I’ve long had a penchant for silly conspiracy theories, sometimes the sillier the better. Unfortunately, since the COVID-19 pandemic spread beyond China to the rest of the world earlier this year, I’ve discovered that even the silliest-sounding conspiracy theories are not necessarily that silly given their potential effects in promoting the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19. Sure, I might laugh at COVID-19 deniers who blame 5G and glyphosate for the pandemic or claim that the flu vaccine increases your risk of severe COVID-19, but these conspiracy theories spread as widely as the ones claiming that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered by scientists in a Wuhan lab and that shadowy global forces released SARS-CoV-2 to cause a “plandemic” and get less attention from the more mainstream news and science communication sources that have widely debunked conspiracy theories such as the ones promoted by Judy Mikovits and Mikki Willis. That’s when Orac steps in, hopefully before these more obscure COVID-19 conspiracy theories bubble up from the antivaccine and COVID-19 denier underground to the more “mainstream” crank social media sources. So here I go. Have you heard the one from James Grundvig and Sherri Tenpenny “corona brucellosis“?
This latest conspiracy theory comes from James Grundvig of antivax doctor Sherri Tenpenny’s blog Vaxxter. We’ve met Sherri Tenpenny many times before and James Grundvig a few times before. Our most recent encounter was pre-pandemic (albeit not that long before the pandemic started dominating the news), when Grundvig and Tenpenny were desperately trying to deny that measles kills. This time around, they’re peddling a new one on me, namely the claim that food poisoning due to brucellosis will be passed off as COVID-19? No, this isn’t a joke. Yes, Grundvig and Tenpenny appear to be serious. I wish I could make stuff like this up, but I can’t (and if I could I hope that I wouldn’t).
How would this work, you might ask? After all, brucellosis is a form of food poisoning, a zoonosis (an infectious disease that jumps from an animal to humans) usually resulting from the ingestion of unpasteurized milk or undercooked meat or inhalation of aerosols coming from animals infected with a genus bacterial species known as Brucella. (Infection due to aerosols or bacteria entering the body through skin wounds is more of a problem with workers in slaughterhouses, meat packing plant workers, and veterinarians.) Brucellosis has other names, including undulant fever, Malta fever, and Mediterranean fever. Brucella infection in humans resulting in brucellosis is primarily due to four species: Brucella abortus, Brucella canis, Brucella melitensis, and Brucella suis. Animals most commonly infected with brucella include sheep, cattle, goats, pigs, and dogs, among others. Human-to-human transmission is possible, but quite rare. According to the CDC, initial symptoms of brucellosis include:
- fever
- sweats
- malaise
- anorexia
- headache
- pain in muscles, joint, and/or back
- fatigue
Other symptoms can last longer and persist for a long time:
- recurrent fevers
- arthritis
- swelling of the testicle and scrotum area
- swelling of the heart (endocarditis)
- neurologic symptoms (in up to 5% of all cases)
- chronic fatigue
- depression
- swelling of the liver and/or spleen
Brucellosis is generally diagnosed either by finding Brucella in samples of blood, bone marrow or other bodily fluids or by serology, finding antibodies against Brucella in the blood and is treated with the antibiotics doxycycline and rifampin in combination for a minimum of 6-8 weeks.
So, given that brucellosis is a very different disease caused by a completely different organism than COVID-19, how do Grundvig and Tenpenny justify their claims? (SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, is a virus, specifically a coronavirus, while Brucella species are bacteria, specifically gram-negative, nonmotile, nonspore-forming, rod-shaped bacteria.) Given how weak their “Corona Brucella/Corona Brucellosis” conspiracy mongering is, unsurprisingly they have to do a bit of conspiracy prestidigitation, bringing up multiple unrelated COVID-19 conspiracy theories. First up, there’s one we heard before, the Rockefeller Institute “prediction”:
In 2010, the Rockefeller Foundation published “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development.” In the 54-page report, the globalists war-gamed four “what-if” scenarios set in the near future. The first, called “Lock Step,” profiled a scenario in which “A world with top-down government control and more authoritarian leadership, with limited innovation and growing citizen pushback,” would fill the voids in society after a global pandemic. The year the scenario ran: 2012. The opening summary of this scenario reads, in part:The pandemic also had a deadly effect on economies: international mobility of both people and goods screeched to a halt, debilitating industries like tourism and breaking global supply chains.How clairvoyant. That is precisely what happened with COVID-19 in 2020. No conspiracy theory, just a cold analysis of how a complex global economy might collapse in such a scenario. The globalists’ key takeaway wasn’t the number of dead or infected, but how successful they were in getting citizens to surrender to increased power and control…
This particular conspiracy theory was featured, also unsurprisingly, in Plandemic and has been featured in a number of other COVID-19 conspiracy theories. I’ve discussed it in the context of—of course!—Plandemic and Judy Mikovits and Kelly Brogan‘s and Sayer Ji‘s COVID-19 conspiracy mongering; so I’m not going to go further into this other than to mention that the Rockefeller Institute is a favorite hobby horse of conspiracy theorists going back to conspiracy theories about the last global pandemic this huge, the 1918-9 influenza pandemic.
Next up come the conspiracy theories about Bill Gates, the CDC, and the World Health Organization. (Of course!) This takes the form of a rather twisted fantasy in which Bill Gates, CDC Director Robert Redfield, Anthony Fauci, and WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus are one-upping each other on how deadly the COVID-19 pandemic should be in a warped drinking game:
Bill Gates grins slightly. The wrinkled, bespectacled, predatory billionaire waves his hands in the air and replies, “Right, that’s a good one. But a little sophomoric. Now, what if I claim ‘millions are going to die by the end of 2021?’ There, that will work!” He sips his next shot.
