[12] Most transmission is said to take place in homes and especially hospitals and care homes. Borders can be closed for migrants, holidays and business trips but not essential imports/exports – likewise food and essentials must be produced and distributed internally – so so-called ‘Zero covid’ policies, if taken literally, are surely not possible.
As others have pointed out, China can't back away from its 'Zero Covid' strategy, since that would mean tacitly admitting that 'covid' doesn't kill 1 in 12 people that it infects; that 4,000 patients of 60,000 'positive tests' in Wuhan were killed by something else. China locked regions down again in December 2021 despite its case count being "tiny compared to many outbreaks elsewhere in the world". Again, this timing coincided with the beginning of the collapse of China's housing market.
See: Bendavid et al., European Journal of Clinical Investigation (“There is no evidence that more restrictive non-pharmaceutical interventions (‘lockdowns’) contributed substantially to bending the curve of new cases in England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, or the United States in early 2020”; Chaudry et al., The Lancet (“government actions such as border closures, full lockdowns, and a high rate of covid-19 testing were not associated with statistically significant reductions in the number of critical cases or overall mortality”); Kuhbandner et al, University of Regensburg (“official data from Germany’s RKI agency suggest strongly that the spread of the coronavirus receded autonomously, before any interventions become effective”); Wood, University of Edinburgh (“the decline in infections in England… began before full lockdown… [S]uch a scenario would be consistent with… Sweden, which began its decline in fatal infections shortly after the UK, but did so on the basis of measures well short of full lockdown”); Homburg and Kuhbandner, datascienceassn.org (“Flaxman et al. allege that non-pharmaceutical interventions imposed by 11 European countries saved millions of lives. We show that their methods involve circular reasoning.”); Rice, BMJ (“the addition of interventions restricting younger people might actually increase the total number of deaths from covid-19”); Cohen and Lipsitch, HHS Public Access (“interventions that reduce but do not eliminate exposure can paradoxically increase the number of cases of severe disease by shifting the burden of infection toward older individuals''); Karáth, BMJ, “(Belarus’s President… [who later fended off a US-backed coup] refused to impose a lockdown… yet the country’s death rate is among the lowest in Europe”); Thomas et al., Biosecurity and Bioterrorism (“the negative consequences… are so extreme… they should be eliminated from serious consideration”).
When Austria locked down its population in November 2020 the number of new cases fell by a similar amount as in Hungary, Croatia and Slovenia, which did not lock down.
Another study from 1997 says that “more diverse social networks were associated with greater resistance to upper respiratory illness”. (See link for other studies making similar conclusions.)
Another has reported that “myopia in children ages 6 to 13 increased by up to three times in 2020, from the period between 2015 and 2019". Myopia has rocketed in the past five decades of neoliberal privatisation. The biomechanist Kay Bowman explains that such an outcome is not only a result of spending too much time in front of our laptops and phones but that we do not use our eyes enough outside looking at things in the distance, so our eyes presume obsolescence and adapt. We spend 90% of our time inside but often also live in built up areas when we do go outside – something that can largely be put down to the centralising needs of capital accumulation.
Many studies have also challenged mask mandates. A 2009 study said that, “Face mask use in health care workers has not been demonstrated to provide benefit in terms of cold symptoms or getting colds. Of the 8 symptoms recorded daily, subjects in the mask group were significantly more likely to experience headache.” The Ontario Nurses Association successfully challenged hospital mandatory mask policies on the basis that “there was ‘scant evidence’ that masks reduced the transmission of influenza to patients”. A 2021 study claims that extended mask wearing caused “psychological and physical deterioration”. The Lancet in 2021 claimed that, “We did not find any evidence of decreased risk of transmission in individuals who reported mask use.” Even the CDC found that, “daily case and death growth rates before implementation of mask mandates were not statistically different from the reference period”. And the FDA states that (April 2021), “While a surgical mask may be effective in blocking splashes and large-particle droplets, a face mask, by design, does not filter or block very small particles in the air.” Mask-wearing is particularly detrimental for children in early years of literacy learning.
Masks are also causing many eye problems. Professor Michael Braungart, director at the Hamburg Environmental Institute has said that mask wearers risk breathing in carcinogens, allergens and tiny synthetic microfibres by wearing both textile and nonwoven surgical masks. Another industry textile chemist, Dr. Dieter Sedlak, claims to have found elevated concentrations of hazardous fluorocarbons, formaldehyde and other potentially carcinogenic substances on surgical face masks.
The WHO itself has warned against overusing alcohol-based hand sanitising gel for fear of giving rise to ‘superbugs’ that learn how to resist the product. Andrew Kemp, head of Scientific Advisory Board on the British Institute of Cleaning Science, said it has not yet been proven that alcohol-based hand sanitising gels could kill any virus that causes covid-19 on skin. “Even if [hand gels] did kill 99.9% of all bacteria, there can be more than a million bacteria on your hands at any one time, leaving 10,000 alive after sanitisation,” he said. “These will be in a residue of sugar and protein. Recent research shows the surviving bugs which are not killed by alcohol gels are themselves highly dangerous pathogens and may increase in numbers.” Is this because they have been isolated and poisoned by the antibacterial agent (see footnote 13)? Potentially of more concern is the wiping away of a diversity of bacteria that the human body, including the skin microbiome, needs.
As a Bloomberg article headlined "Germ-killing brands now want to sell you germs" indicates, the recent great push for antibacterial products looks increasingly like the desperate last hurrah of a dying industry, which is being exposed by new tech and, in turn, better science. More importantly, it is becoming unprofitable – no new class of antibiotics have been brought to market since 1987 – prompting investment in probiotics, where the previous lack of investment means there is room to generate higher profit margins (until the market becomes saturated like any other). Funnily enough, antibiotics in Latin means ‘anti life’. Perhaps today’s startups in probiotics and food health will become tomorrow’s capitalist monopolies even before socialism takes off.
With enough state support, people with symptoms could afford to self-isolate. Low sick pay forced low-paid workers to continue working after being told to stay home (“£13 a day isn’t enough — isolating workers need proper sick pay”. Morrisons – coincidentally after profits slumped – disgustingly said it will cut the sick pay of unvaccinated workers.) Black and minority ethnic people, overrepresented in the NHS and low-paid work, have been disproportionately affected both by infections (Manchester.ac.uk, 12 January) and the punitive measures enforcing lockdown, with a sharp rise in ‘stop and search’, which went up by 40% (“Coronavirus: Disproportionate number of BAME people fined”, BBC, 3 June). They have also disproportionately lost more jobs, according to the TUC (FT, 20 January. In the US, mortgage failures are highest in predominantly black counties (Black Knight Inc); and black-owned small businesses have seen their business activity fall three times more than white counterparts (-41% vs -17%; -32% for Hispanic; -26% Asian) (National Bureau of Economic Research).
Hancock claimed one in three people with covid-19 are asymptomatic and labelled them a “silent danger”. The BMJ says 80% are asymptomatic. A BMJ editorial reported that a city-wide prevalence study of almost 10 million people in Wuhan found “no evidence” of asymptomatic transmission and said rapid testing of asymptomatic people was a waste of scarce resources.
