the X rated epstein article

LINK

China and Ebola

Instapundit links to a Canadian site about how a Canadian lab sent Ebola virus to China (on a commercial flight). And something about the Chinese scientists working in the Canadian labs who were fired.

"I think there will need to be an inquiry into the scientists to potentially see whether or not they were compromised or any elements of their work were compromised and that China gained illegal or improper access to Canadian intellectual property ... to see what China may have gained access to without knowledge, prior to this incident," West says.

Hmm... China stealing "intellectual property". Who wudda thot?

Place conspiracy theory here. Is China trying to weaponize Ebola as a bioweapon? Or just trying to make money off of their vaccine?

SciAmerican notes that China has a new Ebola vaccine, and is trying to test it in the present day epidemic in the Congo (Where the one dose Ebola vaccine by Merck is the only one certified, although there is a two dose version by another company that is being tested now).

The head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Gao Fu, is reported to have said that a team of experts will travel to the DRC on Friday, bringing with them an unspecified number of doses of vaccine. “We will seek to use the Chinese developed vaccine there to help with control and prevention of the disease, but for the present the vaccines will likely only cover Chinese living in Congo,” Gao is reported as saying in China Daily.

Chinese living in the Congo? Why, yes. They not only have interest in oil, but are there trying to get a monopoly on rare earth metals.

CGTN website notes:

Fearing a major Ebola epidemic, the U.S. European Union, Russia, and China are developing Ebola vaccines. At present more than 15 vaccines are at various stages of testing. Pharmaceutical companies have committed to ramping up the production capacity once the vaccine passes crucial tests, the WHO statement last year said. “This could be the fastest vaccine roll-out in history.”

StrategyPage has been following the wars, chaos, and Ebola in the DRC. LINK

July 25, 2019: A Chinese oil company has halted work in western Uganda due to the Ebola virus threat. Uganda’s major oil fields are near Lake Albert, which borders Congo. The Chinese operate Ugandan fields along with two European partners, Total and Tullow Oil.

China has invested a lot in Africa, and unlike the west, tends to send their own people to run these "development" programs.


A couple years ago, Angola had a major Yellow Fever outbreak, and a couple of Chinese who went back to China were infected.

Yellow fever spreads via mosquitoes, and I guess hospitalizing the cases stopped the spread, or it could have killed thousands.

Just as an aside: on their article about the Central African wars, StrategyPage notes this:

 July 24, 2019: Due to the Ebola virus threat, Saudi Arabia has banned the entry of any tourists or Hajj pilgrims from Congo. The Kingdom said that it reached this decision in order to protect the lives of other Hajj pilgrims.

The Saudis are aware of the  possibility of various epidemic diseases among the pilgrims, many of whom are from poor third world countries.

And the last European Smallpox outbreak (1972) was brought there by a Yugoslavian pilgrim.

Luckily, most Europeans had received Smallpox vaccination in the past, and by revaccinating 18 million people the epidemic was stopped.

However, if you really want to worry, read this 2001 (pre 911) war game scenerio which proposed a release of smallpox by terrorists at an Oklahoma truck stop.

After 9-11, and especially after the Anthrax letters, our Public health clinic received instructions on how to organize the response: From using schools as hospitals, to vaccinating first responders, to how to do"ring vaccinations" to contacts.

Since I had worked in Africa, I was the one who had to read and organize the possible response. Luckily, only Anthrax (which does not spread person to person) was used to terrorize the population (by whom is another controversy which I won't get into here).

But actually superflus might be the real danger, as the SARS epidemic showed. Then there is MERS (coming to a hajj pilgrim near you), bird flu, and yellow fever (via Brazil), not to mention Dengue, which is now affecting the Philippines.

How bad is our Dengue epidemic? So bad that they are considering restarting the Denguevax program...
the vaccine was blamed for causing a few deaths, but in a severe outbreak would probably save a lot more lives than those with side effects (the deaths were due to improper screening of candidates).

No, no racism here

Damien Thompson quit his post as editor of the UKCatholic Herald because "the new owners” and he “do not agree on the future direction of the company.”

Satireblog EcclesIsSaved writes about it here.

Following a take-over of the Sovereign Order of the Catholic Herald, its Grandmaster-in-chief, Fra' Damian Thompson, has quit his position because of "a difference of opinion".

Commentators have been asking whether the "blood-crazed ferret" has been biting the bishops of England and Wales too hard, in view of his criticism of their lordships' response to the decision of hanging judge Mrs Justice "Blood! Cut! Sever! Aagh!" Lieven to force a woman to abort her baby (a decision now overturned).

