The Arrow #151

Hello friends.

Greetings from Fayetteville, Arkansas.

And a Happy Thanksgiving to all!

I’m probably not in Fayetteville as you read this. I’m in Little Rock, where we’re spending Thanksgiving with our youngest son and his fam. Plus our middle son and his fam, but our youngest is hosting for the first time. We’ll be heading to MD’s brother’s house for a later visit.

In thinking about Thanksgiving and gratitude, I have to say that I have nothing but thanks and a huge serving of gratitude to you readers of The Arrow. If it weren’t for you, I would probably have abandoned this effort long ago as creating it every week is pretty time consuming. So I thank you very much for hanging in there with me. And I’ve got to give a HUGE thank you to all who are paid subscribers.

I had a moment of consternation last week when I hit the send button for The Arrow #150. Substack always grabs the first graphic in any given post and uses it for the featured image. Whenever I send the post, a page pops up showing me the feature image Substack has selected. Imagine my surprise and consternation when the image below popped up.

The cropping was in the worst place possible. This same photo is still in the header on the home page. I’ve got to get it fixed, but what with everything going on, I haven’t had the time.

Okay, on to other things.

First, it’s wonderful that our entire family is unvaccinated—pure bloods, as they say—so there won’t be any fights over Thanksgiving dinner. But, second, the same doesn’t apply to the distaff’s fam we’ll be visiting later. I’ve tried to get MD to let me bake the pie shown below to take over. It would be great fun. But alas…

Speaking of vaccinations…

Big Pharma’s Little Helpers

Dr. Peter McCullough, epidemiologist, cardiologist, research scientist and former editor of a couple of prestigious journals, supervised a graduate student at his alma mater the University of Michigan in doing a study looking at autopsy findings since the start of the Covid-19 vaccines. These are standard types of studies graduate students are assigned to do. They develop literature research skills under the tutelage of experienced researchers.

In this case, the grad student was to comb the medical literature as published in PubMed looking for any papers written about autopsies done post Covid vaccines. This is more difficult than it might appear on the surface. It takes a bit of skill to figure out how to sort through the literally millions of papers written since the Covid vaccines were started and find the ones that are pertinent to the search. A simple query for “autopsies” won’t do it. This is a skill learned by doing, which is why it is often assigned to grad students.

Here is how they went about it and what they found.

The team tabulates the data and writes the paper and the peer-review process begins, which can be lengthy.

And, of course, they posted the graphical abstract on Instagram as the laborious process discussed above was moving slowly along. Then out of the blue, “Health Feedback, the fact-check blogging site posted this false claim.”

Big Pharma never sleeps. As Dr. McCullough asked:

We know Dr. McCullough’s credentials. As he wonders, we do as well. What are the credentials of the people who wrote this?

I’m sure Big Pharma has a lot of people on the payroll lurking throughout social media to counter claims such as these. Or bot algorithms even.

All it takes is a bit of doubt entering the equation, and it gives those wavering the strength they need to hew to the Big Pharma point of view. Sowing doubt is how all these Fact Checkers work. And it is the primary way various operators keep the hesitant in line. Big Tobacco has been a master at it.

Here we are talking about the fact checkers when the facts being checked are from a paper showing 73.9 percent of autopsies of people who died after being vaccinated had evidence of vaccine injuries that may well have killed them.

In many cases, the pathologists doing the autopsies weren’t looking for the subtle and not-so-subtle signs of vaccine injuries because they don’t typically look for those. The researchers involved in this study took a second look at the autopsy reports with vaccine injury as a possibility. What they came up with was that almost four fifths of those who died had such signs. Which should get everyone’s attention.

Since these folks were totally on the lookout for these injuries, they probably over estimated them a bit. But even if it was 50 percent, that’s a lot. Enough, I would think, to start a real investigation.

Do you think these fact checkers went through and looked at each autopsy report and came to a different conclusion? That would have taken as much time as it took the researchers doing the study to make a determination. I would suspect it is doubtful they came anywhere close, if they even looked at all.

It’s a lot easier to just say the results are false and move on. And pick up a check from Big Pharma.

