Wouldn’t Put it Past ‘Em: The 228th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 228th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we talk about the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this week’s episode, we discuss the WHO, International Health Regulations, and this week’s rally in Geneva. Also: major concessions in the Covid narrative. And: avian flu (H5N1). Finally: on the joys of motorcycling in the Alps with one’s son.*****Our sponsors:Timeline: Accelerate the clearing of damaged mitochondria ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 200 and something.
200 and... I know, it's one of those things.
I should have seen this coming because we've done this now 200 and some odd times.
But, um, what number is it?
It's 228.
It's 228, and it's June.
And it's June, and we have had a run-in with, uh, Junuary here, uh, that is over.
The sun is now shining.
Yeah, you say as if you had to live through it.
No, I was I was away.
Yes, you were away.
And the many of the experiences that you had while you were away are going to form the basis for a lot of what we're going to be talking about today.
But yeah, it's been it's been wet.
Wet and woolly and windy and cool here and literally as you and your elder son Zachary were flying back into the island yesterday the weather cleared as if as if the weather gods were saying they're back.
Here we go.
Well, we had quite the landing, actually.
A little caravan is the creature in question.
And that's the plane.
And the pilots faced a gusty crossed wind landing that had us approaching the runway diagonally until the very last second.
But anyway, it was brilliantly done, I thought.
These air pilots are, to a person, awesome.
Right, and it was done so well that they can use the plane again.
Nice!
Not only did everyone survive, but... It's the gold standard.
Yeah.
I should point out what I didn't point out earlier, which is that I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein and you are Dr. Heather Hying.
Indeed.
And we are ready to confront a modified state of the world here in the first week of June.
Excellent.
Join us on Locals if you're not there already.
There's a watch party going on right now and lots of other good stuff, including access to the Discord server.
We're going to be doing a Q&A after this episode, and where we start our Q&As every time is with a question from the Discord server, and then all the rest of the questions are coming from people on Locals, and the Q&A is for Locals subscribers only, so join us there.
Join us there.
If you got queues, that's the place for the A's.
Yes, and lots of other stuff too.
Yes.
And we, without further ado, always start off the top of our hour with three ads.
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Alright, just a matter of terminology to make things clearer.
Oh God, this is not going to make things clearer at all.
No.
I'm going to look on your face.
It's going to make things a lot clearer.
No.
We should refer to mitochondria that are failing as mitonotocondria.
Mitonotocondria.
Yeah.
I hear nothing, it's not crickets at this time of day, it's birds, but I hear nothing but birds.
Mitochondria.
Yeah, mitochondria.
Yes.
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Exactly.
Okay, now with that I feel we've hit rock bottom and so nowhere to go but up.
That's never true.
That seems comforting until you think about it.
Peek whatever.
Maybe or whatever.
Nope.
Never true.
Nope.
It's not your turn yet.
Oh, I know that.
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What?
I'm just trying to find what you just changed.
I'm just pointing out that straight to your door is... Straight, I see.
Should not be taken literally.
Given that it's Pride Month, is it maybe it ships queer to your door?
I did not see that coming.
And now my mind is racing many, many times.
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Wait a second.
I've said these things before very recently.
Here's the thing, though.
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You came home somewhat sleep-deprived, and it was like 5 in the morning where you came from before you were finally able to get into bed here, but you slept so well.
I slept.
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Still a bit sleep-deprived.
Not to be used as a selling point on the invitation.
Seems like it would be cheating.
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Wrong.
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Is that right?
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All right.
Yes.
On the plane?
Yes, I believe so.
Now, it wasn't the pernicious, tyrannical surveillance that we have all grown to expect.
This was a much more localized type of surveillance.
I'm inferring now after having had a night to sleep on my experience.
Zach almost missed the plane, as you know, because he was tied up in Passport Control.
And he was told at Passport Control that nobody was going to miss their plane.
He was just fine.
And when I got to the gate ahead of him, I said, my son is at Passport Control.
It's taking some time.
They said, don't worry, he'll be fine.
I got on the plane, sat down, and then they called my name.
And I found a steward and I said, you've just called my name.
And anyway, through a series of, uh, discussions, it was, it became apparent that not only had Zach not arrived at the gate yet, but that the gate had been closed.
The airplane, he would not be boarding the airplane with me.
Abandoned in Europe.
At which point I got kind of annoyed because both of us had been told that he wasn't gonna miss his flight.
You love the young man.
I do love the young man.
We're hoping to keep him with you.
He probably would have endured a delay of a day to get on the next flight or whatever.
It seemed that having been told multiple times that there was not a problem that he should have, they should have, you know.
And as I understand it, you, like, you guys weren't late.
No.
No, actually our flight in, it was a connecting flight in Paris, and we arrived on time, so passport control was slow for whatever reason.
But given that they had told us that he wasn't in danger of missing his flight, he had not done what other people were doing at passport control, which was saying, I have a very tight connection, and then they got advanced through the line.
So they, passport control, and everyone else who assured us that he wasn't going to miss it, had in fact caused him to miss it.
So, anyway, yes, well, I got annoyed.
Not terribly annoyed, but I got a little annoyed that he was about to miss the flight and that they had closed the door, having told us that he wasn't going to miss the flight.
And somehow, miraculously, the pilot on this Air France flight, thank you Air France, intervened, got the gate open, which I've never seen happen before.
He literally walked down the... He literally went up the jetway to get them to open the gate to let Zach in.
Zach got on the flight.
Voila, as they say.
They do.
Yes.
However, I'm pretty sure that for the first time in my life, for the rest of the flight, I was subjected to the concern that this person might be a problem, right?
That, you know how we've all seen video of people who are a problem on a plane, and I think my having gotten a little upset that Zach was about to miss the flight had caused them to Have some sort of a meeting amongst the people on the flight and to discuss the possibility that I might become unruly which of course I wouldn't have Nonetheless, so that was a little exhausting.
I did have the sense that... Oh, that's interesting.
...interactions were not standard.
Well, you're talking about with the... With the crew.
Staff.
With the crew, yeah.
The meeting may have resulted in surveillance of you, but it resulted in them giving me, backing coach, a glass of champagne.
So, different results for the two of us.
Interesting.
Yes, an apology to you and surveillance for me.
Well, it all works.
But, anyway.
Voila.
We have both arrived home.
Yes.
All right.
Okay.
Okay.
So, um, you were not in fact spending time in Paris.
You were spending time in Geneva.
In Geneva.
Yes.
Um, and we are going to get to the substance of, um, why... should we start with, um...
Yeah, we're gonna start with your talk.
Alright, so here's what we're gonna do.
The primary reason for me to be in Geneva was to participate in a rally.
Geneva is the headquarters of the UN and the World Health Organization, more importantly.
And a rally on the occasion of the final fate of the Pandemic Preparedness Treaty and international health regulations.
A rally was scheduled at which I was invited to speak.
So that was my primary purpose.
for going, and we thought we would show you that speech.
It's short, it's under five minutes, and we thought it would be a good idea for you to get the sense of what it sounded like and all of that, especially for Dark Horse viewers who have watched us discuss this many times and have that interest.
So Zach, do you want to play that?
Okay, so our next speaker told me that he's here to fight the man because the man won't fight himself.
Brett Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist, co-author of the best-selling book, A Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, co-host of the Dark Horse Podcast, and fellow at the Brownstone Institute.
Please give a warm welcome to Brett Weinstein.
- Ladies and gentlemen, citizens of the world, we are under attack.
The principles of national sovereignty, personal liberty, and the consent of the governed have been slated for destruction by a tiny global elite that desperately wants to rule us.
They aim to dictate what we are allowed to do, to say, and to think.
To control where and when we may travel, what drugs and injections we must take, what doubts we are allowed to harbor.
They want the ability to shut down discussion and to close down the channels we use to challenge the veracity of their narratives and the legitimacy of their power.
In short, they are angry that we successfully pulled back the curtain during the COVID era and they are itching for a rematch.
They are working overtime at the World Health Organization to rewrite all the rules so that next time they can win.
That is the true meaning of these negotiations over what they falsely call pandemic preparedness.
They are seeking an unprecedented level of control.
They must fail, and they will.
This international cabal finds our belief in liberty irritating, and it finds our insistence on informed consent laughable.
So it has targeted our national sovereignty from above.
Our nations are to be subordinated to an opaque international super order with veto power over our rights and our liberties as citizens.
We are to be controlled by a mechanism placed out of reach of any check or balance we might hope to employ.
We are told that these authoritarian measures are being crafted to protect the public's health and to keep us safe from a pandemic that we are assured is always ready to leap from wild animals into people.
It's not a matter of if, Tedros assures us, it's a matter of when.
But nothing could be further from the truth.
Nature is full of unknown viruses.
That much is not a lie.
But the ability of novel pathogens to jump the evolutionary gap and suddenly trigger a global human pandemic is very small.
Or at least it would be small, if not for the massive network of laboratories currently working to weaponize natural pathogens using gain-of-function technologies.
These labs are part of an undeclared Cold War of which the citizens of the world are barely aware.
The damage done to the world over the last four years should make the danger of enhancing human pathogens obvious.