The shot game of one-upmanship continues.
Anthony Fauci, President Trump’s sidekick, facepalms and shakes his head, saying, “Bill, you’ve been saying that all year. And Bob, Twindemic sounds like a high school musical. But I have the best idea,” Tiny Tony thumps his chest. “Tell everyone we are entering a ‘Pandemic Era.’ That cements it. No one knows history any more thanks to CDC’s fluoride campaigns, Big Tech’s censorship, and Big Media’s brainwashing, no matter what generation of snowflakes we refer to today.” He sips whiskey through a straw.
At the end of the bar, drunk from tequila shots, barfly Dr. Tedros, head of the WHO, raises his head, squints through thick, round spectacles and flags the three drunks. He lifts his shot glass in a toast, and declares, “‘This must not be the last pandemic!’ We must militarize the lockdowns.”
Fauci claps, nodding in approval at Tedros’ support of his Pandemic Era label. “Now pay the tab, Bill.” Fauci pats Gates on the back, calling out, “We must vanquish corona-fatigue from people’s minds and give them the real thing!”
“Yes! I want bodies in the street!” Dr. Tedros yells, slamming the shot glass down.
Yes, COVID-19 conspiracy theorists think this way about public health officials, much as antivaxxers also think this way about Bill Gates, the CDC, and the WHO, and it’s not surprising that Grundvig and Tenpenny ask:
Why sound the klaxon on a new scourge of COVID when there is zero evidence and zero data to show one is coming? Do the architects of the plandemic know something that the rest of society doesn’t know?
One can’t help to answer that question by saying that Fauci, Gates, Tedros, and Redfield do know something that the rest of society doesn’t know: They know the data. They understand infectious diseases. They understand that, given that SARS-CoV-2 is a respiratory virus and given that the beginning of the 2020 flu season is upon us, fall could be very bad, as people have to spend a lot more time indoors, where respiratory viruses spread much more easily than outdoors.
After trotting through a “greatest hits” list of other COVID-19 conspiracy theories and pseudoscience, such as the claim that deaths due to other things are being falsely coded as COVID-19 deaths and the “only 6%”” gambit that I recently wrote about, Grundvig and Tenpenny finally get to their claim under the heading Future Scenario: Food Poisoning Masked as COVID tagged as an “October surprise”:
Over Labor Day weekend, I heard two different, unconnected researchers float the idea about a possible brucellosis outbreak. If the plan goes through, brucella bacteria will be released to infect humans and cause food poisoning which would mimic COVID symptoms, if the germ was lab-modified into a bioweapon. One of the researchers, Joe Imbriano, runs several websites including www.5gdangers.com. His analysis has been spot-on regarding the dangerous biological effects of 5G. When I heard another podcaster warn America about a brucellosis attack, my interest peaked.
When I started to dig through peer-reviewed studies in PubMed, I was astonished. The first ten articles on brucellosis came from China. It appears brucella food contamination has run amok in the mainland since the time of Mao. Other articles about brucellosis point out that the CDC uses PCR testing to test for brucella bacteria in blood serum samples. Militaries have designed and tested brucella to be used as a bioweapon and for bioterrorism attacks.
The first link is to a 12-minute video by Joe Imbriano of the Fullteron Informer. A quick look at his Twitter feed and website reveal a conspiracy theorist on par with Alex Jones, only nowhere near as famous, with rants about 5G, wifi, coronavirus, cosmology, and—I kid you not—Apple setting a price of $666 and Disney “promoting” homosexuality. (If you really want a laugh, take a gander at his 5G Dangers website, which is even wackier.)
In the video, Imbriano claims that Brucella will be placed in frozen foods (or even sprayed on us), that the brucellosis outbreak will start out slowly and spread, and that the symptoms of brucellosis are “identical” to the symptoms of COVID-19. That latter claim is, of course, utterly ridiculous, as ridiculous as a common old claim that the symptoms of mercury poisoning were “identical” or “near-identical” to those of autism. (Who remembers that blast from the past from antivaxxers?) Just look again at the symptoms of brucellosis that I listed above and compare them with the symptoms of COVID-19:
- Fever or chills
- Cough
- Shortness of breath or difficulty breathing
- Fatigue
- Muscle or body aches
- Headache
- New loss of taste or smell
- Sore throat
- Congestion or runny nose
- Nausea or vomiting
- Diarrhea
Sure, there’s some overlap, but these are different symptom sets. Moreover, thinking that a brucellosis could be mistaken for COVID-19 requires a lack of understanding of biology, bacteriology, virology, and infectious disease that is truly epic. It also assumes that physicians are either idiots who can’t tell the difference between the two diseases or are all in on the conspiracy and intentionally misdiagnosing brucellosis as COVID-19. To be honest, I stopped lisenting to Imbriano’s video before the end because it was incredibly unscientific and ignorant even by the standards of antivaxxers and COVID-19 deniers. It’s not just about brucellosis as COVID-19, though. Imbriano goes on about mosquitos being released with malaria, 5G amplifying illnesses, and a number of other crank conspiracy theories. The only thing he says that makes sense, albeit for completely the wrong reasons, is to caution people against consuming unpasteurized milk and to urge people to thoroughly cook their meat.
The inherently unscientific, pseudoscientific, and conspiratorial bent of this claim matters not to Grundvig and Tenpenny, though, who warn against the next “false flag” event:
Mass food poisoning, disguised as the second wave COVID-19 outbreak. Finally, targeting children and the young would create brucella-infected clusters across America, and act like a comet striking society in an Occam’s razor attack vector. Imagine this:If this happens, it would be far worse than merely injecting more dysfunction and mayhem into the U.S. presidential election. It would mean lockdowns that would finish the destruction of store-front businesses, the travel industry and more. Families will never recover and the monolithic, Orwellian police state will be fully implemented, the “New Normal” George Orwell and Aldus Huxley warned us about more than half a century ago.
