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Enigmata

  PIERRE ROCHELEAU



   An essay—and a Covid memoir (perhaps)

















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The thing is, the immune system is very complicated. Arguably the most complex part of the human body outside the brain, it’s an absurdly intricate network of cells and molecules that protect us from dangerous viruses and other microbes. These components summon, amplify, rile, calm, and transform one another: Picture a thousand Rube Goldberg machines, some of which are aggressively smashing things to pieces. Now imagine that their components are labeled with what looks like a string of highly secure passwords: CD8+, IL-1β, IFN-γ. ...

Even the word immunity creates confusion. When immunologists use it, they simply mean that the immune system has responded to a pathogen—for example, by producing antibodies or mustering defensive cells. When everyone else uses the term, they mean (and hope) that they are protected from infection—that they are immune. But, annoyingly, an immune response doesn’t necessarily provide immunity in this colloquial sense.

—Ed Yong, Immunology is Where Intuition Goes to Die (2020)





Good science, original work, always went beyond the body of received opinion, always represented a dissent from orthodoxy. How, then, could the orthodox fairly assess it?

—Richard Rhodes (in an extended discussion [1986] of what science is and is not and in which he at one point describes and perhaps defines science as “controlled rebellion”)


Doubt grows with knowledge.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


I may be old but I got to experience the world before everything turned to shit.

—A man’s sweatshirt (2024) [The man of interest ca. 54 years old I would say seen on Washington Street in Manhattan April 8 2024] 







A virus goes viral.


Efforts at containment are (perhaps) laudable—but it is by no means clear that a virus can be contained. That dissemination of a transmissible virus in a population can be slowed is arguable. A main problem is viral size. A virus is unimaginably small. Bacterial size is imaginable. Viral size is not (not really).


In the opposite direction—a billion dollars may be imagined (tho’ not easily and not well). A quadrillion dollars may not.


So close and yet so far away. A virus spumes and froths (and writhes and mutates and evolves) in ways that have little to do with human time (not to mention space) scales. What any given virus is up to—always at far remove from human concepts of time and space, and human perceptions of the flow of time (and space).


Viral behaviors (viral behavior is metaphor) may be dimly, hazily, let’s say partially fathomed—in the way that “the immune system” may be partially fathomed. Dr. Gary Goldman has said—we understand the immune system at its fringes. (That would be the adult immune system. We understand even less than that—of the pre-adolescent immune system, the small child’s immune system, the toddler’s immune system, the infant’s, the neonate’s, the immune system of the fetus.)


There are components of viral fitness and sustainability we know nothing about. There are things we know we don’t know, and there are things we don’t know we don’t know (the unknown unknowns)—per the late Donald Rumsfeld.


Human perceptions/observations are founded more in ways in which human consciousness is structured to perceive things than in the inherences of the things under observation. Science never gets it entirely right.


Viruses are basic. They are everywhere. They are far and away the most numerous biological entity on Earth.


We are virus. Viruses are us. Estimates vary—but a considerable portion of the human genome is “retroviral” (a way of saying a considerable portion of the human genome is viral). Meaning: some DNA sequences in human genomes are viral genome sequences—pointing to viral colonization/infection of our ancestors. Horizontal gene transfer (virus to human) is a means by which the human genome has evolved, by which human beings have evolved.


Even terms virus and viral are not entirely understood—they are that basic. Virologist Luis Villarreal: “So powerful and ancient are viruses, I would summarize their role in life as ex virus omnia [from virus, everything].”


Living things, individual living organisms, plant or animal, are bughouses—or madhouses—of migratory and migrating DNA/RNA. Inside living things viruses (which have their own chromosomal material) and virus-like entities (e.g. transposable elements, “jumping genes,” exosomes) equal, or add up to, orgies of genetic information transfer—a transfer of information taking place within cells and among and between cells (virtually all cells), at all times.


Per the New York Times (Trillions Upon Trillions of Viruses Fall From the Sky Each Day April 13 2018): “Between 40 percent and 80 percent of the human genome may be linked to ancient viral invasions.” If that is correct or near correct, then viral colonization/infection equals the mechansim of human evolution.


There’s the microbiome. The discovery of the (human) microbiome. A gradual discovery. The discovery of the (human) bacteriome, the virome, the phageome, the mycobiome etc. Talk about your paradigm shift. The human body’s microbiome is the aggregate of all microbiota residing in or on it (and in bodily fluids). The numbers come to us from pop science magazines, and from science journals. The number of bacterial cells may be well above 100 trillion—per 160 lb. male. (It may be at around 40 trillion.) The number of virus particles (including bacteriophage) per 160 lb. male, more of an unknown than the number of bacterial cells, may be at around 40 trillion (it may be something on the order of 400 trillion).


The numbers are phantasmagoric. From Nature Reviews (September 2011).




The number of microorganisms in a teaspoon of soil:  1 × 109
The number of bacterial cells in a gram of dental plaque:  1 × 1011
The rate of viral infections in the oceans:  1 × 1023  infections per second




The microbiome includes the respective genomes of the resident microorganisms. Individual genes of gut bacteria and other resident bacterial microbes are vital to human existence. Gut bacterial genes produce enzymes indispensable to the metabolism of some complex sugars, for example. The genomes of resident microorganisms are an extension of the native human genome—or (depending on how you look at it) a not functionally distinct part of the overarching genome, the hologenome. Per one pop science magazine—the native genome (the 46 chromosomes) is approx. 10 percent of the hologenome. Per another—1 percent.


And each of us needs his virus—the tens of trillions of them. Viruses, including bacteriophage, are at least as essential to life forms, and to human life, as bacteria—as essential to human health and human wholeness and haleness.


There’s the good viruses do.... Bacteriophage (viruses that “eat bacteria”) modulate and tamp down bacterial microbial populations (particularly gut bacterial populations), they order them, they keep them in check.


Years ago (25 and 30 years ago) I would read often of oncogenic viruses. Oncogenic meaning: generates tumor. There was much to read. In the past 7 or 8 years I’ve tended to read about oncolytic viruses and oncolytic virus therapies. Oncolytic meaning: destroys tumor.


And yet it’s dodgy or disingenuous of me—to speak of “the good viruses do.” In saying it I am deferring to others. The phrase suggests that viruses are generally bad actors—an 1890s mindset.


The idea that humankind is at war (against these bad actors) is part of an 1890s mindset.




Note: It’s hard, or it’s hard for me, to speak of viruses that bring harm (to specific hosts) versus those that do not. A schema of this kind leaves out terrain theory. And terrain theory in some form must enter in. The individual human corpus (or soma) and its general condition are the terrain. Per terrain theory illness comes into view when this general condition flags, or dips, below a critical threshold, or multiple thresholds. Terrain theory is opposite to (or comes close to being opposite) as well as the inverse of germ theory, the germ theory of disease. What did Pasteur say—or is alleged to have said—on his deathbed? According to terrain theory, the virus that causes harm and even catastrophic harm in one terrain will have next to no effect in another terrain. SARS coronavirus 2/Covid-19 would be an example of that.




RNA and DNA are the information molecules. Viruses are parcels of information—information that needs to be communicated. Evolutionary biology has at least as many theorists as quantum physics. Many writers, and theorists, have gone a step further than I, they do not hedge their statements as I have done sometimes (above). They say with confidence and sometimes a fervor: Viral infection is the mechanism of evolution. Dr. Zach Bush: “Viral material got inserted into mammalian and primate genomes. That is how we occurred.”


Zach Bush avers: Mammals became possible only through viral modification (of protomammalian animals) that allowed for gain of function. A term that’s been abused. Live birth (in mammals), a sumptuously functioning placenta and umbilical cord, DNA replication and protein synthesis that proceed smoothly and at very high speed—would not have been possible without viral updates, without viral gain of function. Nature has been doing gain of function viromics since the dawn of large organic molecules that wriggle.


Bush sees viruses and the world of viruses as “beautiful.”


Viruses are there to foment biological adaptability and biodiversity on the planet. In the same vein pandemics equal broad-scale viral updates (to genomic apparatus).

 


Are viruses including bacteriophage full status components of ecological systems? We know that bacteria are that. What happens if you remove or attempt to remove ostensibly lowly components of these systems from the systems: do they, the systems, go haywire?


Less is known of the virome (versus the bacteriome), in part owing to viral lability (instability). Viruses evolve rapidly (particularly RNA viruses). Thus the virome—a specific host animal’s virome—evolves rapidly. A host animal’s virome includes the viruses that have been integrated into the genomes of cells of the host animal.


How do the discovery of the microbiome and the germ theory of disease (1878) come together? How does one square with the other? How does one alter the other? A potentially massive subject I believe. Human beings everywhere appear to have pushed the discussion forward.


Philosopher, and medical philosopher, Sayer Ji (b. 1972) writing in 2021:




The relatively recent discovery of the microbiome is not only completely redefining what it means to be human, to have a body, to live on this Earth—but is overturning belief systems and institutions that have enjoyed global penetrance for centuries. A paradigm shift has occurred, so immense in implication, that the entire frame of reference for our species’ self-definition as well as how we relate, fundamentally, to concepts like “germs” have been transformed beyond recognition. The shift is underway and yet, despite the popular interest in our gut ecology, the true implications remain unacknowledged.




Does Nature abhor sterility? Bacteria are abundant in arctic environments, in the hottest of hot springs, in all parts of Earth’s crust, in deepest oceanic waters (7 miles down) and beneath deepest ocean floors. And viruses more abundant than that.


The viruses that rain on us (per the New York Times piece April 13 2018) arrive at Earth not from distant parts of the solar system or outside the solar system. They are of the Earth. They are “swept into the air by sea spray,” they sail in the upper troposphere “above the planet’s weather systems but below the level of airline travel”—whence they sweep down again. Eight hundred million striking every square meter of the Earth’s surface per day. That seems a low number. (It has been theorized that some viruses falling to Earth are coming from much farther afield.)


How many virions (virus particles) in his local environment does the lone human animal “collide with” in 24 hours? How many ingested or inhaled, in 24 hours? Back of the envelope calculations. The questions are mostly unanswerable. And I don’t want to be or appear to be overly credulous. But I have read: 750,000 virus particles. (That seems a low number.) I have read: 30 billion, and well above. I’ve also read on: the number of new kinds of virus (new species or strains, species or strains in relation to which he is virgin) the lone human animal collides with—per day. Per one source I looked at: on some days zero.


In respect of viral “collisions” per day let’s say it is 750,000. One can ask: What part of the 750,000 is kept at bay by social distancing? Not the best question perhaps. Perhaps it is not how many virus particles adsorb to, or are absorbed by, the lone human animal per day... it is how many virus particles that are likely to cause harm (in a specific host) adsorb to, or are absorbed by, per day. And most virus particles (greater than 99.9999 percent I believe) will engender zero harm, in that host. A related question: does a well-functioning, healthful immune system require near constant exposure to a vast and hyperdiverse collection of antigens?


Viroids resemble viruses. Viroids are very ancient—they are subviral and pre-viral. Viroids are strands of nucleic acid (RNA) minus the protein coat. They are part of plant world, of plant life. In plants they are sometimes agents of harm. It is sometimes theorized that the viroid is the origin of life. Viroids are skittish. They transmit plant to plant, sometimes via leaf to leaf contact.


Virus particles skittish, slippery, ubiquitous—reminds me a little of RNA world (a world that may never have existed). RNA is the first large organic molecule, the first self-replicating molecule. In RNA world RNA was all there was as it were. It was a world in which RNA biology was the only biology. RNA world is hypothesis, a hypothetical stage in the history of Earth. It would have existed prior to the formation of continents—in the part of the Precambrian Eon in which oceans were a novelty.


RNA viruses, and viroids, are perhaps living relics of widely-assumed RNA world. On the plane of the imagination at least RNA world survives.







Today. July 15 2020. I understand that I will be allowed to enter the state of Maine—should I wish to enter it. However one month ago I learned (via mainetourism.com as well as maine.gov) that my entry to or my admission to the state was going to be problematic. (One month ago I was making plans to travel to Maine. I postponed.)


