Category Archives: Germ Warfare

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When pandemics have led to persecution of certain communities, which has been pretty common as we discussed in the previous article, they are often accused of using disease as a biological weapon. The Jews were accused of poisoning the wells of the Christians at the time of Black Death for instance. There has been a lot of discussion currently about COVID-19 being used as a biological weapon by China. Although much of these accusations does not hold water, and reflect cultural prejudices, it is also a fact these fears are based on stories about similar use of disease as a biological weapon in history.

As far back as 1000 BC, the Chinese are supposed to have poisoned water sources of their enemies with arsenic. In fact, poisoning or infecting water sources seems to have been a common strategy. The Romans had poisoned the wells of the besieged enemy cities in 130 BC. In the 12th century, the Holy Roman Emperor, Barbarossa is supposed to have used bodies of dead soldiers to poison the wells of enemies. And as recently as in the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, the Red Cross had accused the Israeli militia of releasing the typhoid bacteria into the water supply of the city of Acre, causing an outbreak of typhoid.

The most well-known story of biological warfare in history is linked to the deadliest pandemic in history, the Black Death. It is well established that the plague arrived in Europe at the port of Messina on Genovese trading ships fleeing Kaffa, a Genoese trading port in Crimea. According to many historians, when the Mongol hordes got affected by plague themselves and were on the verge of abandoning their siege of Kaffa, they used catapults to throw diseased corpses inside the city walls. The plague then spread within the city, leading to some Italians fleeing the city on ships carrying the plague with them to Italy and thereby Europe.

Photo:https://militaryhistorynow.com/2014/02/06/we-have-met-the-enemy-and-they-are-small-a-brief-history-of-bug-warfare/

Another well known story of biological warfare is from the wars between the British and the native Indians in America. When the British were besieged by the Delaware Indians at Fort Pitt (which became Pittsburgh) in 1763, they gifted the Indians two blankets and a handkerchief already contaminated with small pox hoping that disease would lead to ending the siege. The attempt has been well documented though the impact has been debatable though the Indians did suffer an outbreak of small pox soon after. Similarly, the small pox epidemic that ravaged the Aborigines in Australia in 1789 has been argued as a case of deliberate infection.

Also Read:Pandemics In History 1: Shipping The Virus

Also Read:Pandemics In History 2: Rats And The PlagueAlso Read:Pandemics In History 3: From Rats To Bats

The development and use of biological weapons in the 20th century is well documented understandably. With the support of scientific advancements, countries started researching and trying out efficient ways of using disease as a biological weapon. By 1933, Japan had built a bioweapons lab in Manchuria, where the notorious Japanese army doctor Shiro Ishii was testing such weapons on Chinese prisoners. Many countries were quick to follow. The US also set up a bioweapon research facility in Maryland. Both the US and the former Soviet Union had developed the technology to spread Yersinia directly and efficiently as an aerosol.

The research and development of biological weapons using disease became so widespread and alarming that most of these countries came together in 1972 to ban them in the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. The Soviet Union, however, was believed to be secretly developing biological weapons and that was later confirmed when Dr. Vladimir Pasechnikdefected in 1989 and confirmed the rumours.

Also Read:Pandemics In History 4: A Tale Of Two Countries

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But the weapons that were being developed were targeted unlike the biological weapons in thrillers and science fiction, which targeted the human race including the people developing it. Soon after COVID-19 broke out, excerpts from the novel Eyes of Darkness by Dean Koontz became viral and it was hailed as a prophetic novel for talking about Wuhan-400, the germ developed at the lab outside Wuhan, and which can wipe out entire cities and countries. What many do not know is that this novel was first published in 1981 at the height of the Cold War, and the germ was called Gorky-400 in the first edition. When the 2nd edition was published in 1989 at the end of the Cold War, it was renamed as Wuhan-400 as China was the new threat to the US.

Photo: https://www.siasat.com/wuhan-400-novel-predicted-coronavirus-40-years-ago-1830971/

It is because of this recent history of the development of biological weaponry, which was highly targeted and designed to ensure minimal fatalities on the sides of the attackers that many experts of biological weapons such as Dan Kaszeta argue quite convincingly that COVID-19 is not a biological weapon.

Also Read: Pandemics In History 7: Pandemics And Persecution

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Pandemics In History- 8: Disease As Weapon - ODISHA BYTES - OdishaBytes

Are These On Your List Of Penny Stocks To Watch In May 2020?

Regardless of which names are on your list of penny stocks, this week will be an interesting one. While the coronavirus captivated headlines most of this year, China trade could be a focus for the broader markets.

Last week, President Trump threatened to reignite a China trade war in the middle of a global recession and pandemic. This ended up sending the major indexes sharply lower on Friday. Over the weekend this has continued to gain buzz online. Over the weekend, we also saw comments from the Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett. He told shareholders at the annual Berkshire meeting that the firm sold its holdings in airline stocks amid the coronavirus pandemic.

[Special Report]The Biggest Market Opportunity Of 2020: Coronavirus

I think there are certain industries, and unfortunately, I think that the airline industry, among others, that are really hurt by a forced shutdown by events that are far beyond our control, he said. Theres no doubt that investors have taken into account the lasting effects of the novel coronavirus pandemic. Will airline stocks recover? Thats a question better suited for when the economy is back to some kind of normal in my opinion.

What has also gained attention over the weekend were comments made by Gilead (GILD Stock Report). The companys CEO, Daniel ODay told CBS Face of the Nation that the company intends to get remdesivir to patients in the early part of this coming week. Gileads CEO said it wants to work with the government to determine which cities are most vulnerable and where the patients are that need this medicine.

In addition to this Gilead also donated its entire supply of the drug to the U.S. Government. Whether thats good or bad, it has shown the company aims to find a solution for this virus. ODay said, Weve donated the entire supply that we have within our supply chain and we did that because we acknowledge and recognize the human suffering, the human need here, and want to make sure nothing gets in the way of this getting to patients.

Last week the company released preliminary results from a clinical trial. It showed 50% of the COVID-19 patients that were treated saw improvement with a 5-day dose. The company expects to produce more than 140,000 rounds of its 10-day treatment regimen by the end of the month. It also expects to make around 1 million rounds by the end of 2020. Needless to say, there is still much more attention on companies working to address side-effects of the virus and will likely be a focus during the week ahead.

Penny Stock Basics: What Is The Best App For Penny Stocks?

Last week Algernon Pharmaceuticals (AGNPF Stock Report) (AGN) revealed big news last week on its latest treatment progress. Algernon announced late Wednesday afternoon that it has received a No Objection Letter from Health Canada to proceed with a NP-120 (Ifenprodil) COVID-19 Phase 2b/3 multinational clinical trial. The same study protocol is being prepared for submission to the U.S. FDA and Australian regulatory authorities.

The trial will begin as a Phase 2b study and after an interim analysis is performed on the first 100 patients, the data will determine the number of expected patients needed to reach statistical significance in a Phase 3 trial. With positive preliminary data, the clinical trial will move directly from a Phase 2b into a Phase 3.

This news came on the heels of Algernons receipt of regulatory and ethics approval for Phase 2 Ifenprodil COVID-19 human study in South Korea. The company has even received positive feedback from the U.S. FDA for a new intravenous formulation of the treatment. The FDA has advised that for the toxicology program of the new intravenous Ifenprodil formulation, a single animal 30-day study would be acceptable.