- The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) provide the weaponized bacterium to be distributed in food plants and production centers across the United States;
- Brucella infection acting as a more virulent version of COVID;
- Children falling seriously ill and perhaps dying;
- Faulty CDC PCR tests lying one more time that a “new strain” of coronavirus is wreaking havoc.
- This seems like a plausible scenario. The Rockefeller Foundation would agree.
Or it could just be the fever dream of antivaxxers turned COVID-19 grifters and conspiracy theorists. You might wonder if this sort of conspiracy theory could ever gain any sort of purchase in the general public. When you wonder this, though, just think of a conspiracy theory that’s really taken hold that is, if anything, even more ridiculous: QAnon, a conspiracy theory positing that elites are running a child sex trafficking and cannibalism ring that was originally run out of a pizza parlor. Even if this particular conspiracy theory strikes you as too ridiculous ever to take off, it is an interesting view into the mindset of COVID-19 deniers, who apparently believe that the Chinese government, the WHO, the CDC, Bill Gates, and various world governments are plotting to spike our food supply with Brucella in order to start a brucellosis outbreak and blame it on COVID-19, all in order to institute a worldwide totalitarian dictatorship.
85 replies on “Brucellosis: The latest and (maybe) silliest COVID-19 conspiracy theory yet!”
For a moment I thought Grundvig was behind the strange conspiracy theory about the 1918 influenza pandemic and vaccines, but checking your discussion of it shows it’s anti-vaccine lawyer Barry.
You have to wonder: how many diseases have fever and chills and/or cough as symptoms, and how many of them will these people raise? Sigh.
My understanding is: lots of them, because those aren’t even really symptoms of the diseases so much as they are reactions by the immune system. Anything that irritates the throat can lead to coughing, for example, whether it’s a disease that specifically targets the respiratory system or just something that causes general irritation on anything it’s attacking.
Jenora, I agree. We had to ditch “hoarse voice” from our list of symptoms in screening because of the number of smokers who answered yes.
I have posited that a brucella infection might have caused my… past indescrectional hallucinations and accusations. Also, toxoplasmosis from a dirty cat box. Doc {I’m being very generous in ascribing that title to him} laughed it off without testing. I worked with cows (to include kissing some of the little ones on their snotty snouts). Sars-CoV-2 is not this. It is primarily a vascular disease and not one of the mind (until the blood/brain barrier breaks down, of course).
This association is a stupid.
Just consider that at his criminally neglegent rally tonight that he played the Village People – Y.M.C.A. My parents used to use the ‘Yong men’s Christian Association’ as a baby sitter service. I know more about ‘red-light, green-light’ than I care to disclose. My parents were: baptist, Nixonian republicans. What is that song about again?? Who is the kid seeking solice from?? Ohh. — He projects. Always. Biden must be doing drugs to get through a speech because Dumpf gorges on adderal like Hitler did meth.
Fffs, He played Ccr ‘Fortunate son’ at his last rally which highlights having influential parents being able to prevent one from being drafted for fighting war**. Capitan Bone Spurs leads us now– This is the way.
**I was in a Church of Christ kindergarten. We counted to a hundred every day, we did the ‘hokey pokey’ every day, we learned of leprosy every day, and we were told that we should enjoy all that because when we got out we would go to veitnam and die.
New shit has come to light, man:
My parents did not do that but a bad baby sitter my parents hired did. Also, I have a strong memory of said baby sitter taking me and my sister to the ‘bad side of town’ where an individual jumped out a window while it was still closed — I remember a fat lady saying ‘heroin’ but, with my today eyes, I suspect it was something different.
I was just mad because I was missing Buck Rodgers on the telly.
These conspiracy theories are getting more and more tiresome and more and more ridiculous as time flies by. I mean, when “Pizzagate” broke up, there at least was a modicum of “evidence”, if one could call that, that was circumscribed to a specific and given topic, and that was “seemingly credible” as long as you had the willingness to “connect the dots”.
Nowadays, people see three lonesome dots and go in full pareidolia mode.
It’s not even “funny” any more.
These days, I often wonder how the Catholic Church must have felt when Gutenberg invented the printing press…
Here’s a quote:
““The Printing Press as an Agent of Change,” published in 1979 by the historian Elizabeth Eisenstein, is the seminal account, more than seven hundred pages long, of how mass printing, in Francis Bacon’s phrase, “altered the face and state of the world.” Eisenstein is a thorough scholar, and she is dutiful about lodging the necessary caveats. She acknowledges that many early printers were driven, at least in part, by the profit motive, and that much of what they printed was disinformation or propaganda. Still, even when noting such drawbacks, she tends to couch them in a narrative of redemption. She argues, for example, that many “fraudulent esoteric writings” were, ultimately, “paving the way for a purification of Christian sources later on. Here as elsewhere there is a need to distinguish between initial and delayed effects.” She makes similar claims at other points in the book, downplaying initial effects in favor of taking the long view, even though the initial effects of the printing press included heightened ethnic tensions, the spread of medical misinformation, and about a century’s worth of European religious wars. In other words, even when early printing technology ought to be described as a weapon, Eisenstein treats it more like a light bulb.”
I’m going to hang on very tight to my misanthropy. These QAnon people are so dense that they bend light.
Not just the early stage. I would argue that any technology allowing mass-scale information dissemination is a weapon (or potentially used as one). Obviously, this could be said of radio, TV, and internet as well.
And like any weapon or tool, the morality of using one depends on both the intents and the results.
