Is the Gut the Driving Force of Systematic Inflammation?
Dr Robin Martingale (2019)
Film Review
In the following video, ICU general and trauma surgeon Dr Robin Martingale explains the role of gut bacteria in protecting human beings from infection and inflammation. The key take home from his presentation is that it always seems to take the medical establishment at least 20 years to catch up with basic science research. Peer reviewed research about the role of the gut microbiome first appeared in medical journals about 20 years ago. When the mainstream media began reporting on the research around 2010, many “alternative” health practitioners (naturopaths, homepaths, etc) began incorporating the knowledge into patient care. It’s only thanks to efforts of pioneers like Martingale, that some mainstream medical practitioners are finally incorporating it into mainstream medical practice.
The research Martingale presents shows a direct statistical link between modern humans declining diversity in gut bacteria* and the the epidemic of chronic illnesses we presently experience (eg diabetes, cardiovascular disease, autism, obesity, cancer, asthma, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia and even mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, depression and bipolar disorder). The mechanism here is a loss of “good bacteria” (symbiants and commensual) that protect us against endotoxin-producing pathogens (“bad bacteria”) that lead to chronic inflammation.
Martingale blames the loss of microbiome diversity to our increasing exposure to pesticides (especially Roundup), vaccines, chlorine, artificial sweeteners, emulsifiers (in processed food) and overuse of antibiotics.
He also presents numerous animal and human studies showing that obesity correlates far more closely with gut dysbiosis and systemic inflammation than lifestyle.
I found the ICU-related research he reported on the most interesting. For example, he cites one study that shows an 30% increase in ICU mortality in patients who have taken antibiotics in the past six months. And another showing a significant correlation between “leaky gut” syndrome and sepsis and multiple organ failure in ICU patients.
In the ICU at Oregan Health Sciences, where Martingale works, he has significantly increased survival rates by prescribing probiotics for all ICU patients and even fecal transplants** for patients with sepsis and multiple organ failure.
*Human immunity is based on friendly gut bacteria that prevent pathogenic bacteria from producing endotoxin. When absorbed into the blood stream, the latter can can cause systemic inflammation.
**A fecal transplant involves the transfer of stool of a healthy patient to one with dysbiosis, an imbalance in normal gut bacteria.
The Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine is seen at a pop up vaccination site in the Staten Island borough of New York on April 8, 2021. (Mary Altaffer/AP Photo)VACCINES & SAFETY
Denmark Drops Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 Vaccine Over Possible Blood Clot Link
BYZACHARY STIEBERMay 4, 2021Updated: May 4, 2021—Epoch Times
Denmarkon Monday announced it will not use the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine because the shot is potentially linked to blood clots.
“The Danish Health Authority has concluded that the benefits of using the COVID-19 vaccine from Johnson & Johnson do not outweigh the risk of causing the possible adverse effect, VITT, in those who receive the vaccine,” the authority said in a statement.
VITT refers to the severe cases of blood clots, a small number of which have led to deaths among those who got a shot.
In the past couple of months, our esteemed public health experts have had a rough go of defending the supposedly settled science behind lockdowns and mask mandates.
White House covid-19 advisor Andy Slavitt was first on the chopping block back in mid-February, when he was reduced to parroting empty platitudes about social distancing after failing to explain why a completely open Florida had numbers no worse than a strictly locked-down California. Then comes media darling Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has had a particularly embarrassing series of public appearances of late. During a recent MSNBC interview Fauci expressed confusion and wasn’t “quite sure” as to why Texas was experiencing falling cases and deaths an entire month after lifting its mask mandates and capacity restrictions. Moreover, during a hearing with Representative Jim Jordan, Fauci completely dodged Jordan’s question of why Texas has lower case rates than some of the most notable lockdown states. Fauci, refusing to answer the question, simply responded that having a lockdown is not the same thing as obeying lockdowns. Fauci was correct here, but he indirectly claimed that citizens of New York and New Jersey, two notorious lockdown states, were complying less with mitigation measures than a state that had, and still has, practically none. A quick check of Google’s covid-19 mobility reports lays this counterintuitive claim to rest.
The American Media’s Agenda
When governments and media outlets around the world have successfully captured audiences by stoking fear of covid-19, the data that should so easily assuage this fear become irrelevant, and interviews like those mentioned above are simply brushed aside in favor of a fear-born allegiance to the “morally superior” government-mandated lockdowns, curfews, mask mandates, and more. This “scared straight” approach, as Bill Maher correctly described it, is the state’s bludgeon of compliance.
As far as scaring citizens straight, Project Veritas has released footage showing CNN employees explaining how the network plays up the covid-19 death toll to drive numbers. Especially disgraceful was CNN technical director Charlie Chester’s admission that the network doesn’t like to report recovery rates because “[t]hat’s not scary…. If it bleeds it leads.”
