General

A new study in India has raised hopes that the coronavirus may be significantly less lethal than thought (at least in India) and that achieving herd immunity through infection could be a viable strategy, but the enormous shortcomings of the study make such conclusions mere wishful thinking.

Coverage in the {Hindustan Times} is typical. An article headlined “15% Population May Have Virus Antibodies, Says Private Lab Data” begins “Thyrocare, a private diagnostic laboratory shared data from 60,000 antibody tests across 600 pincodes [postal codes] that it conducted over 20 days. Of those 15% tested positive for antibodies.” This figure suggests that far more people have already contracted and cleared the coronavirus than previously thought, and that the danger per infection is therefore significantly lower.

But such antibody tests have enormous problems, as has been seen in the article by Stanford Professor John Ioannidis, reported on in this publication some months ago, or the April 22 press conference by California doctors Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi, which received unmerited attention. The trouble with these studies is the selection of who goes to be tested.

People who think they’ve already had COVID-19 — due to symptoms or known exposure — are more likely to seek out antibody testing. Without a more randomized sampling, the resulting figures will be too high.

In contrast with levels of 15% or 20%, the Indian Council of Medical Research found that less than 0.73% of people sampled — chosen randomly across 83 districts — had antibodies in late April. The {Journal of the American Medical Association} published on July 21 an article describing antibody screening in blood samples taken for other reasons (cholesterol levels, general health checkups, etc.) from March 23-May 12. They found SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in 1% of samples from the San Francisco Bay area and in 6.9% of samples from New York City. While these levels are much higher than the number of confirmed cases, they do not support the wishful thinking that we are near herd immunity, or that the morbidity and mortality of COVID-19 are low.

Join us at 2pm on Saturday, July 25 for a discussion between Bill Binney, Dennis Small and Mike Billington.

Is it true that the arc of the moral universe is long, but bends towards justice?

Thirty-seven years ago, Lyndon LaRouche was involved, with the full knowledge of the National Security Council, in a back-channel negotiation with the Soviet Union. That process led to the Reagan Administration’s thermonuclear war avoidance policy the termed the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI.) Despite the fact that the senior director of the National Security Council, Norman Bailey, had met with LaRouche, and, as reported by the Washington Post in 1985, had “described LaRouche’s organization as “one of the best private intelligence services in the world,“ LaRouche was put through a federal prosecution by the United States Justice Department. Former United States Attorney General Ramsey Clark described the persecution of LaRouche and his movement as constituting “a broader range of deliberate and systematic misconduct and abuse of power over a longer period of time in an effort to destroy a political movement and leader, than any other federal prosecution in my time or to my knowledge.”

That LaRouche prosecution from the years 1986-1994 and after, was the seed-crystal for the succeeding decades-long abuse of power carried out, under the guise of “national security,” through illegal surveillance, biased prosecutions, and judicial railroads. This was ultimately done not only against many innocent American citizens, but also against the United States Presidency itself, largely through the actions of British intelligence services and their American assets, as in the thoroughly discredited “Russiagate hoax. The recent visit of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to London, where he said, “it’s great to be back in London to reaffirm the special relationship we share with our closest ally,” illustrates the problem.

Now, through the courageous actions of “good Americans” such as William Binney, the former Technical Director the National Security Agency (NSA), it becomes possible to expose the snake-pit of corruption, duplicity and sedition that has prevented the policies of war-prevention and economic growth of Lyndon LaRouche. This is what is now preventing the Presidency from advancing the General Welfare of all American citizens through economic cooperation with other nations, particularly Russia and China, in the pursuit of peace through economic development and scientific progress.

Join us on Saturday at 2pm, as Bill Binney and friends continue their dialogue with the American people and others who wish to create a new just paradigm.

China is definitely committed to make infrastructural projects a centerpiece of its strategy to get out of the pandemic-related depression. ECNS reports at some detail that China will add up to nine magnetic levitation railroads of over 1,000 kilometers in total length into its service network in the long term: a tourist railway line in Southwest China’s Yunnan province, intercity passenger lines and urban mass transit lines in places such as North China’s Shanxi province, Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region and Sichuan province in the nation’s southwestern region.

With the country setting the goal to run high-speed maglev trains clocked at 600 km per hour by the end of this year, East China’s Zhejiang province announced it will invest 100 billion yuan ($14.22 billion) and adopt maglev trains to build a railroad connecting Hangzhou and Shanghai, the provincial government unveiled in mid-April in its transportation development plan over the next three decades. It will take about 15 minutes to complete the 162-km journey at this kind of speed, said Feng Hao, a researcher at the National Development and Reform Commission’s Institute of Comprehensive Transportation.

Aside from the Yangtze River Delta region, the Development and Reform Commission of Shenzhen plans to introduce maglev rail lines to the Second Guangzhou-Shenzhen High Speed Railway to ease the operational pressure of regular and bullet trains in the area, the commission said in a feasibility study released last year.

The Second Guangzhou-Shenzhen High Speed Railway is to be built in 2025 and is expected to be completed in 2030, said information released by the Guangzhou government in 2019.

Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province, also said in its transportation network development plan that it intends to launch maglev services between the city and Chongqing in the future.

China Railway Rolling Stock Corp, the country’s largest rolling stock manufacturer by production volume, is also developing wheel technology-based high-speed trains.
The Europeans and Canadians have failed to compete with China in this field in recent years, said Chen Jian, a professor specializing in railways at Chongqing Jiaotong University.

In addition to three existing maglev railroads in Beijing, Shanghai and Changsha, two short-distance low-speed maglev railways are being constructed in Qingyuan, Guangdong province and Fenghuang county, Hunan province. Both are scheduled to be operational in 2021, said China State Railway Group, the country’s railway operator.

An article in {Cell} reports on an mRNA SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidate that elicits T cell and antibody responses in animals and has been shown to create immunity in mice. While this is not the first vaccine of its type, its design gives it a one-week shelf life in liquid form at room temperature. This could be a significant advantage in achieving immunization in parts of the world without reliable access to electricity for temperature control — which is itself a situation that must be remedied! https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30932-6