@ Athaic
It’s deeper than intent. This is not a matter of free will. This is a matter of social determinism when it comes not merely to propagation of bullshit but also to propagation of human emotions such as, not merely “hatred”, but malignancy and moral blindness. Which is way worse in my opinion.
The only solution to this mess is to speed up the rational use of these new media. It took at a very bare minimum a century to digest religious wars. We’d better think of ways to speed up the resolution of such conflicts. Some very religious countries have the bomb…
This is a time for a man likeHari Seldon… which, of course, is pure wishful thinking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_%28TV_series%29
Of course, how could it possibly be depicted on screen?? Brave New World had enough action and eye candy to… placate. So, there is that.
No kidding on the religious wars, when you consider that you could make a good argument that one of the first treatises to really ‘go viral’ was Martin’s Luther’s 95 Theses…
@ Jenora Feuer
Doesn’t that make you… “worried”… about the near feature?
Worried, yes. We have lots of evidence that Facebook at the very least has been an active enabler of extremism of many sorts, because they’re all about ‘engagement’ and leading people to extremism gets the people more engaged. Twitter’s design encourages reacting without thinking and discourages nuance. Pretty much any large social media platform is deliberately impossible to actually govern, because hiring enough people to enforce what pitiful rules they have would cut into the profit margins. And that’s on top of the fact that many of the people supposed to be enforcing the rules are of the ‘more rational than thou’ type.
Anonymity isn’t the problem, lack of consequences is. Lots of people are quite willing to sign their real name to utterly horrible statements.
(See also the previously mentioned Martin Luther, who may have been right about a number of the problems in the Catholic church, but was also a raging anti-semite and literally wrote a 60,000 word book titled ‘On the Jews and Their Lies’.)
Also, some of the best places to have discussions on the Internet are places like here which allow for a degree of pseudonymity but which still have a combination of automatic and active moderation that limits the ‘flying monkey brigades’ from drowning things out.
@ Jenora Feuer
In France, we are seeing IMO the same phenomenon, but the institutional response seems to be: 1. no hate speech with a wide net for the definition of hatred that includes insolence as defined here 2. banning pseudonymity 3. The State is more rational than thou.
IMO, the problem is not any more limited to merely conspiracy theories and limits on free speech. It has become the lack of speech against nonsense. The “more rational than thou” type of people are being cornered in their limited understanding of rationality and are unable to weaponise rhetorics to the adequate and relevant extent.
This is beginning to look like a religious war. Of a new kind. A religious war without religion.
@ Jenora Feuer:
With social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter we also need to consider the issue of scale. There are something like 2 billion active users on Facebook. Even if each one only posted once a day, that’s a huge number of posts that would need to be evaluated. Even with the simple-ish algorithms that look for obvious nudity, violence and scams, there are still millions of posts that have to be reviewed by a human every day.
I’m not sure it’s possible unless that was literally the only thing everyone did.
@F68.10 – as long as you had the willingness to “connect the dots”. This reminded me of when I was a child at school learning about the constellations and the Greek mythology behind them – I was very impressed with the imaginative prowess of our ancient forbears in connecting random dots in such fantastical ways, alas it seems we are still looking for connections, the more fantastic the better.
Gosh…..I’d pay to see Robert Scott Bell, Del and Dr Sherri tear Orac and Dorit—two of Big Pharma’s best knob gobblers a new one.
Unlike Bell, Bigtree and Tenpenny: Orac and Dorit do not lie. That puts in at disadvantage, and why there will never be a debate. Your heroes should actually put of real verifiable evidence, and not lie to be taken seriously. But they won’t because it stops the money flowing into their pockets from the gullible like you.
You should read about this debate: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/battling-antivaccinationists-at-freedomfest/
Talking about science bases medicine….. Are the PCR tests meaningful and reliable. I have never seen an article which comprehensively and in detail debunks that they are useless. Herd is the article claiming that the tests are useless: https://off-guardian.org/2020/06/27/covid19-pcr-tests-are-scientifically-meaningless/
Repeated for emphasis. Thank you.
It’s not like Covid19 was the first viral pandemic in the past three decades.
Actually:
Or, in the cases of some alt-reality individuals, don’t want to know.
Infectious disease doctors and epidemiologists have been talking about the next big pandemic since at least the 90s. Just like someone always eventually wins the lottery, sooner or later, it was going to happen.
Sure.
Just like governmental officials in California discuss the Big One or tsunamis because earthquakes happen and NY/NJ officials contemplate the next Superstorm-. It doesn’t mean that they cause these events, it ,means that by using information they can predict that these events may happen in a certain time frame.
Sadly, part of this conversation has also been (for decades) how inadequate our resources are to respond to such a pandemic. We finally got a president who started to address the issue, only to have him replaced by the current Republican disaster.
Other countries have done better.
If you look at Covid-19 death rates by country ( Wikipedia 9/14 – I wanted to look at European rates but got global rates) you’ll see that the US and UK have rates well over 50 per 100,000. Sweden, which health freedom advocates cite as a sterling example,, is rather tarnished at a slightly lower rate.
BUT places like S. Korea, Japan and Singapore do much better- shockingly better.
Why?
It ain’t “Oriental” Medicine but how interventions worked. People in these locales may have been educated because of earlier epidemics/ pandemics and a history of using masks.
Data is our friend ( unless if we advocate for woo).
Do bull-shitters suffer from Bovine brucellosis ?
“Finally, targeting children and the young would create brucella-infected clusters across America, and act like a comet striking society in an Occam’s razor attack vector.”
Can CNS brucellosis cause insanity? Tenpenny and Grundvig may already be infected.
They sure don’t seem to know what Occam’s razor was about.
Oddly enough, I had been listening to TWiV episode 632, where they talked about an outbreak of vesicular stomatitis in horses in Kansas.
