These are excerpts of July 2020 articles. For a quick sense of information and faster summary just read the red marked texted.
My primary source is the extremely well researched RFK jr.’s “Children Health Defense” organization. The CHD is suffering some severe censorship on social media because they are exposing government/corporate media inconsistencies, distortions and censored facts about the Covid pandemic!
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2020-07-28 COVID-19’s Class War The pandemic is exposing the racial fault lines that divide our society. More African American and Hispanic people are hospitalized than Anglos, and more people of color die from COVID-19 in every age group as a percentage of their respective populations. https://prospect.org/coronavirus/covid-19-class-war-death-rates-income/
2020-07-18 Did Covid-19 Come From a Lab? Andrew Kimbrell, founder of the Center for Food Safety, to discuss the dangers of genetically engineered viruses and the possibility that COVID-19 escaped from a lab. “We can’t stop natural pandemics from happening in nature. That’s going to happen. But we can stop pandemics that originated in the laboratories around the world, because people are deliberately creating them in laboratories.” https://www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/did-covid-19-come-from-a-lab/
2020-07-18 Trump and Pence and others, systematically undermining the efforts of our experts to bring the pandemic under control “Unlike other countries, we are not allowing federal experts in public health and medicine to lead the response. In fact, not only are we not letting them lead the response, we have our leaders, Trump and Pence and others, systematically undermining the efforts of our experts to bring the pandemic under control.” “There’s a clear need for Trump and Pence to step aside. And turn over the reins of control of the federal response to the pandemic immediately and if that doesn’t happen soon things that are bordering on catastrophic will become catastrophic.” https://www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/did-covid-19-come-from-a-lab/
2020-07-16 COVID-19: Why Laos, Vietnam & China Have Beaten the Virus and India, Brazil and the US Have Not Vijay Prashad explores the differences between the pandemic responses of a few countries with socialist governments and others in the capitalist order.
But countries like Laos, Vietnam, Cuba, and Venezuela face severe challenges, even as they have largely been able to contain the virus. Cuba and Venezuela remain threatened by a callous sanctions program set in place by the United States; they cannot easily get access to medical supplies or easily pay for them. A government official from Laos told me, “We defeated the virus crisis. Now we are going to be defeated by the debt crisis, which we did not create.” This year Laos will have to pay $900 million to service its external debt; its total foreign exchange holdings amount to under $1 billion. The coronavirus recession, absent the universal cancellation of debt, has produced a serious challenge to these socialist governments who have been able to valiantly manage the pandemic. A call for debt cancellation in this context is a matter of life and death. This is why it is a key part of the “Ten-Point Agenda for the Global South After COVID-19.” https://consortiumnews.com/2020/07/16/covid-19-why-laos-vietnam-china-have-beaten-the-virus-and-india-brazil-and-the-us-have-not/
2020-07-16 Laos Has Tackled COVID-19, But It Is Drowning in Debt to International Finance On June 11, Laos (Lao People’s Democratic Republic)—a country of 7 million in Southeast Asia—said it had temporarily prevailed over COVID-19. There were no new cases of COVID-19 in Laos since April 12 (93 days of no new cases as of July 14). There have been no deaths from COVID-19 in Laos.
Laos is a landlocked country, surrounded by the People’s Republic of China, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand, and Cambodia. It shares a 423-kilometer border with China, across which traders and tourists routinely travel. Nonetheless, Laos—like its neighbor Vietnam—has had no deaths from COVID-19. Laos has been particular about the possibility of transmission through travelers who have crossed from neighboring countries (which is why they are being held in quarantine centers for two weeks).
The Vientiane Times credited the lack of cases in Laos to the rigorous scanning and testing done at ports of entry and the quarantines imposed on those who entered the country. Even those who showed no symptoms when they entered Laos were told to go into self-imposed quarantine for two weeks. Showing an abundance of caution, on March 9, the government declared that celebrations of Lao New Year (April 13-15) would be canceled.
“Poverty in Laos will be exacerbated because large numbers of people have been laid off from their jobs.” Her ministry “reported recently that the unemployment rate had surged from the average of 2 percent to 25 percent at present,” according to the Vientiane Times. The World Bank noted that while Laos has “so far avoided a health crisis,” it has not been “immune from the global economic downturn.” Growth rates, which had been estimated before the pandemic to be secure at 7 percent, will collapse to near zero as a consequence of the global coronavirus recession. Most terrifyingly, this will mean that Laos, which had a relatively stable economy, will slip into debt and chaos. “We defeated the virus crisis,” a government official told me. “Now we are going to be defeated by the debt crisis, which we did not create.” https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/16/laos-has-tackled-covid-19-but-it-is-drowning-in-debt-to-international-finance/
2020-07-09 Pandemic failure or convenient scapegoat: How did WHO get here? On April 7, the number of reported deaths in the United States due to COVID-19 reached 12,757—surpassing the CDC’s median estimate of 12,469 deaths from the 2009 Swine Flu pandemic, during Barack Obama’s administration.
