This was in 2005. Dr. Fauci knew then HydroxyChloroQuine was effective against Covid type viruses. “In the 1985-86 edition of Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine [a highly recommended book for students studying medicine in medical colleges], Dr. Fauci wrote that HCQ worked an anti-viral agent despite being an anti-malarial drug. There was no Covid-19 back then, but HCQ’s anti-viral properties were already well known.
In 2015 the only level-4 virus lab in the U.S. conducting defensive research against “Gain of function” viruses was closed because of the inherent danger to the population should the virus escape. Not to worry, President Obama, Melinda Gates and Dr Fauci started to look for a new place to conduct the research. They found it in Wuhan, China; the Chinese have no such scruples as danger to the people. This lab was taken over in 2017 by the Chinese army, conducting bio-weapon research (defensive only, of course), so the research continued, this time controlled by the Chinese.
In January 2017 Anthony S. Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said there is “no doubt” Donald J. Trump will be confronted with a surprise infectious disease outbreak during his presidency.
It is getting interesting. The virus escaped the lab, sometimes in the fall of 2019, and the Chinese knew it but kept silent. They closed off Wuhan to all other Chinese, rail, car and air. But they kept international travel open, as if they wanted the virus to spread all around the world. And Dr. Fauci knew it!
In Indiatoday Prabhash K Dutta, New Delhi wrote in June 7, 2021:
Remember Donald Trump-touted hydroxychloroquine? Study in India backs it as Covid-19 cure.
Hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug touted as a magical Covid-19 cure by former US President Donald Trump last year, has been found effective in a prophylactic study published in a prophylactic study published in the Journal of The Association of Physicians of India (JAPI) last week..
The study showed that hydroxychloroquine, popularly known as HCQ, could prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection in varying degrees depending on its dosing regimen. The highest prevention rate of 72 per cent was found among those given hydroxychloroquine over six weeks or a longer duration.
The study said, “[W]hen adjusted for other risk factors, HCQ dose as per government recommendations, 2-3, 4-5, 6 or more weeks reduced the probability of Covid positivity by 34 per cent, 48 per cent and 72 per cent.”
The study was conducted May-September last year when HCQ was still part of the Union health ministry’s recommendation in treatment protocol for Covid-19, and it began against the backdrop of contesting claims made by authorities and experts including Donald Trump and his advisor Dr Anthony Fauci, the US’s top infectious disease expert.
In March 2020, Donald Trump declared that hydroxichloroquine was a “game changer” drug in the fight against Covid-19. Dr Fauci dismissed the claim citing lack of study and evidence. Despite Fauci’s counter-positioning, Trump continued to be vocal about taking HCQ as prophylactic drug.
Incidentally, the Union health ministry on June 6 dropped hydroxychloroquine from Covid-19 treatment protocol. In its nine-page guidelines released on Sunday (June 6) by the directorate of health services, hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin and favipiravir find no mention.
The government’s decision came on the back of criticism by experts who pointed out a lack of study-based evidence to recommend hydroxychloroquine in Covid-19 cases. The government’s revised guidelines, however, contradicts the recommendations made by the Indian Council of Medical Research as released on May 17.
The ICMR guidelines prescribed the use of hydroxychloroquine in mild cases of Covid-19.
The authors of this prophylactic (relating to prevention of a disease) study said that this “is the largest multicenter study on HCQ prophylaxis on HCWs (healthcare workers), covering over 12,000 HCWs at the risk of Covid-19”.
The study was conducted in May-September last year across 44 hospitals in 17 states involving hundreds of doctors, who received doses of hydroxychloroquine.
One of the co-authors of the study, Dr Raj Kamal Choudhry said, “In the 1985-86 edition of Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine [a highly recommended book for students studying medicine in medical colleges], Dr. Fauci wrote that HCQ worked an anti-viral agent despite being an anti-malarial drug. There was no Covid-19 back then, but HCQ’s anti-viral properties were already well known.”