The fact that our leaders refuse to discuss the weapons research that produced the COVID catastrophe is powerful evidence of how cynical those leaders have become.
If the international community was serious about protecting people from infectious disease, instead of planning to lock down, censor, and inoculate the world, it would focus on two things.
First, it would focus on basic measures to increase innate resistance to disease, like improving food quality and reducing vitamin D deficiency.
Second, it would focus on shutting down the labs that weaponize pathogens and place us all in jeopardy of laboratory leaks.
When we began to spread the word about the WHO's obscene power grab, the Director General released a statement.
He said the unprecedented concentration of power under consideration at the WHO was not a breach of the sovereignty of our nations.
He called that misinformation.
Because, he argued, our democratic governance would be working on our behalf to hand veto power over our rights and liberties to the Director General.
The absurdity of this is obvious.
Our governments are captured by the same private interests that finance the WHO.
Our only remaining influence over this well-sealed system of profiteers is to deliver our response in the streets, which is why, Mr. Director, I have traveled thousands of miles to give you your answer.
We, the informed citizens of the world, do not consent and we will not comply.
All right.
I I do want to highlight one important thing from that piece.
I believe that we should be thinking very carefully about two parallel tracks.
There's the track we are on where these international bodies are focused on whatever they have chosen to focus on.
I would argue largely at the behest of pharma and I don't know who else.
And then there's what they ought to be doing.
If the real objective was to protect people from infectious disease, there are things we could be doing.
We could be addressing vitamin D deficiency, for example, and the horrifying state of our food quality.
And if we had a proper accounting for what the actual impact of these things were, the net impact on health, it's a slam dunk.
I'm convinced of this.
But the other thing is, and we will talk about this more in the future, but the question of how much of what we face in terms of risk from pathogens is actually the result of human tinkering.
I think this is an explosive and important piece of the story.
It will come up in one of the later segments today, but this is really an important question.
If this was really about protecting human health, there are measures that we could Indeed.
If I were to try to steal man, say, the who's position as to why they aren't doing the things that you just laid out that seem obvious from where we stand now, I don't Maybe I'll try over in vitamin D and better food in a moment.
But with regard to shutting down the labs that are creating the very pathogens that are at risk of running amok in the world, The argument that they might give is that's so far outside of our purview that we have no—I would hope that they wouldn't say ability to affect, because presumably they know that they have the ability to affect everything, because that is what they are actively trying to do.
But ability to assess whether or not that is actually the risk.
Interestingly, right, the pseudo-sophisticated position with regard to virus origin was agnosticism.
It doesn't matter.
I don't know.
How could we know?
Let's just, now that we've got the thing, let's just start there.
And of course, this was not the actually sophisticated position.
It's an evolutionary position, and given that a large part of what we've seen has been evolutionary processes, both What has happened in the wake of, say, vaccinating the population, but also what happened in the lab that produced the thing?
An A evolutionary position is an uninvestigated and dangerous one.
Yes, I'm not excusing them, and I'm not saying that this makes sense as an argument, but if I'm to try to explain why the WHO would be silent on the question of shutting down the labs that are creating exactly these viruses, that might be it.
I guess.
I'm not sure what to do with it.
One, as I have long argued, I don't think you can steelman a position that isn't an earnestly held position.
A cynically held position is not steelmanable.
And in this case, if we're going to make arguments about what needs to be done regarding the food supply, you know, for example, bird farms or egg farms or whatever, I don't see why this falls outside of anything.
The fact is it's the international community.
It's a threat to human health.
We can debate how much of our pathogenic environment is affected by human tinkering of various kinds.
There's two different ways it will come up in a later segment today, but to the extent that somebody is putting the world in jeopardy, even if there has never been a lab leak, The fact that they are putting us in jeopardy by enhancing the pathogenicity of pathogens in the laboratory, there will ultimately be a leak.
Everyone recognizes that there have been leaks and some argue that none of the leaks so far have produced anything dangerous.
So no one, no one claims that lab leaks don't happen.
Therefore, there will be, if there hasn't already been, which there is abundant evidence there has been, one or more leaks of one of these pathogenized viruses. - Yes, and the obscene inversion of obligation to humans where and the obscene inversion of obligation to humans where we leave the virus makers as they are, and we attempt to immunize the population as a remedy,
That is truly an upside down world.
Mm-hmm.
You know, just as, you know, imagine that we were going to, instead of ensuring that medical schools taught surgeons to clean their hands very well, imagine that we were going to give you a dozen inoculations against the bacteria that are on their hands.
That are on their hands.
So as to preserve their ability to come in from whatever else they were doing without cleaning themselves.
Right.
Exactly.
You know, A, it wouldn't work.
And B, what the hell are you doing?
The obvious place to address this is at the source.
And when the source is human meddling, it's very easy not to do it.
Which is which, you know, in turn is partially explanatory for why it's so important that the zoonotic spread hypothesis is on everyone's lips over in virology and public health land.
Oh, it's, you know, zoonotic spread, that's how we get these diseases, and animals are dangerous, and nature is wild, and it's happened before, and it must be the source of all of the scary, dark pathogens, right?
Well, humans are coming into more contact with nature, don't you know, Heather?
It's the result of growing human populations and pressure on nature.
That's what that paragraph in all of their grant applications says.
Yeah, pressure on nature.
Yeah, it's pressure.
It's unfortunate, but we all know the human population is growing, and so pandemics are going to be more and more common, which is why they're always around the corner.
Isn't that right, Tedros?
Yeah, because people are definitely in much greater contact now than they were 100 years ago, 1,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago.
A lot more contact.
Yeah, and that's before we even get to the nature documentaries that they're watching, and I presume they could catch diseases from those too.
Yeah, well, I mean, the documentaries can go viral.
Well played.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, shall we get to the substance of what actually went down with the World Health Organization in the midst of this meeting, it actually turns out?
Because it's actually rather interesting and the range of opinions on whether we won or lost is rather large.
Now, I will caution people.
We talked about this in advance of the trip.
to this rally and we said actually if you look at this carefully we won not we didn't win the war but we certainly won a major battle and you could see that by how weakened The international health regulations under consideration were and the fact that Tedros surrendered on the pandemic treaty itself.
Yep.
Now, the international health regulations were the place where the more frightening content was.
A treaty has a different legal status, and so it was frightening in that regard.
But nonetheless, you could see that the World Health Organization had backed way off of what we had initially discussed when we first became aware of what was taking place at this level.
So this is not going to be a repeat of that discussion because there's actually been a whole lot of water under the bridge since then.
Now what we discovered while we were in Geneva, we had a little conference, a one-day conference in advance of the rally that we had and then we all went to dinner to talk about what we had experienced.
Now, the whole thing was infused with content from the World Health Organization.
It turns out that our conference was being held in a hotel and it turned out that the people negotiating this treaty, I didn't know this until after the fact, had actually decided to meet in the same hotel.
Uh, now that could be a coincidence, but it's not obvious that they should have been meeting.
And I mean, especially because we were in Geneva, it's not like they don't have a place to meet.
Um, so it sort of seemed like they had chosen to meet in that hotel, but maybe not.
Maybe they have some, uh, other excuse they, um, Apparently delivered a message to our side, basically trash-talking, saying, well, we'll see at the end of the day who's raising a glass, right?
Who is going to be celebrating at the end of today, they told us.
This message is how delivered?
It's like by pigeon?
Oh, some social media.
Okay.
Um, but the most interesting thing is, all right, we held this rally.
There were, uh, some very good, fiery talks.
We will probably compile some of that and put it out for, uh, folks in a condensed form.
James Lindsay gave a very good talk.
Del Bigtree gave a very good talk.
Kat Lindley, lots of, lots of people that, uh, those in this fight will, will be well familiar with.
Remember Malone?
Um, Jessica Rose did a, uh, a rap, which I did not see coming.
That's great.
Awesome.
But anyway, at the end of this rally, we had a rally, it was successful, probably wasn't as big as it might have been because people got the sense that the battle was over since they surrendered on the treaty last week.
But it was still large, very large from the point of view of a rally in Geneva.
That was the scuttlebutt and in fact there was a march afterwards where the folks who had gathered marched through Geneva and it was on everybody's lips.
It was a significant fact.
But we went to dinner to discuss what we had learned from the whole thing and as we're at dinner, predictably, I mean it was on our schedule.
Which is public.
Public enough, yeah.
The people negotiating the international health regulations.
Gathered 9 o'clock at night and they voted on their new toothless international health regulation.
So the long and toothless as we discussed last week in terms of having had most of what it was trying to do extracted except for the censorship.
Except for the censorship part.
Now, extracted means something in this case.
They took all of the language that would have given the World Health Organization and, in fact, the Director General at his sole authority, the ability to mandate things like vaccines.
And oh, my God, gene therapies was actually in there to mandate those things, to mandate lockdowns, to mandate restrictions on travel.
Right.
They were looking for this absolutely authoritarian power.
And what they did was they basically backed off to an advisory role, which is what they've had.
Now, I'm not saying they're not dangerous in an advisory role.
They are.
But the basic point is...
