Category: zerohedge

President Trump’s mere “suggestion” that the US ought to think about delaying the November election (Nov. 7, 2024 sounds like a pretty safe date) unleashed a torrent of hysterical commentary as the president’s dedicated #resistance critics accused the president of wilfully subverting our great democracy – despite the fact that even WaPo is worried about the USPS “backlog” and the risk that some mail-in ballots won’t arrive by November.

The hysteria dominated yesterday’s news cycle, despite the fact that Trump’s tweet was in all likelihood intended to distract from the abysmal Q2GDP data released Thursday morning…

Trump’s ‘let’s delay the election’ tweet was clearly intended to distract from the Q2 GDP print on a slowish news day…yawn https://t.co/Capw9L5VuP

— jsadinolfi (@jsadinolfi) July 30, 2020

…now, in an amusing coincidence, Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam on Friday announced that the city state would postpone its elections set for the fall as the “third wave” of SARS-CoV-2 causes more outbreaks than the prior two waves (prompting HK to crack down on indoor dining/bars and impose the most restrictive social distancing measures yet).

Here’s more from the SCMP:

Hong Kong’s embattled leader has invoked emergency powers to postpone the Legislative Council elections scheduled for September 6, citing health risks from the resurgent Covid-19 crisis as the primary reason.

Flanked by the ministers for justice, health and constitutional affairs, Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor told a press conference on Friday evening the decision was the most difficult she had made in the last seven months.

“Since January, we have been fighting the pandemic for seven months. This pandemic has dealt a heavy blow to our economy,” she said.

“We have not been complacent. We need to be on high alert all the time and respond.

“We are facing a serious situation … The World Health Organisation’s chief recently said we sometimes need to make some hard choices, and my decision today is the hardest of all.”

Lam said she was invoking the Emergency Regulations Ordinance in doing so, and her decision was supported by the central government.

Beijing supports canceling September’s legislative elections? Color us shocked. Domestic pro-democracy critics immediately slammed the HK government for using COVID-19 as a ruse to crack down on freedoms in the city, where a new ‘national security’ law has given authorities sweeping powers to punish anybody for political dissent that is now legally tantamount to terrorism. Yesterday, we reported that 4 teens in the city had been arrested for political social media posts.

The decision comes as Hong Kong reports a record single-day jump in new COVID-19 cases, extending the streak of 100-plus single-day infection numbers.

Americans should probably pay closer attention to what’s happening in Hong Kong – because President Trump clearly was. Lam’s decision to cancel the September vote followed a decision on Thursday to disqualify at least a dozen opposition hopefuls who managed to qualify for the vote, per the SCMP.

In a statement released earlier, 22 pan-democrat lawmakers, including four barred from seeking another term, said the Legislative Council elections were a core element of Hong Kong’s constitutional foundation.

“According to the Legco Ordinance, the polls can only be postponed by 14 days,” the statement said. “To postpone it [beyond that] is to trigger a constitutional crisis in the city.”

“After a year of democratic movement, it is urgent for Legco to undergo a baptism of public opinion, that is the root of the city’s governance…The government and the whole of society must make every effort to make sure that the general elections can be held as planned.”

[…]

election officials cited the city’s new national security law and the pan-democrats’ previous calls for foreign governments to sanction Beijing and Hong Kong as reasons for barring four incumbent lawmakers – the Civic Party’s Alvin Yeung Ngok-kiu, Dennis Kwok and Kwok Ka-ki, as well as accountancy sector lawmaker Kenneth Leung.

Other disqualified opposition figures included Joshua Wong Chi-fung, Ventus Lau Wing-hong, Gwyneth Ho Kwai-lam and Alvin Cheng Kam-mun, along with district councillors Cheng Tat-hung, Lester Shum, Tiffany Yuen Ka-wai and Fergus Leung Fong-wai.

Returning officers cited similar reasons for their invalidation and their earlier vow to vote down the government’s budget and other bills, should the bloc win an unprecedented majority in the legislature.

Opposition lawmakers accused the central government of trying to deprive HKers of their right to vote, and noted that more than 60 elections have been held worldwide since the start of the outbreak, either right on schedule or after a brief delay. But Beijing was never going to risk an embarrassing electoral defeat in the LegCo. Opposition lawmakers probably understood that going in, now that Hong Kong’s freedoms have been stripped away by the new Nat Sec law.

Tropical Storm Isaias was upgraded in the overnight hours to a Category 1 hurricane. 

Hurricane Isaia has maximum sustained winds at 80 mph and is quickly moving northwest at 17 mph, located 15 miles south-southwest of Great Inagua Island, reported CBS Orlando. 

Isaia is expected to pass over the southeastern Bahamas early Friday, then central Bahamas Friday evening, and should close in on South Florida by Saturday. The storm is expected to hug the Florida coast through the weekend.

Most spaghetti models show the hurricane could move up the East Coast and head to the Outer Banks by late Monday. A couple of models show the storm tracks more into the Atlantic. There’s even a model of the storm heading into the Gulf of Mexico. 

