Wednesday, October 21, 2020

A Clearer Presentation, I Hope, of the Efficacy of HCQ and the Unnecessary Deaths caused by its Banning

From the WHO website a perfect example of the misinformation about HCQ:  referring to studies on which they based some decision about a particular trial: .

..both showed that hydroxychloroquine does not result in the reduction of mortality of hospitalised COVID-19 patients, when compared with standard 

Excuse me, I have to shout:  OF COURSE IT DIDN'T RESULT IN THE REDUCTION OF MORTALITY OF HOSPITALIZED COVID-19 PATIENTS:  IT ONLY WORKS IN THE VERY FIRST WEEK OF THE ILLENESS AND IS USELESS WHEN THE VIRUS HAS GONE TO THE SECOND STAGE, WHICH IS THE CASE WITH HOSPITALIZED PATIENTS.  IT SHOULD BE USED ON OUTPATIENTS AT THE FIRST SIGN OF ILLNESS OR EVEN BEFORE IF THERE HAS BEEN A POSITIVE TEST THOUGH NO SYMPTOMS.    EVERYONE WHO HAS DEFENDED THE DRUG HAS SAID THIS, WHY DOESN'T THE WHO KNOW IT?  PLEASE READ THE ARTICLE BY STEVEN HATFILL THAT IS No.4 POSTED BELOW:

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In the rest of this post I want to expand on some of the informatin I've given before on this subject.  

1)   Here is my abstract of the main points made on the drug HCQ from the video I posted of Drs. Simone Gold and Daniel Wohlgelernter:   https://watchpraystand.blogspot.com/2020/07/hydroxychlorophone-another-victim-of.html

 The discussion of Hydroxychloroquine starts about 13:00 into the video.   Dr. Gold discusses how three prestigious journals published faulty studies and then had to retract them.  The New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, and the Journal of the American Medical Association.   The JAMA study was done in Brazil using not Hydroxychlorowuine but Chloroquine, a precursor to HCQ that has a known lethal dosage limit which was exceeeded with many of the patients in that study.  About 24:45 Dr. Gold starts talking about the VA study and how it went wrong in the first place by studying people in the late stages of the virus, that HCQ especially with zinc, works best in the vert early stage to prevent the virus from replicating in the cells, but that later there is too much viral load in the body, with a high inflammatory condition and organ failure as the immune system overreacts, and it's too late for the drug to do any good.  So of course people died in that study.

2)   Dr. Harvey Risch wrote for Newsweek a piece titled
The Key to Defeating COVID-19 Already Exists:  We Just Need to Start Using It   https://www.newsweek.com/key-defeating-covid-19-already-exists-we-need-start-using-it-opinion-1519535
As professor of epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health, I have authored over 300 peer-reviewed publications and currently hold senior positions on the editorial boards of several leading journals. I am usually accustomed to advocating for positions within the mainstream of medicine, so have been flummoxed to find that, in the midst of a crisis, I am fighting for a treatment that the data fully support but which, for reasons having nothing to do with a correct understanding of the science, has been pushed to the sidelines. As a result, tens of thousands of patients with COVID-19 are dying unnecessarily. Fortunately, the situation can be reversed easily and quickly.

I am referring, of course, to the medication hydroxychloroquine. When this inexpensive oral medication is given very early in the course of illness, before the virus has had time to multiply beyond control, it has shown to be highly effective, especially when given in combination with the antibiotics azithromycin or doxycycline and the nutritional supplement zinc.

3)   Here is an interview of Dr. Risch by Mark Levin at You Tube.  Lasts about 12 minutes:     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6lNoFBTlfI 

4)    The disinformation problem was pursued in a Real Clear Politics article by virologist Steven Hatfill , who also gives a rather detailed history of misunderstandings and bad judgments including the use of bad studies like the VA study, that led to the banning of HCQ and still continue to dominate policy and the public consciousness 

   An Effective COVID Treatment the Media Continue to Besmirch     https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/08/04/an_effective_covid_treatment_the_media_continues_to_besmirch_143875.htmlI". 

