Schneider Shorts of 30 July 2021: shitty antivaxxery, innovative cancer cures, the REAL cause of global warming, Sputnik V goes over 100%, journalists discover the new Galileo reincarnation, and don’t you also just hate those medicinal regulatory authorities?
Table of Discontent
COVID-19
- More trouble for Proxalutamide Fraudsters
- Ivermectin, Antivaxxery, and Shit
- Stöcker Vaccine for Antivaxxers
- Lab Leak Theory updates
Science Breakthroughs
- Harvard Galileo Bakes Cake for Aliens
- Susogenic Global Warming
- Magnetic Helmet Cures Cancer
- Cancer Wormhole: AKT now!
News in Brief
COVID-19
More trouble for Proxalutamide Fraudsters
It’s so unfair. Just when the proxalutamide scamming quacks Flavio Cadegiani, Arie Zimerman, Andy Goren et al thought they fully restored the credibility of their obviously illegal and falsified proxalutamide clinical trials, and succeeded to dismiss the alarm about the horrendous death rates there, all thanks to publishing their results in world’s bestest science outlet, Frontiers… Disaster struck.
Their own sponsor, the Chinese company Kintor (which sells proxalutamide) distanced itself from these crooks. See in this regard a comment by Jose Galucci-Neto here, and here is the relevant Globo reporting:
“Clinical studies carried out in Amazonas on the use of proxalutamide, the “new chloroquine” advertised by President Jair Bolsonaro, were excluded by the manufacturer of the substance from the reference research list presented in the authorization request made to the National Health Surveillance Agency (Anvisa) for a new research, approved last week. […]
The exclusion of Amazonas data in the request made to Anvisa represents a change in Kintor’s own strategy. The developer of proxalutamide is a US partner of Applied Technology, which registered, planned and sponsored the study among patients from the Samel hospital network. The head of the study, Flavio Cadegiani, is the company’s clinical director.
After a series of blog posts showed the suspicions that irregularities in the Amazonian study aroused in the scientific community, the Chinese pharmaceutical sought to approach other research centers, like Unifesp, and now it seeks to dissociate its image from the initial researchers.
In addition to the high number of deaths found in the study, other inconsistencies were identified not only by researchers, but also by Conep.”
The Anvisa statement announces to consider only the ongoing clinical trials in China and states regarding those by Cadegiani et al:
“In the documentation presented to Anvisa, a study conducted in Brazil for Covid-19 (NCT NCT044464290) by the initiative of independent researchers was cited, whose data were not made available. The Agency was also told that a study in critically ill patients was ongoing (NCT04738802), but no report or results were presented.
These studies were not considered for Anvisa’s consent for the clinical research to be carried out and also cannot be submitted for the purpose of eventual drug registration, as these are studies whose data are not subject to regulatory assessment.”
More lies were exposed: it also turned out that Cadegiani’s and Zimerman’s TratoCov COVID-19 diagnostic app was not hacked at all, as Brazil’s health minister claimed. The app worked exactly as designed, diagnosing everyone with “any two symptoms“, such as headache and nausea with the “probable diagnosis of covid-19“. The victims were then automatically prescribed with a combo of chloroquine, hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, azithromycin, doxycycline, zinc and dexamethasone.
This drug combination is similar to the “standard care” protocol of Cadegiani’s and Zimerman’s proxalutamide control arm, and explains the murderous mortality of 50% therein.
Ivermectin, Antivaxxery, and Shit
Mail for For Better Science. Somehow I ended up on the mailing lists of various university PR offices, sending me unsolicited press releases. This one, from some commercial PR agent, did pique my interest. Because it peddles dangerous COVID-19 quackery:
“Hi there,
I’m working with renowned gastroenterologist Dr. Sabine Hazan, creator of ProgenaBiome, a state-of-the-art genetic research sequencing laboratory. She has found remarkable success in treating COVID-19 patients using Ivermectin, in conjunction with Zinc and Vitamin C supplements.
Dr. Hazan has spent her career sequencing the human gut microbiome, looking for microbial answers to digestive and other disorders. When the COVID-19 outbreak began, Hazan used her resources to seek a remedy. Thus far, she has treated hundreds of patients with COVID.
Please let me know if you’re interested in speaking with her about this story. We can also connect you with patients to discuss their experiences with this treatment.”
No thanks.
But I did click on that link in the email to learn about Dr Hazan. Oh my. She is based in California, and owns two companies, Ventura Clinical Trials (where she lists all the Big Pharma as her clients) and another business named ProgenaBiome™ , which is mostly about shit. Because Hazan claims to be able to cure Crohn disease with stool transplants.
