A Black Lives Matter protester arrested during riots in Washington over the weekend had also attended riots in Kenosha and Portland, police said Monday, as the Justice Department announced it would be probing whether organizations are paying individuals to move across the country.
Seattle-based Jeremy Vajko, 27, was arrested on Saturday night amid clashes between law enforcement officers and rioters. According to the Metropolitan Police Department, he drove recklessly near the Hay-Adams Hotel and drove “into a crowd of over 100 individuals.”
Vajko, who reportedly worked for Microsoft until May, was released from jail on Sunday and his charges have since been dropped. He has insisted that his “Snack Van” is used to hand out food and water and to help transport medics.
“The van is just full of free water, food, and medical supplies for the homeless and protesters,” Vajko tweeted Thursday. “I even gave water to the people that destroyed my van.”
Washington Police Chief Peter Newsham said during a press briefing on Monday with Mayor Muriel Bowser that Vajko’s van had been sighted previously in during clashes in both Portland, the nexus of the riots, and Kenosha.
“There was a van that was driving recklessly, potentially could have hit pedestrians and officers in the area,” Newsham said of Saturday’s incident in the nation’s capital, without mentioning Vajko’s name.
“We have intelligence to suggest that van was also at some of the violence we saw in Portland, Oregon, and some of the violent activity we saw in Kenosha,” he said.
The police chief noted that his officers are being assisted by the federal government to investigate whether there is “an organized, funded attempt to create violence in our city.”
“This isn’t just Washington, D.C. We’ve seen violence in other cities and to the extent that that is coordinated, us in law enforcement, we have a responsibility to find out if it is and then answer that question ‘Who?’—and hold them accountable,” Newsham said.
He said that 70 percent of individuals arrested in recent days were from outside Washington, D.C. Bowser noted that weapons were brought into the capital by “outside agitators” to “destroy property in the District.”
Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary (DHS) Chad Wolf said late Monday that the heads of organizations believed to be behind the recent riots in the United States are being probed by the Department of Justice (DOJ).
DOJ officials are “also targeting and investigating the head of these organizations, the individuals that are paying for these individuals to move across the country,” Wolf added, without specifying which groups.
“So we know they’re moving around, we’ve seen them in D.C., in Sacramento, and elsewhere. We know they’re organized. We have seen similar tactics being used from Portland and other cities across the country as well,” he said.
A White House spokeswoman told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement:
“The president is highlighting questions that need answers such as who may be funding travel and lodging for organized rioters. For example, violent rioters in Kenosha who were arrested hailed from 44 different cities. An investigation is underway to determine who is funding these organized riots happening across the country.”
I’ve been getting tons of emails on this one, and, granted, it’s about that story we’re all sick of hearing about, it is nonetheless intriguing. So thanks to you all who passed it along and shared it. I had so many people sending it to me that it vaulted to the top of the finals box. The CDC appears to have released an interesting set of numbers which, if true, raise lots (and lots[and lots]) of questions:
Now, here’s the clincher, the whopper doozie squating in the middle of all of this:
Table 3 shows the types of health conditions and contributing causes mentioned in conjunction with deaths involving coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 2.6 additional conditions or causes per death. The number of deaths with each condition or cause is shown for all deaths and by age groups.
Wait a minute, of all the deaths being reported, only 6% are due to the virus itself without other factors (co-morbidities)? (Emphasis added)
Now, if you’ve been following this whole story carefully, very early on many in alternative media were raising serious questions about the numbers of reported deaths, and many were claiming that people who were dying with covid were being reported as having died of covid, and here we appear to have a back-handed admission that this was so.
A further ramification of these new numbers is that if the percentage of deaths from the virus alone as a percentage of deaths with complicating factors is so small, the percentage of deaths relative to the whole population is even smaller.
And if that’s the case, then there seems to me to be a further implication, especially for those calling for mandatory vaccines against the virus: why is a vaccine needed for a virus that now appears, by these latest numbers, not to be nearly the dreaded pandemic we were led to believe? Or is there some other agenda behind that? Or conversely, why is there a call for a expensive vaccine research and mandates, when the dreaded (and inexpensive) hydroxychloriquine seems to have, by some sources’ lights, an effective therapeutic and in some cases curative effect?
At the minimum, these new numbers raise some disturbing questions, and appear to corroborate at least to some degree those early skeptics’ views of the basis of the numbers being reported. Time will tell, of course, what other new numbers from the CDC might indicate, or, as the case may be, backpedal, on these latest statistics.
In the meantime, Kamaula Harris is calling for nationwide mask mandates, while others push the meme that it will “never go away,” raising the prospects that “they” want to keep everyone masked… forever. The question is why. Why – with previous planscamdemics (think SARS from a few years ago) – were no such draconian measures instituted? And why institute them now?
Bottom line: the CDC’s numbers raise disturbing questions and implications. This is a case of “you tell me”…
Columbia Journalism Review Explains How The Gates Foundation Manipulates The Media Narrative
Most of the feature stories published by the Columbia Journalism Review, a mostly-digital biannual “magazine” published and edited by the Columbia School of Journalism and its staff, is sanctimonious media naval-gazing filtered through a lens of cryptomarxist propaganda, written by a seemingly endless procession of washed-up magazine writers.
But every once in a while, just like the NYT, Washington Post and CNN, even CJR gets it (mostly) right. And fortunately for us, one of those days arrived earlier this month, when the website published this insightful piece outlining the influence of the Gates Foundation on the media that covers it.
Most readers probably didn’t realize how much money the Gates Foundation spends backing even for-profit media companies like the New York Times and the Financial Times, some of the most financially successful legacy media products, thanks to their dedicated readerships. For most media companies, which don’t have the financial wherewithal of the two named above, the financial links go even deeper. Schwab opens with his strongest example: NPR.
LAST AUGUST, NPR PROFILED A HARVARD-LED EXPERIMENT to help low-income families find housing in wealthier neighborhoods, giving their children access to better schools and an opportunity to “break the cycle of poverty.” According to researchers cited in the article, these children could see $183,000 greater earnings over their lifetimes—a striking forecast for a housing program still in its experimental stage.
If you squint as you read the story, you’ll notice that every quoted expert is connected to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which helps fund the project. And if you’re really paying attention, you’ll also see the editor’s note at the end of the story, which reveals that NPR itself receives funding from Gates.
NPR’s funding from Gates “was not a factor in why or how we did the story,” reporter Pam Fessler says, adding that her reporting went beyond the voices quoted in her article. The story, nevertheless, is one of hundreds NPR has reported about the Gates Foundation or the work it funds, including myriad favorable pieces written from the perspective of Gates or its grantees.
And that speaks to a larger trend—and ethical issue—with billionaire philanthropists’ bankrolling the news. The Broad Foundation, whose philanthropic agenda includes promoting charter schools, at one point funded part of the LA Times’ reporting on education. Charles Koch has made charitable donations to journalistic institutions such as the Poynter Institute, as well as to news outlets such as the Daily Caller, that support his conservative politics. And the Rockefeller Foundation funds Vox’s Future Perfect, a reporting project that examines the world “through the lens of effective altruism”—often looking at philanthropy.
As philanthropists increasingly fill in the funding gaps at news organizations—a role that is almost certain to expand in the media downturn following the coronavirus pandemic—an underexamined worry is how this will affect the ways newsrooms report on their benefactors. Nowhere does this concern loom larger than with the Gates Foundation, a leading donor to newsrooms and a frequent subject of favorable news coverage.