Dr Raj Kamal Choudhry, who was the nodal officer for the prophylaxis study of HCQ in Bihar’s Bhagalpur medical college, said, “We had given about 2,700 doctors and paramedical staff, laundry and kitchen people the prophylaxis of HCQs in the dose of HCQs 400 mg 1×2 for first day then 1 tab daily for 4 days.”
“We did not give to those who had palpitations and had QT prolongation [a measure of heart ailment]. Those who took this drug did not have Covid excepting 5 and 6. The effect was tremendous. Later, we gave this drug to all who had mild cases. Only those patients who were in ICU were not given.”
“Of 2,700 people who were given HCQs, 700 were doctors. Only five or six got infected with SARS-CoV-2 in Bhagalpur but none developed serious complications, and nobody died of Covid-19,” Dr Raj Kamal Choudhry told Indiatoday.in.
The evidence is piling up. There has been numerous, over 50 studies like this showing that HCQ is effective, both as prophylactic, and as an early cure. Yoo bad that the medical bureaucracy considered it more important to get rid of Donald Trump than to save over 100,000 lives in U.S. alone.
In addition HCQ is too cheap and generic to warrant a double blind study.
The other medication that may be as effective, and save lives is Ivermectin, an anti-parasite drug used to treat horses and other farm animals. You can buy it at Tractor Supply, so I have been told. I do not know proper dosages, but if done properly, it is safe for humans when treating parasitic infections. It also is too cheap for the medical community to take seriously.
One more thing, make sure you take supplemental Vitamin D3 (I take 5000 IU/day). An Indonesian study found that the death rate went from 95% if the values were less than 19 nanograms/milliliter to less than 5% if the D3 values were over 31 nanograms/milliliter. The study was made in Covid patients over 65 years old.
I have counted the u.s covid-19 cases cases and deaths for the first week of April, and divided them by states requiring mask wearing and not requiring wearing masks. The mask wearing states had a death rate of 0.91% while the non mask wearing states had a death rate of 1.59%. The non mask wearing states had 244 deaths per day. This means we could have saved 244 (1.59-0,91)/1.59 = 103 lives per day as a nation if all were forced to wear a mask, everything else being equal (which of course it isn’t). (Look at Appendix 1 to see how your state is faring.)
Are there any better ways to save lives?
In March 2020 President Trump became a proponent of using HydroxyChloroQuine as a remedy for Covid-19. It was met with strong opposition from CDC and even scorn from his political opponents. CDC even published strong advice against using it to treat Covid-19, while still recommending its use to treat Lupus and rheumatoid patients with essentially no restrictions, including pregnant women and nursing mothers. After all, it had an over 50 year safety record as treatment for Malaria. Even Dr Fauci acknowledged its safety and efficacy as a cure for Coronaviruses as early as 2005, (see Appendix 2). Many countries are using HCQ as a first defense against COVID-19, and they experience on average less than half the death rate of nations that do not use HCQ as a first defense. To complicate matters, HCQ is prescribed to between 16 and 30% of all Covid cases in the U.S. As a guess with today’s 491 death’s per day, we could have saved more than 40%, about 200 lives a day, or twice as many lives as are saved by the mask mandate. The biggest problem for CDC is that HCQ is generic, cheap and easy to produce, so there is no profit in making a double blind study. For Trump opponents it was far more important to defeat Trump than to save a hunded thousand lives. ( see https://lenbilen.com/2020/09/06/u-s-a-corona-virus-death-rate-as-of-september-5-is-3-00-41-countries-have-higher-death-rates-15-countries-giving-hcqzincz-pac-to-covid-19-patients-as-soon-as-symptoms-occur-have-much-lower-death/ )
But there are other interesting cures for COVID-19, Ivermectin is fantastic. It has one problem, through.You can buy it at Tractor-supply, it is used as an antiparasitic agent for dogs and horses, and it is generic. However the worldwide interest is so big that at least 50 trials have been conducted and there is a 76% decrease in mortality. That means,using it properly would save nearly 400 lives per day.