“As of now, the center of Isaias is expected to remain off the coast of Florida,” News 6 meteorologist Jonathan Kegges said. “The worst of the weather is on the northern and western side of the storm.”

A more precise track will be determined later in the day on Friday.

While the trade-weighted dollar has only just begun to breakdown…

Gold has been signaling something very different in the ‘currency’ markets for a few years now, and its recently accelerated dramatically…

So what is that message?

FFTT’s Luke Gromen  laid out in a few short tweets his take on what is being priced in (by some assets)…

1/ Let’s pretend the currency system is a human body.

The US says it wants to de-couple from China; 20 yrs ago, we could’ve de-coupled & it would’ve been like amputating a finger or a hand.

2/ Even 10-15 years ago, perhaps “de-coupling from China” would’ve been like amputating an arm, or a leg from our currency system.

However, after 20+ years of $200-400B surpluses (USD exports), & China’s (generally) savvy reinvesting of those USD exports…

3/ “De-coupling from China” is no longer amputating an arm or a leg off the currency system; it is like cutting out some critical organ like heart, the lungs, or the liver out of the currency system…

4/ Yes, we can do it, & it’s probably the right thing to do, but the cold, hard math of the situation is that “US de-coupling from China” means the currency system as we have known it for 50+ yrs will die on the table, shortly after the critical organs are removed,

UNLESS…

5/ Some entity or entities can provide the financial equivalent of a blood transfusion, or kidney dialysis, etc. to the currency system that will be left dying on the table without it.

Guess what that is? Yup, you guessed it…

6/ This is a take on gold as we have been looking at it for our clients at FFTT for some time.

On the same day that Trump shocked by suggesting “Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???” — China has charged the White House with stoking a new Cold War for the cynical purpose of finding a scapegoat to gem up fervor among Trump’s base.

China’s ambassador to London, Liu Xiaoming, said Thursday in response to a media question that linked the ongoing trade war with the November US election that “It is not China that has become assertive. It’s the other side of the Pacific Ocean who want to start new Cold War on China, so we have to make response to that,” Reuters reports.

“We have all seen what is happening in the United States, they tried to scapegoat China, they want to blame China for their problems,” he said. “We all know this is an election year,” the ambassador said.

“They want to do anything including treating China as an enemy,” Liu said. “Probably they think they need an enemy, they think they want a Cold War but we have no interest, we keep telling America, China is not your enemy, China is your friend, your partner.”

While not referencing Trump over Democratic contender Joe Biden directly, Liu’s comments were clearly directed at the ratcheting Trump administration pressure campaign targeting Beijing.

The interview and comments came on the heels a state-run Global Times article the day prior. GT often serves as an unofficial foreign policy arm of Beijing signaling the communist government’s intent and messages to the West.

The publication strongly suggested Wednesday that soaring tensions with China will be used of Trump to facilitate an October surprise.

It began by saying that “Chinese experts said on Tuesday that China could be restrained on retaliating to new US provocations on politics, diplomacy or economy, because Chinese policymakers will not let the Trump administration use them for his reelection, and will wait for the presidential election result to decide how to respond.”

“However, if Washington launches military provocations to challenge the bottom line of China’s national security and sovereignty, China will make immediate and effective retaliations. Experts said whether or not the two major powers can avoid military conflict in the next three months depends on the White House, and China needs to make its deterrence ‘more visible’ to warn the US about how dangerous a war could be,” Global Times wrote.

Authored (satirically) by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

Today’s Caitlin Johnstone essay has been replaced with a National News Conglomerate op-ed by General Hank Hammerfist. NNC: Obey.

The Trump administration has begun slashing the US military presence in Germany from an almost satisfactory 36,000 troops to a practically microscopic 24,000. I think we can all agree that this is the single worst thing that has ever happened in the history of Germany, and arguably the universe.

While most Americans were until now unaware that their government had that many troops in a nation known predominantly for beer and bleak documentaries, pundits and politicians in the know have been rightly proclaiming their outrage at this catastrophic event which disrupts God’s natural plan of endless military expansionism until the entire planet is an undifferentiated sea of camouflage fatigues and tiny American flag patches.

“Trump’s decision to withdraw US Forces from Germany shows a broad lack of strategic understanding. It sends the wrong signal to our adversaries and leaves our allies vulnerable in the face of increasing global threats. It’s simply unacceptable,” tweeted former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who as we all know is always correct about military matters.

“Did Trump give Putin a heads up on the removal of 12,000 US troops from Germany? Was there an implication it was a kind of down payment for election help, a taste of what could follow in a second term?” asks super smart foreign policy expert Bill Kristol.

“US to withdraw nearly 12,000 troops from Germany in move that will cost billions and take years,” warns a CNN headline that is both helpful and totally sane.

NPR’s national security correspondent David Welna informs us that the move is “a slap at a longtime ally frequently reviled by President Trump.”

“There’s no strategy behind the decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Germany,” says Slate foreign policy pundit Fred Kaplan.

“It’s about the president’s anger and ego.”

