Marburg - Big Pharma and the Next Global Pandemic?

Here's the latest scary health and existentially threatening news from the World Health Organization:

 

 

For my readers that aren't familiar with Marburg, here is a brief description of the disease from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:

 

Here are the signs and symptoms of Marburg noting the frightening case-fatality rate:

 

"After an incubation period of 2-21 days, symptom onset is sudden and marked by fever, chills, headache, and myalgia. Around the fifth day after the onset of symptoms, a maculopapular rash, most prominent on the trunk (chest, back, stomach), may occur. Nausea, vomiting, chest pain, a sore throat, abdominal pain, and diarrhea may appear. Symptoms become increasingly severe and can include jaundice, inflammation of the pancreas, severe weight loss, delirium, shock, liver failure, massive hemorrhaging, and multi-organ dysfunction.

 

Clinical diagnosis of Marburg virus disease (MVD) can be difficult. Many of the signs and symptoms of MVD are similar to other infectious diseases (such as malaria or typhoid fever) or viral hemorrhagic fevers that may be endemic in the area (such as Lassa fever or Ebola). This is especially true if only a single case is involved.

 

The case-fatality rate for MVD is between 23-90%."

  

Here is the current treatment protocol:

 

"There is no specific treatment for Marburg virus disease. Supportive hospital therapy should be utilized, which includes balancing the patient’s fluids and electrolytes, maintaining oxygen status and blood pressure, replacing lost blood and clotting factors, and treatment for any complicating infections.

 

Experimental treatments are validated in non-human primate models but have never been tried in humans."

 

And, lastly, here is a complete listing of the known cases and outbreaks since the disease was first discovered in August 1967:

 

Please observe how few laboratory cases and disease-related deaths have been confirmed over the past nearly six decades.

 

Now, since the ruling class seems to be prescient when it comes to what lies down the road, let's see what Bill Gates and GAVI, The Vaccine Alliance, had to say about Marburg back in April 2021:

 

 

Coincidental?

 

Here's a quote from the article with my bolds:

 

"Since Marburg virus can spread between people, extremely stringent infection control measures are needed to avoid people being in any contact with each other, to ensure any laboratory samples are disposed of carefully, and to ensure safe burial procedures. Avoiding handling or eating bush meat is also critical to avoid any potential infection that could spread from animals. International travel is a major risk factor for the spread of Marburg virus beyond Africa and rapid diagnostics to ensure that cases are picked up before people carry the virus to other countries will be important."

 

Frightened yet?

 

Even the World Economic Forum has weighed in on Marburg during the 2021 outbreak in Guinea:

 

 

As you have read in this posting, there are no current vaccines for Marburg, however, there was a patent for this notable exception:

 

Notice that this now expired vaccine patent was held by the United States Department of the Army.

 

For completeness sake, here is the latest news on the development of a Marburg vaccine from Anthony Fauci's former employer, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases:

 

...and from Nature:

 

...with this quote:

 

"The World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland, convened an urgent meeting yesterday (February 14, 2023) to discuss the feasibility of testing Marburg vaccines that are in various stages of development. But the odds are against a successful trial, they say, because other control measures such as quarantine could end the outbreak before a single vaccine dose can be administered....

 

If a vaccine trial in Equatorial Guinea were to go ahead, an independent group of experts that advises the WHO would make decisions about which vaccines to test, says Ana Maria Henao-Restrapo, who co-leads the WHO’s R&D Blueprint effort to lay the groundwork for such studies during outbreaks. Any trial would also require the permission and involvement of Equatorial Guinea’s government.

 

Even if a trial can get off the ground, it’s unlikely that enough cases will develop before the current outbreak comes under control for researchers to determine conclusively whether any vaccine is effective or not, Edmunds says. “It’s a double-edged sword, isn’t it? It’s good news for public health and the people of Equatorial Guinea, but perhaps bad news for science.”"

 

Isn't it a pity that non-pharmaceutical measures might actually save lives but could interfere with clinical trials for a potential Marburg vaccine.  Where is the profit in that?

 

Here's an additional quote from the article in Nature:

 

"I cannot emphasize enough the need for speed,” said John Edmunds, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, at the WHO meeting....