Bad Batches, Good Batches

Dr. McCullough alerted me to another study (this one from Denmark) showing yet again that batches matter. As you can see in the graphic below from the study, some batches cause vastly more serious adverse events, including death, than do others.

Based on info from the study, the blue line shows batches (each dot represents a batch) causing the vast majority of SAEs but these batches represent only 4.22 percent of vaccine doses given. The green line represents the majority of vaccine doses at 63.69 percent of all doses given. And the yellow line depicts the SAEs of 32.09 percent of all the doses.

These vaccines were all administered in Denmark. If you have been vaccinated and would like to see the issues, if any, from any batch your vaccine(s) may have come from, you can go to this site and track them down.

I haven’t been vaccinated, but if I had been, my main concern would be about how long I have to worry about some SAE happening to me.

We know that most of the SAEs occur close to the time of vaccination and drop off after as time goes on.

Dr. McCullough opines that

Covid Discharge Military Lawsuits Looming

Looks like the military made a big mistake with their Covid vaccine mandates. A lot of valuable members of all the services said, No, Sir. They refused the vaccines and were drummed out. Now the various services are begging them to come back.

Not only that, many of them are suing for back pay and other benefits in what may turn out to be a huge class action lawsuit.

Dale Saran, the guy heading up the legal team, is a friend of mine and a reader of The Arrow. He was successful years ago in representing military personnel who refused to take the anthrax vaccines and were facing court marshal. You can read his book about these anthrax vaccine lawsuits and get some idea of what he and his team will be dealing with now.

According to Dale, the lawsuits are

SOURCE

It’s just another typical case of a major governmental cock up that no one involved in will lose so much as a day’s pay, while we, the taxpayers, will foot the bill. It’s just like this latest Pentagon audit failure for the sixth year in a row. Will anyone get fired?

What do you think would happen to you if you screwed up your books for six years running? Would the IRS simply say, Okay, you worked really hard to get it all together, but it’s just not there yet. Don’t worry, though, you won’t be fined and have your bank account seized or anything like that. Just try to do better next year.

And now this. It’s deja vu.

Nothing new under the sun. The government makes stupid mistakes, and we pay.

Turkey Day Swoon

Ever wonder why everyone falls asleep in front of the TV after Thanksgiving dinner?

The post-meal swoon is a function of a couple of metabolic processes. First, turkey contains a lot of an amino acid called tryptophan. Tryptophan is set apart from other amino acids in that it doesn’t respond to insulin as strongly as others do.

Amino acids, like fats and carbs, are moved out of the blood and into the tissues by the hormone insulin. After a meal, insulin is up, driving all the fuels out of the blood and into the various cells. But since tryptophan is more resistant to the effects of insulin than other amino acids, the relative level of tryptophan increases as compared to the other amino acids.

Tryptophan converts through a series of steps to serotonin. Serotonin makes you sleepy. But usually food high in tryptophan can’t make enough serotonin to matter. Unless a lot of insulin is present.

Tryptophan competes with other amino acids for transport into the brain. So when tryptophan levels are relatively higher in the blood than aminos that are insulin-transport-sensitive because all of the other aminos have been driven into the cells, more tryptophan is converted to serotonin.

On Thanksgiving everyone eats a lot of turkey (high tryptophan) and typically a lot of carbs and fat. As we’ve discussed, due to the incretin effect, insulin goes way up. The massively elevated insulin levels ensure a relative abundance of tryptophan, which easily converts to a bunch of serotonin. And nighty-night! You get sleepy and doze off. And wake up saying, “who won?”

Now you know.

Cholesterol Madness

Sometimes you come across something so stupid that you think it can’t possibly be true. Then you realize it really is true. People really are this stupid.

In scanning all the latest medical issues that hit my mailbox, I came across this article on gene editing [paywalled] with CRISPR to turn off the PCSK9 gene in the liver. By turning off the gene, the hope is that LDL-cholesterol levels will fall and reduce the risk for heart disease.

Before I can tell you just how stupid this study and the whole idea behind it is, I’ve got to make sure you are aware of a few issues.

