What Sort of Future Should We Be Planning for Ourselves?
You may remember a couple of months ago that a man in the US received a kidney transplant from a genetically modified pig. This was the result of years of research and animal genetic modification carried out by multiple teams of researchers at a cost of many billions of dollars. In late March, the operation was hailed as a success and heralded by the world’s media and scientific journals as a beacon of hope for all people awaiting transplants. The prestigious scientific journal Nature announced it opened the door for an era of xenotransplanted (animal to human) organs.
The recipient, Richard Slayman, died suddenly a few days ago, just five weeks after being pronounced well and being discharged from hospital. His doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) said on Sunday “there was no indication his death was a result of the transplant”. Please forgive my scepticism and crudity, but this reminds me of Peter Sellers as Dr. Clouseau in a lift who creates a bad smell then leaves someone standing next to him to take the fall.
To add insult to injury, following Mr Slayman’s death, Joren C. Madsen, Director of the MGH Transplant Center emphasised the significance of Mr Slayman’s contribution to medicine saying “Mr. Slayman becomes a beacon of hope for countless individuals suffering from end-stage renal disease and opens a new frontier in organ transplantation.” I suppose to say anything else like “we got it wrong” or “we are not sure what went wrong” or “this is a setback for xenotransplantation” or even “sorry, we overhyped this” might have dried up MGH’s funding.
I think you can see there is nothing routine or even conceivably financially viable about a procedure carried out on one person that absorbs billions of dollars and fails. To say that this will benefit “countless individuals” is just baseless hype. There is currently no basis to suggest that any such procedure will become viable for large numbers of individuals or more importantly no indication that it can be made to work safely for even one individual.
In another billion dollar misstep, after years of questionable research on animals, a Neuralink implant has mysteriously become detached from the first human patient’s brain. The patient, Noland Arbaugh, underwent surgery in February to attach a Neuralink chip to his brain, but the device’s functionality began to decrease within the month after his implant. Some of the device’s threads, which connect the miniature computer to the brain, had begun to retract.
According to the Guardian report, Neuralink, which Elon Musk owns and which was valued at about $5bn last year, has widely touted the success of its first implant, positioning itself as a world leader in brain-chip technology. Although the device is still in its early stages, the company’s disclosure brings more attention to the untested and complicated nature of the experimental procedure.
These are two cases of hugely costly invasive implantations carried out on single volunteers that have ended in setbacks or death. As you know, we are concerned at the Hatchard Report about another failed genetic intervention, (which increasingly looks like a genetic implantation), carried out on billions of individuals, in most cases without their informed consent and in many others against their will.
This brings me to a paper published in the journal Vaccine in April entitled “COVID-19 vaccines and adverse events of special interest: A multinational Global Vaccine Data Network (GVDN) cohort study of 99 million vaccinated individuals” whose co-authors include or own Dr. Helen Petousis-Harris of the University of Auckland. We have commented on the worrying findings and deficiencies of this paper previously including its failure to investigate cancer incidence and other possible adverse effects, but I thought you would like to know that even ardent vaccine advocates are weighing into the debate on our side.
Vinay Prasad MD MPH is a hematologist-oncologist and Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California San Francisco. He runs the VKPrasad lab at UCSF, which studies cancer drugs, health policy, clinical trials and better decision making. He is author of over 500 academic articles, and the books Ending Medical Reversal, and Malignant. He has analysed the paper on his YouTube channel and other blogs and is currently preparing an academic paper on the subject.
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Dr. Prasad comments that this paper shows a number of very concerning safety signals across a number of domains including myocarditis, ITP (immune thrombocytopenic purpura), Guillain-Barré syndrome, Bell’s Palsy, ADEM (acute disseminated encephalomyelitis), pulmonary embolism, febrile seizures and more. More importantly he picks apart the methods used in the study and concludes that it significantly underestimates the rate of adverse effects.
Dr. Prasad goes on to describe the paper as ‘unnerving’ because it shows that the harms of the mRNA Covid vaccines clearly outweigh the benefits for many age cohorts and possibly most cohorts. On this basis he questions the wisdom and ethics of the medical authorities who mandated Covid vaccines. His short video (linked above) is well worth a view and remember this is an eminent vaccine advocate speaking out and blowing the whistle on the unthinking and unconscionable decisions of our medical tsars and physicians. You can’t sanitise this sort of behaviour, we have been lied to and now that the truth is coming out, no one wants to own up.
At the Hatchard Report, we want to maintain a commitment to positive solutions. In my book Your DNA Diet (to order go here), I outline the four areas of life that we can directly control ourselves: Experience, Behaviour, Food and Consciousness. We have referenced in other articles improved routines involving adequate exercise and rest; lighter, more nourishing natural food choices; and a routine of meditation, breathing exercises and yoga postures, but what kinds of practices can improve Experience?
There is a fundamental rule of experience: ‘what you pay attention to grows stronger in your life’ or rather ‘what you see is what you become’. The converse of this is expressed in the saying: ‘where is the time for the unwanted?’ In the field of experience we have to exercise discrimination. It is easy to fall into patterns of experience that are undesirable, especially in the internet era. There are two ways we can control this.
Firstly the most powerful path to wisdom is to follow the joy. Respect that inner voice which tells you if something is good. A walk in the morning sun by the beach is healing. A concert, a play, a get together with friends, a celebration of achievements or a milestone should not be postponed. Our choices should favour joy.
Secondly, if you know something is wrong or not useful, but you still feel compelled to participate, the technique to deal with it is to postpone. Maybe it feels too hard to decide to stop smoking altogether, but you can easily say to yourself I’ll postpone smoking for today, and then tomorrow, and so on.
I was strongly reminded this week of the need for faith, hope, and charity. Faith is a choice, hope is a necessity, and charitable actions that help create a brighter future should not be postponed.
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