The ZIKA
virus is named after the ZIKA forest in Uganda, where it was first discovered,
and is a type of flavivirus, closely related to those which cause more serious
diseases like dengue and yellow fever. ZIKA normally produces symptoms such as
fever or conjunctivitis and sometimes joint pain, but typically so mild that
the symptoms last for only a few days and most people don’t even know they have
it. The ZIKA is not contagious but is transmitted by mosquitoes, which means
you must be bitten by an infected mosquito to contract it. Africans have
developed antibodies to the virus and are mostly immune, but Westerners have no
such immunity and for them there is no vaccine or cure for the ZIKA virus,
though none is generally necessary.
The virus
was first isolated from a rhesus monkey in Uganda in 1947, was discovered in a
few humans in Uganda and Tanzania some years later, and in humans in Nigeria in
1968. (1)
(2)
There was never any indication that the virus "traveled well", and it
remained an obscure and unremarkable illness with only a handful of reported
cases for 40 years until it suddenly appeared on a South Pacific island in
Micronesia in 2007, which was the first time it had been seen outside its
original home, but where it apparently did nothing of consequence. (3) Some
six or seven years later, there was a outbreak in French Polynesia, also in the
South Pacific, that affected about 10% of the population, but this time with
the added feature of apparently causing Guillain-Barré syndrome, a
rare autoimmune disorder in which the body’s immune system attacks itself, or
at least the body's nerves, and can be paralysing or even fatal. Then after a
hiatus of seven or so years ZIKA appeared abruptly in Brazil, with a virtually
simultaneous spread to more than 20 other countries. On this occasion, ZIKA was
now linked to a severe birth defect called microcephaly and
possibly other birth defects and neurological disorders. Those are the basic
facts.
There was
substantial controversy about the links between ZIKA and microcephaly, the
official narrative being that ZIKA was suspected - and indeed was strongly
promoted - as the cause, but always with caveats suggesting the links might
have been coincidental or opportunistic rather than causal. (4)
(5) One
group of medical practitioners in Brazil wrote a paper suggesting microcephaly
was either caused by, or linked to, the dispersal of the chemical pyroxiprophen,
an insecticide recommended by the WHO, which was heavily sprayed in drinking
water reservoirs in the areas exhibiting the highest incidences of the
condition, a theory that appeared to have at least a solid circumstantial
basis. The physicians stated that pyriproxifen was a hormone disruptor and
growth inhibitor that altered the development process of mosquitoes, generating
malformations and causing their death or incapacity to reproduce. They wrote,
"Malformations detected in thousands of children from pregnant women
living in areas where the Brazilian state added pyriproxifen to drinking water
is not a coincidence, even though the Ministry of Health [rules out] the
hypothesis of direct and cumulative chemical damage." (6) A
German epidemiologist, Dr. Christoph Zink, had been studying and
charting the timing and geographic distribution of both ZIKA and microcephaly,
and wrote "I soon got the idea that blaming the ZIKA virus for this
epidemic does not really get to the point", stating a suspicion there had
been under-reporting of cases for years. (7) But, according to a CBC report, he
also suspected a chemical explanation for the heavy concentration in Northeastern
Brazil, stating, "I would ask my toxicological colleagues in Brazil to
please look very closely into the practical application of agrochemicals".
Others discounted this hypothesis on the basis of an inconsistent time-line and
some conflicting data. Be this as it may, the links between ZIKA and the birth
defects appeared at the time of writing (and later) to be only coincidental at
best, with no evidence of direct causality.
It was
interesting that this debate conducted itself with more heat than light, exhibiting
the kind of characteristics we associate with the pros and cons of 5G
communication, that is to say more ideological and emotional than scientific.
It was also interesting that the American CDC and the UN's WHO acted fervently
to lay the blame for birth defects directly on ZIKA while simultaneously
building an exit for possible later use with what I thought were rather
cleverly-worded suggestions that the link was "not entirely proven".
This clearly coordinated campaign, with its vast international media support,
carried with it a powerful scent of an intent to deflect the main issue into a
desired channel and thereby discourage active investigation or discussion of
topics outside the official approved list. Evidence of this seemed apparent in
the unwarranted eagerness with which officials and the many elements of the
media literally trashed anyone suggesting a story line that differed from the
official version. As I wrote in the Introduction, a clear warning sign that a
desired official story is being crafted is when those presenting contrary facts
and theories are not only immediately and widely denounced as biased ideologues
but derided as conspiracy theorists. ZIKA fit this template very well.
Whatever
the totality of truths may be about this viral outbreak, the media coverage -
the official narrative - about ZIKA quickly focused entirely on the
statistically insignificant numbers of birth defects in relation to the total
infected populations, and the simultaneous initiation of a concentrated debate
about the cause of such defects, while dismissing in a single careless phrase
the origin of the ZIKA outbreak itself. While it is the origin and cause of the
outbreak that should have been the main story, the official narrative pushed
this aspect into the background where the media buried it. And it is primarily
this that contained the scent of an attempt to deflect the main issue not only
into a desired channel but away from other, perhaps politically dangerous,
aspects of the event. So let's take a few minutes to examine the curious origin
of this outbreak.
As
already noted, ZIKA was never predisposed to travel, considering that it sat in
Uganda since 1947 and went nowhere. Surely it had multiple opportunities to
attach itself to a person or mosquito and land on another continent. But no. It
stayed at home, and for almost 60 years was not a public menace, had never been
associated with birth or other physical defects, and attracted no attention.
