MetaDTA: Diagnostic Test Accuracy Meta-Analysis v2.0

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HUM Calculator (Windows standalone): public.ostfalia.de/~klawonn/HUMCalc.zip

crsu.shinyapps.io/dta_ma/

micncltools.shinyapps.io/TestAccuracy/

micncltools.shinyapps.io/ClinicalAccuracyAndUtility/

WHO’s defining criteria for a pandemic

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Key scientists advising the World Health Organization on planning for an influenza pandemic had done paid work for pharmaceutical firms that stood to gain from the guidance they were preparing. These conflicts of interest have never been publicly disclosed by WHO, and WHO has dismissed inquiries into its handling of the A/H1N1 pandemic as “conspiracy theories.” Deborah Cohen and Philip Carter investigate

Cohen D, Carter P. Conflicts of interest: WHO and the pandemic flu “conspiracies”. BMJ 2010;340:c2912. doi:10.1136/bmj.c2912 PMID:20525679
Fulltext: true-democracy.ch/wp-content/uploads/WHO-Swine-Flu-Conspiracies-British-Medical-Journal-2010.pdf

There has been considerable controversy over the past year, particularly in Europe, over whether the World Health Organization (WHO) changed its definition of pandemic influenza in 2009, after novel H1N1 influenza was identified. Some have argued that not only was the definition changed, but that it was done to pave the way for declaring a pandemic. Others claim that the definition was never changed and that this allegation is completely unfounded. Such polarized views have hampered our ability to draw important conclusions. This impasse, combined with concerns over potential conflicts of interest and doubts about the proportionality of the response to the H1N1 influenza outbreak, has undermined the public trust in health officials and our collective capacity to effectively respond to future disease threats.

WHO did not change its definition of pandemic influenza for the simple reason that it has never formally defined pandemic influenza. While WHO has put forth many descriptions of pandemic influenza, it has never established a formal definition and the criteria for declaring a pandemic caused by the H1N1 virus derived from “pandemic phase” definitions, not from a definition of “pandemic influenza”. The fact that despite ten years of pandemic preparedness activities no formal definition of pandemic influenza has been formulated reveals important underlying assumptions about the nature of this infectious disease. In particular, the limitations of “virus-centric” approaches merit further attention and should inform ongoing efforts to “learn lessons” that will guide the response to future outbreaks of novel infectious diseases.

Central to this debate has been the question of whether H1N1 influenza should have been labelled a “pandemic” at all. The Council of Europe voiced serious concerns that the declara-tion of a pandemic became possible only after WHO changed its definition of pandemic influenza. It also expressed misgivings over WHO’s decision to withhold publication of the names of its H1N1 advisory Emergency Committee.3 WHO, however, denied having changed any definitions and defended the scien-tific validity of its decisions, citing “numerous safeguards” for handling potential conflicts of interest.5

www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/89/7/11-086173.pdf

Under Your Skin! Covid-19 vaccines, nano patches, quantum dots, gene guns…

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Keywords to research: Luciferase and Bioluminescent quantum dots
Essential question #1: Non-GMO’s cannot be patented but GMO’s can (synthetic DNA)- who holds the “copyright” when the human genome is manipulated with synthetic gene sequences (e.g., via “vaccination”)? cf.:
Craig Venter: Why I put my name in synthetic genomes.
#2: Nanotechnology/hydrogels in vaccination?
#3: The body as crypto currency coupled to the 5G cloud? patents.google.com/patent/WO2020060606A1/en
#4: Biosensors in Covid vaccine?

Operation Warp Speed is a public–private partnership, initiated by the Trump administration, to facilitate and accelerate the development, manufacturing, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics.see Wikipedia

From Wikipedia.com (30.10.2020):

The leader of the Operation Warp Speed project, Moncef Slaoui, had been a board member of the U.S. vaccine developer, Moderna, and divested his shares in Moderna stock, at a potential personal gain of $10 million, raising questions of his neutrality in judging vaccine candidates.[37] Although Slaoui resigned from the Moderna board when named to head Warp Speed, his share value in Moderna stock increased by $3 million in one day when Moderna announced an advance in vaccine clinical research.[37]

