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Clots and COVID-19 vaccines: Misadventures under the microscope

All around quack and conspiracy theorist Mike Adams looked at blood clots under the microscopes and blamed COVID-19 vaccines. Hilarity ensued. Or it would be hilarious if lay people could see through it.

I’m tempted to file this under “everything old is new again when it comes to antivax lies,” but I know that some readers are irritated by my constant harping on how antivaxxers constantly have recycled the same sorts of conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and misinformation to demonize COVID-19 vaccines. On the other hand, I never pass up a chance to laugh at Mike Adams when he does what he does so well, namely publish bad science so astoundingly stupid and ill-informed that actual experts in the field facepalm in unison. This time around, Mikey is engaging in misadventures in microscopy again to claim something very dire about blood clots, which he of course blames not on COVID-19 infection (which is known to cause blood clots) but on COVID-19 vaccines (one of which has been associated with a rare clotting disorder). The latest example of this occurred this week, when Adams published a “bombshell” on his conspiracy site Natural News entitled EXCLUSIVE: Shocking microscopy photos of blood clots extracted from those who “suddenly died” – crystalline structures, nanowires, chalky particles and fibrous structures, which he followed up yesterday with WATCH: Dr. Jane Ruby offers fresh insights about self-assembling “clots” and “nanowires” found in fully vaccinated cadavers.

Let’s just say that…hilarity ensued. I should clarify. Adams’ fear mongering about COVID-19 vaccines and blood clots is, from a strictly scientific standpoint, hilarious because of his epic incompetence analyzing clots with a microscope and the risibly silly conclusions to which he comes, particularly in light of his past misadventures with microscopy. It’s less hilarious in that it’s effective disinformation.

Adams starts, as he often does, with a lot of fear mongering:

Today we are publishing a series of lab microscopy photos of bizarre clots which are now being routinely found in adults who “suddenly died,” usually in a number of months following covid vaccinations.

These clots are often referred to as “blood clots” but they are nothing at all like normal clots, and they consist of far more than mere blood cells. Unlike normal clots which are gelatinous, almost jelly-like, these so-called “clots” contain extremely large, complex, repeating structural elements (all shown below) that are clearly being constructed in the blood of the victims who died from these clots.

All of these clots were extracted from patients within a few hours of their death. These are not the result of post-mortem blood stasis. These are structures found in blood vessels and arteries. They are not congealed blood.

He then goes on:

These structures exhibit the following shocking properties:
  • They are tough, fibrous and resilient, showing material properties similar to small rubber bands.
  • They consist of many strands of small, fibrous strands.
  • These fibrous strands (see the very last photo set below) show repeating patterns of scale-like engineering, as if the body has been programmed to build another life form inside the blood vessels.
  • There are strange crystalline-like structures found on these clots, exhibiting transparency and resistance to normal gram staining techniques.
  • Below, you will find one example of a structure that appears to resemble a silicon-like biocircuitry or microchip-like structure. We don’t yet know what it is.
  • One of the photo sets below reveals what appears to be a biocircuitry wire which clearly shows repeating patterns and nano-scale interface structures that are assembled in a specific geometry for an unknown purpose.

I laughed out loud at his ignorance, and then I considered that he might be lying. First, why is Adams amazed that there are “structures” and “repeating structural elements” in these clots? Similarly, why does he think that blood clots are “congealed blood”? The clotting cascade involves a lot of proteins and clots, as a result, have a lot of protein in them. Heck, just a quick Google search (since I’m writing for lay people) bring up articles that describe clot formation, for example:

Proteins in your blood called clotting factors signal each other to cause a rapid chain reaction. It ends with a dissolved substance in your blood turning into long strands of fibrin. These get tangled up with the platelets in the plug to create a net that traps even more platelets and cells. The clot becomes much tougher and more durable.

Also:

Blood clots are made up of little particles called platelets and a meshwork of protein strands, called fibrin. Clots in arteries have a different composition than clots in veins.

Clots in arteries are mostly made up of platelets (figure 3).      Clots in veins mostly made up of fibrin.  (figure 4)

I’ll even “borrow” Figures 3 and 4:

Clots: arterial vs venous
Anyone want to guess where the clots being displayed by Mike Adams came from?

I’ll hazard a guess that these clots came from veins, rather than arteries. In fact, Adams states that the got the clots from a “reputable embalmer (Richard Hirschman) who is active in the field of embalming and who confirmed these are not blood vessels or other tissues of any kind” and claimed that these are “structures that were evacuated from inside blood vessels during embalming procedures.” As I suspected, these came from veins, as in general during the embalming process the blood is removed from the cadaver by cannulating large veins, after which embalming fluid is introduced into arteries. So these clots almost certainly came from veins.

