Schneider Shorts of 20 August 2021: with lasers and radio frequencies, WHO COVID-19 investigators admitting to be pathetic wusses, a German antivaxxer nurse causing major damage, a German child psychiatrist causing even more damage, a dirty old man in Marseille facing forced retirement, Einstein reincarnated to save the world from the pandemic, twice, and the real science of anti-aging revealed by Aubrey De Grey’s fall.
Table of Discontent
COVID-19
Science Elites
Science Breakthroughs
News in Brief
COVID-19
Einstein finds the Achilles’ Heel
The Austrian genius, Mr ACE2 Josef Penninger (now at UBC in Canada) has vanquished COVID-19, not once, but twice already. And still no Nobel Prize. Now Penninger even took to wearing his wild hair white, obviously as a discrete hint that he is the new Albert Einstein, to the very least.
I previously wrote about Penninger saving the world with his soluble ACE2 drug APN01, which is once again marketed by his own company Apeiron (after GSK gave back the licence after some failed clinical trials). I also previously wrote about his new invention of yet another therapy, something with lectins. All media keeps blathering ever since Penninger’s preprint about the “Achilles’ Heel” of the virus having been found, apparently this new Einstein wants you to be aware of his classical European education.
Now, the peer reviewed paper has been published, and the Achilles’ Heel mantras, the excited news cycle, and the Saviour-of-the-world TV appearances started all over again. This is the paper (no Guido Kroemer on it, what disappointment!):
Hoffmann, D. […] Penninger, J. (2021) Identification of lectin receptors for conserved SARS-CoV-2 glycosylation sites. The EMBO Journal. doi.org/10.15252/embj.2021108375.
From the press release by IMBA in Vienna:
“For Josef Penninger and the whole team, these findings hold promise for pan-variant therapeutic interventions against SARS-CoV-2.
Penninger sums up: “The approach compares to the mechanism of the drug candidate ‘APN01’ [Apeiron Biologics], which is undergoing advanced clinical trials. This is a bioengineered human ACE2 that also binds to the Spike protein. When the Spike protein is occupied by the drug, the gateway into the cell is blocked. Now, we identified naturally occurring, mammalian lectins that are capable of doing just that!“”
According to Penninger, his APN01 drug was supposed to be approved as COVID-19 therapy already last December. This world is not worthy of his genius.
Fluvoxamine W0RKS!
The anti-depressant fluvoxamine works, just as hydroxychloroquine, Vitamin D and ivermectin do! COVID-19 can be history, cured cheaply and easily, were it not for the libtard Fauci-Gates-Soros conspiracy of Big Vaccine!
“An inexpensive anti-depressant curbed the number of COVID-19 patients ending up in hospital by 30 per cent, making it a potential breakthrough treatment for a virus that continues to spread widely, a Canadian-led clinical trial is reporting. […]
The relatively large, randomized controlled study was carried out in Brazil and spearheaded by co-principal investigator Ed Mills and other researchers associated with McMaster University in Ontario. It was part of their larger Together trial that is testing a number of potential drug treatments against COVID.
The researchers looked at the rate of hospitalization among patients with test-confirmed infection. Most of the eight studied drugs, including much-debated candidates such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, showed no detectable benefit.
But the study found that 77 of the 739 subjects who were randomly selected to receive fluvoxamine ended up spending more than six hours in an emergency department or being admitted to hospital, compared to 108 of the 733 who were administered a placebo.
It is a bit strange, these new fluvoxamine results are not on the website of the Canadian TOGETHER trial. And the press announcement forgets there was no effect on mortality:
The Brazilian clinical researcher Jose Galucci-Neto studied the PowerPoint presentation by the Canadian researchers and explained to me the issues with the fluvoxamine trial data:
- “It is only an interim analysis
- “reduced the risk of disease progression by 29%” – but this was Relative Risk Reduction. According to the video presentation, the Absolute Risk reduction was 4,5%. The primary outcome is a weird combination of hospitalization or observation for more than 6h -(which includes patients without the need of hospitalization). No positive findings for secondary outcomes – mortality and viral load.”
Indeed, it was just another video presentation, instead of a paper or a preprint. You know, like happened before in Brazil, with proxalutamide.
These are the crazy times we live in, clinical science reports served exclusively via YouTube and TikTok (or Vimeo, in this case).
