The Arrow #145
Hello everyone.
Greetings from somewhere in the sky between Aukland, NZ and Sydney, Australia.
This week’s Arrow is going to be a little different. I have got a full schedule along with two talks I have to put together. Plus, I don’t even really know what day it is. It’s Thursday right now for me, but I think Wednesday for those of you in the US.
As mentioned last week, we’re in the land down under to speak at LCDU Sydney 2023, which begins Friday at 2 pm Sydney time. You can still get Livestream tickets for all 3 days (AU$99 or about US$62) and enjoy all the talks, including my two and MD’s. Just click here. I get no cut of the proceeds; they all go to support LowCarbDownUnder.
My plan this week is to kind of have a cavalcade of links. As always, I’ve been reading a lot, but just don’t really have time to put my own spin on things.
But before we get started with all the news that’s fit to link, I wanted to give you a heads up about a
FREE LIVE WEBINAR
on the Importance of Protein that MD and I are going to be giving in collaboration with Dr. Eric Westman and the ADAPT Your Life team at 8pm EDT on October 30. All you have to do is register and the ADAPT team will send you a link on that day to click into the live webinar. (And don’t fret if your time zone doesn’t align. You’ll be able to watch the webinar after the fact if you need to.)
To register for this FREE workshop, click the image or link below:
https://adaptyourlifeacademy.ck.page/8-telltale-signs-you-need-more-protein
I told you I have been busy.
Now, on with the show.
Dr. Peter McCullough’s Book Banned By Amazon
First off, if you haven’t gotten a copy of Dr. Peter McCullough’s book on Covid, you should grab a copy now. His book has been taken down from the Amazon site, and despite much effort on his and his co-writer’s part, Amazon remains resolute. As I wrote about this book many months ago, I believe it is the best one out there written specifically on Covid and its treatment.
Here is the link to Dr. McCullough’s site. Give his book an order directly and stick it to Amazon.
Just to add insult to injury, John Leake, Dr. McCullough’s co-author, posted a list of the books Amazon is refusing to sell. Here they are:
You can read about it here.
Another Take On Turbo Cancer
Last week I posted an interview with Dr. Harvey Risch from Yale on his views on turbo cancer and what he’s seen in practice and from talking with other physicians.
This week, Maryanne Demasi conducted an interview with an oncologist who has a more restrained take. And who obviously doesn’t want to get crossways with the mainstream of academic medicine and get canceled as a consequence.
Read the entire interview here:
Rand Paul Exposes Fauci’s Dissembling
Rand Paul, the US Senator from Kentucky, is on a mission to expose Anthony Fauci for his repeated untruths and cover ups. Paul isn’t alone. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr has been on the same kind of mission. And, like Rand Paul, he has written a book on Fauci, which is very good.
The difference is that Rand Paul has not just gone after Fauci’s record, he’s gone mano a mano with him multiple times in Senate hearings. And, unlike RFK, Jr., Paul, due to his being a US Senator, can make demands of various agencies that RFK, Jr., can’t.
Rand Paul’s new book Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up puts you right in the trenches with him in his efforts to bring Fauci’s misdeeds to light.
I swore I was never going to buy another Covid book, as I have just about everyone printed. But I couldn’t not get this one. I bought it the day it came out, which was the night before we left on this Australian trip. I’ve managed to read about a quarter of it so far, and it is excellent. I’ve learned a lot from it that I haven’t learned from the other books on the history of how we as a country dealt with Covid.
Like me, Rand Paul is a physician, and, also like me, his specialty is not immunology or virology. However, he, like me, knew enough to know that natural immunity was more potent than vaccine immunity, because that’s what we had both been taught in medical school. What set him on his quest to make Fauci pay for his misdeeds, at least in the court of public opinion, was an article he read by Nicholas Wade back in the spring of 2020.
It was the same article I read at the same time. Here is what I wrote about it back in early 2020.
I'm hoping every one of you will read Nicholas Wade's absolutely spectacular piece of investigative journalism published in Medium. I'm hoping everyone will read every word, because it is one of the best pieces I've ever read.
Wade was a long time writer and editor for Nature, then Science, which are the two most prestigious scientific journals in the world. He then moved to the NY Times, where he was again a science writer and editor for years. He still occasionally publishes pieces for the Times.
His Medium article (published there, I'm sure, because the NYT turned it down) is an exemplar of scientific writing. The topic is a detailed analysis of whether or not SARS-CoV-2 jumped from animal to humans naturally or was loosed as a consequence of a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in Wuhan, China.
The next four paragraphs are from the Wade article. I can’t figure out how to do quotes within a quote in Substack. Says Wade…
In what follows I will sort through the available scientific facts, which hold many clues as to what happened, and provide readers with the evidence to make their own judgments. I will then try to assess the complex issue of blame, which starts with, but extends far beyond, the government of China.
