Strategy of reward and punishment In the newly coined so-called War on Covid, the arsenal is eclectic. There is not only science, in the form of experimental RNA vaccines hastily developed by giants of the pharmaceutical industry, but also semi-authoritarian or full-blown authoritarian government measures imposed and legally validated by declarations of states of emergencies. […]
In any scientific field, censorship sooner or later must yield to the truth, because without it there can be no scientific progress. As it happens, a June 2020 article that detailed the challenges to be met in designing an anti-COVID-19 vaccine also turned out to be a damning exposé of the SARS-CoV-2 virus as being […]
If the English-language press had done its job, and not parroted press releases that promote vaccination as the only escape from the social isolation we’ve endured the last three months, the public would be asking many questions about the ongoing protests and their relation to the logistics of vaccine trials. To test a vaccine, typically […]
As drug makers prepare to make a killing on supposed vaccines against COVID-19, it is important, particularly for those who consider vaccines to be a wise investment today, or those whose retirement savings might get invested in such vaccines without their knowledge, to reflect on the fact that corporations are themselves viruses that can only […]
In one of the greatest scientific understatements since Watson and Crick wrote, “it has not escaped our notice…” in their famous 1953 paper on the double-helical structure of DNA, the authors of a January 2020 paper concluded: “our findings suggest unconventional evolution of 2019-nCoV that warrants further investigation.” The authors of the more recent paper […]
We are supposed to be thinking this week about the health disparities in the United States based on race and ethnicity, since the New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio, and even USA Today are going on about it. This is the hot topic presumably because of a recent analysis of the demographics of COVID-19 deaths by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The first infection by the agent of COVID-19, variously called 2019-nCoV or SARS-CoV-2, probably happened around December 12, 2019, based on the interviews in late December with a group of new pneumonia patients in Wuhan, China.
Pathogenic RNA viruses began to prey in earnest on humans around the time of our industrial revolution. As the human population exploded and then increased its density by a massive effort of urbanization, it also changed land use to encroach on wildlife. Such changes continue today, unabated, even accelerated, as the human population attempts to achieve its final doubling. There is currently tremendous encroachment on wild animals.