Of course, given the source of these clots, the topic of postmortem versus antemortem clotting has to be considered. Adams denies that these are just run-of-the-mill postmortem clots, even though there are well-understood characteristics that allow pathologists to distinguish postmortem clots from thrombi that formed while the person was still alive. (They’re even taught to medical students!) Moreover, as Adams says himself, these clots were not dissected out of blood vessels; they were aspirated through a large bore needle. So, unsurprisingly, Adams doesn’t even consider the potential effect that sucking a clot through a needle much smaller than the clot could have on its appearance.

Someone pointed me to a useful slide posted on Twitter:

Pursuing Mike Adams’ photos, guess which of these the clots he touts look more like.

Leaving aside what these clots really are, I laughed again at Adams’ technique:

I stained these samples using standard gram staining techniques used for microbiology in order to enhance structural contrast during microscopy. One of the samples below — the more yellowish sample — was stained only with iodine, not any violet-colored stains.

Gram staining techniques used for microbiology? Adams gram stained the clots? That is not how one prepares histologic samples for microscopy; that is, unless one is specifically looking for gram-positive bacteria. (My pathology colleagues will correct me if I’m wrong here.) In general, one would formalin fix and paraffin embed the specimens, and then likely stain with hematoxylin and eosin (H&E), with special stains reserved for other purposes. (Again, my pathology colleagues will correct or add to my explanation if I’ve missed anything.)

Colleagues on Twitter noted other…deficiencies…in Adams’ sample preparation, at least one of which I had suspected, that some of the clots had been allowed to dry out, which could account for how stringy and fibrous some of them looked and for the salt crystals observed:

And:

Personally, I was also very much amused by this passage:

Protein structures circulating in the blood like this, building up over time, are clearly being constructed by the body’s cells. The ribosomes in the cells instruct the body what proteins to construct. These ribosomes are hijacked by mRNA gene therapy injections, which overwrite new instructions to the cells, causing them to manufacture something other than human.

I believe the structures you are seeing above are the result of mRNA protein synthesis instructions which have been injected into people under the false umbrella of “vaccines.” I welcome input from other experts who may have other theories or explanations of where this is coming from.

While it’s true that ribosomes do use mRNA as a template to produce proteins and that spike protein is not a human protein, Adams’ wild and ignorant speculations are off-base in the extreme. mRNA-based vaccines include mRNA coding for one protein and one protein alone: The SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. Moreover, contrary to what fools like Adams claim, the amount of spike protein generated is infinitesimally small because the vaccine doesn’t need to produce a lot of protein to prime the immune system to respond to the spike protein. Adams makes it sound as though the clots he misunderstood are made of “nonhuman” proteins produced because the mRNA from COVID-19 vaccines “hijacked” cells to produce them. One wonders why he didn’t do some immun0histochemistry for spike protein, one does. After all, he’s incompetent at simple histology. What’s stopping him from getting some antibodies to spike protein and going wild doing immunohistochemistry?

Unsurprisingly, Adams “brings it on home” by relating these clots to another COVID-19 conspiracy theory:

In conclusion, they are not “blood” clots. They are structures in the blood. They are “structural clots” or “fibrous clots” that are extremely large and are being constructed inside the body over time.

My grave concern is that every person who has been injected with mRNA instructions may be constructing these fibrous structures inside their bodies at this very minute, and that it’s only a matter of time before they block major arteries or cause heart attacks, strokes or other acute causes of “Sudden Adult Death Syndrome” (SADS).

I believe these structures may very well explain why so many seemingly healthy adults are suddenly dying.

SADS used in this context is, of course, a misnomer for Sudden Arrhythmic Death Syndrome, which is a syndrome that’s been recognized for decades in which seemingly healthy, often young, adults die suddenly and unexpectedly of cardiac arrest or arrhythmias. As I discussed recently, there’s no evidence that SADS has become more common since COVID-19 vaccines were released, and there’s no evidence linking COVID-19 to SADS other than the fevered imaginations of conspiracy theorists like Adams.

Indeed, the conspiracy theories go even further, as shown by an interview with Jane Ruby, who supposedly connected Adams to the embalmer Richard Hirschman:

Dr. Ruby is convinced that all of this was planned and this is no accident that these strange foreign objects are self-assembling inside people’s bodies and eventually killing them. She also made a clear distinction between the concept of messenger RNA, or mRNA, which is not what these jabs contain.

What they do contain – or produce, depending on the brand (Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna) – is a synthetic RNA technology that we still do not fully understand since it is novel and has never before been used in humans.

Dr. Ruby also suggested during the interview that some of the vials of the material that Hirschman stored away actually saw their contents expand in size even while outside the body. This suggests that perhaps these self-assembling structures do not even require a living human body in order to continue building themselves.

Actually, the mRNA used in the vaccines is indeed mRNA, although it does use a chemically modified base N1-methylpseudouridine (m1Ψ) to increase their effectiveness, because mRNA that includes this base is less immunogenic, making it less likely that the immune system will destroy the mRNA, and has a longer half-life than “natural” mRNA, which is rapidly degraded. What particularly amused me is the claim that these “self-assembling structures” might not even require a living body to continue to building themselves, a truly bonkers claim even if it were true that these were anything other than clots.