CNN isn’t alone in the fearmongering business. Thanks to the surplus of United States media outlets willing to churn up a disproportionate amount of negative covid-19 headlines—roughly 90 percent of covid-19 news in the United States is negative compared to 51 percent internationally—is it any surprise that nearly 70 percent of Democrats, 51 percent of Republicans, and almost 50 percent of independents think the chances of being hospitalized with covid-19 range anywhere from 20 percent to over 50 percent?
Where’s the Correlation?
Government- and media-induced panic have blinded us to the data, which for the past thirteen months have consistently shown zero correlation between the timing, strength, and duration of mitigation measures and covid-19 incidence. Nowhere could this lack of correlation be more prevalent than among lockdowns and mask usage.
Leaving aside the disastrous and deadly consequences of government lockdowns—see here, here, and here—the evidence for lockdowns’ ability to mitigate covid-19 mortality remains scant.
Looking at the United States, we can address the widely believed notion that states with more intense lockdowns will see fewer covid-19 deaths by plotting each state’s average restriction ranking over the past thirteen months against the total number of covid-19 deaths for each state. To get the average ranking, the author averaged data from Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government—this source ranked each state by the average time spent at a stringency index measure greater than sixty up until mid-December 2020—and WalletHub, which also ranked each state by stringency using a weighted average of various measures from January 2021 onward. Now, if the past year’s worth of sanctimonious lectures from public health experts have any scientific weight behind them, we should see a very strong negative correlation between the intensity of states’ restrictions and total covid-19 deaths.
Some workers are suing to get their job back, according to lawsuits reviewed by MarketWatch, but all these cases want judges to block employers from making vaccination requirements.
A court date on an early test is coming up later in May, and that’s just one of several lawsuits making their way through the system
Christopher Neve had a spotless record and several pay raises in his six years as a deputy sheriff with the Durham County Sheriff’s Office.
In March, he was put on leave without pay for insubordination and then terminated, court and personnel records show.
This happened because Neve, 33, refused to get vaccinated, according to his North Carolina federal lawsuit filed in April.
Christopher Neve, as a deputy sheriff with the Durham County Sheriff’s Office, could take the vaccine against his will or risk job loss, potential career consequences, a federal lawsuit alleges.
In an open letter, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons asked universities to reverse mandates “before more students are harmed” and to make the vaccines “rightfully optional.”
The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) is calling on U.S. colleges and universities to allow students to attend in-person classes without requiring them to be vaccinated for COVID.
In an open letter, AAPS listed 15 reasons universities should reconsider vaccine mandates.
“Although, at first glance, the policy may seem prudent, it coerces students into bearing unneeded and unknown risk and is at heart contrary to the bedrock medical principle of informed consent,” the letter stated.
According to its website, AAPS is a non-partisan professional association of physicians in all types of practices and specialties across the country. The organization was founded in 1943 to preserve “the sanctity of the patient-physician relationship and the practice of private medicine.”
As The Defender reported last week, more than 100 colleges across the country will require students to get the vaccine for in-person attendance, though most will allow medical and religious exemptions.
Global Research, May 03, 2021National File 1 May 2021
According to data in the national Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, a 15-year-old boy in Colorado died of a heart attack only two days after being injected with the controversial Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine despite having no previous history of allergic reactions.
The case, listed in the database asVAERS ID 1242573, reveals that the 15-year-old boy was “vaccinated with Pfizer/Biontech” on April 18, 2021. He began to experience adverse reactions to the vaccine on April 19, 2021, and “died 04/20/2021, 2 days after vaccination.” The VAERS database also reveals that he had no other illnesses, no preexisting conditions, no known allergies, no birth defects, and no permanent disabilities. He merely died…
President Joe Biden’s administration is reportedly considering working with private firms to monitor “extremist chatter by Americans online” because the federal government is legally limited to what they can do without a warrant.
The report said the federal government is also banned from using false identities to gain access to private messaging apps and groups. The government can scan public social media profiles.
“The plan being discussed inside DHS, according to multiple sources, would, in effect, allow the department to circumvent” laws that limit what the federal government can do in surveilling U.S. citizens without a warrant, CNN reported. “A source familiar with the effort said it is not about decrypting data but rather using outside entities who can legally access these private groups to gather large amounts of information that could help DHS identify key narratives as they emerge.”
The report claimed that the private firms that the Biden administration is considering using would “act as middlemen” to obtain the information, which would consist of “broad summaries or analysis of narratives that are emerging on these sites” and would not “target specific individuals.” However, some of these firms use fake identities to access the private social media spaces that the government can’t access, which could cause potential legal headaches for the administration.