They were driven by our raising the alarm to have to take those things out.
Why?
Because they couldn't pass.
Right?
And so what they did was they gathered at nine o'clock at night when we were predictably dining elsewhere discussing the rally and the consequences of it.
And they met and they passed their toothless draft that does have this one onerous provision about censorship, and we'll come back to why that's the one thing that they decided to keep.
But anyway, they met and they passed it.
So, you know, information came to us that they were meeting, you know, nine o'clock at night on a Saturday.
Now, my point would be this.
We drove them to massively weaken their power grab so that it becomes now an advisory problem, which is still in this day and age bad, but it's not the authoritarian power structure that they had described in their initial draft.
and they're having to meet when they you know when the rally's over they're meeting at night right like they're meeting while we're at dinner in order to pass this thing and they put out you want to show Ted Rose's tweet of this uh the meeting in which they passed the um The International Health Regulations.
So Tedros, this was, of course, a face-saving exercise.
And here, Tedros says, the historic decisions taken today by the WHA 77 delegates to one, adopt the International Health Regulations amendments and to finalize the pandemic agreement within a year.
So what they did was they resurrected the idea that they might pass a treaty.
by the WHA 78 or earlier, if possible, in 2024, demonstrates the common desire by who member states to protect their own people and the world from a shared risk, public health emergencies and future pandemics.
And there's a picture of the delegates meeting at night to pass this thing.
Well, I don't.
I don't know the time.
The timing is is odd, right?
This is dated June 1st, 2012, 51.
So that's midday on Saturday.
So I wonder if they had the meeting.
So this is the historic decisions taken today.
And this isn't the sign that you're talking about.
This was the meeting that led up to it.
But now go down to Ryan Cole's.
So Ryan Cole points out.
He was also at the rally, right?
Yes, he was.
He's now talking to Tedris.
He says, it is nice that you show a full room.
The truth is only a third of the room was full and the recorded vote was not taken.
Nations were exhorted.
Extorted.
I can't see it.
Extorted to not object.
To not object.
We the people will never comply.
The U.S.
will exit the hoop.
He points out that they've taken a picture that makes it look like the countries of the who gathered when in fact This was not well attended.
They did not take a roll call vote.
They did this the appearance of consensus but anyway, the whole thing is deceptive and and It is designed to leave the impression that they won when in fact the obvious interpretation is very much the one that we talked about last week, which is actually we drove their agenda.
We drove them to meet secretly and most egregiously.
There is an article, Article 55, in their own rules, their own bylaws, that requires them to give four months review period before voting on such a document.
So instead they released this thing last minute and voted on it all of a sudden in a non-roll call vote.
And so they clearly violated their own rules.
Which should make it not binding.
Right.
They are in violation of the rules.
And I would like to put this all in the context of what Tedros said when we started talking about this publicly.
Which is he said this is not a violation of sovereignty.
Basically because your own governments which you have elected are going to participate in its crafting now if our governments have signed up for a World Health Organization in which there is a rule in which we will have four months to review anything And they are violating that rule then even his argument is insane so right anyway We talked extensively last week about the idea of feedback.
Your enemy does not want you to understand when you are succeeding, because if you understand when you are succeeding, you can get better at doing it more often.
If you think you're failing when you're succeeding, then you won't.
And so I would caution all of those in the freedom movement who are saying, we knew it was a trick, We knew that they wouldn't relent.
Well, they did relent.
Yes, they arranged it so that they can say, in the end, we passed our international health regulations.
Oh, yeah?
What was in them?
An advisory role on thing after thing.
Now, the one exception is the censorship provisions, which remain onerous.
And what I would point out is there is a reason that they chose, if they were going to succeed on anything, they need to succeed on that.
Why?
Because our ability to talk about what they are doing is successful at repelling their advances.
We are fending off tyranny with speech.
That's why speech is encoded in our Constitution the way it is, and it's why they are targeting it, especially when they eliminated everything else and reduced themselves to an advisory role.
We need to keep our eyes on the prize.
We are winning.
We are driving them.
They are scheduling their meetings around us.
They are altering their documents around us.
We are winning.
Have we won outright?
No.
Are they going to relent?
No.
These people dream of this authoritarian power and they will continue to pursue it.
But We have to understand that what we are doing works and we can do it better.
That's the thing we should be focused on.
What did we do right?
And how can we do it better so that they are going to have to relent on their censorship?
And they are going to have to abandon their own rule breaking ways because they can't beat us.
Fantastic.
Yeah, I think it is.
I think it is fantastic.
And I wish I wish the freedom movement was better at Not sniping at itself and behaving in a counterproductive way.
We just need to say, did we win absolutely outright?
No, but we punched way above our weight class and we've got to keep doing that.
Agreed.
All right.
Agreed.
So the other two things, uh, that you'd want to bring to us today, uh, were somewhat unrelated.
I'm just going to show you rather than that or that.
Um, I tell you what, we've got, uh, let's do the, um, the, uh, avian flu piece here.
Yeah, actually there are two other things that need to be introduced here along with the avian flu thing.
There have been, um, A couple of major concessions to the heterodox narrative.
To those of us who have been saying, actually you're not being told the truth across many different domains during the COVID so-called pandemic.
There have been some, yeah, do you want to show?
So here is the first of these major concessions.
This is Alina Chan, who is a biologist co-author with Matt Ridley of a major book on the lab leak, writing, interestingly, in the New York Times.
So this is a guest essay opinion piece.
She says why the pandemic probably started in a lab in five key points.
Now, the important thing here is not so much The technical argument that she lays out that would be well familiar to people who've paid attention to Dark Horse or any of the other folks who have been focused on the evidence which has frankly from the beginning all pointed to a laboratory origin.
The only thing that pointed in the other direction has been the presumption that viruses come to humans from animal sources that there was no evidence that ever pointed any other way and now we've seen both embarrassing communications in which the cover-up is arranged we've seen
Financial incentives that are frankly jaw-dropping that explain why people like Christian Anderson would have changed his tune from a scientific one in which he said, uh, this virus sure doesn't look consistent with natural evolution to, oh, it can only have come from nature.
In the Proximal Origins paper.
So anyway, we've seen all of that, but to have the New York Times now prominently featuring an article from a prominent member of the lab leak scientific community is a major concession.
What that means is that they are no longer going to attempt to maintain their nonsense line that A, the virus most likely and almost certainly came from nature, and B, that anybody who sees it otherwise is a crank, right?
They've demonized us for years over our insistence that this looked suspicious, and now they have, much like the Who, they have surrendered on this point.
But that is only one of two such points to happen this week.
The other one came in the British Medical Journal.
It was actually published a few months ago, but it's getting play.
It's getting play in the mainstream press.
So here you have the Telegraph in the UK.
This was also, if you're looking for lots of detail, here I would recommend John Campbell's video on this.
recent video.
But anyway, COVID jabs may be to blame for increase in excess deaths, covering the British Medical Journal's discussion of all cause mortality.
Do you want to show Heather's screen here?
So this is the BMJ Public Health article, which was actually submitted last June, a year ago, accepted March 20th.
I don't actually see here.
It may have just come out.
I don't see exactly when it was published, but exactly as The Telegraph is reporting, they find with, you know, somewhat questionable... I'm trying to find the date that it was released.
I think it's recent.
You know, it'd be better if they hadn't used the data from Our World in Data, which are not always as rigorous as they might be, but the short version is, as they report in the results of their abstract here, the total number of excess deaths in 47 countries of the Western world was over 3 million from January 2020 until end of 2022.
Excess mortality was documented in 41 countries in 2020, 42 countries in 2021, 43 countries in 2022.
In 2020, the year of the COVID-19 pandemic onset and implementation of containment measures, records present over a million excess deaths.
In 2020, the year of the COVID-19 pandemic onset and implementation of containment measures, records present over a million excess deaths.
In 2021, they're reporting over one and a quarter million excess deaths.
And in 2022, excess deaths in the amount of over 800,000.
We all just lived through this, but memories appear to be very short.
Basically, the vaccines were rolled out for health practitioners at the very, very, very end of 2020.
And so 2021 was the year in which most people who were going to get vaccinated got vaccinated for the first and second and in some cases third time.
And so that was the year this research finds with the highest excess deaths, with excess deaths still high, but falling off somewhat in 2022.
Yeah.
Now I would point out there's lots, um, I'm not faulting the authors of this study.
Um, but there's lots here that underplays the harm.
Um, and So anyway, what you get is a very conservative estimate of the excess deaths.
It's certainly not extrapolated to the globe.
I don't exactly know why they focused on the West, it seems to me.
That's an arbitrary boundary.
There may be reasons for it, but the point is one wants to extrapolate to the entire world.
It may be that, you know, to the extent as we've talked about before on Dark Horse, to the extent that China did not vaccinate anybody with anything based on spike nor based on the mRNA platform.
It may be that there's a billion plus people to whom the extrapolation is not relevant.
You know, what exactly happened in India, which is not by their categorization part of the West.