Of course, Mike Adams has a long history of looking under the microscope and labeling things that he can’t identify as something terrifying. This time around, he sees various structures and, instead of simply saying that he doesn’t know what they are and asking experts to tell him what they are, likens them to “nanowires” and “silicon-like chip structures.” It’s an elaborate game of JAQing off, in which he denies that he’s saying that these are “nanowires” and chips, but he’s saying that they are nanowires and chips.

For example:

This series shows something that appears to resemble silicon-based microchip structures, although I cannot claim with certainty that this is a circuit of any kind. It simply resembleswhat micro-circuitry looks like at similar magnifications.

The hilarious thing is that these don’t even resemble microchips that much. I really have to stretch to see any resemblance. More likely, they’re just protein fibers:

Adams' clots and microchips
Does this look like silicon chips to you?

For another example:

What follows here is a stunning look at what appears to be, at first, a micro-scale wire. Zooming it, we see a series of repeating structures along the top that appear to be nano-scale wire interface junctions. The entire “wire” is made of repeating segments, and its outer layer is covered in repeating “scale-like” patterns that actually resemble reptile skin more than anything human.

For the record, we don’t know what these structures are. However, it’s clear this doesn’t belong anywhere in the circulatory system.

Let’s take a look:

Nanowire in clots?
Clearly, Mike Adams hasn’t looked at very many protein fibers under the microscope.

As I like to say, clearly Adams’ experience looking at biological structures under the microscope is…limited. Of course, to Adams the silence of the medical and scientific community is evidence that there must be something nefarious going on here, because there must always be a conspiracy theory:

I believe the structures you are seeing above are the result of mRNA protein synthesis instructions which have been injected into people under the false umbrella of “vaccines.” I welcome input from other experts who may have other theories or explanations of where this is coming from.

More research is needed to confirm the function and composition of these structures, yet because of the extreme censorship and “science authoritarianism” that now exists in the world, no lab or university will dare examine these clots and honestly report the results. To do so would risk losing all NIH funding and federal grants, since the very same people who engineer vaccines and bioweapons also control most science funding in America.

Thus, only independent scientists, labs and journalists will dare tell the truth about these clots.

I wonder whether, if a real expert (not one of the crank pathologists out there looking at COVID-19 vaccines under the microscope and misidentifying dust particles or other artifacts of poor sample preparation to something nefarious) were to tell Adams what he was actually looking at, it would make a difference. I think you know the answer. Also, one wonders if Adams has ever actually asked a reputable pathology lab to look at these clots. Actually, one doesn’t. However, Adams does need his conspiracy theories in which “they” won’t look at evidence showing that COVID-19 vaccines are causing clots that kill young adults en masse. While it is possible that more clots are being found in people who die, if true it’s far more likely that COVID-19 itself is responsible, not vaccines.

This is, of course, not the first time Adams has done something like this. Longtime readers might remember an incident from nine years ago, when when Mike Adams decided that he’d take a microscope and look at Chicken McNuggets. Hilarity definitely ensued. Adams inadvertently provided a treasure trove of unintentional humor for anyone who was the least bit knowledgeable about science or microscopy as he expressed extreme alarm over his findings, saying that “microscopic photos reveal an alien-like landscape with weird shapes and fibers.” To me he sounded like someone who’d never looked at common every day objects under a microscope before. After all, pretty much every object, if you magnify it enough, will reveal an “alien-like landscape with weird shapes” and, possibly, depending on what you’re looking at, fibers. When I looked at the images published by Adams, the “hair-like” objects that he found looked like dust to me, while the black dots looked like pepper and the red and green dots that he showed could easily have been seasoning of some sort. Some of the “fibers” looked like nothing more than muscle fibers, given that meat is muscle. At the time, I characterized Adams as Inspector Clouseau with a microscope.

That characterization still holds up.

By Orac

Orac is the nom de blog of a humble surgeon/scientist who has an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his copious verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few probably will. That surgeon is otherwise known as David Gorski.

That this particular surgeon has chosen his nom de blog based on a rather cranky and arrogant computer shaped like a clear box of blinking lights that he originally encountered when he became a fan of a 35 year old British SF television show whose special effects were renowned for their BBC/Doctor Who-style low budget look, but whose stories nonetheless resulted in some of the best, most innovative science fiction ever televised, should tell you nearly all that you need to know about Orac. (That, and the length of the preceding sentence.)

DISCLAIMER:: The various written meanderings here are the opinions of Orac and Orac alone, written on his own time. They should never be construed as representing the opinions of any other person or entity, especially Orac's cancer center, department of surgery, medical school, or university. Also note that Orac is nonpartisan; he is more than willing to criticize the statements of anyone, regardless of of political leanings, if that anyone advocates pseudoscience or quackery. Finally, medical commentary is not to be construed in any way as medical advice.