Fauci said in January 2020 that asymptomatic transmission “never drives outbreaks” only to change his mind five months later, contradicting the WHO. The Tory government, which blames the public for not following lockdown rules when the infection rate goes up, can now justify lockdowns any time it feels any kind of political threat. As Linda Bauld, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, has said, Downing Street’s “blame game” consists of reproaching young people and threatening to impose larger fines. Johnson complained about people “brazenly defying” restrictions when an “extremely high” 90%+ of the public followed them. Yet he defended his unelected chief aide Dominic Cummings, who drove to a beauty spot on his wife’s birthday to “test his eyes” and then 260 miles to see his parents, supposedly to seek childcare when his wife had covid-19, on a day that happened to coincide with the death of his uncle, Lord Justice Laws. People reportedly started to follow guidelines less strictly as a result (Independent.co.uk, 3 June), which was perhaps the intended outcome. The Tory party is badly divided on the issue of lockdown, since some sections of capital are doing well out of it at the expense of others, resulting in inconsistent rules (“Independent shops hit out at high street chains trading during lockdown”, TheGuardian.com, 7 November).
Incidentally, the Soviet Union once defeated a smallpox epidemic in 19 days without resorting to a nationwide lockdown.
The social impact of lockdowns on human relationships is extremely worrying given the share of men under 30 who aren’t having sex tripled in the 12 years following the financial crash. (A trend that seems to apply to everyone.) In France, births were down year-on-year by 13% in January 2021. For France, a country that has traditionally had the highest fertility rate in the 27-member EU, it marked the biggest fall in births since the abrupt end of the baby boom in the 1970s (tallying with the first notable post-war capitalist crisis). China’s population fell in 2020 for the first time since 1961.
As a result of the 2008 recession there was an approximate 25% increase in suicide in the US. "The same increase today would result in an extra 59,000 suicide deaths. That would also project about 87,000 additional deaths due to drug abuse."
[13] The pandemic has reintensified debate on the ‘germ’ vs ‘terrain' theory of infectious disease. Although this is something we will not be able to interrogate on the necessary scale until after science has been liberated from the profit motive – it may even take generations for any mistaken present biases to die out – the terrain theory side of the argument does seem more holistic and in line with Marx’s dialectical materialism, and germ theory more binary, in line with atomistic/bourgeois materialism. The latter is dying out as automation, which operates non-binarily, replaces mechanisation, which operates binarily. Significant parts of terrain theory have become accepted by mainstream science in recent decades.
Capitalist ideology, partly invented to discredit indigenous and peasant notions of animism, the 'oldest religion' — that all of nature is animated and alive, something we now know to be true albeit not spiritually but in terms of the bacteria that regulates all life and evolution — made out that man was somehow separate from nature in order to justify the non-reciprocal plunder of the earth for accumulation. Capital’s mechanistic ideology labelled nature, including human bodies, as merely productive, unconscious machinery. Its dualistic ideology — reflecting the dualistic character of capitalist production, i.e. commodities are both exchange-values and use-values (whereas communism produces solely use-values); the binary operations of mechanical mechanisms; and the division of owner/producer — either pitted sentient humans, the thinking subject (“I think, therefore I am”), against the ‘lifeless objects’ of nature, to be possessed; or framed nature as a ‘beast to be tamed’. It also pitted ‘the civilised’ against ‘the savage’, justifying colonialism. Obviously nature is not completely benevolent – especially when continually abused – but capitalism's dominant ideological view of nature has been one-sided, obscuring the processes and interactions in nature that make up an incredible web of life-giving co-operation.
Cowan and Morell write (loc 1303-18),
“The notion of hostility and competition in all of nature fit with attempts to justify the social inequalities, poverty and sufferings that characterised the dawning industrial age...
... the [light] microscope gave scientists the ability to find germs at the site of disease. Their observations... [provided] a ready and easy explanation for illness – one that circumvented the more difficult and less profitable work of cleaning up the cities, improving diets, mitigating poverty, and reducing pollution.
(Cowan and Morell argue that "bacteria are found at the site of disease for the same reasons that firemen are found at the site of fires. They are the clean up crew taken with digesting and getting rid of dead and diseased tissue." More on that below.)
Germ theory seems to fit with dualistic ideology – an external pathogenic microorganism invades a body or cell. Even now that modern DNA and genome sequencing tech has exploded the old germ theory myth, showing that the ‘vast majority’ of microbes are not agents of disease after all (that invade a sterile human terrain) but a collectivistic driver of all life on Earth, arguably a new ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ bacteria/virus dualism has been formulated to re-justify bourgeois ideology in the face of scientific progress made in late monopoly capitalism. Or perhaps the tech still does not quite yet exist to totally disprove the old theory. (Only about 100 types of bacteria are now considered ‘bad’.)
Only in 2010 did mainstream science begin to acknowledge the existence and importance of the microbiome – the trillions of bacteria in the human gut that regulate our digestive, immune and neurological systems – and has still only scratched the surface in this area of research. New technology has now made it unignorable, although government nutritional guidelines are yet to catch up.
O’Hara & Shanahan argued in 2010 that the gut flora is a “forgotten organ”; that they are a critical part of the whole.
The studies that say that “more diverse social networks were associated with greater resistance to upper respiratory illness" are particularly interesting in the context that before the development of gene-sequencing technology, there was no way for us to know that "many of our microbes aren’t found anywhere on Earth besides the human body, which means we can only get them from other humans".
As Professor Rose Anne Kenney explains, new studies show that loneliness/isolation is as "biologically toxic as any other factor" since "we've evolved to need other people" and so isolation "triggers the chronic inflammation that probably underpins all the big diseases we know about".
Dr Zach Bush tells the story "a lesson I learned from a couple in Icaria, Greece, which is one of the incredible blue zones on the planet where almost everybody lives over 100 years. They say they live a long time not because of the food they eat but because of who we share it with. The tradition here is to always set an extra chair at the dinner table hoping that somebody uninvited will show up.... 'In Icaria we never ask what we ate last night but who did you eat with last night.'"
Bush reminds us that humans are "congomerations of billions and billions of viruses" and that it is bacteria that liberates energy from our cells. He argues that there are "not good and bad germs but healthy and unhealthy ecosystems" – a more holistic approach to the binary of germ theory.