It’s just the latest reminder that all of NPR’s reporting on the coronavirus and China is suspect due to its links to Gates and, by extension, the WHO. Back in April, we noted this piece for being an egregious example of a reporter failing to make all of the sources links to China explicitly clear. Though a few clues were included.
Of course, even CJR left out certain salient examples of the media’s penchant for protecting Gates. He was reportedly a close friend of Jeffrey Epstein’s, even reportedly maintaining ties after the deceased pedophile’s first stint in prison.
That photo never gets old.
Of course, the Gates Foundation is unusual in the level of heft it exerts, but it’s not alone. The Clinton Foundation has benefited from equally light-touch treatment from the mainstream press, if not more so. Little unflattering reporting was done on the Clinton Foundation until Steve Bannon helped Peter Schweizer produce “Clinton Cash”.
Read some more of the CJR piece below:
I recently examined nearly twenty thousand charitable grants the Gates Foundation had made through the end of June and found more than $250 million going toward journalism. Recipients included news operations like the BBC, NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, Univision, Medium, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, the Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde, and the Center for Investigative Reporting; charitable organizations affiliated with news outlets, like BBC Media Action and the New York Times’ Neediest Cases Fund; media companies such as Participant, whose documentary Waiting for “Superman” supports Gates’s agenda on charter schools; journalistic organizations such as the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the National Press Foundation, and the International Center for Journalists; and a variety of other groups creating news content or working on journalism, such as the Leo Burnett Company, an ad agency that Gates commissioned to create a “news site” to promote the success of aid groups. In some cases, recipients say they distributed part of the funding as subgrants to other journalistic organizations—which makes it difficult to see the full picture of Gates’s funding into the fourth estate.
The foundation even helped fund a 2016 report from the American Press Institute that was used to develop guidelines on how newsrooms can maintain editorial independence from philanthropic funders. A top-level finding: “There is little evidence that funders insist on or have any editorial review.” Notably, the study’s underlying survey data showed that nearly a third of funders reported having seen at least some content they funded before publication.
Gates’s generosity appears to have helped foster an increasingly friendly media environment for the world’s most visible charity. Twenty years ago, journalists scrutinized Bill Gates’s initial foray into philanthropy as a vehicle to enrich his software company, or a PR exercise to salvage his battered reputation following Microsoft’s bruising antitrust battle with the Department of Justice. Today, the foundation is most often the subject of soft profiles and glowing editorials describing its good works.
During the pandemic, news outlets have widely looked to Bill Gates as a public health expert on covid—even though Gates has no medical training and is not a public official. PolitiFact and USA Today (run by the Poynter Institute and Gannett, respectively—both of which have received funds from the Gates Foundation) have even used their fact-checking platforms to defend Gates from “false conspiracy theories” and “misinformation,” like the idea that the foundation has financial investments in companies developing covid vaccines and therapies. In fact, the foundation’s website and most recent tax forms clearly show investments in such companies, including Gilead and CureVac.
In the same way that the news media has given Gates an outsize voice in the pandemic, the foundation has long used its charitable giving to shape the public discourse on everything from global health to education to agriculture—a level of influence that has landed Bill Gates on Forbes’s list of the most powerful people in the world. The Gates Foundation can point to important charitable accomplishments over the past two decades—like helping drive down polio and putting new funds into fighting malaria—but even these efforts have drawn expert detractors who say that Gates may actually be introducing harm, or distracting us from more important, lifesaving public health projects.
From virtually any of Gates’s good deeds, reporters can also find problems with the foundation’s outsize power, if they choose to look. But readers don’t hear these critical voices in the news as often or as loudly as Bill and Melinda’s. News about Gates these days is often filtered through the perspectives of the many academics, nonprofits, and think tanks that Gates funds. Sometimes it is delivered to readers by newsrooms with financial ties to the foundation.
The Gates Foundation declined multiple interview requests for this story and would not provide its own accounting of how much money it has put toward journalism.
In response to questions sent via email, a spokesperson for the foundation said that a “guiding principle” of its journalism funding is “ensuring creative and editorial independence.” The spokesperson also noted that, because of financial pressures in journalism, many of the issues the foundation works on “do not get the in-depth, consistent media coverage they once did.… When well-respected media outlets have an opportunity to produce coverage of under-researched and under-reported issues, they have the power to educate the public and encourage the adoption and implementation of evidence-based policies in both the public and private sectors.”
As CJR was finalizing its fact check of this article, the Gates Foundation offered a more pointed response: “Recipients of foundation journalism grants have been and continue to be some of the most respected journalism outlets in the world.… The line of questioning for this story implies that these organizations have compromised their integrity and independence by reporting on global health, development, and education with foundation funding. We strongly dispute this notion.”
The foundation’s response also volunteered other ties it has to the news media, including “participating in dozens of conferences, such as the Perugia Journalism Festival, the Global Editors Network, or the World Conference of Science Journalism,” as well as “help[ing] build capacity through the likes of the Innovation in Development Reporting fund.”
The full scope of Gates’s giving to the news media remains unknown because the foundation only publicly discloses money awarded through charitable grants, not through contracts. In response to questions, Gates only disclosed one contract—Vox’s—but did describe how some of this contract money is spent: producing sponsored content, and occasionally funding “non-media nonprofit entities to support efforts such as journalist trainings, media convenings, and attendance at events.”
Over the years, reporters have investigated the apparent blind spots in how the news media covers the Gates Foundation, though such reflective reporting has waned in recent years. In 2015, Vox ran an article examining the widespread uncritical journalistic coverage surrounding the foundation—coverage that comes even as many experts and scholars raise red flags. Vox didn’t cite Gates’s charitable giving to newsrooms as a contributing factor, nor did it address Bill Gates’s month-long stint as guest editor for The Verge, a Vox subsidiary, earlier that year. Still, the news outlet did raise critical questions about journalists’ tendency to cover the Gates Foundation as a dispassionate charity instead of a structure of power.
Five years earlier, in 2010, CJR published a two-part series that examined, in part, the millions of dollars going toward PBS NewsHour, which it found to reliably avoid critical reporting on Gates.
In 2011, the Seattle Times detailed concerns over the ways in which Gates Foundation funding might hamper independent reporting…
Apropos of today’s main blog, a physician has noticed the same thing and is posting to her twitter account:
Colleen Huber, NMD
@ColleenHuberNMD
Naturopathic Medical Doctor, headed Euro Cancer Summit, #LCHF doctor since 2006, wrote Manifesto for a Cancer Patient, featured in America’s featured in America’s Best Cancer Doctors
Colleen Huber, NMD. @ColleenHuberNMD
BOMBSHELL: If you’re human, you’ll likely test + for #COVID19, whether you’ve had it or not. More evidence that there is no pandemic, and that “covid deaths” are in fact old age deaths.
BOMBSHELL: WHO Coronavirus PCR Test Primer Sequence is Found in All Human DNA
This was important enough that I wanted to get it out immediately. My research into the NCBI database for nucleotide sequences has lead to a stunning discovery. One of the WHO primer sequences in t…pieceofmindful.com
Here is the article she references:
BOMBSHELL: WHO Coronavirus PCR Test Primer Sequence is Found in All Human DNA
This was important enough that I wanted to get it out immediately. My research into the NCBI database for nucleotide sequences has lead to a stunning discovery. One of the WHO primer sequences in the PCR test for SARS-CoV-2 is found in all human DNA!
The sequence “CTCCCTTTGTTGTGTTGT” is an 18-character primer sequence found in the WHO coronavirus PCR testing protocol document. The primer sequences are what get amplified by the PCR process in order to be detected and designated a “positive” test result. It just so happens this exact same 18-character sequence, verbatim, is also found on Homo sapiens chromosome 8! As far as I can tell, this means that the WHO test kits should find a positive result in all humans. Can anyone explain this otherwise?