Fra' Thompson's "In some ways, possibly, well, one might argue, without making too much of this, that the bishops' response to the court decision was less than it might have been had it been more than it was" was itself a watered-down version of what he originally wrote, namely, "Ye brood of vipers, who hath shewed you to flee from the wrath to come?"

Now that he is a free man and doesn't have to kiss the tushes of the powerful be subtle, he gives his opinions to Raymon Arroyo in an interview.

======

hmmm... I didn't realize that the moderately mentally disabled woman in a court case where a pro abortion judge agreed with a social worker she should be forcibly aborted was a Nigerian... makes you wonder if racism or eugenic thinking was influencing the decision. Note that her mother, a midwife, was willing to adopt/care for the child...

but the best part of the interview starts at 10 minutes, discussing the Amazon synod. Put down coffee and read it (Brits can be sooo wonderfully snotty). and calls it a "PC Disney production... Avatar written by octagenarian European socialists..."
and goes on to mention their wishywashy condemnation of the traditional infanticide by some tribes because they don't want to change their culture.

This is, by the way, nonsense:

among the Shona tribe in southern Africa, traditionally twins were killed, usually by the grandmother, because due to lack of milk, tribal knowledge knew that these twins would lose weight and die slowly (and losing weight and dying this way was a sign they were bewitched, so better to kill the bewitched children before the spell affected others, was the belief).

But you know what? As soon as the missionaries set up schools and clinics, and there were ways to supply formula to the moms, such killing stopped. I met only one lady who said this had happened to her children (probably in the late 1940s), and it made her so upset that she left her husband and went back to her family.

GetReligion blog has a similar story, this one from the Amazon, where tribal elders ordered a child killed, but it was saved by some Protestant missionaries.

but there is more to the story, from the UKTelegraph: The ironic part of this story? when the tribal elders ordered the murder, the parents killed themselves rather than kill their child.

Attempts to change tribal attitudes and counter official indifference are being led by a Brazilian couple, Marcia and Edson Suzuki. They have worked with one tribe, the Suruwaha, for 20 years. Mr Suzuki, the founder of a campaign group called Atini - Voice for Life - said: "We are fighting against doctors and anthropologists who say we must not interfere with the culture of the people."

Such attitudes are exemplified by Dr Erwin Frank, an anthropology professor at the Federal University of Roraima State in the Amazon. Speaking of the tribes, he said: "This is their way of life and we should not judge them on the basis of our values. The difference between the cultures should be respected."

Like other tribes, the Suruwahá considers that if a child has any deformity or disability, it does not have a soul and so - as an animal - should be killed. ...

The Suzukis recounted the harrowing story of one girl, Hakani, who they saved from death and adopted. Born in 1995, Hakani - which means Smile - was still unable to walk or talk by the age of two, prompting tribal leaders to conclude she had no soul and to order her parents to kill her. They committed suicide - eating a poison root - rather than obey the order.

Why do anthropologists assume that these "tribal customs" are holy and not to be interfered with? Remember, the tribes of the Amazon once had sophisticated farming and fishing culture, but died from European diseases a couple years ago.

When there was dire poverty, maybe such children should have been killed since food was very short and they could not support themselves, but now there is an alternative for such children, so there is no excuse: Especially when (like my patient, or like Hakani's parents) they wanted their children to live.

I suspect because the anthropologists and other experts don't see these Indians as human beings, but only as specimens to be kept untouched in a cage

I was aware of the measles vaccine to help them push an agenda to confirm their private vices/, not to mention using them for experimental subjects for a new measles vaccine (reminds me of the Denguvex scandal here: the anti vaxxers are nuts, but there is a reason behind their madness).

Wikipedia page on the book Darkness in ElDorado has details on the sexual exploitation of the tribe: HERE. and HERE.
or you can read the rant by that modern Jeramiah, Ann Barnhardt, about why the pedophiles in the Vatican love them.

or you can just watch the film:






And they are allowing self selected tyrants to terrorize those who have no power to say no, and pretending that the powerless agree with these self proclaimed tyrants.