To contact Orac: [email protected]

54 replies on “Clots and COVID-19 vaccines: Misadventures under the microscope”

@ Orac:
Well, what would you expect from Mikey! Hilarity

On his HealthRanger.com site/ profile bio:
he has a BS degree but his later writing ( My Brush with Poverty , NN) says his degree is in Technical Writing, mostly about computers. Possibly U Kansas, Lawrence
( in the HR bio) he brags about all of the areas he’s studied, including economics and ” early college courses in microbiology and genetics” but not much else of relevance that I can find

When he started his so-called lab several years ago, he said that he taught himself how to do analyses, use equipment etc. He bought, used cut-rate equipment from universities on line.
The rest is history.

Of the two photos that you included, I really don’t know what those structures in the first one are. Since it’s a Gram stain, it might be a clump of gram+ bacteria, but certainly not circuitry. Postmortem overgrowth of bacteria is very common, and I usually actively avoided Gram stains on autopsy material unless they would have been highly relevant to the case.

The second image kind of looks like a hair. It’s hard to judge without knowing the magnification.

I assume that he is using a dissecting microscope to look at an entire fragment rather than processing the specimen properly and cutting five micron sections, the standard thickness for routine microscopy. Again, the use of a Gram stain makes interpretation really difficult.

Doing non-standard things can make it difficult for others to figure out what he’s looking at. That may be the point.

It is definitely a hair. Most likely a human hair. Googling human hair and microscopy bring up exactly the same kind of images. Since Adams was not there when the specimen was collected he cannot exclude sample contamination. The specimen was at some point definitely sticky.

I am also pretty confident that he got all the magnifications wrong. He is clearly using a dissection microscope with reflected illumination. There is no way he is getting a 1000x magnification. He would need transmitted light and section his samples. A lot what he shows is simply dust. And the word magnification is meaningless for digital images, because it depends how large the image is somebody is looking at.

Is it even legal to take samples from a dead body and give them to somebody like Adams? There is nothing mentioned which shows whether that the deceased or his family would have agreed to any of this.
Don’t know if removing tissue would fall under this:
https://mynbc15.com/news/local/new-law-requires-family-notification-for-organ-donors.

How can you be an antivaxxer without misinterpreting/misunderstanding the research?

As I mentioned in a post in the Kirsch/Wakefield thread a few days ago, Adams is woefully misinformed about the appearance of genuine antemortem thrombi (which may have medical significance), versus postmortem clots commonly seen at autopsy, which have zero significance. Adams’ NN piece referred to “normal clots” which he thinks are “gelatinous, almost jelly-like, which is incorrect – he’s actually describing postmortem clots as opposed to real thrombi which are typically more fibrous-appearing, tend to adhere to blood vessel walls and show a layered appearance, corresponding to deposition of platelets, fibrin and red blood vessels (the macroscopic “lines of Zahn” that med students are taught to recognize as clinically significant clots).

That’s what makes Adams’ claim that “no lab or university will dare examine these clots and honestly report the results” so hilarious. If you bother to take thin sections of actual thrombi (or emboli) and process them for light microscopy, you can clearly identify those layers and verify whether the clots were antemortem (and potentially significant) or represent postmortem artifact. If the thrombus has been in place for long enough (hours to days), a process called organization takes place, in which there is ingrowth of fibroblasts and inflammatory cells into the clot, with eventual formation of fibrous tissue and capillaries, as in this microphotograph:

http://i.pinimg.com/originals/27/3c/9e/273c9eb33712207a4d9a75590c6f2b53.jpg

The images which Adams promotes as “shocking” look to me like postmortem clots that have undergone chemical treatment (i.e. by embalming fluid) and/or air drying.

Conclusion: Adams once again has shown himself to be laughably incompetent as a “scientist” and microscopist. His latest big moment is a pratfall.

“Conclusion: Adams once again has shown himself to be laughably incompetent as a “scientist” and microscopist. His latest big moment is a pratfall.”

Completely irrelevant. What matters is he’s a competent storyteller, weaving a narrative powerfully effective at separating the paranoid narcissists from their coin. Remember, these people want to believe. Mikey’s just selling them what they’re happy to pay for. If all you skeptics can’t sell them a more desirable story, you might as well admit you have already lost.

Adams isn’t incompetent as a scientist or microscopist because he isn’t a scientist or microscopist. (Claiming to be a thing doesn’t really make you one.) But what is he? Whatever, we call it, he doesn’t seem to be incompetent at it, as he appears to have built not just a successful business but an internet following around it. We could, of course, call him a pseudoscientist, but that begs the question of what pseudoscience is — which is not sufficiently answered by delineating what it isn’t – e.g. “correct” etc. That rubric might be too broad for Mikey, since there certainly different forms, degrees, etc. of pseudoscience, and Adams’s is pretty extreme. I.e. he’s way off in the deep end of the conspiracy theory pool — I don’t know f-all about microscopy, but I know there ain’t no nanowires. But maybe his extremism may just make clearer some defining feature of the category that exists in more modest measures in more moderate forms. (I am, honestly, speculating, as in ‘not at all sure, just trying out some ideas.’)