I am a believer in science, and as such I want to get as much information as possible before making a judgement regarding masks. So I took the official statistics of coronavirus 19 cases and deaths for the 50 states and some territories for the seven day period between March 22 thru March 28, divided them up into states with mask mandates and states with no current mask mandates, totaled them up, and this is what I found:
The total death rate for states with mask mandates: 1.46%. The total death rate for states with no mask mandates: 2.02%. This seems to indicate that wearing masks reduce deaths by 28%.
The counter argument to this is that the State of California, one of the most restrictive state in the union had a death rate of 7.63%, while South Dakota, a state that never had a lockdown, nor a mask mandate had a death rate of 0.5%. This seems to indicate that not having a mask mandate is 15 times better.
Obviously the truth is somewhere in between, wearing masks may or may not improve the situation.
These are the U.S. states and territories with mask mandates:
The table below shows that USA came in as number 28 of the 40 countries with the largest outbreak of the Wuhan virus. This table reflects the first 40 days of the new U.S. administration. Most countries have a declining death rate, with the notable exceptions of Mexico, South Africa, Germany, United Kingdom, Colombia, Poland, Romania, France, Spain, Pakistan, Russia, Portugal, Ukraine, Iraq, and the United States of America.
An old British saying used to be: “Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” We may not be able to do much about the weather, but at least we can try to save the world from the “Climate Crisis”. The term used to be Climate Change, but with the new administration the term has been upgraded.
When I grew up a long time ago in Sweden the old folks used to say “If you make it through February, you will make it another year.” This was of course before electricity and central heating”.
There is a saying in Norway: “There is no bad weather, only bad clothes.” Here is an example, the souwester” It works well in freezing rain.
The long term weather forecast for February, issued January 21 by the weather channel looked like this:
Great, no need to buy that extra sweater, and Texans can go another season with thin t-shirts and designer pre-torn jeans.
But the weather forecast three weeks later looked like this:
But the windmills don’t work in freezing rain, so the electric grid was challenged when over half of the windmills froze just as the demand spiked. Normally coal and natural gas electrical plants would have kicked in, but many of the coal plants had been shut down due to environmental regulations, and the emergency request to restart them were denied due to environmental concerns. The natural gas plants ran full bore until the natural gas pressure in the pipelines started dropping below safe levels. This lead to rotating power-outs to preserve gas line pressure. But in the wisdom of the authorities the gas line pressure compressors had been switched from natural gas to electricity (environmental concerns), so if the compressors were in an area of electric blackout, there went the gas pressure, causing a chain reaction, and the whole power grid came within hours of a total collapse. Only nuclear power hummed along as if nothing had happened, but nuclear power is a base load and cannot increase the power above a certain level. Back in 2017, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry proposed paying Coal and Nuclear Power Stations to keep at least 90 days worth of coal onsite, for disaster resilience. At the time the resilience proposal was widely criticized as being a thinly disguised Trump scheme to pump government money into the coal and nuclear industries. So the plan was rejected by the bureaucracy. But in hindsight, a bit more resilience might have saved Texas from days of painful electricity blackouts, and even deaths.
The bill for these monumental miscalculations is yet to be paid. The cost of electricity for these 2 weeks off horror is yet to be paid. The Texans who were fortunate enough to have power have to pay the bill for intermittent electricity at a cost of two dollars per kilowatt-hour. A retired veteran on social security got a bill for over 16,000 dollars for part of February.
Since weather is so hard to predict, do we have any hope of being able to predict future climate? People keep trying. And they keep developing climate models. Here is a chart of most of them:
Not much has changed since this chart was first published. While the IPCC confidence in their climate models keep increasing, so does the difference between model prediction and actual temperature.
Climate finance continues to be the central issue in how the global community proposes to follow through with implementation of the Paris Agreement, which Joe Biden has decided to rejoin by executive fiat. This is in the opinion of his advisors, such as John Kerry appropriate in the context of the last IPCC report showing a USD 1.6-3.8 trillion energy system investment requirement to keep warming within a 1.5 degree Celsius scenario to avoid the most harmful effects of climate change (IPCC, 2018).