With all of this progress, Algernon stock has managed to reach new all-time highs of $0.4867 and marked a run of 188% from April 1 to April 30th. After the late-week pullback from highs, is Algernon set for another rally in May?

One of the late-breaking penny stocks to watch from last week was Fluidigm Corporation (FLDM Stock Report). For most of the Friday session, shares of FLDM stock were quiet. But during the later afternoon session, the penny stock shot up from around $2.15 to highs of $4.39. Why did Fluidigm stock rally so strongly last week?

To get a better understanding, you should know what the company does. Fluidigm focuses on cancer, immunology, and immunotherapy. Using proprietary CyTOF and microfluidics technologies, the company has a multi-omic solution for testing and diagnostics. Fluidigm began focusing its efforts on COVID-19 to research applications for SARS-CoV-2 virus detection. To this end, FLDM stock managed to take off after the company gained attention in an article on The Guardians website.

Titled US germ warfare research leads to new early Covid-19 test, the article discusses a test that has the potential to identify carriers before they become infectious. Within the article released on May 1, Chris Linthwaite, the chief executive of Fluidigm was quoted. He said that this test could have exceptional demand. Hes referring to a project involving Fluidigm to develop a blood-based test. The goal is to be able to detect a viruss presence as early as 24 hours after infection.

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According to the Guardian, the test has emerged from a project set up by the US militarys Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa). Its aimed at rapid diagnosis of germ or chemical warfare poisoning. It was hurriedly repurposed when the pandemic broke out according to The Guardian. The new test is expected to be put forward for emergency use approval by the US FDA within a week.

Shares of Millendo Therapeutics Inc. (MLND Stock Report) saw a strong close to the week last week. The penny stock tumbled in early April after reporting unsuccessful results from a Phase 2b clinical trial. The trial was for evaluating lead drug livoletide in patients with Prader-Willi syndrome. Its an inherited disorder characterized by obesity and type 2 diabetes due to insatiable hunger.

After dropping to lows of $1.26, MLND stock has been working to regain its previous trading levels. There is still a long way to go considering that earlier this year, MLND traded above $9 a share. Needless to say, hopes remain high for some of the perma-longs in this stock. Friday saw MLND stock kick May off with a bang. More than 6.4 million shares traded while the penny stock reached a high of $2.13. After closing at $1.85, the buzz surrounds what comes next.

Millendo hasnt released any big updates to speak of. Furthermore, the last corporate filing simply included the companys filed proxy statement on April 24. However, something of note came in a statement made during the April 6 result PR that could have sparked interest in the company.

With the rapidly evolving COVID-19 global pandemic and the extraordinary burden it has put on hospitals and healthcare providers, we are monitoring the potential impact of the situation on these programs and will provide an update when we have more clarity on expected timelines.

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Midam Ventures, LLC | (305) 306-3854 | 1501 Venera Ave, Coral Gables, FL 33146 | news@pennystocks.com

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What Are The Best Penny Stocks To Watch This Week? 3 For Your List - Penny Stocks

Apr 23rd 2020

Editors note: The Economist is making some of its most important coverage of the covid-19 pandemic freely available to readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. To receive it, register here. For our coronavirus tracker and more coverage, see our hub

THE CORONAVIRUS that has killed over 180,000 people worldwide was not created with malice. Analysis of its genome suggests that, like many new pathogens, it originated by natural selection rather than human design. But if SARS-COV-2 had been deliberately engineered or launched into the world by malefactors, the consequences might have been much the same. Covid-19 has demonstrated the vulnerability of the US and global economy to biological threats, which exponentially increases the potential impact of an attack, says Richard Pilch of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. Those concerns are prompting renewed interest in the threat from biological weapons, a lurid corner of warfare that normally languishes in happy obscurity.

In theory, bioweapons are banned. Most countries in the world are party to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) of 1975, which outlaws making or stockpiling biological agents for anything other than peaceful purposes. But some countries probably make them secretly, or keep the option close at hand. America accuses North Korea of maintaining an offensive biological-weapons programme, and alleges that China, Iran and Russia dabble in dual-use research. Toxins like ricin have also been bought and sold on shady recesses of the internet known as the dark web.

Germ warfare briefly rose to prominence in September 2001, when letters laced with anthrax spores were mailed to American news organisations and senators, killing five people. That was a wake-up call. Public health became part of national security. BioWatch, a network of aerosol sensors, was installed in more than 30 cities across America. But in recent years threats from chemical weapons, like the sarin dropped by Syrias air force and the Novichok smeared on door handles by Russian assassins, took priority.

Though the Trump administration published a national biodefence strategy in 2018, it shut down the National Security Councils relevant directorate and proposed cuts to the laboratories that would test for biological threats. Funding for civilian biosecurity fell 27% between fiscal years 2015 and 2019, down to $1.61bnless than was spent on buying Black Hawk helicopters. Its the kind of thing thats very easy to cut where you dont see the damage youre doing until youre in a situation like this, says Gigi Gronvall of the Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security.

Biological weapons are now likely to rise up the agenda, though the lessons from covid-19 are not clear-cut. The Department of Homeland Security warns that extremist groups have sought to spread the virus deliberately, and Mr Pilch says that it has challenged some long-standing assumptions regarding what biological agent may be used as a weapon. Yet many pathogens used as weapons tend to differ from respiratory viruses in important ways.

Those like anthrax, caused by bacteria which form rugged and sprayable spores, but do not spread from human to human, have the advantage of minimising the risk of rebound to the attacker. With the notable exception of smallpoxa highly contagious and lethal virus that was eradicated in 1979 but preserved by the Soviet Union for use against America (but not Europe), and now exists only in two laboratories, in America and Russiamost biological weapons would therefore have more localised effects than the new coronavirus.

Even so, the slow and stuttering response to the pandemic has exposed great weaknesses in how governments would cope. This outbreak has put stress on pretty much every element you need to respond to a biological attack, says Gregory Koblentz of George Mason University, and yet what were seeing is every part of our public-health infrastructure is either broken or stretched to the max. The centrepiece of Americas biosurveillance programme, a network of laboratories designed for rapid testing, failed, says Mr Koblentz, while the national stockpile of face masks had not been substantially replenished in over a decade. Would-be attackers will take note.

Governments are also worried about a new generation of biological threats. In 2016 American intelligence agencies singled out genome editing as a national-security threat for the first time. Two years later a major study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine warned that synthetic biology, a potent set of methods for tinkering with or creating organisms, could, in time, be used to re-create viruses like smallpox or make existing pathogens more dangerous, such as resistant to antibiotics.

In 2011 Dutch and Japanese scientists said that they had created a version of bird flu that could be transmitted between mammals by the respiratory routean announcement that prompted the Netherlands to treat the relevant academic papers as sensitive goods subject to export controls. In January Canadian scientists funded by an American biotech company used synthetic DNA from Germany to synthesise a microbe closely related to smallpox, indicating the ease with which it could be done. If a potential bad actor pursues a weapons capability using SARS-COV-2, the virus is now attainable in laboratories all around the world, and blueprints for assembling it from scratch have been published in the scientific literature, notes Mr Pilch.

The trouble is that biodefence has evolved slowly, says Dan Kaszeta, a former biological weapons adviser to the White House. Compact devices that can detect chemical threats and warn soldiers to don a gas mask have long been available. That doesnt exist for anthrax or any of the other aerosol pathogens, says Mr Kaszeta. Telling the difference between an anthrax spore and a bit of tree pollen is not something you can do in a couple of seconds.