I can’t help but seeing the current COVID iteration of hard-core antivax as at least a parallel, if not a related phenomenon, to ‘Big Lie’ election-denial conspiracy theory. The election deniers even have their own pseudoscience ‘proofs’ of fraud, from Douglas Frank’s “third order polynomial” to Dinesh D’Souza’s 2000 Mules. Like Adams’s interpretations of his microscope pics, I think it’s fair to say these ‘arguments’ are only convincing to people who arrive at them really, really, REALLY wanting to believe them.

And that, it appears, is all but impenetrable to debunking, no matter the source or the facts brought to bear. A local election board in NM refused to certify vote totals in the recent primary because Dominion voting machines were used. Last week, we see video of William Barr laughing off i>2000 Mules for the foolishness it is. This week, Republicans in the Michigan State Legislature are demanding the State Attorney General investigate it’s claims. This morning, an MSNBC host asked a political columnist from Florida whether he thought the 1/6 committee hearings would get Trump people to change their minds, and he replied something to the effect that studies show people tend to double down when their beliefs are challenged, so, no, he wasn’t expecting much if any change.

And i thought, yes, there it is, the power of belief… the triumph of belief. Maybe that’s why Trump has such a following, he’s a paradigm of asserting will over ‘objective’ reality, warping the situation around him to bend to what he professes to believe. At once role model and unchallengeable master. That he has few if any actual core beliefs, but only whatever serves his narcissism at the moment just makes the power of his belief more perfect, unfettered as it is from anything but itself.

In a recent post on Adams tying COVID vaccines to SADS, Orac chronicled how hard-care antivaxers have blamed anything and everything imaginable on vaccines, giving enough examples that i could only react, ‘this is just nuts!’ By which I mean the phenomenon is of another realm entirely from the good doctor’s explanation of what SADS actually is, why vaccines have nothing to do with it — all of which is just operating in terms that are actually irrelevant to how the phenomenon at hand functions. It’s just this massive Krakatoa of belief in the Evil of Vaccines that carries everything along on the waves that emanate from its epicenter.

So i suggest that what Mike Adams is, is a provider of belief services. His function is not unlike a priest, or preacher, or witchdoctor. Not that he or his ‘flock’ understand their relationship in anything like the self-conscious terms many people have with their religious beliefs, ‘say what you will, i have my faith.’ They just, somehow, know they have the righteous Truth. Anything that reinforces that is worthy of celebration — nanowires? sure, why not!! — anything that goes in the other direction must come from the insidiously hidden cabals of The Dark Side: Big Pharma, Satan, Joe Biden, transgender communist groomer great-replacement gazpacho police…

In sum, what I’m suggesting is that it’s a mistake to think of the Mike Adams’s of the world as just incompetent or funny. That’s bringing in a set of standards that don’t apply, and it’s just wishful thinking on our part to imagine they do.

@ sadmar:

” A provider of belief services”…. who creates gospel for a certain segment of the population which has been described by the psychologists that I’ve quoted.

Moreover, Mikey is a writer whose “talents” include the psychological skill to understand what his chosen audience requires. HIs article, My Brush with Poverty, NN, tells how he accompanied his Taiwan-born wife to that country: they couldn’t find work as he couldn’t speak Chinese and companies didn’t hire married women- he wrote up descriptions / adverts about tech products and Ms Adams translated and then hawked them as brochures to companies selling computers etc at trade shows.

Similarly, Null came to NYC from WV and did hack writing for an editor and appeared on low rent radio, then was approached to write a book about health. Which he “researched” as he went along. Like Adams, he understands his audience who are aggrieved with reality-based material and have many axes to grind. Both exhibit contempt for the
“elites” who have power and gravitas as well as respectable degrees and CVs.

I’ve always suspected that the reason these dudes are able to affect their audiences is because they themselves are very similar in personality and social class. They are not well educated, lower middle class, small town, rural and have issues with how a great part of the country has lived in the past 30-40 years and harken back to the edenic ( largely fictional ) past of down home traditional family life on the farm amidst good Christian folksiness. They often rant and rail against education although the each simultaneously parades their spurious or basic degrees and “research”.

They also know how to raise money: both sell products they design and have “charitable” orgs on their sites. And they provide a dose of g-d with their vitamins.
They scare their audiences and then sell them products to deal with the aforesaid problem AND the marks reward them for their ‘services’ to mankind.

I think he’s a liar. I think he doesn’t believe most of what he says. Maybe the base layer, but all the icing he slaps over the shit pile is just his version of ‘the end justifies the means’.

I’m not all that concerned about what Adams believes or doesn’t in his heart of hearts. I’m just trying to understand how his output functions within the subculture from which he draws followers. That said, there are all kinds of lies, so even if we take Mikey to be a liar, we’re just at a diagnostic level analogous to saying, “uh yeah, you’ve definitely got something.” Since I’m not up for going any deeper than that, I’ll just reiterate that the question isn’t so much Adams’s motives as why some people are so eager to jump on his pile.