Washington Post reporters Ariana Cha and Laurie McGinley were back again on May 22, with a new article shouting out the new supposed news: “Antimalarial drug touted by President Trump is linked to increased risk of death in coronavirus patients, study says.” The media uproar this time was based on a large study just published in the Lancet. There was just one problem. The Lancet paper was fraudulent and it was quickly retracted.

However, the damage from the biased media storm was done and it was long-lasting. Continuing patient enrollment needed for early-use clinical trials of hydroxychloroquine dried up within a week. Patients were afraid to take the drug, doctors became afraid to prescribe it, pharmacies refused to fill prescriptions, and in a rush of incompetent analysis and non-existent senior leadership, the FDA revoked its Emergency Use Authorization for the drug.... 

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, a search was made for suitable antiviral therapies to use as treatment until a vaccine could be produced. One drug, hydroxychloroquine, was found to be the most effective and safe for use against the virus. Federal funds were used for clinical trials of it, but there was no guidance from Dr. Anthony Fauci or the NIH Treatment Guidelines Panel on what role the drug would play in the national pandemic response. …. 

Following a careful regimen developed by doctors in France, some knowledgeable practicing U.S. physicians began prescribing hydroxychloroquine to patients still in the early phase of COVID infection. Its effects seemed dramatic… In contrast --- and in error -- the NIH-funded studies somehow became focused on giving hydroxychloroquine to late-presenting hospitalized patients.... 

By April, it was clear that roughly seven days from the time of the first onset of symptoms, a COVID-19 infection could sometimes progress into a more radical late phase of severe disease with inflammation of the blood vessels in the body and immune system over-reactions. …, [by then]  no antiviral drug could be expected to show much of an effect during this severe second stage of COVID. 

On April 6, 2020, an international team of medical experts ...reaffirmed that hydroxychloroquine was a safe drug with no serious side effects. ... Consequently, [many] countries ... began to use hydroxychloroquine widely and early in their national pandemic response. ... 

However, the NIH promoted a much different strategy for the United States. The “Fauci Strategy” was to keep early infected patients quarantined at home without treatment until they developed a shortness of breath and had to be admitted to a hospital. Then they would be given hydroxychloroquine. The Food and Drug Administration cluelessly agreed to this doctrine and it stated in its hydroxychloroquine Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) that “hospitalized patients were likely to have a greater prospect of benefit (compared to ambulatory patients with mild illness).” 

In reality just the opposite was true. This was a tragic mistake by Fauci and FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn and it was a mistake that would cost the lives of thousands of Americans in the days to come. 

At the same time, accumulating data showed remarkable results if hydroxychloroquine were given to patients early, during a seven-day window from the time of first symptom onset. ...In mid-April a high-level memo was sent to the FDA alerting them to the fact that the best use for hydroxychloroquine was for its early use in still ambulatory COVID patients.... 

Failing to understand that COVID-19 could be a two-stage disease process, the FDA ignored the memo and, as previously mentioned, it withdrew its EUA for hydroxychloroquine based on flawed studies and clinical trials that were applicable only to late-stage COVID patients.

 By now, however, some countries had already implemented early, aggressive, outpatient community treatment with hydroxychloroquine and within weeks were able to minimize their COVID deaths and bring their national pandemic under some degree of control. 

In countries such as Great Britain and the United States, where the “Fauci-Hahn Strategy” was followed, there was a much higher death rate ....

[In Switzerland] Following a lag of 13 days after stopping outpatient hydroxychloroquine use, the country’s COVID-19 deaths increased four-fold .... Early outpatient hydroxychloroquine was restarted June 11 but the four-fold “wave of excess lethality” lasted until June 22, after which the nrCFR rapidly returned to its background value. 

Here in our country, Fauci continued to ignore the ever accumulating and remarkable early-use data on hydroxychloroquine and he became focused on a new antiviral compound named remdesivir. This was an experimental drug that had to be given intravenously every day for five days. It was never suitable for major widespread outpatient or at-home use as part of a national pandemic plan. We now know that remdesivir has no effect on overall COVID patient mortality and it costs thousands of dollars per patient.  

