering public health” and “elections.” That tells you the EU will force all of these platforms to censor medical information and election information.

X Implementing New Identification Rules

X is also pushing us deeper into surveillance state tyranny by requiring XBlue subscribers to submit a selfie and a government-issued ID to verify their identity.²² X will store this personal information for 30 days and share it with an Israeli identification verification company called AU10TIX.

For now, non-blue users are not required to verify their identities, but I suspect it’s only a matter of time. Eventually, you’ll have to have a digital identity to use the internet at all, and every move you make online will be tracked as part of your social credit score. X is simply paving the way.

CCDH Feigns Innocence

In 2021, it became apparent that the U.S. government was basing many of its censorship decisions on information from an obscure U.K.-based group called the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). Its “Disinformation Dozen” report,²³ published March 24, 2021, has without question been one of the most widely cited “justifications” for censorship over these past two years.

The problem is that this report was itself an example of gross misinformation. The CCDH claimed 12 individuals were responsible for 73% of vaccine misinformation on social media, including Facebook, yet an investigation by Facebook revealed the so-called “disinformation dozen” were responsible for just 0.05% of all views of vaccine-related content on the platform.²⁴

Yet, even after Facebook set the record straight, the federal government continued to cite the CCDH report as the reason for why they wanted the people listed in it censored by Big Tech.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren demanded that Amazon ban my book, “The Truth About COVID,” based on the CCDH’s false statements about me, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) even relied on it to identify “domestic threat actors,”²⁵ meaning domestic terrorists.

Put simply, the DHS has tagged me as a domestic terrorist based on the fabrications of a shadowy intelligence-connected group that in a rational society would have no credibility whatsoever.

This is the intelligence community’s version of Nancy Pelosi’s “wrap-up smear” tactic,²⁶ which is when a politician feeds false information to the media and then uses those media reports to support their false claims.

August 3, 2023, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, launched an investigation into the CCDH’s potential role in the Biden administration’s censorship regime.

The group was ordered to hand over records to the Judiciary Committee detailing its interactions with the U.S. government and the executive branch by August 17.²⁷ As reported by The Washington Post that day:²⁸

“On Thursday [August 17], the CCDH responded with a full-throated defense of its research and communications with government officials, dismissing Jordan’s allegations as ‘confusion about the organization’ in a letter.

Related documents, which were exclusively viewed by The Washington Post, show that the organization has worked with government officials from both parties …

Jordan also has released internal communications from Meta, which he has dubbed ‘the Facebook Files,’ citing the CCDH’s research. The emails … show that the White House discussed the CCDH’s coronavirus research with Facebook executives as it pressured the company to take a tougher line against vaccine falsehoods.

Nadgey Louis-Charles, a House Judiciary spokesperson, recently told The Post that these emails expose the ‘extent to which the Biden White House used the work of the CCDH to try to censor speech.’”

Free Speech Without Reach Is Not Freedom

The CCDH’s fabrications have been used by a long list of government actors and representatives, including members of Congress, state attorneys general and even President Biden himself, all of whom publicly called for retaliatory actions to be taken against us.

As a result, we’ve been censored on social media, delisted by Google Search, and demonetized on YouTube. We’ve been deplatformed and cut off from online payment processors, our websites have been cyberattacked and, in several cases, taken down completely — and we’ve been debanked, all for the “crime” of sharing Constitutionally-protected views and published science.

At the end of the day, the so-called “problem” of misinformation and disinformation is pure nonsense. In a free society, people debate issues and bring varying viewpoints to the table. “Misinformation” is a completely fabricated problem, made up by the very people who seek to control the public discourse for their own aims.

The technocratic cabal driving this global censorship movement know they must silence dissenting viewpoints because what they intend to impose on us is so heinous, if people understand what they’re doing, they’ll never be able to achieve their goals.

So, it’s not just “democracy” that hangs in the balance. Basic freedoms, human rights and life as we know it will be taken from us, and the only way to stop it is by waking people up to reality through information sharing. The very survival of humanity now depends on our ability to maintain free speech, which is why we must keep pushing back against all forms of censorship.

June 22, 2023,¹ the American multinational conglomerate, 3M, agreed to pay $10.3 billion to at least 300 communities² in a multidistrict litigation (MDL) to clean up “forever chemicals” in the water supplies.

Per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are known as “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down easily in the environment and they bioaccumulate in people and wildlife. In the human body, PFAS have half-lives of two to five years.³ These widely used chemicals have been added to industry and consumer products since the 1940s, but while PFOA and PFOS were phased out in the U.S. due to their toxic properties,⁴ other PFAS are still in use.