According to Sender et al., if you were to count up all the cells that constitute your body, you’d find that more of them belong to other lifeforms than belong to ‘you’ as such. As the British philosopher of science John Dupré has put it, “These findings make it hard to claim that a creature is self-sufficient, or even that you can mark out where it ends and another one begins.” Thus the capitalist myth around The Individual (the entrepreneur) is blown away – the world is powered, as Marx argued, by dialectical (fluid, rather than atomistic) processes and collectivism. As Dupré writes (2012):
Where once we had discrete and distinct ‘proteins’ and ‘organisms’, all we are left with are highly dynamic processes… Process-thinking has profound implications for medicine, because it shifts the burden of scientific explanation away from the interaction of things based on essences, and towards how unruly processes somehow manage to crystallise into identifiable patterns. Take cancer: when we see the human patient as a mechanism, as scientists generally do, we’re inclined to look for the causes of disease in ‘damaged’ internal parts, often genes. But note how the focus shifts if we think about change as the norm, and stability as the phenomenon that needs explaining. The persistence of the human organism over the lifecycle requires an almost inconceivably precise balance of division, differentiation and destruction of cells (apoptosis). The conditions called ‘cancer’ involve various failures of this balance, an uncontrolled proliferation of cells of a certain type or types. Rather than a dysfunction that requires a specific explanation, perhaps cancer is actually the expected state – and what we need to understand is how self-regulation explains our remarkable tendency not to suffer from cancer. (Indeed, it seems that messed-up genes are as much an effect as a cause of cancer.)
You can do a similar switch with microbial disease. We’ve come a long way in appreciating the function of our microbiome, but scientists have been a little too eager to suggest a division between good, bad, and neutral microbes. The task of medicine looks easy from this point of view – it’s just about recognising and destroying the bad bacteria. However, while some bugs really are just bad, whether microorganisms are good or bad for you is often a matter of context. Bacteria that are beneficial in the gut can get very nasty indeed if they invade other parts of your body. Microbes don’t generally work alone. In your gut, there are thousands of different strains, and these often serve interconnected functions. Consequently, what a particular strain does, and whether it is beneficial for the host that it does it to, will depend on the overall composition of the microbial community. Moreover, while the word ‘microbe’ tends to apply to bacteria, there’s a growing awareness that we might need to include viruses in our survey of health-giving microscopic entities. Many viruses appear to be beneficial, perhaps essential, for human life – such as phages that regulate bacterial populations.
Indeed, as well as the discovery of a microbiome, we may well also have a virome. Without phages, bacterial processes in our bodies and throughout nature "could tip out of balance", as Jason Hickel says. (Quoted in Less is More, Windmill Books, 2021, p. 174.) (The word 'virus' originally meant 'poison' in Latin.) In a 2016 paper Dupre says that viruses have been excluded from research that that has brought about the "realisation of the near omnipresence of symbiosis" whereby "what had seemed to be intrinsically stable entities have turned out to be systems stabilised only by the interactions between a complex set of underlying processes”. Viruses, he says, should probably be seen as living processes rather than things or mere substances and “actually enable a deeper understanding of the fundamentally interconnected and collaborative nature of nature”.
This process-oriented view is more in line with Marx's view of matter, which is not static or discrete. He believed matter could not be reduced to an atom, etc., but that it is fluid, vibrational and mutually supportive – he would not even use the word ‘interconnected’, as this implies discreteness – a view now held by quantum physicists.
Others go further. See “The belief that viruses are pathogenic invaders is crumbling: New study says ‘exosomes’ can’t be distinguished from viruses,” DrTomCowan.com. Cowan writes:
The early proponents of germ theory ... established a framework that postulated that human beings were somehow separate from nature… The main proponents…, including the Frenchman Louis Pasteur and the German Robert Koch, ardently believed that all the bacteria in living organisms, including human beings, were invaders from the outside... from our skin inward, we were sterile, except if we had been invaded by a pathogen. 150 years later, this idea seems laughably incorrect and naïve. Almost everyone now knows that trillions of bacteria live in and on every surface of our bodies. Some people have even attempted to demonstrate that most of our genetic material is bacterial rather than human in origin. We now have conclusive evidence that these trillions of bacteria help digest our food, synthesize crucial nutrients, participate in detoxification functions, help regulate and control our emotions and, in some ways, participate in every normal human function.
In the case of viruses, a similar shift is just beginning to happen in the scientific community….
Cowan's theory is that viruses (one-thousand times smaller than bacteria) are actually ‘exosomes’ – not invaders but “toxin-gobbling messengers” that our cells produce to help us adjust to environmental changes.
See also: “The Misconception Called ‘Virus’” by Dr. Stefan Lanka. In 2017 the highest court in Germany agreed with Lanka that measles was not caused by a virus, and that there was in fact no such thing as a measles virus… Lanka writes:
Scientists who think they are working with viruses are actually working with typical particles of specific dying tissues or cells…. They believe that those tissues and cells are dying because they were infected by a virus. In reality, the infected cells and tissues were dying because they were starved and poisoned… The infection theories were only established as a global dogma through the concrete policies and eugenics of the Third Reich. Before 1933, scientists dared to contradict this theory; after 1933, these critical scientists were silenced.’
Julian Davies challenges the literature in microbiology that arguably reflects both capitalist exploitation and scorched-earth military doctrine (arguably applied in chemotherapy):
It is often assumed that microbes in their natural environments are in a constant war of attrition for space and nutrients. Many publications speak of battlefields and the production of chemical weapons to permit one or more organisms to successfully exploit a particular environment... In the human gut, microbes number many trillions with upwards of 1,000 phylotypes; are they all engaged in lethal conflict with each other? Despite the fact that small molecules with antibiotic activity can be isolated from gut bacteria grown in the laboratory, there is no in situ evidence that they actually play such roles in the intestinal tract; it is equally likely that these molecules are mediating interactions with mucosal cells lining the gut. Our ignorance of the workings of microbial communities in these environments is profound and remains tainted by our anthropomorphism.
(The right balance or diversity of gut microbes can help to repair depleted mucosal layers and excess gut permeability, which can play a large role in obesity and diabetes.)
Pirofski & Casadevall argue that, “... attempts to classify microbes as pathogens, non-pathogens, opportunists, commensals etc. are misguided because they attribute a property to the microbe that is instead a function of the host, the microbe, [the natural environment] and their interaction.”
Germ theory has seemingly long been used to justify the overprescription of medication with significant side effects, including antibiotics, which doctors often ineffectively prescribe for viral conditions, thereby encouraging resistance to antibiotics and decimating the microbiome (including in expectant mothers and their unborn children). The first five years of a child’s life is the most important for their microbiome, with lasting effects in terms of preventing or causing autoimmune disease, for example.
A study in JAMA Pediatrics found antibiotic use in breastfeeding babies can reduce some of the long-term health benefits of nursing. Another at the University of Helsinki found that kids who receive antibiotics (especially macrolides like azithromycin, which are commonly used to treat upper respiratory tract infections) before age two are at an increased risk of asthma and obesity. That study also found that it can take children’s guts at least a year to recover from one course of antibiotics. Emma Allen-Vercoe, an associate professor of molecular and cellular biology at the University of Guelph, believes antibiotics may even be at the root of the increased incidence of autism spectrum disorder in the last decade. (Today, one in 68 children is diagnosed with ASD, compared to one in 150 in 2000.)
Joan Robinson, chair of the Canadian Paediatric Society’s Infectious Diseases and Immunization Committee in Edmonton, says for all the ear infections that get treated, only between 10 to 20% of patients need antibiotics.