And of course, she aims to cure autism with stool transplants also:
“She conducted extensive research, which led her to Dr. Sydney Finegold, an infectious disease specialist, who was also focused on the microbiome and its relationship to disease, particularly Autism. He told her that the answer lies in the bacteria of the gut,”
Incidentally, also Andrew Wakefield started by connecting the Crohn disease to autism, and then to MMR vaccines.
No, no, I would never compare Dr Hazan to Wakefield. She is never an antivaxxer!
Here is Dr Hazan suggesting to avoid MMR, DPT, polio and other vaccines for children and consider stool transplant instead. Also for COVID-19 apparently.
Maybe Dr Hazan didn’t produce enough shit to treat all her COVID-19 patients? Is this why she went for ivermectin? Don’t forget her teachings: “VACCINES ARE NOT WORKING as well as we thought!“
In this regard, I found this press release where Hazan hinted to have also tried hydroxychloroquine “with remarkable success“, and thisrecent preprint on ivermectin:
Sabine Hazan, Sonya Dave, Anoja W. Gunaratne, Sibasish Dolai, Robert L Clancy, Peter A. McCullough, Thomas J. Borody Effectiveness of Ivermectin-Based Multidrug Therapy in Severe Hypoxic Ambulatory COVID-19 Patients medRxiv (2021) doi: 10.1101/2021.07.06.21259924
The preprint declares:
“Ivermectin is a safe, inexpensive and effective early COVID-19 treatment validated in 20+ RCTs. Having developed combination therapies for Helicobacter pylori, we tested various COVID-19 combinations and describe the most effective. In 24 consecutive COVID-19 subjects with high risk features, hypoxia and untreated moderate-severe symptoms averaging 9 days, we trialed this novel combination comprising ivermectin, doxycycline, zinc, and Vitamins D and C. It was highly effective.”
The clinical trial NCT04949230 was registered as retrospective observational trial with “no intervention”, operated by Hazan’s company ProgenaBiome. The preprint claims these patients were the excluded leftovers from ProgenaBiome’s other clinical trial NCT04482686 which had in total just thirty participants with mild COVID-19 (“identified from patients referred by physicians, or word-of-mouth“). Allegedly, the retrospective observational NCT04949230 trial had 300 participants. In reality, it was just 24, and with intervention: all were treated with ivermectin, plus the “standard care” of zinc and vitamins C and D (“made in America“). The inclusion criteria into that retrospective trial was: “Recovery from COVID-19“, meaning those who did not recover were excluded. No wonder all chosen trial participants did great, thanks to ivermectin!
Since the enterprising investigators had no control arm, they invented one: “a synthetic control arm” which “was calculated from the public CDC database of COVID-19 subjects [21]“. Basically, ivermectin miracle was proven by comparing “our treated group arm survival” with 24 non-hospitalised patients “to the control group survival rate in the general population” of over 313,805 patients of “real-world care“.
All this pseudoscientific garbage is possible because America is such a free country that every doctor is free to prescribe to their clueless patients any registered drug off-label for any random indication, purpose or disease. The opioid epidemic was a great American success story, and now COVID-19 became a prescription bonanza for that certain kind of greedy US doctors, in this regard Pierre Kory became the guru of ivermectin quackery. Such private and unapproved clinical trials with off-label drugs is also what Vovka Zelenko was allowed to do with hydroxychloroquine, and this is what David Seftel now does with the anti-depressant fluvoxamine. In USA, this is not just perfectly legal, it’s endorsed an American inventor spirit and plucky entrepreneurship.
Stöcker Vaccine for Antivaxxers
Winfried Stöcker, the entrepreneur with highly socially conservative views, founder of the German diagnostics company Euroimmun (sold recently to Perkin Elmer), is currently testing how far above the law billionaires like himself are. Stöcker designed his own COVID-19 vaccine, made from recombinant coronavirus protein, and tested it on himself, his wife and children and some other volunteers. He then engaged as his lawyer a German liberal-right-wing MP Wolfgang Kubicki (who is the vice president of the Bundestag) to argue that Stöcker’s experiments were actually compassionate use and required no ethics approvals.