Manufacturers like the chemical properties of PFAS as they repel oil, dirt and water. The chemicals have been added to consumer products ranging from cookware and food packaging to carpets, cleaners and firefighting foam.⁵ The ubiquitous use of more than 9,000 PFAS⁶ and wide exposure is likely responsible for the chemical being found in at least 97% of Americans in 2015.⁷

Eight years later, and without controlling the release of PFAS in the environment and water supply, it is highly likely that the percentage of Americans with PFAS has not gone down. These chemicals are linked to significant negative human health effects, including cancer, decreased immune system function,⁸ and hormone and metabolism dysregulation,⁹ which raises concerns that the chemicals are putting the health of future generations at risk.

The 3M Lawsuit Was Over Firefighting Foam

WBUR reports that the agreement of $10.3 billion over 13 years must still be approved by the court.¹⁰ According to an interview in NPR, the 3M lawsuit was over firefighting foam that the company produced and sold for decades.¹¹

3M was not the only company to manufacture and sell PFAS chemicals. A similar agreement was reached with DuPont, Chemours and Corteva¹² in which those companies agreed to pay $1.19 billion for PFAS remediation, a deal The New York Times called “the first wave of claims.”¹³

Several communities in Massachusetts were involved in the lawsuit. Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey spoke at a press conference just one year ago when the lawsuit was filed, saying:¹⁴

“Their actions violate state and federal laws that are intended to protect our residents and place costly burdens on our communities that are now forced to clean up this mess. These are manufacturers who attempted to hide just how dangerous this foam was, who prevented their workers from discussing the dangers of their products.

Despite the fact that PFAS was toxic, these makers continued to make and sell their products without disclosing the harm.”

The litigation was resolved relatively quickly. By comparison, the lawsuit settlement against Monsanto on June 24, 2020, took more than one year of negotiations and three consecutive trial losses.¹⁵ The lawsuit was originally brought by the city of Stuart, Florida, and was consolidated in the United States district court in South Carolina.

“Not surprisingly, the defendants decided to settle before the trial even started,” says Erik Olson, senior strategic director for health at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “They had several major motions that were decided against them, and once that happened, I think the handwriting was on the wall.”¹⁶

Experts anticipate the $10.3 billion settlement will not cover the cost of cleanup. Rob Bilott, an attorney with Kentucky law firm Taft Stettinius & Hollister, spoke with a reporter from Time. His early PFAS work pursuing claims against chemical companies was the basis of two films. He said:¹⁷

“Cities all over the country are facing costs. [It’s] not just to get PFAS out of their water, [communities] are now realizing that natural resources — the fish, the soil, the groundwater — everything is contaminated.”

EPA Proposed Drinking Water Regs Raise the Cost of Clean Up

It is important to note that the settlement is not an admission of liability for 3M. Wendy Hager Bernays is a toxicologist at Boston University School of Public Health. She spoke with WBUR, saying she would have loved to have seen money allocated for medical monitoring:¹⁸

“… but that would have required acknowledgment of harm. There are certainly communities in Massachusetts who have been poisoned. You’ll rarely hear me say that, but they have been.”

June 23, 2023, NPR spoke with Barbara Moran, WBUR environmental correspondent from Massachusetts. Moran notes that while the 3M settlement sounds like a lot of money:¹⁹

“… it’s nowhere near enough money to pay for all the cleanup. It’s like, you know, a drop in the bucket … that’s because the cleanup is really expensive, so it can cost a small town, like, $20 – $30 million to install filters to clean up their drinking water, plus, you know, ongoing maintenance for years and years.”

Small towns in Massachusetts have already spent $30 million on filters to deal with PFAS. Jennifer Pederson, executive director of the Massachusetts Water Works Association, believes that Massachusetts alone will need billions for cleanup. She went on to say:²⁰

“We’re looking at a good percentage of our Massachusetts public water systems that are likely going to have to treat for PFAS. Based on what we’re seeing, there’s still going to be a burden on the ratepayers to fund PFAS treatment.”

At the consistent urging of health advocacy groups like the Environmental Working Group (EWG),²¹ in March 2023, the EPA²² announced a proposed National Primary Drinking Water Regulation (NPDWR), which includes cleanup of six PFAS chemicals. Scott Faber, senior vice president for government affairs at the EWG, commented on the announcement:²³

“Today’s announcement by the EPA is historic progress. More than 200 million Americans could have PFAS in their tap water. Americans have been drinking contaminated water for decades. This proposal is a critical step toward getting these toxic poisons out of our water. The EPA’s proposed limits also serve as a stark reminder of just how toxic these chemicals are to human health at very low levels.”

There Are Thousands of Claims yet to Settle

According to WBUR,²⁴ Massachusetts has set aside $170 million to begin the PFAS cleanup. The federal government also announced that the state will receive $38 million to help address the cleanup of emerging contaminants in the drinking water, including PFAS. However, how the money from the 3M settlement will be distributed is still unclear.

According to Fortune magazine,²⁵ the amount of the settlement is also unclear. Payments will be made out over the next 13 years, which Fortune reports could reach $12.5 billion. The amount depends on the number of public water systems that detect PFAS over the next three years.