So, if this ZIKA virus could stay at home and remain more or less localised for
60 years, why would it suddenly begin travelling the world? And, if the virus
had never spread explosively at home in Africa in that 60 years, how could it
suddenly become so active and virulent as to have infected almost the entirety of
South and Central America in only a few months?
Let's
review the path. One day in 2007, ZIKA traveled by means unknown, 15,000
kilometers from Africa to land on a tiny Micronesian island named Yap, where it
rested for six or seven years doing nothing remarkable, then continued its
voyage of several thousand kilometers to French Polynesia where it landed to
infect a large percentage of the population and do rather more harm. After
another lengthy pause of six or seven years it began another voyage, this time
traveling 12,000 kilometers or so, crossing much of the Pacific Ocean, the US
and Mexico, all of Central America and the Caribbean, and finally traversing
all of South America to land on the Atlantic side in Rio and São Paulo. From
there, it almost instantaneously radiated outward 4,000 or 5,000 kilometers in
all directions to cover most of Brazil (the fifth-largest country in the
world). ZIKA then spread to all of South and Central America and the Caribbean,
flooding more than 20 countries within a few months, then embarked on journeys
of 8,000 kilometers or more, voyaging as far as Mexico and Puerto Rico. It then
quickly headed Northeast on another journey of 8,000 kilometers to land in
Spain where it was predicted to become a calamity.
Now let's
think about the journey. Viruses can't fly, and they don't travel on airplanes.
They travel by mosquito, and mosquitoes don't travel either. They live their
entire short lives within maybe one kilometer of wherever they were hatched.
It's true they are sometimes blown around by prevailing winds and could
potentially end up almost anywhere, but these wind-blown insects tend to number
in the tens or hundreds rather than the hundreds of millions necessary to
infect millions of people in a vast country like Brazil. Some news media
published deliberately misleading and unforgivably uninformed reports referring
to the "migration patterns" of mosquitoes, but mosquitoes do not
migrate, not in any sense of the meaning of that word. Birds migrate, caribou migrate,
locusts and lemmings migrate. Monarch butterflies migrate. Ducks, geese and
hummingbirds migrate. Mosquitoes do not migrate. They cannot.
As one
entomologist wrote, "mosquitoes live within a mile or two of their
breeding grounds their entire life, with little evidence they make purposeful
long distance flights that can be classified zoologically as migration. It is
better to regard all mosquito flights as dispersal." In other words, we
cannot have tens of millions of mosquitoes, infected or otherwise, filling
their tiny luggage with mini-viruses and flying 15,000 kilometers to take up
residence in another country. We are told that mosquitoes will sometimes breed
in pools of water, in old auto tires and other odd places, and can by this
method be transported around the world, but again the numbers of insects
traveling this way would be exceedingly low for our purposes since no country -
and certainly not Brazil - is importing sufficient numbers of old tires to
bring us the hundreds of millions of insects we need to create an epidemic. And
yes, mosquitoes breed, but to burgeon in only weeks from a few infected mating
pairs in one location to a few hundred million scattered over millions of
square kilometers is beyond the ability even of mosquitoes.
•The
Infected World Cup Visitor
And it
was here that the WHO and the Western media began crafting their tale. The
official narrative was that the mosquitoes never did travel. Instead, the virus
found itself a means of long-distance transport and was "believed to have
been brought to Brazil by an infected visitor to the World Cup". Thus,
according to the WHO and the compliant media, a lone traveler infected millions
of people in Rio and within a few months the disease had spread to Colombia,
Paraguay, Venezuela, Panama, the Honduras, Guyana, Martinique, Puerto Rico and
Mexico, and altogether more than 20 countries. We need only think for a moment
to realise this proposition is a ridiculous impossibility. I wrote above that
the origin of the ZIKA outbreak was dismissed in a single careless phrase, that
phrase being "believed to have been brought to Brazil by an infected
visitor to the World Cup", a statement tossed out with no evidential
support, one that appears superficially credible but which constitutes logical
rubbish. And, as we will see, ZIKA was in Brazil long before the World Cup.
Remember, ZIKA is not a contagious disease spread by coughing or sneezing or
even extended social contact. It is a virus infection carried by mosquitoes,
and one must be bitten to contract it. The traveling of infected people from
Polynesia to Brazil is of no consequence in itself since the only way to
transmit their disease is by being bitten by mosquitoes, which might in turn
become infected then spread the infection by biting others. (8)
Let's
take a moment to think about the supposedly-infected (and surely imaginary)
World Cup visitor, and consider the astonishingly-rapid spread of the
infection. The official narrative was that the virus came to Brazil from French
Polynesia, but how many people, infected or otherwise, would be likely to
travel from the tiny population of French Polynesia to Brazil just to watch a
football game? Two? Ten? So how could clean, uninfected Brazilian mosquitoes
find those few infected Polynesian people, bite them and become infected in
turn, then spread the infection to at least tens of millions of insects in a
few months so as to bite and infect many millions of people throughout the
entirety of Latin America? The sheer volume of the outbreak coupled with its
virtually instantaneous spread, dismisses any possibility of this infection
originating with a foreign traveler. One mosquito biting one person does not
constitute an epidemic. If we want to have an "explosive spread" of a
mosquito-borne virus like the ZIKA, which infected millions of people in only a
very short time, we need at least tens of millions of mosquitoes but more
reasonably we need hundreds of millions of them. This is especially true when
the mosquitoes seem determined to infect the enormous land areas of South and
Central America, passing over vast unpopulated areas in the process. Not every
mosquito is infected, not every infected mosquito will find someone to bite,
not everyone will be bitten, and not everyone bitten will be infected. And a
mosquito's life is very short indeed, about ten days.