Don’t dismiss the fact that he (and others like him) spread their misinformation and lies with certainty: they know A caused B because B followed A. They can say that the “science” (as they would refer to it) doesn’t show definitive results so “big pharma” must be hiding something — the thing the grifters are pushing.

Reagan demonstrated that you don’t need to tell the truth (which he never did) to get people on your side — you just need to lie with confidence. You see the same thing in the crap greg, labarge, and the other folks do here: they say things that are completely unsupported (and unsupportable) but assert them as though they are facts.

@ Idw56old:

What you write is so absolutely, fundamentally true! **
‘Lying with confidence’ is a good descriptor.

Whilst Orac, Dr Fauci or any of us might say ” It is most likely..” or ” probably true” or ” Studies show that usually this happens..” or ” vaccines decrease severe illness in most people”..

BUT alties talk about ” all”, “none”, “always” and make statements like ” Vaccines don’t work” and ” SBM cancer care fails”.

Because I listen to these liars, I know how they proceed :
— they present themselves as authorities with special cred because they reveal the truth about high level malfeasance
— they read off a laundry list of their previous findings and accomplishments
— it is said with an air of arrogance that they can’t be challenged, ex cathedra as it were.
— another list of the many failings of medicine, governments, media and corporations is read off, even if they need go back decades or centuries.

Their vocal tone and air of haughty certainty goes a long way.

** Oh wait, maybe I shouldn’t phrase it quite that way! Instead,
it’s quite true most of the time. As far as we can tell.

“You see the same thing in the crap greg, labarge, and the other folks do here: they say things that are completely unsupported (and unsupportable) but assert them as though they are facts.”

I disagree. While all are telling lies, Mikey is most likely a psychopath, fully cognizant that he’s lying to others to gain power and profit; whereas gerg, labilge, etc are narcissists, who don’t really understand they’re lying because the first person the narcissist instinctively lies to is himself: “I am Special. I am Right.” Their personal truth is Absolute Truth, because their person is Absolutely Everything.

The psychopath, when one of his scams fails, can cut his losses and quickly pivot to the next. Whereas the narcissist, upon others rejecting his Truth, is grossly insulted and doubles-down instead. Because a narcissist’s word is the narcissist, and the narcissist is never wrong.

This is why Mikey’s product is crafted to appeal to paranoid, narcissistic egos: he knows his market. He knows he’s lying; he doesn’t care. And when the narcs regurgitate Mikey’s lies, they know that they’re speaking Truth, because they checked them themselves and found a perfect fit.

“That which holds the image of an angel becomes itself an angel.”

“no lab or university will dare examine these clots and honestly report the results”

Well, that always gives a nice way out of anything that opposes his views. If they report their results, he just can say they are not reporting the real results and they are not honest..

I should add this about Mikey**:

He and the other loon have followers who listen religiously to every broadcast so there is frequently ‘information’ hidden within the depths*** of their meandering recitatives. Usually, it is not written down anywhere else or not highlighted as a title and often it contains highly suspicious content ( e.g. Mike’s secret sources who are intell officers/ his accomplishments in martial arts/ combat; Gary’s “cures” of hiv/aids or stage 4 cancer/ energy healing “research” and work in psychology)
BUT it’s there! and followers probably are influenced by it. In Mikey’s case, his bio says he has a BS degree but not in what area whilst his article about ‘poverty’ plainly states that it was in Technical Writing. Writing about computers IIRC Not Bio, Not Chemistry, Not Pre-med etc.

Also I notice that claims/ confabulation get wilder as the broadcast continues so 40 minutes in is much worse than 20 minutes in: probably more balanced minds give up before 30.

** and I believe that I am the first person to ever call him that
*** I skip around or leave the recording on as I do other work

“he has a BS degree”

That he does. As I recall, he was selling Y2K scams until the clock inevitably ran out on that. Pivoting onto alt-med was a sensible move; quackery never gets old. Of course, the same can be said for some percentage of its marks—not that ever slows these psychopaths. And whose blood does the rest of their market bay for? Hint: not theirs.

That science is not producing a better yarn is not science’s fault. It’s our own.

Still not as funny as the time Mike Adams put chicken Mcnuggets under the microscope and was horrified to find fibres.

I’m not a biologist or doctor, but I am in a STEM field and have done a bit of microscopy – what gets me even before I look at what’s in the image is that there are no scale bars. How is anyone supposed to know what any of this is if you can’t tell how big the alleged structures are?

“How is anyone supposed to know what any of this is”

Because Mikey told them.

A large percentage of society is raised not merely to accept the Word of Authority without question, but to crave it. Mikey may be a shameless opportunist, but he’s only profiting off what’s already been built.

Science folks may be smart, but you’re also kinda dumb. Y’all got outmaneuvered by kindergarten.

“Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.” – Aristotle

I avoid chicken nuggets based upon gross inspection alone! No need for pathologic examination

To Mikey, when cattle die** en masse, it isn’t due to extreme heat that the region recently experienced but that the magnetosphere is weakening as the poles begin to flip, developing “rifts” which allow intense solar radiation through ( yesterday) and here I thought it was because of a new cattle vaccine Fauci approved. /s.

— AoA speculates that cardiology for kids will become the specialty of choice for physicians because Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were approved for younger children so that all ages beyond 6 months are eligible

— Florida’s governor*** rescinded his former blocking of the new children’s vaccines. I wonder if a poll said that anti-vax wasn’t as big an issue determining votes for president.
Unfortunately, polls do say that many parents are hesitant about vaccinating younger children.

— anti-vax elitist, Katie Wright ( twitter) interminably harps on how children are being “harmed” by vaccines, masks and school shutdowns and any supporter of these policies. Like Mike, she is way out of her depth on PH questions.

The fact that vaccines will now be available for younger kids will give anti-vaxxers and alties loads of impetus for comments. posts, tweets, protests and probably , songs.

** which will lead to a beef shortage- he had to get that in
*** Maher says he isn’t as bad as Trump

I think that the understandably confused and freaked out have moved on by now. Despite all the propaganda, most people getting serious cased are unvaxxed, and for every person in the “I was vaxxed and got it anyway club!” there’s multiple people in that very dull club called “I’m dead.” Their friends got the message.

Sure would be nice if the College of American Pathologists would call Adams’ claims and “expertise” for what they are: complete fraud and garbage.

Yeah, I can dream, can’t I. If the pandemic taught me anything it’s that I was an idiot to hope that the medical societies/academies/licensing & specialty boards would actually do something against disinformers (be they actual disinforming physicians or outright frauds like Adams playing at being a medical expert).

According to The Highwire, Thursday, Peter McCullough received a letter from the ACIM, his board, informing him that he will be reviewed for his misinformation about Covid. He was not happy.
Good.

I can’t imagine the College of American Pathologists bothering to call out a non-physician, non-scientist lunacy-monger like Mike Adams. As for pathologists that stray from reality, note that they are not required to be members of the CAP or the other major pathology advocacy and education organization, the ASCP, and I can’t recall either group tossing out members who’ve promoted quackery.

Still, the CAP has reportedly “distanced” itself from Dr. Ryan Cole, the Idaho pathologist who’s gained a national following over his attacks on Covid-19 vaccines, including the claim that vaccinated people are experiencing a spike in cancers (Cole said he was seeing a 20X increase in endometrial cancers), and promotion of alternative remedies for Covid-19. The American Board of Pathology urged the Washington Medical Commission to investigate Cole over his Covid-19-related claims, and an investigation has ensued.

Recent updates on Cole include reports that he misdiagnosed cancer in a woman, resulting in major surgery that turned up no cancer, and wrongly reported precancerous cells in a biopsy from another patient, a finding not confirmed on review. Activities at his laboratory have also come under scrutiny.

http://idahocapitalsun.com/2022/05/06/idaho-doctor-who-falsely-links-covid-19-vaccine-to-cancer-has-misdiagnosed-patients/

http://idahocapitalsun.com/2022/05/06/taking-covid-19-funds-cole-was-reckless-with-lab-operations-records-and-former-staff-say/

“Sure would be nice if the College of American Pathologists would call Adams’ claims and “expertise” for what they are: complete fraud and garbage.”

Nope. Pig wrestling. With a near infinite supply of pigs.

For a regulatory insititution to engage with gutter trash only raises the trash’s status and proves they have power. Narcs crave attention: positive or negative, they don’t care. The only way to win is not to give them any. Ever. At all.

Boards should, on the other hand, have zero tolerance for their own members’ misbehavior. Any member who amplifies this garbage should be stripped of accreditation and thrown out in disgrace. That will speak louder about honesty and standards in medicine than any dumb pissing match with a professional pisser like Mike Adams.

Individual pathologists who choose to excoriate Adams are welcome to do so. Especially if they bring popcorn, as there is one form of attention narcs do not like: being laughed at. So let’s have more of that. Lots more.

“If the pandemic taught me anything it’s that I was an idiot to hope that the medical societies/academies/licensing & specialty boards would actually do something against disinformers”

So who regulates the regulators?

If boards are failing to censure their bad members, it falls on the good members to join up and use their massed weight to stomp their board into doing its damn job: protecting them. For by tolerating bad apples they rot the entire barrel. If the last 2 years have proved anything, it is that shruggie-ism is an abdication of social duty that no self-respecting medical professional can afford. Otherwise, what’s the use of your profession?

“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.” – Calvin Coolidge

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’.” – Isaac Asimov

Ah, Cal Coolidge, patron saint of the mediocre…at least until Senator Roman Hruska (R-Nebraska) turned up to defend a less-than-impressive Supreme Court nominee.