Hydroxychloroquine, by contrast, costs 60 cents a tablet, it can be taken at home, it fits in with the national pandemic plan for respiratory viruses, and a course of therapy simply requires swallowing three tablets in the first 24 hours followed by one tablet every 12 hours for five days. 

There are now 53 studies that show positive results of hydroxychloroquine in COVID infections. There are 14 global studies that show neutral or negative results -- and [those were severely flawed].

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Want to add here that I ran across an interview at You Tube with a Dr. David Brownstein who has been using what he calls a holistic treatment method with COVID patients, using IV vitamins,A, C and D, and  iodine  particularly, and claims nobody he's treated has died of the virus.

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Now want to add one more thing.  A Dr. Brian Tyson of El Centro, California, reports positive results of HCQ on over 1700 patients but I want to point out that it was given to patients of all ages, which as Dr. Risch has said is not necessary, and it confuses the data since patients younger than 60 would most likely have recovered without any treatment.  It should be given to the high-risk groups who would likely die otherwise.  I found the same problem with the Ford study which also reported positive results.  That too did not discriminate on the basis of age, and since it was done with hospitalized patients who are already into the inflammatory and immune system overreaction phase, the older patients of course had the highest death rate even with the HCQ..   It's unfortunately likely in that case that only the younger patients survived, and that was credited to the HCQ although it may simply have been that they are low-risk and would probably have survived anyway.  There's no way to know since they don't isolate the data for these different conditions.

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Another interesting bit of information:  Fox News reported on a study of the use of comercial mouthwashes and nasal irrigations that showed they kill the virus at anything from 30 seconds to two minutes.  Good to know.

Sunday, October 18, 2020

A Succinct Presentation of the Pretribulation Rapture

I'm posting this just because David Guzik does such a good job of laying out the biblical basis for the  pretribulation rapture in one hour.  I have some problem with the arguments for the Millennium but I'll get to that in some other post.

Sorry again, Blogger changed things a couple months ago so that I can no longer figure out how to embed a You Tube video;  all I can do is give the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QiXG7bpKec


Wednesday, October 14, 2020

Another Teacher on the Spiritual Meaning of Song of Songs

I love discovering a new inspiring Christian voice, someone I hadn't heard of before.  I just discovered Charles Alexander when I was looking for some good preaching on the Song of Songs at Sermon Audio.  Vernon McGee is good but I think Alexander is better.   Nobody yet is completely convincing on all parts of this subject though.  Many parts of the Song get a new interpretation from each individual preacher and I'm not in a position to know who is right.   All I know is I'm attracted to those who bring out the most glorious characteristics of the Beloved and I'm looking for something to increase my love of God far more than I'm looking for correct theology.

Besides sermons at Sermon Audio, I found this page of Alexander's thoughts on the Song of Songs -  http: www.allbygrace.com/alexsong04803.html  - which has many inspiring passages.  "Name Above All Names" is the theme.  I just ran across one statement that particularly thrills me though it's not directly related to what I was just saying:  

We repudiate with disgust the modern attempt to force upon the Christian public the false name YAHWEH in place of Jehovah. No such name exists. It is without meaning, invented largely when theology had begun to be perverted during the course of the nineteenth century.

YES YES YES YES YES!    Thank You Lord.  I don't recall ever before seeing anyone repudiate that abomination of a name for God, but it's grated on me for years as so many products of the "higher criticism" do (along with so much of the work of Westcott and Hort in foisting an abomination of a Greek manuscript and a repugnant English translation on the Church).   I've mentioned my abhorrence of this name many times in my blogs though I really only have my own visceral repugnance for it to go by.  At least now I find that repugnance shared by someone whose perspective is appealing to me in general.