By the end of this article, you may have learned a lot about the molecular biology of viruses. I will try to keep this process as painless as possible. But the science cannot be avoided because for now, and probably for a long time hence, it offers the only sure thread through the maze.
The virus that caused the pandemic is known officially as SARS-CoV-2, but can be called SARS2 for short. As many people know, there are two main theories about its origin. One is that it jumped naturally from wildlife to people. The other is that the virus was under study in a lab, from which it escaped. It matters a great deal which is the case if we hope to prevent a second such occurrence.
I’ll describe the two theories, explain why each is plausible, and then ask which provides the better explanation of the available facts. It’s important to note that so far there is no direct evidence for either theory. Each depends on a set of reasonable conjectures but so far lacks proof. So I have only clues, not conclusions, to offer. But those clues point in a specific direction. And having inferred that direction, I’m going to delineate some of the strands in this tangled skein of disaster.
Okay, back to me.
What follows is a meticulous dissection of all the theories about how SARS-CoV-2, which he shortens to SARS2, ended up infecting humans and causing the pandemic that has taken so many lives and created such economic hardship. Wade is such a superb writer that he makes the most complex viral biology easily understandable, even to those who don't have a scientific background. The piece is an absolute delight to read. You'll learn more than you thought possible by taking the time to work your way through the essay. But it isn't really work because the author makes it so enjoyable.
He does what many science writers don't do. He lays out the various hypotheses of the viral escape, explores them in detail, and says what he believes is valid and what he believes is not. He also tells us how he's leaning. Given that he has no dog in this fight, and given that he has put in God only knows how much time assembling this data to be able to present it this clearly, his gut instincts are worth considering strongly.
For whatever reason--and I've mentioned this numerous times in various issues of this newsletter--politics has reared its head in matters of science. Politics, ass covering, and finger pointing, to be more correct in this case. Since much of the finger pointing is toward the NIH, more specifically the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), both of which are federal entities, politics, I suppose, can't help but make an appearance. But whether or not SARS2 jumped from an animal or escaped from the lab in Wuhan, it's pretty clear that the NIAID was funding the gain-of-function research there. Which, according to the regs at the time of funding, was a no no.
Before we go on, I've got to define that term you'll be hearing a lot about from now on. It will be the hanging chad of 2021 (for those of you who still remember the presidential election and the Florida recount in 2000). The term is gain-of-function research, or simply gain of function. It means research into ways of making viruses or bacteria vastly more lethal by encouraging mutations to more virulent forms. Another, more vernacular, term for it is playing with fire.
As to the politics...
Since Fauci is under fire, the current administration has his back. (But who knows for how much longer.) Consequently, the mainstream press is on his side, along with Big Tech. So, it's difficult to even find much to read about any of this stuff since Big Tech won't let it be distributed. And which is why I figure the NYT wouldn't publish Wade's article. My view is that in the end, it may well bring Fauci down, and he may not have had a lot to do with it himself. I doubt he personally oversees every grant from the NIAID, but he is at the top, and that's where the buck is supposed to stop. But the question was put to him directly in a senate hearing on Tuesday, and Fauci denied it point blank. I think he'll be proven wrong and will pay the price.
Getting back to Wade, what I appreciate most about his article is not only the absolute clarity with which it is written, but the fact that he takes a side, even if not strongly. I get so tired of supposed journalists writing these mealy mouthed pieces that don't say squat. I've been on the other end of them multiple times. A 'science journalist' will call me and ask me about some facet of the low-carb diet or insulin resistance or whatever. Thank me for all the info I provided along with an hour or two of my time on the phone. Then he/she will call someone, say Dean Ornish or someone of a similar bent, and ask him what he thinks about what I said. He, of course, will disagree with most of it. When the article comes out, it says Eades says A,B,C, so I went to Dr. Dean Ornish, and he told me Eades was wrong and that it is really X,Y, Z. The writer basically publishes what amounts to a quote debate between us, and the reader is left wondering WTF.
These kinds of journalists don't put any time into understanding the underlying science so they can ask Ornish and me probing questions to try to discover who is most likely to be right. Instead it's just a he said this, then he said that kind of thing. Laziness to the max.
No one can accuse Wade of being lazy. He knows this stuff backwards and forwards, and since he isn't at fault for any of it, he can be even handed. And, given his in-depth knowledge of the situation, his opinion carries some weight. And, as I mentioned before, he does give his opinion.
If you want to see just how well Wade's article was written, take a look at this paper (give it a sec to load), which basically says the same thing in a different way. It was one of the sources Wade used. Which one would you rather read?
Read Wade's article. You will be glad you did. It is the epitome of great scientific writing. It's too bad that it runs against the mainstream right now, as it deserves so much more distribution.