Anyway, there's a lot to be done with the question of actually what is the likely number but nonetheless here what you have is a Scientific exploration in a major scientific journal followed by Yes, the Telegraph has been much better than other mainstream publications, but it is nonetheless a mainstream publication Which is now talking about what we have been
Arguing for years now is the case that these shots are very dangerous and that what we see in the VAERS database, for example, which is also liable to be a dramatic underestimate for many many reasons, among them that it is likely to catch immediate effects of a shot, but if you die of a heart attack six months or a year after your shot, it is unlikely to be catalogued.
In fact, I think it's certain not to be catalogued in VAERS.
Even though the mechanism that we have described here on Dark Horse, where the conscripting of your own cells and the production of foreign proteins will necessarily result in your own immune system attacking those cells.
And if that happens in your heart, for example, that can create a fatal wound or at least a vulnerability that can become fatal, you know, in a moment of soccer exuberance or whatever.
So all of this is now coming together.
The powers that be have failed in their propaganda effort to pretend that these things aren't real and we are now seeing discussion in the mainstream press.
So that's huge.
Now I would say of the three major initial questions, the origin of the virus, Vaccine safety and effectiveness and the utility of repurposed drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
That last one still remains a successful story of propaganda.
The actual evidence is quite clear, but it is very hard to get acknowledgement of that, and the mainstream press certainly hasn't yet.
There have been acknowledgements that the CDC shouldn't have told people.
Not to use Ivermectin, but as for... The FDA shouldn't have tried out their horses.
Yeah.
The question of whether or not it works is still suffering from that massive propaganda effort.
If you're interested in it, I highly recommend Pierre Khoury's book, The War on Ivermectin.
You will learn things about how pharma demonizes a competitor.
And destroys the reputations of people who recognize its value.
But anyway, story for another day.
But anyway, there we are.
The world is changing.
We've got the WHO backing off its diabolical, tyrannical plans.
You've got the mainstream press acknowledging that laboratory origin is highly likely.
You've got acknowledgement that millions of people appear to have died from the safe and effective vaccines.
So that is, uh, huge progress.
Now, I would also argue it's maddening if you know what's really going on to watch this stuff slowly dawn on the public consciousness.
In other words, we're still looking at a, you know, a fraction of the strength of the evidence of laboratory origin and the meaning of that story.
If you're interested in the meaning of that story, highly recommend Bobby Kennedy's most recent two books, The Wuhan Cover-Up Fascinating.
Difficult read, but fascinating.
And the real Anthony Fauci.
You'll learn something about a whole world you don't know exists that involves players you're well familiar with.
So anyway, something is pivoting.
Something is in retreat, and it is trying to re-establish control by acknowledging things that are now common knowledge in an effort to strengthen its position going forward.
Now, what's it going to move forward to?
That's a different question.
Well, of course, in this country, the timing of anything in 2024 warrants a reference to the election.
So, you know, of those three big items that we have been talking about for a long time, as have many, many people,
I feel like what is tolerated now, what is moving into the Overton window, as someone offstage is moving the window around so that at various moments we don't know whether or not we're going to be considered in or outside of it, even if our positions don't change.
The Team Blue needs to defeat Trump no matter what.
And what happened to Trump in the courtroom recently was, you know, some will argue a move in that direction, and some will argue a terribly badly played move.
But regardless, that fight is still very much alive, and we've still got several months to go in the U.S.
before this election happens.
Obviously, COVID hit when Trump was president.
Did he have a position particularly on lab origins?
It seems like on that one, he made a few forays into, you know, referring to the China virus, right?
And kind of didn't care much.
And on vaccines, he thinks it's a great success.
So on both of these topics, it is kind of a gift, not just to the public and to those of us who've been saying things, but also a cryptic gift to, again, Team Blue, to say, "Yeah, these we were kind to say, "Yeah, these we were kind of maybe wrong about a little bit, and oh, by the way, so was Trump." Right?
Whereas the repurposed drugs, this is one of the very few places where Trump actually stood up to Fauci, right?
And, you know, he said some crazy stuff, but he was talking about hydroxychloroquine, and I believe he was talking about ivermectin, although I'm not as sure about that.
I think he didn't end up talking about Ivermectin.
But he certainly talked about hydroxychloroquine, and the slam on him was immediate and swift.
At the time, I bought it.
I didn't pay much attention to it.
It's like, early chaos of COVID, and the president thinks he's an epidemiologist now, and he's got an idea.
How did they even do it?
They then started talking about bleach.
Yeah, Fifth Tank Cleaner.
So which of these three things are they not likely to give us any movement on, at least before the American election?
It's probably going to be the repurposed drug swap, because that was where Trump fought back in a way that was You know, not completely coherent, but it was fighting back.
That's really interesting, actually, that the idea, the reason that we can't succeed with Ivermectin, where the evidence is frankly quite clear, if you look at the actual evidence, is that a concession to Trump is unthinkable to this team.
Right.
I think that makes sense.
I will say, so much in our traveling Discussion of what your travels with Zachary.
Yes.
Yeah It's amazing that something as significant as the conviction of President Trump in New York over this insane Issue which is among other things a massive Double standard, given what President Clinton was allowed to get away with.
But the point is, it has to be highlighted that our system is deeply threatened by Team Blue.
The threat to democracy represented by An administration prosecuting its enemies in court really cannot be overstated.
And as much as I've said many, many times that I think Bobby Kennedy is the right guy to ascend to the White House in order to address the threat to our republic, nothing has made me feel as sympathetic to Trump as watching Uh, this absolutely insatiable quest to, uh, to control him with legal exotica, so-called, uh, lawfare.
Anyway, so that needs to be said.
Glad it's now been said.
I also feel, although we didn't plan to talk about it today, that the absolute insanity of authorizing the Ukrainians to use American weapons inside of Russia also seems to be A bizarre kind of brinksmanship that threatens potentially to escalate into a nuclear catastrophe.
I mean imagine if the Russians were doing this to us and authorizing Someone to be using their weapons inside our board.
It's unthinkable.
So, in any case, there is something shocking afoot.
I think the fact that it's happening in an American election year is not an accident.
And we need to wake the hell up because something is willing to play games with
the lives of obviously in the case that you're risking a confrontation with a major nuclear nation we're talking about hundreds of millions of lives in jeopardy right the idea that anybody would take that anything less than absolutely seriously is shocking and that it's happening at the same time that our constitutional liberties are in jeopardy and political opponents are finding themselves in court you know
The Chinese curse, may you live in interesting times, seems to describe this moment better than anything else.
And yet you said, we are making headway.
We're making progress.
The who has almost entirely stood down for now.
There are these major concessions within mainstream media, within the New York Times with regard to lab origins, at the Telegraph with regard to excess deaths being potentially attributable to these vaccines, which itself is referencing a BMJ article that is recently out.
Then there are all these other pieces of evidence that things are very much alive and afoot in some dangerous ways, into which comes flying.
Bird flu.
Right.
It feels it seems clear that we are being set up for another attempt, another run, including a rollout of what is likely including a rollout of what is likely to be mRNA platform vaccines to deal with what we are being told is going to be the next pandemic.
Right, and I think actually you're wise to phrase it that way.
We are making headway against pieces of something that we cannot fully make heads or tails of.
So yes, we want a major victory against the World Health Organization and the rules that it wished to live the next catastrophe under.
Rules that put it at an unbearable advantage over Sovereign nations and people.
But other parts of the plan appear to be proceeding apace.
So for example, Zach, do you want to put up the mRNA headline?
the headline from an article i sent you on vaccines for h5n1 All right.
So what Zach is going to show you here is just an article saying that scientists are developing mRNA-based vaccines against H5N1 bird flu.
And then scroll down a little bit.
So, okay.
An experimental mRNA vaccine against the H5N1 avian flu is highly effective in preventing severe illness and death in lab animals, researchers report.
The vaccine could help fight the H5N1 bird flu outbreak now spreading in wild birds, poultry, and cows in the United States.
Yada, yada, yada.
Okay, so what we know is that the mRNA platform is a dream come true from a pharma business perspective.
The ability to effectively load in any antigen in mRNA description into this platform and deploy it almost immediately.
It's fast and there's no thinking required.
It's fast and there's no thinking required.
On the other hand, it is massively dangerous by virtue of the fact that the lipid nanoparticles used to deliver the mRNA template are in no way targeted, and if they cannot be restricted, therefore, to the injection site, they place all the tissues of the body in jeopardy of an attack from your own Immune cells.
So why are they playing around with this mRNA platform that they have not solved the problems of for avian flu?
What's more, the whole avian flu story appears to be an exercise in Curiouser and Curiouser.
The more you look at what is being claimed as is taking place, the more this doesn't smell right.
So before we get into what is being claimed now, I think we should just mention that I at least am not sure how this interplays with John Cullen's work, where he has posited with considerable evidence, although enough of the evidence is sort of not available that it's hard to fully assess, but he has posited that SARS-CoV-2, while real, was not the thing making people sick, that it was bird flu all along.
Yes, H7N9.
Yes, not the same one, but bird flus being of a type and, you know, there are a whole set of relatively closely related viruses, of which the one that he suggests was responsible for the deaths from COVID, in quotes, were actually deaths from bird flu, H7N9.
As opposed to this one now, H5N1.