I really cannot overstate the significance of this finding. At minimum, it should have a notable impact on test results.
Homo sapiens chromosome 8, GRCh38.p12 Primary Assembly
Sequence ID: NC_000008.11 Length: 145138636
Range 1: 63648346 to 63648363 is “CTCCCTTTGTTGTGTTGT”
Update: After some effort, I have finally discovered a way to display proof (beyond my screenshots) that human chromosome 8 has this exact same 18-character sequence. Please try the link below. The sequence is shown at the bottom of the page.
There’s been, of course, a focus in the news – and hence on this website – recently on the whole Fauci-Lieber-Wuhan virus narrative. Some of that focus has been on the various attempts to skew the numbers, and this in turn has focused on the tests for it. Odd stories have come out that have increasingly focused on the reliability, or lack thereof, of those tests, and some have entertained the speculation that the tests covertly involve (1) DNA testing and (2) DNA data collection. These types of speculations have focused on those odd stories of, for example, the governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, first tested positive for the virus, and then, mere hours later, negative! (See: Ohio Gov. DeWine tests negative for COVID-19 hours after testing positive)
All this is background grist for the mill of today’s high octane speculation, and it’s really, really high octane speculation, and it isn’t even my own speculation, save insofar as I’ve entertained similar speculations. In a word, and beyond the questions about the covid statistics and how they’re being counted, I’ve sensed there is something underneath even that problematic that is just… well… “off.”
Well, this week’s “inbox” included the following article that was shared by “S”, and it’s both a stunner and a “whopper doozie” that, if true, raises that “offness” to a whole new degree and by several orders of magnitude. Indeed, “S” offered his own speculations which I shall do my best to recapitulate, because the implications of the article – again, if true – are obvious. Here’s the article:
This article is so short, and such a stunner, that I cite it in full:
This was important enough that I wanted to get it out immediately. My research into the NCBI database for nucleotide sequences has lead to a stunning discovery. One of the WHO primer sequences in the PCR test for SARS-CoV-2 is found in all human DNA!
The sequence “CTCCCTTTGTTGTGTTGT” is an 18-character primer sequence found in the WHO coronavirus PCR testing protocol document. The primer sequences are what get amplified by the PCR process in order to be detected and designated a “positive” test result. It just so happens this exact same 18-character sequence, verbatim, is also found on Homo sapiens chromosome 8! As far as I can tell, this means that the WHO test kits should find a positive result in all humans. Can anyone explain this otherwise?
I really cannot overstate the significance of this finding. At minimum, it should have a notable impact on test results.
In other words, those who began to notice the peculiarity of the tests for the virus, and how they might be used to (1) collect human DNA, and (2) possibly covertly insert things into people’s nasal cavity, may have had a point, and then some. Again, assuming the article to be true, and given the vast amount of “positive” tests, are we really witnessing “false positives” that are, in fact, genuine in the sense that the patient is being shown to be human? And is this why there is such an emphasis on testing everyone?
Years ago, at the Secret Space Program conference of 2015 in Bastrop Texas, I offered the idea that the sudden rise of DNA testing corporations that will, through genetics, “show your ancestral history” might be a covert way of searching for people that look fully homo sapiens sapiens, but aren’t. The only way to determine whether or not such a population exists among us ala the old late 1960’s science-fiction TV show, The Invaders, would be to test for genetics. So why put a primer for a virus into a virus test that, essentially, is common to all humans, and then insist that everyone get tested? It might be exactly what one might do in order to search for such a population. This isn’t to say that the virus is not real, and that positive tests are ipso facto suspicious. It is to suggest that maybe, under the guise of the planscamdemic, they’re really looking for something, or rather, someone else. And it might be that this is an underlying reason why the numbers “cases” as a percentage of the population appears to be so high, while actual deaths as a percentage of population appears to be so low.
If that sounds already off-the-end-of-the-speculation-twig, it is to be sure. But there’s an even worse implication, and this is where is gets completely crazy, because it might mean “testing negative” could be interpreted by the wilder and crazier sort, as testing not negative for the virus, but negative for humanity. In this regard, my mention of the old The Invaders TV series was not accidental, but to a purpose. The series, for those who do not know, starred actor Roy Thinnes, who accidentally discovers the “aliens among us”, who looks, walk, talk, and in all but very minor respects resemble humans, as they slowly take over the world through a process of infiltration. Thinnes’ character – “architect David Vincent”, an apt name for a small human trying to triumph over the covert “alien Goliath” – then spends the series trying to collect evidence and names of other witnesses to persuade the government to take action. Interestingly enough, Chris Carter, producer of the later aliens-among-us series, The X Files, in a master-stroke of TV esoterica had Thinnes star in a few episodes in the reverse role, playing one of those aliens-among-us. But in any case, in the original Invaders series, Thinnes’ character shows up at the trial of a friend being accused of murdering a man, who it turns out, was one of those aliens-in-disguise, leading to the premise of “the alien defense” as the defense team, at Thinnes’ encouragement, argues that the murder was not murder because a human being had not been killed, neatly sidestepping the moral issue of how it is not murder when a thinking, rational intelligence being like us in all respects except DNA is dead at someone else’s hand.
Cutting a swath through the northern half of the U.S. state of Arizona is the remote escarpment that stretches around 200 miles from Yavapai County to the border of New Mexico, as well as forming the southern edge of Arizona’s Colorado Plateau, and is called the Mogollon Rim. It is a place of breathtaking vistas of plateaus and badlands, like something out of a Wild West movie, with a certain rustic charm all its own. Along its eerie and beautiful landscape of steep slopes, canyons and gullies are vast swaths of Ponderosa pine forests, which have served as an integral habitat for a great many unique species of birds, plants, animals, and insects, but according to reports going back into the 1800s a far more mysterious beast also calls this place its home. Out here along the rim and its vicinity have long reports of a massive, hulking bipedal beast stalking the wilds here, which has come to be known as the Mogollon Monster.
The creature is in many respects reminiscent of a Bigfoot in the typical appearance. Standing between 7 and 8 feet tall, covered with long, matted hair usually described as having a reddish-brown coloration, and having a face somewhat between a man and an ape. It is also recognizable for the incredibly potent odor that orbits it, described as smelling like “dead fish, a skunk with bad body odor, decaying peat moss and the musk of a snapping turtle.” It differs somewhat from typical Bigfoot encounters in that the creature of the Mogollon Rim is often characterized as being extremely aggressive and even violent, known to terrorize hikers and campers, throw stones, charge trespassers, and it is often blamed for mysteriously mauled and mutilated animals found out in the wild. It is also well-known for its shrill, bloodcurdling screams and shrieks, and most reports say it is mostly certainly a predatory creature.
The Mogollon Rim wilderness
While the Mogollon Rim region and surrounding areas including around Prescott, Williams, Alpine, and Clifton Arizona, have had reports of large and vicious man-like beasts going back to the days of the first settlers of the area, the creature really made a name for itself in 1903, when a harrowing report of an encounter with the monster made the news. The creature was supposedly seen near the Grand Canyon, by a witness named I.W. Stevens, whose story made the Williams News and The Arizona Republic. According to Stevens, he came across the creature as it was hunched over a dead cougar, presumably eating the carcass. He would describe it:
I saw … a man with long white hair and a matted beard that reached his knees, face seared and burned brown by the sun, with fiery green eyes. He wore no clothing and upon his talon-like fingers were claws at least two inches long. A coat of gray hair nearly covered his body, with here and there a patch of dirty skin showing.