Internationally, the issue is largely neglected. Theres no single facilitator in the UN system for a high-consequence biological event of unknown origin, says Beth Cameron of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, an NGO. The BWC, she says, operates on a shoe-string budget.

Military labs across the world are already heavily involved in the fight against covid-19, but government money is a drop in the ocean compared with the billions of dollars of private funds now being unleashed against the virus. One hope is that the crash efforts to develop better tests and a vaccine may yield so-called platform technologies that would have utility not only against coronavirus, but also a wide range of other biological threats. Anthrax, for instance, has a vaccine but requires a cumbersome five doses. The holy grail, says Mr Kaszeta, would be a broad-spectrum antiviral or vaccinea shield against natural and human foes alike.

Dig deeper:For our latest coverage of the covid-19 pandemic, register for The Economist Today, our daily newsletter, or visit our coronavirus tracker and story hub

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "Spore wars"

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The havoc wrought by covid-19 will spark new concern over bio-weapons - The Economist

Dr. Alison Matthews David giving her presentation on Fashion Victims and Germ Warfare for the National Arts Club (all screenshots by Elisa Wouk Almino/Hyperallergic)

Clothing can both harm and protect us, says fashion historian and author Dr. Alison Matthews David. For centuries, accessories like hats and gloves have been used as shields and even tools of self-defense. But clothing has also been an insidious carrier of disease.

On Tuesday, Matthews David was invited by New York Citys National Arts Club to share her research in a Zoom talk titled Fashion Victims: Germ Warfare. (The presentation drew heavily from her book Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Dress Past and Present.) The topic is only timely, as we consider what to wear and how to protect ourselves during the COVID-19 pandemic. Do virus particles spread through clothes? Should we wash our clothes every time we leave the house?

These anxieties, Matthews David revealed, are nothing new. In Victorian times, people believed long skirts dragged all kinds of diseases a 1900 cartoon from Puck magazine shows a maid dusting off clouds of influenza and typhoid from one such skirt. (Typhus did, in fact, travel through clothes that couldnt be laundered.) To help combat this, in the early 20th century, women began carrying around skirt grips to hitch up the trailing fabric. Matthews David suspects that the switch to shorter skirts had at least something to do with paranoias around hygiene.

Large, voluminous skirts, known as crinolines, are also being revisited as early forms of social distancing. While this seems funny at first, Matthews David says that women really did think of the skirt that way it gave them space in public, so that people couldnt touch or grab them. Similarly, broad-rimmed hats created a kind of protective orbit, preventing people from encroaching (in one caricature, a woman pokes a man with her hatpin for sitting too close to her on the train). The hats and skirts were social measures reflective of their era, but their relevance to our current moment is hard to overlook. A hoop skirt might be useful on those infrequent grocery trips.

Today, in pandemic times, were all rethinking about what we touch, said Matthews David. Were asking ourselves things like, Should I wear gloves? According to the historian, if we were to time travel to the 1800s, any member of the elite class would probably be disgusted by the suggestion of leaving the house without gloves shaking with ones bare hands was considered downright dirty.

The other major clothing item were all thinking about is, of course, masks. In one of her cleverly illustrated slides, Matthews David compared the masks that plague doctors wore equipped with a beak infused with sweet smells, which were thought to be protective to the more modern prototypes being fabricated by the likes of Chanel.

Once upon a time, masks were considered fashion items to protect ladies from dust and wind, Matthews David pointed out. But today, in Western culture, masks have primarily become signs of suspicion and distrust (the masked bandit).

When I asked Matthews David if she had to predict one change in how we dress after this pandemic has hopefully passed, she asserted, Social practice around clothing will change [] From a Western consumer perspective, I imagine that the cloth mask will become a staple in many wardrobes, especially in urban areas and close quarters like supermarkets. Well start carrying them around with us and put them on when necessary.

Our relationship to clothing is arguably already evolving, as we share our work-from-home outfits and dress for comfort. In an email exchange, Matthews David shared that shes been thinking about all the women sighing with relief in terms of going braless and whether womens dress tends to shift more than mens after times of crisis. (Consider the 1920s, when womens dress radically changed after World War I.)

As she touched upon during her talk, there is a powerful link between our mental and psychological health and what we wear. Major shifts like the pandemic we are experiencing now make us grow more conscientious of this connection, as some of us find newfound pleasure in putting on a nice outfit to run a supermarket errand.

At the end of the talk, which you can watch in full on YouTube, a listener asked Matthews David what measures she takes, if any, to avoid the various dangers of fashion in our present moment and beyond. Her advice: Im very careful to launder everything before I wear it.

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A Fashion Historian on the Relationship Between Clothing and Disease - Hyperallergic

Last Thursday, NBC announced it'll be doing a reunion episode of Parks and Recreation this Thursday, April 30,to benefit Feeding America'sCOVID-19 Response Fund.

Thanks to an inside source (who is 100 percent not Chris Pratt's dog baptizer), wewereable to get our hands on a leaked script of the special. It is WILD. (Editor's note: This is a parody, so read on.)

If you want to know all the nitty-gritty deets about the special, read on as we break down the scripts with this detailed recap. It is nothing but spoilers (not really), so don't put us on your list because we ruined things for you.

We begin with a cold open. Tom struts into the office, wearing a floor-length chenille parka. Except for Donna, nobody pays it any mind. Enraged that his sweet fit isnt getting the respect it deserves, Tom vows to turn the streets of Pawnee into his own personal runway.

People will be lining up around the block to give me high-fives when they see this, he shouts as he storms out. He comes back an hour later: It was a hit! I touched so many people both literally and poetically, like Babyface!

Two Days Later...

Perd Hapley announces that there are over 400 cases of COVID-19 in Pawnee. Nobody knows how the disease spread so quickly, but the town is in a panic.

Leslie fully activates her centrist Democrat powers and vows to beat this virus with 100 plans, 1,000 action items, across-the-aisle cooperation, and a little American can-do spirit. She convinces the city council to pass a stay-at-home order and close all nonessential businesses.

Unfortunately, everybody in town is written to be raving morons (like always) and wont cooperate. Ron Swanson is infuriated at this government overreach and vows to stay out of his house at all times. He walks within two feet of everybody else, shakes every hand within his reach, and makes a point to cough on any vegetables he sees.

Tom, feeling a little unwell but seeing a business opportunity, takes a meeting with Dennis Feinstein and pitches him on partnering up to produce a line of designer hazmat suits. Dennis instead convinces Tom to invest in Feinsteins Hand Xani: hand sanitizer that is 10 percent aloe vera and the remainder as liquid Xanax. Everybody coughs on Jerrys desk and touch it constantly because they're monsters.

Ann Perkins, the only useful person on this show, does what she can to fight the pandemic by pulling in extra shifts at the hospital.

Worried about his immune system being compromised, Chris orders a stillsuit that converts his waste into sanitizer. Ben tries to help Leslie sell her plan to the town by appearing on Joans talk show, but instead flies into a rage and ends up punching out Joan when she says that R.E.M. sucks. Andy, watching the show with a giggling April, mutters, Its not like it can get any worse, babe.

One Week Later...

Chaos reigns in Pawnee. Over 3,000 Pawneans are dead from COVID-19. Ron buries stashes of toilet paper around town. Tom dies after overdosing on Dennis Feinsteins Hand Xani and posthumously treats himself to being buried in a Gucci body bag. Due to Leslies stay-at-home orders, nobody attends his funeral except for Jean-Ralphio and DJ Roomba. Tears in his eyes, Jean-Ralphio empties a bottle of Snake Juice on Toms grave while Roomba plays Flo Rida.