One does not need to be a Marxist SJW to see the power differential makes the entire argument that the "tribal custom" means the decision of a tyrant to boss people around, especially when there are alternatives for such children and parents.

beware your heart

there are urban legends in the US about patients waking up on the operating table as doctors prepare to take out their organs, or that doctors will "hurry you along" to die to take them out, and a recent story in USA today says that killing people (by euthanasia) to take out their organs is becoming more popular: and is increasingly discussed at medical conferences as a possibility:

At international medical conferences in 2018 and 2019, I listened as hundreds of transplant and critical care physicians discussed “donation after death.” This refers to the rapidly expanding scenario in Canada and some Western European countries whereby a person dies by euthanasia, with a legalized lethal injection that she or he requested, and the body is then operated on to retrieve organs for donation.

At each meeting, the conversation unexpectedly shifted to an emerging question of “death by donation” — in other words, ending a people’s lives with their informed consent by taking them to the operating room and, under general anesthesia, opening their chest and abdomen surgically while they are still alive to remove vital organs for transplantation into other people...

Recently, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published an article by two Canadian physicians and an ethicist from Harvard Medical School, who contended it might be ethically preferable to ignore the dead donor rule if patients declare they want to die in order to donate their organs.

ah, the NEJM, who published a dozen pro euthanasia articles in the early 1990's that insisted everything was hunky dorey in the Netherlands so why not copy their practice. The problem? They ignored the many reports in the lay press and in the medical literature that the guidelines were not followed and most cases were not reported, but hey, as the editor assured me, these articles were "opinions" and so didn't have to be factually accurate.

the USA Article continues:

While literally “giving yourself” to others might seem commendable at first glance, let’s discuss three downstream considerations to abandoning the dead donor rule.

►People with physical and mental disabilities have expressed that they feel stigmatized and that society devalues their lives. Would this send them a not-so-subtle message to get out of the way and do something noble with their healthy organs?

►How quickly would we see expansion whereby those who can’t speak for themselves are included as donors?

►What does it mean for all of us when our healers — physicians — are in a position that directly overrides nearly 2,500 year-long prohibitions against taking life?

what happens is that a small minority of physicians quickly decide they will follow the newfangled Oath of Lasagna instead of the Hippocratic oath, a modern oath which insists" If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God."

in other words, they will not "play at god", they will become god, and assume they have the power of life and death over those under their care.

And if you don't think that this is a frightening idea to poor and minority patients you are naive. Tuskegee experiment, anyone? and this is why minorities often refuse living wills or refuse to go along with "end of life" decisions pushed onto them by the establishment physicians (something that is lamented about in many medical journals who can't understand why patients who face prejudice in their daily life, including at many medical establishments, won't just let some strange doctor have the power of life and death over them or their loved ones).

and, as the USAToday article notes: it's not just terminal patients who face this subtle prejudice:

 Consider the case of Ben Mattlin, who suffers from spinal muscular atrophy. In a 2012 column for the New York Times, he wrote of the “thin and porous border between coercion and free choice” for those who feel devalued. On the subtle erosion of his autonomy, he wrote: “You also can’t truly conceive of the many subtle forces (to die) — invariably well meaning, kindhearted, even gentle, yet as persuasive as a tsunami — that emerge when your physical autonomy is hopelessly compromised.”

what started me on this subject was not the USA today article, but one on StrategyPage, about China. At the end of the discussion of China's economy, China's aggression in the West Philippine sea, and why Hong Kong's population is demonstrating against them, they have this small paragraph:

June 17, 2019: An international tribunal released the results of its investigation into Chinese organ transplant activity. This is not a new problem. At the end of 2014 China announced that it would stop taking transplant quality organs from dead (usually executed) prisoners as of 2015.

Many Chinese and foreigners believed that this profitable organ trade would simply go underground and become another source of corruption. .

Corruption in China? Who wudda thot?

Some of the organs are from executed prisoners, but what about the others? Is there an illegal underground "pay for organ" service, as we see here in the Philippines? or is something more cynical going on?

Since China still executes hundreds of criminals each year, and has thousands of political prisoners, who often go into prison camps and just disappear, there always seems to be available organs for transplant in China.

For years desperate, and well heeled, foreigners come to China, got their life-saving transplant, and noticed that there are a lot of military personnel working in the hospitals. ..

..The Chinese government still insists there is no government involvement in this transplant industry, yet the operations continue and may be closer to 100,000 transplants in some years.

 Sigh.

Wikipedia even has a page on the harvesting of organs from Falun Gong prisoners, whose only crime is to belong to a forbidden Buddhist sect. Dean Koontz wrote a horror novel about this practice, but as a whole, few in the west seem upset at the practice and few even protested when a rich New York writer's book about getting a kidney in China makes light of the question of who died was killed to sell his brother a kidney.