I used to live in Butler County, where one of the cases was identified.
https://promedmail.org/promed-post/?id=7486055
This disease can be carried by cattle and other domesticated animals and can be spread to humans by, for example, kissing your horse or cow.
Also, I would think that one of the many trials treating Covid-19 by using antibiotics would have shown some benefit if this were a bacterial disease.
But the authors of this degree flunked their course in thinkology.
” This takes the form of a rather twisted fantasy…” ( Orac)
But isn’t that how woo-meisters and ant-vaxxers proceed in general?
HOWEVER they fail to notice how their own gurus profit off of their conspiracy mongering: both Grundvig and Tenpenny write books which they sell. Others with websites and product lines spin fictions about how SBM supporters profit wildly which we can observe right here at RI, without any evidence of course: Mike Adams concocted an elaborate tale about Orac’s “friend” which had him working hand-in-hand with a doctor who was found guilty of various crimes because…. wait for it…, they worked in the same city and they both treated cancer patients altho’ in different ways. Haven’t well-know woo-meisters tried to link him to other people they don’t like through FOIA requests? Don’t trolls try to link Orac or his minions to pharma lucre without any evidence, data or reality testing?
— if it were true that Covid were really Brucellosis, wouldn’t it be likely that somewhere, someone over the past 6 months anywhere in the world, armed with a microscope, would have revealed it? How could that get past thousands of people who have looked at body fluids, tissue samples etc? No one saw that a certain bacterium accompanies all of the so-called viruses?
@ Athaic:
Interestingly, saying “Occam’s Razor” may be becoming a thing in woo-topia although it may be pronounced “Oxxam’s Razor” at times.
re Tenpenny’s and Bigtree’s abilities:
all you need to know about them is that she contributes to films by Gary Null and he often collaborates with RFK jr: that alone should tell you that they don’t know what they’re talking about if they can tolerate the level of nonsense spouted by those two and that profit is going to be written into the equation.
@ Denice
I was heroically resisting the urge to point to non-serious occurrences of “Occam’s Razor” in fictional stories. If woo-ists insist on presenting themselves as joking targets, the tentation is going to be unbearable
While trudging through a turgid book of Western Philosophy this summer (“A Brief Illustrated History of Western Philosophy” my eye. 500 pages and 10 pictures of statues is neither brief nor illustrated in my mind) one of the philosophers mentioned was someone called Ockam. I had to stop reading and look up this person online to see if Ockam was the same as Occam (yes).
Apparently if you’re a British scholar of philosophy you get to spell things however you want.
Well, I’ve found historical instances of both Occam and Ockam even William of Ockham BUT…..
only barely literate woo-meisters pronounce it “Oxxam”
Ockham is a village in Surrey. English spelling was not settled in the 13th century.
@Chris Preston,
Indeed English spelling is regularly in flux, but by 1998 (the publication date of the book I was reading) there was general consensus on how historical people’s names were spelled.
It was hardly the most egregious error/omission in the text, just kind of weird because Occam was one of the few philosophers I’d heard of before. (Far more egregious in my mind was leaving out basically all female philosophers from Plato to the present.)
In a way I’ve come to prefer these completely absurd tales over something like what the NYT published about PCR several days ago. The article was a dismal bit of handwaving with no scientific evidence whatever offered, but now all the COVID denialists have latched onto it. They are shrieking that PCR is detecting 10 times as many cases as it should and finding people harboring only a single virion who don’t get sick and can’t possibly infect anyone else and Kary Mullis said it doesn’t work and it’s all part of the left wing fascist plot to subjugate everyone and keep them in constant fear, and …
The NYT has some semblance of general credibility. In my estimation, people who aren’t fools are more likely to accept what appears there than from Tenpenny, if they’ve ever run across her drivel.
Quoting Kary Mullis may not be the best strategy for promoting science as he was an hiv/aids denialist, didn’t accept AGW and believed in astrology and glowing raccoons.
( see Wikipedia and rational Wiki entries for him)
And then there was the glowing green raccoon-like alien he saw. But he won a Nobel prize so he MUST be credible on all matters!
I haven’t been able to find any info on when Mullis started saying PCR shouldn’t be used for diagnostic purposes, but I’d be willing to bet it was after he got in with the HIV/AIDS denialists.
I reckon I have seen a few of those in my time. After a night out on the tiles.
Orwell’s and Huxley’s dystopias could not be more different. Neither was caused by an outbreak of disease.
That’s why they’re so often paired for study, because 1984 and Brave New World have striking similarities, but the interesting thing is the differences and how the authors posit getting from here to there.
Weirdly, the BNW, even though they have embrionic vaccines for (it seems like) everything, for some reason all the diseases are still around. That stuck out to me when I read it in high school: why haven’t these diseases been eliminated? Maybe they never bother vaccinating the Epsilons?
Despite being futuristic, they were both tied to the time they were written. Unfortunately I read 1984 when I was in 8th grade, so my memory is minimal. I was living in the then Panama Canal Zone, a ten mile by fifty mile strip of land controlled by the US Army Corps of Engineers smack dab in the middle of country, which at that time was under a dictatorship (Omar Torrijos). Um, yeah… it seemed kind of part of my normal. I need to read it again.
But I read Brave New World as an adult in college and was struck by some of the language that would not have been acceptable even in the late 1970s (like the treatment of Native Americans). It was amazing to me that they had some way to prevent pregnancy. As a woman majoring in a male dominated field I had my own opinions on how one’s destiny was set based on who you are when you are born. My youngest had to read The Giver by Lois Lowry in school, so on a whim I read it. The similarities were quite striking.