(See “The scary truth about antibiotic overuse in kids”; “Casting the dye: the first antibiotics,” mcdreeamiemusings.com, 15 January 2020; “Infection-quashing antibiotics damage the body’s cells, too,” Boston.com, 3 July 2013; Antibiotics, cancer risk and oncologic treatment efficacy: a practical review of the literature,” ecancer.org.)
As Dr Michael Mosley has written,
Like animals in the wild [wiped out to expand commodity production], many species in our gut are in decline and have been for decades. It’s partly because we eat such a narrow range of foods, which means our gut bacteria also have to live on a restricted diet. Of the 250,000 known edible plant species, we use less than 200. 75% of the world’s food comes from just 12 plants and five animal species [due to monopoly capitalist monoculture]. Another reason for the decline is the widespread use of antibiotics, not only to treat us but to help the animals we eat put on weight [to maximise profits]. Finally, there are emulsifiers... chemicals that are added to processed foods to extend their shelf life. They’ve been shown to reduce microbial richness, and may directly contribute to colitis and diabetes. (The Clever Guts Diet, Short Books, London, 2017, p. 66.)
A paucity of anaerobic bacteria and/or biodiversity in the gut – dysbiosis – amounts to an imbalance that allows one set of bacteria to become dominant, causing, for example, certain unhealthy cravings by reducing hormones that quell hunger, contributing to the so-called 'obesity crisis' (which is also associated with air and plastic pollution, along with the processed diets that capitalists have hardwired into masses of people; although the definition of obesity has arguably been overly expanded to justify certain medications).
Hunter-gatherer tribes, among whom autoimmune disease is extremely rare, have been found to have a much higher biodiversity of species in their gut.
In the 1930s and 40s, a dentist called Weston Price travelled to study the health of so-called ‘primitive peoples’ living on ancestral diets. In his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, he discusses 14 groups in regions as diverse as the Swiss Alps, the Outer Hebrides, Alaska, South America, Australia and the South Seas, where he says he found people only exhibiting wide facial structures, naturally straight teeth and freedom from tooth decay and disease. After the “displacing foods of modern commerce” made inroads into a population, they became vulnerable to both chronic and infectious disease, especially tuberculosis. (Cowan and Morell, loc 753-760.)
Mosley recommends a Mediterranean style diet: grass-fed meat (i.e. not raised on antibiotics); eating a wide and colourful variety of plants and veg and fermented produce. He also recommends keeping windows open as much as possible, spending more time in outdoorsy settings, and getting green-fingered (since we spend 90% of our time inside).* (Cowan and Morell also recommend fermented produce, along with whole organic grains and meat, natural sweeteners in moderation; and say that bone broth and animal fats are good for cartilage and cell health. Loc 2705-2811.)
With all this in mind, it does not seem illogical that mask mandates, isolation and social distancing could well accelerate the decline of biodiversity in the gut and therefore the weakening of our immune systems. The UK government has rejected advice from scientists who say perspex screens being used to separate people in offices etc. are doing more harm than good since such screens disrupt airflow and ventilation, allowing any virus to flourish.
In opposition to germ theory, terrain or cellular theory focuses on the terrain of human cells and/or the microbiome. It does not necessarily argue that germs do not exist but that ‘the terrain’ of the human cell must first be deficient or toxic/sick in order for infection to manifest. This theory is arguably more complete and two-sided/holistic than germ theory from a Marxist perspective, which seeks to reveal the essence of processes and interactions by utilising a dialectical (bidirectional) science, seeing the unity and fluidity between opposites, going back and forth between the abstract and the concrete, the particular and the general, in a method of induction, deduction and successive approximation, whereby elements are excluded and reintroduced to see what changes occur.
(The rejection of dualism and embrace of ‘interconnected’ oneness of terrain theorists like Cowan, however, often come off as more Spinozian – i.e. theorised in ‘the oneness of God and his creation’ – than Marxist; and therefore potentially leans too much the other way into abstraction, or the metaphysical. Their arguments should certainly be taken seriously; but they perhaps look too much to the past for answers instead of the opportunity to combine the best practices of the past with the immense potential of the future. For example (although this is not completely clear) Cowan seems to promote pre-industrial slow fermentation in food production as a solution to toxic processed food production when we are on the cusp of speedy, cheap, abundant, clean and nutritious food production through precision fermentation – showing that history is coming full circle, just in an updated, more productive form – and cellular agriculture (effectively forms of automation). His rejection of wireless internet due to what he says will be higher levels of electromagnetic radiation from 5G could possibly be addressed by building electrical infrastructure with mycelium, hemp and other fibrous plants. Hempcrete is associated with effectively absorbing electromagnetic radiation. We have to acknowledge on some level that it has been historically necessary to go through the pain of capitalist development to get to the promised land of global communism. In the future, better methods and corrections need to be embraced to reduce our dependence on toxins significantly; but we will need to build up capacity through central planning before the new technologies filter out and become owned by all at the communal and individual level. Nor can we over-obsess about environmental toxins; we cannot eliminate them entirely, at least not for some time yet; and bodies can deal well with a certain amount of toxins. What we need to do is stop their overaccumulation in our bodies. Just as we should not mandates vaccines, we would not mandate nutritious food but heavily promote and subsidise it, since people can react badly to being told what to do but are likely to make better choices if they have access to better information that promotes their self-interest and are incentivised to choose to do so (not that Cowan promotes mandating healthy food).)
In The Truth about Contagion (2021), Cowan and Sally Morell write (loc 280-328):
Imagine a case in which some people who drink milk from a certain cow develop profuse, bloody diarrhoea… You examine the milk under the newly invented microscope apparatus and find a bacterium… You then examine the milk consumed by people who didn’t develop diarrhoea and find that none of the milk samples contain this particular bacterium. You name the bacteria ‘listeria’ after a fellow scientist. Then… you purify the bacteria, so that nothing else from the milk remains. You give this purified bacterial culture to a person who then develops bloody diarrhoea; the clincher is that you then find this same bacteria in their stool. Case closed; infection proven.
Pasteur did this type of experiment for 40 years. He found sick people, claimed to have isolated a bacterium, gave the pure culture to animals – often by injecting it into their brains – and made them sick… His work led to pasteurisation, a technique responsible for destroying the integrity and health-giving properties of milk….
… [W]hat if the milk came from cows that were dipped in flea poison; maybe they were fed distillery waste and cardboard – a common practice in Pasteur’s day…
We now know with certainty that any toxins fed to a nursing mammal show up in her milk. What if these listeria bacteria are not the cause of anything but simply nature’s way of digesting and disposing of toxins? If you put stinky stuff in your compost pile, the bacteria feed on the stuff and proliferate. No rational person would claim the compost pile has an infection. In fact, what the bacteria do in the compost pile is more of a bioremediation.
If you take aerobic bacteria – bacteria that need oxygen – and put them in an anaerobic environment in which their oxygen supply is reduced, they often produce poisons [partly explaining, perhaps, the danger of unhygienic masks]. Clostridia is a family of bacteria that under healthy circumstances ferments carbohydrates in the lower bowel to produce important compounds like butyric acid; but under anaerobic conditions, this bacteria produces poisons that can cause botulism. It’s the poisons, not the bacteria itself, that make people sick; or more fundamentally, it’s the environment or terrain that cause the bacteria to create the poisons.