“The plan outlined by the Administration today to remove thousands of U.S. troops from Germany is a grave error,” said Senator Mitt Romney in a statement. “It is a slap in the face at a friend and ally when we should instead be drawing closer in our mutual commitment to deter Russian and Chinese aggression. And it is a gift to Russia coming at a time when we just have learned of its support for the Taliban and reports of bounties on killing American troops.”

“A special gift to Putin and a blow to NATO,” tweeted former National Security Advisor Susan Rice.

“Donald Trump is not playing on America’s team.”

So as you can see, this troop withdrawal is being met with righteous garment rending by all the best people. What more evidence do you need that we should regard endless military expansionism as the norm and treat even the slightest most peripheral deviation from that path as a freakish apocalyptic travesty?

I weep for the poor Germans, who are doubtless stricken with inconsolable terror at the loss of one third of their benevolent protectors. Who will protect Germany from being occupied by a violent and brutal regime without a robust occupying US military force?

I for one can’t wait until we get this evil, despotic monster out of the White House and replace him with someone who understands what America is really all about…

*  *  *

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American public health experts, led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, have struggled over the past couple of months to push a specific narrative on the public: Wearing a mask doesn’t so much protect you from being infected with SARS-CoV-2, but if you are infected, wearing a mask could stop you from passing the virus to someone else.

The mainstream media has backed up these assertions with vague references to “science” and “research”, while a coalition of celebrities and progressive activists have tried to tar anybody who doubts this narrative – or, worse, refuses to wear a mask at all times outside their home – as a “denier”.

Well, if everybody who is skeptical of the “masks save lives, period” is a “denier”, then how does one explain the Dutch government’s decision to refuse to mandate mask wearing (the only place where masks must be worn in the Netherlands is on public transit).

On Thursday, Reuters reported that the Dutch government had decided the day before that it would not advise the public to wear masks to slow the spread of coronavirus because their effectiveness has not yet been proven.

The decision was announced by the Netherlands Minister for Medical Care Tamara van Ark following a review by the country’s National Institute for Health. Following a resurgence in cases over the past week or so, the Dutch government has decided it will instead seek better adherence to social distancing rules.

“Because from a medical perspective there is no proven effectiveness of masks, the Cabinet has decided that there will be no national obligation for wearing non-medical masks” Van Ark said.

Many European countries have made masks mandatory in public indoor stores and in crowded outdoor places. The US has generally followed suit, though some overzealous governors and local officials are also requiring people to wear masks in most outdoor scenarios, even when they aren’t in a large crowd. And NY Gov Andrew Cuomo has pledged to launch an “investigation” into a “drive thru” concert on Long Island where the Chainsmokers and “DJ D-Sol” provided entertainment. This, despite the fact that a growing body of research and experience suggests that outdoor gatherings don’t present a major risk of spread. Case in point: Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio are allowing protests to continue unabated, without question, despite the complete absence of evidence to suggest that COVID-19 cares about your personal politics.

Last week, nearby Belgium made face masks mandatory in more public places, and in England they have become compulsory in shops.

Even President Donald Trump has done an about-face on masks, swallowing his tremendous ego and donning a mask for the press.

However, in the Netherlands, masks are mandatory only on public transport. And Van Ark and her peers on the government committee aren’t the only experts to question whether masks contribute anything. Anne Wensing, a virologist at the University Medical Center Utrecht, has also questioned whether masks “actually contribute anything extra.”

The Dutch government insists that it’s strictly following the advice of the experts in the so-called Outbreak Management Team, which doesn’t believe in the general use of masks.

Dutch virologist Jaap van Dissel from the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment said Wednesday that masks can lead to a “false sense of security”. When wearing masks, people might not follow other social distancing rules like keeping their distance which also help prevent spread. 

Mask-wearing may also prompt people to touch their face more frequently, putting them at risk of accidentally infecting themselves while adjusting their masks.

Belgium and the Netherlands both managed to flatten the curve. However, it’s become clear that it’s tilting upward once again.

As Politico points out, there are also questions about legality surrounding compulsory mask wearing.

Moreover, legal experts in the country are skeptical about the legality of compulsory masks. One law professor, Jan Brouwer, told NRC that a widespread mask mandate goes against the constitution. According to Brouwer and other experts, there needs to be a separate law on masks to make this regulation possible.

But critics charge that the evidence is sufficient to implement masks in places such as hairdressers, reports NOS. In a letter to Prime Minister Mark Rutte and Health Minister Hugo de Jonge, a group of experts, including epidemiologist Arnold Bosman, called for quick action.

Belgian virologist Marc Van Ranst, meanwhile, warned the Dutch government on Wednesday that it will have to make masks mandatory in crowded places if the Dutch want to avoid a complete lockdown.

“As in Belgium, the corona curve in the Netherlands has been increasing since July 10,” he told local media. “If the number of infections continues to rise, you will not be able to avoid a face mask obligation.”

Over the past week, almost 1,400 new COVID-19 cases were reported, or 342 more than the prior week, in the Netherlands.

