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December 25, 2020

Daily Archives

Statement of Dr. Joycelyn Elders, Former U.S. Surgeon General, on Behalf of the Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites

December 25, 2020by David Dobrodt in General, The Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites

This statement was released on Christmas Eve, December 24. The Committee, initiated in July 2020 by a call from Helga Zepp-LaRouche of the Schiller Institute, involves many medical professionals, educators and retired U.S. military officers.

As the year 2020 draws to a close, let us fervently hope and diligently work, that the new year will bring about a great transformation for the health and well-being of all humanity.

This year has seen a sea of troubles, starting with the COVID-19 pandemic, which has already killed over 1.7 million people worldwide; which has exacerbated a famine crisis in large parts of the world, and which according to World Food Program director David Beasley, now threatens the lives of 270 million people; which has created mass unemployment and increasingly desperate conditions throughout the globe.

The COVID pandemic is not under control. We are now seeing new and more infectious strains of the coronavirus, as in Great Britain, which is creating economic chaos. This catastrophic situation can be remedied, but it requires the urgent mobilization of the population, including emphatically the implementation of public health measures, that have proven to be effective in containing the virus. We cannot simply wait for the vaccines to be administered. This emergency requires that nations work together to accomplish these solutions. Pandemics don’t discriminate. Any nation, any region, any group of people not treated in the course of this pandemic will come back to harm us.

The following measures should be undertaken by national, regional, and local governments. Community organizations, universities, medical institutions, religious groups, and others can begin to implement aspects of this immediately. This will spur broader action and save lives in the interim.

  • Public health measures should be strictly adhered to and enforced. These measures were recently reiterated by Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams, appearing on Sunday’s “Face the Nation,” December 20th: “We need to wash our hands, wear a mask, watch our distances, keep our household gatherings small.”
  • Get vaccinated. While this cannot be a mandatory requirement and is not without legitimate questions and concerns, it is highly recommended, as the best option, at present, to beat the COVID pandemic.
  • Rapidly recruit, train, and employ thousands of young people to work as community health care workers to educate people regarding the public health measures cited above and to overcome “vaccine hesitancy and fear,” and, where viable, to assist medical personnel with vaccine administration.
  • Conduct mass testing, especially in areas of vulnerable populations, i.e., the elderly, the impoverished, and “hot spots,” etc. This should be done with a rapid test, so that people get results immediately. This testing should be done regularly, once per month, until the area has a 65-70% vaccinated population. Testing sites should be established in areas where the vulnerable populations live, i.e. neighborhood churches, supermarket parking lots, etc. Mobile medical/clinic vehicles should be utilized wherever possible to reach out-of-the-way areas.
  • Isolate and quarantine infected individuals. A safe, secure environment should be provided where people can recover and receive good food and medical treatment, while doing so.
  • Begin public protocols immediately on promising prophylactic treatments, including Alpha-interferon and Vitamin D-3 supplements. These promising treatments and their results have generally been unreported. This may also address and build trust among the medically underserved communities, who have in many cases legitimate concerns about their general health conditions, independent of COVID-19.
  • Get everything moving as rapidly and on as large a scale as possible. What would it take to get everyone in the U.S. and in most of the world vaccinated and COVID-free by Independence Day, July 4, 2021? In this regard the expertise of the U.S. military including the National Guard and the Army Corps of Engineers, should be utilized.

It is often said that hindsight is 20/20. Let the year 2020 be remembered as the year the population woke up, realized our past mistakes, and changed, in order to create a better and healthier world for all mankind.

China Is Potentially a Positive Wildcard in Vaccine-Making.