First, the subjects in this study all were heterozygous for familial hypercholesterolemia (FH). People who are homozygous for FH have extremely elevated levels of cholesterol and die of heart disease at an early age at greater rates than do those without FH. But if they survive into middle age, they often end up living longer on average than those who don’t have FH. So, for these folks, at least, there is something protective in their elevated cholesterol levels.

The subjects in this study had only one gene for FH, not both, so they do not have full blown FH, but still typically have higher LDL levels than those without the gene.

Second, the PCSK9 gene codes for a protein that helps regulate the amount of LDL in the blood. It does so by preventing LDL receptors reaching the surface of liver cells. Once LDL receptors are on the surface of the liver cells, they attach to a circulating LDL particle and pull it out of the blood and into the liver. PCSK9 inhibitors are a class of drugs that, as their name implies, prevents the PCSK9 protein from stopping the LDL receptor on its journey to the cell surface. By doing so, the drug increases the number of LDL receptors that reach the cell surface and pull in LDL particles, resulting in less LDL in the blood.

These drugs are outrageously expensive and must be taken by injection. They are the new drugs out there still under patent. Now that statins are off patent and can be had generically, the drug companies are pushing PCSK9 inhibitors because that’s now where the money is.

Now you know what FH is and what the PSCK9 protein does, so let’s look at this study.

Researchers used VERVE-101, a CRISPR-based gene editing mechanism designed to inactivate the liver gene PCSK9. Inactivation of this gene would end up with reduced production of PCSK9, which would allow more LDL receptors to make it to the cell surface and pull more LDL out of the blood.

There were ten subjects in the study, both male and female with ages ranging from 18 to 75. All had “HeFH, established atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease and uncontrolled hypercholesterolemia despite being on maximally tolerated lipid-lowering therapy.”

The study was a phase 1 study, which are typically done to test for safety. The results for the larger doses appeared to work in terms of reducing serum LDL levels. We have no idea what the long term consequences are.

In terms of results, there was a marked lowering of PCSK9 protein in all the subjects, but especially in those with the highest levels.

In medicine, the most important commandment is to first do no harm. This process changes the genome forever, so we have no idea what the long-term consequences might be. But even the short term consequences might be bad.

In this small study of only ten subjects, one had a heart attack the day after the infusion and another subject had a fatal heart attack five weeks after getting the infusion. I’m not sure a 20 percent serious adverse effect rate is all that safe.

The crazy part of all this is that this therapy that changes the genome forever is all done in the service of a mere hypothesis. There is still no real hard evidence that LDL causes heart disease. Even after all the work done trying to prove the connection, it is still just an hypothesis. I’m not sure I would want to permanently change my genome because of an unproven hypothesis.

Okay, here’s where I make my pitch for paid subscribers. Where else would you learn—and for pennies a day, at that—that it might not be a good idea to have your genome permanently altered in an effort to permanently lower your LDL level? Click below to sign up.

Woman the Hunter?

I wrote about this a year or so ago when the same online magazine posted a piece on how women were hunters during the Paleolithic. Now comes another article espousing the same thing. Written, of course, by two female anthropologists.

Here is how it starts.

The article basically goes on to detail how women have more type 1 fibers than men. Type 1 muscle fibers are the so-called slow twitch fibers that can’t muster up a lot of strength, but are good for endurance. The authors also discuss how females produce estrogen, which helps with fat burning. Therefore, they posit, women may well have been better hunters than men during endurance hunts.

Okay, let me start out by saying that I have nothing against women in terms of their strength or endurance. I’m sure if you drew a Venn diagram representing the strength of all the men in the world and all the women in the world, there would be overlap. But not a lot. There would be a little slice.

No one bans women from men’s sports. I’m sure if a woman could bring a 95 mile per hour fastball, she could play in the MLB. Or if she could hit a 95 mph fastball. Same with golf. No one limits women from playing on the PGA tour. They just can’t hit it as far as the professional males. There is a huge disparity in strength and muscle mass between men and women, and all things being equal men are pretty much always going to beat women in athletic events involving power, strength, and speed.