But they are all relatively closely related.
I'm not saying that this is that, but that bird flu as a thing that is actually responsible for pathogenicity is Already an idea that's circulating in some careful intellectual space.
Yep, and if you go back and look at things that I've said in the last, I don't know, six months, I've said I do not agree with the folks who say there was no Virus, there was no novel pathogen during the COVID so-called pandemic.
I say so-called pandemic because they changed the definition of pandemic so that it did not include severity so that they would be able to call it a pandemic.
So I don't believe there was a pandemic, but it doesn't mean I don't believe that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered and circulated.
However, you will hear, if you go back to the various things I've said, That I, although I believe that our family experienced a novel pathogen, I wouldn't be able to tell you what it was.
Of course not.
And so that's why.
There may well be something to John Collins' work on this.
As much as I'm annoyed with some recent behavior of his, he does clearly have an evidentiary point that is worth considering.
We will return to that another time.
So, we are currently talking about H5N1, which we are being told is something that we should be alarmed about.
We are going to talk about the World Health Organization's advisory about H5N1 and a recent paper published by, among others, Peter McCullough, On this bird flu for which the international community seems to be gearing up, including vaccine manufacturers who seem to be preparing mRNA vaccines.
All right, so you want to show the Peter McCullough paper.
So this is the actual... Oh, so Zach is showing the substack.
Zach is showing the substack.
So McCullough has the substack Courageous Discourse and the title of this most recent from June 4th is Breaking Publication Proximal Origin of Epidemic Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza H5N1 Clade 2.3.4.4B and Spread by Migratory Waterfowl.
In which McCullough and his two colleagues are publishing the introduction to the paper, which if you want to show my screen here, Zach, this is the paper to which they are linking.
And it's a preprint.
It hasn't been peer reviewed.
Not that any of us at this point should assume that peer review means anything about whether or not it's been truly vetted.
I don't know where you want me to go exactly.
Well, I just want to point out the general trajectory here.
So, what McCullough and his colleagues are arguing is that the avian flu that is being found in domestic birds, in farm birds, Shows the signs of having been the result of a laboratory origin that in fact that it appears to have been a Enhanced.
And I do not know whether or not we are facing a setup.
Could be that something has leaked and we are facing a rerun of COVID if in fact COVID was an accidental leak.
Or it could be that there is something else afoot in which somebody wishes to have power over us and it has found that fear of pathogenic disease is very effective.
Now there are interesting things in both McCullough and colleagues description here and in the announcement by the World Health Organization of what this is and why we should be worried about it.
Interestingly, the World Health Organization on its page acknowledges H5 in their the World Health Organization on its page acknowledges H5 in their Do you have this on your computer so you could show it?
Oh yeah.
So the World Health Organization.
This is which so you can show my screen here Zach.
This is the WHO on Influenza A H5N1 and you wanted you wanted me to share the what is what is it?
No, click on the how does H5N1 virus spread to people.
Okay, so that and it's it's pretty small here and this is okay.
Almost all cases of H, this is the WHO saying, almost all cases of H5N1 virus infection of people have been associated with close contact with infected live or dead birds.
or H5N1 contaminated environments, for example, live bird markets.
Okay.
There have been some instances of spread from infected mammals to humans as well.
While there may have been some cases that were not detected, the virus does not seem to easily infect humans or spread from person to person based on the current knowledge and understanding.
Okay.
Now, to the extent that somebody wants us to be spooked by H5N1, the fact that it is not known to spread between people tells us a lot about where we are evolutionarily.
Oh my goodness, there might be a human pandemic of age 5 and 1.
Well, so far what we've got is a virus that moves from animals to people.
You're not in danger of getting it because somebody else who works in a chicken farm has come down with it.
They can't transmit it to you.
So that means that this is in the same state As the virus in Yunnan province that the Wuhan Institute of Virology went pursuing when six miners came down with the disease after working in a mine clearing bat guano.
Okay, so six miners came down with the disease.
Three of them died.
It was not a disease at that point that appeared capable of moving from one person to another.
They infected nobody, but that seems to have alerted people who are interested in enhancing viruses that there was a virus in Yunnan that knew one of the two tricks necessary to turn it into a human pandemic, right?
The two tricks are can you infect a human and can you move from one person to another?
So they had a virus that did one of those things and they got very excited about that and they went looking right so that I'm building I'm putting together the story as we now can understand it.
It took a long time to understand what the relationship between that Yunnan set of miners and the Wuhan Institute of Virology is.
is.
But this H5N1 here appears not to be a virus that people can transmit to each other.
It's a virus that people appear to be able to contract from animals that they are in contact with.
Now, McCullough and his colleagues, I won't say McCullough at all because he's the last author, not the first.
Yeah, it's all such.
But they describe a number of features of the current outbreak of H5N1 that are worthy of consideration.
The reason that they are calling attention to the possibility that this emerged from a laboratory is that they find a number of things which will sound shockingly reminiscent of what we went through with SARS-CoV-2.
And in some ways I would argue that the evolutionary story if we try to infer it Suggests that panic is not the right response here by far.
We've got a virus that shows a huge range of possible I want to say vectors because we don't know if they transmit it, but a large number of creatures appear to be able to be infected by this H5N1.
Yeah, actually, this is a place I want to go.
It's on my screen here from The Who, right?
Yeah.
Since 2022, there have been increasing reports of deadly outbreaks among mammals also caused by influenza.
IAH5, including influenza AAH5N1 viruses.
There are likely to be more outbreaks that have not been detected or reported.
Both land and sea mammals have been affected, including outbreaks in farmed fur animals, seals, sea lions, and detections in other wild and domestic animals such as foxes, bears, otters, raccoons, cats, dogs, cows, goats, and others.
My reaction reading that list was, how do they know?
Like, they know that this virus is in sea lions?
Like, what is that work that is being done?
And when I look at the link that I think it's Hulshir Sorry, I'm butchering his name at all.
The McCullough paper, with two other co-authors, links to, with regard to evidence of this virus in a terseopsis, a bottlenose dolphin.
I find some I find a lot of stuff that seems science-ish, right?
And that has all of the pieces.
But here we are in this paper.
Here's the top of it.
Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, H5N1 Virus in a Common Bottlenose Dolphin in Florida.
This is published just recently, April 18, 2024.
And here's just slightly farther down.
The recent spread of H5N1 viruses has been accompanied by novel infections of cetacean species around the world, including three common dolphins in Peru, Wales, and England, two harbor porpoises in Sweden and England, and an Atlantic Whiteside dolphin.
In the harbor porpoise from Sweden, influenza virus was predominantly found within the brain, causing meningioencephalitis.
Consistent with this current report and other recent detections in terrestrial mammals, The harbor porpoise displayed neurological signs including circling, inability to right itself, and subsequent drowning.
So part of the answer is these are captive animals.
This doesn't explain the seals and sea lions.
These are captive animals, right?
That's how they know because they had animals that became sick and then they went looking But what they have done feels very much to me like the bait-and-switch trick that Forrest Moretti writes about with regard to polio.
And I don't know, like we don't know, but the fact that meningioencephalitis shows up here as as The thing that was the apparent disease for which they then went looking for the cause, and they found H5N1 in these animals and went, aha, that must be the cause.
I want to see the actual research that ties that virus, the presence of that virus, to this cause.
And maybe it exists.
I don't have a hope either way, but I don't see any evidence that that relationship between cause and effect has been made.
They just went, oh my god, bad problem happening to our animal.
Oh, we know that there's this circulating thing about which we've been told to be concerned, and hey, presto, magic, we have a test for it.
We went looking, and yes, they have this virus.
I don't know if there's a relationship.
The claim is embedded in the thinking so much that we aren't even expected to notice that there was a magic trick there.
And it raises questions, as with Forrest Moretti's work on polio, what's it doing in the brain?
Now, I can tell a story where, um, this virus grows in the, in the brains of birds and that those birds being fully consumed by predators, it gets passed on to those predators.
But how does it get out of the predators?
How does something get out of the brain of a dolphin into another dolphin?
Right?
So the point is, this begins to raise all kinds of ecological questions.
That are not a slam dunk.
What's more, this raises questions about their test for this thing.
Yep.
Right?
And in specific, and mind you this is not an area of expertise for either one of us, so I really want to talk to somebody like Jumi Kim who knows this set of techniques, but the problem with PCR is that you can amplify trace signals in order to give you a positive.
This was something that the inventor of PCR, Kerry Mullis, warned about.
That it was not an appropriate diagnostic technique because you can play games with cycle thresholds and end up convincing yourself that something is there that isn't really there in a meaningful form.
We certainly saw that game played during the COVID so-called pandemic.
Here's what caught my eye on this list.
Farmed fur animals.
Farmed fur animals I believe is going to be code for minks.
The reason minks is interesting is because ferrets are used as a laboratory animal.
Potentially for gain-of-function serial passaging experiments because they have Similar cellular physiology.
I know they have an ACE2 receptor that's similar to people.
But the point is, you would expect if humans had been monkeying around, so to speak, with this thing in a laboratory, then if they had passaged it in ferrets, you might find that once again, we had a problem with disease running rampant in mink farms.