With only
a handful of infected people, such a widespread epidemic is impossible by this
method of transmission. The number of travelers is statistically insignificant,
so even if they were all bitten many times by different insects, the totality
of those insects could not have in turn bitten and infected millions of people
in 20 countries within a few months, especially countries many thousands of
kilometers away, considering that mosquitoes do not travel. It's true the infected
mosquitoes would breed and perhaps contaminate their young, but this would by
definition be a localised outbreak with no natural possibility of traveling
even tens, much less thousands of kilometers to cover a continent. One infected
mosquito cannot breed millions of offspring and cover millions of square
kilometers in a few months. And, if one person traveled to Rio or São Paulo for
a football game, how does that explain the disease exploding in a dozen other
cities in Brazil, all at approximately the same time? How does that explain the
disease spreading to Colombia and a dozen other nearby countries, and 8,000 Kms
away in Mexico and Puerto Rico, very shortly thereafter? Even if infected
travelers from Brazil went to Mexico, how many would be bitten by clean
mosquitoes there, and be able to pass on the virus? Statistically zero, or
thereabouts.
Millions
of mosquitoes cannot bite the same ten travelers, become infected, then bite
millions of other people and cause an epidemic. You don't have to be a
statistician to know that's not possible. If millions of people are infected,
there had to have been at least many millions of infected mosquitoes in the
area. So, the most important question in this entire saga is: how did at least
tens, and more likely, hundreds, of millions of insects become infected? The
virus did not exist in Brazil. Native mosquitoes were not infected with ZIKA,
and could have become infected only by either biting countless thousands of
infected people, or else being the offspring from millions of matings with
infected insects, but where would those come from? A few infected travelers
cannot account for such a massive geographical outbreak within weeks, which
means vast numbers of infected mosquitoes must have been introduced in those
locations. There is no other possible explanation.
The WHO's
official statement said ZIKA appeared to be spreading so rapidly for two
reasons: One, because it was a new disease to the region and so the population
had no immunity, and two, because ZIKA is primarily transmitted by a mosquito
species known as A. aegypti, which lives in every country in North and South
America except Canada and Chile. These statements are deliberate misinformation
and unforgivably dishonest for what they neglect to say. The portion about the
lack of immunity is true, but that lack of immunity exists only because, as the
WHO itself pointed out, ZIKA is a new disease to the region, meaning it didn't
exist in Brazil or South-Central America prior to this time. The second portion
of the statement is even more dishonest. The WHO tells us the disease spread so
rapidly because it is transmitted by a species of mosquito which exists
locally, but the reason the disease was new to the region in the first instance
is that domestic mosquitoes had never been infected and therefore could not possibly
have been responsible for the dispersion of the virus.
It is
worth noting the cleverness of the WHO's statement. It does not say the disease
was spread by local mosquitoes (and could not have been, since they weren't
infected), but spread by the same species that lives in South America. That's
not exactly the same thing. The fact that this strain of mosquito lives in
South and Central America is entirely irrelevant to the ZIKA outbreak because
these local mosquitoes were not infected. The statement appears to blame local
insects - by family association, and we would normally draw this inference from
a casual reading, but if we examine the words, the statement tells us
absolutely nothing and is fraudulent because it leads us to a false conclusion.
The WHO glossed over the most important question in this entire issue, which is
how tens or hundreds of millions of a local variety of clean mosquitoes
suddenly became infected by a foreign virus and in a few months caused an
epidemic covering nearly 20 million square kilometers.
It is of
course theoretically possible for a single infected person to initiate an
eventual epidemic, but consider the circumstances necessary. One infected
person traveling to a new location is bitten by one or more mosquitoes who
become infected and who bite a few other persons who become infected in turn.
The infected mosquitoes breed and die, leaving potentially infected offspring
who can gradually spread the disease. At the beginning, this would be tightly
localised, not only in one city but likely in one area of one city since we
have very few infected mosquitoes that do not travel. Then gradually, infected
persons would move to other areas of the city and to other cities, and slowly
spread the infection to other areas. But it should be obvious that this method
would require years to create an epidemic, and would still not account for an
explosive spread in the new locations. By definition, a natural introduction
and spread of a mosquito-borne virus would require years to develop. The only
physical way to have an explosive spread of an insect-borne disease is to have
hundreds of millions of infected insects. And, since Latin America did indeed
experience precisely such an explosive spread, the fundamental question is the
source of those infected insects.
•Oxitec's
GM "Terminator" Mosquitoes
There is
one additional fact in this story, a fact that was heavily suppressed by the
media. It involves a company named Oxitec, which bills itself as "a
British biotech company pioneering an environmentally friendly [i.e.
genetically-modified] way to control insect pests that spread disease and
damage crops". Oxitec was conducting genetically-modified "transgenic
mosquito trials" in Brazil and many other locations, trials that,
according to Science Magazine, "have not been without controversy in the
past". (9) It will not be a surprise that one of Oxitec's
"collaborators" is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as
other non-surprises that include the WHO, the CIA, the Pentagon, the
Rockefeller Foundation, Fort Detrick, and other luminaries of the world of
genetically-modified pathogens. In particular, one article that appeared to be
credible, claimed that the equity owners of Oxitec had strong links to the CIA.