Lab Leak Theory
Remember that WHO-China joint investigation into COVID-19 origins, led by the Wuhan Institute of Virology money man Peter Daszak, which decreed a lab leak to be “highly unlikely”, definitely not worth investigating? And that the virus may have actually arrived to Wuhan from Europe or US via “cold chain” of frozen food?
Well, the man who said this at the press conference last spring was the WHO-China team member Peter Ben Embarek, Danish epidemiology professor. He now spoke to Danish TV, The Washington Post writes:
“Speaking to Danish documentarians, Peter Ben Embarek said Chinese researchers on the team had pushed back against linking the origins of the pandemic to a research laboratory in Wuhan in a report about the investigation.
“In the beginning, they didn’t want anything about the lab [in the report], because it was impossible, so there was no need to waste time on that,” Ben Embarek said during the interview. “We insisted on including it, because it was part of the whole issue about where the virus originated.”
Grown-up, educated people. Chose lying over serving the public in the only moment when their expert academic services were most needed. What were they afraid of? To be expelled out of China and miss out on that ridiculous guided tour of China’s propaganda exhibition? Washington Post report continues:
“A discussion of whether to include the lab-leak theory at all lasted until 48 hours before the conclusion of the mission, Ben Embarek told the Danish reporters. In the end, Ben Embarek’s Chinese counterpart eventually agreed to discuss the lab-leak theory in the report “on the condition we didn’t recommend any specific studies to further that hypothesis.”
Asked in the documentary whether the report’s “extremely unlikely” wording about the lab-leak theory was a Chinese requirement, Ben Embarek said “it was the category we chose to put it in at the end, yes.” But he added that this meant it was not impossible, just not likely.”
Ben Embarek now says a bat-transmitted infection of a Wuhan virologist is a perfectly reasonable lab leak theory which he always believed to be likely.
And then this:
“In further comments during the interview that were not included in the documentary but were incorporated in an account by the Danish channel TV2 on its website, Ben Embarek suggested that there could have been “human error” but that the Chinese political system does not allow authorities to acknowledge that.
“It probably means there’s a human error behind such an event, and they’re not very happy to admit that,” Ben Embarek was quoted as saying. “The whole system focuses a lot on being infallible, and everything must be perfect,” he added. “Somebody could also wish to hide something. Who knows?”
Asked for comment, Ben Embarek initially said the interview had been mistranslated in English-language media coverage. “It is a wrong translation from a Danish article,” he wrote, declining to comment further [..]”
Daszak is a genuine crook, but Ben Emarek and the rest of the WHO mission are pathetic wusses. Some of their Chinese colleagues risked their freedom and even lives to inform the international community, but these pampered western professors wet themselves as soon as a Chinese official wagged a finger.
Science Elites
Making SENS of Anti-Aging
A very unpleasant goblin of anti-aging quackery gets his comeuppance. Aubrey De Grey, the freakishly bearded founder of SENS Foundation, was apparently all these years coercing women to sex, not just with him, but also with his wealthy donors. De Grey’s own foundation now suspended him, probably a punishment for his failure to keep his victims silent. Who would have known that all that anti-aging science of rejuvenation was always about nothing else but having sex with young women, by force if needed.
“Halioua, who had been an intern at SENS Research Foundation in 2016 and whose research as an undergraduate and graduate student had been funded by the organization, alleged that SENS executives exploited her youth and attractiveness to solicit funds from donors. Halioua described a dinner in which de Grey allegedly told her that she had a responsibility to have sex with the SENS donors in attendance so they would give money to the organization.
“I left that dinner sobbing,” she wrote. “It has taken me years to shake the deep-seated belief that I only got to where I am due to older men wanting to have sex with me.”
In her own post, Deming described an encounter she had a decade ago with de Grey, in which he told her over email that he had an “adventurous love life,” and expressed a suppressed desire to talk about it with her. Deming was 17 at the time, and had known de Grey since she was 14 and a precocious freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”
Trouble in China
One of China’s top scientific leaders in the fight against COVID-19, the head of the Shanghai Medical Treatment Expert Group and Communist Party member, Zhang Wenhong, is now accused to have plagiarised his PhD thesis. Which was on Traditional Chinese Medicine, btw. For example:
“In the discussion section of Zhang Wenhong’s doctoral dissertation, pages 77 to 83 are almost copied from [plagiarised] three articles, up to more than 5,000 words.“
Unfortunately, a Communist Party crackdown had all Zhang critical reporting deleted, including the website I was referencing. Also his PhD thesis can’t be downloaded anymore. But here is a relevant tweet by Fang Shimin:
“The main body of Zhang Wenhong’s doctoral dissertation and the journal papers published thereon are essentially plagiarisms from the FDA Mycobacteria Laboratory in 1996. One of Zhang Wenhong’s supervisors, Li Zhongming, worked in the laboratory and was the first plagiarized paper. Three authors. Zhang Wenhong’s paper not only thanked Li Zhongming for his “detailed guidance”, but also mentioned three times that Li Zhongming provided the experimental materials. So this is a transnational plagiarism group. Has Li Zhongming returned home resolutely?“
There is also this, Zhang Wenhong is penultimate author:
(hattip Tiger BB8).