Right?
Are mink farms going to keep getting hit because ferrets are a go-to animal in gain-of-function research, in weapons labs, yada yada yada.
So, farmed for animals.
Ain't it interesting that that's on the list?
Farmed for animals, and just to go back to the sea mammals for a moment, all those captive dolphins, We don't know what else is true about those captive dolphins.
Not only are they presumably not living a life that is entirely like their wild lives, but they may have received additional things.
Medicines.
Things that passed for medicines, including inoculations, that may have made them more susceptible.
I don't know.
I don't know if we are allowed to know, but I don't know if this is true, but the fact that this is being seen in captive animals, in farmed furred animals, this is a list that looks big and scary, but when you look more closely, you begin to wonder, okay, how many of these are wild populations?
And if this is a kind of a fellow traveler virus, To what degree should we be alarmed at the ability to find maybe tiny, tiny amounts or maybe not so tiny amounts?
Do we know for sure that it is what is causing things like the neurological abnormalities that are being cited?
Right.
I don't think we do.
Right.
Or at least I have not seen.
And the chances, given what we've seen hidden, the chances that something is hiding here seem large.
Now what I notice on this list is just how long this damn list is.
And here's what I get from that.
They're telling us about a very terrifying virus.
They're telling us about a virus that in humans kills, what did the who say?
I don't remember.
Anyway, very high rate of fatality.
Now, very high rate of fatality sounds terrifying if this was something spreading from person to person.
If it's something that can't spread from person to person, then apparently as far as we know, it can't.
And the point is, how many people are going to come down with it?
Small number of people.
And they're not transmitting it to each other.
You're not talking about the human population having some major wave of death.
Now let's look at that list of creatures, though, that is being invoked by the Who.
We've got farmed fur animals, seals, sea lions, domestic animals, wild and domestic animals such as foxes, bears, otters, raccoons, cats, dogs, cows, goats, and others.
So you've got two bovids, you've got four, five carnivorans, You've got seals and sea lions.
You've got pinnipeds.
So the point is I think one of the things that was really weird about COVID that we called out at the time was the hugely wide tropism both within the body.
COVID seemed to attack many different cells which didn't make a lot of sense because in general a virus Should be adapted to infect those cells that allow it to be transmitted to another person or another creature That's how they do it, right?
So to have all of these different symptoms in different tissues was weird But the other thing it did was it transmitted to a huge number of different animals most of whom couldn't transmit it to each other except guess what?
Minx, right?
They claimed that minx were spreading it to each other.
So anyway, the point is Trade-offs, there's an inescapable logic of trade-offs.
This is what my dissertation was about, right?
As you said last week, there is no free lunch.
Sometimes you can borrow from someplace you don't care about and it seems like you got a free lunch, but trade-off wise, you can't beat the logic.
So the point is, A highly dangerous, highly pathogenic virus in people is not consistent with something that is super generalist, that infects every damn kind of mammal and bird it seems to encounter.
So, how much fear should we have that there's something apparently circulating that is related to a flu that we claim is highly dangerous to people, but it seems to infect all sorts of different animals?
The answer is, that's actually suggestive of this broad tropism, which I think is consistent with not a high level of virulence, right?
The generality of the virus means it's not going to be highly effective.
So, while you were talking, I found the paper where all of this stuff emerges from, I believe.
You can show my screen here.
It's a pre-print yet.
Pathology of natural infection with highly pathogenic avian influenza virus, H5N1 clade, in wild terrestrial mammals in the United States in 2022.
And, um, I've got a bird in here or something.
Um, uh, keywords, you know, all of, many of the, of the mammals that, uh, that you were talking about.
Abstract.
This article describes the first detections of disease due to natural infection with highly pathogenic avian influenza virus.
So they've started with the highly, it's highly pathogenic, right?
The assumption is in the title of the paper.
H5N1, the Eurasian lineage goose, Guangdong clade in wild terrestrial mammals throughout the United States during 2021-2022.
So this is not right now.
This is from a couple years ago.
Affected mammalian species include 50 red foxes, 6 striped skunks, 4 raccoons, 2 bobcats, 2 Virginia possums, 1 coyote, 1 fisher, and 1 gray fox.
Necrotizing meningencephalitis, interstitial pneumonia, and myocardial necrosis were the most common lesions.
However, species variations and lesion distribution were observed.
That sounds terrifying, right?
analysis of sequences from 48 animals indicates that these cases represent spillover infections from wild birds.
That sounds terrifying, right?
That sounds terrible.
It seems that the order of the sections of papers has changed, and often the materials and methods get disappeared really deep Here, they actually have it up top, but it's hard to figure out what they did.
Like, where did they find these animals?
Well...
Here it is.
These cases represent opportunistic sampling of wild mammals that were reported or found by citizens and either submitted to wildlife rehab centers or collected by regional wildlife professionals and state agency personnel.
These are animals that reported because they were sick.
Once they're sick, they're then tested for H5N1 with the same PCR technique that you were just talking about.
And again, they were found to have it.
But the assumption that because they had H5N1 and they were sick is that they had H5N1 and therefore they were sick.
And that cause and effect relationship, again, has not been established.
And what we don't have is...
The obvious other part of this research that should have been done, which was, given that you've got these species, go out and sample animals that aren't being brought to your attention because they're acting sick, but go out into the wild and actually sample healthy individuals of all of these species and see if they have this.
Until that, we don't know anything here.
Until we know if healthy individuals of the same species are also likely to be infected with H5N1, we simply don't know.
Yeah, you don't know.
It could be that this is a super generalist.
A, it could be that there's something wrong with their PCR, right?
The question is, how specific are these primers at finding the exact thing?
I'd like to know.
Maybe they're good.
But assuming that they are good, you could have a super generalist, not very interesting virus, of which there are many.
Did these animals die with H5N1 or die of H5N1?
It's that again.
Did all those people in the hospitals die with or from COVID?
Many of them died with.
Many of these animals may have.
Perhaps all of them.
I have yet to see the good scientific research that establishes the causal relationship between this virus and disease manifestation.
And it may exist.
Right.
It may exist.
But we need to see work that tells us what story because what they've done is they've created a certain number of dots and you're supposed to connect them.
Oh my God, a super terrifying.
And they have the dots and then they connect the dots in the fricking title of the paper.
Right.
But that thing right there, you don't even have to reference the title of your paper.
There may be no reference trail, and they just went right to, this is the thing.
So there is, in fact, not even a way to discover what the evidence is, because it's simply being asserted.
Yep.
Now, the McCullough paper, the scientific paper, and then the substack that describes it, Talks about a number of features of this particular clade of H5N1.
H5N1 is a reference to antigens.
There's a kind of modularity to these viruses.
And so there's the question of what antigens they're displaying.
And then there's also a question of if you look at their genome, where on the phylogenetic tree of influenza do these things fit?
So they're talking about a particular clade.
That appears to be spreading that has them spooked.
Yep.
Or has them spooking us over these things.
I don't know whether they're actually spooked.
But McCullough and his colleagues describe odd features of this clade both in terms of its
Biological nature, but also more interesting to me was the distinction between the purported migration between continents of this strain and Historical examples apparently this jumped very quickly to North America from Europe but the The proposed mechanism goes in the opposite direction of the migration of the creatures that are alleged to have carried it, which seems off.
And they argue, and I'm in no position to check it, but they argue that the place of detection is actually quite close to a laboratory that appears to have been experimenting on viruses that could well have become this.
So their basic point is that you've got a fairly strong circumstantial case for laboratory emergence of a serially passaged virus.
I think I've found the section that you're talking about here.
If you want to show my screen here, Zach, again, this is the Hulsher et al.
A preprint posted a couple of days ago, the introduction of which is on Peter McCullough's substack.
He's the final author on the paper.
The world's first detection of H5N1 clade 2344B occurred in the Netherlands in October 2020.
Concerningly, Ron Fauchier et al.
modified H5N1 to become airborne transmissible via HA and PB2 alterations in ferrets at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in 2012.
H5N1 clade 2344B, derived from a 2022 farmed mink outbreak in Spain, was recently reported to be airborne transmissible in ferrets due to PB2 T271A mutation.
This raises the concern that the original emergence of H5N1 clade 2344B may be a result of Fauchier et al.' 's gain-of-function experiments.
Moreover, the primary authors of the Yuk et al.
study work at the... I don't remember what SEPRL stands for.
It's a lab in Athens, Georgia.
It's a salient fact that these recognized authorities, entrusted with researching H5N1 clade 2344B, are known for performing gain-of-function experiments on H5N1 viruses.
Several references.
This raises the concern that, like Drs.
Peter Daszak and Ralph Baric in the case of SARS-CoV-2, these researchers are unlikely to serve as impartial investigators of possible leaks from their labs.
In none of their studies regarding H5N1 clade 2344B do they mention the possibility that human agency may have contributed to its emergence.
Instead, they attribute the emergence of these viruses to a reassortment with Eurasian wild bird LPAIVs.
They postulate that H5N1 clade, same genotype, A1, first arrived in North America via the East Atlantic Flyway in November 2021.