Other Oxitec funders are the WHO, who provide research grants, and apparently a
Hong Kong investment fund called Asia Pacific Capital, which is controlled by
GE Capital of the US.
Oxitec
was conducting "experiments in the suppression of mosquitoes",
experiments which involved the release of countless millions of
genetically-modified Aedes aegypti mosquitoes (the same species that spread the
ZIKA virus) that had been bio-engineered for male insterility. Oliver Tickell
wrote an interesting article published in The Ecologist on February 1, 2016,
titled, "Pandora’s Box: how GM mosquitoes could have caused Brazil's
microcephaly disaster". (10) In it, he wrote, "The idea of the Oxitec
mosquitoes is simple enough: the males produce non-viable offspring which all
die. So the GM mosquitoes are 'self-extinguishing' and the altered genes cannot
survive in the wild population." The theory is that these GM-modified
'terminator' mosquitoes will breed with native females to produce non-viable
larvae, thereby eradicating the entire mosquito population. Unfortunately, the
truth, even according to Oxitec's own information, is that a large percentage
of their mosquitoes are not sterile after all, that many do survive and thrive,
and that apparently a large percentage of native female insects refuse to breed
with these introduced GM terminators, rendering some part of the experiment
useless.
According
to Tickell's research, the insect dispersions occurred between May of 2011 and
early 2012 and, in some locations alone, involved millions per month. I do not
know the total number of locations in which mosquitoes were dispersed nor the
total number of insects dispersed, but for the disease to spread the way it
did, the dispersion was certainly carried out in many locations and likely
involved tens of millions of insects in each case and, with several years to
breed, gives us the hundreds of millions we needed. Certainly the dispersals in
some instances contained massive volumes. In the Cayman Islands, Oxitec
"liberated" 3.3 million of their "transgenic mosquitoes" in
80 separate releases that covered only about 16 hectares of land, and the same
a bit later in Malaysia. (11) With 100 hectares in a square kilometer, how many
mosquitoes would have been released in 20 million square kilometers? At this point,
we can perhaps assume it was a micro-biologist from Oxitec who traveled to
Brazil, but not for the World Cup. This assumption explains many things, but
apparently not to the converted. Soon after, the world media were actively
promoting the theory that Oxitec’s "mutant" GM mosquitoes were
instead being used to battle ZIKA. (12) (13)
Tickell
discussed the potential survival of the GM insects and how they could spread
the ZIKA infection, but ignored the much more important question of how they
became infected in the first place. Let's try a direct analogy: You do not get
rabies from a dog bite; you get rabies when bitten by a rabid dog. If the dog
doesn't have rabies, all you get is a dog bite. And dispersing thousands of
non-rabid dogs into a clean environment will give you only thousands of
non-rabid dogs in a still-clean environment. You may get bitten much more
often, but you still won't get rabies. By this analogy, the vast dispersal of
genetically modified Aedes aegypti mosquitoes is of no consequence unless the
mosquitoes are already infected with the ZIKA virus. If they do not carry the
virus, their bites will do nothing to their victims, leaving us with no way to
spread a foreign virus.
The
important point, so studiously avoided by the CDC, the WHO and the media, is
that since ZIKA was not endemic to Brazil or indeed to South-Central America,
it had to be introduced from somewhere, and on a massive scale. One infected
visitor to the World Cup cannot do that, but importing and dispersing hundreds
of millions of infected mosquitoes can do that. It is not possible to disperse
millions of uninfected mosquitoes into a clean environment then have them
magically become self-infected by a virus whose nearest proximity is 18,000
kilometers distant, which means the insects dispersed by Oxitec had to have
been infected before their dispersal because there is no other credible
explanation for the comparatively instantaneous explosion of ZIKA in so many
millions of square kilometers, events that appeared to coincide with the
dispersion of Oxitec's insects. The question then is how a company like Oxitec
could disperse millions of insects without knowing they were infected. After
all, they engineered the mosquitoes, they surely were aware of the dangers, and
certainly had the ability to do testing. The only possible conclusion I see, is
that they did know. If there is an alternative explanation, I cannot imagine
what it would be.
I am
reminded of Dr. David Heymann of the WHO who, when speaking of the identical
issue of the origin and spread of HIV, claimed, "The origin of the AIDS
virus is of no importance ... speculation on how it arose is of no
importance." I disagreed then, and I disagree now. The WHO took enormous
pains to obscure investigation into the origin and spread of that virus, and
appeared to be doing the same with ZIKA. In the Scientific Method, we try to
form a theory to explain the phenomena we witness. Then, if we can, we test our
assumptions and hypotheses to see if they correlate with the known facts. In
this case, we have unknowns and unanswered questions in a situation where the
official explanation doesn't appear plausible, and where confusion exists in
some facts. But if we theorise that Oxitec carried out its field trials in
these locations with infected mosquitoes our theory explains almost everything
we know about ZIKA. But this isn't quite the end of the story.