Stöcker even posted the recipe for the recombinant vaccine on his blog, inviting doctors to order his freeze-dried protein and mix the vaccine themselves. The crazy bit is that it is the German antivaxxers and Querdenker who are the biggest fans of the Stöcker vaccine, there were also local doctors who started to jab people with it, while denouncing the mRNA vaccines as unsafe. One such GP in the Görlitz area (where Stöcker incidentally owns a huge shopping mall) is “vaccinating” people in her private practice with “Stöcker” (the vaccine) and was quoted: “I have a list of at least 150 interested parties, including 50 Euroimmun employees“.
Apparently, Stöcker now himself opened a vaccination centre in the German state of Saxony. The public news channel MDR reports:
“The public prosecutor’s office in Görlitz is investigating against unknown persons because of an illegal vaccination campaign in Schönau-Berzdorf. As a spokesman for the public prosecutor’s office told MDR SACHSEN, they are investigating a violation of the Medicines Act. It is also about whether the vaccination campaign is an act of bodily harm. The criminal police took over the investigation.
A few days ago, up to 200 people in the Schönau-Berzdorf district of Kiesdorf were injected with an unapproved corona vaccine. It is said to be the vaccine by Winfried Stöcker, the founder of the Euroimmun company. Investigations against Winfried Stöcker are already pending at the Lübeck public prosecutor’s office. There are several reports against the doctor for a violation of the Medicines Act.”
I had the honour to exchange emails with Stöcker before, because his own research with Euroimmun, with him as coauthor, was flagged by Elisabeth Bik for strange image irregularities. What with Stöcker’s attitude to research integrity and medical ethics, I take the risk of being sued by Kubicki, and state here that I don’t not trust the Stöcker vaccine at all.
Lab Leak Theory
WHO and its Secretary General politely asked China to allow another investigation into the origins of COVID-19 which would involve actual access to Wuhan virology research facilities, their raw data and lab records, as well as to disappeared virus databases. Chinese government predictably exploded, told WHO and everyone else to go f*** themselves, and demanded to investigate Fort Detrick in Maryland, USA, instead as the REAL source for COVID-19.
Now the EU Commissioner for Science Mariya Gabriel, her Australian and Japanese colleagues and the US presidential science advisor Eric Lander join the WHO request.
Funny how just month ago most journalists and science experts denounced lab leak as a conspiracy theory. Only this spring, the science has spoken from the authority of the previous WHO-China investigation (led by Peter Daszak and Chinese Communist Party officials), which then suggested COVID-19 may have emerged in Southeast Asia outside of China or even in Europe, from where it was smuggled to China via frozen food.
Science Breakthroughs
Harvard Galileo bakes cake for aliens
A nutty professor claims are aliens are out there, writes an unhinged book about the Oumuamua asteroid being actually an alien spaceship, and instead of laughing and pointing fingers he
a) gets $2 million in cash from billionaire donors for his “Galileo” project to seek aliens,
2) all newspapers write about this travesty as if it is a perfectly scientific breakthrough and Loeb himself is a genius.
All because Avi Loeb is full professor of astronomy in Harvard. He got his endowed chair in 2012 from the Baird family Foundation, which owns an investment bank and claims to be committed with its charity to “Inclusion & Diversity“. As a white heterosexual male Loeb is still the perfect fit, because who be more diverse than Loeb’s extraterrestrial visitors?
When I first read about that new stint of his in Jerusalem Post, I thought, oh well, that one is a trash newspaper serving ghost-written press releases as “Israeli Scientists” jokes to those less-discerning among the American Jewish audience.
But there was also a statement on the Galileo Project under the heading of the Harvard University:
“Given the recently discovered abundance of Earth-Sun systems, the Galileo Project is dedicated to the proposition that humans can no longer ignore the possible existence of Extraterrestrial Technological Civilizations (ETCs), and that science should not dogmatically reject potential extraterrestrial explanations because of social stigma or cultural preferences, factors which are not conducive to the scientific method of unbiased, empirical inquiry. We now must ‘dare to look through new telescopes’, both literally and figuratively.”
This is how Loeb got the cash, according to Jerusalem Post:
“Earlier this year, Loeb published his book on ‘Oumuamua and was featured in articles and on television and podcasts. And this brought the attention of donors.“A few weeks ago, a few people I had never met before came up to me and offered me funding with no questions asked,” Loeb recounted.“I first heard through Harvard that I suddenly had a new research fund. I never heard of the donors, but they funded me because they heard about my research,” he said. “Then a multi-billionaire came to me and asked about my research.”He had over $1 million in funds after a week, and could now finally do what he wanted: gather data himself.”