Terrified at the sight of this otherworldly beast from a nightmare crouched over a dead cougar seeming to drink its blood, Stevens remained absolutely still and silent as he tried to hide behind a nearby boulder. However, whatever it was managed to detect him, whipping its head up, standing to its full height of 7 feet tall, and issuing an ear-piercing wail, while also waving about what appeared to be an intimidating club. This was enough for Stevens, and he ran off, luckily without the monstrous thing in pursuit. Stevens got to his boat, left behind at the river’s edge, and looked back to the creature, this time gathering courage from the perceived safety of his boat to shout at it. According to Stevens, it then “flourished his club again and screamed the wildest, most unearthly screech I ever heard” and went back to eating the cougar. Stevens would call it “The Wild Man of the Rocks” and speculate that it had been a person who had gone feral and insane out in the wilds.
A perhaps even more high-profile case allegedly occurred in the mid-1940s, when cryptozoologist Don Davis was on a childhood Boy Scout camping trip to Tonto Creek, near Payson, Arizona. As they were sleeping in their tents, something out in the dark shrieked to wake them with a start, after which they could hear rustling and shuffling as if someone were rummaging through the campsite and looking through their gear. At the same time, the entire area was hit by a pungent odor that permeated the air and made some of them gag. When David looked outside of the tent, he says he was confronted with the sight of a creature the likes of which he had never seen before or since. He explains:
The creature was huge. Its eyes were deep set and hard to see, but they seemed expressionless. His face seemed pretty much devoid of hair, but there seemed to be hair along the sides of his face. His chest, shoulders, and arms were massive, especially the upper arms; easily upwards of 16 inches in diameter, perhaps much, much more. I could see he was pretty hairy, but didn’t observe really how thick the body hair was. The face/head was very square; square sides and squared up chin, like a box.
This horrifying site caused Davis to cower in his tent, hoping that it would come no closer, and after picking through the campsite a bit more it ambled off into the dark wilderness to never return. Sporadic sightings of the monster have been made ever since, notably a spate of sightings that plagued the White Mountain Apache Nation reservation in 2006. At the time there were numerous panicked residents of the Fort Apache Indian Reservation reporting a very tall, black creature covered in hair, with inhumanly long arms, and walking in enormous strides. At the time, tribal police were inundated with calls from frightened residents claiming to have seen the monster, and reservation police lieutenant Ray Burnette would say:
A couple of times they’ve seen this creature looking through the windows. They’re scared when they call. The calls we’re getting from people — they weren’t hallucinating, they weren’t drunks, they weren’t people that we know can make hoax calls. They’re from real citizens of the Fort Apache Indian Reservation.
Another recent sighting was given to the site Cryptozoology News by a 28-year-old woman by the name of Y. Estevez, who says she encountered it while hiking along the Canyon Point trail of the Mogollon Rim. As she made her way along the trail, she noticed a massive brute that looked like “a troll” crouched down drinking from a pool of water. She would state:
It was on its knees, drinking water, when I found it. Drinking, making noises like a pig, so at first sight the animal looked like a pig to me. I figured it was just a pig…kind of hairy though, which seemed a little odd for a hog. As soon as I made a little noise, the animal turned its head and looked directly at me. Now that’s when I freaked out. It was staring at me. Just like what you do with cougars. They always tell you to make yourself look bigger and to get very loud, and in theory, the animal will leave. So I start making noise and moving my arms up and down, the creature gets off its four legs and stands on its hind legs. It had long hair, grey and bluish, and I swear it looked like one of those trolls from a fairy tale. Ugly stuff. The face was human looking, no hair on it, but full of bumps. The eyes were kind of a brown-red. Thick big nose, small lips. No expression on its face at all. It then took off running like a person. From now on, I will make sure I don’t hike alone. At least not around here.
What is this strange creature? A popular idea among cryptozoologists is that is is some regional form or subspecies of the Sasquatch, with its appearance and behaviors indicative of the forbidding habitat it dwells within. It could also be misidentifications of other wildlife or even pure made-up hoaxes and fabrications. Yet, there seem to be enough reports from sincere and reliable witnesses that it is difficult to just throw it all away. We are left to wonder whether there is some large, bipedal ape-like beast roaming the wilds of Arizona, and the answer continues to evade us, leaving us to speculation and wonder.
Gresham’s law holds that bad money drives out good money. If there are two coins with the same face value, but of different intrinsic value (assume that one is made of a more precious metal) the coin with less intrinsic worth (bad coin) will be used for currency transactions and the more valuable coin will go out of circulation.
This law applies to the pharmaceuticals today. If there are two drugs of comparable efficacy, the drug that costs more (bad coin) will drive out the good drug (less expensive one) out of the market. It is unfortunate that we are experiencing this in the midst of the humanitarian tragedy of the Covid pandemic.
The present pandemic is caused by a novel virus and mankind has no experience with how to deal with it. There are no drugs or vaccines we know will work. To fight the virus, one approach is to re-purpose approved drugs developed for other uses. A variety of drugs in the market can be tested for efficacy against the new virus. We will discuss the testing of two such drugs against Covid-19.
Remdesivir is a candidate drug. It had been developed for the Ebola virus but it was not found to be effective against it. A generic version of the drug manufactured by Hetero costs Rs 5000 to Rs 6000 per vial. The 11 vials needed for a 10-day course costs Rs 55,000. Remdesivir was subjected to a clinical trial against Covid-19 and the early results of this study were published by Beigel and colleagues in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) on 22 May 2020. There was no statistically meaningful benefit for survival with use of the drug, but among those that survived, recovery time was reduced by four days to a median of 11 days instead of 15 days. The US FDA has approved this drug for compassionate use.
Hydroxychloroqunin (HCQ) is another drug under consideration. It is an antimalarial drug that costs Rs 68 for 10 tablets and a course of treatment requires 12 tablets. The WHO studied this drug in 400 hospitals in 35 countries. It was called the Solidarity trial. However, on 22 May 2020, on the same day that the Remdesivir report appeared in the NEJM, another famous medical journal, The Lancet, published a report that HCQ caused 35% more deaths due to adverse effects of the drug in another trial. Within three days of the publication of the Lancet paper, the WHO suspended the Solidarity study.
India, however, decided to defy the WHO and continue its trial of HCQ. During the period when the Solidarity study was suspended, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) wrote to the WHO, that Solidarity schedule was employing four times the recommended dose of HCQ. The WHO schedule prescribed 1600 mg of the drug on the first day and total of 9600 mg for the full course of treatment. This dose was likely to be toxic and potentially fatal. Dr Vinod Paul in the Niti Aayog was of the opinion (New Indian Express 29 May) that the drug given in the correct dose was useful against Covid in India.
It turned out that the Lancet paper about HCQ deaths was fraudulent and used fabricated data. The Lancet paper was retracted within 13 days of publication. On 3 June, the WHO resumed the Solidarity HCQ study. Inspite of the warning about the drug dosage from the ICMR, the same toxic dose was continued.
Ten days later, Dr Meryl Nass, an US physician and expert on adverse reactions with drugs, wrote in her blog on 14 June 2020 about the lethal dose of HCQ being used in the Solidarity trial. People on Twitter, took it up. Three days later, on the 17 June, the WHO announced that it was suspending the HCQ trial because ‘there was no reduction in mortality’ with the drug, without any mention of the controversy about the drug dosage being used. No data was published.