•Back
to the Future
Many
virologists and media sources inform us that the ZIKA virus was first isolated
from a monkey in the ZIKA Forest in Africa (Uganda) in 1947 while scientists
were researching Yellow Fever, but the more interesting parts of ZIKA's story
occurred in labs rather than forests. The virus was isolated in a laboratory by
a microbiologist named Jordi Casals (14) (15), whose entire career (but for two
years after graduation) was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, mostly
working in labs at Yale University. Casals was a specialist in ticks and
virus-borne diseases (of the kind produced by the US Military at Fort Detrick
and Plum Island), as well as the viruses that cause encephalitis and the kind
of hemorrhagic fever the US dispersed in North Korea during the war and later
in Cuba. He was for years a consultant to the WHO and to the US Army Research
Institute in Bethseda, Maryland, where he was performing concurrent work in
what appeared to be related to bioweapons research.
The media
and the medical history books tell us that after its discovery, ZIKA remained
an "obscure and unremarkable illness" that caused no trouble and was
of no apparent interest to anybody, but that's not entirely correct. After
Casals isolated ZIKA from Rockefeller Foundation monkey number 766, a quiet
interest apparently emerged in this 'obscure' virus, with both the WHO and
America's CDC establishing "virus research laboratories" very near
the same forest where ZIKA was discovered, and in 2008 the Wellcome Trust - who
are coincidentally one of Oxitec's sources of funds - also became involved in
microbiology programs at the same location. (16) (17) The Rockefeller
Foundation established its East African Virus Research Institute in Entebbe,
Uganda, in 1936, the UVRI forming at the same time (with whom the CDC began
working in 1991, the WHO joining the affiliation in 1996). (18)
More
recently, when the ZIKA outbreak occurred in 2007 on the Micronesian island of
Yap, the US military was reported to have sent what was described as "a
large research presence" to that island, consisting of individuals from
both the CDC labs at the University of Colorado and from the military, all
experts in insect-vector bio-pathogens. (19) (20) (21) Perhaps coincidentally and
perhaps not, Yap Island is only about 800 Kms. from Guam, the original site of
the US military's NAMRU-2 biowarfare lab which depended primarily on
researchers from the Rockefeller Institute. And to bring us up to date with
Brazil, one media report informed us that two American researchers from the
University of Wisconsin, one a professor of pathobiological sciences named
Jorge Osorio (22) (23), the other his assistant named Matthew Aliota, were the
first to identify ZIKA virus in South America. Osorio's assistant, Aliota, had
a long history with the US Army's bio-warfare lab, USAMRIID, located at Fort
Detrick, Maryland, and was also a professor at Colorado State University, the
source of the CDC's virological staff originally sent to Yap to examine the first
ZIKA outbreak. (24) (25)
•The
Microcephaly Problem
There had
for many months been a flurry of media activity with reports containing an
utter confusion of claims about the incidence of this condition, a multitude of
false alarms causing misunderstandings and creating excessive caution. One
report in the New York Times claimed that fears of the virus resulted in
"massive over-reporting". In early February of 2016, Brazil's Health
Ministry accounted for about 5,000 reported cases, but in fact only a few
hundred had actually been confirmed, an insignificant number that would
normally be buried within the statistical averages. Interestingly, the WHO was
guilty of laying most of the fuel onto this fire, announcing an
"international health emergency", appearing primarily motivated to
strongly focus public attention onto the birth defects and away from other
considerations. Indeed, virtually all of the media attention appeared to focus
on a few hundreds of potentially damaged fetuses and a few thousands of
symptomatic mothers rather than on the millions of civilians inexplicably
infected by a foreign virus of (so far) unknown provenance. In any case, the
clear intent was to establish a link in the public mind between ZIKA and birth
defects, going so far as to advise all mothers in South and Central America to
delay planned pregnancies for several years. Much of this was alarmist and
unjustified. The New England Journal of Medicine claimed that "29 percent
of women who had ultrasound examinations after testing positive for infection
with the ZIKA virus had fetuses that suffered [undocumented] "grave
outcomes"." (26) (27) But they neglected to mention that the total
number of women in this sample was only about 40, if memory serves me correctly.
The media
reports on this problem, virtually without exception and certainly including
all those from the WHO, consisted mostly of dramatic attention-getting
headlines. An article would quote an apparently prominent virologist claiming
his research "strongly indicated" that "the ZIKA virus, and
nothing else" was responsible for the rash of birth defects. Other
scientists were quoted as saying ZIKA targeted the brain cortex, leaving
readers to worry that every pregnant mother in all of Latin America would give
birth to a brain-damaged baby. A website calling itself the Virology Blog, run
by a virologist and professor at Columbia University in the US, stated that
published reports made "a compelling case that ZIKA virus is causing
microcephaly in Brazil", quoting from studies with such small samples they
were statistically invalid, and even admitting no confirmations were available
of ZIKA infections in the microcephaly cases studied. He even went so far as to
write, "Here is the clincher – the entire ZIKA virus genome was identified
in brain tissue" of an infant born with this condition. (28) Another
virologist promptly informed this writer that he had all his facts wrong, and
that only small sections of the virus had in fact been identified. Virology
Blog - ZIKA virus is causing microcephaly in Brazil.
Other
scientists expressed their amazement that a flavivirus like ZIKA could cause
birth defects when no strain or variety of flavivirus had ever done so before.