It wasn’t just that silly Jerusalem Post then. All the big and allegedly serious media outlets picked it up. NONE of them was sceptical, sarcastic or suspicious that Loeb is both a looney and full of crap. USA Today quoted the genius:
“Those military personnel and politicians that talk about these Unidentified Aerial Phenomena were not trained by scientists, and it’s sort of like asking the plumber to bake you a cake,” Loeb told USA TODAY. “We should not ask them to figure out what objects in the sky are all about. That’s the job of scientists.“
The team, which includes professors from Princeton, Cambridge and Stockholm universities, will study existing and future astronomical surveys along with artificial intelligence to identify interstellar objects that defy current scientific explanations.
Gosh, Harvard, Princeton, Cambridge and did I hear Stockholm, where the Nobel Prize lives? No wonder science journalists are so excited, even The Guardian joined the celebration. So now Loeb is making a cake in case aliens drop by to visit.
It will be a very expensive cake though. Scientific American informs us:
“It is currently backed by four affluent individuals who mainly made their money developing industrial equipment for chemistry applications, among them chemist and entrepreneur Frank H. Laukien. Loeb says the funding comes with “no strings attached in a way that allows me complete freedom,” although each of the supporters sits on a philanthropic advisory board for Galileo.”
These four member donors, next to Laukien, are Eugene Jhong, Vinny Jain
and William A. Linton, founder and CEO of the biotech company Promega.
The Boston Globe quotes Loeb, who as every Israeli, used to serve in the Army:
“In the military, there is a saying: ‘If you’re a good soldier, you put your body on the barbed-wire so that others can pass over it,’” he said in 2019. “I’m willing to put my body on the barbed wire.”
What the journalists have not considered: isn’t the fact that Loeb’s superhuman intelligence a sign of his own extraterrestrial origin? You wouldn’t expect a plumber to find a cake in the toilet, and you wouldn’t expect a mortal human to find aliens where others failed.
Susogenic Global Warming
If you are concerned about the beginning anthropogenic climate change disaster and your own carbon footprint: don’t fret! It’s not our fault, it’s the pigs. Yes, we humans innocently burning a wee bit of fossil fuels have been wrongly blaming ourselves all these decades for warming up the planet, while all the time it was the wild swine digging up the mud with their snouts. All that excessive CO2 in the atmosphere? Pigs did it. Science has spoken.
Here the study from University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia:
Christopher J. O’Bryan, Nicholas R. Patton, Jim Hone, Jesse S. Lewis, Violeta Berdejo-Espinola, Derek R. Risch, Matthew H. Holden, Eve McDonald-Madden Unrecognized threat to global soil carbon by a widespread invasive species Global Change Biology (2021) https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.15769
They find the pigs’ “soil disturbance results in median emissions of 4.9 million metric tonnes (MMT) CO2 per year (equivalent to 1.1 million passenger vehicles or 0.4% of annual emissions from land use, land-use change, and forestry“. In its coverage, Wired warns:
“according to the team’s model, Oceania accounts for 60 percent of total global emissions driven by rooting wild pigs.”
No, it does not matter that Australia has one of the highest CO2 footprints per capita. No, it is not an issue that Australia is by far the world’s biggest exporter of coal (almost 40%), the most polluting fuel of all. It’s the pigs.
What to do, what to do? Even the scholars behind the thesis are desperate, as Wired quoted:
““If we get in a helicopter and we go shoot pigs, or we set traps, we build fences, that causes emissions,” says O’Bryan. “So we have to account for these trade-offs.”
Magnetic Helmet Cures Cancer
A press release from Texas:
“Houston Methodist Neurological Institute researchers from the department of neurosurgery shrunk a deadly glioblastoma tumor by more than a third using a helmet generating a noninvasive oscillating magnetic field that the patient wore on his head while administering the therapy in his own home. The 53-year-old patient died from an unrelated injury about a month into the treatment, but during that short time, 31% of the tumor mass disappeared. The autopsy of his brain confirmed the rapid response to the treatment.”