In mid June I learned (at maine.gov) that beginning July 1, the traveler to Maine had to agree to self-quarantine in Maine for 14 days or present a “certificate of compliance” that showed proof of a “negative Covid-19 test”—the test having been administered within 72 hours prior to his, the traveler’s, arrival in the state. Per maine.gov (accessed June 20 2020), to whom the certificate of compliance was to be presented was deemed an unimportant detail, apparently. There is no such thing as a Covid-19 test by the way. Neither the antibody tests nor the RT-PCR (reverse transcription—polymerase chain reaction) tests, the tests that utilize RT-PCR, are tests for active disease. The protein antigen tests are not tests for active disease. Each is a test for (prior) exposure. At best—each is a test for exposure. Exposure to SARS coronavirus 2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2; SARS CoV 2). It is an important distinction. All positive test results in the absence of symptoms mean nothing, or next to nothing. (Positive test results in the presence of symptoms don’t mean a lot.)


If none is a test for active disease, then none can be a “diagnostic test.”


Within the medical arts—it is illness and only illness that can be diagnosed. (I’m sorry. You can’t diagnose exposure to a pathogen.)


Sickness in the absence of symptoms (actually signs and symptoms) contravenes 6,000 years of accumulated human observation, intuition, experience.


And I feel like a skunk for asking, but I’m hoping to get some clarity: were I to have tested positive (less than 72 hours prior to my arrival, in Maine): would they have wished to keep me out, or would they have sent a welcoming committee to the train station? [At present, use of RT–PCR testing to diagnose Covid illness is, I believe, science fraud. But let us for purpose of discussion put that to one side. Let’s put the dilemma of false positive results to one side. Let’s assume for a minute or two that false positive and false negative results are rare to nonexistent.] I took a one-semester course in immunology. (OK, 41 years ago.) It used to be a generally understood, generally unspoken a priori principle of immunology: evidence of exposure (to a pathogen) in combination with zero symptoms IS A GOOD THING. Of course evidence of exposure coupled with zero symptoms does not mean anything absolutely. It is not proof of immunity (which by the way is never 100 percent). But what it is likely to mean: some measure of natural immunity—the best kind. If a prospective traveler to the state of Maine had received a negative result, wouldn’t he have been viewed as more vulnerable to infection—and more likely to become a spreader? So was the guy who had received a negative result the guy who was barred from entering, or the guy who was welcomed in? All mimsy were the borogoves. I think they got it mixed up, in Maine.


And similarly. In respect of all those “cases” making headlines in summer 2020, the asymptomatic cases, the cases whose numbers were “soaring,” and “skyrocketing,” the cases that were not cases—certainly not if they were symptomless, having been designated cases via one method (positive RT–PCR result): were their skyrocketing numbers A GOOD THING? Were the persons being named “cases” deserving of welcoming committees (as they, these persons, started turning up at public events)?




And so. “Instinctive” principle of immunology: Absence of exposure (to a pathogen)—having never been exposed—is a factor that predisposes toward disease. (Covid test results were not reliable. But in principle it should never have been: persons testing negative getting the OK; persons testing positive being embargoed.)


Immunology equals landscape of paradox, landscape “where intuition goes to die.”


The idea of immunity centers on paradox and the idea of paradox. (Homeopathy, the same. All homeopathy centers on paradox.)


A paradox of sorts: In the American Civil War, more American boys died from infectious disease than from traumatic injury. And it was boys from rural places (real specimens, often) who died in far greater numbers and far more quickly than boys from the inner city (with the latter cohort’s greater exposures and more constant exposures to wide arrays of pathogens). Immunity is primed by (near constant) prior exposures.


Few noticed—or would have cared to notice: With the implementation of quarantines (in 2020, 2021, and 2022) and the barring of (unvaccinated) persons from public buildings and other spaces—you are among other things taking the focal idea of immunity and inverting it, turning it upside-down. You’re taking the focal idea of vaccination and inverting it.
   



Diagnoses by the way are tentative. They can be final, usually they are not. Diagnoses are subject to change. (Diagnoses of death have been in error.) Diagnoses are ruled out and ruled in. They are tweaked, refined, added to. A diagnosis often improves (as it is revised)—i.e. becoming more accurate over time. Established scientific principles are tentative—they have standing until something better (some new theorizing) comes along.


What is diagnostic of Covid-19? Signs and symptoms. A set of signs and symptoms in the lone individual. Illness makes the illness.


It is a well-kept secret. Diagnosis of Covid-19 is problematic. It is as straightforward as the (deeply problematic) diagnosis of flu.


What is a Covid “case”? A Covid case is a sick individual, not a positive test result. I want to say—a manifestly sick individual.


At any rate for 6,000 years it is illness (signs and symptoms) that gets you medical attention, study, diagnosis, care, treatment.


A case is not a positive test result—and not a positive test result in someone who feels well. A case is not for example a positive test result in someone who is radiant with good heath, so radiant with good health that he or she is eye-catching.


Love and a cold cannot be hid (George Herbert, born 1593).


To the clever or talented eye, illness as well as brimming good health cannot be hid. They are unmistakable. The clever eye I speak of has a maternal character, a maternal cast, as well as a physicianly cast. It used to be said (not so long ago) that clever doctors, gifted doctors can diagnose many an illness—at a glance, a single glance.


My banker calls me to find out how I’m getting along in the pandemic. Wait. That doesn’t sound right. I don’t have a banker actually. He calls me from time to time because I have something in the neighborhood of 100,000 dollars sitting in a savings account (it’s about all I have), and if there is one thing that unnerves a banker, flummoxes him, and leaves him with the screaming mimi’s it is money sitting in a savings account. Under present banking protocols in the United States all monies must go to Wall Street. (Better to let them play with it and safeguard it [!] and try to grow it—is the ethos.) In the United States money in a savings account (beyond a certain dollar amount) will soon be banned by state and federal law. So not my banker, I will call him my friend. He wishes to interest me in an investment vehicle, one of the bank’s investment vehicles (which sounds rather like euphemism). He volunteers that he was “tested for Covid-19.” I bite my tongue. I do not say “That is impossible.” He was tested and members of his extended family living in New York (originally from Argentina) were tested. For whatever. All tested positive. All are asymptomatic.


My friend has tested positive. My friend is asymptomatic—and a veritable specimen. He is a brash young banker with beautiful suits, beautiful muscle tone, and a teeny tiny waist. He is shaped like an hourglass. (He works out.) He moves well. He has quite a spring in his step. (I see him walking in the neighborhood. The bank is less than a block from my building.) I ask him if he has had the “PCR test.” He doesn’t know. Then I say “The nasal swab?” Yes, he has had the PCR test—AKA (on the radio I listen to) “the diagnostic test,” “the viral test,” and “the gold standard test.” Gold standard test my foot.


[Frankly—or strictly speaking—it is not even a test. It is a technique that enables a test. You’re looking for a particular something.... Finding it versus not finding it is the test. PCR makes the something a lot easier to find.]


Tests that use PCR (RT–PCR), in this context, to identify nucleic acid fragments and to decide health status on the basis of the identification of nucleic acid fragments, are ineffective. At any rate—if this guy is sick I’m a monkey’s uncle. If he is a Covid case (emphasis on the word case) pigs can fly.


In July 2020 my next-door neighbor tests positive. My neighbor is from Australia, she is under 30, her name is Cate. Cate would knock your eye out (my father’s expression). Camille Paglia has written—one possesses the status of “sexual being” or one does not. Cate possesses it. A small number of times I’ve watched Cate at a distance—sashaying, gadding about, going here and there in the neighborhood. And wherever she goes she creates a small riot. Cate and I bump into each other at West 4th and Bank. Cate tells me she has “been tested.” (About a month later I learn of her positive result.) Yes, it is the RT–PCR “test”—widely regarded all of a sudden (in July 2020) as “the real test” (for Covid-19), the test that separates the men from the boys as it were. However in my view the lowly antibody tests are superior as tests for prior viral exposure/infection. Superior to the inordinately complex and arcane (PCR) tests (there are many) that identify viral debris found in “respiratory tract samples”—found in a layer of mucus that is effectively outside the human body, the layer of mucus that sits at the “outer” surface of the nasopharyngeal and oropharyngeal epithelium. The epithelium plus mucus impose a physical barrier between “the inside” and “the outside” (the great outdoors). The mucus has antimicrobial function. Antimicrobial proteins secreted by the epithelium, contained in the layer of mucus, function to prevent microbes from even entering the body. That layer of mucus is a burial ground. Recovery of an intact virion (an intact virus particle) from that microorganic burial ground is practically speaking impossible. The epithelium plus mucus are a formidable barrier, a formidable defense against infection. They are a main (and primarily forgotten) defense against infection. They are a main part of the “innate immune system.” The body’s “barrier defenses” (barriers both physical and chemical) give tangible form to greater than a billion years of evolution. As long as the disease-causing agent (or its remains, or remnants) is held at the “far” side of this epithelium there is no infection, there is not even colonization.




Note: The goings on of the (underrecognized) innate immune system (which includes the epithelial defenses) are generally feverish. They include, in mammals, the marshalling of large numbers of macrophages just “underneath” or just interior to epithelial surfaces—versatile immune attack cells ever at the ready. The mechanisms of the innate immune system are quick to engage or to be engaged, within minutes (or seconds) of microbial infiltration of the host animal. The acquired immune system shows delayed (and more “specific”) responses. The production of antibodies is part of the acquired immune system, it is its pièce de résistance.


Immune cells of the acquired immune system are capable of “recognition” of antigenic stimuli. (Immune cells of the innate immune system have some capabilities of this kind.) It is said often that the efficiency of the acquired immune system is miraculous as it were. (The efficiency of the underrated and underrecognized innate immune system is also miraculous.) Against many infections including many viral infections the mechanisms of the innate immune system, by themselves, are potent; the greater part of these infections are cleared by the innate immune system acting alone.


 The antimicrobial molecules secreted by the pharyngeal epithelial cells (part of the innate immune defense system) include for example defensins—very ancient defenders against infections. Defensins “go back” approx. 3.4 billion years. These protein molecules are highly “conserved” across eons of time. They are part of the self-defense of plants, fungi, invertebrates. They are first responders. They are found in the skin of amphibians. They are found in the skin of the horny toad (a reptile, not an amphibian). They are found in pharyngeal mucus (in mammals).




Dr Michael Yeadon, biochemist, pharmacologist, former Chief Scientific Officer and Vice President of Pfizer Global Research and Development [for] Allergy and Respiratory Diseases, speaking in an interview [October 29 2020]: “The pathology that’s stalking [the United Kingdom] is the government’s PCR testing system. Testing the well population—people who aren’t ill—it’s just a madcap thing.” Madcap? Gracie Allen of Burns & Allen was madcap. Positive PCR (“positive” for detritus of the agent that causes Covid-19) does not a viral isolate make—not even close. And by the way recovery of the live virus from pharyngeal mucus, were it possible, would not prove (Covid-19) illness or infection. In the fall of 2020 the generation of a positive “signal” by PCR (used in this context) in the absence of symptoms is meaningless.


Cate radiates something—some je ne sais quoi—but something very positive. If Cate is sick with Covid-19 (has replicating virus) at the time of our little tête-à-tête at West 4th and Bank, pigs will fly in the morning across the Hudson River.


In the present technocracy (in the United States) one’s gut instincts are no good, they cannot be trusted. They count for nothing. Save for the instances in which it is the technocrat’s instinct.


A paradox we are stuck with. Miracle of all time, miracle of miracles is the human immune system—yet policymakers, not just in government and including those who make policy (sometimes just company policy) at “public health” organizations and at media companies, deny every efficacy to the immune system per se (the immune system unaided) and ascribe every efficacy to the therapies and preventives (drugs and vaccines, quarantines etc.) being promulgated, lockstep-wise, by governments, “public health” organizations, “public health” services, and media companies.







This business of the maternal eye I allude to (above) insinuates itself into or makes its way into clinical medicine—virtually all of it. It makes its way hugely into the discipline of pediatrics—in which the mother (or talented stand-in) “interprets” the infant, “translates” the infant for the pediatrician. The mother’s genius—a little like Alan Turing closing in on the Enigma code, perhaps.


How the mother intuits her child’s wellness status: there’s genius in it.


The eye with a maternal cast may not be the eye of the literal mother. The clinician does well if he seeks to develop this maternal eye. (It’s possible to do.)