China is a rogue nation in these matters, of course (I mean, they have a million Muslims in re education camps without many in the west protesting about it).

But when Canada starts normalizing the practice of killing people for organs, I think the problem is a a prediction of things to come in the USA.
from https://spectator.org/canada-conjoins-euthanasia-and-organ-harvesting/

ow do you convince society to embrace euthanasia as a means of attaining utilitarian benefit — while also convincing yourselves that your culture remains both moral and compassionate? Once you get past the squeamishness of allowing doctors to kill patients, it isn’t that difficult: First, legalize euthanasia of the seriously ill and disabled. Once the community becomes comfortable with doctors committing homicide as a means of eliminating suffering, you next allow those who want to be killed to donate their organs. After all, they won’t need their livers anymore, so why not let others have them? Next, ensure that the potential of euthanasia to add to the organ supply becomes well known, both to normalize doctor-administered death and to induce people to believe they or a loved one might personally benefit from doctors killing the sick. Finally, over time, you expand euthanasia/organ donation eligibility to patients who are far from death, such as those with neuromuscular disabilities or psychiatric illnesses — better organs, don’t you know — justifying it as you go along with soothing words of respecting autonomy and preventing suffering. Lest any reader believe that I am conjuring a paranoid dystopian fantasy, this very scenario consumed the medical and organ transplant ethics of the Netherlands and Belgium, nations in which patients with mental illnesses and other diseases are admitted to hospitals, killed by lethal injection, and then wheeled immediately into a surgical suite for organ harvesting.

When I bring up these facts in domestic debates about assisted suicide, supporters of doctor-prescribed death sniff that the Netherlands and Belgium are not the United States, and that such crass utilitarian exploitation of the despairing would never happen here. But why? Once we deem certain categories of people to be killable — which is precisely what legalizing assisted suicide and euthanasia does — it becomes all too easy to conclude, as Belgians and Netherlanders have, that since these patients want to die we might as well benefit societally from their deaths.

That is precisely what happened in Canada,

corruption link ignored in contaminaed Valsartan problem

this is cross posted from my main blog.

CNBC notes another batch of Valsartan, a medicine used for high blood pressure and heart failure, has been found to be contaminated with small amounts of a cancer causing chemicals.

But missing from the story: Where was it manufactured?

From Sciencemagazine.

In this case, the valsartan recall was originally traced back to a problem with the material from Zhejiang Huahai Pharmaceuticals. 

Remember that name: ZHP.
That’s the Chinese manufacturer who made the API itself. but some of it was repackaged.
however, it wasn't just ZHP: the newest batch recalled? That was made in India.

the article goes into details about manufacturing, but if you continue reading you find (TADA!) the source of the problem:

But how do you get N-nitroso compounds from the amines, and why was the solvent switched? Well, the classic industrial syntheses of these molecules involved reacting an aryl nitrile with tri-n-butyltin azide (often formed in situ from the trialkyltin chloride).

ZHP themselves appear to have introduced a cheaper, higher-yielding route using just sodium azide and zinc chloride in an aprotic solvent like DMF...

italics mine.

 The excess azide is consumed at the end of the process using sodium nitrite – but nitrite under acidic conditions will give you some nitrous acid, and nitrous acid will react with secondary amines to give you N-nitrosoamines. That would seem to be the root of the problem. Well, one of the roots. The second problem is that no one apparently picked up on the N-nitroso contaminants for years.

so it's also the first world drug companies who are at fault for trusting the manufacturers were being honest and following manufacturing protocol

and after ZHP got away with it, apparently other manufacturers decided they could get away with it too.

why is this little fact important? Because those of us in third world countries know there is a huge problem with contaminated, fake, and substandard medicines mainly from China, and also India and other third world countries.

Yes, much of the medicine is generic but by US/European/Israeli companies, but the dirty little secret is a lot of the world's medicines are outsourced to companies who can manufacture it cheaper.

and the Science magazine article naively wonders what is behind the problem.

 So we’re going to have to think about the way that synthetic routes in the generic API business are monitored, it would seem. People seem to have missed that changing the chemistry for the sartans could lead to this problem, so what else are we missing?

again, italics mine.
Anyone here in Asia could tell you what you are missing:
uh, it's the culture of corruption that is the problem.