By a strange coincidence, on the same day the WHO stopped its HCQ trial, the UK announced that it was stopping its trial of HCQ (called the Recovery trial) because they found simultaneously, that there was no reduction in mortality with the drug. The UK Recovery trial was funded in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (B&MGF) and it was also using the same toxic dosage as the Solidarity trial. No data was provided about the other outcome measures like the reduction in time to recovery.
One can see the contrast here between the trials with the two drugs. The Remdesivir trial reported in the NEJM had found no reduction in mortality but the trial was continued on the basis of an improvement in recovery time among survivors. This was not reported on in the HCQ study. Clearly there are different standards operating here for the two drugs.
We cannot let matters rest here. The Lancet paper was retracted but we need to investigate who was really behind this effort to fraudulently discredit HCQ. “Surgisphere” is reported as the organisation that manufactured the data, but who got them to do this? Did they get any extraordinary help from the journal for publication?
Was this a concerted effort by pharma to discredit the less expensive drug? While it is made to appear as a rogue company “Surgisphere” appears to have done this to improve its visibility, it is necessary to have a deeper investigation into the motives and involvement of others, including publishers.
Further, one needs to know who was responsible for putting lives at risk by recommending toxic doses of HCQ in Solidarity and Recovery trials. One cannot assume this was an unintentional mistake, as the dose was not corrected even after the error was pointed out by the ICMR. We need to get to the bottom of this and those involved need to be discredited and weeded out, if we do not want bad science, like bad coins, taking over the world. If this is not done, in all probability, the results of the ICMR HCQ study will not be allowed to be published. Gresham’s Law of Pharmacotheraputics–only expensive drugs will show positive results.
ONE OF THE MOST FRUSTRATING ASPECTS of how academic science conducts itself in the US is high reliance to SELECTIVE ATTENTION to information that suits one’s particular viewpoint in science. Graduate students writing theses or dissertations are expected to provide a reasonable approximation of a background of the foundations upon which their thesis is built. Somewhere along the way, some scientists have forgotten the ethics of the moral responsibility of providing an unbiased representation of the state of knowledge upon which they base their positions. To seek only confirming instances that match one’s own viewpoint is positivistic – and it is the essential driver of confirmation bias. CDC and Fauci’s reliance of the Selective Attention Bias is monumental is size and historically destructive in scope.
Here I outline a few rather important facts that CDC and Fauci (and thus the rest of public health and most of the US medical system) have forgotten. The result is a public health policy response in the US that is full of … holes, at immense cost to the well-being of society.
When I read headlines like “Scientists discover” X, Y or Z about Coronavirus”, I almost always groan. “We ALREADY KNOW that about coronviruses” is my response, and so off to Pubmed I go.
Here are some things we already know that are being forgotten, or ignored, in public health policy in the US (and elsewhere) on the COVID-19 response.
(1) Coronavirus antibodies don’t last. Based on a non-peer-reviewed study preprint of a King’s College Study that monitored SARS-CoV-2 antibody levels for three months, the media represents this as new because the researchers who have presented the data failed to provide a thorough representation of past studies – and the media failed to pick up on the reality of what we already know. We’ve known that the antibody response to coronaviruses in humans is shorter than that, say, for human rhinoviruses (the common cold) since 1990.
Here’s the study on coronviruses (1990):
“After preliminary trials, the detailed changes in the concentration of specific circulating and local antibodies were followed in 15 volunteers inoculated with coronavirus 229E. Ten of them, who had significantly lower concentrations of preexisting antibody than the rest, became infected and eight of these developed colds. A limited investigation of circulating lymphocyte populations showed some lymphocytopenia in infected volunteers. In this group, antibody concentrations started to increase 1 week after inoculation and reached a maximum about 1 week later. Thereafter antibody titres slowly declined. Although concentrations were still slightly raised 1 year later, this did not always prevent reinfection when volunteers were then challenged with the homologous virus. However, the period of virus shedding was shorter than before and none developed a cold. All of the uninfected group were infected on re-challenge although they also appeared to show some resistance to disease and in the extent of infection. These results are discussed with reference to natural infections with coronavirus and with other infections, such as rhinovirus infections.“
And here’s the study on rhinoviruses (1989):
“The specific humoral immune response of 17 volunteers to infection with human rhinovirus type 2 (HRV-2) has been measured both by neutralization and by ELISA. Six volunteers who had HRV-2-specific antibodies in either serum or nasal secretions before HRV-2 inoculation were resistant to infection and illness. Of the remaining 11 volunteers who had little pre-existing HRV-2-specific antibody, one was immune but 10 became infected and displayed increases in HRV-2-specific antibodies. These antibodies first increased 1-2 weeks after infection and reached a maximum at 5 weeks. All six resistant volunteers who had high pre-existing antibody and eight of the volunteers who became infected maintained their HRV-2-specific antibody for at least 1 year. At this time they were protected against reinfection. Two volunteers showed decreases in HRV-2-specific antibodies from either serum or nasal secretions. They became infected but not ill after HRV-2 inoculation 1 year later.“
So, people infected with coronaviruses have short-lived active antibodies compared to rhinovirus, but have a mild infection a year later if re-exposed. To be fair to the authors of the study, they referenced the coronavirus study from 1990, as well as length of antibody responses in SARS and MERS. But it’s still a fair question to ask:
Why then are we reading headlines such as
?
The high profile emphasis is followed by proclamations that natural immunity from infections might not prove to be”enough”, begging the question of definition of “enough” – Fauci and others (like Paul Offit) have already presaged that an untested vaccine might only make the infection less severe, and not prevent infection or transmission. So this high emphasis and follow-on claim that natural herd immunity might not be enough is a type of distortion used to convince the public that they may have to wait for a vaccine to save society. Of course.
2. Masks Don’t Really Work Outside of Healthcare Systems.
A meta-analysis on masks concluded that masks should work in the healthcare setting, but the three studies that focused on the utility of masks to protect the wearer outside of the healthcare system? Two of three studies say “no effect” – and the one that is significant is only marginally significant, and oh, also (like all of the other studies) only focused on the ability of masks to protect the wearer.
And, for good measure, N95 does NOT mean they stop 95% of droplets, as incorrectly reported by “Ask Ethan” on Forbes – it means they can block viruses no smaller than 5 microns. SARS-CoV-2 is 30 times smaller than N95.
In a BSL3 laboratory, workers must wear much more effective equipment that an N95 mask, or a handkerchief, or a shirt collar, to block viruses the size of coronaviruses. Clearly we are being socially conditioned to submit to pressure to conform to an agenda to accept the spate of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines as the living Savior of society. Oh, if only that could even be theoretically true. Unfortuantely, CDC, Fauci and apparently FDA also forgot that
“Objective The aim of this study was to compare the efficacy of cloth masks to medical masks in hospital healthcare workers (HCWs). The null hypothesis is that there is no difference between medical masks and cloth masks.
Setting 14 secondary-level/tertiary-level hospitals in Hanoi, Vietnam.
Participants 1607 hospital HCWs aged ≥18 years working full-time in selected high-risk wards.
Intervention Hospital wards were randomised to: medical masks, cloth masks or a control group (usual practice, which included mask wearing). Participants used the mask on every shift for 4 consecutive weeks.
Main outcome measure Clinical respiratory illness (CRI), influenza-like illness (ILI) and laboratory-confirmed respiratory virus infection.
Results The rates of all infection outcomes were highest in the cloth mask arm, with the rate of ILI statistically significantly higher in the cloth mask arm (relative risk (RR)=13.00, 95% CI 1.69 to 100.07) compared with the medical mask arm. Cloth masks also had significantly higher rates of ILI compared with the control arm. An analysis by mask use showed ILI (RR=6.64, 95% CI 1.45 to 28.65) and laboratory-confirmed virus (RR=1.72, 95% CI 1.01 to 2.94) were significantly higher in the cloth masks group compared with the medical masks group. Penetration of cloth masks by particles was almost 97% and medical masks 44%.