Moncef Slaoui is invested in Galvani Bioelectrics, a company concerned with bioelectronic medical applications. At the first C.E.C. Workshop, in Brussels in November 1991, bioelectronics was defined as ‘the use of biological materials and biological architectures for information processing systems and new devices’. N.B. The human nervous system uses electro-chemical signal transduction. Complemetary to classical pharmacological agents based on neurochemistry, bioelectronical applications target the “morse code” of the nervous system, i.e., bioelectronics aims to modulate various levels of neuronal information which is coded in electrical action-potentials. The domain can thus be seen as a counterpart to neurochemistry/neuropharmacology.

home

Galvani Bioelectronics is a pioneering medical research company dedicated to the development of bioelectronic medicines to treat chronic diseases. Formed through a partnership between two global healthcare companies, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Verily Life Sciences (formerly Google Life Sciences), a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. Galvani Bioelectronics combines GSK’s life science knowledge with Verily’s expertise in software and electronics for clinical applications.

From Wikipedia.de (30.10.2020):

Die Operation Warp Speed (OWS) ist eine Public-Private-Partnership Initative der Regierung Trump für die Entwicklung und Auslieferung eines SARS-CoV2 Impfstoffes für die Vereinigten Staaten. Präsident Donald Trump teilte im Mitte Mai 2020 mit, dass bis Ende des Jahres 300 Millionen Dosen eines noch nicht existenten Impfstoffes (Stand Oktober 2020) beschafft werden würden.[1][2]

Pressekonferenz zur Vorstellung der “Operation Warp Speed”, General Perna am Mikrofon.

Am 15. Mai 2020 kündigte Präsident Trump die „Operation Warp Speed“ an. Mit ihr sollte die Entwicklung eines Coronavirusimpfstoffes gegen SARS-CoV-2 beschleunigt werden. Geleitet wird diese Operation durch den Pharmamanager Moncef Slaoui und den General der US-Army Gustave Perna.

Die Idee für die Aktion kam Anfang April 2020 auf. Im Juli 2020 waren fünf entwickelte Stoffe in der engeren Auswahl.[2] In der 2. Fernsehdebatte zu US-Wahl 2020 nannte Donald Trump die Operation als Erstes, als er nach seiner Reaktion auf die Pandemie befragt wurde.

 

  1. Kathryn Watson, Trump announces top officials for “Operation Warp Speed” for coronavirus vaccine development, CBS News vom 15. Mai 2020.
  2. Dr Petra Jungmayr: USA: Die fünf aussichtsreichsten COVID-19-Impfstoffkandidaten. 16. Juli 2020, abgerufen am 26. Oktober 2020.

 

Next-generation vaccines enabled through advances in nanotechnology

Viruses are nanoscale objects and therefore can be regarded as naturally occurring nanomaterials; per that definition, LAVs, IVs and viral vectors are nanotechnologies. Nanoparticles and viruses operate at the same length scale—this is what makes nanotechnology approaches in vaccine development and immunoengineering so powerful. Nanoparticles, natural or synthetic, mimic the structural features of viruses whereas chemical biology, biotechnology and nanochemistry enables the development of next-generation designer vaccine technologies. From a vaccine technology development point of view, this is an exciting time and novel technologies and approaches are poised to make a clinical impact for the first time.

www.nature.com/articles/s41565-020-0737-y

Rice bioengineer reveals dissolving microneedles that also embed fluorescent medical info

Quantum-dot tattoos hold vaccination record

The researchers believe the quantum dots are safe to use in this way because they are encapsulated in a biocompatible polymer, but they plan to do further safety studies before testing them in patients.

“Storage, access, and control of medical records is an important topic with many possible approaches,” says Mark Prausnitz, chair of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Georgia Tech, who was not involved in the research. “This study presents a novel approach where the medical record is stored and controlled by the patient within the patient’s skin in a minimally invasive and elegant way.”

The research was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Koch Institute Support (core) Grant from the National Cancer Institute.

news.mit.edu/2019/storing-vaccine-history-skin-1218

“Gene-gun”
www.bio-rad.com/en-dk/product/helios-gene-gun-system?ID=42e9d6be-369a-49f8-8fbb-281a0fea6df8

“Gene-gun” usage in plants
www.nature.com/articles/s41565-020-0737-y

The latest report on the worldwide Gene Gun market represents a comprehensive understanding about the futuristic Gene Gun market estimations, based on the historical and current predictions. It is considered to be the significant and professional document that especially focusing on the Gene Gun market drivers, size, leading segments and topological zones. Moreover, the report splits the global Gene Gun market size by volume and value on the basis of product types, applications, well-established vendors and major geographies.

