After 2 years of government suppression of early treatment for COVID-19, and with world spending on COVID vaccines expected to reach $157 billion through 2025 (https://tinyurl.com/2ekbkw7w), the Biden Administration plans to invest $3 billion in an antiviral development strategy (https://tinyurl.com/dc2wrd2). Perhaps some of these agents (https://tinyurl.com/tajruwwj) will work out, but what can we do in the meantime?
There is a large body of evidence supporting hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and other agents, summarized at c19study.com. In many countries it maybe difficult to obtain HCQ or IVM owing to governmental restrictions, or in the U.S. mostly because of physicians’ reluctance to prescribe. For treatment protocols proposed by various physicians, see c19protocols.com, which also lists resources including telehealth.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus has certainly been associated with mass destruction of human lives and livelihoods—without directly killing more than other viruses that have not shut down economies and forced people into house arrest. The “emergency” goes on and on. Who can make plans for the future of a business if it could be shut down by a report of a couple cases within the company’s ZIP code? A semblance of “normalcy” will possibly return IF everyone gets the needle in the arm—at least for people with the “Green Pass.”
Daily reports of COVID deaths lack all perspective. As David Stockman pointed out in August 2020, “we are in the midst of a full on public hysteria that has empowered that statist proclivities of present-day American politicians…to erupt in a brutal attack on the economy, personal liberty and the very notion of government via constitutional due process.” He challenges the “underlying predicate…that the Covid presents a Black Plague level threat to life and limb, …an alleged once-in-a-hundred-years existential threat.”
Friday, July 30, 2021 9am to 3pm – Optional Tour to Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter (The tour is currently full, write ddp@ddponline.org for tour waiting list.)
7pm to 9pm – Welcome Reception. The meeting will officially kick off with the Friday evening welcome reception where you can eat, drink, meet, and network with speakers and attendees.
Saturday, Jul 31, 2021 7:45 am Welcome. Jane Orient, M.D., DDP President
8:00 am Sunspots: Hindcasting and Forecasting the Solar Cycle. Willie Soon, Ph.D. Dr. Soon, an astrophysicist, authored The Maunder Minimum and The Variable Sun-Earth Connection.
9:00 am Bloom Energy: the Theranos of Thermodynamics.David R. Legates, Ph.D. Dr. Legates is professor of geography and spatial sciences at the University of Delaware and a former Delaware State Climatologist.
10:15 am Cancer Risk Assessment: Rewriting Its History. Edward Calabrese, Ph.D. For more than 20 years, Dr. Calabrese’s research has focused on the dose response to drugs and pollutants in the low-dose range.
11:15 am Oil, Gas, and Renewables: 2022 and Beyond. Joseph Leimkuhler Mr. Leimkuhler is chief operating officer of Beacon Offshore Energy.
12:15 pm Lunch: Healing Arizona Veterans. Carol Henricks, M.D., Rosie Torres, Will Wisner, Micaela Bensko Traumatic brain injury and toxic exposures are crippling veterans and contributing to 22 suicides per day.
2:00 pm The Biden/AOC Green New Deal Scam. Paul Driessen, J.D. Mr. Driessen is the author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death, and policy advisor to the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow
3:00 pm The Magic Trick of Climate Science.Howard Hayden, Ph.D. Dr. Hayden is professor emeritus of physics, University of Connecticut, and publishes The Energy Advocate.
4:00 pm The Price of Panic and the Tyranny of Experts. Jay W. Richards, Ph.D. Dr. Richards, a research professor at the Busch School of Business, Catholic University of America, is a bestselling author. . 6:30 pm Banquet: Global Reset: the Evil Twins of Technocracy and Transhumanism. Patrick Wood Author of Technocracy Rising and other books, Mr. Wood studies trends that are transforming global politics, economics, and education.
Sunday, Aug 1, 2021
8:00 am Civil Defense for 21st Century America, Stephen Jones .Ex-nuclear arms technician, USN, civil defense activist since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
9:00 am The Single Point Failure of the National Pandemic Plan. Steven Hatfill, M.D. Dr. Hatfill is an adjunct assistant professor at George Washington Univ and has done research involving Ebola, Marburg, and orthopox virus. . 10:15 am Practical Aspects of Sheltering in Place in Prolonged Emergency.Hermann Børg, M.D. Dr. Borg is a neuro endocrinologist, founder of ARCRO (Clinical Research Organization), and a researcher at the University of North Carolina.
11:15 am DOA: Event 301 and the Decade of Action. Debbie Bacigalupi Debbie Bacigalupi is a California cattle rancher and expert on the effects of environmental policy on rural America.
12:15 pm Lunch. Is There Life Off Earth? Alan Korwin An expert on gun laws, Mr. Korwin is working on his 15th book, Why Science May Be Wrong, with a chapter on the Sagan Assumption.