Those who insist that masks can stop the outbreak (yes, many Americans have apparently bought into this notion, despite little in the way of evidence to back it up) might benefit from reflecting on how we go there. As Politico reports, the science surrounding wearing a face mask in the community has evolved during the pandemic. In March, the WHO said that healthy people don’t need to wear masks unless they’re caring for a sick person.

Then in early April, the WHO changed its view, saying that in countries where other preventive measures are hard to adopt, the widespread use of masks could be useful. After that, the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control issued a new recommendation signaling support for masks. Last month, the WHO issued advice suggesting masks worn in public could help stop the spread of the virus. During the early days of the outbreak, some countries like the Czech Republic and Slovakia saw promising results as they mandated mask wearing. In April and May, Greece, Spain and Germany mandated masks in spaces where social distancing was impossible – including shops.

Research suggests that social distancing measures, including the selective wearing of masks, help slow the spread of the outbreak. But the notion that “science” has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that wearing masks in public can protect the wearer and/or – more importantly – innocent bystanders simply isn’t true.

Which begs the question: Why is the media so determined to sell it as fact – and denounce all who question as demented loons or, worse, self-dealing snakeoil sellers – when dissent is still so obviously warranted?

Authored by Eric Worrall via WattsUpWithThat.com,

According to Edge Hill University Professors Geoff Beattie and Laura McGuire, the way to prevent people ignoring climate change and Covid-19 messages is to “avoid presenting both sides of the argument”.

Coronavirus shows how to get people to act on climate change – here’s the psychology

July 29, 2020 8.22pm AEST

Geoff Beattie Professor of Psychology, Edge Hill University
Laura McGuire Research Fellow in Education, Edge Hill University

…

With COVID-19, the early messaging attempted to circumscribe the nature of the threat. In March, the WHO announced that: “COVID-19 impacts the elderly and those with pre-existing health conditions most severely.” Similar statements were made by the UK government.

A reasonable interpretation of this would be that the virus does not “affect” young people. But as new clinical data came in, this message was changed to emphasise that the virus could affect people of all ages and doesn’t discriminate.

…

The initial positive message for young people also created an “optimism bias”. This bias is very powerful – we know of various brain mechanisms that can ensure that a positive mood persists. One study found that people tend to have a reduced level of neural coding of more negative than anticipated information (in comparison with more positive than anticipated information) in a critical region of the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in decision making. This means that we tend to miss the incoming bad news and, even if we don’t, we hardly process it.

…

To make climate change messages more effective, we need to target these cognitive biases. To prevent temporal and spatial biases, for example, we need a clear message as to why climate change is bad for individuals in their own lives in the here and now (establishing an appropriate affect heuristic). 

And to prevent optimism bias, we also need to avoid presenting “both sides of the argument” in the messaging – the science tells us that there’s only one side. There also needs to be a clear argument as to why recommended, sustainable behaviours will work (establishing a different sort of confirmation bias).

We also need everyone to get the message, not just some groups – that’s an important lesson from COVID-19. There can be no (apparent) exceptions when it comes to climate change.

Read more here…

I guess big tech shutting down dissenting voices on Coronavirus was just a test run, for what these two professors from Edge Hill University want to inflict on us.

Things have sure changed since I went to school. I remember my professors arguing for logic, debate and reason, rather than an authoritarian shutdown of dissent.

Was this a Freudian slip by the defense secretary, or is he going for Trump-style bluntness of naked and brutal honesty no matter how non-PC?

During Wednesday’s press conference announcing the controversial Trump-ordered Pentagon plan to withdraw 12,000 troops from Germany, Mark Esper said the “importance” of NATO” lies in part with its mission to “avoid peace in Europe”. 

Given the slip, Russian media was fast to pick up on it. RT called it “a momentary lapse of honesty”.

“I’ve said that very publicly, I’ve said that very privately to my counterparts as well – about the importance of NATO, any alliance, sharing the burden so we can all deter Russia and… avoid peace in Europe,” Esper said

It came while the Pentagon chief chastised Germany for being the “wealthiest country in Europe” but refusing to shoulder its fair share of defense spending, which the Trump administration has long urged Berlin must boost.

About half the withdrawn troops are expected to return to the states, while the other will be ‘repositioned’ in places in Europe.

Meanwhile Russian media has said the troops will deploy near borders with Russia, such as the Baltic states or Poland.

Sputnik, for example, interpreted Esper’s remarks as confirming that “the US troops would begin leaving Germany in just a few weeks and would then be repositioned to Belgium and Italy amid the Pentagon’s plans to deploy some of them closer to Russia’s borders,” according to its commentary.

Authored by Colin Todhunter via Off-Guardian.org,

The British government, regulators and global agrochemical corporations are colluding with each other and are thus engaging in criminal behaviour. That’s the message put forward in a new report written by environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason and sent to the UK Environment Agency. It follows her January 2019 open letter to Werner Baumann, CEO of Bayer CropScience, where she made it clear to him that she considers Bayer CropScience and Monsanto criminal corporations.

Her letter to Baumann outlined a cocktail of corporate duplicity, cover-ups and criminality which the public and the environment are paying the price for, not least in terms of the effects of glyphosate. Later in 2019, Mason wrote to Bayer Crop Science shareholders, appealing to them to put human health and nature ahead of profit and to stop funding Bayer.