Chris: I read The Giver first (rather, it was read to me the year it was published, 5th grade), then wrote a term paper on 1984 in 9th grade and then read Brave New World probably also in 9th grade, but just on my own. I liked BNW least (as a book), probably because of how sexist it was, even compared to 1984.
There were definitely parts of The Giver that only made sense many years later, but the thing that strikes me thinking about it now is how very long it took to realize that it was a dystopia. 1984 and BNW are not nearly so subtle.
Mostly what I remember about BNW world was how it aged, and not in a good way. Around that same time I read the full Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. Much of it is still relevant. I still have that book, but BNW is long gone.
JustaTech, just out of curiosity, what was it about The Giver that caused it not to strike you as a dystopia, if you remember? It definitely struck me as one right away, even before the revelation about what “release” meant and so on. The emotional flatness, the sort of lack of maturity (even if I wasn’t exactly fully mature when I read it, I could certainly grasp that the adults were childlike, and not in a way that I liked for some reason.) The extremely controlled society. Etc.
@JP: The reason it took so long to realize that The Giver was a dystopia was that it was the first one I ever read/had read to me.
And I was 10.
But mostly because it was probably the first piece of “speculative fiction” I’d read. Compared to a fairy tale or Star Trek or any book with anthropomorphic animals, it’s reasonably subtle (for children). Unlike the other books in the series, it’s not obvious from the get-go that this is not “our world”. People live in houses, not tents or castles, adults go to work, children go to school, all pretty normal things.
It would be interesting to ask a kid and an adult to read it now and see when they catch on with the dystopia. When I re-read it as an adult I picked up on it much earlier, but that was a re-read.
Re Orwell vs. Huxley:
https://highexistence.com/amusing-ourselves-to-death-huxley-vs-orwell/
I don’t understand this metaphor, but it has a certain spunkiness to it.
@ Narad
Welcome back.
If I were an evil mastermind looking to take over the world, I don’t think I’d pick a non-motile, gram-negative, non-spore-forming bacteria as my weapon of choice. Like, they don’t get around on their own and they’re easy to kill. Even the conspiracy guy says they’re easy to kill (‘don’t drink unpasteurized milk and cook your meat thoroughly’)!
On the other hand, any time we can take a break from QAnon and the goddamn blood libel is good.
The air quality up here is so bad I shouldn’t do any aerobic exercise, even in my house, so a few light chuckles at “death by milk!” is a huge improvement over the heart pounding fear/rage reaction I get from QAnon.
DW: “— if it were true that Covid were really Brucellosis, wouldn’t it be likely that somewhere, someone over the past 6 months anywhere in the world, armed with a microscope, would have revealed it? How could that get past thousands of people who have looked at body fluids, tissue samples etc?”
Well, we pathologists are notoriously sloppy when it comes to identifying the True Causes of Disease.
I’ve looked at a gazillion malignant tumors under low and high magnification and never found any of Hulda Clark’s liver flukes lurking in them (you know, the parasite that causes all cancers). I guess I should have been paying more attention, but I was busy managing my my multimillion dollar Pharma shill accounts. 🙁
I was thinking that too: any high-school kid with a benchtop microscope can see a bacterium. And, many COVID patients are routinely treated with antibiotics to prevent or control secondary bacterial pneumonia: surely that should have done the trick?
So, this is too easy.
As for mercury poisoning symptoms resembling autism: I knew an inorganic chemist who accidentally was exposed to a mercury reagent. Her symptoms were a rapid onset of hand-trembling and other nerve-type symptoms, and brain fog and slow loss of cognitive skills, which progressed within days to coma, which progressed within six months to death.
Not a striking resemblance to anyone on the autism spectrum that I’ve ever known. But hey, why bring facts into it?
While it would seem like anyone coming in sick as sh*t with pneumonia will get slammed with antibiotics, and they often do, those usually involve Zosyn and Vanc then deescalation when we get a culture and susceptibility.
Brucellosis is killed by doxy, which messes with the 30S ribosomal subunit. Pretty specific mechanism of action. 2nd line is a fluoroquinolone, which have fallen out of favor, so we rarely use them anymore. Shame because the old school “respiratory” flouros model of antibiotic use would probably kill this bug.
Zosyn and other beta-lactams are notoriously poor at treating things that the tetracyclines specialize in. Vanc probably won’t touch it since it’s a Gram (-) it has the outer membrane protecting it. None of this is meant to imply that this jackass conspiracy nut is onto something, just some musings.
Two thoughts on how they honed in on Brucella spp:
1) They were mentioned in the wildly popular series Yellowstone and I started hearing a lot of talk about them after that. Most people talking about it had no idea that brucellosis existed before that airing and still have no clue what the causative agent is or is not.
2) They were investigated as a weapon and, I believe, are still “Select Agents.” Every kook I know won’t let the old US BW program go and finds some way to fold it into their crank theories.
I am reliably told that there were no liver flukes in the cancers extracted from me. I think the pathologists need to look harder.
At university, I extracted liver flukes from sheep. They were a little too large to fit in the last cancer carved out of me. Perhaps they don’t live there permanently?
Tenpenny and Grundvig have as much chance of being right as they have of winning 20 powerball lotteries in a row. How do you solve the dilemma of not wanting to give them any airtime vs not wanting to let their BS go unchallenged? I think it’s better to tear their bollocks apart and have done, in this case.
Fans of the idea that SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t really cause illness (and so the Covid-19 pandemic has been faked in order to promote Big Pharma and Bigger Government) have been impatiently waiting for Dr. Thomas Cowan’s book due out at the end of the month, “The Contagion Myth”, which reputedly will debunk germ theory and offer us a brighter path to health.