2:00 pm The Corruption of STEM Education: Harvey Mudd College. James Enstrom, Ph.D., M.P.H Dr. Enstrom, an epidemiologist, is a retired research professor at UCLA and founder of the Scientific Integrity Institute.
3:00 pm Issues at Our Southern Border. Zach Taylor Mr. Taylor is chairman, National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers
4:00 pm Bringing Science into the Oregon State Legislature. Arthur Robinson, Ph.D. Art Robinson is founder of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, and an Oregon state senator.
I hope you have been able to stay warm this winter.
But wherever we live, we need to learn from Texas. It is quite likely that your state or locality is making firm plans to hop on the “renewables” train, following the lead of Texas and California. Tucson, Arizona, recently distributed an opinion survey about how, not whether, to phase out “fossil fuel.”
Texas has prided itself on leadership in the wind industry. But as the graph below shows, if you had power in Texas in early February, it was coming from natural gas, coal, or nuclear—mostly gas.
If you were able to leave your frozen home, to drive a few hundred miles to a place where you could heat formula for your baby, you drove in a vehicle with an internal combustion engine. If you slept in your car to keep warn—not in a closed garage!—you were burning fuel. If you did not have gas in your tank, too bad. Service stations can’t pump gas without electricity.
Doctors for Disaster Preparedness Newsletter | Vol. XXXVI, No. 5
No, Doctors for Disaster Preparedness does not recommend do-it-yourself medicine.
You should have a physician who knows you and is available to advise you—confidentially. Fewer and fewer people are so fortunate. Most are enrolled in a “health plan” and have an assigned “healthcare provider.” Even if the provider has an M.D., evaluation and management may be determined by the drop-down menus in the electronic health record. The EHR will follow you everywhere, tracking your history and compliance—some even have electronic “sticky notes” to flag potentially disruptive patients who have a politically incorrect attitude.
Corporate medicine has been adamantly opposed to early home treatment of COVID-19, and employed physicians deviate from that policy at their peril. Hospitals, clinics, and most of “organized medicine,” including the AMA and the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), will cite “the science” as determined by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Doctors for Disaster Preparedness Newsletter | Vol. XXXVI, No. 4
Between the date on the masthead and the time of this writing (January 2021), events have moved at a breathtaking speed. With a foot-high pile of selected articles on COVID-19 waiting to be read, I’d like to pause for historical perspective.
DDP was founded in the early 1980s, when medical journals were full of articles on the “bomb run,” the effects of a nuclear attack on one or more American cities: death and destruction, the few remaining medical facilities overwhelmed, environmental contamination, panic, and despair (hope to be at Ground Zero, kiss yourself good-by, etc.).
At that time, during the Cold War, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) still had an Office of Civil Defense and remnants of a civilian nuclear defense program. DDP and The American Civil Defense Association (TACDA) promoted these programs, and FEMA officials spoke at our meetings. There were home shelter displays.
Biden and Harris have promised to fight climate catastrophe by transitioning to “clean, renewable” energy. Can they do it? And what would happen if they did?
The magnitude of the problem is shown in the pie chart below.
How could wind and solar, currently supplying 3 percent of the world’s energy, grow to replace the 85 percent supplied by coal, oil, and natural gas?
The percentage could be increased by drastically reducing total energy, as by getting rid of “fossil fuels.” The federal government could conceivably shut down coal mining, fracking, off-shore drilling, refineries, and pipelines—within the U.S., and then ban imports.
In his ABC town hall, Joe Biden said, “There are well over 100,000 [gas?] wells that are left uncapped in the region [Pennsylvania?]. We could hire 128,000 of these people who are working in the industry to cap these wells and get a good salary doing it now, number one.”
We can’t get to 100 percent renewables by 2030 as promised by the Green New Deal, he said. We must transition to a “place where we get to net zero emission including in agriculture. I’ve laid out a detailed plan…. “We can do things like pelletize all the chicken manure and all the horse manure and cow manure and they can be—and take out the methane and use it as fertilizer and make a lot of money doing it.”
What can we learn from other countries that are far ahead of us in renewables? Germany generates more than 30 percent of its electricity from renewables. South Australia has a 50 percent renewable energy generation target for 2025, getting around 40 percent of its electricity currently from intermittent renewables such as wind. What has happened?
Germany has among the highest electricity prices in the world (3 times those in the U.S.).
In South Australia, rates have frequently hit above $10/kWh (cf $0.12 in U.S. and $0.35 in Germany). Cold weather caused prices to rise 100-fold.
Energy-intensive industry is relocating to Asian countries that have reliable, affordable power.