There are so many things in the Biblical record that I think most of us grasp only superficially without making an effort to understand them better.  That's true of me anyway and now that I know it I'm hoping to get more deeply into these things.  Alexander for instance discusses the incarnation in far more depth than I've encountered before, and of course it must be a very complex topic that could take us deeply into mysteries of God we've hardly ever touched on if we spend time thinking it through.   We believe it of course, we know it's true, but how many of us have spent any time contemplating its mysteriousness?  And that's just one of hundreds of topics we could and should think about more deeply.  Jesus prayed that we would "know" Him after all, and that takes learning more about Him, spending more time with Him etc..

And I just want to say one more time that the Song of Songs must surely be understood in the spiritual sense and that those who interpret it as about human married love are missing the whole point.  For one thimg it just seems so unlikely that God would include a whole book on that subject when there are so many believers who are single and will never marry.  Addressing specific instructions to special groups (husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, parents, children, slaves, slave owners, pastors, elders, women etc.) makes sense, but not writing a whole book about married love to congregations in which there are many unmarried people.   The love between Christ and His Church, which scripture calls His Bride after all, includes all believers.   And that's not even to address the point that the ancient Jews called the book the Holy of Holies.  Married love is certainly a great blessing given by God, but calling it the Holy of Holies, no.  But the mystery of the union of Christ with His Bride deserves such a designation, a union of soul with soul or spirit with spirit, not a carnal union.  And only the carnally minded are going to think of this as something wispy or unreal, whereas the spiritual has a reality far more solid than the physical.

Tuesday, October 13, 2020

Another that belongs in the Evolution blog.

 Evolutionary Biology is an amusement I indulge from time to time.  They discuss many things biological that can clearly be discussed without the slightest reference to evoltion and yet they always have to tack it on at some point and carry on as if it were relevant.  You can discuss the mesentery, the membrane that holds together the internal organs of many creatures, without any reference whatever to evolution.  It apparently has interesting properties that have never been fully appreciated.  You don't need evolution to think about those things.  

But then someone mentions Junk DNA and vestigial organs and they have to discuss them as products of evolution --  Junk DNA MUST have a function you see, because after all it's such a huge percentage of the genome evolution requires it.  I dunno, in reality not much actuall function has been found in these otherwise normal-looking genes.  The chemistry is so complex it can still show some signs of life I suppose, long after having lost the normal coding function of a gene, which suggests SOME sort of continuing function of a different sort, though what that function might be is purely speculative.  Something more like rigor mortis comes to my mind but then I'm no biologist.  And it's Evolution that requires the function so they'll turn even rigor mortis into a function to fit the theory if they have to.  (Funny though, some evoltuionists think that just as dead genes it supports evolution, being a record of former evolutionary experiments in the long history of evolutionary change.  Or maybe they've realized that one didn't work, I haven't kept up with it).    

They seem also to think that what are called vestigial organs have a function too.  Organs the creature can apparently survive well enough without.  Seems to me that they could have lost their function and still go on sort of more or less doing something or other even though it's no longer a necessary something or other.    Oh well.   These things are such wonderful evidence for Creationism and against Evolution but oh well, oh well.  All life is running down as it were, the whole planet is running down as it were, the cosmos is running down as it were, all that is evidence for the Biblical accounts of Creation, Fall and Flood, not Evolution.   It all implies a formerly perfect biological system that has lost its functions over the millennia as Death took over through the Fall.   Stages of death over time you could say, the Flood being one gigantic death that all by itself could have brought about Junk DNA in the ensuing centuries.  A long litany of loss is the most likely explanation for what we actually see.

I was pondering again how each creature certainly seems to demonstrate a Species coherence that belies the whole idea that Species evolved from other Species.  Well there are many reasons that idea is bogus but I'm thinking at the moment of how you can often see a structure that defines each that remains quite recognizable through all the variations within a particular Species.  You can always tell a cat from its skeleton, can't you?  Or a dog.  Distortions can occur but the basic structure is reocgnizable.  Many other parts may vary according to the way the DNA gets sexually combined, but something in the basic structure remains definitive of the catness of cats, the dogness of dogs and so on. Birds too..  Penguins don't look a lot like other birds on the surface but they sure do in their skeletons.  Ostriches too.  Yep and the trilobiteness of trilobites, yep, I hope I'll get to spend some time putting that one together some day if I live so long.  Or maybe we'll get to do such things in the Millennium.  That would be fun.