“Gathering information on US citizens — no matter how abhorrent their beliefs — raises instant constitutional and legal challenges,” the report added. “Civil liberties advocates and privacy hawks have long criticized any efforts to collect even publicly available information on Americans in bulk as a violation of Americans’ First and Fourth Amendment rights.”
Rudy Giuliani appeared before the Michigan House Oversight Committee in Lansing, Michigan on December 2, 2020 (Photo by JEFF KOWALSKY / AFP) (Photo by JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP via Getty Images)
By Glenn Greenwald
One of the primary plagues of corporate journalism, which I have documented more times than I can count, just reared its ugly head again to deceive millions of people with fake news. When one large news outlet publishes a false story based on whispers from anonymous security state agents with the CIA or FBI, other news outlets quickly purport that they have “independently confirmed” the false story, in order to bolster its credibility (oh, it must be true since other outlets have also confirmed it).
This is an obvious scam — they have not “independently confirmed” anything but rather merely acted as servants to the same lying security state agents who planted the original false story — but they do it over and over, creating the deceitful perception that a fake story has been “confirmed” by multiple outlets, thus bolstering its credibility in the public mind. It was the favored tactic for spreading debunked Russiagate frauds and is still used. One of the most vivid examples occurred in December, 2017, when CNNfalsely reported what it hyped as “a major bombshell”: that Donald Trump, Jr. had advance access to the WikiLeaks archive. Within an hour, NBC News’ Ken Dilanian and CBS News both claimed they had “independently confirmed” this fairy tale. When it turned out that it was a complete lie, all based on a false date on an email to Trump Jr., these outlets embarrassingly corrected it hours later and then simply moved on as if it never happened, never explaining how multiple outlets could possibly have all “independently confirmed” the same blatant falsehood.
On Thursday night, The Washington Post, citing anonymous sources (of course), claimed that the FBI gave a “defensive briefing” to Rudy Giuliani in 2019, before he traveled to Ukraine, that he was being targeted by a Russian disinformation campaign to hurt Joe Biden’s candidacy, yet he ignored the FBI’s warnings and went anyway. The Post also claimed that the right-wing news outlet OANN was similarly briefed. The claim about Giuliani not only predictably ricocheted all over social media and cable news — where, as usual, it was uncritically treated as Truth — but it was shortly thereafter “independently confirmed” by both NBC News’ de facto CIA spokesman Ken Dilanian along with The New York Times.
What was the problem with this story? It was totally false. The FBI never briefed Giuliani on any such thing. As a result, The Washington Posthad to append this “correction” — meaning a retraction — to the top of its viral story:
The Washington Post, May 1, 2021
At first, The New York Timesattempted to quietly change the story to delete the false claims without noting they were doing so. But upon being pressured, they finally faced up to what they did and posted their own retraction at the very bottom of the story that reads: “Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated whether Rudolph W. Giuliani received a formal warning from the F.B.I. about Russian disinformation. Mr. Giuliani did not receive such a so-called defensive briefing.” In their self-glorifying jargon, the Paper of Record did not spread Fake News — perish the thought — but merely “misstated” the truth. Meanwhile, NBC News, at the top of its false story, posted this explanation for why Dilanian got the story completely wrong:
An earlier version of this article included an incorrect report that Rudolph Giuliani had received a defensive briefing from the FBI in 2019 warning him that he was being targeted by a Russian influence operation. The report was based on a source familiar with the matter, but a second source now says the briefing was only prepared for Giuliani and not delivered to him, in part over concerns it might complicate the criminal investigation of Giuliani. As a result, the premise and headline of the article below have been changed to reflect the corrected information.
This credibility carnage was so glaring that even CNN acknowledged that “the corrections are black eyes to the newsrooms which have aggressively reported on Giuliani’s contacts with Ukrainians in his attempts to dig up dirt on then-presidential candidate Joe Biden.” But there have been so many similar “black eyes” like this one, indeed far worse ones, over the last five years, and they never change anything that causes these “black eyes” because they want to do this: spreading disinformation is their function. Indeed, as I have asked almost every time these debacles happen: how is it possible that these same outlets keep “confirming” one another’s false stories?
And the answer is obvious: they all serve as mouthpieces for the same propagandists and disinformation agents of the CIA, FBI and other security state agencies. In this capacity, they dutifully write down and vouch for what they are told by those agencies to publish without any investigative scrutiny or confirmation. The most amazing part of it all is that when they try to malign independent journalists for not doing “real reporting” — real reporting like these corporate outlets do — this is what they mean by real reporting: getting a call from the CIA or FBI and being told what to say. And that is why they so often mislead and deceive the public with blatant disinformation in unison.
Increasingly, states are lifting or modifying mask mandates. The following 14 states, in alphabetical order, had mask orders but have lifted them: Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
As of April 30, 25 states had statewide mask orders in effect, including 20 of the 23 states with Democratic governors and five out of the 27 states with Republican governors.