April and Andy both get the virus. April seems to become even more dark and evil while Andy gets his brain super-sized and starts getting smarter.Chris has a plastic bubble built around him and his Peloton to protect his microchip from being compromised.

Ben scrambles to stop Sweetums from releasing a line of edible face masks while Leslie, in full-on crisis mode, produces a 2,000 page color-coded manual on stopping the pandemic. Nobody reads it.

Everyone in the office continues coughing, spitting, licking, and rubbing themselves all over Jerrys desk. He bears this constant, life-threatening germ warfare with good humor. Ann is too busy fighting the disease and helping people to waste her time with a B plot.Leslie, who is desperate for guidance, prays to Nancy Pelosi late at night. The silence of Nancy, like the silence of a merciful God, is deafening.

One month later.

A quarter of Pawnee is on fire. Eagletonians, realizing that their plan to literally throw money at sick people is failing, take refuge in Pawnee.

Diane and the girls are dead. Ron, broken and in the depths of despair, dyes his mustache black. After her beloved Mercedes gets infected, Donna empties a full clip into the engine and falls on top of the hood. She stains the pristine paint job with her tears. Ben receives a used Letters From Cleo CD in the mail and forgets to disinfect it. Leslie visits him every day in the hospital as he succumbs.

A guilt-ridden Ron, upset that his individualist beliefs doomed the town and destroyed all the people he loved, attempts to hang himself. However, the chair he stands, with its shabby craftsmanship, cant hold his weight. He weeps and begs God to take him.

Ben is dead. A numb and devastated Leslie leaves the hospital, leaving Ann behind, and walks down the burning streets. She finds Ron asleep outside a furniture store and lies down next to him. She dreams about a shirtless John McCain riding across the sky on a pale horse.

In the midst of all this, Andy has become a super genius. He has built a beer helmet that lets him talk to Bandit. He tries to get Mouserat back together, but the rest of the band are dead

Mark Brendanawicz returns to Pawnee as part of an emergency team sent by the federal government. Orrin, doing an archery recital for April and Andy, fires an arrow out the window and accidentally kills Mark. Nobody notices or cares.

Leslie returns home and is shocked to find Ben waiting for her. He reveals that hes Ben-Prime, a Ben from an alternate timeline who created a board game so complex, it opened a rift in the space-time continuum. Other Bens appear in the house from other timelines. The sight of them destroys Leslies fragile psyche.

The episode ends with a cut back to Chriss office. Traeger, injecting apple cider vinegar into his toes, notices theres a small rip inside his bubble. He screams in horror as the bubble collapses around him.

"The microchip," he shouts.

TO BE CONTINUED

We jump 10 years into the future.The U.S. government, desperate to prevent the Pawnee death-clap from spreading across the rest of the world, has dropped a giant dome on top of Pawnee and Eagleton. Chris Traeger, driven insane after catching a common cold, has transformed himself into a Randall Flagg-style satanic despot and rules "Plaguee" with an iron fist.

April, thanks to years of overbearing mentorship from Leslie, has become Chriss trusted aide-de-camp. She spends her days cheerfully typing up death lists for Chris to approve. April is jubilant every day now. Thats how bad things have gotten under the dome.

Opposing the dark lord Traeger is an underground resistance led by Jerry and Ann Perkins. Jerry is now a fearsome robo-warrior who crushes enemy skulls. Ann, still the only useful person in the hellscape, is hard at work developing a vaccine.

Leslie has retreated into alcoholism. A still-mournful Ron, refusing to be a joiner, hides inside the bunker and bides his time. Hopelessly addicted to snorting luxury shoe polish, Jean-Ralphio secretly leaks information about the resistance to Kyle, Chriss reluctant lackey.

Thanks to Ben-Primes time-shattering board game, more and more Bens continue to enter this reality and have become the new dumb and angry population of Plaguee. A Benleads a brutal attack on the resistance base. Leslie is taken prisoner while Donna goes down guns blazing. In her dying moments, she sees her 2011 Mercedes-Benz ML350 flashing its high beams down at her from Heaven.

In their darkest hour, the resistance is saved by Andy Dwyer, who has gotten so smart that hes figured out a plan to stop Chris and has come up with a way of sending all the Bens back to their original timelines. Ann sends Leslie to recruit Ron for a suicide mission: assassinating Chris Traeger by force-feeding him a double-patty bacon Angus slider.

Everything converges back at City Hall for the climax. Jerry rips out Kyles spine (after apologizing profusely), andApril kills Jerry by putting a spider in his inhaler. Ron succeeds in feeding Chris the burger, but dies from getting grazed by a tofu-laced bullet. His redeemed soul is borne aloft to Paradise by a heavenly host of angelic Tammies. At last, he can be with Diane and the girls!

Leslie, the newly elected president of Plaguee, sees that nobodys done any paperwork in the last 10 years and sobs uncontrollably on her John McCain body pillow.

Ann and Andy are both moments away from succeeding in making a vaccine when disaster strikes. Someone wheels an idol of Zorp the Surveyor into the town square in a shopping cart, claiming they found it in the woods. The idol is actually a nuclear bomb that Ron bought from a suspicious Russian at a woodcarving convention. The bomb goes off, instantly killing everyone in Pawnee and Eagleton.

Adult superstar Brandi Maxxx, who got the hell out of Pawnee long before the dome went down, watches all this happen on TV. The disintegration of Pawnee and Eagleton is the nations most popular reality show. She is now the only Pawnee citizen left.

Fade to black.

Ben-Prime returns to his timeline. He and Leslie are getting ready to move out of Pawnee. He tenderly embraces his wife. The camera pulls away from the couple and zeroes in on the TV in the living room. Hapley is on the air, positive and professional as always, reporting that Pawnee just got its first confirmed COVID-19 case. Cut to Andy making an OH MY GAWD face.

The end.

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Treat Yo Self to the (Fake) Leaked Parks and Recreation Reunion Special - Phoenix New Times

Saturday began as a day like any other for me: I woke up, poured myself a pot of coffee, and opened up Twitter to discover that I was a propagandist for the Chinese Communist government.

It turned out that Toronto Sun scribe Candice Malcolms weekly column was, in part, about me.

Dont let anyone stop you from asking tough questions about China, the headline read, and I was one of those supposedly standing in the way of her quest for Sino-justice.

Malcolm wrote that, in January, she had taken to her podcast and raised questions about the link between the new coronavirus and Chinas lone biosafety level-4 laboratory, but as has become a sad sign of our times, agenda-driven journalists quickly attempted to discredit these questions.

Canadian freelance writer Justin Ling wrote a post for Foreign Policy regurgitating Chinese propaganda that implied I and others were spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories by bringing up these questions.

The column, which ran across the country, is part of Malcolms attempt to rewrite her own corner of history, to make herself look like the Nostradamus of the Sun. Judging by some of the emails in my inbox, people are buying it.

Malcolm wrote that the theory that COVID-19 leaked from a Chinese laboratory is looking more credible with each passing day.

Which is, to begin with, not really accurate. But, for Malcolm, an occasional Rebel Media guest and former contributor, the theory has to be true. She, after all, predicted it! Or so she implies in the column.