Brownouts and blackouts can result when intermittent sources generate too much or too little power, causing expensive equipment to fail at industrial facilities. Last year, Germany paid wind farms $548 million to switch off in order to prevent damage to the country’s electric grid.
The “silver bullet” of antibiotics seemed to herald the conquest of infectious diseases, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shifted its focus to noninfectious “epidemics” such as cancer and heart diseases. But with the rise of multiply resistant bacteria as well as the ever-present threat of viral diseases, we might soon be living in the post-antibiotic era. We need to review methods from the pre-antibiotic era, which rapidly lost favor after the discovery of penicillin.
In 1892, William Osler wrote that lobar pneumonia “is a self-limited disease and runs its course uninfluenced in any way by medicine. It can be neither aborted, nor cut short by any known means at our disposal.” By 1913, leaders at the Rockefeller Institute initiated equine serum therapy for the treatment of pneumonia. Two decades later, mortality from lobar pneumonia was 25%–40% in patients not receiving serum, but 10%–20% in those who received this therapy. While the treatment was a major advance, it was expensive, time-consuming, needed to be matched to the serotype of the bacteria, and limited by allergic reactions to horse or other serum. Serum therapy was soon eliminated after the introduction of sulfonamides in 1939.
X-irradiation began to emerge as an alternative to the therapeutic monopoly of serum treatments in the 1930s. Edward Calabrese and Gaurav Dhawan (Yale J Biol Med 2013;86:555-570, tinyurl.com/s7ua856) trace its history, beginning with the first report in 1905. Radiotherapy (RT) was broadly accepted early in the 20th century, with notable successes in the treatment of many inflammatory and infectious diseases such as gas gangrene, carbuncles, sinusitis, arthritis, and inner ear infections.
You have probably heard the claim that marijuana is less harmful than tobacco or alcohol.
We might find out that this is not true with more widespread use of more potent product. Too late? Arizona Prop 207, which legalizes marijuana and hashish, will be virtually impossible to change once it passes. A “yes” vote turns all 17 pages into law.
Dangers of marijuana that you might not have heard about include:
Serious mental illness: Teenagers who smoke marijuana regularly are about three times as likely to develop schizophrenia. And 27% of people with schizophrenia had been diagnosed with cannabis use disorder, according to a 2010 review.
Violent behavior: Despite its reputation for making users relaxed and calm, cannabis appears to provoke some patients to violence. In a Swiss study of 265 psychotic patients, young men with psychosis who used cannabis had a 50% chance of becoming violent over a 3-year period.
Lowered IQ: Marijuana harms brain development, which is not complete until the early 20s. There was an average drop of 8 IQ points between age 13 and 38 in heavy users in teen and adult years, compared with no drop in never-users. There is a significant decrease in verbal memory for each 5 years of cannabis use, accompanied by a decreased size of working memory areas of the brain shown on functional MRI.
Birth defects: A spectrum of neurologic impairments is seen, including some that mimic autism, and many heart and gastrointestinal anomalies may occur. Marijuana lingers in the system months after use is stopped. The father’s use may also harm the baby.
Cancer: Marijuana contains more tar and carcinogens than tobacco, and marijuana smokers tend to inhale more deeply and for a longer period.
Impaired driving: Marijuana’s effects include distorted perceptions and impaired reaction time, attention span, and judgment. Users have a doubled risk of involvement in an auto crash.
Cardiovascular disease: Users have an increased risk of stroke (26%), heart failure (10%), and sudden cardiac death.
I hope that you and yours are safe. My friends are fighting fires trying to cross the firebreaks around their home with hoes and shovels as well as water.
Meanwhile, fiery political darts are being hurled at producers of fossil fuels, users (that includes all of us), and politicians who resist a Green New Deal. Joe Biden called President Trump a “climate arsonist.”
Has climate change produced conditions leading to “unprecedented” fires? Did CO2 emissions cause the change? And can it be stopped by reducing those emissions?
The COVID-19 lockdowns have hinted at what a drastic change would be needed to get to “net zero.” With automobile traffic cut in half in April, and air traffic virtually halted for months, CO2 emissions were down only 8 percent—and more than 600,000 people were out of work.
Before prescribing a still more drastic remedy, let’s consider the diagnosis:
1. The fires are not unprecedented. The figure below shows that acreage burned was much greater in the early 20th century.
2. Wildfires are affected by many variables:
Sun’s variations and earth-sun orbital variation
Extraterrestrial impacts such as meteorites
Lightning
Fuel loads
Animal grazing
Climate: rainfall + temperature
Human activities: soil condition, land use, controlled burning, arson
We could change forest management practices NOW. Reducing CO2 emissions to zero MIGHT reduce temperature by 0.05 degrees Celsius by 2050.