 

The Sabin Vaccine Institute in Washington DC has a candidate vaccine that uses a modified chimpanzee adenovirus to deliver instructions for cells to make a Marburg virus protein, whereas a candidate made by Janssen in Beerse, Belgium, uses the human adenovirus on which the company’s successful COVID-19 vaccine was based (Janssen is a subsidiary of Johnson and Johnson)."

 

Remember that use of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 adenovirus vaccine was cause for concern as shown here:

 

It's looking like there is a good chance that the fear porn industry will be using Marburg as its next candidate and that, like the COVID-19 vaccines, Big Pharma will be rushing potential vaccines to market to battle a virus that has only killed a confirmed total of 379 people since it was first discovered in August 1967.  The upside for Big Pharma are the tens of millions of Africans who may be willing to "roll up their sleeves" to accept a vaccine for a rather rare virus that has never reached pandemic levels of penetration.

 

The speed of science comes to the rescue yet again.  Let the vaccines roll.

Project Guilt and Fear - How Governments Create Panic in the COVID-19 Era

The United Kingdom's Department of Health and Social Care has recently released a television advertisement as part of a program that is clearly designed to ramp up the fear and guilt that are associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. 

 

Here is the announcement of the government's new national campaign and the role that the television advertisement will play:

 

Here is further information on the campaign and the advertisement in particular:

 

"To support the message, an additional short film has been developed featuring one-on-one interviews with the hospital staff from Basingstoke and North Hampshire Hospital. and patients from both Basingstoke and St George’s hospital in London who feature in the new advertising campaign. Within the interviews you hear about the daily lives of these hospital staff and the impact COVID-19 has had on them and calls on the public to take the message seriously and stay at home to help stop the spread."

Here are quotes from key members of the U.K.'s COVID-19 government response team:

  

Health and Social Care Secretary, Matt Hancock:

 

"The NHS is under intense pressure. They are relying on all of us to follow the rules.

 

I know how long the last few months have felt, and I know the vast majority of people are following the rules, but we have come too far to let up now.

 

Every day we are closer to beating this virus, and already over 5 million people across the UK have been vaccinated. But right now more than ever we need to stick together to protect our NHS and to keep saving lives.

 

The message couldn’t be clearer – stay at home."

 

Chief Medical Officer, Professor Chris Whitty, said:

 

"The impact of the current wave is still putting significant pressure on hospitals across the country and many patients are very sick.

 

Vaccines give clear hope for the future, but for now we must all continue to play our part in protecting the NHS and saving lives."

Now, let's look at how the Johnson government is going to further install fear.  According to the U.K government , the video features testimonials from National Health Service Staff and COVID-19 patients from the Basingstoke and North Hampshire Hospital, located to the southwest of London.  Here is the video in its entirety:

 

The advertisement was created by OmniGOV, a media/marketing agency that works in close conjunction with the U.K. government as part of Manning Gottlieb OMD.  The video will be accompanied by a print, digital and media campaign that looks like this:

Rather than focussing on obedience to government diktats, the new program will focusing on encouraging people to take personal responsibility for their actions and consider the impact of their behaviours on other human beings.

 

Interestingly and as further background, the United Kingdom government struck a £119 million deal with OMD in March 2020, just weeks before the first lockdown began, suggesting that the government was already had its draconian COVID-19 response plan in place and just needed a marketing firm to help them "market" it to the British public as shown here:

 

Scaremongering and guilt; the business model being used by governments around the world to deflect from their chronic neglect and underfunding of their health care and long-term systems.  Guilt and fear are marvellous incentives and governments have known and used the motivational impact of those emotions for untold centuries to get their own way.  For that matter, a real pandemic doesn't require governments to stir up fear.

Social Distancing - The Difference That Three Feet Makes

Many of us are being subjected to social distancing rules, something that most people had not heard of until the appearance of the most recent novel coronavirus, 2019 edition.  

In my jurisdiction, we are being told that we must maintain a 2 metre or 6 foot distance from everyone, whether they are exhibiting symptoms like coughing or sneezing that may indicate that they are positive for COVID-19 or not.

With that in mind, let's look at how various governments around the world are managing the social distancing aspect of the coronavirus pandemic.  Here is what is on the Canadian government's Health Canada COVID-19 website:

Here is what is on the United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website:

In both of these cases, the Canadian and American governments are recommending a 2 metre or 6 foot distance between everyone.