... Pasteur committed massive fraud in all his studies. For instance, when he said that he injected virulent anthrax spores into vaccinated and unvaccinated animals, he could trumpet the fact that the unvaccinated animals died, but that was because he also injected the unvaccinated animals with poisons….
Cowan and Morell argue that the pastuerisation of milk (heated to kill bacteria), which they say depletes milk'shealth-giving qualities, was done not to protect the public from harmful bacteria but to extend shelf life. That would make sense in terms of reducing storage costs; and the cost of most food coming from transport costs, passed on to the consumer – capital that employs transport workers to transport commodities is part of the production and exploitation process, so capital has relatively little interest in the local consumption of food. (Before the introduction of pasteurisation in the mid-1900s, all cheese was made with raw milk - chiming with the timing of the rise of 'modern disease'.)
In opposition to Pasteur, Antoine Béchamp's ‘pleomorphic theory of disease’ stated that bacteria change form (i.e., demonstrate pleomorphism; something that again chimes with dialectics) in response to disease. In other words, they arise from tissues during disease states. Béchamp further postulated that bacteria arose from structures that he called microzymas, which to him referred to a class of enzymes. Béchamp postulated that microzymas are normally present in tissues and that their effects depended upon the cellular terrain.
In A New Outlook on Health (Foreign Languages Press, Paris, 2020 [1975], pp. 52-51) by the Marxist James Boggs, Boggs described the introduction of germ theory as “disastrous”, saying that it
did not view the patient as a human being developing and living in a particular environment. Instead it focused on the disease at an isolated location in the body which could be treated in and of itself. Based on this philosophy, the social approach to illness, which had sparked the massive public health programs of the late 19th century, was excluded from the medical curriculum. Excluded also were all other systems of therapy based on fundamentally different concepts of the human body and the human being, especially those based upon helping the body to keep healthy and to heal itself.
… All theories of the causes of illness which place responsibility upon society to tackle the social conditions, or on the patient for greater self-reliance, or on the natural forces within the body to restore equilibrium, were discarded. Only the germ theory of illness was accredited, because it is the theory best suited to a medical system based on the bourgeois outlook that all knowledge and power should be concentrated in an elite, while the masses of people are regarded as less than human. They are only bodies, no different from animal bodies, which can be examined under a microscope in a laboratory, incapable of developing knowledge about or caring for themselves.
… Not only was a limit placed on those who could become doctors, but those doctors produced by the new, narrow approach to the human body and to human beings began to think of their patients only in the narrowest terms, isolated from their environment and from each other. Their illnesses were now viewed chiefly as invasions of the body by demon-like germs which must be driven out by the magic bullet of drugs…
…Not only was admission to medical schools limited to those who came from affluent families, but even those few of humble social origin… become indoctrinated with an elitist outlook to their patients as ‘cases’, i.e., as dehumanised objects of scientific analysis.
… As medical practice became a passport to privilege, doctors became more and more distant from people as human beings and more and more divorced from social responsibility to any community... The more the patient was viewed only in terms of separate parts—a diseased heart or lung or liver—the more doctors began to think in terms of specialising in the knowledge and treatment of specialised parts of the body.”
The recent leap in human genome sequencing and the recent discoveries regarding the microbiome and the endocannabinoid system at least seem to indicate that health care is now becoming more holistic again, chiming with our contention that capitalism really is ending.
The human genome project has undermined the gene-centric scientific view, showing that genes can change and heal and be activated and deactivated. As Dr Jeffrey Rediger says, “We thought that most diseases were genetic, but now we know that genes can change and heal. Changing your relationship with stress changes genes, turns genes on and off. We now know that 90% of illnesses are lifestyle-related.”
The real issue in most ‘modern diseases’ that didn’t exist 50+ years ago is inflammation caused by an overactive immune system that isn’t being regulated by a healthy microbiome and, in turn, proper nutrion from whole foods, which have been largely replaced by processed food/refined sugar/corn syrup.
What we're starting to realise is... doctors are trained to specialise in body parts... [but] it turns out that a patient doesn't have a blood pressure problem, or a heart problem, or a cancer problem or an immune problem, or a diabetes problem; more fundamentally a person has a chronic inflammation problem. If you want to heal the inflammation in your body then you need to heal your immune system…. [Our new understanding of the microbiome] is a massive paradigm shift. It takes 30 years for research in the lab to reach the clinic. There are thousands of studies on the microbiome now that are revolutionising the way we think about health and that's the future; but that's not what doctors are training their patients to do most of the time. So we really need to help people become aware of the microbiome.
Biomechanist Katy Bowman, author of Move Your DNA (2014), argues that sedentary lifestyles also contribute significantly to many modern diseases and that we need to uptake more and more intelligent ‘nutritious movement’ as the remedy – another approach attacking the root cause instead of mere symptom-treating medicalisation.
Some recent studies that potentially back up terrain theory – other than those already mentioned regarding pollution etc – include one on necrotising enterocolitis (NEC) that usually occurs in premature babies. Because it occurs a week or more after birth, the suspicion has been that NEC is caused by an infectious pathogen. Recent surveys from babies have shown that NEC is very likely caused by an imbalance of the immature microbiota. A baby’s microbiota can be severely depleted by C-section births and antibiotics, with long-lasting effects. (Finlay, B. and Arrieta, M., Let Them Eat Dirt: How Microbes Can Make Your Child Healthier, loc 920.) Scientists have also been surprised to learn that Lactobacilli probiotics are better than antibiotics at treating mastitis (loc. 1066) – an inflammation of breast tissue that sometimes involves an infection which most commonly affects women who are breast-feeding. The infection is thought to be caused by pathogenic bacteria that the probiotics ‘fight off’, but terrain theorists would likely argue that this is a case of rebalancing against dysbiosis and/or that the infection had been caused by latching, antibiotics, etc.
Kaur Parve has pointed out that spikes in illness have coincided with drops in temperature – which slows down enzymatic binding, chemical reactions, etc. – partly because central heating systems (which are designed to “supply fresh air at low energy cost”) exacerbate poor humidity levels and dehydrate the mucosal microbiome that has the job of “turning inhaled viral particles harmless”. This theoryy potentiall adds another dimension to the significance of the recent criminalisation of the Insulate Britain movement. At the same time, vitamin D deficiencies are bound to become more likely in the winter (and there is also a lack of vitamin D in industrial meat that is not raised in sunlight).
Cowan’s argument that modern science is actually starting to move away from germ theory potentially tallies with other developments in science in late-monopoly capitalism that are beginning to look more and more ‘pre-socialist’ (i.e. dialectical, holistic, systematic). As Hickel writes:
Biologists are discovering that humans are not standalone individuals, but composed largely of microorganisms on which we depend for functions as basic as digestion. Psychiatrists are learning that spending time around plants is essential to people’s mental health, and indeed that certain plants can heal humans from complex psychological traumas. Ecologists are learning that trees, far from being inanimate, communicate with each other and even share food and medicine through invisible mycelial networks in the soil…. And Earth-systems scientists are finding evidence that the planet itself operates like a living superorganism. (Op cit, p. 33.)