“Even if he [Harold Carswell] were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they? We can’t have all Brandeises and Frankfurters and Cardozos.”

Persistence and determination – ah yes, survival fallacy anyone?
I remember an interview with Todd McFarlane and he told about his repeated attempts to get into comics, Marvel I think. He remembered thinking after his 100th rejection about when does determination slip into delusion?

This strikes me as an optically elevated form of grave robbing. Are there any ethical limits on what morticians can do with what ends up in their collection jars? If this had happened in a hospital morgue, it would presumably be a HIPAA violation.

As to the interpretation of the samples by Adams, it’s not so much the fact that looking at dried down gunk will show you all kinds of weird shapes, or that postmortem biological material may look strange. It’s the ability to be horrified, or to feign being horrified, and to concoct some conspiratorial explanation based on the demon of the day that is of interest here. Apparently this guy has a talent for finding something to be scared about every ten years or so — which is to say, whenever he partially dusts off his microscope and looks at the remaining dust.

The picture of the silvery thingies appearing to emerge from the jello-ey yellow wafts — the one that indeed doesn’t look like a microchip — does kinda look like something out of a Cronenbergian body-horror film. “Long Live The New Flesh”? Maybe Mikey’s been watching too much underground video on Civic TV.

Videodrome? James Woods and Debby Harry? That was a new flesh kind of movie.

Did you not recognize my avatar above as Dr. Brian O’Blivion? “The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye…”

“Apparently this guy has a talent for finding something to be scared about every ten years or so”

More like every ten minutes.

Oh no! I’ve looked at sheep’s wool under a microscope and seen those scales! I was always told it was why wool felts but now I see the truth that SHEEP ARE LIZARDS TOO! Wake up, sheeple! ?

I was thinking this as well. I doubt the human beings that these samples came from gave permission to use their tissues in this way.

I don’t understand how this is suppose to even pass the facial possibility test, even among Adams readers, regardless of what he says about the clots – just based on his prediction of “everyone will die”. It is June 2022. The vaccines started to be given at the end of 2020. They have been given to hundreds of millions in the U.S. alone, many more world wide. There have not been millions of clot-related deaths among the vaccinated. It just did not happen. And?

“There have not been millions of clot-related deaths among the vaccinated. It just did not happen.”

Doesn’t matter. It’s not a statement of fact; it’s an article of faith. Its power derives from how hard its adherents Believe, not from how much they Know.

Indeed, for such people, knowledge and belief are one and the same. It is so much easier to lie to yourself when you know you are already Right. While arch-manipulators, from Adams to Hitler, laugh all the way to the bank.

I don’t blame the liars who lie to others. They are simply predators acting according to nature; inhuman. I blame the liars who lie to themselves. Enablers who, by their enabling, become abusers themselves. Shit humans. May they all enjoy the blood clots that are caused by COVID19.

A former Miss Brazil has died at age 27, after months in a coma due to reported complications following a tonsillectomy which included severe bleeding.

The Health Nut News lady, Erin Elizabeth is agog about this event, coyly saying “Guess what she had?”

I dunno, EE, what did she have? A Big Mac? A dose of coconut oil? A subscription to Joe Mercola’s newsletter?

Don’t hint around, tell us.

Mike Adams continued his examination of the mysterious clots by adding concentrated nitric acid to a clot sample. He used dog food as a control.
https://www.brighteon.com/74a43e7c-eabc-46ed-a2a1-7cf771e0fafe
He observed highly unusual reactivity with sputtering, popping and evolution of red-brown gas!
Just one problem, the clot material was stored in isopropyl alcohol. All of the “clot reactivity” is due to the alcohol. Several commenters have pointed out the problem. We shall see if Mike ignores them and sticks with his dramatic narrative.

I saw something about that, but I really don’t know if I have the intestinal fortitude tonight to sample that video.😂

[…] I encountered this “theory” (and I certainly use the term loosely) than two weeks ago, when Mike Adams finally reported the results of his ICP-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) analysis of the elemental mineral composition blood clots supplied to him by a dodgy, conspiracy-minded embalmer named Richard Hirschman who had claimed to have recovered them from bodies that he had embalmed. As was pointed out to me, this was, of course, totally unethical unless this embalmer had obtained the prior consent of the next of kin of the deceased to harvest anything from their bodies (even clots) for “research,” something that was never really discussed or clarified. It also didn’t matter that Adams used blood as his “control” to compare to the clots because he labored under the ignorant delusion that blood clots are nothing more than just “congealed blood.” (They’re not; although they do contain platelets and some trapped red and white blood cells, clots are mostly made up protein.) It did lead to my laughing as he expressed amazement on more than one occasion that the elemental composition of blood clots was different than that of blood. (Not as much as his claims that these clots were “self-assembling nanostructures, but enough.) Earlier, Adams had looked at the same clots under the microscope and found the aforementioned “self-assembling nanostructures” (although he took care to say only that they might be “self-assembling nanostructures,” pending further analysis), with hilarious results. […]

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