HCQ: Some Lies are More Lethal than Others

 The suppression of a drug that could have saved thousands upon thousands of COVID patients is a crime almost beyond belief.  We've seen a lot of corruption, lies, good for evil and evil for good, these days, but this one is the scariest of them all.  They are facilitating murder.   Truth is suppressed and lies are propagated in countless ways these days, but this one actually tops the others.  They just go on and on talking about the virus as if there were no way to control it.  Maybe it's less virulent than it was and that's a major hope.  But the HCQ is ignored.  Maybe now the drugs used for Trump will be promoted, and since they apparently worked for him that's not a bad thing in itself.  The problem is that HCQ could already have saved the vast majority of those who have died by this virus and it continues to be lied about.

What can be done?  The people with the power are the ones suppressing the truth and promoting the lies and those who see through it have no power.   Well, maybe there could be some lawsuits at least.   Nicholas Sandman who was so viciously slandered has successfully sued his slanderers.   Families of people who died of COVID who could have received HCQ but didn't, could sue the doctors and hospitals and the governors and other politicians who banned the drug, and maybe the propganda machines.  The people censored from social media could sue them.

I'm personally most disappointed in Trump that he has abandoned HCQ.  There was really no need for the new drugs they used for him because HCQ is known to be safe and effective and a lot cheaper.  There is no need for a vaccine for COVID either, let alone a "warp speed" effort to develop one,  since we have such a safe and effective and cheap cure for it.   Greed?  Politics?  Ignorance?  Fake Science?  All of the above?  

Monday, October 12, 2020

Another Doctor Testifies to HCQ and the great scandal of its being suppressed. NOW CENSORED

A Rambling Gospel Pondering

 Have they not heard the gospel?  Is that why they continue to think they are safe with their religious teachings and practices, their meditations, their good works?  It's possible they haven't heard it.  Perhaps it was given them but was so inexact it wasn't really the gospel.  Perhaps I have been guilty of that myself.  I blurt things out hoping it to be saving truth but maybe I'm sticking to a general warning about coming earthly judgment and leaving out the eternal judgment?  I think I may be doing that.  Then I am guilty of the blood of anyone who dies not having heard the true gospel of salvation.  

Jesus died to pay for your sins so that you could have eternal life, and if you refuse His sacrifice you will die in your sins, and dying in your sins means going to Hell.  We are all born destined to Hell, because we are all born in the sin of Adam, meaning born inheriting the original sin of our first father, born into the fallen world which resulted from that sin..  The world around us is broken just as we are broken, but we take it for normal because it is all we've ever known.  The only way we can know about it is through revelation by the God who made it all, and that's what we have in the Bible.  Christianity isn't a "religion" the way other religions are, it's the actual speaking of the Creator God to us.  He made us in His own image, with the ability to know Him, but that's what was lost when Adam fell.  He lost his connection to God.  So we all inherit Adam's inability to know God.  That's why He sent Jesus, to restore that ability to us.  That is what it means to be born again, to have a new life given to us, the lif3e of the spirit by which we recognize the God who made us.  Without the new birth, the regeneration of the spirit that died at the Fall, we remain in darkness, unable to know God.

Buddhists and Hindus can meditate forever and never find God because they are fallen as is the whole human race.  The best they can do is explore the Creation itself, the Cosmos and their own nature in which their spirit is fallen, even dead.  They can bring some of their nature under control.  They can to some extent learn to control their own destiny, but it's very limited because they are fallen and they will never discover their fallenness or God Himself.  God can't be recognized until the spirit is "quickened" as the King James Bible puts it, brought to life, reborn or regenerated.  That new birth is given when we believe in the sacrifice of Christ to pay for our sins.  And it isn't just the recovery of our own lost spirit, because the Spirit of God Himself comes to indwell us and be our strength.