Quantum field theory has confirmed Marx’s view that matter is irreducible, not atomistic; meaning that the universe is one and that things that seem discrete are only relatively discrete. (See Reese, Sublation Media, Jan 23, 2023.)
Hickel adds:
Humans have two sets of DNA — one contained in the nucleus of each of our cells, and the other in the mitochondria, an ‘organelle’ that lives within the cell itself. Biologists believe that this second set, the mitochondrial DNA, is derived from bacteria that were engulfed by our cells at some point in the evolutionary past. Today these little organelles play an absolutely essential role in human life: they convert food into energy that our bodies can use. This is mind-bending: that our most basic metabolic functions, and even the genetic codes that constitute the very core of who we are, depend on other beings.
The implications … are profound. A team of scientists associated with the Interdisciplinary Microbiome Project at Oxford University have suggested that discoveries related to bacteria may revolutionise not only our science but our ontology too: ‘Our ability to map previously invisible forms of microbial life in and around us is forcing us to rethink the biological constitution of the world, and the position of humans vis-a-vis other forms of life.’
The latest scientific advances reflect the fact that the economic-technical base of society is becoming socialist – solely use rather than dually use and exchange value based. The same thing is happening technologically. Computing operations are binary, for example, but emerging and much more advanced quantum computing is non-binary, existing on a spectrum.
With all this in mind, it seems plausible that the events of 2019-2021 have been erected as an attempt by the ruling class to roll back the progress that has been made both socially and in scientific thought. That would make sense from the perspective of history: every ruling class has ended up rejecting all manner of progressive trends, scientific or otherwise, when it finally threatens its power. It is forced to fight back to cling to power, eventually ‘bites off more than it can chew’ — since the enemy it itself has spawned has grown more abundant — and is then, through violent struggle, finally overthrown.
Today, the relatively dwindling capitalist class is outnumbered by billions of the proletarians it exploits. Indeed, germaphobia seems analogous to anti-communism: as with how bacteria becomes increasingly resistant to antibiotics (which mean anti-life in Latin); the more the ruling class is compelled to attack the masses, the more the masses tend to turn into communists – the nightmare that keeps capitalists awake at night.
NB: Many Marxists mistakenly dismiss scientific findings from scientists who represent 'small/medium' capital on the basis that they must be inherently motivated by right-wing ideology. Even if they are, we should not forget that ‘small/medium’ capital tends to be more flexible than monopoly capital: i.e. it is less capital-intensive, with generally higher rates of profit, and therefore enjoys more scope for experimentation and innovation. The larger capital gets, the more expensive it becomes to sustain. The innovations monopoly capital seems to make usually come from the state; or from small/medium capital (often spin offs from state R&D) that monopoly capital later absorbs.
We should certainly be wary of small/medium capitalists as their ideology is based both on resisting monopoly capital and exploiting labour. This can manifest in opposing welfare and public spending that monopoly capital needs to keep workers in working order. Opposition to germ theory and vaccines could arguably be motivated by opposition to paying taxes that could fund such spending, i.e. taxes that they increasingly cannot afford; plus the need to promote their own products and discredit those of competitors.
Interestingly from the dialectical perspective, both germ and terrain theorists generally seem to have made some concessions to each other over the centuries. David Gorski, a surgical oncologist and defender of germ theory, says,
there is a grain of truth in Béchamp’s ideas. Specifically, it is true that the condition of the 'terrain' (the body) does matter when it comes to infectious disease. Debilitated people do not resist the invasion of microorganisms as well as strong, healthy people. Of course, another thing to remember is that the 'terrain' can facilitate the harmful effect of microorganisms in unexpected ways. For example, certain strains of the flu (as in 1918 and H1N1) are more virulent in the young because the young mount a more vigorous immune response... [I]t is true that there are cases in which the native bacterial flora living on our body 'crowd out' pathogenic bacteria and the elimination of that bacterial flora with antibiotics can leave a person susceptible to pathogenic bacteria.
He also says germ theory denialists are "softer" these days as they tend to accept "that microbes 'can' cause disease, but they argue that microbes can only cause disease if the host is already diseased or debilitated".
`writing in 2019, Jason Pontin, an investor in microbiotic companies in therapeutics and agriculture, calls Pasteur a "bitter crank" who was
comprehensively wrong, but not absolutely so. His idea that microorganisms are necessary to good health, and that beneficial microbiota are pathogenic under the wrong conditions or in the wrong place, is now the standard view….
What changed? According to Justin Sonnenburg, a professor of microbiology at Stanford University and the author of The Good Gut, our new emphasis on the functional importance of the microbiome is the product of three events. First, beginning in 2001, scientists observed that mice with different microbiota had different biologies, suggesting that resident bacteria could modulate the host’s gene expression. Second, in 2006, researchers demonstrated that gut microbes could cause changes in a host’s phenotype, such as obesity. Finally, gene sequencing tech … free[d] scientists from the limitations of culturing bacteria and reveal[ed] how microbial genes expressed themselves in their hosts. ‘People realized that [the microbiome] wasn’t some quirky, beautiful thing in biology, but was functionally crucial,’ says Sonnenburg.
Microbiome science is a revolution in how humans understand and control biology. Pasteur’s theory bequeathed a metaphor that germs were constantly besieging animals (battles in wars that were ultimately lost when bacteria overtook a corpse and it decayed). The metaphor was not the microbiologist’s fault; Pasteur knew we wouldn’t be healthy without microorganisms. But as Ed Young explains in his 2016 book, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes within Us and a Grander View of Life, ‘Microbes… were cast as avatars of death. Bacteriology became an applied science, which studied microbes in order to repel or destroy them.’
... We can only understand animals and plants by comprehending how they interact with the communities of microorganisms that live within and on their surfaces. But this insight was originally Béchamp’s; he understood that what we now call ‘dysbiosis’ was just an imbalance or maladaption of the microbiome. He was the first to propose that some cancers were caused by bacteria. He would have been unsurprised to learn that a bacterial overgrowth in the small intestine leads to poor absorption of nutrients, which in turn cause unpleasant or serious symptoms’ or that disturbances of the vagina’s microbiome can increase the risk of infection by HIV.
In microbiology, the idea of terrain is today quietly resurgent. Janelle Ayres, a professor of immunobiology at the Salk Institute, is seeking to replace antimicrobials, such as vaccines, antivirals, and antibiotics… for ‘damage-control therapeutics’.