The maternal eye is relevant to and shows up in the (current) Vaccine Wars AKA the French Wars of Religion. That’s the French Wars of Religion of the latter half of the 16th century. (That’s my own name for the Vaccine Wars. It is slow to catch on.)


Proud ex-vaxxers, non-vaxxers, un-vaxxers and anti-vaxxers are the Huguenots.





________________

Addendum. June 16 2024. Virtually always an unanswered question. A few times I have been present—as persons speaking in mixed companies have asked (often with an air of surprise and/or innocence): “Why is the term anti-vaxxer a pejorative term?” There are answers—but no good ones (in my view). For me the question is perhaps: Why, why on Earth, is “anti-vaxxer” so unfailingly and reflexively pejorative? We are taught, from kindergarten on up, to err on the side of caution. In my experience the question is likely to issue forth from persons not aware of its contentiousness, persons not conversant in the (latter-day) French Wars of Religion—and their hatreds. I am not saying—I think “anti-vaxxer” needs to be made into a laudatory term. (At least right now I’m not.) Mary Holland of Children’s Health Defense has said that the term “anti-vaxxer” is moving very gradually toward (full) respectability. I have sometimes thought: Why is “anti-vaxxer” not rendered, more often than not—as a neutral term?

So it is a question needing to be answered (in my view). That “anti-vaxxer” is so categorically and reflexively rendered as a pejorative term has to do of course with conditioning/propaganda. How could it not? If one did not invoke conditioning/propaganda, how might one answer the original question—Why is “anti-vaxxer” a pejorative term?  

Likewise “vaccine hesitancy.” Why always a pejorative phrase? Why never a laudatory term? Again—why not more or less a neutral term?    



Somewhat relatedly. Censorship was so thick during the Covid phenomenon that the smallest departure from the main (Covid) narrative was embargoed (in the United States, and outside of it). The larger departures from the main narrative were suppressed and invisibilized to such a degree that most Americans had (and have) no idea that the then-prevailing “alternative” ideas, alternative points of view, alternative schools of thought even existed. Seated at my work table I am staring at a book jacket: Thomas Cowan M.D. and Sally Fallon Morell, The Contagion Myth: Why Viruses (including “Coronavirus”) Are Not the Cause of Disease. (Tom Cowan: speculative thinker, rocker of boats, iconoclast.) I am reading it presently (June 16 2024) because I cannot not read it.

Simone Weil:

We must welcome all opinions—but they must be arranged vertically [from those that carry the most weight down to those that carry the least].

Albert Einstein:

Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.


Albert Einstein—speculative thinker and rocker of boats. In biographies and other printed copy on the life of Einstein: he has pure contempt for authority and authoritative opinion that begins when he is still a small boy. With just a tad of (Internet) searching one can find several of these quotes—in which Einstein expresses his hatred of “authority,” inside the domain of science or outside it (but particularly inside). 
 
So... everyone is obligated to bestow on every “opinion” a crumb of attention, at least that..... Possibly not much more than that.

Some of the (aforementioned) larger departures from the main narrative as follows. (These are mere examples.)

  • There was no pandemic.†  

  • Covid-19 was not [or not nearly] the big killer and serious illness the public was led to believe it was.

  • [More radically] Viruses are not the cause of disease.

  • [More radically still] Viruses do not exist. In other words: Very small (smaller than bacteria), transmissible, disease-causing agents have never been proven to exist. Cell lysis, cell destruction that follows the application of a filtered solution (obtained from patient specimen, filtered to filter out larger entitites, such as bacteria) to a growth medium, a population of cells—does not prove the existence of very small, disease-causing agents.

  • [More radically still] Science does not exist. There is no real science.


Medical doctors with substantial reputations have spoken of the Covid débâcle (certainly there has been that); have used the phrase “the alleged pandemic”—and sometimes “the Covid hoax.” One must make a mental note of even that.

Back to Cowan’s book: I don’t want to read it. Yet I must read it. I won’t tip, at least not here and now—but it may be my sense that Cowan is wide of the mark here, essentially. Yet by some internal compulsion I must give this 192-page volume some attention. I don’t know Cowan is wrong... Who, who in the name of humanity, knows what the orthodoxies (science orthodoxies) will be 125 years from today?


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† I may have to abort this particular essay-cum-memoir, gather up my crayons and go home. Soon. (If there was no pandemic.) Of all those who have striven to demonstrate that the offical Covid narrative was horseshit (essentially; in a nutshell), none has been more interesting and more perspicacious perhaps, and none less afraid of reprisals perhaps (in my view), than Denis Rancourt. Rancourt has studied the Covid phenomenon via the agency of, and through the lens of—virtually a single datum. That datum all-cause mortality. Which Rancourt, and others, have called—a powerful datum, a datum denuded of bias, a flawless shining datum. All-cause mortality per period, all-cause mortality per jurisdiction. A patient has died or he has not.

Naming exact cause of death is controversial, political, and actually hard to do—very often. (Rancourt [2025]: The said problem [identifying cause of death] is unavoidable because of the very nature of death itself, which is a complex and cooperative system failure involving a multitude of damaged components.)

He says a lot here [following], in a relatively small number of words. 

[T]he underlying concern itself regarding “spread” was not ever warranted and is irrational, since there is no evidence in reliable mortality data that there ever was a particularly virulent pathogen. In fact, the very notion of spread during the Covid period is rigorously disproved by the temporal and spatial variations of excess all-cause mortality, everywhere that it is sufficiently quantified, worldwide (Rancourt 2023). [Emphasis mine.]




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Addendum. March 18 2025. One more word on vaccine hesitancy.

On March 10 2025 I get an email from Meryl Nass—physician (in Ellsworth Maine) with strong expertise in the U.S. anthrax vaccine and bioterrorism, consultant on issues related to anthrax and the U.S. anthrax vaccine. (I am on Nass’s mailing list.) Its header asks: Why has the U.S. government spent millions and millions on studying vaccine hesitancy? Because universal vaccine uptake was necessary to complete the Great Reset?

[“Studying vaccine hesitancy” may be euphemism.]

Nass:

Another thing I learned during those years [in which Nass studied the U.S. anthrax vaccine and functioned as physician activist] was that all these agencies were worried about a dread disease I had never learned about in med school. Its name was Vaccine Hesitancy. It was being studied aggressively even 25 years ago. I first heard the phrase “Knowledge, Attitudes, Beliefs (KAB)” back then. The agencies were probing the hoi polloi (us), to find the chinks in our mental constructs about vaccines. HOW COULD THEY CHANGE OUR MINDS SO WE DEVELOPED ABSOLUTE TRUST IN VACCINES? Millions of bucks were spent studying KAB, even then. All the CDC employees knew what KAB meant. I was the odd man out who didn’t. They also sought out KOLs to convince us. Key Opinion Leaders. I didn’t know that term either.

So I was thrilled to see that some of this nonsensical “research” will now end.

Nass then points her readers toward the news that under the Trump Administration, NIH has terminated funding for “research” on vaccine hesitancy.


One week later on March 18 2025 I receive an email from Toby Rogers (I am on Rogers’ mailing list).

My thoughts on the recent decision by the NIH to stop funding studies on “vaccine hesitancy.” There is no such thing as “vaccine hesitancy.” The term itself is completely Orwellian. It was likely coined by an expensive Pharma PR firm. The purpose of the term is to cast aspersions on parents who do proper research on the risks of medical interventions. By disparaging due diligence, the term does a terrible disservice to society and may violate article 1 of the Nuremberg Code that prohibits any form of coercion in medical decision-making.

Whoa. (I find that Rogers’ prose is—rather often—a punch in the stomach.)

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The maternal eye comes up (in the latter-day French Wars of Religion) every time a mother says to a doctor or other health care practitioner: “My child was vaccinated and then he was not the same. He began to regress.” (It is a consistent story coming from parents. It turns up again and again—yet must always count for nothing.) To which the physician-scientist replies: “No good! Your words are no good. It’s not science. It is antiscience.”


In conversations with friends I have invoked a mother’s intuition, a mother’s testimony, in relation to a child’s being treated for illness, as items of unassailable and unparalleled value. On one occasion my interlocutor avowed she had next to no interest in listening to a mother’s testimony—as “[any statement a patient advocate might make—that she’d be willing to listen to] would have to be based on solid data and expert knowledge.” A phrase I never forgot. I was certain I had never heard anything as pompous. The physician who treats a child and gives short shrift to its mother’s testimony is being an idiot.




The connection between mother and infant, if all goes well, is profound—profound to the point where it’s of an appalling or frightening character (when it is put to the test). A mother’s uncanny comprehension of her child is a powerful thing, sometimes an astonishing thing.


Andrew Wakefield speaks of “the power of maternal intuition.” Wakefield has said, “Maternal intuition is the reason we’re here on this earth right now.”


Allow me to say in passing: the vilification of Andrew Wakefield is one of the great hoaxes of all time, of all recorded history—and one of the cleverest.


So maternal intuition is not science. Actually it goes one better than science, goes one further than, scales just a bit beyond science, climbs a bit higher than science. The maternal eye combined with a certain species of gifted personality is pure genius.


We live it now, the French Wars of Religion. Oh come on? Grow up. The differences between the two conflicts (the one that begins in France in the 1530s, and the one that begins in England around 1720) are minuscule, superficial, cosmetic. It is the same (kinds of) sectarianism and sectarian passion. It is the same ugliness, the same bile. The same kinds of hatred and enmity, the same kinds of tantrums. The same intractabilities, immovabilities (on the parts of combatants). The never-ending Vaccine Wars have very much the character of a religious war. It is the same bifurcation of populations and subpopulations into believers and infidels. There are the same desires to cancel opposing views—and when time has passed the same hankerings, murderous hankerings, after the purging of infidels, of one’s opponents. All the enmity of Right v. Left flows into the latter-day French Wars of Religion.


Note. August 5 2021. I receive an email that reprimands me that says: “Oh no you don’t. The vaccine wars have nothing to do with religion.” I am aware of that. What I am saying: They are quasi-religious.


What of this science we must never for a moment swerve from? And what of the ubiquitous and ignorant sacralization of science and of scientists? What of all this nauseating talk, by editorialists, columnists and bloggists, of “unimpeachable” scientists? Editorialists speak of unimpeachable scientists—but are very far from being able to name one.


Science is not pristine. Science is not a monolith. Science is not a pristine monolith. And in 2021 in the United States one-half of all science is a bunco game. (Think Edward G. Robinson, his films, 1930s.) There is bad science, junk science, industry science, industry-funded science, white paper science, science with a slant, science with a twist, even cretin-ish science. There is corruption in science, dysfunction in science. There is a dark side to science that many people do not know exists. There is the dark side and occasional dark heart of the medical–industrial complex.


“I follow the science.” Something each of us claims. Per conservative guy Tom Woods: We must remember that “the most irrational, anecdote-driven, fact-free believers in voodoo [he has ever encountered]” follow the science too.




gao
2021.

Clever, imaginative depiction of the (unfolding) Great Reset and the Build Back Better movement.




Speaking of intractabilities, the enmity between Protestants and Catholics that burned and blazed in France approx. 500 years ago—in somewhat altered form lives today. Old hatreds never die. Actually they can die—but it takes 1,000 years. (I am from northern New England, born at midcentury. Something I am expert in: the entrenched lovelessness that obtains, to this day, between Protestants and Catholics.) The venomous Vaccine Wars (close to 300 years old) may not, in the year 2021, live for another 1,000 years. They will certainly live on for another 600 (or so)—I guarantee it.






First there is colonization. Colonization is subclinical and preclinical. It has no clinical expression. Under a school of thought that is “classical” and pervasive: Viral infection means damage to the body (to cells of the body), it means cell death—somewhere. An infection entails (physiological) dysfunction and then illness—altho’ that illness can be subapparent (subclinical).


It gets tricky. There is a blurring among: colonization, subclinical infection, subclinical illness, asymptomatic infection, asymptomatic illness, mild infection, mild illness; and somewhat related to these—viral latency, commensalism, commensal virus, symbiosis, phenomena of immune tolerance. It is all complex. In immunology there is little that isn’t “gray area.”