They noted too that the Brazilian strain of the virus was a 99.75% match,
indicating it was the same virus from other areas of the world, and that birth
defects existed in none of those places. Many virologists stated that
historically no flavivirus had ever been implicated in birth defects, claiming
the conditions pointed to a "localised environmental factor" or some
other cause. Dr. Ahmed Kalebi, Director of the Lancet Pathology Research Group,
echoed a similar sentiment, stating the possibility that "ZIKA is just a
red herring and there is something else . . . that makes those babies get
microcephaly". And a published study posted on the WHO website stated,
"ZIKV has been identified in Africa over 50 years ago, and neither there
nor in the outbreaks outside Africa, has such an association with microcephaly
[ever] been reported." Another virologist wrote that there was no proof of
a cause-effect relationship, that the ZIKA virus might just have been
"infecting opportunistically, and that these are cases that would have
developed birth defects even without it". Others noted that the apparent
surge in these cases occurred only in Northeastern Brazil, primarily in
Pernambuco in and near Recife (where the WHO-recommended insecticide
pyroxiprophen was being sprayed), and many noted that there was no actual proof
of correlation between ZIKA and microcephaly, other than the fact that the
virus had been found in some infants with the condition. Unfortunately, none of
these other voices were ever able to reach the microphone.
And there
is more. I downloaded a study from the WHO's own website, titled "Microcephaly
in northeastern Brazil: a review of 16,208 births between 2012 and 2015"
(29) that states in part, "However, if the ZIKV were indeed introduced in
Brazil at the World Cup in mid 2014, the outbreak of microcephaly would have
preceded it." In case this isn't clear, the authors of this paper
documented that microcephaly began appearing in Brazil in 2011 and 2012, well
prior to the appearance of the claimed "visitor from Polynesia",
which by itself would seem irrefutable proof that the ZIKA virus cannot be
responsible for the birth defects in Latin America. Not only that, according to
this same paper, the initial appearances of microcephaly would have coincided
perfectly with the spraying of pyroxiprophen and the timing of Oxitec's GM
mosquito dispersal program. Certainly the WHO was fully aware of this
information, and the media pundits either were aware or should have been aware,
but these crucial facts were entirely censored by all the media. In March of
2016, Canada's CBC reported on another study in Paraíba State in Brazil, which
lies next to Perambuco, and which also discovered cases of microcephaly prior
to 2012, a full two years before the appearance of the supposed Polynesian
visitor, and which confirmed as well that these cases have been concentrated in
Brazil's Northeast where the bulk of the chemical spraying was done. (30) (31)
(32) (33) Nevertheless, the New York Times was telling us "There is no
longer any doubt that Zika causes microcephaly", quoting a study of ZIKA
at estimated a "1 in 100" risk of microcephaly. (34) (35)
•The
Media Focus
In the
extensive media coverage of the ZIKA epidemic, several elements were not only
unusual but were so uniformly focused they had a distinct appearance of having
been coordinated as part of plan. The first of these I have already discussed:
the apparent absence of any interest whatever in the source of the ZIKA
infection. Aside from the almost-flippant attribution of a sudden and massive
international outbreak of ZIKA to a single traveler from Polynesia, I was
unable to find any reference, question or investigation by any part of the
Western mainstream media as to alternative explanations. It seems that no
scientist or reporter in the Western world had any apparent interest in this
critical matter, a circumstance I find almost bizarre. Every newspaper, TV
station, publication, that I could monitor, studiously avoided any mention of
alternative explanations of the source of millions of infected mosquitoes. With
every other disease outbreak in the recent past, we have had various theories
and consequent debates as to source and origin, but not this time. This is
exceedingly curious, since the officially-attributed source is clearly
impossible.
The
second element was a persistent coordinated focus on the relatively few
instances of microcephaly to the neglect of almost every other aspect, leading
one to conclude the outbreak might consist of millions of microcephaly cases
instead of instances of a minor virus infection. This was true not only with
the Western mass media but also with internet searches. In repeated searches
for the incidence of total ZIKA infections in Brazil and other South American
nations, Google repeatedly produced only information on births with apparent
ZIKA-related defects. I will note here that Google's searches are often highly
selective in a manner not entirely explained by an autonomous algorithm. When
repeated and diligent searches on one topic produce only results on another
topic, it is safe for us to conclude that someone is pulling the strings. In
broad searches for rates of ZIKA infection, Google's entire emphasis was on
supposedly ZIKA-related microcephaly cases, and searches for percentages
produced more of the same "reported but unconfirmed" statistics
misleadingly quoted to infer that a very high percentage of births were
defective - which was absolutely not the case. Let's look at some statistics.
The total
population of South and Central America is almost 450 million, with reported
ZIKA infections projected to total perhaps 4 million overall. This means that
less than 1% of the total populations of these countries will be infected with
the ZIKA virus, of which a very small portion (perhaps only 1% or 2% at any
given time) will be pregnant mothers. Remember too, that there were only a few
hundred confirmed microcephaly cases and only about 1% of those contained any
link with ZIKA. This means that of all the pregnancies in Brazil, perhaps one
ten-thousandth will result in microcephaly and, as noted above, only about 1% of
these would exhibit a ZIKA infection. I by no means wish to trivialise
individual tragedies but, with confirmed cases measured as a percentage of the
population or by the incidence of all other primary causes of diseases and
deaths, the incidence of microcephaly in Brazil was statistically zero, whether
ZIKA-induced or not.