In contrast, here is what we find on the European Centre for Disease Prevention website:

Here is what we find on the Australian Government's Department of Health website:

Lastly, since the World Health Organization is largely responsible for driving the measures that nations have used to slow the spread of COVID-19, here is what the world's leading health body has to say about social distancing:

Here is a WHO video with the same information:

Note, that in this case, the World Health Organization does not recommend social distancing for all people, just for those who have a fever or who are coughing or sneezing and then only a distance of 3 feet.

Let's close with a couple of thoughts.  Where I live, grocery stores have recently implemented very strict social distancing measures including putting tape on the floor to ensure that customers are more than 6 feet apart when waiting to check out, putting arrows on the aisle floors to ensure that people only go one direction and remain more than 6 feet apart and only letting a small number of people into the store to ensure that they remain more than 6 feet apart.  This 6 foot/2 metre rule is the main reason why restaurants, bars and retailers in Canada and many other jurisdictions have been forced to close and why police are now issuing tickets when two people with different addresses are siting in the same vehicle.  I can certainly understand erring on the side of caution but when the World Health Organization is only recommending 3 feet/1 metres for social distancing from people showing potential symptoms of COVID-19, why is it that governments have taken it upon themselves to make a bad situation even worse by making us keep at least 6 feet away from everyone, positive for the virus or not?  On a personal note, after seeing people's reactions when I get what they deem as "too close for comfort" in our "6 foot social distancing world", perhaps governments are just ramping up the fear and discomfort level to justify whatever comes next.  By then, many of us will be begging for freedom.

Who would have ever thought that 3 feet could make such a difference?  If it's scientifically sound consistency that you are looking for in the COVID-19 narrative, you will have to keep on looking.

How Governments Use Fear

Updated February 2015

An interesting research article on the Independent Institute's website looks at the role of fear in the government's arsenal of ways that they control the masses.  This is particularly pertinent in this time of the seemingly endless global war against terror which continues, despite governments' assurances that they have the situation under control. 

In case you weren't aware of it, The Independent Institute is a non-profit, non-partisan scholarly research and educational organization that sponsors in-depth studies of critical social and economic issues.  The organization seeks to advance peaceful, prosperous and free societies that are not grounded in partisan interests.  Dr. Robert Higgs, the author of "Fear: The Foundation of Every Government's Power", has a degree in economics from John Hopkins University and has been a visiting scholar at Oxford University and Stanford University and a fellow for the Hoover Institution and the National Science Foundation.

Dr. Higgs begins by noting that all animals experience fear and that some level of fear is essential to survival.  Fear alerts us to dangers.  That said, governments understand this basic instinct of humans and both exploit and cultivate it to secure submission, compliance and co-operation with the government and its dictates.  Without fear, governments would not survive.

There is a long history of fear and government.  The earliest governments used warfare and conquest to advance their empires, what we might call the warrior element.  The losers in a battle were destined to live their lives as subjects of the dominant group, fearing for their lives.  Often the losing side was forced to hand over their material wealth to preserve their lives.  This handing over of one's material possessions evolved into taxation.  Conquered people naturally resent the imposition of government and taxation and, throughout history, there are many examples of a subjugated populace overthrowing their masters.  Even if outright rebellion doesn't take place, the masses take action to avoid the laws imposed by their political masters or do what they can to sabotage their ruler's government.

In both the past and present, rulers have augmented their powers with religion using what we might call the religious element; in an ancient example, Egyptian Pharaohs were thought to be gods and in a modern times, the Emperor of Japan was deemed to be descended from the gods and the current Supreme Leader of North Korea is third in his family's line of god-like figures who are believed capable of controlling the weather and who have no need to urinate or defecate.  In the evangelical Christian world, one verse in the New Testament is often quoted as found in Romans 13:1 "Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God."  That verse has long been used by the church to force Christians to subject themselves to the whims of government, no matter how bad or unfair that government may be.

Through the use of both the warrior and religious elements, people are in fear for both their lives and for their eternal souls.  It is this combined fear that has propped up governments around the world for the past few thousand years.