Per the more classical view—illness of every stripe (including “mental illness,” including chronic illness, including low-grade illness) is going to manifest somehow, somewhere. It is an altered look in the eye.... His movements are not precisely the same. His baby toe is giving him a problem. It, sickness, will manifest somewhere.


And yet—eminent microbiologist René Dubos (1901—1982) has written: “[Organisms] can live peacefully with their microbial enemies.” And: “[I]nfection can occur without producing disease.” Again, one needs to be a bit careful: many of the (relevant) terms and phrases are used variably (by the varied writers). 




Evident good health (to the naked eye) that includes the élan vital of Henri Bergson, that aura of vigor—with operant illness lying beneath its surface is a modern idea. A 21st century idea. And it contravenes 6,000 years of practical wisdom.


Beda Stadler, immunobiologist, professor emeritus, the “vaccine pope,” the “grandfather of immunology,” former director of the Institute for Immunology at the University of Bern, Switzerland, had published a piece titled Coronavirus: Why Everyone Was Wrong (July 8 2020). Beda Stadler:




The experts have missed basic connections. The immune response against the virus is much stronger than we thought.


This new breed of [immunity] deniers had to observe that the majority of people who tested positive for this virus, i.e. the virus was present in their throats, did not get sick. The term “silent carriers” was conjured out of a hat and it was claimed that one could be sick without having symptoms. Wouldn’t that be something! If this principle from now on gets naturalized into the realm of medicine, health insurers would really have a problem, but also teachers whose students could now claim to have whatever disease to skip school, if at the end of the day one didn’t need symptoms to be sick.




So what do the results of “Covid-19 tests” (per the large media companies, per U.S. and state government websites) pick up on, signify, what do they establish? 


In general transmissibility and transmission of infectious illnesses are only partly knowable. In 1980 I was taking a course in infectious diseases—and we were told: the transmission of leprosy is not fully understood. I was stupefied. I couldn’t move for 20 minutes. For an hour I couldn’t get it out of my head: Not fully understood after 5,000 years?!


Robert Koch was a bacteriologist. The first of Koch’s Postulates (on the establishment of causalities for infectious disease states, from the 1880s): “The microorganism must be found in abundance in all organisms suffering from the disease, but should not be found in healthy organisms.” The second: “The microorganism must be extracted from a diseased organism and subsequently grown in culture.” There’s a neatness to them. But they are rather ambitious (perhaps over-ambitious). They are problematic. In not a single instance (of infectious disease) I believe—was Koch, using his own postulates, able to establish “proof” of origin of disease. Koch’s Postulates (there are 4) have some utility presently. For the most part they are obsolete.


Koch’s Postulates are “academic,” pun not intended. I don’t think Koch’s Postulates were ever banked on much or relied on much—in clinical medicine. Doctors and other clinicians treating colds and flu for example move forward on their instincts. They must treat immediately very often (owing to patient discomfort, patient suffering).


Diagnosis of influenza is problematic. Most cases are presumed cases. Diagnosis of influenza is problematic enough that another diagnosis had to be invented. Influenza-like illness (ILI) is a medical diagnosis for possible influenza, for illnesses showing signs and symptoms that resemble those of influenza—including influenza. Diagnoses of influenza and ILI are, for practical purposes, equivalent and equal. Treatment of influenza almost always goes forward in the absence of any confirmation of influenza illness. In most patients with presumed influenza (well above 50 percent—above 70 percent), respiratory tract specimens tested for influenza virus show negative results (influenza virus is not found).  


Diagnosis of Covid-19, the illness, is similarly problematic. Many (or most) cases are presumed cases. Symptomatologies of Covid-19 are markedly similar to those of other viral illnesses of the respiratory tract. Misdiagnoses are common—no one knows how common. The foremost problem with testing (such as it is, for illness presumably caused by SARS coronavirus 2) is not the presence of false positives and false negatives. It is interpretation. Of test results. What do positive results mean? What do negative results mean?


The first criterion of the Bradford Hill criteria (for the establishment of evidence of causal relationships—not necessarily having to do with disease states, from the mid 1960s, the brainchild of statistician and epidemiologist Sir Austin Bradford Hill—in an earlier draft I was writing Sir Freddy Eynsford Hill): Strength [the criterion]. “A small association does not mean that there is not a causal effect, though the larger the association, the more likely that it is causal.” And so the “larger” the association (between disease state and putative cause), the greater the likelihood of causality. The fifth criterion [there are 10]: Biological gradient AKA presence of an exposure–response, or dose–response, relationship. [This one comes with caveats.] “Greater exposure should generally lead to greater incidence of the effect. However, in some cases, the mere presence of the factor can trigger the effect. In other cases, an inverse proportion is observed: greater exposure leads to lower incidence.” Between disease state and putative cause an exposure–response relationship may be unfindable. When such a relationship is present, the fact of its presence is (often) strong evidence of causality. The first “caveat” (mere presence of the factor can trigger the effect) suggests homeopathy (to my imagination). The second (greater exposure leads to lower incidence) sounds rather like a reference to natural herd immunity.  
 

At any rate the Bradford Hill criteria, also (sometimes) part of academic medicine, are also partly obsolete. There are criticisms of the Bradford Hill criteria. There are arguments that sets of criteria may be used as guides in investigations of (disease) causality—but that fulfillment of a set of criteria should not by itself “decide” disease causality.





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Addendum. March 1 2024. A few words from computational biologist, mathematical biologist Jessica Rose [February 26 2024] on the subject of the Bradford Hill criteria (for causality) as applied (by Rose and others) to VAERS Reports of Covid vaccine adverse events (AEs). [See M. Nathaniel Mead et al. (2024) Covid 19 mRNA Vaccines: Lessons Learned from the Registrational Trials and Global Vaccination Campaign.] 


Fact: The Bradford Hill criteria are used to assess causality in epidemiological data such as the VAERS pharmacovigilance system. ...

Fact: The Bradford Hill criterion Reversibility is satisfied. When a drug is withdrawn, the side effects disappear.

Fact: The Bradford Hill criterion Specificity is satisfied. [Causation is likely if] [a] very specific population at a specific site and [in respect of a specific] disease is reported with no other likely explanation. Dose 2 is associated with a fourfold increase in reporting of myocarditis in 15 yr. old boys. This indicates specificity with regard to age and gender. ...

Fact: The Bradford Hill criterion Dose-Response [Biological Gradient] is satisfied. Greater exposure leads to greater incidence of the effect. Following Dose 2, an increase in signal occurs. ...

There are 7 more Bradford Hill criteria that are satisfiable. That’s a ten-out-of-ten BINGO. Conclusion: Standard operating procedures for analysis of safety signals when utilized reveal causal links between the Covid 19 injectable products and the adverse events investigated. [Empasis Rose’s.]

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Generally speaking an infectious pathogen, inside a host organism, is on the rise or on the wane. It kills you or you kill it. Asymptomatic infection is paradoxical. The phrase asymptomatic infection suggests contradiction, peculiarity. It also suggests—there’s been a compromise, an accommodation. It suggests symbiosis (or commensalism) and a kind of stasis. Asymptomatic viral infection of the upper respiratory tract is rare—rare to nonexistent.


There are asymptomatic carrier states, there is asymptomatic transmission. Hepatitis B (viral hepatitis type B) comes to mind. Tuberculosis comes to mind. Mary Mallon, Typhoid Mary, comes to mind.


A young “public health” officer turns his thoughts to transmissibilities (of a given infectious illness) because he must. There is pressure on him to get it right. Chances are he will not get it right. As I have mentioned transmissibilities and transmissions of infectious illnesses are elusive and never entirely understood. There will be counterintuitivities everywhere... Inflammatory/immune responses in lone individuals to the same pathogen are hypervariable. We only know the immune system at its fringes. And so on. But he tries to get an instinct for it (transmission), he even tries to envision it (transmission, happening, “in real time”). Understandings of these matters (as close as they can get) are obviously of vast importance in the field of “public health.”




The hepatitis B virus is a DNA virus. It is (obviously) not a respiratory virus... Chronic hepatitis B develops from the acute illness. (The acute illness is likely to be mild but can be severe.) Chronic hepatitis B may be asymptomatic—however it is my experience (with IV drug addicts, in the 1970s and 1980s) that the chronic illness is never entirely asymptomatic. For example I never met anyone having, or having had, a diagnosis of chronic hepatitis B who did not possess an altered and esoteric skin color. So hepatitis B is possibly not the best example of illness or infection that can be asymptomatic. But patients with let’s say very mildly symptomatic chronic hepatitis B can transmit the illness to others—in fact the chronic illness is highly contagious—but the modes of transmission are different (versus for example those of common respiratory viruses). Hepatitis B, acute and chronic, is sometimes understood as a sexually transmitted disease. It is spread through contact with bodily fluids (blood and semen, to a lesser extent vaginal fluid, to a lesser extent saliva)—via sexual activity (and among IV drug users). Chronic hepatitis B infection is perhaps best thought of as a suppressed or smoldering infection. Never entirely invisibilized. It does not go entirely dormant. It sets up a chronic inflammation in the liver that leads to greater risks of cirrhosis and liver cancer. (So its damages are wrought at least in part by the body’s defense systems.)




Tuberculosis, a respiratory illness caused by a bacterium (Mycobacterium tuberculosis), not a virus, is a veritable pandemic, as we speak (NB worldwide pandemic is redundant). Ca. 1.5 million deaths per year, worldwide. Tuberculosis infection is likely to be asymptomatic. Primary infection (phase one) and the latent form of the disease (phase two), in which the body manages to “wall off” and therefore limit the multiplication of the tuberculosis pathogen, are both likely to be asymptomatic. Granulomata that wall in tuberculosis bacteria also provide nooks enabling the bacteria to survive. The granuloma (singular) is thus an accommodative phenomenon, one that embodies paradox. A kind of immune system exhaustion during the latent phase engenders the active form of the disease (phase three).


Most persons with the latent form of the disease will never get the active form. Latent tuberculosis is endemic everywhere. Per the World Health Organization [who.int accessed 14 October 2020] one-quarter of the human population has it. Tuberculosis bacteria in these persons are likely to manifest a lifelong dormancy (an accommodative phenomenon) and are not likely to cause illness.


Approx. 10 percent of the asymptomatic infections will progress to active tuberculosis. The active and symptomatic illness is spread person to person, through the air, via the expulsion of respiratory droplets (all sizes). With the active form the mycobacteria can spread to other organs (besides the lungs).


The active form of the disease is highly transmissible. The latent form is, per every source I was able to consult, intransmissible. Symptomatic tuberculosis: highly transmissible; asymptomatic tuberculosis: intransmissible. That’s not exactly what I expected to find. Nature generally speaking doesn’t demarcate or bifurcate so exactly I believe.


My eyebrow goes up whenever I look at a range of sources (sometimes 8 or 10 or more) for points of information—and all source materials are or appear to be identical in respect of those points. Absences of multiplicity, of multiple opinions, in respect of articulations of scientific idea, signalling groupthink perhaps, can point to the exact opposite of science.




Say polio in mixed company and someone in that company will say Franklin Roosevelt. It never fails. Beginning around 2003 several teams of doctors have undertaken to study the (considerable) available historical record and medical record (of the paralytic illness and other illnesses of Franklin Roosevelt) and have generally concluded—Roosevelt starting in 1921 suffered from Guillain–Barré syndrome, not from polio. Some of these medical persons have opined that Roosevelt’s symptoms were not entirely consistent with those of poliomyelitis, for one thing. Of course historical, or retrograde, medical diagnoses are problematic.


Polio—a tangled skein of terms, phrases, concepts I find. I find it hard to wade through medical literature (that centers on poliomyelitis), sometimes. Once again owing to the variability and varied uses of terms, phrases, concepts. Terms polio, infantile paralysis (mostly obsolete), poliomyelitis, poliovirus, wild poliovirus, poliovirus infection, wild poliovirus infection, nonpoliovirus infection, paralytic poliomyelitis, nonparalytic poliomyelitis, nonparalytic polio, paralyzing polio, gastrointestinal polio, abortive polio, nonpolio enterovirus infection, paralysis symptoms, paralytic disease, viral paralytic disease, acute flaccid paralysis, acute flaccid myelitis, transverse myelitis, encephalomyelitis, paralytic disease thought to be polio, paralytic disease not thought to be polio, paresis, [a] paralytic syndrome, [a] paralytic syndrome of unknown etiology. Terms in the foregoing list are (of course) not synomymous terms (altho’ there are multiple pair of near-synonyms in the list). Most pair of items are overlapping—some have considerable overlap. In medical discourse and medical literature there is always—conflation of the virus, the virus itself, and the relevant illness, the two (terms) being used interchangeably. (Covid-19 and SARS coronavirus 2, for example.) That is usually OK; it does make for confusion sometimes.   