As previously noted, this hypothesis is based on the erroneous proposition that migratory birds departed Europe and flew northwest across the North Atlantic to Newfoundland via Iceland in the autumn of 2021.
That's related to what you were talking about, but it looks like maybe they had an earlier reference.
It's a flying pangolin hypothesis.
They've got pangolins transmitting this virus from Europe to North America, which is amazing.
Yeah.
They could have asked any ornithologist or ecologist or just anyone to look at a globe and just consider what migration is and under what circumstances you migrate.
And they're going to start heading north in the North American autumn.
No, they're not.
Yeah, this is so reminiscent of what went down in the early days of the COVID so-called pandemic, where the stories that were being given just don't add up.
The pangolins never added up.
Ecologically speaking, that was never plausible.
And here we're being given more garbage biology because who actually cares about that stuff anyway?
And lo and behold, it turns out there's a gain-of-function dimension to this story that we just don't find out about until we're here.
But how interesting is it, you know, my speech in front of the UN said that if you wanted to improve human health, Or protect it, that one of the primary things you would do is you would shut down the labs that are turbocharging viruses and what do we find here?
We find the WHO trying to spook us about H5N1, which just so happens to look like it might well be the result of one of the labs that they don't bother to tell us exists.
And what's the remedy?
Oh, it's going to be a vaccine.
And what kind of vaccine?
Hmm, looks like mRNA.
You know, how much of this is just a simple rerun?
How much of it is a simple rerun?
It will never play the same way twice.
Many of us Became much more aware of, or in many cases I presume, for the first time aware that these kinds of labs existed at all.
I won't speak for you.
I knew that some kind of work was being done that was at risk of enhancing Existing pathogenicity.
I couldn't have told you anything about how many labs there were, where they were, that there was collaboration between American and Chinese researchers, that the work had been stopped under Obama, but it hadn't actually stopped.
I knew none of that.
I'm certainly not alone in now knowing a lot more about what kind of research is being done.
It's not going to be possible to For them to play this the same way they did four years ago.
Yeah, I don't think they'll get away with it, because for one thing, it took a lot of education, self-education, in order for us to understand the dimensions of what was going down over COVID.
Some of it painful, lots of mistakes.
Sure.
And this time, you know, we know.
Well, there's still a lot we don't know.
There's a lot we don't know, but the point is we know the basic tricks, and to the extent that this looks like a rerun, that's in part because we know what we're looking for.
Now, I did want to highlight another piece of the the McCullough work here, which has to do with the testing of captive birds.
These are farm animals who are showing low rates of infection with this virus and are being destroyed to prevent the pandemic that we are told we are in danger of.
Now, it's not transmissible between people.
It is presumably transmissible between birds and so it is plausible that you could have spread amongst farm animals.
However, the potential for abuse of PCR in looking at captive bird populations is through the roof.
You would really want a completely independent body that understood PCR and how to use it because Let me just take an example so people understand the hazard here.
Let's say that you wanted to protect the human population from smallpox.
And so what you did was you took a very excellent quality, and we never had an excellent quality test for COVID, they were all garbage, but let's say that you had a really excellent test for smallpox that had a very low rate of false positives.
And you went around and you tested let's say that you know you're concerned about smallpox had you test You know all the people of earth for this thing Well, you're gonna get Depends how good the test is it not showing false positives, but even a tiny rate of false positives might give you hundreds of thousands of cases across a population of eight billion people and You would therefore have the sense that oh my god smallpox is spreading amongst people again.
It's back Well, there is no smallpox.
Even an excellent test with a tiny number of false positives is going to give you the impression that smallpox is way more prevalent than you know.
We think the number of people who have it now is zero.
But a small rate of false positives will give you the impression We got a problem because Smallpox is back and nobody knows what to do about that.
So if they do this with the birds, you know, their test, if you're testing all of the birds, you know, out of what they're going to call an abundance of caution, how much is your false positive rate going to cause you to destroy perfectly healthy farm animals?
Which then gets to a question about what is the impact on the food supply?
If you say, well, you know, we tested all of the farms and it turned out there was a low rate of this bird flu.
Right?
What's going to happen?
So, you know, is somebody smart and, you know, moral in charge of dictating the policy over, you know, whether or not these animals actually have the disease that they're going to be, that we're going to be told they had before they were destroyed?
I would very much like to know that.
Now, that does raise a question.
We've all heard that there is a spate of destructions of food supply, factories, farms, etc.
Now, I will say I have no idea what the actual background rate of destruction of such facilities is, and so I can't compare it to the current rate and say, whoa, that is alarming.
You know, these things are being destroyed at a rate that's unprecedented.
Somebody must not want us to have enough food.
I honestly have no idea if anybody's interfering with the food supply.
But I wouldn't put it past these people, right?
To the extent that we have seen them play games with human life and limb over the course of the COVID so-called pandemic, I know they don't care that they kill people by accident or, you know, just in the course of doing whatever their tyrannical thing is.
Yep.
So anyway, I don't know whether or not this is part of a plan to reduce the amount of food to make us more compliant.
That would certainly be viable if the only source of food that you had because it wasn't available at the Supermarket was you know the government which would give you food if you behaved according to their rules I don't know could that be I can't say but what I can say is the chances that a test applied to food animals for a
A particular virus is going to result in the destruction of large numbers of animals that don't have it as a result of a small number of false positives on that test or the result of the abuse of the cycle thresholds or whatever.
The chances are very high and so we need to we need to get aware very quickly because even by accident we could end up destroying a huge amount of totally viable food for no good reason.
Well, there's something that you slip past a little quickly there, which is just an incredibly useful framing for not just this, but many modern predicaments that we find ourselves in, which is when confronted with an idea that sounds outlandish, unlikely, horrifying if true,
Unprecedented human history that requires some people, some organization having behaved in a way that is truly abominable with regard to humanity.
Very often the response is, that's preposterous.
How could that possibly be true?
What are you talking about?
There is a third position.
There are not just the people who have adopted the Conspiracy, if you will, right?
Because conspiracies do happen.
I think this conspiracy happened.
Oh, yes, this conspiracy happened.
That's one camp.
How dare you?
That's impossible.
That conspiracy could not have possibly have happened.
That's the other camp, and we are often told that those are the only two possible positions, but they're not.
Because there are a number of things, and the deeper into the Cartesian crisis we go, the more often we are going to be finding ourselves confronted with a situation where we could say, and this is exactly what you just said, I don't know.
Don't know.
I just don't know.
I don't even know if there's an ability for me to know.
I don't know if the data that I could get are going to be true.
I don't, I don't know.
I don't know, but I wouldn't put it past them.
Yep.
That's the framing, right?
And that's, that's the framing that you gave.
Yep.
Yeah.
They're not morally beyond such a thing.
Right.
They may technically not have the ability to do it.
Or they may not have done it.
Right.
Maybe they could, but they didn't.
I don't know why.
But wouldn't put it past them.
I don't know, but I wouldn't put it past them.
Yep.
Um...
I guess there was one other piece of this that you were thinking about talking about before we finished with the last, much more upbeat topic, which is that when you and I were talking about this earlier, you said pharma always wins.
In introducing a new mRNA vaccine, running clinical trials, you came up with one and I came up with another way in which it seems like pharma is setting itself up to win, which of course they would.
But we should all be thinking about all the possible ways that we are being set up to lose.
So let's talk about these two mechanisms.
The one I came up with was we have learned painfully, you and I have learned painfully, starting with the discovery of just how bad the safety testing was for the COVID so-called vaccines.
That one of the tricks that pharma has played for other vaccines is to not test them against a placebo.
What they do is, through some logical hocus pocus, they argue that in fact all you want to do is test the novel part of the so-called, in this case, real vaccine.
Right.
against a version that contains all of the other components but for that one part.
So, for example, you could leave the adjuvants as components in both the so-called placebo group and the treatment group, and you could just change the subject matter of the vaccine, the antigenic component.
Now what that does... As if the adjuvants were neutral when they are included precisely because they are not neutral.
Precisely because they are bioactive.
So the point is you hide the harm by making sure it shows up in both the placebo and the treatment group and then when people say well it was tested against placebo, placebo doesn't mean placebo in that case.
Again with the linguistic shenanigans.
Yeah, placebo implies to most of us, when we are naive, it implies neutral, right?
It's saline, something like that, something that is not bioactive.
But when you have an active component, then you hide whatever harm is done by the version you intend to inject in people by having the harm also done to the control group.
Yes.
One thing that makes the mRNA platform a wet dream from the point of view of pharma is that basically the way it functions is you've got the platform and then the subject matter which instead of being loaded in as an antigen is loaded in as a transcript, an mRNA transcript that then gets translated by your body into an antigen.
So, you know, they will make the argument that you don't have to keep testing the platform.
All you've got to do is test the new transcript and see whether that has a problem.
But if you've been paying attention to Dark Horse, you know that our argument has been actually the platform itself.
Guarantees your immune system will attack your own cells because it will mistake them as virally infected.
Does that matter if they are cells in your liver?
Probably not.
You can afford to lose a bunch of liver cells and you've got plenty of reserve capacity, spare liver tissue.
