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SARS MONKEY
BUSINESS

by Jon Rappoport
April 16 2003

AND NOW COME THE MONKEYS...
IS THIS PHASE THE NEXT SARS SCAM?

Larry Altman, the dean of American medical writers, reports in the NY Times that monkeys have been intentionally and experimentally infected with the reputed SARS virus and have come down with the disease.

This animal work, done in the Netherlands, is part of fulfilling what are called Koch's postulates, a method by which conventional researchers prove a new disease is caused by a particular germ.

Altman states that the coronavirus was placed in the monkeys' nostrils. Some monkeys then went on to develop pneumonia and a pattern of lung damage similar to that found in human SARS cases.

First, there is no word about who the researchers are or where their work has been published. This may sound like a minor point, but in fact it is major---because without the precise findings and the details of the monkey experiment, this is science by press conference.

Actually, Altman is reporting on exactly that, a press release from Dr. David Heymann, the director of the World Health Organization division for communicable diseases.

The NY Times article is only a reflection of a press conference. It appears that the Netherlands experiments are not yet published, and therefore scientists from all over the world have not had a chance to confirm or deny, through their own attempts to replicate the Netherlands results, whether this is real or flawed research.

Again, you may think I'm nitpicking, but this is how science is supposed to be done. Somebody publishes a serious paper, and other scientists then study the experimental methods and details, and pick holes and try to set up the same experiments themselves to see what they find.

Instead, according to Altman, WHO scientists are meeting now in Geneva to look over the Netherlands findings prior to drafting a statement---another press release---which will probably affirm that these monkey findings are good to go.

This is completely outrageous. But researchers around the world these days have become used to being pre-empted by major announcements from health bureaucracies like WHO and the CDC.

Altman says nothing about the size of the overall sample in the Netherlands study. Was it two monkeys? Ten? Twenty? A hundred? When he writes that SOME monkeys came down with pneumonia after the coronavirus was placed in their nostrils, what is he talking about? Does some mean half the sample population of animals? One-third? Two out of ten?

These are vital questions. If the overall sample size was small to begin with, the experiment meant next to nothing. It was just a pilot study, and such projects are traditionally ended with a call for MORE RESEARCH before any conclusion can be reached. In this case, however, it appears we are being set up for a short-circuiting of the WHOLE AND EXHAUSTIVE research process.

Equally outrageous is the fact that you are reading this analysis here and not hearing it from the howls of angry researchers from Newfoundland to Tierra del Fuego who are fighting mad that the scientific method has been grossly shortchanged.

By conventional standards of animal research, ALL the test animals should contract the disease from the injected virus. Otherwise, the conclusion that, in this case, the coronavirus is the cause of what is being called SARS is AUTOMATICALLY in grave doubt.

Finally, there is a long-standing debate, suppressed in research journals, about the validity of any animal disease studies, when they are applied to humans. I'll let that one go for the moment.

Altman himself is disingenuous in his reporting of the animal study in the Netherlands, if you know that reporter's work on AIDS from the 1980s. And I do. Altman consistently failed to highlight the fact that HIV was NEVER shown to cause AIDS in the more than one hundred chimps, around the world, in whom that virus was injected. Then, in the 1980s, he ignored the fact; now he appears to trumpet the positive finding in the Netherlands monkey study as a victory for conscientious research.

Altman is merely acting as a mouthpiece for WHO here. If his job is echoing WHO press releases, he and his newspaper should say so. If not, then Altman should resign his post for having engaged in egregious misleading reporting.

I need to emphasize the basic reasons researchers read other published studies and then try to replicate them: To see if their own results are the same as in the original study. To see if, in the very reading of the original study, they perceive errors in the design of the experiment. And to guard against outright fraud that may be present in the original work.

If WHO succeeds in short-cutting further animal research on this coronavirus, then fraud is the obvious conclusion here.

I find it very interesting that, several days ago, the director of a WHO lab in Canada, Frank Plummer, confessed that his people could only find very, very tiny amounts of coronovirus in the nasal passages of human SARS patients. In fact, the amount of virus was so tiny it could only be observed at all AFTER the PCR test was done. The PCR took gene fragments of the coronavirus---tiny pieces of tiny pieces---and blew them up many times to bring them to light.

Only a scientific moron or a fraud would infer that such infinitesimal quantities of a virus could cause disease.

Which leads to this burning question: how much coronoavirus was loaded into the nostrils of those monkeys in the Netherlands? Did scientists really inject infinitesimal fragments in their lab monkeys, to match the Canadian human finding? I doubt it. Another reason why we must see the methods used by the researchers from the Netherlands.

There is an old trick you do with animals. You shove in very large amounts of a germ you are hoping to establish as the cause of a disease. You also may "prepare" the animals by dosing them with chemicals to weaken their immune systems before giving them any virus. In other words you CREATE what you later FIND.

In conventionally real science---a subject WHO is obviously ignoring--- you never say one or two or three or four animal experiments are sufficient to announce a conclusive finding.

So far we are simply getting several press conferences here. And complicit silence from thousands of cowards who call themselves scientists around the world, scientists whose degrees should be stripped from their walls and discarded like so much trash.

The public, of course, understands none of this. The public merely watches TV and reads the newspapers and accepts what the huge health bureaucracies tell them.

Update---yes, as I suspected, it's official---WHO just announced from Geneva that they have accepted the Erasmus University monkey study in toto---and the coronavirus is the official cause of SARS---no science, no scientific method, just another press conference.

Jon Rappoport has worked as a free-lance investigative reporter for 20 years. He has written articles on politics, health, media, culture and art for LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, Village Voice, Nexus, CBS Healthwatch, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has hosted, produced, and written radio programs. He has appeared as a guest on over 200 radio and television programs, including ABC's Nightline, Tony Brown's Journal (PBS), and Hard Copy.

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