Conclusions This study is the first RCT of cloth masks, and the results caution against the use of cloth masks. This is an important finding to inform occupational health and safety. Moisture retention, reuse of cloth masks and poor filtration may result in increased risk of infection. Further research is needed to inform the widespread use of cloth masks globally. However, as a precautionary measure, cloth masks should not be recommended for HCWs, particularly in high-risk situations, and guidelines need to be updated.
Trial registration number Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry: ACTRN12610000887077.”
From Ref #2
“Summary:
Respiratory infection is much higher among healthcare workers wearing cloth masks compared to medical masks, research shows. Cloth masks should not be used by workers in any healthcare setting, authors of the new study say.”
C. R. MacIntyre, H. Seale, T. C. Dung, N. T. Hien, P. T. Nga, A. A. Chughtai, B. Rahman, D. E. Dwyer, Q. Wang. A cluster randomised trial of cloth masks compared with medical masks in healthcare workers. BMJ Open, 2015; 5 (4): e006577 DOI: 10.1136/bmjopen-2014-006577
Even Medpage today published an article that concluded that some politicians are pushing masks for fear mongers, not toward evidence-based medical purposes.
3. Coronavirus Vaccines Cause Pathogenic Priming… and Therefore Require Phase 1 Animal Studies to Detect Disease Enhancement
This has been covered in my blog before as suggested reading, but I’ll put those findings again right here for those expecting more from our regulatory agencies. In March 2020, FDA allowed Fauci, I mean, Moderna, to skip the critical Phase 1 animal studies that led to a halth to human studies for SARS and MERS vaccines. That was a LONG time ago now (5 months). How many times over could Moderna (I mean, Fauci) have conducted the animal studies to detect pathogenic priming by now? Maybe they have! Certainly we would have head of the results if they showed no disease enhancement. Come on, we may be – collectively- stupid, but we’re not dead. Yet.
Immunization with inactivated Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus vaccine leads to lung immunopathology on challenge with live virus.“Lung mononuclear infiltrates occurred in all groups after virus challenge but with increased infiltrates that contained eosinophils and increases in the eosinophil promoting IL-5 and IL-13 cytokines only in the vaccine groups. Inactivated MERS-CoV vaccine appears to carry a hypersensitive-type lung pathology risk from MERS-CoV infection that is similar to that found with inactivated SARS-CoV vaccines from SARS-CoV infection.”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27269431
Vaccine efficacy in senescent mice challenged with recombinant SARS-CoV bearing epidemic and zoonotic spike variants.“VRP-N vaccines not only failed to protect from homologous or heterologous challenge, but resulted in enhanced immunopathology with eosinophilic infiltrates within the lungs of SARS-CoV-challenged mice. VRP-N-induced pathology presented at day 4, peaked around day 7, and persisted through day 14, and was likely mediated by cellular immune responses.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17194199
Immunization with Modified Vaccinia Virus Ankara-Based Recombinant Vaccine against Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Is Associated with Enhanced Hepatitis in Ferrets“Immunized ferrets developed a more rapid and vigorous neutralizing antibody response than control animals after challenge with SARS-CoV; however, they also exhibited strong inflammatory responses in liver tissue.”
Animal Models for SARS and MERS coronaviruses. “The concern that is extrapolated from the FIPV vaccine experience to human SARS-CoV vaccines is whether vaccine recipients will develop more severe disease if they are exposed to or infected with SARS-CoV after neutralizing antibody titers decline. The second concern is whether recipients of a SARSCoV vaccine would be at risk of developing pulmonary immunopathology following infection with an unrelated human coronavirus e.g. 229E, OC43, HKU1 or NL63 that usually causes mild, self limited disease. Although findings from preclinical evaluation have revealed these concerns, studies in animal models may not be able to provide data to confirm or allay these concerns.”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4550498
Lab-Made Coronavirus Triggers Debate“…a study on his team’s efforts to engineer a virus with the surface protein of the SHC014 coronavirus, found in horseshoe bats in China, and the backbone of one that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice. The hybrid virus could infect human airway cells and caused disease in mice…”
There are many other bits of Science that CDC, Fauci, and the FDA have forgotten – such as how to accurately count deaths, how to design an accurate PCR test. And there will no doubt be some science they would like to forget . They seem hell bent on holding society hostage with lock-downs, and mask mandates, and destruction of small businesses, depletion of retirement accounts.
We won’t forget that the disaster is largely man-made, stemming first from CDC’s flawed PCR test, fumbled attempts to contain by early contact tracing, and made much worse by a lock-down that was supposed to last two weeks. We have not forgotten that we never signed up for lock-downs of long duration that destroy our means of making a living, feeding and housing ourselves and our children. But there is a bright light coming out of the tunnel BEFORE the untested vaccines.
A Bit of Science CDC and Fauci Would Like To Ignore
Here’s a bit of Science I want YOU to help make certain NO ONE forgets. Please share Dr. Brownstein’s case series study on his protocol used on 107 COVID-19 patients with zero deaths – and only 1 hospitalization on the core protocol – with every ND, DO, DC, nurse, geriatric specialist, nursing home employee, public health official, friend, neigbor, and family member you know. Share my editorial, too.
If this virus can be so easily treated, why are we destroying America?
Having finally solved the grand monetary policy puzzle, Japan has now moved on to other crucial societal problems, like getting people to feel comfortable using public toilets.
At least, that was the thinking behind Tokyo’s new transparent public toilets: to help ease “toilet anxiety”, according to Forbes.
In Japan, where public toilets are held to a higher standard of cleanliness than most other place around the world, the country’s residents still “harbor a fear that public toilets are dark, dirty, smelly and scary.”
That’s why the non-profit Nippon Foundation has now launched “The Tokyo Toilet Project”, which has asked 16 well known architects to renovate 17 public toilets located in one of the busiest areas of Tokyo, the public parks of Shibuya.
The idea was to apply a design that would make public bathrooms comfortable and accessible to everyone. The Nippon Foundation has a goal “that people will feel comfortable using these public toilets and to foster a spirit of hospitality for the next person.”
Pritzker Prize-winning architect Shigeru Ban is the brain-child behind the transparent restrooms. The smartglass they are built with turns opaque when someone is in them. The Nippon Foundation commented: “There are two concerns with public toilets, especially those located in parks. The first is whether it is clean inside, and the second is that no one is secretly waiting inside.”
“At night, they light up the parks like a beautiful lantern,” the Foundation concluded.
Earth’s largest optical telescope, the Gran Telescopio Canarias, is closed due to COVID-19. Many others have also closed.
Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias
The alarm sounded at around 3 a.m. on April 3. An electrical malfunction had stalled the behemoth South Pole Telescope as it mapped radiation left over from the Big Bang. Astronomers Allen Foster and Geoffrey Chen crawled out of bed and got dressed to shield themselves from the –70 degree Fahrenheit temperatures outside. They then trekked a few thousand feet across the ice to restart the telescope.
The Sun set weeks ago in Antarctica. Daylight won’t return for six months. And, yet, life at the bottom of the planet hasn’t changed much — even as the rest of the world has been turned upside-down. The last flight from the region left on Feb. 15, so there’s no need for social distancing. The 42 “winterovers” still work together. They still eat together. They still share the gym. They even play roller hockey most nights.