Science Breakthroughs
Pizza, Pasta and Cereals
Did you know that sugared breakfast cereals, frozen pizza, microwave mac’n’cheese, and white toast bread are all actually health superfoods and can never make you fat? No? Well, you are behind science then!
“A study recently published in Advances in Nutrition, a peer-reviewed nutrition journal from the American Society for Nutrition, concludes that high-glycemic (high-GI) foods (often called “fast carbs”) are no more likely than low-GI foods (often called “slow carbs”) to lead to weight gain – and no less likely to lead to diet-induced weight loss. […]
“This study is the first to definitively demonstrate that fast carbs do not make you fat,” says study co-author Glenn Gaesser, PhD, professor of exercise science in the College of Health Solutions at Arizona State University. “Contrary to popular belief, those who consume a diet of high-GI foods are no more likely to be obese or gain weight than those who consume a diet of low-GI foods. Furthermore, they are no less likely to lose weight.”
This was the revolutionary paper, in a journal with Impact Factor of 8.7, issued by the American Society for Nutrition:
Glenn A Gaesser, Julie Miller Jones, Siddhartha S Angadi Perspective: Does Glycemic Index Matter for Weight Loss and Obesity Prevention? Examination of the Evidence on “Fast” Compared with “Slow” Carbs Advances in Nutrition, (2021) doi: 10.1093/advances/nmab093
From the small print, we learn that “This work was supported in part by the Grain Foods Foundation“, an industry lobby group funded by US bakers and other relevant businesses, including the giants Kellogg and DuPont. We also learn about the study’s authors:
“Author disclosures: GAG, JMJ, and SSA are members of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Grain Foods Foundation; GAG is a member of the Scientific Advisory Boards of the Wheat Foods Council and Ardent Mills, LLC; JMJ and SSA are members of the Scientific Advisory Council to the Quality Carbohydrate Coalition.”
And this is why Kellogg’s breakfast cereals are actually health superfood. In this regard, CNN reported:
“Ultra-processed foods — such as frozen pizza, microwave meals, packaged snacks and desserts — accounted for 67% of calories consumed in 2018, up from 61% in 1999, according to research published in the medical journal JAMA Tuesday. The study analyzed the diet of 33,795 children and adolescents nationwide.”
From the paper:
“Examples of ultraprocessed foods include sweet or savory packaged snacks, sugar-sweetened beverages, candy, industrial bread, industrial breakfast cereal, ready-to-heat and -eat pasta dishes and pizza, and sausages and other reconstituted meat products.“
So good news actually, kids are eating exactly the right kind of food? God bless America.
Lasers and Radio
Dear readers, I know you expect silly stuff here, but this sketch is about to get too silly. Mind you, we are talking about a US university, the Youngstown State University in Ohio, proudly announcing in the local media:
“There’s a project going on at YSU right now that could change how we fight disease. YSU is doing some really cool things in research. The idea is to find cures for things like Alzheimer’s, CTE and even PTSD.
“It just really thrills me that we’re able to do this,” said Bill Hartman, a 1964 YSU grad.
His company, Halberd, has identified four cytokines, substances that come from the immune system and have an effect on other cells. Already, they’ve eliminated two of them, and they’ll start work on a third.
“Dr. Sturrus is going to try and eliminate that using radio frequencies and lasers starting Monday. This coming Monday. We’re that close,” Hartman said. If they can eliminate all of them, it could demonstrate the ability to eliminate or attenuate Alzheimer’s.
The intellectual property is based on the Felder Doctrine, which is physically removing the basis of the disease with lasers or radio frequency and a chemical bonding process.
“If you think about that sentence very carefully, you realize that beats any disease,” said Dr. Mitchell Felder, Halberd Chief Technology Officer.