World Health Organization article on this problem estimates one out of ten medicines sold in third world countries are fake, counterfeit, substandard or have toxic additives.:

No countries remain untouched by this issue — from North America and Europe through to sub-Saharan Africa, South East Asia, and Latin America. What was once considered a problem limited to developing and low-income countries has now become an issue for all.

With the exponential increase in internet connectivity those engaged in the manufacture, distribution and supply of substandard and falsified medical products have gained access to a global market place. This extends both to consumers and business forums. ...

However, it is in low- and middle-income countries and those in areas of conflict, or civil unrest, where health systems are weak or non-existent that bear the greatest burden of substandard and falsified medical products.

Measles in the DR Congo

AlJ reports:

Nearly 90,000 suspected cases of airborne infection recorded since January, health minister says....
Ilunga added the mortality rate was estimated to be at 1.8 percent, a figure which translates to more than 1,500 deaths.

actually, I suspect the death rate is higher: often the children get better after the rash disappears, then they die one or two weeks later because Measles causes "anergy" or lowered immune system response, and die of pneumonia or tuberculosis.

 "To stop the chain of measles transmission and prevent future epidemics, at least 95 percent of the population have to be vaccinated," he said. More than two million children were vaccinated in April, according to the health ministry, with anothe

r immunisation campaign covering a further 1.4 million others set to be launched "in the coming days".

typhoid in Los Angeles

....

the NewAmerican has an article on the trash problem in Los Angeles.

Typhus is a disease born of filth, most commonly spread by contact with the feces of fleas. It is most often reported in the third world or places such as POW camps where hygiene is of little concern. Last year, Los Angeles County reported a record 124 confirmed cases of the disease, enough to be classified as a full-blown outbreak. So far, in 2019, more than 50 cases have been reported. The reason? Fleas are attracted to rats and rats are attracted to huge piles of food-waste infused garbage, like the ones that currently litter vast portions of downtown Los Angeles. 

he overburdened sanitation department does the best it can, but it simply doesn’t have the manpower necessary to keep up with the gigantic piles of filth that spring up quickly and are left to grow and rot for months at a time. A spokesperson for the city’s Department of Public Works reports that the current backlog for trash pickups around the city’s homeless encampments stands at approximately 8,400, with an average of six calls per site.

the Atlantic article (March) about the problem in Los Angeles among the homeless.

Los Angeles recently experienced an outbreak of typhus—a disease spread by infected fleas on rats and other animals—in downtown streets. Officials briefly closed part of City Hall after reporting that rodents had invaded the building. People in Washington State have been infected with Shigella bacteria, which is spread through feces and causes the diarrheal disease shigellosis, as well as Bartonella quintana, or trench fever, which spreads through body lice.*

Hepatitis A, also spread primarily through feces, infected more than 1,000 people in Southern California in the past two years. The disease also has erupted in New Mexico, Ohio, and Kentucky, primarily among people who are homeless or use drugs.

Public-health officials and politicians are using terms like disaster and public-health crisis to describe the outbreaks, and they are warning that these diseases can easily jump beyond the homeless population. “Our homeless crisis is increasingly becoming a public-health crisis,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said in his State of the State speech in February, citing outbreaks of hepatitis A in San Diego County, syphilis in Sonoma County, and typhus in Los Angeles County. “Typhus,” he said. “A medieval disease. In California. In 2019.”.....

. Bubonic plague could be next.

NPR article from August 2018. So it means it's not a new problem.

Medical journal Article about the Hepatitis outbreak in SanDiego that started in 2016.

The hepatitis A outbreak affected 588 individuals. An epidemiologic and morphologic review of the cases with a focus on the UCSD patients was performed. No common sources of food, beverage or drugs have been identified that have contributed to this outbreak. Mode of distribution is likely direct person to person transmission. The health department initiated an extensive public vaccination and education campaign, distributed hygiene kits, deployed portable bathroom and hand washing and declared a local public health emergency. Due to the extensive public health campaign, the outbreak seems to be under control as of January 2018.

the epidemic started in 2016, but the WAPO finally noticed it in 2017, explaining how "power spraying" with bleach and other basic public health hygiene methods were being used to control the disease.

Actually the hepatitis epidemics was the harbinger of these plagues, and it is due to neglect by local governments. And that epidemic was noted as a problem a couple years ago. (2016-2018), meaning it can't be blamed on Trumpie boy, but wait and they will manage to politicize the problem.

Ah, but their priorities are in place: They banned Plastic straws.

cross posted to my regular blog.