And that’s why the South Pole Telescope is one of the last large observatories still monitoring the night sky.
The world’s largest optical telescopes, shown here, have shut down in droves in recent weeks (open sites are in green). The Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory in Texas is the largest optical telescope left observing. Construction has also halted at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory site in Chile.
Astronomy/Roen Kelly
An Astronomy magazine tally has found that more than 100 of Earth’s biggest research telescopes have closed in recent weeks due to the COVID-19 pandemic. What started as a trickle of closures in February and early March has become an almost complete shutdown of observational astronomy. And the closures are unlikely to end soon.
Observatory directors say they could be offline for three to six months — or longer. In many cases, resuming operations will mean inventing new ways of working during a pandemic. And that might not be possible for some instruments that require teams of technicians to maintain and operate. As a result, new astronomical discoveries are expected to come to a crawl.
“If everybody in the world stops observing, then we have a gap in our data that you can’t recover,” says astronomer Steven Janowiecki of the McDonald Observatory in Texas. “This will be a period that we in the astronomy community have no data on what happened.”
Yet these short-term losses aren’t astronomers’ main concern.
They’re accustomed to losing telescope time to bad weather, and they’re just as concerned as everyone else about the risks of coronavirus to their loved ones. So, for now, all that most astronomers can do is sit at home and wait for the storm to clear.
“If we have our first bright supernova in hundreds of years, that would be terrible,” says astronomer John Mulchaey, director of the Carnegie Observatories. “But except for really rare events like that, most of the science will be done next year. The universe is 13.7 billion years old. We can wait a few months.”
The prospects get darker when considering the pandemic’s long-term impacts on astronomy. Experts are already worried that lingering damage to the global economy could derail plans for the next decade of cutting-edge astronomical research.
“Yes, there will be a loss of data for six months or so, but the economic impact may be more substantial in the long run,” says Tony Beasley, director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. “It’s going to be hard to build new telescopes as millions of people are out of work. I suspect the largest impact will be the financial nuclear winter that we’re about to live through.”
Closing the windows on the cosmos
Through interviews and email exchanges with dozens of researchers, administrators, press officers and observatory directors, as well as reviewing a private list circulating among scientists, Astronomy magazine has confirmed more than 120 of Earth’s largest telescopes are now closed as a result of COVID-19.
Many of the shutdowns happened in late March, as astronomy-rich states like Arizona, Hawaii and California issued stay-at-home orders. Nine of the 10 largest optical telescopes in North America are now closed. In Chile, an epicenter of observing, the government placed the entire country under a strict lockdown, shuttering dozens of telescopes. Spain and Italy, two European nations with rich astronomical communities — and a large number of COVID-19 infections — closed their observatories weeks ago.
Even many small telescopes have now closed, as all-out shutdowns were ordered on mountaintops ranging from Hawaii’s Mauna Kea to the Chilean Atacama to the Spanish Canary Islands. Science historians say nothing like this has happened in the modern era of astronomy. Even during the chaos of World War II, telescopes kept observing.
As wartime fears gripped Americans in the 1940s, German-born astronomer Walter Baade was placed under virtual house arrest. As a result, he famously declared Mount Wilson Observatory in California to be his official residence. With the lights of Los Angeles dimmed to avoid enemy bombs, Baade operated the world’s largest telescope in isolation, making groundbreaking discoveries about the cosmos. Among them, Baade’s work revealed multiple populations of stars, which led him to realize that the universe was twice as big as previously thought.
In the decades since, astronomers have built ever-larger telescopes to see fainter and farther-off objects. Instruments have become increasingly complex and specialized, often requiring them to be swapped out multiple times in a single night. Enormous telescope mirrors need regular maintenance. All of this means observatory crews sometimes require dozens of people, ranging from engineers and technicians to observers and astronomers. Most researchers also still physically travel to a telescope to observe, taking them to far-flung places. As a result, major observatories can be like small villages, complete with hotel-style accommodations, cooks and medics.
But although observatories might be remote, few can safely operate during a pandemic.
“Most of our telescopes still work in classical mode. We do have some remote options, but the large fraction of our astronomers still go to the telescopes,” says Mulchaey, who also oversees Las Campanas Observatory in Chile and its Magellan Telescopes. “It’s not as automated as you might think.”
‘You don’t know what you missed’
Some of the most complicated scientific instruments on Earth are the gravitational-wave detectors, which pick up almost imperceptible ripples in space-time created when two massive objects merge. In 2015, the first gravitational-wave detection opened up an entirely new way for astronomers to study the universe. And since then, astronomers have confirmed dozens of these events.
The most well-known facilities, the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) — located in Washington state and Louisiana, both pandemic hot spots — closed on March 27. Virgo, their Italian partner observatory, shut down the same day. (It’s also located near the epicenter of that country’s COVID-19 pandemic.)
More than 1,200 scientists from 18 countries are involved with LIGO. And no other instruments are sensitive enough to detect gravitational waves from colliding black holes and neutron stars like LIGO and Virgo can. Fortunately, the observatories were already near the end of the third observing run, which was set to end April 30.
“You don’t know what you missed,” says LIGO spokesperson Patrick Brady, an astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “We were detecting a binary black hole collision once a week. So, on average, we missed four. But we don’t know how special they would have been.”
The gravitational-wave detectors will now undergo upgrades that will take them offline through at least late 2021 or early 2022. But the pandemic has already delayed preliminary testing for their planned fourth run. And it could prevent future work or even disrupt supply chains, Brady says. So, although it’s still too early to know for sure, astronomy will likely have to wait a couple of years for new gravitational-wave discoveries.
Then there’s the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). Last year, the EHT collaboration released the first-ever image of a black hole. And on April 7, they published another unprecedented image that stares down a black hole’s jet in a galaxy located some 5 billion light-years away. But now, EHT has cancelled its entire observing run for the year — it can only collect data in March and April — due to closures at its partner instruments.
Around the world, only a handful of large optical telescopes remain open.
The Green Bank Observatory, Earth’s largest steerable radio telescope, is still searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, observing everything from galaxies to gas clouds.
The twin Pan-STARRS telescopes on the summit of Hawaii’s Haleakala volcano are still scouting the sky for dangerous incoming asteroids. Both instruments can run without having multiple humans in the same building.
“We are an essential service, funded by NASA, to help protect the Earth from (an) asteroid impact,” says Ken Chambers, director of the Pan-STARRS Observatories in Hawaii. “We will continue that mission as long as we can do so without putting people or equipment at risk.”
The 10-meter Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory in Texas is now operating with just one person in the building.
Marty Harris/McDonald Observatory
The last of large telescopes left open
With observatory domes closed at the world’s newest and best telescopes, a smattering of older, less high-tech instruments are now Earth’s largest operating observatories.
Sporting a relatively modest 6-meter mirror, the biggest optical telescope still working in the Eastern Hemisphere is Russia’s 45-year-old Bolshoi Azimuthal Telescope in the Caucasus Mountains, a spokesperson there confirmed.
And, for the foreseeable future, the largest optical telescope on the planet is now the 10-meter Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) at McDonald Observatory in rural West Texas. Astronomers managed to keep the nearly-25-year-old telescope open thanks to a special research exemption and drastic changes to their operating procedures.
To reduce exposure, just one observer sits in HET’s control room. One person turns things on. And one person swaps instruments multiple times each night, as the telescope switches from observing exoplanets with its Habitable Zone Finder to studying dark energy using its now-poorly-named VIRUS spectrograph. Anyone who doesn’t have to be on site now works from home.