Mason outlined with supporting evidence how the gradual onset of the global extinction of many species is largely the result of chemical-intensive industrial agriculture. She argued that Monsanto’s (now Bayer) glyphosate-based Roundup herbicide and Bayer’s clothianidin are largely responsible for the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef and that the use of glyphosate and neonicotinoid insecticides are wiping out wildlife species across the globe.

In February 2020, Mason wrote the report ‘Bayer Crop Science rules Britain after Brexit – the public and the press are being poisoned by pesticides’. She noted that PM Boris Johnson plans to do a trade deal with the US that could see the gutting of food and environment standards. In a speech setting out his goals for trade after Brexit, Johnson talked up the prospect of an agreement with Washington and downplayed the need for one with Brussels – if the EU insists the UK must stick to its regulatory regime. In other words, he wants to ditch EU regulations.

Mason pondered just who could be pulling Johnson’s strings. A big clue came in February 2019 at a Brexit meeting on the UK chemicals sector where UK regulators and senior officials from government departments listened to the priorities of Bayer Crop Science. During the meeting (Westminster Energy, Environment & Transport Forum Keynote Seminar: Priorities for UK chemicals sector – challenges, opportunities and the future for regulation post-Brexit), Janet Williams, head of regulatory science at Bayer Crop Science Division, made the priorities for agricultural chemical manufacturers known.

Dave Bench was also a speaker. Bench is a senior scientist at the UK Chemicals, Health and Safety Executive and director of the agency’s EU exit plan and has previously stated that the regulatory system for pesticides is robust and balances the risks of pesticides against the benefits to society.

In an open letter to Bench, Mason responded:

That statement is rubbish. It is for the benefit of the agrochemical industry. The industry (for it is the industry that does the testing, on behalf of regulators) only tests one pesticide at a time, whereas farmers spray a cocktail of pesticides, including over children and babies, without warning.”

It seems that post-Brexit the UK could authorise the continued use of glyphosate. Of course, with a US trade deal in the pipeline, there are major concerns about glyphosate-resistant GMOs and the lowering of food standards across the board.

Mason says that glyphosate causes epigenetic changes in humans and animals: diseases skip a generation. Washington State University researchers found a variety of diseases and other health problems in the second- and third-generation offspring of rats exposed to glyphosate. In the first study of its kind, the researchers saw descendants of exposed rats developing prostate, kidney and ovarian diseases, obesity and birth abnormalities.

Glyphosate has been the subject of numerous studies about its health effects. Robert F Kennedy Jr, one of the attorney’s fighting Bayer (which has bought Monsanto) in the US courts, has explained that for four decades Monsanto manoeuvred to conceal Roundup’s carcinogenicity by capturing regulatory agencies, corrupting public officials, bribing scientists and engaging in scientific fraud to delay its day of reckoning.

Kennedy says there is also cascading scientific evidence linking glyphosate to a constellation of other injuries that have become prevalent since its introduction, including obesity, depression, Alzheimer’s, ADHD, autism, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, kidney disease, inflammatory bowel disease, brain, breast and prostate cancer, miscarriage, birth defects and declining sperm counts.

In her new document sent to the UK Environment Agency, Mason argues there is criminal collusion between the Department for Environment and Rural Affairs (Defra), the Chemicals Regulation Division and Bayer over Brexit.

She also claims the National Farmers Union has been lying about how much pesticides farmers use and have ignored the side effects of chlorpyrifos, chlorothalonil, glyphosate and neonicotinoids. The NFU says farmers couldn’t do without these inputs, even though they destroy human health and the environment.

Of course, farmers can and do go without using these chemicals. And the shift away from chemical-intensive agriculture is perfectly feasible. In a recent article on the AgWeb site, for instance, US farmer Adam Chappell describes how he made the shift on his 8,000-acre farm. Chappell was not some dyed-in-the-wool organic evangelist. He made the shift for financial and practical reasons and is glad he did. The article states:

He was on the brink of bankruptcy and facing a go broke or go green proposition. Drowning in a whirlpool of input costs, Chappell cut bait from conventional agriculture and dove headfirst into a bootstrap version of innovative farming. Roughly 10 years later, his operation is transformed, and the 41-year-old grower doesn’t mince words: It was all about the money.”

Surely there is a lesson there for UK farmers who in 2016 used glyphosate on 2,634,573 ha of cropland. It is not just their bottom line that could improve but the health of the nation. Mason says that five peer-reviewed animal studies from the US and Argentina released in July 2020 have focused minds on the infertility crisis being caused by glyphosate-based herbicides.

Researchers at The National University of Litoral in Sante Fe, Argentina, have published three concerning peer-reviewed papers including two studies on ewes and rats and one review. In one study, researchers concluded that glyphosate and glyphosate-based herbicides are endocrine disruptors. They also stated that glyphosate-based herbicides alter reproductive outcomes in females.