People, this is not satire, this is not some obscure student comedy, even I couldn’t have made this crap up. This is a US university collaborating with a publicly listed business named Halberd Corporation (stock price stable at 3 cents) to deploy “radio frequencies and lasers” to eliminate all diseases.
News in Brief
- The Chloroquine Guru Didier Raoult faces a forced retirement as IHU Marseille director. The 69-year-old crook is already long past the legal pension age in France, now the leadership of the Aux-Marseille University and regional hospitals decided to force him into retirement and appoint a new IHU director in 2021 (Le Monde). So instead of a sack and a court trial, there will be a huge retirement party in Marseille for Raoult, banquets, medals, celebrities giving speeches and all. It doesn’t matter who the new director of IHU will be, because there are no plans to dismantle the rotten power structures inside it.
- One German nurse in a small town in Lower Saxony has been injecting people with saline instead of COVID-19 vaccine. Her lawyer assures the nurse is never an antivaxxer despite her explicit social media posts, and that it was only 6 cases, because the nurse accidentally dropped a vaccine vial and was afraid to admit it. Police found that to be a lie, so now over 10,000 people are invited to get re-vaccinated. The nurse apparently also faked her own vaccination certificate and is currently under arrest where she refuses to collaborate with the police. (NDR, here and here, in German).
- In USA, far-right covidiot governors of Florida, Texas and Missouri now fight the communist facemask conspiracies and the evil Big Pharma with its sinister vaccines by… pushing perversely expensive antibody therapies for COVID-19 (Politico). Incidentally, their Big Pharma manufacturers happen to donate to these same Republican politicians. Never mind that the antibody cocktails work rather poorly, or maybe not at all (see assessment by Derek Lowe).
- A German paediatric psychiatrist and bestseller book author is now accused of pseudoscience and child abuse. Michael Winterhoff has been diagnosing virtually all children he met with pathological narcissism and prescribed them the neuroleptic drug Pipamperon. Now the victims and their parents spoke up, Winterhoff is losing contracts with German youth welfare offices and the state prosecutor is investigating (Tagesschau, in German).
- Former US college professor Gary Maynard, who taught criminology in New York and California universities, has been arrested for being “a serial arsonist who went on a spree of setting fires in July and August — and who sought to trap fire crews with his fires” (NPR). Usually in such cases the arrested professor’s peers remind the judiciary of his impressive publication record and citation index, so can we have this for Maynard please?
- Russian state-controlled media combines anti-US propaganda with the typical toxic Russian misogyny to smear the US astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor, whom Russian officials blame for secretly sabotaging their Soyuz spaceship in 2018: “TASS claimed that Auñón-Chancellor had an emotional breakdown in space and then damaged a Russian spacecraft so that she could return to Earth early.” NASA initially made the matters worse by remaining silent, and only now rose to defend their astronaut and to refute Russian allegations outright (Ars Technica).
- Meditation is scientifically vindicated, by Zhang et al Scientific Reports 2021! A press release by the Binghamton University’s Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering informs that “Eight weeks of meditation training enhanced brain connectivity between the default mode network and the dorsal attention network, allowing participants to quickly switch between mind wandering states and focused attention.”
- It’s alive! We are informed by Futurism that “a trio of researchers just published an unusual research paper that claims that blockchain technology — the decentralized ledgers behind cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin — fit at least some criteria biologists use to define life.” The lead author Oleg Abramov explains that “our observations reveal a number of functional and structural similarities between the blockchain and DNA, a self-replicating molecule that is the genetic blueprint for all known life.“, in their peer reviewed paper, Abramov et al assure that blockchain has “artificial general intelligence (AGI) with the capability to evolve by self-direction“.
- Earth’ oceans are so polluted with plastic that it became a giant ecosystem of its own, now studied by researchers and termed “plastisphere”. Luckily, some bacteria are even able to break down plastic waste, but we should not count on the to solve the problem we created (The Guardian)
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For Better Science 
Evelien Peeters of UMC Utrecht https://www.umcutrecht.nl/nl/ziekenhuis/zorgverleners/peeters-e-f-h-i?lang=en is a rabid antivaxxer and is chair of the “Artsen Covid Collectief”. A detailed rebuttal of misleading information about COVID-19 by the “Artsen Covid Collectief” was recently posted at https://www.zorgvisie.nl/blog/discutabele-retoriek-van-artsen-covid-collectief-kan-volksgezondheid-schaden/ (in Dutch, with a link to a document with all details, also in Dutch). PhD student Bernard Leenstra (“promovendus/arts-onderzoeker en huisarts i.o., UMC Utrecht”) is one of the authors of this rebuttal.