“We don’t have the world’s best observatory site. We’re not on Mauna Kea or anything as spectacular,” says Janowiecki, the HET’s science operations manager. “We don’t have any of the expensive adaptive optics. We don’t even have a 2-axis telescope. That was [intended as] a massive cost savings.”
But, he added, “In this one rare instance, it’s a strength.”
The supervising astronomer of HET now manages Earth’s current largest telescope from a few old computer monitors he found in storage and set up on a foldout card table in his West Texas guest bedroom.
Like the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, the handful of remaining observatories run on skeleton crews or are entirely robotic. And all of the telescope managers interviewed for this story emphasized that even if they’re open now, they won’t be able to perform repairs if something breaks, making it unclear how long they could continue operating in the current environment.
The 48-inch Samual Oschin Telescope is the workhorse of the Zwicky Transient Facility at Palomar Observatory in Southern California.
Palomar/Caltech
‘We will miss some objects’
The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) utilizes the robotic, 48-inch Samual Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory in Southern California to produce nightly maps of the northern sky. And, thanks to automation, it remains open.
The so-called “discovery engine” searches for new supernovas and other momentary events thanks to computers back at Caltech that compare each new map with the old ones. When the software finds something, it triggers an automatic alert to telescopes around the world. Last week, it sent out notifications on multiple potentially new supernovas.
Similarly, the telescopes that make up the Catalina Sky Survey, based at Arizona’s Mount Lemmon, are still searching the heavens for asteroids. In just the past week, they found more than 50 near-Earth asteroids — none of them dangerous.
Another small group of robotic telescopes, the international Las Cumbres Observatory network, has likewise managed to stay open, albeit with fewer sites than before. In recent weeks, their telescopes have followed up on unexpected astronomical events ranging from asteroids to supernovas.
“We are fortunate to still be keeping an eye on potential new discoveries,” says Las Cumbres Observatory director Lisa Storrie-Lombardi.
But, overall, there are just fewer telescopes available to catch and confirm new objects that appear in our night sky, which means fewer discoveries will be made.
Chambers, the Pan-STARRS telescope director, says his team has been forced to do their own follow-ups as they find new asteroids and supernovas. “This will mean we make fewer discoveries, and that we will miss some objects that we would have found in normal times,” he says.
NASA’s DART spacecraft is scheduled to launch in 2021 on a mission to visit the binary asteroid Didymos. Astronomers need additional observations to help plot the course.
NASA/JHUAPL
‘It’s stressing them out’
Astronomer Cristina Thomas of Northern Arizona University studies asteroids. She was the last observer to use the 4.3-meter Lowell Discovery Telescope before it closed March 31 under Arizona’s stay-at-home order.
Thomas warns that, in the short term, graduate students could bear the brunt of the lost science. Veteran astronomers typically have a backlog of data just waiting for them to analyze. But Ph.D. students are often starved for data they need to collect in order to graduate on time.
“It’s stressing them out in a way that it doesn’t for me. We’re used to building in a night or so for clouds,” Thomas says. “If this goes on for months, this could put [graduate students] pretty far behind.”
One of Thomas’ students was set to have observations collected for their dissertation by SOFIA, NASA’s airborne observatory. But the flying telescope is currently grounded in California, leaving it unclear when the student will be able to complete their research. And even when astronomy picks back up, everyone will be reapplying for telescope time at once.
But the damage isn’t only limited to graduate students. An extended period of observatory downtime could also have an impact on Thomas’ own research. Later this year, she’s scheduled to observe Didymos, a binary asteroid that NASA plans to visit in 2021. Those observations are supposed to help chart the course of the mission.
“The big question for us is: ‘When are we going to be able to observe again?’” Thomas says. “If it’s a few months, we’ll be able to get back to normal. If it ends up being much longer, we’re going to start missing major opportunities.”
The Keck Observatory telescopes in Hawaii use high-tech adaptive optics equipment that changes their mirrors’ shape 1,000 times per second to counter the twinkling caused by Earth’s atmosphere. Keck instruments also need to be chilled below freezing to reduce noise. If the warm up, cooling them down can take days or weeks.
W. M. Keck Observatory/Andrew Richard Hara
Can’t just flip a switch
The same qualities that brought observational astronomy to a standstill in the era of social distancing will also make it tough to turn the telescopes back on until the pandemic has completely passed. So, even after the stay-at-home orders lift, some observatories may not find it safe to resume regular operations. They’ll have to find new ways to work as a team in tight spaces.
“We are just starting to think about these problems now ourselves,” says Caltech Optical Observatories deputy director Andy Boden, who also helps allocate observing time on the Keck Observatory telescopes in Hawaii. “There are aspects of telescope operations that really do put people in shared spaces, and that’s going to be a difficult problem to deal with as we come out of our current orders.”
Astronomers say they’re confident they can find solutions. But it will take time. Tony Beasley, the NRAO director, says his team is already working around a long list of what they’re now calling “VSDs,” or violation of social distancing problems. Their workarounds are typically finding ways to have one person do something that an entire team used to do.
Beasley’s research center operates the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, as well as the Very Large Array in New Mexico and the global Very Long Baseline Array — all of which are still observing, thanks to remote operations and a reimagined workflow.
Although the new workflow is not as efficient as it was in the past, so far there haven’t been any problems that couldn’t be solved. However, Beasley says some work eventually may require the use of personal protective equipment for people who must work in the same room. And he says they can’t ethically use such gear while hospitals are in short supply.
But Beasley and others think interesting and valuable lessons could still come out of the catastrophe.
“There’s always been kind of a sense that you had to be in the building, and you’ve got to stare the other people down in the meeting,” he says. “In the space of a month, I think everyone is surprised at how effective they can be remotely. As we get better at this over the next six months or something, I think there will be parts where we won’t go back to some of the work processes from before.”
Modern-day cathedrals
Despite best efforts and optimistic outlooks, some things will remain outside astronomers’ control.
Right now, researchers are completing the 2020 Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey, a kind of scientific census. The guiding document sets priorities and recommends where money should be spent over the next 10 years. NASA and Congress take its recommendations to heart when deciding which projects get funded. Until recent weeks, the economy had been strong and astronomers had hoped for a decade of new robotic explorers, larger telescopes, and getting serious about defending Earth from asteroids.
Engineers prep NASA’s Mars InSight lander for launch to the Red Planet. It is currently stationed on Mars investigating the planet’s deep interior.
(Credit: NASA)
“Many of NASA’s most important activities — from Mars exploration to studying extrasolar planets to understanding the cosmos — are centuries-long projects, the modern version of the construction of the great medieval cathedrals,” Princeton University astrophysicist David Spergel told the website SpaceNews.com last year as the process got underway. “The decadal surveys provide blueprints for constructing these cathedrals, and NASA science has thrived by being guided by these plans.”
However, many experts are predicting the COVID-19 pandemic will send the U.S. into a recession; some economists say job losses could rival those seen during the Great Depression.
If that happens, policymakers could cut the funding needed to construct these cathedrals of modern science — even after a crisis has us calling on scientists to save society.
A perhaps even more high-profile case allegedly occurred in the mid-1940s, when cryptozoologist Don Davis was on a childhood Boy Scout camping trip to Tonto Creek, near Payson, Arizona. As they were sleeping in their tents, something out in the dark shrieked to wake them with a start, after which they could hear rustling and shuffling as if someone were rummaging through the campsite and looking through their gear. At the same time, the entire area was hit by a pungent odor that permeated the air and made some of them gag. When David looked outside of the tent, he says he was confronted with the sight of a creature the likes of which he had never seen before or since. He explains:
Another recent sighting was given to the site 