Pivotal industry players involved in this report are:

Bio Rad
Wealtec
DuPont
BTX
Life Technologies
Scientz
Chintek
…

The Global Gene Gun market divided by product types:

Desktop Type
Handhold Type

Gene Gun market segregation by application:

Agriculture
Medical
Other

Jean Baudrillard, Libération 1991, La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu

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The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (French: La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu) is a collection of three short essays by Jean Baudrillard published in the French newspaper Libération and British paper The Guardian between January and March 1991.

Part 1, “The Gulf War will not take place” (La guerre du Golfe n’aura pas lieu) was published in Libération on January 4, 1991.
Part 2, “The Gulf War is not really taking place” (La guerre du Golfe a-t-elle vraiment lieu ?) was published in Libération on February 6, 1991 and
Part 3, “The Gulf War did not take place” (La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu) was published in Libération on March 29, 1991.

Contrary to the title, the author believes that the events and violence of the Gulf War actually took place, whereas the issue is one of interpretation: were the events that took place comparable to how they were presented, and could these events be called a war? The title is a reference to the play The Trojan War Will Not Take Place by Jean Giraudoux (in which characters attempt to prevent what the audience knows is inevitable).

The essays in Libération and The Guardian were published before, during and after the Gulf War and they were titled accordingly: during the American military and rhetorical buildup as “The Gulf War Will Not Take Place”; during military action as “The Gulf War Is Not Taking Place”, and after action was over, “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place”. A book of elongated versions of the truncated original articles in French was published in May 1991. The English translation was published in early 1995 translated by Paul Patton.
Contents

Summary

Baudrillard argued the Gulf War was not really a war, but rather an atrocity which masqueraded as a war.[1] Using overwhelming airpower, the American military for the most part did not directly engage in combat with the Iraqi army, and suffered few casualties. Almost nothing was made known about Iraqi deaths. Thus, the fighting “did not really take place” from the point of view of the West. Moreover, all that spectators got to know about the war was in the form of propaganda imagery. The closely watched media presentations made it impossible to distinguish between the experience of what truly happened in the conflict, and its stylized, selective misrepresentation through simulacra.[2]

The Corona Fraud: A crime against humanity with extensive legal consequences

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You can find the German version below…

Publication: Bulletin of the World Health Organization; Type: Research Article ID: BLT.20.265892 Page 1 of 37; Author: John P A Ioannidis

Conclusion: The infection fatality rate of COVID-19 can vary substantially across different locations and this may reflect differences in population age structure and case-mix of infected and deceased patients and other factors. The inferred infection fatality rates tended to be much lower than estimates made earlier in the pandemic.

URL: www.who.int/bulletin/online_first/BLT.20.265892.pdf

Operation Moonshot: UK Government plans up to 10 million covid-19 tests a day

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The UK government has drawn up plans to carry out up to 10 million covid-19 tests a day by early next year as part of a huge £100bn (€110bn; $130bn) expansion of its national testing programme, documents seen by The BMJ show.

The internal correspondence reveals that the government is prepared to almost match what it spends on the NHS in England each year (£130bn) to fund mass testing of the population “to support economic activity and a return to normal life” under its ambitious Operation Moonshot programme.

A briefing memo sent to the first minister and cabinet secretaries in Scotland, seen by The BMJ, says that the UK-wide Moonshot programme is expected to “cost over £100bn to deliver.” If achieved, the programme would allow testing of the entire UK population each week.

A separate PowerPoint presentation prepared for the government by the global management consulting firm Boston Consulting Group, also seen by The BMJ, says the plans had the potential to grow the UK’s testing capacity from the current 350 000 a day to up to 10 million tests a day by early 2021.

Read more:
www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3520
www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3585

Deepfakes with AI

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Deepfakes (a portmanteau of “deep learning” and “fake”) are media that take a person in an existing image or video and replace them with someone else’s likeness using artificial neural networks.[2] They often combine and superimpose existing media onto source media using machine learning techniques known as autoencoders and generative adversarial networks (GANs). Deepfakes have garnered widespread attention for their uses in celebrity pornographic videos, revenge porn, fake news, hoaxes, and financial fraud. This has elicited responses from both industry and government to detect and limit their use.