Generally speaking poliomyelitis is a benign gastrointestinal illness. When I read on the subject of poliomyelitis, I sometimes look up and say: what is actually under discussion here—is not polio [in this particular instance], it is muscle weakness/paralysis (or flaccid paralysis, or acute flaccid paralysis). Or I will say: what we are really talking about here is acute flaccid paralysis of unknown etiology. I will say: poliomyelitis is under discussion here as well—but paralysis or paralytic illness should be the actual text heading.


Read about something, about anything—and then read on the same subject in real depth. You will come away with little or nothing of what you were expecting to find. (Such has been my experience.) It almost never fails. Read about the history of Flanders. Read about the life of Oliver Goldsmith. Read about the life of Queen Christina of Sweden (and her friendship with René Descartes). Read about magnetism. Read about William Ewart Gladstone. Read about Coco Chanel. Read about Parkinson’s disease. Again, go back a second time—and read and study in depth. You will not find what you were expecting. Possibly similar to the way that 20th century physicists who had studied atomism and the kinetic theory of gases and other things pertaining to matter (and found it all rather satisfying) subsequently went deeper: they began to study matter at the subatomic level and found things that shocked them, stymied them, flummoxed them, buffalo’ed them. And so with “the story of polio.” You will not find what you were expecting.


Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk (2013) in Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History: 



The polio story is a haunting one: long, complicated and ugly. It’s not a story you will have read or that the medical profession will be able to tell. Beyond the smoke and mirrors lie sketchy statistics, renaming of diseases, and vaccine-induced paralytic polio caused by both the Salk and the Sabin vaccines. ... Despite many well-documented historical problems, polio and smallpox vaccines serve as the anchor for vaccination faith today.



There are illnesses, some of them not viral illnesses, that can mimick polio as it were. Coxsackie virus infection, enteric cytopathic human orphan (ECHO) virus infection, transverse myelitis, DDT poisoning, arsenic poisoning, Guillain–Barré. To name a few.


Coxsackie viruses and ECHO viruses, like polioviruses, are enteroviruses. (The genus is Enterovirus.)


Humphries and Bystrianyk have posited that poliovirus infection, tending strikingly toward benignancy, has been made far worse (in the last 120 years in the United States) by environmental toxins and other environmental “inputs.” It is complex. Some environmental inputs whose effects can mimick (paralytic) poliovirus infection can also worsen poliovirus infection when the two (e.g. poliovirus infection, DDT poisoning) occur simultaneously.


From Gordon C. Brown et al. (1960) Laboratory Data on the Detroit Poliomyelitis Epidemic—1958. (From the abstract.)



During an epidemic of poliomyelitis in Michigan in 1958, virological and serologic studies were carried out with specimens from 1,060 patients. ... In a large number of paralytic as well as nonparalytic patients, poliovirus was not the cause. Frequency studies showed that there were no obvious clinical differences among patients with Coxsackie, ECHO, and poliomyelitis viruses. Coxsackie and ECHO viruses were responsible for more cases of “nonparalytic poliomyelitis” and “aseptic meningitis” than was poliovirus itself. This, added to the fact that two immunological types of the poliovirus were involved in the epidemic, suggests the difficulty to be anticipated in future programs of immunization. 



Humphries and Bystrianyk have written of the sketchiness... the murkiness of diagnosis of poliomyelitis prior to 1954. Diagnosis of poliomyelitis—even presently, as we speak—it is February 2024—has its difficulties. Per Humphries and Bystrianyk, the standards of diagnosis prior to 1954 were, for lack of a better word, pitiful.


In the context of vaccines and vaccine science (pediatrician Lawrence Palevsky has said—the term vaccine science is oxymoron), 1954 is a banner year. It is the year of the final stages of development and reportedly successful testing of “the Salk vaccine” by Jonas Salk (not the first reportedly successful polio vaccine—I believe the second).


A poor to nonexistent method of diagnosis conduces to misdiagnosis.


Suzanne Humphries writing in her book (2013):



Specific polio diagnosis was not pursued with laboratory testing before 1958. The diagnostic criteria for polio were very loose prior to the field trials for the vaccine in 1954. Before the vaccine was deployed, health care professionals were vigilantly programmed to be on the lookout for polio. After the trials, they were vigilantly noting who developed polio—vaccinated or unvaccinated—and made every effort to diagnose a nonpolio illness in a vaccinated person. ... 

The practice among doctors before 1954 was to diagnose all patients who experienced even short-term paralysis (24 hours) with “polio.” In 1955, the year the Salk vaccine was released, the diagnostic criteria became much more stringent. If there was no residual paralysis 60 days after onset, the disease was not considered to be paralytic polio.



I noticed—Humphries and Bystrianyk (in Dissolving Illusions) not infrequently in their discussion of polio bracket the word polio with quote marks—pointing toward potential snags or stumpers in the diagnosis of polio. See just above. (I also noticed—the relevant chapter title is The “Disappearance” of Polio; note use of quote marks.)


Humphries then quotes Bernard Greenberg (1919—1985), “visionary leader in the field of biostatistics.” Greenberg was quite famous in his day. Greenberg writing in 1960:



The change [in diagnostic criteria] in 1955 meant that we were reporting a new disease, namely paralytic poliomyelitis with a longer-lasting paralysis. ... Prior to 1954 large numbers of [cases of Coxsackie virus infection and aseptic meningitis] were mislabeled as paralytic poliomyelitis. Thus, simply by changes in diagnostic criteria, the number of paralytic cases was predetermined to decrease in 1955—1957, whether or not any vaccine was used. [Emphases mine.]



And so—in the mid 1950s criteria for the diagnosis of paralytic poliomyelitis changed. Humphries has called it “renaming the disease.” Greenberg had said in 1960: a new disease was being reported.


Changing criteria for disease (or for nondisease, absence of disease) “midstream.” It is a tactic that is used (sometimes) in clinical trials of drugs/biologics/vaccines/medical devices—to enable the owners of the data to get the numbers they want in the end.




Humphries and Bystrianyk, in Dissolving Illusions, on polio—and challenges related to its diagnosis (2013):



Approximately 33,000 people are afflicted by transverse myelitis in the United States, with 1,400 new cases per year.  

Does the public have any idea that there are hundreds of cases of something that is now called transverse myelitis that would have historically been called polio and is [in 2013] leaving children permanently dependent on a modern version of the iron lung [dependent on a ventilator to breathe]?



Transverse myelitis is a neurological illness associated with and caused by bilateral inflammation of spinal cord tissue at one level of the spinal cord. Exact cause of the inflammation: often a mystery. The inflammation (in some cases) may be caused by viral infection (including poliovirus infection).




In the years 2014 to 2019 I remember reading often at Internet news sites, several times per week—of outbreaks of “acute flaccid paralysis” and “acute flaccid myelitis” in pediatric populations in the United States. There is overlap between acute flaccid myelitis and acute flaccid paralysis. In medical literature acute flaccid paralysis is primarily—a symptom; acute flaccid myelitis—a clinical syndrome. Acute flaccid paralysis is the broader term. Acute flaccid myelitis, the syndrome, is likely to include the symptom acute flaccid paralysis. However acute flaccid paralysis has many potential etiologies. Acute flaccid myelitis entails inflammation of spinal cord matter (spinal cord gray matter). It tends to crop up in children, it tends to occur in outbreaks/clusters.


In general the reports (and the headlines) that caught my eye in the period 2014—2019 centered on acute flaccid paralysis. (Most of the reports were about “acute flaccid paralysis.”) The outbreaks of acute flaccid paraylsis were most often reported on as being of unknown (underlying) causes—as being mysterious in the end. In the reports polio was (virtually) never mentioned. (A very small number of the reports stated categorically—the outbreaks were unrelated to vaccination against polio and unrelated to poliovirus infection.) Nonetheless I wondered: why on Earth don’t they mention whether these kids (the kids who made up the outbreaks) had been vaccinated against polio—and if so when. A diagnostician (a diagnostician hunting down a medical mystery) considers everything, considers the likely and the unlikely (and the very unlikely), considers the intuitive and the counterintuitive, he can leave no stone unturned. I used to wonder: why can they not say—just to humor us (some of us)—whether the kids (and infants) with acute flaccid paralysis were vaccinated against polio? It is always a weird feeling—to read a news piece in which a particular detail, a particular datum (perhaps even an elephant in the room) has been (rather conspicuously) left out. In each of the pieces I looked at, across several years—mention of vaccination or nonvaccination against polio (a passing mention let’s say) would have been hugely relevant.  




As I mentioned acute flaccid paralysis (flaccid paralyis with sudden onset) is a broad term, it has many causes. It is strongly associated with poliomyelitis.


Infection by poliovirus is generally asymptomatic. The spread of poliomyelitis in a community is asymptomatic—i.e. transmissions originate from persons who are asymptomatic. (So there would have to be “silent spreaders,” infective silent carrier states.) Transmission is fecal to oral. That’s your oral and someone else’s fecal. Shit is everywhere. (Hence transmission is typically via contact with fecal matter from an infected individual, often via ingestion of contaminated food and/or water.) Because most cases are asymptomatic poliovirus can disseminate widely in a community while it is still invisible in that community.


Poliovirus replicates in cells of the gastrointestinal tract and only rarely (in under 1 percent of these gastrointestinal infections) makes its way (via multiple mechanisms) into cells of the central nervous system. And in less than 1 percent of these infections does the illness progress to paralytic illness (poliomyelitis manifesting as acute flaccid paralysis). And in many of these patients there is total recovery.


Per the CDC there have been no cases of paralytic polio caused by the wild-type virus in the United States (that have originated in the United States), owing principally to vaccination efforts, since 1979. Where paralytic polio has occurred (since 1979) it has come into the United States from other places or has been an outcome of vaccination by the live-virus oral polio vaccine. The live-virus vaccine is no longer used in the United States.


Diagnosis is via symptoms, stool sample analyses, serological studies, imaging studies of the brain and spinal cord—some combination thereof.


Where polio infection remains confined to the gastrointestinal tract—these gastrointestinal infections will sometimes generate minor symptoms. The duration of these symptoms (e.g. fever, sore throat, nausea, vomiting) is typically on the order of 3 to 5 days. The duration for which an infected patient remains a transmitter of poliovirus via the fecal–oral route (the duration of viral shedding) depends in part on his or her overall immune health and ranges from a few weeks to a few months (following the onset of symptoms). One is infective as long as one continues to excrete poliovirus (literally).


Initial signs and symptoms of “paralytic polio” are the same—as those of nonparalytic polio, gastrointestinal polio, “abortive polio.” (Transmissibility is the same: paralytic disease vs. nonparalytic disease.) Approx. 1 to 2 weeks after the onset of gastrointestinal symptoms (caused by gastrointestinal poliovirus infection), signs and symptoms of a more “evil” cast (e.g. stiff neck, weakened reflexes) may arise. In some patients there is a rapid progression to serious illness that may include muscle weakness/paralysis. The neurological symptoms may go away entirely (see just above). At any rate they are a medical emergency.




When acute infectious symptoms go away it is (usually) because the host’s immune system has won the war. The immune system has eradicated the infection—usually with the greatest of ease. (A pathogenic virus does not sometimes take pity on the host animal and decide to give it a break.)


There is something called post-polio syndrome whereby individuals sickened by poliovirus infection in childhood and recovered from it are stricken again, by symptoms similar to the erstwhile symptoms, 2, 3, 4, and 5 decades later. There is no need to say it perhaps: it is not well understood. Post-polio syndrome is not a matter of viral dormancy, or viral latency, and subsequent viral reactivation, apparently. It is believed to be an aftereffect of something called “neural fatigue” (a complex phenomenon). It is not an infectious process. Persons who experience post-polio syndrome do not shed or excrete poliovirus.