There are an additional 3,000 claims that are still unsettled and Michael London of the New York law firm Douglas & London, representing plaintiffs in the Stuart, Florida case, told Time, “There are also 5,000, perhaps 6,000 individuals who have brought personal injury cases [nationwide].”²⁶

It’s estimated that Dupont and 3M will not be the only defendants as companies that knowingly used PFAS in manufactured products could also be liable. London implied that he believes, ultimately, each of these companies would settle rather than risk a court judgment, as he continued:²⁷

“There’s going to be probably twenty-plus defendants who have their fingerprints on [the] MDL. Some will settle early, some will settle in the middle, some will settle late.”

In the company’s press release,²⁸ 3M chairman and CEO Mike Roman said, “This is an important step forward for 3M.” The company elaborated that PFOA and PFOS had been eliminated more than 20 years ago but despite the lawsuit settlement and mountains of evidence to the contrary, the press release continues to insist that “PFAS can be safely made and used and are critical in the manufacture of many products …”

The company also indicated that if the court does not approve the agreement or if other terms are not fulfilled, 3M would defend itself in litigation and would continue to address other PFAS lawsuits by defending itself.

Rate Hikes to Pay for Cleanup May Help Lower Disease Risk

In 2015,²⁹ PFAS were measured in the serum of at least 97% of Americans. In May 2015, more than 200 scientists from 40 countries signed the Madrid Statement, in which they warned about the harms associated with PFAS and documented the following potential health effects of exposure:³⁰

Liver toxicity	Disruption of lipid metabolism and the immune and endocrine systems
Adverse neurobehavioral effects	Neonatal toxicity and death
Tumors in multiple organ systems	Testicular and kidney cancers
Liver malfunction	Hypothyroidism
High cholesterol	Ulcerative colitis
Reduced birth weight and size	Obesity
Decreased immune response to vaccines	Reduced hormone levels and delayed puberty

PFAS are common contaminants in food, food packaging and personal care products. Even at very low doses,³¹ drinking water contaminated with PFAS has been linked to immune system suppression and an increased risk of certain cancers. Reproductive and developmental problems are also linked to PFAS.

Food wrappers,³² biodegradable bowls and compostable bowls³³ are all significant sources of PFAS. PFAS can also find its way into the food supply by recycling human waste. The 2018 documentary, “Biosludged,”³⁴ revealed the scientific fraud perpetuated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency legalizing pollution of agricultural soils through contaminated industrial and human waste as fertilizer.

In 2019, The Intercept³⁵ reported that 44 samples of sewage sludge tested by the Maine Department of Environmental Protection were all contaminated with at least one PFAS chemical and in all but two of the samples “the chemicals exceeded safety thresholds for sludge that Maine set early last year.”

The U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry³⁶ acknowledges research suggests that PFAS may be associated with changes in liver enzymes, increased cholesterol levels, increased risk of kidney or testicular cancer and an increased risk of high blood pressure or preeclampsia in pregnant women.

This acknowledgment only touches on the scientific data linking PFAS to a laundry list of health problems. For example, a study³⁷ in children and young adults found exposure alters amino acid and lipid metabolism pathways.

The researchers suggest that this may be causing inflammation and oxidative stress that contributes to a variety of diseases. PFAS is also linked to a decline in fertility in women,³⁸ nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD)³⁹ and high blood pressure.⁴⁰

Take Steps to Reduce Your Exposure

Waiting for the EPA to clean up the environment may be too late. It is up to you to take control of your health and limit your exposure by making safer lifestyle choices. Consider the following ways to limit the amount of PFAS chemicals you contact daily.

• Oral care — Limit your exposure by choosing dental floss and other interdental devices manufactured by a trusted company without toxic chemicals. Seek out products using vegan vegetable waxes that are smoother and glide between your teeth easily, as well as those without added fluoride, using nylon instead of chemically treated silk.
• Drinking water — There are more than 9,000 different PFAS chemicals, and scientists are only beginning to unravel their disturbing effects. The full extent of contamination is unknown, but there is a good chance your water is affected. For this reason and others, I highly recommend filtering your water at the points of entry and use in your home.
• Cookware — Get rid of all nonstick cookware in your home, including waffle irons and sandwich makers. Instead, seek out a healthy line of nonstick ceramic cookware made without dangerous PFAS chemicals, and without other heavy metals, such as iron, lead, aluminum or cadmium.
• Food packaging — Limit eating out as PFAS are commonly found in packaging from fast food, pizza restaurants and packaging at your grocery store.
• Personal care products — Certain cosmetics, particularly eye shadow, foundation, powder, bronzer and blush, have a higher risk of containing PFAS chemicals. An Environmental Working Group report⁴¹ found 13 PFAS chemicals in close to 200 products spanning 28 brands, including makeup, sunscreen, shampoo and shaving cream. Consider searching the EWG Skin Deep Cosmetic database⁴² before your next purchase.