I fail to understand how it is possible that it is no problem at all for UMC Utrecht that Evelien Peeters can have a side-job as chair of an organisation which is speading fake news about the covid pandemy.
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I get the “Don’t touch Raoult” hashtag, but “Don’t touch our children”???
Are they now full QAnon at IHU? Not that I’m surprised, but still…
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https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3145119/university-review-plagiarism-claims-against-chinas-dr-fauci
“In a brief statement on Sunday, Shanghai’s Fudan University said it was aware of the online concern and had launched an investigation into the degree it awarded to Zhang Wenhong – often described as “China’s Dr Fauci”– in 2000.
The results of the investigation would be released in a timely manner, the university said.”
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Fudan University, Wenhong Zhang’s current employer and his PhD thesis institution, has issued an announcement of their investigation into Zhang’s thesis issues and concluded that the alleged plagiarism did not exist. All Zhang’s mistakes were simply an improper use of words writing his thesis.
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“improper wording” properly is a better translation.
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https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3146077/chinas-dr-fauci-zhang-wenhong-cleared-thesis-plagiarism
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Covid denialist Simon Goddek states at https://t.me/goddek/541 : “Since Twitter banned both of my accounts (will hopefully get them back by taking legal actions) my friend Dr. Waldemar Züssen is going to publish all of my info threads. I’d be happy if you followed him and also retweeted my important thread on gut health.”
It is stated at https://twitter.com/DrZussen/status/1428319954902863876 : “This thread is dedicated to Dr. Simon, whose accounts have been deleted by Twitter. He allowed me to re-post this thread. Dr. Simon is still active on Telegram for those who are missing his wise and uplifting words here: [ url to the Telegram account of Simon Goddek]”.
G was unable to find details / backgrounds etc. about Dr. Waldemar Züssen (“Philanthropist and MD”). Maybe Leonid is able to find details / backgrounds / whereabouts of Dr. Waldemar Züssen?
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hi Leonid, Eracon Lachesis recently noted a very weird article in the Springer journal ‘Arabian Journal of Geosciences’. The title “Research on coastal atmospheric change and Latin dance performance based on target detection network” consists of two unrelated subjects and the same is the case for the summary. See https://pubpeer.com/publications/C8E52D2C1D14211051FA23D6172599 for details. I fail to understand how to explain that this was able to happen. The name of the editor, Sheldon Williamson, seems to indicate that this editor is able to read / understand English. The article is part of a so-called ‘Topical Collection’ with the title ‘Environment and Low Carbon Transportation’. This ‘Topical Collection’ currently contains 305 articles. Sheldon Williamson is listed as Editor of this ‘Topical Collection’. I have not checked if this ‘Topical Collection’ contains more of such weird articles. G is able to locate details about a scientist with the name Sheldon Williamson.
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An update at https://retractionwatch.com/2021/08/26/guest-editor-says-journal-will-retract-dozens-of-inappropriate-papers-after-his-email-was-hacked/ : “(….) more than 70 articles in a special collection of the Arabian Journal of Geosciences, published by Springer Nature, with titles such as (….) All of the authors of the bizarre papers appear to be from China. As the papers note, the “responsible editor” for the “Topical Collection on Environment and Low Carbon Transportation” is Sheldon Williamson, a Canada Research Chair who studies energy systems. According to Williamson, however, the phrase “responsible editor” is doing a lot of work in those acknowledgements. That’s because, he says, his email — a non-institutional one he uses for editorial work — was hacked. (…) In the meantime, all of these papers made it through Springer Nature’s production system and were published. And his name ended up tied up in all of that. (,,,)”.
Does this imply that all who are working professionally at this “Springer Nature’s production system” are unable to read/understand English? Or does this imply that this whole “Springer Nature’s production system” is totally automatic and that there is not a single human being who is checking what gets published by this journal?
To use other words, is/was this anonymous ‘hacker’ able to push on some buttons to create a so-called ‘version of record’ (VoR) of this kind of texts? So what’s the “added value” that this journal gets published by Springer Nature? Or can https://www.springer.com/journal/12517 be regarded as some sort of platform, similar to for example the arphahub.com platform?
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