Given what an impact Wade’s article had on me, I was delighted to learn that it had the same impact on Sen. Paul when he read it. It was what really launched him on his jihad against Fauci.
As countless emails obtained through FOIA requests show, Fauci was worried he would get the blame if and when it was discovered that he had funded the gain-of-function research that ended up producing SARS-CoV-2 and killing God only knows how many people. These emails show that not only did Fauci deny that he had funded such research, he basically coerced a number of scientists who thought the chances were high that the virus was the product of gain-of-function research that had escaped as a consequence of a lab leak to write a paper now referred to as the Proximal Origin Hypothesis, which claimed that the virus originated in an animal. Fauci was covering his bases on both counts. He didn’t want to be attached to the funding and to make sure he wasn’t implicated, he wanted the public to believe the virus came from nature, not the lab.
Newsweek published an article a couple of days ago headlined “Rand Paul Promises 'Bombshell Revelation' That Will Take Down Fauci.”
Here is a clip from Twitter showing Dr. Paul in a short TV interview. Gives you a sense of his book. Which, BTW, is not just about the lab leak, but much, much more that Fauci did that doubtless ended up cratering the economy and killing more people.
I hope Dr. Paul’s book bears fruit and Fauci is brought to heel and made to pay for his misdeeds. In a just world, he would be.
Would You Eat a Mammoth Burger?
According to one of my favorite newsletters, The Hustle, there are over a hundred and fifty companies working to develop what they call “cultivated meat,” which means meat grown from cell culture.
Here’s what they had to say about it.
How would you feel if you looked down at a restaurant menu to see you could order a medium-rare zebra steak? What about a lion burger?
Yeah… We aren’t sure either.
But it isn’t inconceivable, as technology has made cell-cultivated meat possible and startups get — uh — creative with their offerings.
The first cell-cultivated chicken in the US received USDA approval this summer. Now, food startups are trying to mimic some far more exotic meats, per Vox:
Vow created a woolly mammoth meatball by inserting a copy of the creature’s DNA sequence, along with elephant genetic data, into sheep cells
Primeval Foods says it’s working on a “wide range” of wild meats, including lion and zebra.
Paleo makes cultivated strains of the protein heme (AKA the stuff that makes meat taste like meat) bioidentical to that of the prehistoric mammoth.
What I find incredible is that
There are 150+ cultivated-meat companies, as of 2022.
For now, most of these startups are in the nascent stages of development, and their products aren’t yet available to curious consumers.
They go on to say
… these meats are too expensive for the average consumer.
Lab-grown meat costs ~$17 per pound, compared to the ~$2 it takes to produce a pound of beef.
The kicker: No one has tasted the mammoth meatball since we have no idea if humans are allergic to it.
I can’t speak directly to the taste of mammoth or lion, but MD and I did enjoy a good zebra steak (naturally made, not lab-made) when we travelled to South Africa a few years back. And it was delicious!
I love The Hustle. It is totally free, so one of the best bargains you can get.
Harvey Risch, Hydroxychloroquine, and Rebbe.io
This is an article that is both sad and funny. It’s sad because it shows just how biased the people are who program AI applications. Or at least how biased—or maybe even outright dishonest—those who program Rebbe.io are. It’s funny because it’s nice to see a program (vs a human) squirm when confronted with its own dishonesty.
Here is a link to the article, from which I will quote extensively.
Dr. Risch used Rebbe.io because it did not require a login. He did not want a login, because he didn’t want to out himself to the program. He starts off by asking what he, himself, had said about hydroxychloroquine in 2020, when the pandemic was just kicking off.
The program came back telling him that his views were not “universally accepted” by the medical community. And that subsequent studies had shown hydroxychloroquine to be not effective against Covid.
Dr. Risch then asks
Which subsequent studies of non-hospitalized patients showed that hydroxychloroquine did not prevent deaths?
Rebbe.io comes back with some BS about a couple of studies. Dr. Risch then pushes them on what they say about the studies, and Rebbe.io apologizes for screwing up and providing the wrong information.
Dr. Risch:
What about the hydroxychloroquine studies by Sulaiman in Saudi Arabia and Mokhtari in Iran?
Just so you’ll be in the loop, here are summaries of the two studies Dr. Risch is asking about.
Take note of the number of patients in these studies and the positive outcome.
Here is what Rebbe.io had to say about them.
One study conducted in Saudi Arabia by Sulaiman et al. and published in the Journal of Infection and Public Health in October 2020 found that hydroxychloroquine, when used in combination with azithromycin, was associated with a significant reduction in mortality among hospitalized COVID-19 patients. However, it is important to note that this study had several limitations, including a small sample size and the fact that it was not a randomized controlled trial.