On the January 27 edition of her YouTube show, Malcolm asked her 4,901 viewers: Why isnt the mainstream media talking about the origin of this deadly virus? Could it be linked to Chinas biological warfare program?

She later introduces the story by saying she noticed this story in The Washington Times over the weekend.

First off: Why is Candice Malcolm reading The Washington Times? Many have a habit for confusing the Times with the conservative-but-still-reputable Washington Examiner. They are very different. The Times has a long history of running junk race science and publishing literal white-supremacist writers, is virulently Islamophobic, has run stories contributing to the Seth Rich conspiracy theory, and was a major proponent of the Barack Obama birther movement.

The story Malcolm referred to reported that COVID-19 may have originated from a covert biological weapons program, citing an Israeli biological warfare analyst.

Reading the whole story, it is immediately clear that the only evidence for this theory was a very vague quote from that analyst, Dany Shoham. (The full quote: Certain laboratories in the institute have probably been engaged, in terms of research and development, in Chinese [biological weapons], at least collaterally, yet not as a principal facility of the Chinese BW alignment.)

Malcolm read out an excerpt from the story, adding we dont know anything, and Im not going to speculate, but Im just saying that, you know, an expert who knows what hes talking about is linking this.

That sort of speculation is not helpful, its dangerous. It is not asking hard-hitting questions in the name of the truth, its being duped by a conspiracy rag and repeating it verbatim. Even the Times later appended an editors note to its story, conceding that COVID-19 does not show signs of having been manufactured or purposefully manipulated in a lab.

Around then, I wrote a piece for Foreign Policy, speaking to actual epidemiologists, and debunking the claim that COVID-19 was a lab-made bioweapon. I cited Malcolms bonkers YouTube show, and fellow Sun columnist Tarek Fatahs sharing of an even more absurd conspiracy theory, as evidence that quasi-mainstream figures were spreading misinformation. I even did a followup when the theory was amplified by noted conspiracy- and Russian-propaganda-peddling website ZeroHedge.

The nugget of truth in the theory is that there is, in fact, a highly-secure government lab in Wuhan which handles highly infectious viruses, like Ebola and some strains of coronavirus.

It is not, however, a military lab, nor does it research germ warfare. The lab works to prevent and cure infectious diseases we can say this pretty confidently because it works with an equivalent lab in Canada, and American health officials have toured the lab on multiple occasions. China, undoubtedly, researches biological weapons, but it would not allow American teams into such a site.

In recent weeks, it has become clear that the lab was cited for lax security standards as recently as two years ago. Those revelations appear to have sparked interest from the White House.

Last week, Fox News wrote that there is increasing confidence that the COVID-19 outbreak likely originated in a Wuhan laboratory, though not as a bioweapon but as part of Chinas attempt to demonstrate that its efforts to identify and combat viruses are equal to or greater than the capabilities of the United States.

Despite that apparent confidence level, Fox didnt actually cite any evidence for the theory, simply attributing it to multiple sources who have been briefed on the details of early actions by Chinas government and seen relevant materials. The story does quote U.S. General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who when asked about the possibility of the virus beginning in a Chinese lab and maybe having been released accidentally, said, The weight of evidence seems to indicate natural [origin]. A full-scale investigation has since been ordered.

Peer-reviewed research, published in the journal Nature, has pretty definitively concluded that COVID-19 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.

This news does not in fact back up Malcolms musings from January. Nor have I, or most other journalists working on this story, ruled out the possibility that this was in fact some horrible lab accident.

Nevertheless, Malcolm used her YouTube channel to take a victory lap, declaring that its important that fake-news journalists like Justin Ling at Foreign Policy be called out for their dishonesty.Justin Lings column for Foreign Policy is fake news, and it should be taken down immediately.

She then echoed the message from her perch in the Toronto, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Calgary, and EdmontonSuns.

Anyone who raised questions about the link between the new coronavirus and Chinas lone biosafety level-4 laboratory located in the same city were attacked and maligned, including myself, she wrote.

While Malcolm might want to believe its all true, there is still no hard evidence for this theory, let alone the explanation she offered in January.

And, look, this isnt my first rodeo. Infowars readers giving me the gears for not ascribing to their string-corkboard theories is pretty much a daily occurrence. Most of them, however, do not have a dedicated Saturday column in a national newspaper chain. (While our data is about five years old, the Sun chain used to boast a print circulation of around 250,000 copies on Saturdays.)

I contacted the Sun to write a rebuttal to Malcolms claims, but was immediately turned down by editor Anthony Furey.

The Sun has been a vector for this sort of irresponsible misinformation for some time. Underneath it is a pretty serious set of ethical problems.

Malcolm is both a weekend columnist for the Sun and the founder of True North Canada, a think tank and media outlet. It is also a registered charity, under the name True North Centre for Public Policy.

She actually inherited the charitable registration from a group whose stated mission was to provide support and assistance to UK immigrants coming to British Columbia, which had brought in just a few hundred dollars in donations a year.

True North now reports an income of $500,000 more than half coming from donations, and about a third coming as gifts from other registered charities. The source of True Norths income isnt clear, but PressProgress has reported that $18,000 came from a charity linked to a long-time Conservative donor.

Also on the True North team as a fellow is Furey, Malcolms editor at the Sun.

That potential conflict aside, the Sun has let its already-lax standards slide for some time.

Trying to undercut trust in the mainstream press in favour of Malcolms brand of nonsense, especially at a time of national crisis, is playing with fire. If we dont keep some level of trust in our institutions right now, the effectiveness of our response to this pandemic is going to be severely weakened.

Whats more, buying into whatever conspiracy theory we find on the internet that matches our worldview is giving a free pass to Chinas actual crimes.

Beijing runs a brutal, repressive regime. It has built a rickety empire through exploiting its own workers and keeping them in check through a surveillance regime which they perfected via treatment of religious minorities. It seems fairly obvious now that Beijing has also tried to cover up the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak, potentially robbing the world of crucial time to prepare.

Given all the ways in which we know Xi Jinpings China is dangerous to its own citizens and others, why would we play fantasy?

After the 2003 SARS outbreak, shoddy Russian research helped spark a conspiracy theory in China that the virus was a biological weapon developed by the Americans. China has tried to do the same thing this time.

There is plenty of blame to be directed at China, both in their response to COVID-19 and on their human rights record. We dont need to cling to unproven theories to hold them to account and we certainly dont need to start inventing them.

Justin Ling is a freelance journalist who writes for everybody.

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I Called Out A Sun Columnist For Spreading A COVID-19 Conspiracy Theory, And She Did Not Take It Well - CANADALAND

Sequestered away in my apartment in Washington, D.C., I listen to the sounds of construction outside my window. Despite stay-at-home orders and closures of non-essential businesses, the construction bringing gentrification and overpriced apartment buildings most D.C. residents cant afford continues on. Its a beautiful sunny day and Id like to be anywhere but at my computer right now.

Im multiply disabled and chronically ill with several of the underlying health conditions that make me vulnerable to COVID-19. For the sake of my life and all others I come in contact with Im staying home. However, the vulnerabilities that put my life in jeopardy under this pandemic arent simply the fear of contracting the virus. Im vulnerable during this time partially due to the lack of disability resources and access to my regular medical care. Even if I manage to avoid contracting COVID-19 I could still very well die due to this pandemic.