David S. Baskin , Martyn A. Sharpe , Lisa Nguyen , Santosh A. Helekar Case Report: End-Stage Recurrent Glioblastoma Treated With a New Noninvasive Non-Contact Oncomagnetic Device Frontiers in Oncology (2021) doi: 10.3389/fonc.2021.708017
According to the study, published in world’s most leading and bestest science outlet, Frontiers, the patient died from a head trauma from a fall: “Whether the fall was related to the treatment in any way is uncertain. It is worth noting, however, that the patient had experienced several falls before initiation of treatment.“
Prior to that, his brain tumour was treated under compassionate use with the Optune™ “Oncomagnetic device”, and this patient was the only one to ever receive this therapy. The press release explains:
“The treatment consisted of intermittent application of an oscillating magnetic field generated by rotating permanent magnets in a specific frequency profile and timing pattern.[…] The Oncomagnetic Device looks deceptively simple: three oncoscillators securely attached to a helmet and connected to a microprocessor-based electronic controller operated by a rechargeable battery, an invention by case study co-author Dr. Santosh Helekar. During the patient’s five weeks of treatment, the magnetic therapy was well-tolerated and the tumor mass and volume shrunk by nearly a third, with shrinkage appearing to correlate with the treatment dose.”
Glioblastoma is a thing of the past from now on, and probably all other cancers if you manage to stick the afflicted body part into that magnetic helmet:
““Imagine treating brain cancer without radiation therapy or chemotherapy,” said Baskin. “Our results in the laboratory and with this patient open a new world of non-invasive and nontoxic therapy for brain cancer, with many exciting possibilities for the future.”
Cancer Wormhole
Let’s do the Time Warp Again! A bunch of cancer researchers at Cedars Sinai has been sucked into a time wormhole back into 1990ies where they discovered that AKT enzyme is important in cancer and even developed a patented AKT blocker (called MS21) as a cure for various cancers. A message was sent back, pardon forward into 2021, in the form of a press release:
“Our study lays a solid foundation for the clinical development of an AKT degrader for the treatment of human cancers with certain gene mutations,” said Ramon Parsons, MD, PhD, Director of The Tisch Cancer Institute and Ward-Coleman Chair in Cancer Research and Chair of Oncological Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “Examination of 44,000 human cancers identified that 19 percent of tumors have at least one of these mutations, suggesting that a large population of cancer patients could benefit from therapy with an AKT degrader such as MS21.“
MS21 was tested in human cancer-derived cell lines, which are models used in laboratories to study the efficacy of cancer therapies. Mount Sinai is looking to develop MS21 with an industry partner to open clinical trials for patients.”
This is the relevant peer reviewed paper:
Jia Xu , Xufen Yu , Tiphaine C Martin , Ankita Bansal , Kakit Cheung , Abigail Lubin , Elias Stratikopoulos , Kaitlyn M Cahuzac , Li Wang , Ling Xie , Royce Zhou , Yudao Shen , Xuewei Wu , Shen Yao , Ruifang Qiao , Poulikos I Poulikakos , Xian Chen , Jing Liu , Jian Jin , Ramon Parsons AKT degradation selectively inhibits the growth of PI3K/PTEN pathway mutant cancers with wild-type KRAS and BRAF by destabilizing Aurora kinase B Cancer Discovery (2021)
doi: 10.1158/2159-8290.cd-20-0815
AKT kinase inhibitors are a very old hat, and never proved useful in clinic. But the paper asserts that:
“AKT degradation was superior to AKT kinase inhibition for reducing cell growth and sustaining lower signaling over many days. AKT degradation but not kinase inhibition profoundly lowered Aurora kinase B (AURKB) protein, which is known to be essential for cell division…“
The degrader, patented by the authors and Cedars Sinai, is a modified AKT kinase inhibitor.
News in Brief
- The Russian COVID-19 vaccine Sputnik V is allegedly “100% effective at preventing severe infection”, we keep being told (by Lancet and Nature), never mind the live virus contamination or the manufacturer’s refusal to allow foreign drug authorities access to production sites or to the trial’s raw data. Why Russia now started testing a combination of Sputnik V & AstraZeneca vaccines (Euronews), is a mystery therefore. How can you improve something already as perfect as Sputnik? How does one go above 100%, is this Chechen elections again? Does Kremlin wish to see if with the addition of the western vaccine not just COVID-19, but also any LGBTQ tendencies can be serologically prevented? Or maybe Sputnik is simply not working as advertised after all?
- Oh look, another study claiming Vitamin D supplements could protect against COVID-19. Boston University scientists claimed this in Cozier et al PLOS One 2021. They analysed the Black Women’s Health Study where 13,000 participants provided a blood sample in 2013–2017. In 2020, some of these participants were asked to share their “experiences related to the COVID-19 pandemic“. And look, 25(OH)D levels correlated with COVID-19 positivity years later for “U.S. Blacks, who generally have lower levels of 25(OH)D“, the authors assure it had nothing to do with their socioeconomic situation.
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