December 25, 2020by David Dobrodt in General

An article in the Dec. 3 China Briefing, titled “China’s COVID-19 Vaccine Development and Availability,” names four of China’s vaccine-producers: the Tianjin-based CanSino; the Wuhan-based China National Biotech Group (CNBG), the Beijing-based Sinovac, and ZLongkema, based in Anhui province. These pharma companies have arrangements to carry out testing and distribution of vaccines in 14 developing sector countries, primarily in Ibero-America and Southwest Asia. Recently, China’s Sinovac licensed Brazil’s respected Butantan Institute to get raw materials to manufacture millions of doses of its COVID vaccine inside Brazil. China has the scientific knowledge, manpower, strong Hamiltonian finances, and production engineering skills capabilities to teach other countries to set up vaccine production factories within their borders, to the effect, perhaps, of expanding vaccine production by 1 to 2 billion doses.

The United States has strong capabilities. Were the U.S. to apply the Defense Production Act of 1950 to expand vaccine-manufacturing facilities, it could greatly add to this process, under HHS’s Operation Warp Speed.

The international organization COVAX was formed decades ago, as a joint fund for equitable distribution of vaccines, joining with an organization named Gavi, a funder of vaccines for low-income countries based in Geneva, Switzerland. On Dec. 18, COVAX announced that through contributions, it has pledged that at least 1.3 billion donor-funded vaccine doses will be made available to 92 low- and middle-income economies that are eligible. This valuable immunization initiative would fund only approximately enough vaccine to vaccinate a targeted 20% of the population.

These nations cannot wait until 2023-24 to get sufficient COVID-19 vaccine. The production facilities must be constructed so that the vaccine is available to a considerable share of those nations’ population by the first quarter of 2021. This will require not only vaccines per se, but also the refrigeration chains and other basic infrastructure required to deliver the doses to the targeted population. The method to address this was outlined in the LaRouche plan “Reopen the U.S. Economy: The World Needs 1.5 Billion New, Productive Jobs.”

Mobilization Needed To Produce and Distribute COVID Vaccines to the Developing Sector

December 25, 2020by David Dobrodt in General

A great increase in vaccine-making production capacity is needed globally, if billions of people in Ibero-America, Africa, and Asia are to have access to COVID-19 vaccines in a timely fashion to save tens of millions of lives—and if those populations are not to be made into a petri dish for breeding new mutations and new viruses to reinfect nations who survived the first round.

The following is a preliminary look at existing production capacity for COVID-19 vaccines, and what emergency measures and new construction would be needed to ensure success.

In a Dec. 8 interview with Bloomberg television, Rasmus Bech Hansen, founder and CEO of Airfinity, a life-sciences analytics firm that is currently focusing on SAR-CoV-2 virus, said that 6 billion of the world’s present 7.8 billion people would need to be vaccinated in order for COVID-19 to be defeated. This involves mass vaccination for about 75% of the world’s population.

But that is not occurring; the developing sector is, for the most part, being left out of plans for immediate or near-term vaccination. This means death for them, and continuing danger of contagion for the entire human race. A Nov. 30 article in Nature magazine, entitled, “How COVID Vaccines Are Being Divvied Up Around the World,” reports that vaccine-makers specializing in COVID vaccines, “can make sufficient doses for more than one-third of the world’s population by the end of 2021. But many people in low-income countries might have to wait until 2023 or 2024 for vaccination, according to estimates from the Duke Global Health Innovation Center in Durham, North Carolina.”

Nature further reports that “27 members of the European Union, together with five rich countries, have pre-ordered about half [of vaccine doses]. The countries account for only around 13% of the global population.”

To gain a sense of overall production capacity, the estimated capacity for 2021 for the major vaccine-makers, in billions of doses, is: AstraZeneca, 3 billion; Pfizer/BioNTech, 1.3 billion; Moderna, 1 billion; Russia’s Gamaleya National Center of Epidemiology (which makes Russia’s Sputnik V), 800 million.

Other vaccine-makers, including Johnson & Johnson/Janssen, Novanax, and others, may have the combined capacity to produce another 1.5 billion doses, bringing the total doses to 7.6 billion. But these figures may be overstated. For example, Russia does not have sufficient vaccine-making capacity inside Russia to make the vaccines it has committed to for foreign countries. Many pharma companies make projections of what they would like to produce, but do not reach them, and so forth.