But such is the British government’s willingness to protect pesticide companies that it is handing agrochemical giants BASF and Bayer enormous pay-outs of Covid-19 support cash. The announcement came just weeks after Bayer shareholders voted to pay £2.75 billion in dividends. The fact that Bayer then went on to receive £600 million from the government speaks volumes of where the government’s priorities lie.

According to Mason, the new Agriculture Bill provides a real opportunity for the UK to adopt a paradigm shift which embraces non-chemical farming policy. However, Defra has stated that after Brexit Roundup Ready GA21 glyphosate tolerant crops could be introduced.

It is also concerning that a post-Brexit funding gap could further undermine the impartiality of university research. Mason refers to Greenpeace, which notes that Bayer and Syngenta, both sell neonicotinoid insecticides linked to harmful effects on bees, gave a combined total of £16.1m to 70 British universities over five years to fund a range of research. Such private funding could create a conflict of interest for academics and after Brexit a potential shortage of public money for science could force universities to seek more finance from the private sector.

Neonicotinoids were once thought to have little or no negative effects on the environment because they are used in low doses and as a seed coating, rather than being sprayed. But evidence has been mounting that the chemicals harm bees – important pollinators of food crops. As a result, neonicotinoids have been banned by the EU, although they can still be used under license.

According to Bayer’s website, academics who reviewed 15 years of research found “no adverse effects to bee colonies were ever observed in field studies”. Between 2011 and 2016, the figures obtained from the 70 universities – about half the total in the UK – show Bayer gave £9m to fund research, including more than £345,000 on plant sciences. Syngenta spent nearly £7.1m, including just under £2.3m on plant sciences and stated that many years of independent monitoring prove that when used properly neonicotinoids do not damage the health of bee populations.

However, in 2016, Ben Stewart of Greenpeace UK’s Brexit response team said that the decline in bee populations is a major environmental and food security concern – it’s causes need to be properly investigated.

He added:

But for this research to command public confidence, it needs to be independent and impartial, which is why public funding is so crucial. You wouldn’t want lung cancer studies to be heavily reliant on funds from tobacco firms, nor research on pesticides to be dependent on the companies making them.”

Stewart concluded:

As Brexit threatens to cut off vital public funds for this scientific field, our universities need a cast-iron guarantee from our government that EU money will not be replaced by corporate cash.”

But Mason notes that the government long ago showed its true colours by refusing to legislate on the EU Directive (2009/128/EC) on the Sustainable Use of Pesticides. The government merely stated that current statutory and voluntary controls related to pesticides and the protection of water, if followed, afford a high degree of protection and it would primarily seek to work with the pesticides industry to enhance voluntary measures.

Mason first questioned the government on this in January 2011. In an open letter to the Chemical Regulation Directorate. The government claimed that no compelling evidence was provided to justify further extending existing regulations and voluntary controls.

Lord Henley, the Under-Secretary of State for Defra, expanded further:

“By making a small number of changes to our existing approach we can continue to help feed a growing global population with high-quality food that’s affordable – while minimising the risks of using pesticides.”

In her numerous reports and open letters to officials, Mason has shown that far from having ‘high-quality food’, there is an ongoing public health crisis due to the pesticides being used.

She responded to Henley by stating:

…instead of strengthening the legislation, the responses of the UK government and the CRD have considerably weakened it. In the case of aerial spraying, you have opted for derogation.”

Mason says that, recently, the day that Monsanto lost its appeal against Dewayne Lee Johnson the sprayers came around the Marina in Cardiff breaking all the rules that the EU had set for Roundup.

We can only wonder what could lie in store for the British public if a trade deal is done with the US. Despite the Conservative government pledging that it would not compromise on the UK’s food and environment standards, it now proposes that chlorine-washed chicken, beef treated with growth hormones, pork from animals treated with ractopamine and many other toxic foods produced in the US will be allowed into the UK. All for the bottom line of US agribusiness corporations.

It is also worth mentioning at this point that there are around 2,000 untested chemicals in packaged foods in the US.

Ultimately, the situation comes down to a concentration of power played out within an interlocking directorate of state-corporate interests – in this case, global agrochemical conglomerates and the British government – and above the heads of ordinary people. It is clear, that these institutions value the health of powerful corporations at the expense of the health of the population and the state of the environment.

Authored by Barry Norris via Argonaut Capital,

Read Part 1 here…

It was originally assumed that only those who had previously been infected by the virus and developed an antibody response had any immunity, hence the initial focus on testing for the presence of these antibodies as well as infection. However, studies of antibodies in formerly infected patients demonstrated accuracy issues which subsequently could be explained instead by the antibodies’ rapid decay in recovering patients.  The often disappointingly low levels of antibodies in population samples is often used as evidence that herd immunity is not a realistic goal without a vaccine.

This is not correct.

At the end of May there was a significant breakthrough in understanding of COVID antibodies which was not widely reported: a Swiss study from Zurich led by Professor Onur Boyman demonstrated that a large proportion of the population had a natural immunity through existing antibodies on the mucous membrane (IgA) or cellular immunity (T cells), likely to have been acquired through previous exposure to coronaviruses such as influenza or the common cold (the absence of exposure to previous coronavirus is now thought to explain the opposite effect in 1918).