Governments have refined their use of fear, fostering an ideology that emphasizes our vulnerability to both external and internal dangers and that only the government can provide us with protection from these threats.  Government leads us to believe that only it can protect us from both internal dissent and external threats.  Sometimes bad governments actually do protect their people for a time; the Nationalist Socialist Party (NSDAP) of 1930's Germany is an example.  The NSDAP helped the German people by returning Germany to a place of prominence in the world after the humiliating defeat of World War I and brought the German economy back to its feet after a period of crippling hyperinflation.  Much of this "Thousand Year Empire" was built on the fear of both insiders and outsiders, including Jews and the Slavic population.   On the other hand, when defeat at the hands of the Allies looked to be certain in early 1945, the Nazis thought nothing of sacrificing hundreds of thousands of its own people in a desperate attempt to win what was clearly a lost cause.  The author notes that when governments fail to protect their own people, they often blame scapegoats, a current example would be unpredictable Muslim terrorists whose actions cannot be discovered in advance.

Modern-day governments, particularly in the developed world, have convinced us that only government can protect us from all sorts of fear-inducing threats including unemployment, hunger, illness, lack of income in old age, toxins in food, contaminated water among others.  This has led to the formation of the "welfare" or "nanny" state.  It is the fear of all of these and other "threats" that has allowed government to control us.

While fear is a popular motivator, governments have often learned the hard way that fear has a shelf life.  Successive doses of fear-mongering propagated by governments result in lowered levels levels of actual fear.  Like the boy who cried "wolf", the populace grows weary of constantly being on guard for their lives.  We need look no further that the United States Department of Homeland Security and its multi-stage, colour-coded threat level assessment that looked like this:

It has now evolved to the National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS), a sample of which looks like this:

The Department of Homeland Security is even so kind as to supply a Terror Alert widget that looks like this:

How many of us now even pay any attention to these "terror alerts"?  Even Tom Ridge, former Homeland Security czar admitted that fear is a depreciating asset as shown in this article:

"The Bush administration periodically put the USA on high alert for terrorist attacks even though then-Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge argued there was only flimsy evidence to justify raising the threat level, Ridge now says.

Ridge, who resigned Feb. 1, said Tuesday that he often disagreed with administration officials who wanted to elevate the threat level to orange, or "high" risk of terrorist attack, but was overruled.

His comments at a Washington forum describe spirited debates over terrorist intelligence and provide rare insight into the inner workings of the nation's homeland security apparatus.

Ridge said he wanted to "debunk the myth" that his agency was responsible for repeatedly raising the alert under a color-coded system he unveiled in 2002.

"More often than not we were the least inclined to raise it," Ridge told reporters. "Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment. Sometimes we thought even if the intelligence was good, you don't necessarily put the country on (alert). There were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it, and we said, 'For that?'

"You have to use that tool of communication very sparingly," Ridge said at the forum, which was attended by seven other former department leaders.” (my bold)

War is the great friend of governments around the world.  Bureaucracy builds on itself as the war apparatus takes shape.  Governments know that they can get away with raising the tax burden, rationing goods, borrowing huge amounts of money (think of the trillions spent on the War on Terror since 2001), enacting the draft and other measures that they would never be able to undertake under peaceful conditions.  Few people would dare to complain publicly during wartime  for fear of being branded "traitorous".  During war, people are willing to surrender their wealth, privacy and liberty to governments far more readily than they might otherwise be inclined.  We see prime examples of this since 2001; the revelations of Edward Snowden have made us realize that, in this time of the War on Terror, our privacy means absolutely nothing to governments around the world.  Since September 11th, 2001, there has been a marked resurgence in the "Warfare State".  We have been pulled into two wars and now possibly a third that is a direct offspring of the mishandling of the war in Iraq because of the fear mongering about a remote possibility of a domestic attack by an ISIS-related terrorist.

Here is the closing paragraph of Dr. Higgs' commentary:

"Were we ever to stop being afraid of the government itself and to cast off the phoney fears it has fostered, the government would shrivel and die, and the host would disappear for the tens of millions of parasites in the United States—not to speak of the vast number of others in the rest of the world—who now feed directly and indirectly off the public’s wealth and energies. On that glorious day, everyone who had been living at public expense would have to get an honest job, and the rest of us, recognizing government as the false god it has always been, could set about assuaging our remaining fears in more productive and morally defensible ways."  

We have to be certain that when we listen to what governments tell us that they aren't using their version of the "truth" to further their agenda, particularly their war agenda.