Academic research

Academic research related to deepfakes lies predominantly within the field of computer vision, a subfield of computer science.[11] An early landmark project was the Video Rewrite program, published in 1997, which modified existing video footage of a person speaking to depict that person mouthing the words contained in a different audio track.[14] It was the first system to fully automate this kind of facial reanimation, and it did so using machine learning techniques to make connections between the sounds produced by a video’s subject and the shape of the subject’s face.[14]

Contemporary academic projects have focused on creating more realistic videos and on improving techniques.[15][16] The “Synthesizing Obama” program, published in 2017, modifies video footage of former president Barack Obama to depict him mouthing the words contained in a separate audio track.[15] The project lists as a main research contribution its photorealistic technique for synthesizing mouth shapes from audio.[15] The Face2Face program, published in 2016, modifies video footage of a person’s face to depict them mimicking the facial expressions of another person in real time.[16] The project lists as a main research contribution the first method for re-enacting facial expressions in real time using a camera that does not capture depth, making it possible for the technique to be performed using common consumer cameras.[16]

In August 2018, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley published a paper introducing a fake dancing app that can create the impression of masterful dancing ability using AI.[17][18] This project expands the application of deepfakes to the entire body; previous works focused on the head or parts of the face.[17]
Politics

Deepfakes have been used to misrepresent well-known politicians in videos. In separate videos, the face of the Argentine President Mauricio Macri has been replaced by the face of Adolf Hitler, and Angela Merkel’s face has been replaced with Donald Trump’s.[41][42] In April 2018, Jordan Peele collaborated with Buzzfeed to create a deepfake of Barack Obama with Peele’s voice; it served as a public service announcement to increase awareness of deepfakes. [43] In January 2019, Fox television affiliate KCPQ aired a deepfake of Trump during his Oval Office address, mocking his appearance and skin color.[44]

In May 2019, speaker of the United States House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi was the subject of two viral videos, one of which had the speed slowed down to 75 percent,[45] and another which edited together parts of her speech at a news conference for the Fox News segment Lou Dobbs Tonight. Both videos were intended to make Pelosi appear as though she was slurring her speech.[46] President Donald Trump shared the latter video on Twitter, captioning the video “‘PELOSI STAMMERS THROUGH NEWS CONFERENCE'”.[47] These videos were featured by many major news outlets, which brought deepfakes to the attention of the United States House Intelligence Committee.[48][49]

Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake

Operation Mockingbird

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Operation Mockingbird is an alleged large-scale program of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that began in the early 1950s and attempted to manipulate news media for propaganda purposes. It funded student and cultural organizations and magazines as front organizations.

According to writer Deborah Davis, Operation Mockingbird recruited leading American journalists into a propaganda network and oversaw the operations of front groups. CIA support of front groups was exposed after a 1967 Ramparts magazine article reported that the National Student Association received funding from the CIA. In the 1970s, Congressional investigations and reports also revealed Agency connections with journalists and civic groups. None of these reports, however, mentions by name an Operation Mockingbird coordinating or supporting these activities.

A Project Mockingbird is mentioned in the CIA Family Jewels report, compiled in the mid-1970s. According to the declassified version of the report released in 2007, Project Mockingbird involved the wire-tapping of two American journalists for several months in the early 1960s.

For foreign news media, the report concluded that:

The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets.

See also: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Jewels_(Central_Intelligence_Agency)

See also:

The Smith–Mundt Act – Legal Propaganda

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The U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 (Public Law 80-402), popularly called the Smith–Mundt Act, is the basic legislative authorization for propaganda activities conducted by the U.S. Department of State, sometimes called “public diplomacy”. The act was first introduced by Congressman Karl E. Mundt (R-SD) in January 1945 in the 79th Congress. It was subsequently passed by the 80th Congress and signed into law by President Harry S. Truman on January 27, 1948.

The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012, which was contained within the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013 (section 1078 (a)) amended the United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 and the Foreign Relations Authorization Act of 1987, allowing for materials produced by the State Department and the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) to be available within the United States.

Section 501(a) of the Act (care of the Voice of America Web site) provides that

information produced by VOA for audiences outside the United States shall not be disseminated within the United States … but, on request, shall be available in the English language at VOA, at all reasonable times following its release as information abroad, for examination only by representatives of United States press associations, newspapers, magazines, radio systems, and stations, and by research students and scholars, and, on request, shall be made available for examination only to Members of Congress.

U.S. Congressional Amendments to 1948 Act
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith%E2%80%93Mundt_Act#U.S._Congressional_Amendments_to_1948_Act