That same day, the US president began attacking the World Health Organization for failing to contain the coronavirus pandemic. A week later, Trump declared a freeze on US funding for WHO, pending a White House investigation into its handling of the outbreak. On July 7, the Trump administration formally notified the UN that the United States would withdraw from the WHO.
Other WHO members and leading biosecurity experts have called for a more thorough and immediate forensic investigation of the pandemic’s origins. WHO announced on July 7 that it will send a team of experts to China to begin preparations for a mission to identify how the novel coronavirus made the jump to humans—but did not specify a time frame for that mission. No matter when an independent forensic investigation gets underway (if that ever happens), the questions of how the pandemic began and why it wasn’t quashed in infancy may take years to answer.
WHO had the job of being the world’s alarm system for the coronavirus outbreak. But WHO was established as and remains an organization whose members are sovereign nations. when the most powerful of WHO members, the United States of America, sternly turns around and points the finger of blame at WHO—and, in no small regard, at itself?
In addition to recent regulation and structural reforms, new endeavors like WHO’s R&D Blueprint and modern surveillance mechanisms like the Epidemic Intelligence Open Source system (which first alerted WHO to the Wuhan outbreak at the end of December) have helped modernize and accelerate how WHO and the world reacts to emergent threats. But these innovations can do little to overcome the delayed or inadequate action of member states or the funding gaps enforced by those states. https://thebulletin.org/2020/07/pandemic-failure-or-convenient-scapegoat-how-did-who-get-here/
2020-07-07 Trump Owns the COVID-19 Catastrophe The president and congressional Republicans continue to ramp up the crisis. The economy isn’t roaring back. Just over half of working-age Americans have jobs now, the lowest ratio in over 70 years. What’s roaring back is COVID-19. Until it’s tamed, the economy doesn’t stand a chance.
The surge is occurring because America reopened before COVID-19 was contained. Trump was so intent on having a good economy by Election Day that he resisted doing what was necessary to contain the virus. He left everything to governors and local officials, then warned that the “cure” of closing the economy was “worse than the disease.” Trump even called on citizens to “liberate” their states from public health restrictions. https://prospect.org/coronavirus/trump-owns-covid-19/
2020-07-03 COVID-19 REPORT | Temporary worker at meat processing plant tests positive for Covid-19 “The University of Illinois has conducted weekly environmental sampling throughout the facility. Every sample has been negative for SARS-CoV2. Pre-employment COVID screening has been ongoing since late May, and the preventative measures implemented in April remain in place,” the company statement said. https://www.rantoulpress.com/coronavirus/covid-19-report-temporary-worker-at-meat-processing-plant-tests-positive-for-covid-19/article_39ed23b4-bd7a-11ea-ae5e-fbc85e631673.html
2020-07-01 A pandemic of bad science Compared to public health crises of the recent past, there has been a distinct change in how science is communicated to the public. Experts no longer control the narrative through trusted outlets, and, accurate or not, social media allows anyone to craft their own narrative about science and publish it to an audience of millions. https://thebulletin.org/premium/2020-07/a-pandemic-of-bad-science/
2020-07-01 Assessing the US government response to the coronavirus Despite its spread to countries all over the world and hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide, we are likely still in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. The progression of the disease shows little sign that the worst is over. Estimates from a March 2020 study done by the Imperial College of London highlighted that the United States could suffer 2.2 million deaths assuming no interventions.
Despite these assessments, the federal response has been tepid and inconsistent; it has deservedly become a target. Consider that early in the outbreak, US companies were selling equipment to China that would be critical for fighting the pandemic. Yet only weeks later, President Donald Trump was invoking the Defense Production Act to control the distribution of vital equipment and compel companies to prioritize the government’s requirements over those of other clients. https://thebulletin.org/premium/2020-07/assessing-the-us-government-response-to-the-coronavirus/
2020-07-00 What We Need to Combat Pandemics “Clearly humanity shouldn’t start reacting to a pandemic when it’s already underway. Let’s stop the outbreaks we can’t handle from emerging in the first place.”.
The innovations we need to stop pandemics from emerging in the first place are not to be found in the biomedical sciences but in the social sciences. The only solutions that will allow our long-term survival will require substantial, meaningful, social change in the way we produce and distribute and consume goods and services. https://againstthecurrent.org/atc207/pandemic-combatting/
2020-07-00 Science, Politics and the Pandemic A whole bunch of these are viruses that affect us. And to get right to the immunology of it and why it affects us, and why it affects mainly older people, is that our immune systems have evolved — that is, in all of the animal species — before trains, planes and cars.
The virus itself appears to first inhabit mainly the nasal passages in the back of what’s called the pharynx: the throat and then going down. It then really becomes lethal when it spreads to the substance of the lungs. It goes not only through the tubes that lead to the lungs, but also to the air passages — tiny places where oxygen gets exchanged and CO2 gets out. It hits those cells with a vengeance, and it starts the infection. https://againstthecurrent.org/atc207/pandemic-sciencepolitics/
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Coronavirus Covid-19 Research History – Index
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