Genes, Fear and Politicians

A study by a team of researchers at a selection of universities in the United States has recently published a study with the rather wordy title of "Fear as a Disposition and an Emotional State: A Genetic and Environmental Approach to Out-Group Political Preferences".  This study looks at the relationship between genetics, fear and political preferences.  Recent mass killings and the Boston bombing have already set society on edge and it is now that the fears of many Americans are vulnerable to being exploited.

We all know (or should know) that politicians often consciously or unconsciously use fear to manipulate the voting public into seeing things their way so that they will gain public support for their agenda.  One of the biggest, most recent examples of this was the Bush II Administration's use of fear to convince Americans that going to war against terrorism, and in particular Saddam Hussein, was necessary after the attacks of September 11th, 2001.  Human fear is related to our genetic makeup and, as a result, each one of us are differently disposed to fear since it is our different genetic factors that make us respond differently to fear-triggering stimuli since each of us has a different perception of an event.  The authors of the study then relate individual disposition toward fear to attitudes toward "out-groups" or a social group to which we do not belong.  As the Conflict Resolution Consortium at the University of Colorado states:

"The term "out-group" refers to anyone who is not in your own group. In conflicts between groups of people, disputants usually view people outside their own group as less good, or in the case of the opposing group, really bad. The term "enemy image" refers to the same thing.  The opposing groups is seen as "the enemy," who is inferior to one's own group in many ways."

Doesn't that paragraph explain a lot about today's political landscape where the "other side" is viewed as inferior and even dangerous even though both sides of the spectrum are actually "on the same side"?  It goes a long way to explain the use of derogatory words like "libtard" among others.

Back to the study.  The researchers note that genetic influences account for up to 50 percent of the individual variation in adult disposition toward fear.  Other factors that influence fear are psychological and social in nature, for example, one's family situation, culture and experience.  Children who have less secure family attachments generally experience more fear and are generally found to be more adverse to new situations and people throughout the remainder of their lives.  This fear of unknown others (i.e. out-groups) results in the perception of threats to the "in-group" or the group that they belong to.  Generally, more fearful individuals will be less comfortable with unfamiliar social situations and are less willing to interact with new people and environments, particularly when it brings them into contact with "unlike others".  Other studies also show that show that fear prevents an individual from fully assimilating new information.    When these individuals feel that they are being confronted with a situation where they may suffer a loss of some type (i.e. a loss of freedom), their fear level is raised even further.  A good example of this is the perception that immigration results in the threat of job losses; even if that is not necessarily the case, fearful individuals may not be able to assimilate data that shows that the threat is minimal.

As noted above, higher levels of social fear results in higher bias against out-groups.  This fear trait has a strong influence on political attitudes toward out-groups (i.e. immigrants) because the perception is that they are threatening on some level.

The study consisted of 29682 kinships from 8636 families including 14753 twins and 3184 non-twin siblings with 99 percent of the test subjects being Caucasian.  The individuals were then psychologically assessed for phobias and fears and their political attitudes were measured using an attitude index that measured conservatism-liberalism.

Here are the graphical results followed by an explanation:

The relationship between fear and political leaning was tenuous at best as shown on the first graph, except in the case of extremely fearful individuals (less than 0.3 percent of the sample) who were almost always conservative politically (a negative score on the Liberal-Conservative Index on the first graph).  The results on the second graph show that the degree of social fear is strongly related to the attitude toward out-groups, those who are not "us".  Even the lowest amount of social fear results in a substantially less positive attitude toward those who are seen to be "different".  That said, the authors found that political preferences represented "...a manifestation of a genetic disposition expressed within the context of modern circumstances".  Some people are genetically predisposed to acquire fears in response to novel circumstances.

What concerns me about the relationship between genetics, fear and attitude towards those that we deem to be outsiders is that politicians can use this to exploit us for their own good.  Rather than a scenario where it is us (voters) viewing them (politicians) as an out-group, they manipulate us into believing that it is us (Republicans in the United States/Conservatives in Canada) against them (Democrats in the United States/Liberals and NDP in Canada).  By dividing us, they win and ultimately, we all lose.  In addition, by creating fear of outsiders, foreign or domestic, innocent and well-meaning people are found guilty by affiliation.