But there’s no need to wait – Torsten Engelbrecht and Köhnlein Claus, a tag team of an alleged journalist and a “medical specialist of internal diseases” (who moonlights as an HIV denier)
have a fantastic read for you.
These two blow the lid off a bunch of false virus and vaccine conspiracies in their spanking-new trailblazing book, “Virus Mania”, about how Pasteur was wrong, hepatitis C is caused by toxins, PCR testing is ”lousy”, phony epidemics are invented to make billions for the medical industry and so much more!
https://www.amazon.com/Virus-Mania-Continually-Epidemics-Billion-Dollar/dp/1425114679
Available (of course) via Amazon and other fine literary purveyors.
DB- the book ‘Virus Mania’ has been around since 2007. It is replete with incoherent nonsense.the education system has much to do!
The silliest covid 19 conspiracy theory? At least brucellosis is organic. Surely 5G?
Is Grundvig too dumb to even look up what Occam’s razor is?
It is a cargo cult article. Peppered with scientific terms used completely incorrectly in some vain hope that going through the motions will cause his ramblings to be real.
Grundvig and Tenpenny missed a really juicy tidbit in formulating their conspiracy narrative – namely, an actual release of Brucella blamed on an accident at a vaccine plant.
“(My) calf swelled to twice the usual size and joints all over my body hurt,” Gao said.”
“Gao’s nightmare began at the Lanzhou Biopharmaceutical Plant, a unit of state-owned China Animal Husbandry Industry, located on the northeastern edge of Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu Province. Local health authorities said on Dec. 26 last year that the factory used expired sanitizers while producing Brucella vaccines between July 24 and Aug. 20. This resulted in the bacteria entering the factory’s exhaust and infecting people nearby, officials said.”
http://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/China-s-quiet-brucellosis-outbreak-sickens-thousands-in-northwest
So there you go. Vaccine manufacturing facilities around the world have started to “accidentally” release Brucella (and other pathogens, why not?) to infect millions. The illnesses will be blamed on SARS-CoV-2, resulting in more demand for coronavirus vaccines, universal compulsory vaccination and billions (or trillions) more in profits for Big Pharma.
Diabolical, it is.*
*Rumor has it that Orac once was involved in animal husbandry…until they caught him at it one day.
— Dennis Dimbleby Bagley, How To Get Ahead In Advertising (1989)
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/09/bonkers-federal-podcast-downplays-covid-19-blasts-health-restrictions/
https://www.nytimes.com./2020/09/14/us/politics/caputo-virus.html
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientific-american-endorses-joe-biden/
Never before in 175 years, huu? Deep State is deep now. So disrespectful.
In other news….
— Stop Mandatory Vaccination Now Facebook: Cook goes full Q Anon for 3 hours
— Mike Adams calls BLM/ antifa supporters “demons”.. NYC is the locus of universal evil as citizens there worship abortion, infanticide and transgenderism child abuse/ genital mutilation. Christians need to join him in the upcoming apocalypse
— Gary Null ( PRN) is asking for listener support so he can buy adverts for PRN on Facebook. He’s lost two sources of income: a health food store and free airtime on a non profit station as he triumphantly claims great success for his own private radio station
I guess that things are tough all over..
At The Daily Beast Will Sommer reports that Del and RFKJ (among other anti-vaxxers) will be appearing at a big upcoming MAGA wing-ding, along side QAnon devotees, anti-Semites, islamaphobes (‘we spin hateful conspiracy theory, against both sides!’), anti-maskers, Matt Gaetz, Dinesh D’Souza, and (of course) Roger “Declare Martial Law” Stone.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-doral-hotel-to-host-a-confab-of-anti-vaxxers-and-leading-qanon-champions
While RI regulars may find this alignment entirely predictable, readers who merely follow the news may be confused by the fact that Trump is all about the promise to deliver a COVID vaccine before election day, and has accused Biden and Harris of being, yes, “anti-vaxxers!” for raising the possibility that would be rushing things, safety-wise. Biden will no doubt soon be forced to declare, “I’m pro vaccine. I just want safe vaccines!” Which will be true of course, but still sound weird thanks to RFKJ.
In other news, Michael Caputo is taking a 60-day medical leave of absence for “a lymphatic issue”. Presumably whoever replaces him at HHS will go about twisting CDC messaging to Trumpian fantasy without leaving a trail of cray-cray video on Facebook.
And, let me guess….this large indoor gathering of the cream of MAGA world and other crazies will be completely mask-free, am I right? Because, viruses are a hoax and you can keep yourself healthy by eating right and swallowing colloidal silver until you turn blue. Vaccines kill people, viruses don’t.
COVID is probably rubbing its hand with gleeful anticipation, thinking “Ah! Another target-rich area!”
“colloidal silver until you turn blue”
You have to admit that no blue tinted people have ever caught COVID. Not even smurfs.
It do be topsy-turvy, it seems.
Any thoughts on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_Tippecanoe (0 factor)??
Not to be conspiratorial (bwahaha! of course, I am), but could it be freemasonry or some such honoring the curse?
Reagan did not just get Alzheimer’s while in office — he and wifey were brain dead from the getgo.
Bush was not elected in 2000 but appointed :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore
Harris — evil prosecutor that Trump and daughter invested a disclosed ~ $9000 in her run as AG and she bragged about twisting loopholes into weapons to fulfill private prison quotas; refusing reforms because the state couldn’t afford to lose the slave labor. Sure, she has introduced the MORE act now. Really? Really, really?
Pence — Gay conversion camp and teen suicide magnate, sycophant, all around meme-man-faced dickwad.