If it happens in your heart, it could result in you dying as you try to score the winning goal in your soccer game.
So that hazard is part of the platform and if pharma plays its usual game and it says well we've already tested mRNA vaccines for safety and they're safe and effective and all we're doing here is adding a different transcript.
So let's test that transcript.
Well now you're going to have the mRNA platform in both the control group and the treatment group, they're really both treatment groups in this case, and that will hide all of the harms.
You won't be able to see them.
So that's a big hazard with the mRNA thing because they will make the transcript argument.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I'm going to go quickly because you want to get to one more thing and we actually have to finish very quickly here.
We are doing a Q&A after this, but we got a hard stop not too long in the future.
So the The thing that, when you said, pharma always wins, that came to my mind with regard to the introduction of a new mRNA vaccine, which will require, as it should, clinical trials, is, who's going to sign up for clinical trials for a new mRNA vaccine?
How many of the people who are signing up for clinical trials for a new mRNA vaccine are themselves unvaccinated with the first mRNA vaccine to hit the planet for COVID?
I think that number is going to be approaching zero.
If you, despite all of the forcing and the shaming and the horrors that were inflicted on those of us who refused to get those mRNA shots for COVID, against COVID, associated with COVID, Went through all of that, the chances that you're going to willingly sign yourself up for a clinical trial for the next one seems vanishingly small.
Thus, assuming that that assumption of mine is correct, the control group for a new clinical trial for a new mRNA vaccine is almost entirely vaccinated with mRNA vaccines already.
Technically, therefore, the people running the clinical trial could claim placebo.
They could actually potentially use placebos, although I doubt that they actually are.
Greer, you mean inert placebos?
An actual placebo, as it used to mean, as opposed to what it is being used to mean now.
Inert placebos, yes.
They couldn't actually run a clinical trial with inert placebos.
But having already run their test on humanity not three years ago, in which the people who were signing up for this trial almost certainly got at least two and maybe up to God knows how many of these mRNA shots, There are relatively few actual controls possible.
And so, given that we are now seeing even the Telegraph reporting, that is to say, even the mainstream media reporting on excess deaths in 2021 that exceed excess deaths from 2020, which suggests, you know, what was different between 2021 and 2020?
Well, both had COVID, but only one had these vaccines.
One had these mRNA vaccines.
Given that we have excess deaths in a population that is vaccinated in excess of the excess deaths in a population that only has the pathogen and not the vaccination, There is no unvaccinated control in these clinical trials, almost certainly.
So, whatever additional effects these new mRNA vaccines may have is going to be dampened in terms of the clinical results because you're comparing it to a population that has already experienced mRNA vaccination from the previous disease.
Which is interesting because it is an inversion of a well-known bias that has previously been seen with other vaccines, something called the healthy vaccine bias.
So the problem is that people who get vaccines tend to be health-wise proactive.
So the question is, how much does that appear to be a positive effect of a vaccine when in fact it's a Well, if proactive means following the Pied Piper, it's not going to help.
Right.
Well, in this case, you would expect a healthy non-vaccine bias or a vaccine sickness bias.
And that's the inversion of the normal expected pattern.
Yeah.
Anecdotally, I will say that we talked to yet another person yesterday, and I have not been keeping track, but countless, countless people.
Someone who we were just coming to know who said, you know, I never used to get sick, never used to get sick.
And now every pathogen I run into, I get sick and I get sick for longer.
I'm sick every month.
And she had three shots.
And, you know, the anecdotes accumulate.
They continue to accumulate.
It's hard to ignore the pattern.
Yeah.
All right.
Um, to our last topic.
Um, While Zach and I were in Switzerland, we had obligations and then we had a couple of free days.
And it turned out that although Zach and I differ a little bit on whether Geneva was a little disappointing, my feeling was that Geneva itself felt like somewhere in Europe.
And as much as I have been an advocate for global cosmopolitanism, the downside of it is that it Um, it kind of homogenizes human cultures and Geneva felt like it was nowhere in particular or it was everywhere simultaneously.
It didn't have a, uh, a special character to it, um, which is not universally the case in Switzerland at all.
In fact, we passed, as I will tell you in a second, how we passed through Lausanne, which is a very modern cosmopolitan city, but it has a distinct character.
It's like nowhere else I've ever been.
And yet the particular place you were staying in Geneva had a distinct character, no?
Well, it had a bunch of distinct characters, so we got an Airbnb very close to the... Which I had nothing to do with choosing, I will say.
I didn't even know the address of where you were staying.
Well, it turned out, we discovered upon arriving at the Airbnb for the first time, that it is in the heart of the Geneva red light district, which I didn't know that there was a red light district, an official one.
Apparently, prostitution is legal in Geneva and has been since the 40s.
But anyway, there's a red light district, and there's a lot of other stuff going on there.
It's not like that's all that's there, but our Airbnb did force us to walk through the red light district each time we went back to the apartment.
But anyway, we were in Geneva with a couple of spare days, and it occurred to us, having talked to some of the other members of the rally, that Chamonix Actually, do you want to do this segment in French?
No.
My French is beyond atrocious.
It's like, it's so atrocious that it's offensive.
But anyway, Zach and I realized that there was the possibility if we could talk somebody into renting us motorcycles, that we could go motorcycling in the Swiss Alps.
So you do, you are both licensed to ride motorcycles in the U.S.
Yes.
But you say that as if, let's see if we can get people to just loan us We are licensed in the US and I'm conflicted about this because it is it's a very dangerous way to get around but we live on an island with no traffic lights and reduced traffic and it feels safe enough but for the deer but in any case
We decided to see if we could get somebody to rent us motorcycles and we did succeed in getting a shop.
Three shops left us out of the door because you need reservations months or years in advance, but we did get a shop to rent us some motorcycles and here we are.
And they lent you, the guy lent you jackets.
He lent us his personal jackets and they gave us helmets and gloves and all.
Anyway, so this is us in the Alps.
The Alps turned out to be, I'd never been to the Alps.
That's a great photo.
Yeah.
Who's taking it?
We had somebody who was there take this picture of us.
Anyway, it was Totally once-in-a-lifetime stuff that I didn't, you know, it wasn't on my bucket list because I hadn't thought to put it there.
But having had the experience, I know that it should have been there.
It was a little bit like, you know, drinking the Alps from a fire hose.
Just the rate at which this amazing scenery is Coming by you and you know the feeling of being out in it rather than in a car was Really out of this world so anyway It did make me it reminded me that it is very important to Live while you are alive.
There's just you know the alternatives They don't work.
So anyway I Yeah.
Well, you say that and I think it buries the lead that you were making.
What did you just say?
Doing it the other way doesn't work because you're dead.
Yeah.
But you're talking about It can feel, everyone who considers the sorts of things that you consider and I consider and we talk about on Dark Horse week after week after week, can begin to feel, it can feel hopeless, you can get pessimistic, it can be overwhelming, you could feel like what possibly could I be doing, right?
And so part of what your, you know, live life now Recognition is, there can be beauty and wonder in your environment, and you can also be aware of the looming tyranny, and both of those things can be true.
And given that the looming tyranny is real, I hope that both of things are true, because one of them certainly is.
And there are presumably opportunities for just about everyone to find something amazing and exploratory and beautiful.
Whatever it is that would make you feel most alive, there are opportunities for you to do it, and you should grab those opportunities.
Yeah, I think that's well said.
And in fact, I will say, you know, sometimes people talk to me about the fact that we focus on a lot that's going wrong in the world.
It's a major theme or several major themes of what we do.
I'm not the least bit depressed by it, you know?
I'm troubled by where we're headed, but the fact is there's a tremendous amount that needs to be done and I'd much rather be able to be doing something than be hobbled by the fact that it wasn't obvious to me what I was supposed to be doing.
So, anyway, life is marvelous.
There's plenty that is still very, very beautiful about this planet, and that's really why we need to defend it.
And, anyway, the experience of seeing some place... I didn't even realize, frankly, when we went to Geneva that I was going to be so close to the Alps.
It hadn't occurred to me that that's where Geneva... I mean... Yes, your geography is better than mine, but...
Well, yes, but also when I'm going someplace, if my geography isn't quite up to speed, I Think about it in advance.
Well, let me tell you, we got up to speed and then some.
So you did.
Yes, yes, we did.
So you did.
All right.
All right.
Well, fantastic.
That's all I got.
Oh, and I just will say that also, you know, was great to see the Alps by motorcycle up to Chamonix and down to Martigny and then to Lausanne.
Around the lake, it was marvelous.
But I will also say, total privilege to do that with you, Zach.
That the ability to have that experience with my son was spectacular.
And there was a part of me that, I feel a little bad about this, there was a part of me that wanted to capture it somehow.
It was so, such a precious experience that, you know, there was some Desire, you know, if only there was some way to just capture all of these beautiful vistas that are coming by us and I realized actually can't be done and maybe it's better that it can't be done.
It's the experience itself that is so remarkable and I know I will remember it forever.
Wonderful.
Do we have any merchandise to show this week?
All right, well, head to our store, which is at darkhorsestore.org, and find some cool stuff to get there.
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