The study found that that the presence of (IgG and IgM) antibodies generated on infection which tests had previously focused on, were NOT in fact required to defeat the virus and that existing (IgA and T cell) antibodies that gave a natural immunity. Moreover, the population with this natural immunity was demonstrated to be five times greater than those with the IgG and IgM antibodies on which tests had hitherto focused. If this could be substantiated, then the population already exposed to COVID would also be five times greater than previously assumed. In other words, if a population sample showed 10% had IgG and IgM antibodies (which might be subject to decay) then it was likely that at least half of the population had already been exposed to COVID.

It followed that antibody studies that measured only IgG and IgM that were now predicting population-based mortality risk of 0.1% to 0.5% (lower than the 1% in the elderly population aboard the Diamond Princess) could be even further reduced by a factor of five to 0.02% to 0.1% and the level of symptomatic exposure from 20% to below 5% (consistent with the flu season ironically predicted by Fauci in March). Not only would this mean a further similar reduction in the estimated true mortality rate but it meant that there were far fewer people in the population who had never had exposure to the virus, so a far lower number who could potentially catch the virus in the future.

In short, the infamous herd immunity was much closer than previously realised.

Fig 7. Sweden’s curve flattens without lockdown

This explained why, by July, the virus had all but disappeared in populations like Sweden, New York (Fig. 7) and Wuhan (which reportedly tested its entire population of 11 million and found only 300 cases, all of which were asymptomatic) which were significantly affected by a “first wave”: if the ratio of those with IgA and T cell antibodies to IgG and IgM antibodies across population was confirmed at a factor of five then if 20% of the population had traditional IgG and IgM antibodies (such as New York with 21% and London with 17%) then the virus died out because there was simply no one left for it to infect. It followed that the virus could only survive in population samples where testing showed the presence of IgG and IgM antibodies was below 20% (and allowing for their decay probably well below).

Nobel Prize winning biological scientist Michael Levitt had already come to the same conclusion based on a different approach: he predicted that the virus would “burn out” when it had infected 15-20% of the population though based on a pattern predicted by the “Gompertz curve” which indicated that the number of deaths after the peak is roughly double those from before resulting in Levitt accurately predicting the number of Chinese and Swedish deaths, months in advance. Levitt has recently bravely predicted that US COVID will “be done in 4 weeks [25 Aug] with a total reported death below 170,000”, compared to 149,000 today.

Boyman’s theory on “IgA and T Cell immunity” explained the accuracy of Levitt’s “Gompertz curve” predictions and this was now being backed up by the empirical evidence which showed that the populations which were hit hardest with high initial rates of infection and mortality, were the ones where the virus had almost disappeared.  

Almost none of this was reported by a media which choose instead to attach the misnomer “second wave” to outbreaks of COVID infection in populations which had not yet experienced any meaningful “first wave”: the Sunbelt states in the US, Australia, Hong Kong, Japan. The irony was that the vulnerability of populations which had not yet seen meaningful infection outbreaks and therefore the fallacy of lockdown had already been predicted by Levitt and Giesecke. It was also logical that population groups where IgG and IgM antibodies were still significantly below 20% would continue to see infections.

COVID had become particularly political in the US. Despite the anomalously poor Democratic New York and New Jersey records on COVID mortality (Fig. 6), there was  hysterical reporting of rising infections, from very low levels, across Republican states (Florida, Texas and Arizona) which had largely avoided severe lockdown restrictions.

Fig 6. The Swedish Anomaly?

The same rising trend could also be observed in Democratic California which had been subject to lockdown but was largely avoided in Republican Georgia which was notable in its lockdown defiance (Fig. 10). The suspicion remains that infections will continue to rise irrespective of lockdown until populations have reached herd immunity at which point the virus will largely disappear. The anomalously high death rates of New York and New Jersey could be explained by their being affected at a much earlier stage before better understanding of hospital treatment and curtailment of infection in care homes . As hard as the lockdown fanatics looked, there was no correlation of infections or mortality to lockdown policy.

Fig 10. Analysis of US states and coronavirus

It was a clear misnomer to label rising reported infections in the US sun belt as a “second wave” if these states had never suffered from a “first wave” and rises in infection rate were a predominantly caused by more widespread testing of mostly younger people testing positive for COVID with no symptoms. It must also be borne in mind that “case numbers” are simply people reported as testing positive for COVID, almost entirely without symptoms, with no commensurate leap in hospitalisations or mortality, which has been conveniently ignored as not fitting the narrative. This also led to doubts about whether test results were being accurately reported with reports that some clinics were not reporting negative test results and others reporting cases as simply “probable infections” with individuals having some of the symptoms of COVID but not having been tested.

We must also note that although infections in Arizona, Florida and Texas have seen a similar spike to that witnessed in New York, the mortality remains mercifully lower to a substantial degree (90%) (Fig. 11) which can only be explained by rising testing of a younger population median (since the hospitalisation rate is also lower), better hospital treatment and an improved care home policy (at which New York and New Jersey were anomalously poor). Although we should clearly expect mortality rates to rise in the sun-belt states from very low levels, it is likely that overall mortality remains well below New York levels and beings to taper off when infections begin to peak (which according to Levitt is still a few weeks away).