In “rare” instances the live-virus oral polio vaccine causes paralytic polio. Vaccine-associated paralytic polio (VAPP) exists. The illness will turn up in children who have received the live-virus vaccine and their contacts (in rare instances). Since 2017 cases of vaccine-associated paralytic polio worldwide have outnumbered cases caused by the wild virus. Recipients of the live-virus vaccine who get the illness may transmit poliovirus, symptomatically and asymptomatically, for a small number of days—perhaps 20 days. (It seems that a small or minuscule number of these recipients may continue to excrete live virus for years, even many years, after their initial receipt of the vaccine.)


There is something called provocation polio—which I confess I had never heard of until I started to read in depth RE vaccines in 2014. For over 100 years—beginning in the 1910s—it has been a medical mystery, a concept, a theory, and a thesis. Sometimes a consensus. (In 2024 it is almost consensus; that is to say—that it exists is almost consensus.) For over 100 years there has been debate. Starting in the 1910s—medical doctors and others (in the United States and Europe) were noting correlations between a small number of medical interventions (tonsil surgery, hypodermic needle injections) and paralytic polio.


Historian and medical historian Stephen E. Mawdsley (2014):


Concerns about tonsillectomies coincided with indications that pediatric injections could also incite polio paralysis. Evidence of this correlation was first published [ca. 1910] by German doctors, who noted that children who had received treatment [via injection] for congenital syphilis later became paralyzed in the injected limb. Although further studies from Italy and France corroborated this link, it was not until the end of World War II that injection-induced polio emerged as a public health concern.      




The theory was given new muscle in 1980.



In 1980 public health researchers working in West Africa detected a startling trend among children diagnosed with paralytic polio. Some of the children had become paralyzed in a limb that had recently been the site of an inoculation against a common pediatric illness, such as diphtheria and whooping cough. Studies emerging from India seemed to corroborate a similar association between diagnosis of polio and recent immunization (Mawdsley 2013).




That theory: tissue injury caused by the “medical interventions” mentioned above gives poliovirus access to nerve channels, thereby increasing the virus’ ability to get into the spinal cord and brainstem.


A bit of an aside—the body revolts at every needle puncture (and other breach of epithelial surface barrier, mucosal surface barrier).






Viral latency is a separate phenomenon (from asymptomatic carrier states). Viral latency, or dormancy, a kind of deep hibernation mode (to use metaphor) of viruses, would mean that—all production of new virus particles has ceased. Then transmissibility and transmission are foreclosed.


Viral latency is thinly understood. Virus particles are fickle here apparently. Not perfectly understood is when and where and how, and why, a given viral agent, inside a given host, goes dormant and remains dormant. Is the dormancy part of the lifecycle of the virus in question? Is the dormancy mainly, or entirely, an intracellular phenomenon—for the virus (and the particular host) in question? What are the signals that awaken sleeping virus?


Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) can go into this hibernation mode in some kinds of host cells.


And viral latency is distinct from clinical latency—a source of confusion. Clinical latency (in the context of viral infectious disease) is a phase in the infection in which the virus is likely to replicate at low levels.


HIV infection can also entail clinical latency—in which HIV replicates at low levels for extended periods (perhaps 10 years) and in which the infected individual remains asymptomatic—as populations of immune cells slowly deteriorate.


HIV/AIDS remains partly mysterious. The dominant narrative is I believe incomplete. There has long been the claim, “HIV does not cause AIDS.” (It is likely that HIV does not lead inevitably to AIDS.) And yet—I think I’m correct—the majority of evidence, the preponderance of scientific evidence points to HIV as the cause of AIDS. (Real “proof” particularly in biomedicine is always hard to come by.) HIV infection over time is strongly associated with destruction of CD4+ cell populations (T cell populations). After a period of clinical latency during which injury to the host organism may be catastrophic arrive—may arrive—the opportunistic, the particularly sorrowful infections.


The incubatory and convalescent phases of infectious illnesses exemplify clinical latency. Incubatory and convalescent phases of infectious illnesses (wherein transmissions are usually possible) are disease vectors—often insignificant disease vectors. The term vector being used in its broader meaning here. (A disease vector is not always a tick, flea, mosquito, etc.) Indoor surfaces are a disease vector, in respect of acute upper respiratory tract infections, albeit a minor or insignificant one.




Educated guesses by (nonscientist) “public health” officers and (nonscientist) government officers as to likelihoods and unlikelihoods of transmissions of infectious agents are momentous. They are “of grave consequence”—they drive policy.


For persons who never bothered to become part of the inheritance class—persons who resided at the base of the socioeconomic pyramid prior to Covid and who as an adverse event of Covid containment policy faced the possibility of abject ruin—in general their susceptibilities to hardships and penury were “of grave consequence.” In respect of persons who (continue to) face the possibility of ruin and even literal annihilation presently—at the very least public health policy has been and is of grave consequence to them.




Mary Mallon (d. 1938), Typhoid Mary, New Yorker, Irish-American, born in County Tyrone (in what is now Northern Ireland), food service worker: she was allegedly (and perhaps) an asymptomatic transmitter of infectious illness. Pretty, of delicate appearance (as a young woman), Mallon was the kind of gal who never wanted to make a big splash anywhere—and made one.


Typhoid fever is a systemic bacterial infection. It is caused by a salmonella subspecies (Salmonella enterica serotype Typhi). Typhoid fever is distinct from typhus—altho’ typhoid fever gets its name from typhus (typhoid meaning resembling typhus, as opioid means resembling an opiate, as android means resembling a man, as factoid means resembling a fact, etc etc). Route of transmission, for typhoid fever, is fecal to oral. Illness is spread (often) via contaminated food and drink. Poor sanitation and poor sewage systems are risk factors. Poverty is a risk factor. But everyone’s at risk. Shit, human shit, in very minute (microscopic) amounts, in varied indoor and outdoor environments, is everywhere.


Once ingested, the bacteria may penetrate the intestinal wall and enter the lymphatic system. The bacteria can colonize the gallbladder, leading to shedding in the feces. Untreated, typhoid fever can lead to severe complications (e.g. septicemia). There is also an asymptomatic carrier state. Patients who recover from the acute bacterial infection may continue to harbor the bacteria in their digestive tracts without manifesting symptoms. Chronic carriers may feel well and be unaware of their infections. Between 2 and 5 percent of infected persons become asymptomatic chronic carriers (chronic shedders). The asymptomatic carrier state can last years and even decades. Typhoid fever carrier states are not well understood.


Evidence from mouse models suggests that salmonella bacteria closely related to Salmonella enterica serotype Typhi are able to “hide” in macrophages—critical and hyperversatile immune cells that function in virtually all immune responses, at virtually all stages of immune responses. Apparently the salmonella are able to recast the internal environments & metabolism of the host cells (the macrophages) to their advantage. A queer thing it seems—microbes taking up residence in cells that should be attacking them.


A kind of commensalism (the microbe benefits, the host is not harmed): the microbe in question “learns” to hold off in killing the host animal as it were (its killing the host animal would comprise a kind of suicide)—and creates a protoplasmic reservoir for itself, perhaps. Not true commensalism: the bacterium may cause harm as the host may transmit it to others.


Asymptomatic carriage (in the host animal) is sometimes a byproduct, or an outcome, of a particular commensal relationship. The asymptomatic carrier who doesn’t look as if he’s teetering from illness, who looks pretty good perhaps, who feels good perhaps, is sometimes a byproduct of this particular commensal relationship—it is the phenotype Mallon represents.


Mary Mallon looked pretty good (around 1907). In medical literature she is an “asymptomatic carrier,” sometimes a “healthy carrier.” It seems flawed and faulty maybe—to call Mallon “healthy.” Was Mallon healthy? Arguably she was. Physicians and nurses who treated Mary Mallon and other of her contemporaries commented on her healthy appearance. At the same time (ca. 1907) Mallon’s stool samples showed “massive amounts of typhoid bacteria.” David Schneider, immunologist at Stanford University: “Typhoid Mary was a very tolerant host who unfortunately also shed tons of pathogen.” [From Ten Interesting Things You May Not Know About Typhoid Mary May 8 2020.] A key word is tolerant. It points to a kind of immune tolerance. Tons of pathogen I believe is hyperbolic. Likewise (above) massive amounts.


The interpretation is—the salmonella sequestered in macrophages is part of a phenotype that can include ostensible good health and stamina, in the host animal.


And so. Looks great. Sheds virus—excretes it. That’s the phenotype. Or that is one phenotype.


At establishments where Mallon had gone to work (in food services), outbreaks of illness sometimes followed. She was forcibly quarantined twice on North Brother Island, a tiny island in Manhattan’s East River: for 3 years, and for 23 years. At the end of the 3 yr. stint, in 1910, she was returned to the mainland. But Mallon was a recidivist. (She continued to prepare food for people.) She was returned to North Bother Island in 1915 and remained there, imprisoned, until her death in 1938. Mallon was made to drink of the bitterest dregs—in respect of her treatment by “health authorities” (odious term, a term that starting in 2020 and going forward puts the fear of God in us). Mallon’s humiliation was in the highest degree, to the highest degree. In all media (in her lifetime) she was “Typhoid Mary.” She was Typhoid Mary times 40 years. Alone in spartan quarters on North Brother Island (during the 23 yr. run) she sometimes wailed in the night.






SARS coronavirus 2/Covid-19 resembles colds and flu. (Tho’ one is generally discouraged from saying it.) Its course is most often relatively benign and self-limiting—as with colds and flu. Its course can be virulent and life-threatening—as with colds and flu. Covid-19 resembles the > 200 influenza-like illnesses (including influenza) that are collectivized and denoted by the term influenza-like illness (ILI)—a medical diagnosis. Acute respiratory illnesses that are part of the > 200 “influenza-like illnesses” are often hard to differentiate among or to diagnose. Many have similar symptomatologies, similar transmissibilities, identical “seasonality.”


There is comprehensive “public health surveillance” of influenza in the United States. It is a vast collaborative effort between the Centers for Disease Control and its many partners (e.g. state and local health departments, healthcare providers, hospitals, clinics). Flu data are amassed and studied daily at CDC. (Flu surveillance was suspended at CDC in 2020 for the 2020–2021 flu season.) As part of flu surveillance at CDC prior to Covid, respiratory tract samples were gathered at clinics, from patients having diagnoses of 1. influenza and 2. influenza-like illness, in flu seasons, and tested for the presence of influenza virus. In 2008–2009 in the United States, of 183,839 samples tested, 14.1 percent were positive for influenza virus. In subsequent years, up until 2020–2021, the figure (percentage of specimens positive for influenza) remained at closer to 20 percent.


Most cases of influenza are not influenza if you get my drift, and this has always been the case—pun not intended. (It may not always have been the case when and where there have been influenza epidemics.) Most cases of influenza are not influenza. One is at liberty to ask: what percentage of cases of Covid-19 (even hospital-diagnosed Covid-19, or particularly hospital-diagnosed Covid-19) are not Covid-19?




Covid-19 is minus a long-term asymptomatic disease state, a long-term asymptomatic transmissible phase. (Long-term Covid-19, or long Covid, for which there is still [in 2024] no clinical definition by the way, will have signs and symptoms.)


Summer and fall 2020. It is everywhere on the radio (the not listener-sponsored radio, the lowbrow stuff) I listen to: We all need to get tested “often” as transmission in the absence of symptoms is extremely common, responsible for approx. 40 percent and 50 percent of transmissions. Announced many times per day, sometimes 4 and 5 times in 30 minutes (on one of the stations I listen to). Fuer ihre sicherheit. Sometimes (on the same station) close to 100 percent of all ads aired in an hour are medicine- and healthcare-related.


A medical doctor friend used to say to me: “Common things happen commonly.” Is asymptomatic transmission of Covid-19 illness possible? It is. Is it likely? It is not.


In 2020 the vast majority of persons who tested positive for SARS coronavirus 2 were asymptomatic and they were well. The vast majority were not infective. They did not have Covid-19 illness. This was prior to any anti-Covid vaccination (not counting the clinical trials).