All of my regular medical care, including pain management, is canceled for the foreseeable future. My pain levels are rising with every day. Soon I may not be able to work or pay my bills. Not only is this a financial hardship, but it could mean one less media professional to cover the stories of my hyper-erased and misrepresented communities. Not only am I disabled and chronically ill, but Im also bisexual, Two Spirit and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. I spend a great deal of my time just trying to get people to understand that all of my communities are real and exist. While I dont want to be one of the very few journalists in my communities, it is the reality. It infuriates me that our stories could further go unheard.

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Coupled with the lack of resources pre-pandemic, the crisis has put me at a real risk of losing my home health aide. In 2019 the D.C. government significantly reduced and kicked many people off of the local home health aide program. Many of us, myself included, were already in the midst of filing appeals and suing the government to keep our aides. Now with COVID-19, more of us are losing our aides because they either cant or wont come to work, and the D.C. and federal governments are doing nothing to rectify this situation. The average home health aide in D.C. earns between $11-16 hourly. Benefits are few and far between. Most of the aides are womxn of color and immigrants. The work they do isnt valued because disabled and ill peoples lives, along with elders lives, arent valued.

As public transit has been significantly reduced, many aides are unable to get to their patients homes, and alternate, affordable means of transportation have not been provided to them. My aide and I are paying out of our pockets so she can take rideshares and cabs to my home. Neither of us has this kind of money, but its whats now necessary. With the closures of public schools, many are without their free or low-cost childcare, creating yet another barrier to work. Personal protective equipment (PPE) and information on COVID-19 arent available to many aides either. The agency my aide works for hasnt given out any information to the aides on the pandemic and how to keep themselves and their patients safer. Nor has it given out hand sanitizer or wipes. It only began giving extra gloves and giving the aides one mask each about two weeks ago. When Ive spoken with my case manager and the agency, Ive been told, We cant make people work. This is true, but what they and the government more broadly should be doing is providing health care workers with the supports they need to do their jobs with lower risks to their well-being and that of their patients.

Discrimination and a lack of resources are going unchecked. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and the city council have done little to ensure people such as myself are cared for during this time. The aides arent receiving any additional paid sick leave, hazard pay, nor are their increased expenses being covered.

Access to food for disabled and ill people is an issue. Just this week while attempting to shop at a Trader Joes, I was denied use of an elevator and told that despite being disabled I still had to stand in line to enter the store. Most of the grocery stores in D.C. arent offering special shopping hours for those of us who are vulnerable but arent elders, putting us in the position to either go hungry or risk our lives to grocery shop. Delivery services are often more expensive than shopping in the stores, and they dont all accept SNAP, creating another barrier for many disabled people. Buses, when theyre even running, are only opening the front doors for those who are visibly disabled or elders, but as roughly half the disabled people in the U.S. have invisible disabilities, this has created larger access barriers. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority paratransit program, which is the only way some disabled people are able to get around, has suspended all evaluation processes, leaving some disabled people without paratransit.

Disabled people are more likely to live in poverty and suffer from higher rates of houselessness than the abled. This is partially because employment is difficult for many of us to obtain and keep. Ive had several employment situations where I was denied my federally protected right to reasonable accommodations, such as working from home. I was repeatedly told its not doable, so Ive stayed in poverty even when I was physically able to work full time. Its rather ironic that the universities and other workplaces that have refused to make accommodations for me are now offering these same accommodations widespread to the abled and healthy. I sincerely hope that those of us that come out the other side of COVID-19 have the opportunity to sue employers, institutions of learning and the governmental bodies that are have denied us our federally protected rights.

Compounding my fears are the projections that the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area could become one of the next hotspots, with our peak cases anticipated to possibly hit in late June or early July. I worry that the photos of mass graves being dug for the excess bodies in New York City could become a reality here.

By the time this is all said and done, most of us in the U.S. will know at least one person that contracted COVID-19; many of us will know people whove died from it. As I confront this reality, I think of my communities with deep concern. The Native population only recently grew to 2 percent of the total U.S. population. While this number is small, its significant and represents how were rebounding from over 500 years of genocide, but now we have to worry again about entire tribes ceasing to exist. Indigenous people were already suffering multiple crises pre-coronavirus. Despite the federal governments trust and treaty responsibility, our Native health care system is the worst in the country. The Indian Health Service (IHS) is grossly underfunded, understaffed and without many of the resources even the most bare-bones of medical facilities have. Its also important to note that Native people have the highest rates of disabilities and illnesses in the U.S.

Funding streams and access to supplies have been grossly less than what our tribal leaders have requested or theyve been flat out denied. Many health care facilities that serve Native communities are without COVID-19 tests and the labs to process them. The numbers of confirmed cases and deaths in IHS system continue to grow rapidly. The Navajo Nation has had as many confirmed COVID-19 deaths as thirteen states combined. A lack of accurate data collection, however, doesnt reflect the true rates of contraction and death. Seventy-one percent of Natives are urban based, but our ethnicity often isnt accurately counted in non-Native health care. Despite repeatedly checking American Indian on health forms, throughout my life, Ive often found that Im listed as white in my medical records. The numbers from IHS also dont include the number of cases in tribal-run and urban Indian health centers. Im terrified at what this all means for my communities especially as we now face state economies being reopened. Frankly, Im pissed off that I, and my loved ones, could die due to preventable causes.

Its becoming more difficult for me to maintain my composure every time I leave my home and see people without their faces covered or taking any precautions such as social distancing.

The lack of access to medical care is also further setting us up for eugenics and even genocide. Determinations of whos socially useful and therefore worthy of medical care exclude the vast majority of my community members and many other marginalized people. Our lives are deemed worthless in the best of times, so its not surprising that were deemed unworthy of care during a pandemic. The only real chance I have in being deemed socially useful is that I have the privilege of a graduate education, am a journalist and not an elder. Many of my people arent that fortunate.

The weight of historical and intergenerational trauma from the government restricting Native peoples movement and germ warfare are a heavy burden Im carrying. It wasnt so very long ago that Native people werent allowed to leave reservations without the white mans permission. Pandemics and germ warfare have been used to kill us, and there are signs that this could happen again. Some white supremacists have been reported encouraging each other to go into Indigenous, people of color, and Jewish spaces to cough on us and spread COVID-19 in the hopes that well die. This is a modern-day version of smallpox blankets that were used to solve the Indian problem.

Every day is a struggle to remain hopeful and to continue fighting to live. Since the stay-at-home orders and rising numbers of cases and deaths, Ive had days when my depression has been so bad, I felt a complete void of interest and motivation in anything, including my work, which I love dearly and feel a responsibility to. I worry how many in my communities that struggle with trauma and addiction will fare during this time.

Im especially worried for my home state of Oklahoma, which is one of the very few states that hasnt issued a stay-at-home order. Instead, Gov. Kevin Stitt has told Oklahomans to practice personal responsibility. The first person to die of COVID-19 in the state was a fellow Cherokee Nation citizen. Stitt and the other right-wing, oppressive monsters that run Oklahoma have blood on their hands, proving just how little they value life despite their claims to the contrary.

Regardless of whether or not I make it through this pandemic, I know my communities will endure, as we always have but well pay a very heavy toll along the way.

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I'm Native and Disabled. The US Government Is Sacrificing My People. - Truthout

Posted on Apr 27, 2020

By Harold C. Ford

Two recent reads provide some historical context for the current coronavirus pandemic:

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (1999, W. W. Norton & Company) traces the long history of human pandemics to the domestication of animals.

How to Hide an Empire, A Short History of the Greater United States, by Daniel Immerwahr (2019, The Bodley Head) details the racial inequities of health care and research by political, scientific, and medical leaders in the United States.