These kinds of scientific resurrections occur from time to time in a complication of Thomas Kuhn’s episodic model of scientific progress (which holds that science advances as “paradigms” are overthrown when they no longer explain the world). The 18th century French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck believed that characteristics acquired in life could be inherited by succeeding generations…. The discovery of the structure of DNA buried Lamarkism, except in the Soviet Union, where it was Stalinist dogma. But over the last 15 years, a new field called epigenetics has demonstrated that methylation, a chemical modification of DNA induced by the environment, can alter our genes: a remarkable echo of Lamark’s original thesis."
Some other parts of ‘Stalinist dogma’ in the scientific field ('Lysenkoism', which in parts was flawed and dogmatic) turned out to be more or less correct.
The Soviet Union was miles ahead of the West in terms of using viruses called bacteriophages in the late 20th century as a better alternative to antibiotics.
A new potential treatment on the horizon is targeted probiotics. Currently, probiotics consist of a few select microbes that aren’t chosen for what they do, but because they can be grown easily out of things like milk (Lactobacillus, for example). They typically contain only a single strain, so their impact is minimal. They’re also not designed to stick around in your gut (which is why you have to take billions every day to get any real benefit). But microbiologist Brett Finlay says work is underway to create better probiotics that contain more strains that the body produces naturally, increasing the chance the microbes will colonize the gut and streamlined to target different health issues.
It is also thought that bacteria in the human body may be effective when it comes to fighting specific infections. A 2016 study published in Nature found microbes that live in people’s noses can create an antibiotic that it said not only kills the bacteria that cause meningitis and bronchitis, but also defeats the hospital superbug MRSA.
NB2: In The Invisible Rainbow, Arthur Firstenberg claims that flu-style outbreaks in 1889, 1918, 1957 and 1968 coincided with major upgrades in the “electrical envelope of the earth”, generating unhealthy levels of electrical current in people. This link is again being made with the roll out of 5G. (See Cowan and Morell loc 419-479 and I Cifre, "Study of the correlation between the causes of coronavirus and the presence of 5G networks"). Cowan and Morell point out that things that counter this build up of electricity in people such as hugging and handshakes are now frowned upon or even illegal. Furthermore (loc 396-411),
Western medicine pays scant attention to the electrical nature of living things – plants, animals, and humans – but mountains of evidence indicate that faint currents govern everything... from the coagulation of the blood to energy production in the mitochondria, even to small amounts of copper in the bones which create currents for the maintenance of bone structure – all can be influenced by the presence of electricity in the atmosphere, especially 'dirty' electricity, characterised by many overlapping frequencies and jagged changes in frequency and voltage. Today we know that each cell in the body has its own electrical grid, maintained by structured water inside the cell membrane... Minute electrical currents that course through leaf veins or through the glial cells in our nervous system guide the growth and metabolism of all life forms... Traditional Chinese medicine has long recognised the nature of the human body and has developed a system to defuse the accumulation of electricity that leads to disease. It's called acupuncture.
(Similarly, "Only western medicine invokes the concept of contagion... Neither traditional Chinese medicine nor Ayurveda (...in the Indian subcontinent) entertains the concept of contagion. These ancient healing systems look at imbalances, diet and toxins as the causes of disease." (Loc 1303.) Ancient philosophies like Taoism, which rejects western binary thought, have similarities with Marxist dialectics because they stem from views developed before the advent of private property.)
As 'cranky' as this may sound, electromagnetic fields (EMFs) produced by mobile phones are classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as "possibly" carcinogenic to humans. The EUROPAEM EMF Guideline published in the [US] National Library of Medicine in 2016 says, “It seems necessary now to take ‘new exposures’ like electromagnetic fields (EMF) into account” in regards to the rise of chronic diseases and illnesses:
New wireless technologies and applications have been introduced without any certainty about their health effects… there is strong evidence that long-term exposure to certain EMFs is a risk factor for diseases such as certain cancers, Alzheimer's disease, and male infertility… the emerging electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS) is more and more recognised by health authorities.... Common EHS symptoms include … flu-like symptoms.
A Soviet study in 1978 (NP Zalyubovskaya and RI Kiselev) concluded that workers servicing ultra-high-frequency generators suffered from fatigue, drowsiness, headaches, loss of memory, haemoglobin depletion and hyper-coagulation in the blood.
Lloyds of London, however, and other insurers will not cover injury from long-term non-ionising radiation exposure.
Electrification has certainly tended to lift living standards and life expectancy more than vice-versa. What is needed is to limit the negatives and maximise the positives. Cowan and Morell say that "Paraguay is doing what all countries should do – building a national fibre optics network without resorting to 5G". One research review of almost 200 studies claims to have found that whereas some EMF frequency band patterns may be health-promoting, "the chosen 5G frequencies belong for the great part to the detrimental zones" (loc 495-503).
Cowan and Morell claim that part of the reason most people have adjusted to worldwide radio waves and ubiquitous wi-fi is because the exosomes they say are mistaken for viruses "provide real-time and rapid genetic adaptation to environmental changes".
For them, the unprecedented upgrade that is 5G – because its millimetre waves at 60 GHz, they say, detach iron molecules from haemoglobin molecules, making the former "reactive and toxic" and meaning the latter cannot bind with oxygen or carry it to the cells – explains why covid-19 is much worse than flu and pneumonia when it comes to blood clots in the lungs. According to Professor Mauro Giacca of King's College London, this "unique" pathology shows "not a disease caused by a virus which kills cells". (Loc. 2098-2108.)
*US Americans spend around 87% of their time indoors and an additional 6% in an enclosed vehicle (on average) – that was in the early 1990s. Such a fact begins to make capitalist society look like a kind of captivity; which, of course, it is. This has special relevance to the question of human health if there is any truth to the theory of ‘human photosynthesis’, which may make some sense given that we now know plants, mushrooms and microbes to be genetic relatives to humanity. Bioengineering Professor Gerald Pollack, of the University of Washington in Seattle, has apparently demonstrated that like plants,
we too split water into positive and negative ions using light to make energy… Water behaves as a light-driven battery and, remarkably, our cells behave in the same way. We've often thought the primary benefits of sunlight were down to producing vitamin D… [but] water [transduces] the light … converting it to mechanical energy which keeps the water flowing into cells and through narrow capillaries without a massive increase in blood pressure.
The implications for human health could be stark:
Dr. Heinrich Kremer sees the origin of cancer differently than the mainstream. He terms his new theory Cell Dyssmybiosis. According to Kremer cancerous cells do not originate from DNA mutations, but from a functional process that occurs in the mitochondrion… Sunlight dominates the chemistry of the blood. People who do not get sunlight do not have the same richness and redness of blood.… We are water and it plays the top role in living processes. This is not quite understood by physicians and the public, which unfortunately are led into dehydrating conditions through the use of pharmaceutical drugs and inappropriate food and drinking patterns. Coke and Pepsi have done more to dehydrate the public than anyone can imagine.
Shift work, of course, is often linked with cancer. (The other ‘alternative theory’ making ground in regards to cancer and neurological diseases is that they are often caused by carb-heavy diets – particularly of simple/refined carbs – meaning carb-free diets can starve the disease.)