This is a very good summary of the origin and development of the Global Warming hypothesis and its origin in the Global Governance movement. After all, the first Earth day was set to be the 100 year anniversary of Lenin.
It is over one hour long, but well worth the time. Listen carefully.
Brr, it is cold in Texas, over 3.5 million people are out of power, freezing rain is knocking out power lines and half of the wind turbines are out of commission until they thaw out. The wind chill is way below zero F, and in Galveston they had a snow thunderstorm on the beach!
Maybe wind power is not the best way to go.There are better ways.
That is not all. Efficient wind turbine generators use a lot of rare earth metals to achieve maximum efficiency on the magnets among other things. China still controls over 80% of all rare earth metals mining and refining. This is a national security risk.
How stupid can you get? Here is an example. To de-ice a 747 aircraft costs about 40,000 dollars. Add to this the cost of flying the helicopter, and the fuel it consumes while transporting the glycol from its base to the wind farm.
The rest of the quote: “And I am not sure about the universe.”
Quote from Alexandria Occasio-Cortez in January 2019: “Millennials and Gen Z and all these folks that come after us are looking up, and we’re like, ‘The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change, and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?’ ” she said.
I beg to differ.
We live in only one world. As a concerned citizen I realize we have immense environmental challenges before us, with water pollution; from plastics in the ocean, excess fertilizer in the rivers, poison from all kinds of chemicals, including antibiotics, birth control and other medicines flushed down the toilet after going through our bodies, animals fed antibiotics, pest control, weed control and so on. Increasing CO2 is not one of the problems, it will in fact help with erosion control, and allow us to feed more people on less agricultural land with proper management, and require less fertilizer and water to do so. In fact, proper water management is a larger problem, with some rivers no longer even reaching the ocean. All water is already spoken for, especially in the 10 to 40 degrees latitude, where most people live.
Allow me to be somewhat technical and give the background to why I know we will never experience the thermal runaway they are so afraid of.
Many years ago I worked at Hewlett Packard on an Atomic Absorption Detector. It was a huge technical success but a commercial failure, as it was too expensive to use for routine applications. However it found a niche and became the detector of choice when dismantling the huge nerve gas stockpiles remaining from the cold war. I was charged with doing the spectrum analysis and produce the final data from the elements. One day two salesmen came and tried to sell us a patented device that could identify up to 21 different elements with one analysis. They had a detector that divided the visual band into 21 parts, and bingo, with proper, not yet “fully developed” software you could now analyze up to 21 elements with one gas chromath analysis. What could be better? We could only analyze correctly four or five elements simultaneously. It turns out the elements are absorbing in the same wavelength bands, scientifically speaking they are not orthogonal, so software massaging can only go so far. It turned out that the promised new detector was inferior to what we already had and could only quantify three or 4 elements at the most.
In the atmosphere the two most important greenhouse gases are water vapor and CO2 with methane a distant third. Water vapor is much more of a greenhouse gas everywhere except near the tropopause high above the high clouds and near the poles when the temperature is below 0 F, way below freezing. A chart shows the relationship between CO2 and water vapor:
Even in Barrow, Alaska water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas. Only at the South Pole (And North Pole) does CO2 dominate (but only in the winter).
All Climate models take this into account, and that is why they all predict that the major temperature increase will occur in the polar regions with melting icecaps and other dire consequences. But they also predict a uniform temperature rise from the increased forcing from CO2 and the additional water vapor resulting from the increased temperature.
This is wrong on two accounts. First, CO2 and H2O gas are nor orthogonal, that means they both absorb in the same frequency bands. There are three bands where CO2 absorbs more than H2O in the far infrared band, but other than that H2O is the main absorber. If H2O is 80 times as common as CO2 as it is around the equator, water vapor is still the dominant absorber, and the amount of CO2 is irrelevant.
Secondly gases cannot absorb more than 100% of the energy available in any given energy wavelength! So if H2O did absorb 80% of the energy and CO2 absorbed 50%, the sum is not 130%, only 90%. (0.8 + 0.5×0,2 or 0.5 + 0.8×0.5). In this example CO2 only adds one quarter of what the models predict.