While neither read focuses exclusively on the aforementioned themes, significant portions of both books help explain the historical roots of global health crises and the color-conscious mis-administration of the benefits and burdens of medical care.

In his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Diamond makes clear the role that disease and technology play in Europes domination of global politics for the past five centuries. The domestication of plants and animals, and subsequent disease, that spread from Southwest Asias Fertile Crescent to the European landmass was critical to the emergence of that dominance.

Smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus, bubonic plague, and other infectious diseases endemic in Europe played a decisive role in European conquests, writes Diamond, by decimating many peoples on other continents.

No weapons technology ever conjured up by humans was as efficient as disease in eliminating huge swaths of our species.

Throughout the Americas, Diamond writes, diseases introduced with Europeans spread from tribe to tribe far in advance of the Europeans themselves, killing an estimated 95 percent of the pre-Columbian Native American population.

Historically, the efficiency of disease is evident at both macro- and micro-levels of the human experience. For example, continues Diamond, in the winter of 1902 a dysentery epidemic brought by a sailor on the whaling ship Active killed 51 of the 56 Sadlermuit Eskimos, a very isolated band of people living on Southampton Island in the Canadian arctic.

And the origins of these killer diseases? Blame the animals.

Blame the animals:

The major killers of humanity throughout our recent historysmallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles, and choleraare infectious diseases that evolved from diseases of animals, declares Diamond. Because diseases have been the biggest killers of people, they have also been decisive shapers of history.

Over the past 10,000 years, our species has transitioned from nomadic hunter-gatherers to food producers enabled by the domestication of plants and animals. A more reliable source of food created more leisure time, spurred social classes, and inspired the growth of human culture. It also resulted in more sedentary lifestyles, population growth, and communities of denser population.

So-called crowd diseases, explains Diamond, could have arisen only with the buildup of large, dense human populations. Think of the aforementioned diseases and, more recently, H2N2 (1957-58), H3N2 (1968, influenza A), HIV-AIDS (1981 to the present), SARS (2002), and H1N1 (2009, swine flu).

The worst pandemic in human history was H1N1 (1918-19), the misnamed Spanish flu, that claimed 21 million lives, according to Diamond. Actually, death estimates for the Spanish flu, that likely began at a large army base in Kansas, vary widely from 20 million to 100 million.

For example, Adam Hochschild, in his critically acclaimed book, To End All Wars, A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-18, estimates the Spanish flu death toll to be 50 million or more.

Enlisted to spread the bad news:

Microbes have evolved diverse ways of spreading from one person to another, and from animals to people, Diamond writes. The germ that spreads better leaves more babies and ends up favored by natural selection.

We become enlisted to spread microbes, Diamond warns. Microbes wait for one host to be eaten by the next host: for instance, salmonella bacteria, which we contract by eating already infected eggs or meat; (or) the worm responsible for trichinosis, which gets from pigs to us by waiting for us to kill the pig and eat it without proper cooking

Some microbes dont wait for the old host to die and get eaten, but instead hitchhike in the saliva of an insect that bites the old host and flies off to find a new host, Diamond reports. The free ride may be provided by mosquitoes, fleas, lice, or tsetse flies that spread malaria, plague, typhus, or sleeping sickness.

From our point of view, genital sores, diarrhea, and coughing are symptoms of disease, Diamond writes. From a germs point of view, theyre clever evolutionary strategies to broadcast (and spread) the germ.

Staying alive:

Diamond considers our own selfish interests: to stay alive and healthy, best done by killing the damned germs. He discusses three ways of killing these invisible and deadly invaders.

The first is to bake the germs to death before we get baked ourselves. We develop a fever.

A second common response of ours is to mobilize our immune system (and create antibodies) that actively seek out and kill foreign microbes. However, some clever microbes dont just cave in to our immune defenses, Diamond warns. Some have learned to trick us by changing. Thus, new and various strains of the flu and other diseases.

The third and slowest defensive response is through natural selection (wherein) some people with genes for resistance to that particular microbe are more likely to survive than are people lacking such genes.

Humans have evolved countertricks of our own, Diamond concludes, to which the germs have responded by evolving counter-countertricks. We and our pathogens are now locked in an escalating evolutionary contest, with the death of one contestant the price of defeat, and with natural selection playing the role of umpire.

People with genes for resistance to that particular microbe are more likely to survive(but) unfortunate individuals without the genes were less likely to survive to pass their genes on to babies, concludes Diamond. It does mean, though, that a human population as a whole becomes better protected against the pathogen.

Disease and human history:

Human diseases lie behind the broadest pattern of human history, and behind some of the most important issues in human health today, reports Diamond. That includes racial disparities in the administration of health care.

In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr makes a convincing case that, by mid-20th century, the United States of America had actually transitioned into an empirethe fifth largest in the world in terms of population.

Nearly nineteen million people lived in the (American) colonies, he writes, the great bulk of them in the Philippines (By 1940) slightly more than one in eight (12.6 percent) of the people in the United States lived outside of the states.

Of eight colonial possessions, only Alaska and Hawaii, in 1959, would eventually achieve statehood. Statehood for the Philippines, Puerto Rico, the Panama Canal Zone, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, and American Samoa would never be achieved as they were largely populated by black and brown peoples.

The racism that had pervaded the country since slavery engulfed the territories, too, writes Immerwahr. Like African-Americans, colonial subjects were denied the vote, deprived of the rights of full citizens, called nigger, subjected to dangerous medical experiments, and used as sacrificial pawns in war.

Dangerous medical experiments:

Three episodes that unfolded in American colonies aptly demonstrate the intersection of racism and medicine. They (colonial possessions), writes Immerwahr, functioned as laboratories, spaces for bold experimentation where ideas could be tried with practically no resistance, oversight, or consequences.

Puerto Rico, 1930s:

At the start of the 20th century, anemia was the leading cause of death in Puerto Rico, accounting for some 20 to 30 percent of mortality. By 1930, hookwormthe primary cause of that anemiaafflicted up to 90 percent of rural Puerto Ricans.

Puerto Ricos dense population encouraged the spread of hookworms. The islands governor, Leonard Wood, appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, believed that restricting births among the lower and more ignorant elements of the population was the only salvation for the Island.

Cornelius Rhoads, a mainland doctor trained at Harvard, arrived on the island and, according to Immerwahr, appeared to regard Puerto Rico as an island-size laboratory.

Rhoads refused treatment to some of his anemia patients so that he could compare their progress with treated patients, writes Immerwahr. He tried to induce anemia in others (he referred to them as experimental animals) by restricting their diets.

Rhoads fomented a rebellion by nationalist Puerto Ricans when the contents of a scathing letter made its way to the public. Some excerpts:

Porto Ricansare beyond doubt the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men everIt makes you sick to inhabit the same island with themWhat the island needs isto totally exterminate the populationI have done my best to further the process of extermination by killing off 8 and transplanting cancer into several more.

In 1940 Rhoads was made director of Memorial Hospital in New York. In 1942 he was elected vice president of the New York Academy of Medicine.

He became chief of the Chemical Warfare Services medical division which led the testing of gases and gear on more than 60,000 men in the American military. Some of the experiments were race based. African Americans, Japanese Americans, and Puerto Ricans were tested to see if they would fare differently than whites against mustard agents, writes Immerwahr.