The RT–PCR tests used presently (for diagnosis of Covid-19) smell out nonreproductive, noninfectious viral detritus. High false positive rates prove it. (I am using false positive to mean: absence of disease identified as disease.)


N.B.: The origins of false positive results are multitudinous. In the literature false positive results are almost always ascribed to elevated numbers of DNA amplification cycles, which are heating and cooling cycles (called “denaturation” and “annealling” cycles). But there will be false positive results (absence of disease identified as disease) aplenty—even when numbers of heating and cooling cycles are kept low. Whether the “cycle threshold” is elevated or non-, alignment of single-stranded “target” nucleic acid fragment (obtained from the respiratory sample) with single-stranded DNA template fragment (the primer or probe) does not denote illness or infection. Identification of viral detritus—correct identification of viral detritus—does not “prove” illness or infection. 


If the patient under study is noninfective, by definition he does not and cannot pose a health risk to anyone. It is close to 100 percent: one who is not sick and asymptomatic (“truly asymptomatic”) is noninfective and does not and cannot pose a health risk to anyone.


Persons (bodies) are cleared of infectious agents—generally. They, the infectious agents, do leave calling cards. The operations of the immune system unaided (vis-à-vis the infectious agent), including the development of memory cells, call it vaccination by Mother Nature perhaps, are safe and effective.


Overwhelmingly—in persons who are asymptomatic (minus symptoms that point to infectious illness of the upper respiratory tract) there is nothing to be transmitted.


Mild symptoms are symptoms. Asymptomatic transmission of SARS coronavirus 2/Covid-19 narrows down to the incubatory and convalescent periods—a small number of days (ca. 5 days, ca. 3 days) on either side of the symptomatic period—as with colds and flu. What is most common: the virus is got rid of quickly—as with colds and flu. The concept of viral load enters in. In respect of common viral infections of the respiratory tract, absence of symptoms and absence of disease transmission (to a very great extent) go hand in hand. Put another way: severity of symptoms and likelihood of disease transmission (and viral load) are all directly proportional; to a great extent they hew to one another, tack to one another, go hand in hand. Which would be in keeping with common sense.


Something in which the nervous social distancer, the handwringer (vis-à-vis Covid-19) may take comfort: regardless of test results—as the symptoms of his neighbor strengthen or fade, caeteris paribus (other things equal) the likelihood of harm to himself moves in the same direction. He knows this much.


Dr Michael Yeadon (see above) speaking in March 2021.




This idea that you can be ill even tho’ you have no symptoms and you can be a respiratory virus threat to someone else even tho’ you have no symptoms—that was invented in 2020. There’s simply no history of it. It defies common sense as well. 





In summer and fall 2020 all large media companies (in the United States) with their impeccable senses of duty and scruple were making it clear: cases were “soaring.” [RT–PCR was soaring.] Per big media, the corporate media—across the United States and throughout the world cases were soaring. Cases were “skyrocketing.” Day after day. When I woke each day I grabbed my phone. I would look at sources like Yahoo! News. Each morning, the attack of the headlines. New Covid Cases Soaring in These Five States. New Covid Cases Soaring in These Ten States. New Covid Cases Soaring in These Fifteen States. New Covid Cases Soaring in These Twenty States. (One could find the same headlines at Democracy Now!) Case was never defined (in the reportage) but it became clear in short order (you sort of had to put the pieces together): what was most common—a case was nothing more than a positive RT–PCR result, a confirmed case was nothing more than a positive RT–PCR result, a confirmed coronavirus infection was nothing more than a positive RT–PCR result. In the United States “contacts” of persons testing positive were sometimes counted as cases.


In U.S. media and as promulgated by U.S. media, positive RT–PCR (in this context) and “confirmed Covid-19” were, and are, an identity.


A pandemic is a pandemic. And a case-demic? When PCR test results and “cases” are conflated, a tremendously false picture is promulgated. Including a false picture of tremendously wide disease transmission. A friend of mine said to me—not in the summer of 2020 but at the start of 2021: “Cases are soaring. Nobody’s sick.” He was speaking broadly, about trends. He would not have said it in mixed company. The friend is also a medical doctor. (I am not a doctor. I don’t hang out with doctors. But I seem to draw them to me sometimes, perhaps.) In the United States the data (case counts, Covid death counts) have been an ungodly mess. That is in part owing to inherent difficulties—in the diagnosis of Covid-19 (nobody’s fault)—as well as inherent uncertainties that have to do with infectious illness transmission.


June 2020. Not exactly a fracas. A kerfuffle. The World Health Organization announced that asymptomatic transmission of Covid-19 was “rare,” and “very rare.” It was a piece of good news (for some). But were the WHO statements in some way treasonous, or traitorous (traitorous to the main narrative)? Damage control was swift and successful: asymptomatic transmission of Covid-19 was not rare after all—it was the opposite of rare.


On June 8 2020 epidemiologist Maria van Kerkhove, “Scientist, Technical Lead MERS-CoV” (and “Technical Lead SARS-CoV-2”) at the World Health Organization, said at a “media briefing,” in Geneva Switzerland:




We have a number of reports from countries who are doing very detailed contact tracing. They’re following asymptomatic cases, they’re following contacts, and they’re not finding secondary transmission—it’s very rare, and much of [what is in the reports] is not published in the literature. From the papers that are published, there’s one that came out from Singapore looking at a long-term care facility. There are some household transmission studies where you follow individuals over time and you look at the proportion of those that transmit onwards. We are constantly looking at this data and trying to get more information from countries to truly answer this question. It still appears to be rare that an asymptomatic individual actually transmits onward.




Van Kerkhove said it rather well I think. Her words were careful, unambiguous, measured, considered. On June 9 2020 I went to DuckDuckGo News, perhaps 8 times during the afternoon, to look at headlines. Van Kerkhove’s words were a “bombshell,” they had sparked an “uproar.” The World Health Organization was “scrambling” to clarify, per a few headlines. (It was worse than kerfuffle.)


On June 9 Van Kerkhove’s World Health Organization colleague Dr. Mike Ryan, esteemed “Executive Director of the Health Emergencies Program” at WHO, said at a “Facebook Live event” convoked by WHO for purposes of damage control: “Maybe we didn’t use the most elegant words to explain [transmissibility].” At the same live event Van Kerkhove asserted, “I wasn’t stating a policy of WHO.” (Huh?) Van Kerkhove said her comments may have been “misinterpreted.” Van Kerkhove’s use of words and phrases in the previous day’s briefing (see just above) was good. Putting veracity or accuracy to one side for a moment, her comments were not misunderstood or misinterpreted. It is unlikely that they could have been.


Asymptomatic transmission had been the argument for lockdowns, the closing of small businesses, the closing of schools. The evidence for asymptomatic transmission was always diminutive (it turns out)—that evidence often no more than the erroneous interpretations of positive RT–PCR results.




Reporting (on asymptomatic spread) of course is bifurcated. Asymptomatic spread is enormous, immense; asymptomatic spread is next to nothing. Big Media were instructing us daily, and hourly, in the last months of 2020 and first months of 2021 that perhaps 40 percent, perhaps 50 percent, and perhaps 60 percent of Covid-19 spread was asymptomatic spread.


A piece in Nature Communications (November 20 2020) reported on likelihoods of asymptomatic transmission of Covid per the analysis of data obtained from a massive SARS coronavirus 2 “nucleic acid screening program” (that entailed RT–PCR) conducted in May 2020, in Wuhan China. Persons screened were just under 10 million. Not one of 1,174 “close contacts” of “asymptomatic cases” screened positive.


From a piece titled “Has the Evidence of Asymptomatic Spread of Covid-19 Been Significantly Overstated?” (Clare Craig and Jonathan Engler; December 19 2020, updated March 7 2021), “a British Medical Journal pre-print,” posted at the (contentiously titled) website Lockdown Skeptics: Stay Skeptical. Control the Hysteria. Save Lives (accessed April 4 2021).




Examination of the underlying data from the most frequently-cited such metaanalyses [of transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from asymptomatic patients] reveals that the conclusions [that center on asymptomatic transmissions] are based on a surprisingly small number of cases (six in total globally) [Huh? 6?] and, moreover, the possibility that they are all coincidental contacts with false positive results cannot be ruled out. Transmission which is presymptomatic is rare and represents a negligible risk to the population. It is questionable therefore whether any of the extensive testing, tracing, isolation and lockdown policies have delivered any worthwhile benefit over and above strategies which seek to advise symptomatic individuals to self-isolate. 



Further down:



[A]fter examination of the most frequently-cited papers in this area [asymptomatic transmission of SARS-CoV-2] available to date, we are struck by the paucity of persuasive evidence of anything but the most minor of symptoms resulting from supposed asymptomatic spread; most or all of which could be misdiagnoses and in any event are at no more than anecdotal level. There is no evidence, outside of China, that anyone has developed even moderate Covid-19 based on true asymptomatic spread, as opposed to presymptomatic spread.

 


Nothing gained (arguably) over and above advising symptomatic individuals to self-isolate.  




N.B.: I have used incubatory where others have used presymptomatic. And I have used incubatory (or presymptomatic) as a subset of asymptomatic. (The presymptomatic patient is asymptomatic in the presymptomatic period; he is asymptomatic at the moment he is under study.) Jeremy Hammond, and I believe Van Kerkhove, and others have used asymptomatic to mean: asymptomatic at present and will never become symptomatic.




Self-isolation for the symptomatic. What we do for colds and flu. If you have symptoms stay at home. Do not visit Granny. If you have symptoms stay at home. It might have served as the more reasonable, the simpler, the more perspicacious, the more erudite (the smarter) anti-Covid policy.


A word on locking down well persons. Inviolable law: The working well must work. Change this, you’ve got catastrophe (a Greek word meaning tipped over, fallen to the ground). Since time immemorial. From Minoan Crete (and before) until the start of 2020—if you had symptoms you got to take a rest. (Sometimes not even then.) And up until March 2020—if you were of the working well, and without symptoms, you had to hustle. If you were of the working well and without symptoms, you ran like the devil, in one way or another, continuously, for your survival.


Throughout the Covid phenomenon naturopathic physician Dr. Pam Popper has been saying to her people, her acolytes, her employees (at Wellness Forum Health, in Ohio) on the subject of Covid containment: If you have symptoms stay home. That’s it.



HHHD          

Dr. Peter McCullough, esteemed internist and cardiologist, former Vice Chief of Internal Medicine at Baylor University Medical Center, research scientist, academic physician and clinician, one-man medical dream team, speaking to the Senate of Texas Committee on Health and Human Services on the subject of censorship of discussions of recognized successful treatments for Covid-19, March 10 2021:




There is a low degree, if any, of asymptomatic spread [of Covid-19]. Sick person gives it to sick person. The Chinese have published a study in the British Medical Journal, [ten] million people. They tried to find asymptomatic spread. You can’t find it. (Emphasis added.)




The Chinese study McCollough points to is the nucleic acid screening study, conducted in Wuhan China, mentioned just above.


Sick person gives it to sick person. The robustly healthy individual, child or adult, is not a source of infection.


McCullough again speaking to the Senate of Texas committee, a little over a year later.




And so asymptomatic transmission of Covid-19: barely registrable or comprising more than 50 percent of all transmissions? Barely there or driving the pandemic??


During most of the year 2020 I was saying to a small number of friends in New York: “If you have no symptoms and if you are well do not get tested. Give all attention to symptoms.” It was my instinct. (Two of those friends told me their primary care physicians in New York told them the same thing.) So it was a little interesting, to me, to hear WHO Technical Lead Van Kerkhove also say (in the same press briefing—the one that generated the brouhaha, June 8 2020):




What we really want to be focused on is following the symptomatic cases. If we followed all of the symptomatic cases, because we know that this is a respiratory pathogen, it passes from an individual through infectious droplets. If we actually followed all of the symptomatic cases, isolated those cases, followed the contacts and quarantined those contacts, we would drastically reduce [the spread of illness]. I would love to be able to give a proportion of how much transmission we would actually stop—but it would be a drastic reduction in transmission. If we could focus on that I think we would do very very well in terms of suppressing transmission. But from the data we have it still seems to be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a secondary individual.