The next
concern was what appeared to be a widespread and deliberate program of
fear-mongering, with a coordinated focus that I anticipated but found
disturbing nonetheless. Even the adjuncts were designed to be unsettling and
frightening. For one article on ZIKA, the Washington Post employed a
photographic setting of a statue guarding a tomb in a cemetery, with the
caption, "Flower urns at many graves are breeding grounds for the
disease-carrying mosquitoes." Why a cemetery setting? Why the photo of
graves? How many people had died from contracting ZIKA? Approximately none. The
Washington Post screamed that "The more we learn, the worse things seem to
get". It told us of the virus "sweeping through the hemisphere"
and wrote of the "growing links to birth defects and neurological
disorders" which were even "worse than originally suspected",
and warning of the "increasing the risk for devastating harm" during
pregnancy. The Washington Post told us, "Brazilians panic as mosquito linked
to brain damage in thousands of babies" (36) (37), and Canada's Globe and
Mail told us that "As the virus ravages Brazil", several hundred
babies were left "with devastated brains" (38), while failing to
mention that Canada's House of Parliament has suffered the same condition for
decades.
Thomas
Frieden, Director of the US-based CDC, said he expected cases to increase
"dramatically" (39), and that "The cost of caring for one child
with birth defects can be $10 million or more". He tearfully told us,
according to the Washington Post, of one woman "who was fearful of what
would happen to her baby. To quote, "She said, 'I will be worried for my
whole life, and even after I die, who is going to take care of the baby'."
We were further informed that "studies showed" ZIKA was "likely
behind more birth defects and problems than researchers realised", and was
linked to "a broad array of birth defects and neurological
disorders". As an aside, WHO Director-General Dr Margaret Chan said ZIKA
had gone "from a mild threat to one of alarming proportions", and
that she had set up a ZIKA "emergency team" after the
"explosive" spread of the virus. (40) But as you will read elsewhere,
Margaret Chan apparently wasn't concerned about Ebola that was killing by the
tens of thousands, to the extent that the WHO stopped answering their phones so
people wouldn't continue to bother them with updates. It took years for Ebola -
and other serious outbreaks, including the H5N1 flu and SARS in Hong Kong - to
become "alarming" and explosive" and require Margaret Chan to
establish an "emergency team", so why all the fuss about ZIKA that
killed nobody? To continue, the Washington Post further informed us:
"A
growing concern among pediatricians is that ZIKA could inflict harm to
developing brain tissue in other, less obvious ways than microcephaly. That
condition could be the "tip of the iceberg" of a series of
neurological problems, some of which might not show up in the brain scans used
to spot microcephaly, and it might not even show up for years to come, These
could include epilepsy, behavioral problems and mental retardation, "It
could be that these children are born with a normal head size but manifest
other problems later in life"." From this, we must gather that now
even those babies appearing normal at birth are by no means safe or healthy,
that they might appear normal today but may very well become delinquent,
epileptic and mentally retarded at undetermined points in the future. So we
have not only a strong focus on the relatively few cases of confirmed birth
defects, but solemn and somber warnings that all births in the entirety of
Latin America are suspect far into the indefinite future.
In such a
case, what does one do? Fortunately, the WHO, Western medical
"experts", and the Washington Post, all reading from the same page,
had the ready answer: legalised abortions. And this was the final, and
extraordinarily vocal, thrust of the media coverage. And I have to say, I found
this to be suspicious as hell. Reading from beginning to end, it was difficult
to avoid concluding that the purpose of the exaggerated focus on the birth
defects to the exclusion of all else, coupled with the intense fear-mongering
that followed, were simply the prelude to the main act which was to force a
change in South America's abortion laws. The fear-mongering paid off to some
extent: The governments of many countries in South and Central America, aided
immeasurably by some elements of the media and countless NGOs, advised all
women to delay any planned pregnancies until 2018.
The New
York Times, Bloomberg, Canada's Public Health Service and others were
instructing Latin American women to avoid pregnancy (41) (42) (43) (44), while
the Washington Post ran an article on January 22, 2016 in which it informed
that Latin American countries were advising women to not only postpone
pregnancies but to avoid sex altogether. (45) But then it launched into what I
thought was an extraordinary propaganda piece on abortion in Latin America. It
told us that the topic is "Taboo in election campaigns", then
"estimated" the total number of induced abortions at well over
850,000 per year, stating that perhaps ten million women had obtained illegal
abortions in Brazil alone during the prior ten years. In other words, roughly a
third of all pregnancies in Brazil had been aborted. And a group known as the
Pan American Health Organization, a sister to Margaret Chan's WHO, produced a
study claiming the numbers were well over one million per year. (46) And not
only that, but more than 20% of all women in Brazil have had "at least one
abortion" - this in a country where abortions are illegal. But, according
to these "experts", it is clear that such a prohibition "does
not prevent women resorting to abortion". I guess not. These
"experts" even admitted their figures were "ridiculously
high", but used this as proof that abortions would not increase if they
were legalised - which was the thrust of the entire argument and the purpose of
the almost certainly fabricated facts. The fear-mongering further reared its ugly
head with an (undocumented and certainly false) tale of one woman who
"disappeared after entering an illegal abortion clinic", the article
confiding to us that "She would have died during the procedure and police
suspect that her body was burned and dismembered". With risks like this,
we should conclude that Brazilian women are nothing if not courageous, though I
would have thought the more common procedure would be to dismember first and
burn later. But then maybe things are different in Brazil.