At the end of World War II Rhoads was awarded a Legion of Merit for combating poison gas and other advances in chemical warfare. With a $4 million grant from Alfred P. Sloan, the president of General Motors, he continued researching mustard gas agents after the war. He made the cover of Time in 1949.

Puerto Rico, 1950s:

Into the 1950s, overpopulation was still viewed as an impediment to progress in Puerto Rico. Gregory Pincus, another physician and Harvard man from the mainland, arrived on the scene. Pincus, known as the father of the (birth control) pill viewed Puerto Rico as a suitable place where certain experiments which would be very difficult in this country (U.S.).

According to Immerwahr: Puerto Rico became a laboratory for all sorts of experimental contraceptives: diaphragms, spermicidal jellies, spirals, loops, intrauterine devices, hormone shots, and an aerosol vaginal foam known as Emko distributed to tens of thousands of women.

The practice of female sterilization began in Puerto Rican hospitals in the early 1940s. It grew to staggering proportions. Of the (Puerto Rican) mothers born in the latter part of the 1920s, nearly half had been sterilized, writes Immerwahr.

Bikini Atoll, 1950s, 1960s:

When the United States tested its first atomic bomb, scientists used desert land in New Mexico. Subsequent tests by the Atomic Energy Commission would take place far from the mainland. Government officials and scientists settled upon the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands of the Pacific.

From 1946 to 1958 the U.S. detonated 68 nuclear weapons on or near Bikini. One such test was a fifteen-megaton hydrogen bomb dubbed Bravo shot. The fallout was devastating for some Pacific islanders.

On Rongelap, more than a hundred miles from ground zero, recounts Immerwahr, islanders watched radioactive white ash fall from the sky like snow. (Eighty suffered from radiation poisoning, and the island had to be evacuated for three years.)

The response of Henry Kissinger, then the countrys most esteemed nuclear expert, was typical of many. There are only 90,000 people out there. Who gives a damn?

Past is prologue:

Thus, our nations racist colonial history should serve as prologue to the present. Emerging racial disparities in our war with humanitys newest microbial invadercoronavirusshould not surprise.

According to a report by the New York Times: The coronavirus is infecting and killing black people in the United States at disproportionately high rates, according to data released by several states and big cities, highlighting what public health researchers say are entrenched inequalities in resources, health, and access to care.

In an April 22 press statement released to the public, Michigans Lieutenant Governor, Garlin Gilchrist, chair of the Michigan Coronavirus Task Force on Racial Disparities, cited poverty, availability of health care, level of exposure, predeterminate factors such as obesity, rates of diabetes, and cardiac diseases as reasons for disparate impact on communities of color.

These health disparities are something that has been present, when it comes to health outcomes, for generations in our state and, frankly, in our nation.

Harold C. Ford (Photo by Jan Worth-Nelson)

EVM Education Beat reporter and Staff Writer Harold C. Ford can be reached at hcford1185@gmail.com.

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Review: Need some pandemic reading? These two books offer pertinent context on the plague we're in - East Village Magazine

Germ Warfare traces the long, brutal story of those microscopic weapons. From the infected arrows of Bronze Age archers, to the plague factories of World War 2, up through the biological arms race of the Cold War into our modern age of genetically manipulated terrorism.

This graphic history is both a lesson from the past and a warning for the future. It reminds us never to take public health for granted, because we never know when, or how, the next pandemic will rise.

Max Brooks is the author of the novels World War Z, Minecraft: The Island and the graphic novel The Harlem Hellfighters. He is a non resident fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point and the Atlantic Councils Brent Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

The Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense was established in 2014 to comprehensively assess U.S. biodefense efforts and issue recommendations to foster change. The Commissions 2015 report, A National Blueprint for Biodefense: Leadership and Major Reform needed to Optimize Efforts, identified capability gaps and recommended changes to U.S. policy and law to strengthen national biodefense while optimizing resource investments. Former Senator Joe Lieberman and former Governor Tom Ridge co-chair the Commission, and are joined by former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, former Representative Jim Greenwood, former Homeland Security Advisor Ken Wainstein, and former Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Advisor Lisa Monaco. Hudson Institute is the Commissions fiscal sponsor.

See the article here:

Germ Warfare - Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense

As the United Nations implores countries to cease hostilities and wars to help fight the SARS-CoV-2 virus that is causing the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States is finding ways to use the COVID-19 pandemic to fight its wars. While Saudi Arabia promises to begin a ceasefire in Yemen in response to the U.N. call for a global ceasefire, the United States has found four distinct ways to use the pandemic to further its belligerent foreign policy goals in four countries.

China: The Propaganda War

The first shot in the pandemic propaganda war against China was fired when Donald Trump renamed the virus the "Chinese virus". The G7 was stymied in its attempt to release a joint statement that would help the fight against the pandemic when the ministers from all the other countries refused to yield to U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeos insistence that the coronavirus be called the "Wuhan virus." Donald Trump then went on to threaten putting a hold on US funding of the World Health Organization (WHO) at a time when the 14.67% of funding the US provides is most crucial to the world. Amongst the reasons Trump listed was that the WHO was "China-centric." "I dont know," Trump said, "they seem to come down on the side of China." He added that "they dont report whats really going on" in China. The frequent US claim that China is deceptively reporting its number of deaths and that the number, in reality, is much higher has, at least in part, been debunked, but that didnt stop Trump from using the claim as propaganda to pressure the WHO. The pressure on the WHO may be because the US is using the pandemic in its propaganda war against China, and the WHO wont play ball. The WHO, not cooperating with the US, evaluated Chinas response as "perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history." Dr. Bruce Aylward, the head of the WHO COVID-19 mission even said, "If I get COVID, Im going to China." The American strategy seems to be to withhold money from the WHO until the WHO eases Americas propaganda war on China.

Venezuela: Regime Change

The US is using the COVID-19 pandemic to push its stalled attempt at regime change in Venezuela. As US sanctions thwart Venezuelas efforts to fight the pandemic, the Trump administration revealed a plan that would only release Venezuela from the sanctions on the condition that President Maduro leave office. Though presented as a balanced transition, it is not, since Maduro would not be allowed to run in the upcoming election but US candidate Juan Guaido would. The US is holding the health of the Venezuelan people hostage and using the pandemic to blackmail Maduro into accepting the coup.

Iran: Economic Warfare

In China, its propaganda; in Venezuela its blackmail; in Iran, its economic warfare. The illegal US sanctions on Iran are devastating Irans efforts to fight the pandemic. Irans foreign minister Javad Zarif has called the deprivation of Iran at a time of pandemic "medical terrorism." Irans desperate appeal to the IMF is facing the threat of a US veto. Iran has called the veto "crimes against humanity," and President Rouhani again called the sanctions "economic and medical terrorism." In Iran, the COVID-19 pandemic is being exploited to intensify the economic war.

Israel: Face Masks

In Israel, the strategy is not deprivation, but supply. Despite Trumps insistence that the US not ship personal protective equipment to other countries in the midst of a US shortage, the Israeli press is reporting that the "A plane carrying over a million surgical masks for the IDF landed in Ben-Gurion airport Tuesday night, in an operation run by the US Department of Defenses Delegation of Procurement. It says that the masks are "for coronavirus use."

Four different countries, four different strategies. But in all of them the US is using the COVID-19 pandemic to wage war instead of heeding the UN call for a global cease fire.

Ted Snider writes on analyzing patterns in US foreign policy and history.

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Germ Warfare: How Trump Is Weaponizing Covid-19 - Antiwar.com