Buddhism and other religions teach that we are subject to a unversal moral law which punishes us when we transgress it.  They intuit in an inexact way what the Bible reveals exactly, and they aim much of their religious practice at trying to prevent and/or undo the consequences of that law, which in Buddhism is called Karma.  I don't understand a lot about it but apparently they believe that they can ultimately free themselves from the consequences of Karma and no longer be subject to the punishment it brings about.  Most religions have some version of Hell or Hells, it's a pretty universal concept though its nature varies due to distortions brought about by our fallenness.  There is also the idea of reincarnation which is itself a form of punishment.   The Bible says, by contrast, that we have only one life, no others, and after we die we face the Judgment of God.  If, as we believe, the Bible is the actual revelation given by God Himself, then this is the truth and all the other religions are struggling along under the limitations of their own fallen minds and their fallen minds are their only guidance, not much to which to entrust your eternal fate.

The Moral Law, or Law of God, is spelled out in the Bible in the first five books, principally in Leviticus but also in Numbers and Deuteronomy.  The Ten Commandments are the foundational categories of the Law on which all the others are based.  How we treat God is the subject of the first three, followed by the command to remember the Sabbath Day (which actually applies to the ultimate Rest in Christ as well as a literal day of rest in this life), then we are commanded to honor father and mother (which is usually extended to all legitimate authority)  then we get a list of sins against neighbor after that:  Thou shalt not kill, steal, lie, commit adultery or covet.  Buddhism has a version of the first four of those so they are pretty universal.   Their idea of not killing means you can't kill anything at all even a cockroach, but the Biblical understanding is that it means murder of a human being and nothing else.   In any case this is how you find out what sin is in God's eyes, through His commandments..

The Bible reveals that we cannot be freed from the Law of God by anything we ourselves are capable of.  We can turn from wickedness to righteousness and thereby stop bringing on new punishments, at least to some extent though not perfectly because being fallen we will always be committing sins though not aware of it in many cases, but we can't eradicate those we've already earned.  God Himself had to come to earth to pay for our sins against the Moral Law.  That's what His death was all about.  He died in our place, in the place of every human being who believes in Him.  That is what salvation is.  You can't be freed from the Moral Law, or the Karma version of it, in any other way.  The Law of God is exacting beyond anyone's ability to know it, and every human being has sin in our lives that we will ultimately pay for ourselves in Hell if we do not accept Christ's death on our behalf.

We all suffer the consequences of our sins in this life too, and that continues until death.  Christians who fail to mortify sin, that is, who fail to stop sinning at least in obvious ways, continue to earn such consequences and continue to suffer them in this life.   We often don't appreciate how the Law continues to operate as long as we are in this life.  All sin earns death.  Adam and Eve had eternal life until they disobeyed God, but their disobedeince brought death into the world and all their offspring inherit it.  

That is what fallennness means, the world being fallen and ourselves being fallen.  The world has become a hostile place because of our sins beginning with the original sin of our first parents.  We ourselves continue to suffer the consequences from the sins of our ancestors as well as our own in this life, and we will die with all those sins on our souls which will take us to Hell if we don't throw ourselves on the mercy of God through the death of Jesus Christ which paid for those sins.   

 "The wages of sin is death" says the Bible.  Some sins may bring about literal physical death very soon, but there are stages and phases of "death" in the form of diseases and injuries and misfortunes and every kind of unhappiness in this world short of the death of the physical body.   We are by nature "sinners" so we can't help bringing all this misery upon ourselves.  The breakdown of the body as we age is a form of it.   If some people suffer less it is becauase they have accumulated less sin either from their ancestors or by their own doings, but there is nobody who is sinliess in this world.  Only Jesus Christ was sinless, the only sinless human being who ever lived.  Only an "unblemished" sacrifice could pay for our sins and He is the only one who qualified.

He died that you might live happily forever.   He had all our sins in His own body when He died so that His death paid for them.  Believe that and you will be saved from your sins.  Repent and believe.