Same as it ever was: Giant Douche vs Turd Sandwich.
https://youtu.be/au8oNaVHUHw?t=1
p.s. https://www.salon.com/2020/09/15/donald-trump-called-voting-by-mail-refreshingly-democratic-in-2000-new-york-times-op-ed/
Since he has deleted it, here is a taste of the ‘cray-cray*’:
https://youtu.be/d-Uid387uV4?t=108
“lymphatic issue”, my ass. In my non-expert opinion, that man-thot’s got tha Lyme (you can see that he is in an area that is “somewhat wooded”).
*I know about cray-cray. I subscribed once, decided it was dumb, and stopped subscribing. Much like ATT Directv customers.
Hi Tim,
Lyme disease. I think it is a vaccine injury. Lol. The symptoms are so similar & only rarely does the patient report the classic bulls-eye rash that would indicate a tick bite but many have a history of recent vaccination.
Ticks aren’t the origin of the borellia virus; they catch it from mice.
Cells from mice brains are used in several vaccines. Mostly vaccines for military or travel; rabies virus, yellow fever virus and Japanese encephalitis virus.
These vaccines are suspected of introducing the XMRV virus to humans.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2010.00147/full
If the XMRV virus is able to be transmitted from the cells of infected mice, I think the virus is too. Or maybe it’s incorporated itself into the bacteria.
Heresy, I know.
@christine kincaid
“I think it is a vaccine injury. Lol.”
Umm. It is a bacterium. I obtained the bulls-eye rash on my thigh close to my crotch in 1992 before I had even heard of it. It occured 2 days after I picked the square-shaped tick off. I got the tick, in of all places, Tuskeege national forest — I won’t discount that it could have been a governmet bioweapon test.
I did develop some problems that might be attributed to it, but I think antibiotics that I recieved because of a cat bite and urinary tract infection may have knocked it out.
I was in university in 1992 when two monumental things happened. Alabama banned the sale of 2 Live Crew {if you’ll stop your bullshitting and get on with the fucking I’ll show you how my pussy can do some dick sucking…} and banned licking of frogs.
I had never head of frog-licking; hell, I was new to cannabis. Subsequently, I learned to milk bufotenin out of cane toads by squeezing those ‘warts’ into a tissue and ‘dipping it’ (don’t do that, It is intense, there is too much other really nasty toxins}.
@Christine Kincaid
Not heresy, just wrong
Recombinant Origin of the Retrovirus XMRV
Tobias Paprotka,Krista A. Delviks-Frankenberry,Oya Cingöz,Anthony Martinez, Hsing-Jien Kung, Clifford G. Tepper, Wei-Shau Hu, Matthew J. Fivash Jr., John M. Coffin, Vinay K. Pathak
Science 01 Jul 2011:
Vol. 333, Issue 6038, pp. 97-101
DOI: 10.1126/science.1205292
This virus is a mouse culture artifact
@ Christine Kincaid
“Lyme disease. I think it is a vaccine injury. Lol.”
Lol.
I love the sense of humour of this blog! Please keep it up Christine!
“Lyme disease. I think it is a vaccine injury. Lol. ”
I would love to know who you think is “vaccinating” the mice and deer that carry Lyme disease.
It’s like you don’t know that the entire disease cycle is well understood.
RFK Jr meeting with Dinesh DeSouza and Roger Stone? Of course. Convicted felons gotta stick together.
I can’t fault him for that. His followers are ‘disgusting people’… and meth heads. I’m rather fond of some meth heads.. they should rise up against this turd.
I never cared about handshakes, but I’m really glad the 3 kisses-thing is over and I hope it never comes back.
Every time I see the word Brucellosis, I can’t help it, the first thing that jumps to mind is this Warren Zevon song:
https://youtu.be/4W07dFdGadE
I resemble that remark.
Ha, don’t worry, we aren’t exactly Seattle out here…
Sittin’ pretty (outside) with an AQI of 17 now. I feel for Seattle (I guess they’re still a little ways up they’re up there), but they’ll get their turn. We deserve it after 600 something…
Put a mask on that shit. Naa, we’re still under the low level flow off storm Sally and don’t have to smell all the winning. But the sky is like looking into a glass of milk. So disrespectful.
Hear ya’ll gettin’ rain. Good on ya.
@ Tim,
You got the bullseye rash. And found a tick. That’s different.
The whole “Lyme sans tick” thing reminds me of when community MRSA became a problem & all these people were coming into the ER with “spider bites”. You could clearly see the two punctures in the wound but nobody could ever remember seeing the actual spider. Then they tested positive for MRSA.
Turns out that’s a classic MRSA wound with two “tunnels” very close together. They looked exactly like spider bites but a spider wasn’t involved at all.
I don’t think many Lyme cases have a tick involved either.
Lyme disease is cured by antibiotics, so a bacterium obviously causes it.
@christine kincaid
I found a tick close to my dick. I picked off and developed the rash a couple days later. It is distinct and bacterial. I hadn’t had a vaccine 20 years prior, though I was forced into one for ‘german measles’ that may have gave me hepatitis and it was the common multi-use jet injector nozzle {MUNJI} given by guys in military fatigues; I wish the fuck I just said I was allergic to eggs as it was the sickest I’d ever been in my life.
“Splash-back refers to the jet stream penetrating the outer skin at a high velocity causing the jet stream to ricochet backwards and contaminate the nozzle.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_injector#Splash-back
https://www.change.org/p/veterans-administration-v-a-veteran-contracted-hepatitis-c-from-air-jet-injectors-in-basic-training-you-can-help
I drink alot. That hides their malfeasance as to damage to my liver.
This conspiracy theory is far sillier:
“Since the COVID-19 pandemic reached the US, increasing concern has been expressed about the politicization of the CDC and FDA due to pressure from the Trump administration to downplay the severity of the pandemic and push out treatments and a vaccine as fast as possible, potentially at the expense of safety.”