The
Washington Post ran another article on February 8, 2016, titled, "ZIKA
prompts urgent debate about abortion in Latin America" (47), in which they
stated (much too gleefully, I thought) that calls to loosen restrictive
abortion laws were "gaining momentum", and that "activists"
were "pressing lawmakers" to act swiftly in removing these laws.
According to the Post, the pro-abortion lobby was "taking advantage of
this to liberalize the legislation", and one spokesman for a pro-abortion
NGO named 'Bureau for the Life and Health of Women' hoped that "ZIKA would
change the debate". (48) (49) We were also informed of another Canadian
NGO named 'Women on Web', who specialise in shipping abortion-inducing drugs
through the mail (for a "donation" of $100) into countries where
abortions are prohibited by law. The article informed us that, sadly,
"Often, government customs inspectors seize the pills." No idea why.“And a columnist named Hélio
Schwartsman wrote that he has interviewed a woman that said if she
were pregnant and discovered she'd been infected by ZIKA, "I would not
hesitate an instant to abort", dismemberment and subsequent incineration
apparently being an insufficient disincentive. (50) (51) I should note here that the
Washington Post and all other Western media, while positively glowing about the
prospects of abortion being legalised in South and Central America, neglected
to mention that all the "activists", the NGOs, and the
"pro-abortion lobbies" were all US-based or US-funded, as well as
often being US-managed, many or most closely connected to USAID and US-based
Planned Parenthood, who are in turn the Great-Grandfather and Great-Grandmother
of eugenics, abortion, forced sterilisation, and population reduction.
Then the
New York Times, not one to be left out of the excitement, ran an article by a
Simon Romero, informing that "ZIKA Virus Has Brazilians Re-examining
Strict Abortion Laws", and that "the surging reports" of babies
with microcephaly "are igniting a fierce debate" over the country’s abortion
laws. Romero also noted that (American) "abortion rights activists are
seizing on the crisis" to change the country's laws. (52)"Pregnant
women across Brazil are now in a panic", he tells us, which is no great
surprise given "the surging reports" and the extraordinary amount of
fear-mongering the media contributed to aid their momentum. After reading all
the Western media stories, I'd be in a panic too. He noted that "some
activists", American as usual, compare this to the US debate on abortion
following measles infections in that country, a situation that "paved the
way" for abortion in California and then most states in the US. "The
fears over the ZIKA virus are giving us a rare opening to challenge the
religious fundamentalists who put the lives of thousands of women at risk in
Brazil each year to maintain laws belonging in the dark ages."
It needs
to be noted somewhere that casual abortions as a means of birth control may not
necessarily qualify as a "universal value". People and societies in
different countries are entitled to form their own values, especially those
values involving human life, without the belligerent assistance of either
Planned Parenthood or the Washington Post, and if the countries in Latin
America want to restrict abortions or if China wants to restrict pornography,
it is nobody else's business and is a gross violation of sovereignty to attempt
to force our Western or other values onto them. We formed our values, such as
they are, without interference from others, and they have the right to do the
same.
It is a
truth in all matters involving foreign affairs, most especially those carrying
significant social, political or economic implications, that there are no
fortuitous events, no "coincidences", that all things happen because
they are planned, with the final result inevitably being according to
expectation and plan. How then do we think about ZIKA? It seems implausible
that the intense onslaught by the WHO and the media, wildly exaggerating what
appeared to be non-existent dangers, was simply unintelligent and purposeless
fear-mongering. This, and the sudden overwhelming push for legalised abortions
were too unanimous, too widespread, and too well-orchestrated to have been
merely opportunistic. How then do we think about Oxitec’s release of hundreds of
millions of mosquitoes that were almost certainly infected with ZIKA? How do we
think about the unanimous official narrative of ZIKA packing its bags and
traveling halfway around the world to Brazil at the time of the World Cup? A
coincidence? How do we think about ZIKA choosing as its new home the one place
in the world with concentrated abortion restrictions? How do we think about the
media ignoring the logic in these questions and trashing anyone who raised
them?
What were
the results of the ZIKA outbreak? The most noticeable was an unparalleled
opportunity to raise a critical mass clamoring for legalised abortions, but
there were others. Media reports estimated South America would lose at least
$53 billion in tourism revenue from the widely-advised travel restrictions.
(53) (54) Metropole would have to search hard indeed to find a more convenient
economic sanction for a recalcitrant socialist periphery. And of course,
economic hardship coupled with public fear and panic easily decay into social
unrest, and are the precursor of choice as a seedbed for regime change. We have
seen all of these, and more.
Notes
(4) https://www.huffpost.com/entry/zika-monsanto-pyriproxyfen-microcephaly_n_56c2712de4b0b40245c79f7c
(32) https://inhabitat.com/is-zika-the-real-cause-of-microcephaly-in-brazil-new-study-raises-questions/
(38) https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/the-globe-in-brazil-zikas-groundzero/article28934757/
(39) https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/sep/9/dr-thomas-frieden-cdc-chief-zika-will-be-sobering-/
(44) https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/diseases/zika-virus/pregnant-planning-pregnancy.html
(45) https://www.washingtonpost.com/zika-and-pregnancy/bf70c3c4-23e0-4981-9ff3-3624ffcdef0c_note.html (avoid
sex)
54) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/12/rio-olympics-zika-amir-attaran-public-health-threat
*
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Readers: Please forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your
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Larry
Romanoff is a retired management
consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in
international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export
business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University,
presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr.
Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books
generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted
at: 2186604556@qq.com. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