How do I know this is true? Lucky for us we can measure what increasing CO2 in the atmosphere has already accomplished. For a model to have credibility it must be tested with measurements, and pass the test. There is important evidence suggesting the basic story is wrong. All greenhouse gases work by affecting the lapse rate in the tropics. They thus create a “hot spot” in the tropical troposphere. The theorized “hot spot” is shown in the early IPCC publications. (Fig A)
Fig. B shows observations. The hotspot is not there. If the hotspot is not there, the models must be wrong. So what is wrong with the models? This was reported in 2008 and the models still assume the additive nature of greenhouse gases, even to the point when more than 100% of the energy in a given band is absorbed.
How about Methane? Do not worry, it absorbs nearly exclusively in the same bands as water vapor and has no measurable influence on the climate.
But it will get warmer at the poles. That will cause melting of the ice-caps? Not so fast. When temperature rises the atmosphere can hold more water vapor, so it will snow more at higher latitudes. While winter temperatures will be higher with more snowfall, this will lower the summer temperatures until the extra snow has melted. And that is what is happening in the Arctics
As we can see from this picture, the winters were about 5 degrees warmer, but starting from late May through early August temperatures were lower. It takes time to melt all the extra snow that fell because of the less cold air, able to contain more water vapor.
These are my suggestions
Do not worry about increasing CO2 levels. The major temperature stabilizer is clouds, and they will keep the earth from overheating by reflecting back into space a large amount of incoming solar radiation. Always did, and always will, even when the CO2 concentration was more than 10000 ppm millions of years ago. Ice ages will still come, and this is the next major climate change, maybe 10000 years from now, probably less.
Clean up rivers, lakes and oceans from pollution. This is a priority.
Limit Wind turbine electric energy to areas not populated by large birds to save the birds. Already over 1.3 million birds a year are killed by wind turbines, including the bald and Golden Eagles that like to build their aeries on top of wind turbines.
Do not build large solar concentration farms. They too kill birds.
Solar panels are o.k. not in large farms, but distributed on roofs to provide backup power.
Exploit geothermal energy in geologically stable areas.
Where ever possible add peak power generation and storage capacity to existing hydroelectric power plants by pumping back water into the dams during excess capacity.
Add peak power storage dams, even in wildlife preserves. The birds and animals don’t mind.
Develop Thorium based Nuclear Power. Russia, China, Australia and India are ahead of us in this. Streamline permit processes. Prioritize research. This should be our priority, for when the next ice age starts we will need all the CO2 possible.
Put fusion power as important for the future but do not rush it, let the research and development be scientifically determined. However, hybrid Fusion -Thorium power generation should be developed.
When Thorium power is built up and has replaced coal and gas fired power plants, then is the time to switch to electric cars, not before.
Standard Nuclear Power plants should be replaced by Thorium powered nuclear plants, since they have only 0,01% of the really bad long term nuclear waste.
Start thinking about recovering CO2 directly from the air and produce aviation fuel. This should be done as Thorium power has replaced coal and gas fired power plants.
This is but a start, but the future is not as bleak as all fearmongers state.
Yes, John Kerry must have been the only choice for environmental Czar. After all, he already has six houses, twelve cars, a yacht and his own private jet.
He will promote off-shore wind power, except outside one of his homes, solar power, but no new power lines anywhere near one of his homes, anddo away with coal.
I too want to limit coal consumption, but for an entirely different reason. I want to save some for future generations, and especially when we enter the next ice-age, which may be nearer than most people think.
Now, much better than spend all our natural resources on building wind and solar power is to rapidly develop Thorium Nuclear power for most electricity production. It is the only realistic power source for a Moon colony, and in the last few days of the Trump administration small portable nuclear power stations were promoted for military use. As far as I know, President Biden has not yet rescinded that executive order. Let’s hope he won’t.
It works well in freezing rain.
Not in this storm!
Len Bilén's blog, a blog about faith, politics and the environment. 