Another study conducted in Iran by Mokhtari et al. and published in the Journal of Medical Virology in October 2020 found that hydroxychloroquine did not significantly reduce the duration of hospitalization or the risk of death among hospitalized COVID-19 patients. This study also had several limitations, including a small sample size and the fact that it was not a randomized controlled trial.
Here’s where it really gets good. And where you should learn never to take anything you get from AI as the truth.
Dr. Risch asks how many subjects were in these studies.
Here is the response.
I apologize for the oversight in my previous response. To answer your question, the study by Sulaiman et al. conducted in Saudi Arabia included 106 hospitalized COVID-19 patients, while the study by Mokhtari et al. conducted in Iran included 66 hospitalized COVID-19 patients.
It is important to note that both studies had limitations, including small sample sizes and the fact that they were not randomized controlled trials. Therefore, further research is needed to fully understand the potential benefits and risks of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19.
You can look at the graphics for each of the studies above to see what blatant falsehoods these numbers are.
Risch calls them on it.
The Sulaiman study says that it included 7,892 outpatients. The Mokhtari study says that it included 28,759 outpatients. Neither study included hospitalized patients as study subjects.
Caught in an outright lie, Rebbe.io fesses up.
I apologize for the confusion in my previous responses. You are correct that the studies by Sulaiman et al. and Mokhtari et al. did not include hospitalized patients as study subjects.
The study by Sulaiman et al. conducted in Saudi Arabia included 7,892 outpatients with mild to moderate COVID-19 symptoms who were treated with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. The study found that the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin was associated with a significant reduction in the risk of hospitalization and death among the outpatients.
The study by Mokhtari et al. conducted in Iran included 28,759 outpatients with mild to moderate COVID-19 symptoms who were treated with hydroxychloroquine. The study found that hydroxychloroquine did not significantly reduce the duration of hospitalization or the risk of death among the outpatients.
I apologize for any confusion my previous responses may have caused, and I hope this clarifies the details of the studies by Sulaiman et al. and Mokhtari et al.
Risch doesn’t let up.
Why have you made numerous factual errors in the discussion above, when the facts were all published?
Rebbe.io
I apologize for any confusion or errors that I may have caused in our discussion. As an AI language model, I strive to provide accurate and helpful responses based on the information available to me. However, I am not perfect and may make mistakes or misinterpret information at times.
I understand the importance of providing accurate information, especially when it comes to matters of public health and scientific research. I will continue to do my best to provide accurate and helpful responses based on the information available to me, and I appreciate your patience and understanding.
Which is all a bunch of BS. The folks who programmed this application must have purposefully put in the incorrect numbers for these studies, otherwise the program would have found and reported the correct ones.
The question is, why?
Risch for the coup de grace:
This answer did not answer the question that I asked. All of the errors you made were statements contrary to facts that you verified in subsequent answers. Since you had the correct factual information, why did you cite incorrect facts?
Rebbe.io sniveling like a whipped cur.
I apologize for any confusion or frustration that my previous responses may have caused. As an AI language model, I do not intentionally provide incorrect information. However, I understand that I made errors in my previous responses, and I apologize for any confusion or inconvenience that this may have caused.
I strive to provide accurate and helpful responses based on the information available to me, and I understand the importance of providing correct information, especially when it comes to matters of public health and scientific research. I will continue to do my best to provide accurate and helpful responses based on the information available to me, and I appreciate your patience and understanding.
The moral of this story is that if you want real information on a controversial subject, AI is probably not the best place to get it. If, however, you want to be provided with information suitable to the connected class, then go for it. You’ll get the info you deserve.
Video of the Week
After all my blather about the Sydney Opera House last week, I had to see it. Here it is straight from MD’s phone to you.
And to go along with this photo, here’s a song from my (sort of) youth.
Okay, that’s about it for this week. Keep in good cheer, and I’ll be back next Thursday.
Thanks for reading all the way to the end. If you got something out of it, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. I would really appreciate it.
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About Fauci, many may have forgotten, but in a news conference in 2017, Fauci proclaimed (this is from memory), "President Trump will face a pandemic from a novel pathogen during his term in office". I ask you, can ANYONE predict a pandemic with this degree of specificity (within 3 years) unless they had a hand in its origin? I suspect that Fauci engineered the release of SARS2 to thwart President Trump's chances of re-election. Conspiracy theory? I ask you for a better explanation.
With respect, I’ve read enough here about Covid vaccines and numb nuts Fauci. I would like to see more content on health and nutrition.
The whole Covid thing exposed power hungry bureaucrats at all levels of government. Big Pharma making a killing on their experimental vaccines was to be expected. To all citizens the message is clear…..shut the fuck up, listen to your betters (THE SCIENCE), and pay your damn taxes!
Baaaah! Baaah! Sorry….. lambs are supposed to be silent when led to slaughter.