Cowan and Morell say that water "that supports life inside our cells and tissues" takes the form of a fourth state other than as a solid, liquid or gas; a ‘structured’ or ordered – as opposed to disordered ‘bulk’ water – crystalline gel phase, what Pollack calls EZ (exclusion zone) water that structures itself against hydrophilic surfaces. EZ water “has a negative charge against bulk water’s positive charge, charged by heat and light. This is why we feel better when we are in the sunlight… Heat and light help your intercellular and extracellular water form larger EZs”. Toxins and electromagnetic fields “damage the gel in our cells… a huge factor in disease”. One of the “purest examples of a water gel” is the lens in the eye, which when disturbed "becomes a cataract until it is detoxified". Fevers partially liquify gels to flush out toxins in mucus. “Fever and inflammation is simply a detoxification process, not a disease that needs to be suppressed.”
Cowan claims that, “Preliminary findings indicate that when structured water is exposed to a wi-fi signal from a nearby router, the size of the EZ diminishes by about 15%.”
“Since humans are made up of 70% water by volume and over 99.9% of the molecules in a human being are water molecules, we need to pay attention to the quality of water we drink.” The water consumed by “healthy nonindustrialised peoples” was “free of toxins”, in contrast to the “stagnant” and chemically treated, microplastic-ridden municipal water most people drink today, which also contains “residues of pharmaceutical drugs”. It was also “abundant in vital minerals such as magnesium, calcium, zinc and iodine” and “structured in EZs” by natural vortex patterns, making it “more oxygenated”.
Increasing the oxygen levels in our tissues “improves their function and energy-generating capacity”. Oxygen deficiency has been “widely associated with the development of cancer through the well-known Warburg effect; i.e. the switch from aerobic to anaerobic fermentation processes in our cells”. Hypoxia, the condition of low oxygen in our tissues, “is a typical symptom of covid-19”.
Conventional researchers “often claim that we get oxygen into our bodies only through our lungs”, but studies have argued that we also absorb it from oxygenated water (Reading & Yeomans, 2012). Research has also apparently shown that watering plants with highly oxygenated water stimulates their growth and improves their resistance to disease (Kyoren et al, 2010).
For many scientists, this makes no sense because we are told that plants don’t use oxygen but rather breathe out oxygen…. The oxygen doesn’t affect the plant directly but is used by microbes in the soil… stimulating the growth of healthy aerobic bacteria in the soil. Plants don’t primarily eat or absorb nutrients from the soil; rather, they eat the ‘waste products’ of the bacteria in the soil. So it is with us. We don’t actually absorb the nutrients directly from our food, at least not solely. Rather, we eat food and drink water to nourish the billions of microbes in our gut. If we increase the oxygen level in the water we drink, we grow healthy aerobic bacteria in our GI [gastrointestinal] tract. With plenty of oxygen, these healthy microbes will not switch to an anaerobic metabolism that produces toxins.
Recent research indicates that drinking well oxygenated water improves wound healing (Ladizinsky and Roe, 2010); enhances lactic acid clearance in athletes (Fleming et al, 2017); improves immune status (Grubera et al, 2005); and protects against muscle fatigue (Ivannikov et al). “Oxygenated water is a much better choice for athletes than steroids!”
(Loc 1502-1623.)
[14] Venessa Beeley writes for UK Column (22 April):
Neil Ferguson is acting director of the Vaccine Impact Modelling Consortium (VIMC), which is based at Imperial College in London… Ferguson was instrumental in the modelling of the British government’s response to Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) in 2001, which Professor Michael Thrusfield of Edinburgh University, an expert in animal diseases, describes as “not fit for purpose” (2006) and “seriously flawed” (2012)… An estimated 12 million animals were slaughtered as a result of Ferguson’s 2001 initiative. The farming community was devastated by suicides and bankruptcies that irretrievably altered the landscape of British agriculture — forcing healthy smallholdings into agri-corporate mergers... 88% of all animals slaughtered had not contracted FMD [source: Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs]. Great Orton airfield was used to slaughter sheep under the “voluntary” cull: that was anything but voluntary, and farmers not participating were ruthlessly threatened. There was only one mild case of FMD recorded from the thousands of blood tests done at Great Orton [DEFRA].
... In 2002, Ferguson predicted that up to 50,000 people would die from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob/‘mad cow' disease, increasing to 150,000 if the epidemic expanded to include sheep. Since 1990, 178 people in the UK have died from vCJD....
In 2005, Ferguson claimed that up to 200 million people would be killed by bird-flu or H5N1. By early 2006, the WHO had only linked 78 deaths to the virus, out of 147 reported cases.
In 2009, Ferguson ... that swine flu or H1N1 would probably kill 65,000 people in the UK. In the end, swine flu claimed the lives of 457 people in the UK.
Now, in 2020, Ferguson and Imperial College have released a report which claims that half a million Britons and 2.2 million Americans may be killed by covid-19. The report has still not been peer-reviewed....
Perhaps similarly, Ronald Coase, one of the most influential members of the conservative Chicago School of Economics, has lamented that modern neoclassical economists do not attempt to study real-world wealth creation, as early economists such as Adam Smith sought to do, but focus on building mathematical models of the world and probing datasets to find correlations consistent with the models.
[15] The difficulty in trusting for-profit/private health care is compounded by bogus talk of an ‘overpopulation’ crisis. The environmental/climate crisis is driven not by overpopulation or overconsumption but by capitalism’s dependence on fossil fuels, metal mining production, and deforestation, since its dependence on labour exploitation makes it increasingly dependent on the labour-intensity of extractive/subtractive production.
Most of the things we need and want can be produced additively, such as with microbial fuel cells, mycelium and hemp (which sequesters pollution from the air and remediates the soil), but these do not involve much exploitation of labour, so only attract very limited levels of investment.
Even the Wall Street Journal has reported that “Billionaires try to shrink the world’s population”. 20th century eugenics was at least partly inspired by ruling class fears about the ‘surplus population’ ‘justifying’ WWI/II, sterilisation programmes and The Holocaust.
Unemployment is a feature of capitalism because capital becomes surplus (unprofitable to reinvest; hence trillions of dollars stashed in speculation and tax havens), thereby producing ‘surplus labour’ — workers whom capital can no longer afford to employ. Capital in crisis generates and favours a loose (surplus) labour market, since the threat of unemployment, with an abundance of potential replacements, can be used to compel employed workers to accept lower wages and poorer conditions. The greater the surplus labour, however, the greater the expenditure on 'benefits'/social security (subsidising capital's expenditure on wages) that eat into tax bases and therefore profit margins.
Because socialism produces for utility instead of profit, it can sustain full, formal employment (while reducing working hours for all).
One study estimates that Earth could cope with at least 92 billion humans. We are actually facing an underpopulation crisis, since the replacement rate is falling – there are not enough young people to support the aging population. (The populations that have shrunk the most have been in the ex-socialist bloc where supposed ‘refamilisation’ i.e. sexist, anti-communal policies were introduced.)
Further reading:
Covid-19: Fools rush in where angels fear to tread Institutional corruption of pharmaceuticals and the myth of safe and effective drugs