Fig 11. COVID “first wave” infection curve of AZ/FL/TX similar to New York but mortality 90% below

We should also expect the mortality rate to reduce further as hospital treatment has evolved. We now know that invasive use of ventilators in fact caused COVID deaths which was particularly unfortunate given the initial scandalous news reports on their initial shortage and in the US questionable financial incentives for nursing staff to use ventilators. Doctors have also realised that the specific cause of death in many cases is pulmonary embolism, which can be treated though cheap and well-established blood-thinning medication. Several studies have also shown early intervention with the use of zinc and malaria drug hydroxychloroquine in combination has an immediate significantly reduced hospitalisation rate, of up to 80% and mortality by 50%. There is a great irony that the mortality rate could be reduced to almost zero by proven inexpensive drug combination, though this is not necessarily in the interests of the pharmaceutical industry which would prefer there to be a need for costly new drugs and vaccines.

Yet inexplicably we still hear the daily groupthink catechism that the only “long-term solution” to beating COVID is a vaccine, often without any understanding of the historic limitations of vaccines particularly in the immunisation against coronaviruses (there is still no vaccine against the common cold and vaccines against influenza are patchy in their effectiveness).

A significant obstacle to a successful vaccine is the rapid degradation of IgG and IgM COVID antibodies meaning that even a successful  vaccine might not give any benefit for longer than a few weeks. As the CEO of world leading testing company Roche Diagnostics recently commented:

“What appears to happen is that people do lose antibodies over time. And that of course poses the question, will vaccines actually work if you lose antibodies”.

Reports of successful antibody responses amongst healthy adults in vaccine trials should be viewed with more scepticism. It is also almost certain that any antibody response would be more difficult in population samples with impaired immune systems that are most at risk from COVID. Even an efficacious vaccine might have to be ramped in dosage that would be intolerable to those most likely to benefit from vaccination.  Leading Swiss epidemiologist Pietro Vernazza has demonstrated that the high-risk group is least likely to respond to the vaccine since their immune system is already impaired.  Whilst it is possible for vaccine trials to demonstrate antibody responses, whether these will have any practical lasting benefits in reducing COVID mortality risk which are tolerable for the population group most at risk from COVID is unlikely.

Vaccines hastily developed, rushed to market without proper trials by panicked governments ready to throw money at any promising trial candidate, creates a clear moral hazard for pharmaceutical companies and a public healthcare risk which might rival the virus itself.  We remain sceptical of biotech companies raising equity on tricked up trials, only never to deliver medication that has any practical application, or insiders dumping stock after supposedly promising “game changing” data, or even worse mandatory vaccination of a population on the basis of an erroneous assumption that herd immunity hasn’t already been reached, with the potential for dangerous and unnecessary side-effects in population groups who would otherwise (if they had not already been exposed to COVID) have been asymptomatic.

There is a notable discrepancy between binary expectations that a vaccine will solve COVID and the definition of success for those involved in developing a vaccine. According to Sarah Gilbert, who leads the Oxford Astrazeneca experimental vaccine:

“We need a vaccine with a high level of efficacy against disease, which also has a significant impact on virus transmission. It doesn’t need to cure you… We want a vaccine to stop people from going to hospital and dying. If you can do that, I think people will be pretty happy”

In other words, Gilbert’s definition of “success” was mitigation rather than cure, which better hospital treatment is already achieving anyway.

There is a more fundamental question of whether a vaccination program for the entire population is at all desirable, given that most of the population has a natural immunity, only a small cohort develops symptoms, an even smaller cohort at risk of hospitalisation and the best estimate of mortality risk from COVID now almost statistically insignificant. We are probably already at the stage in terms of hospital treatment whereby no one who does not already have existing comorbidities should die from COVID. If any vaccine does not stop transmission and comes with side-effects which may be dangerous (and could potentially cause a mortality risk where one was previously absent, such as the potential neurological damage caused to children from the vaccinations against “swine flu” a decade ago) it has to be asked whether the exclusive promotion of the vaccine solution by the pharmaceutical industry (and the advice of potentially compromised public health officials like Fauci) is now more likely to end up an investment swindle.

We now know that there was no credible “science” behind lockdown and whilst its imposition may have originally been motivated by the precautionary principle, the perpetuation of the “Spanish Flu” narrative has been a uniquely destructive, particularly considering the exclusion of healthcare provision for non-COVID illness, prolonged absence of child education, and the well-documented economic devastation. Although our understanding of COVID is by no means complete, we now know that its mortality risk can be best mitigated by the management of infection within the care home and hospital environment, better immediate treatment of hospitalised patients and sensible social distancing measures. None of this required lockdown. Nor does it require a vaccine.

The degree of intentionality behind the actions taken by governments, the media and the pharma industry is an unknown, but this continued perpetuation of that narrative in contrast to the empirical evidence is arguably the biggest fraud of all.