My friend Y., a hospital nurse, has said, in the context of acute respiratory infectious illness, again and again: When someone is sick focus on symptoms. Focus on symptoms—case by case. Focus on symptoms—and lessening them.


Give all to love—per Emerson. And give all to symptom awareness, the symptomatic case, the symptomatic patient. It is pragmatic. What is an asymptomatic case anyway (in respect of Covid-19)? It is the patient in whom there has been Covid infection (arguably)—and in whom viral activity is at or close to extinction. Absence of symptoms is meaningful. It is my understanding as well that testing the entirely asymptomatic (for Covid-19) is madcap. (Testing the symptomatic is problematic and yields questionable results.)


I would not necessarily or not so much share in Van Kerkhove’s belief in contact tracing. It is my understanding that contact tracing (in respect of Covid-19) is exceptionally madcap. Mimsy were the borogoves. Contact tracing, which would for most participants entail use of mobile phone apps, is—oh yes, that’s where you come into contact with someone who tests positive a small number of days later and you must then self-quarantine for 14 days. At the end of 14 days you go out again—and come into contact again with someone who tests positive a few days later. You must then self-quarantine again, for 14 days. Sounds perfectly do-able.


Per CDC, the website: “Contact tracing helps protect you, your family, and your community by letting people know they may have been exposed to COVID-19 and should monitor their health for signs and symptoms of COVID-19.” What was that? Pablum? Do you think? 






In the latter half of 2020 Jeremy R. Hammond authored and published a multipart series—titled (provokingly): How the New York Times Lies About SARS-CoV-2 Transmission. The New York Times’ 2 principal “deceptions” per Hammond (as I understand the Hammond piece): 1. the Times posits (builds a case for) a pervasive and intractable community spread (of Covid illness) via aerosols (liquid globules much smaller than the liquid globules that spew in relation to one’s sneezing or coughing) and 2. the Times posits (builds a case for) a pervasive and intractable community spread via asymptomatic transmitters (“silent spreaders,” “unwitting spreaders”). It just so happens to make the transmission of SARS-CoV-2/Covid-19 doubly and even triply invisibilized and insidious. The crisis is enlarged, enhanced. The (putative) danger posed by the lone asymptomatic individual is amplified. (Fears are amplified.) A perfect storm is conjured.


Almost as if by magic the New York Times, and other esteemed media outlets, put together a perfect storm of some kind (I couldn’t exactly name it), in 2020. Masking mandates, social distancing mandates, other mandates, curfews, closures, lockdowns etc. etc. quickly became a moving freight train.


It is my personal view that the New York Times does not do reporting. Perhaps they do minute and minuscule amounts of reporting. My own view is—they want to build cases. It is what they do, it is what they do well. Hammond likes to say: they manufacture consent. (A phrase much associated with Noam Chomsky, and with Walter Lippmann.) They want to put their oar into the existing waters, always, or virtually always. Wanting to put your oar in: that’s not reporting. It is my personal and perhaps peculiar belief that journalism does not exist. Were it to exist—it would require a forbearance, an ability to disengage oneself from one’s personal wishes, and a kind of magnanimity (for lack of a better word) on the part of journalists that exists nowhere on this side of the rainbow.


And so. Silent spread, invisibilized spread, asymptomatic spread, and asymptomatic spread via aerosols—it is going to generate perfect storms and sometimes terror, sure as shootin, sure as you were born. Starting in March 2020 the subtext (that issued forth, daily and hourly, from “public health” authorities and media) was, and continues to be: we are right now (albeit just barely) skirting catastrophe. We are averting catastrophe by the skin of our teeth. Owing to the efforts and commitment and hard work of public health, and government, authorities, those who make and issue health policy (in respect of whom one notices a peculiar absence of infectious disease specialists who have treated Covid and other physicians who have treated Covid), we are managing to do it. (Skirt catastrophe.) We are succeeding—by the skin of our teeth. Another subtext: there will be cause for optimism—if Americans choose to be big-hearted and do as they are told. The subtext matters.


From Part 4 (the final part) of Hammond’s series.




Throughout the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the New York Times, regarded as America’s “newspaper of record,” has been the standard bearer for propagandistic reporting serving to manufacture consent for extreme and harmful lockdown policies by contributing to the sense of fear and mass panic among the public. To that end, the Times has consistently reported about viral transmission in an alarmist manner, delivering fearmongering messages that grossly misrepresent the science.




Some part of this is funny or almost funny. Jeremy Hammond I have said appears not to think much of the New York Times. Perhaps better to say Hammond doesn’t think much of the New York Times in respect of its reporting on Covid—its reporting on anything Covid. Hammond has had scuffles, or spats, or tiffs, with the New York Times (tho’ the Times may not have noticed) that have centered on Covid themes—that have centered on asymptomatic transmission of Covid illness for example. The Times doesn’t notice Hammond much or they just think they have bigger fish to fry, perhaps. Hammond I think sees the New York Times as his nemesis. I could be wrong.


Hammond has said not a small number of times that the New York Times, in its reporting on Covid subjects (and other illness- and health-related subjects), possesses a knack, or a flair, or a special gift, for “misrepresenting” and “grossly misrepresenting” its own sources—the source materials its reporters have pointed to in support of many of their (the reporters’) enthusiastic avowals. I want to say: to misrepresent, deliberately or indeliberately, the sources that you yourself have cited—either way it takes chutzpah.


Almost the first thing I ever read by Hammond was his multipart Should You Get the Flu Shot Every Year? Don’t Ask the New York Times, another 4-part series, this one from 2018. It was a long paper about information laundering by the New York Times on the subject of influenza vaccines, their safety and efficacy (essentially). Per Hammond, what had the feel of pretty solid reporting by the Times (on the safety and efficacy of influenza vaccines) was nothing other than (U.S.) vaccine policy advocacy. Also per Hammond, statements appearing in the Times’ own sources that were going to be (highly) inconvenient to Times’ editors, advertisers, and readers were misrepresented (deliberately or indeliberately) or just eliminated—not reported on, not mentioned. Hammond’s 2018 paper opens with: “The way the U.S. mainstream media typically frame the issue of vaccines, you are essentially either a firm advocate of public vaccine policy, or you are anti-science.” That may sound familiar. The 2018 Hammond piece knocked me out. (I thought it was very good.)
 
 
In both of the long articles (Should You Get the Flu Shot, and Lies about SARS-CoV-2 Transmission) Hammond has illustrated: what the New York Times will report on (in reference to a statement made in its own source material) as established, the original source will have described as plausible. Or vice versa. In both, where the Times finds WHO positions to be not in keeping with the available science Hammond will find those WHO positions to be entirely in keeping with it.


The New York Times, newspaper of record, has 133 Pulitzers. It has won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its coverage of Covid-19. (That is mind-boggling.) Everyone knows—they work hard at the New York Times. They win awards, they smash records over at the Times. The only thing the New York Times cannot do, allegedly, or is likely to do very poorly, allegedly: report on recently published science faithfully.


From Part 3 of Hammond’s How the New York Times Lies About SARS-CoV-2 Transmission:




In Part 2 we saw how [Apoorva] Mandavilli, in her March 31 [2020] article Infected but Feeling Fine: The Unwitting Coronavirus Spreaders, characterized the science as having firmly established that a fifth or more of community spread is driven by people without symptoms. Yet, the Times not only failed to produce even a single study to support that claim, but it also grossly mischaracterized its own sources, such as claiming that one study indicated that “unwitting spreaders” represent a fifth or more of transmission events when in fact its authors explicitly stated that there remained no clear evidence of asymptomatic transmission. [Emphasis in the original.]




The science is never settled—to trot out an old warhorse. Understandings of transmissions of infectious pathogens are always approximate—they would have to be. They are blurred, hazy, never crystal clear, never exact. Understandings of transmissions of infectious pathogens entail opinion, judgment, and guesswork.


A distinction: viral transmission, and transmission of illness are not equal. Asymptomatic transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is known. It is not common. It is uncommon. Asymptomatic transmission of the illness/infection is even less common. The virus has to transmit first. And we’re back at terrain theory.


The term asymptomatic transmission (a propos Covid disease) is as I see it straightforward enough. On the other hand the term asymptomatic case (which one also sees everywhere) is not. See above. It is oxymoron. I am never 100 percent convinced it means anything. It is a rhetorical term only perhaps. The words liminal and subliminal come to mind. Meaning: at the threshold, and below the threshold. In respect of Covid illness an asymptomatic case I believe is a case that hovers at the threshold—the threshold of existence, and the threshold of extinction. An asymptomatic case is a subliminal case one could say perhaps. An asymptomatic case is—barely there. It approaches nothingness. Viral load is close to extinction.


Hammond may not be an anti-vaxxer. Persons who work and campaign and fight for improvements in vaccine efficacy and safety (emphasis on safety) are not anti-vaxxers generally. Almost by definition. They might be pro-vaxxers. Anti-vaxxers, in my view at least, wish to eliminate vaccines.


Hammond says it again and again. It is the Hammond leitmotif. What the media tell us “science” says about the SARS-CoV-2/Covid-19 phenomenon and what the science actually says are 2 (very) different balls of wax. (And more broadly what the media tell us science says about vaccines, their safety and efficacy, and what the science actually says are 2 different balls of wax.)


One more extract from the Hammond magnum opus follows. How the New York Times Lies About SARS-CoV-2 Transmission. (Actually I think at this point Hammond has several magna opera.) The piece is punctiliously detailed. Formulation of scientific statement will compel hair-splitting. It is long (if all parts are taken together). One senses the labor that went into it.


From Part 2.



In a WHO situation report published on April 2 [2020], just two days after the Infected but Feeling Fine article was published in the Times, [WHO] noted that the available data indicated that SARS-CoV-2 “is primarily transmitted from symptomatic people to others who are in close contact through respiratory droplets, by direct contact with infected persons, or by contact with contaminated objects and surfaces.”

Contradicting Mandavilli’s claim that people are most contagious in the days before they develop disease symptoms, the WHO observed that the data indicated that viral loads were highest in the nose and throat “early in the course of the disease,” meaning “within the first 3 days from onset of symptoms,” and that “people may be more contagious around the time of symptom onset as compared to later on in the disease.”

The WHO acknowledged that “transmission from a presymptomatic case can occur before symptom onset,” with presymptomatic transmission having been documented in “a small number of case reports and studies.” It also acknowledged that “some people can test positive” for the virus “from 1–3 days before they develop symptoms”—which, of course, is not the same thing as saying that people are most contagious before they develop symptoms, as the Times claimed.

Rather, this indicated that “it is possible” that infected individuals “could transmit the virus before significant symptoms develop.” (Emphasis added.) “It is important to recognize,” the WHO added, “that presymptomatic transmission still requires the virus to be spread via infectious droplets or through touching contaminated surfaces.” Naturally, a person who is not coughing or sneezing is not as likely to spread the virus as someone who is, as the Times also acknowledged.

Echoing the Diamond Princess study falsely characterized by the Times as having demonstrated asymptomatic transmission, the WHO also stated that, while a few reports had documented asymptomatic infections, “to date, there has been no documented asymptomatic transmission.”

In sum, the Times claimed that numerous studies had shown that a significant proportion of community transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is driven by symptomless spreaders but failed to produce even a single study to support that assertion.









Today. July 25 2020. Leaving NYC. For just a few days. Excitement. I am off. I am off, off, off.


I am off to Ticonderoga (in upstate New York). The fort, the town, the village, the region. I am going to Ticonderoga Land. Tekontaro–ken. Mohawk for at the junction of two waterways. TICONDEROGA OR BUST! I have a “reservation” at Fort Ticonderoga, morning of the 27th. I’m going to get a guided tour. Have wanted to see Fort Ticonderoga since I was 11—when an elementary school teacher of mine who had taken his family there during the summer recess told us, his class, his students, all about it. On the first day of school in September. I listened with both ears.


Getting into Maine was going to be problematic. I did not curse the darkness. I made lemonade. I hope I’m not mixing up my clichés too much. (Actually I loved the idea that I was on my way to upstate New York. I was thinking: the Covid restrictions in Maine have been a kind of godsend. And: I can head up to Maine at a later date.)









SAA
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PETE ROCHELEAU
redlon4@yahoo.com