Women golfers playing in the LPGA can outdrive me. But they can’t outdrive men their age playing in the PGA.

The US women’s soccer team lost badly to a group of Jr. High boys from Dallas. This was the women’s soccer team that had beaten other women’s soccer teams the world over. And they fell to a bunch of non-pro under-15-year-old boys.

I’m not trying to bad mouth the women’s soccer team; they’re a fine team, but it’s just a fact. Men, even adolescent men, are stronger and faster than adult women.

And I haven’t even gotten into sexual dimorphism. Sexual dimorphism is the difference in size between the sexes. The farther back we go in the anthropological record, the greater the sexual dimorphism. Which means, in relative terms, women were smaller than men then as compared to now. But even today, your average woman is smaller than your average man. The difference was greater 25,000 years ago.

Bringing down big game is a dangerous business, unless you shoot them from afar with a gun. Downing them with a spear or a pointed stick is quite a feat, requiring a fair amount of strength, agility, and courage. Women might have had the agility and courage, but they certainly didn’t have the strength of men.

Then once the beast was brought down, it had to be defended against depredation from other large carnivores. And had to be cut up and schlepped back to wherever camp was. These are activities requiring strength.

I can see women perhaps involved in the endurance part of the hunt, i.e., running the animals down. But I can’t conjure up a picture of them actually involved in the killing.

I would imagine that youngish men were the hunters. Youngish women would be saddled with child rearing activities. And were they of childbearing age, they would probably be breastfeeding a growing child, something men cannot do, of course. Although I’m not an expert on Paleolithic technology, something tells me they didn’t have breast pumps. Which means women would have had to either carry their kids on the hunts, or stay closer to camp and breastfeed. I strongly suspect the latter.

I’m pretty sure some men would hunt and some would stay home guarding the women and children. Seems a better division of labor, to me at least.

If you look at any contemporary hunter-gatherer societies anthropologists have studied, you find the men hunting and the women gathering and rearing the offspring.

The authors of this article, however, disagree.

‘Nuff said. The authors of this piece are essentially accusing other researchers of having a bias, while their own ideological bias screams to the heavens. Looks to me more like these two researchers have let their confirmation bias run wild. What they’re practicing is not anthropology but woke-thropology.

New Guidelines On The Way?

A new paper just came out in Circulation titled Cardiovascular-Kidney-Metabolic Health: A Presidential Advisory From the American Heart Association. I haven’t had time to read it in depth, but I’ve pretty much gotten the gist of it: A new syndrome has been identified.

Here is the summary from the article.

Since Circulation is one of the flagship journals of the American Heart Association it is to be expected that it focuses on cardiovascular disease, which causes more deaths than any other disease in Western countries. In this article, the authors focus on not just lowering LDL levels (though, to be sure, that is one focus), but on lifestyle factors, the metabolic syndrome, and kidney disease. All of which are involved with the development and progression of cardiovascular disease (CVD).

I’m fairly certain that with time, we’ll begin seeing all the recommendations show up in the various guidelines to physicians. And you will end up being tested for kidney function and the various components of the metabolic syndrome when you go in for a doctor visit.

Here is a graphic showing an overview of this much more comprehensive way of staging the risk for CVD.

It starts out with lifestyle changes for those with no risk. These recommendations are the AHA trademarked Life’s Essential 8, which, of course, include these dietary suggestions:

Same old, same old. Buried in there is the subliminal recommendation to avoid saturated fat and red meat. And that’s despite the fact that the American College of Cardiology has concluded that saturated fat is not harmful. Old habits die hard, I guess.

Here are the treatment protocols recommended in this paper:

Stage 1 addresses obesity, which everyone pretty much agrees is a risk factor for many other diseases. The first step in dealing with obesity—according to this paper—is to initiate the STOP Obesity Alliance toolkit, which, as far as I’m concerned, is a bunch of gibberish. As per usual, the progression is from diet to drugs to bariatric surgery.

The paper describes obesity as causing a decrease in insulin sensitivity and consequent hyperinsulinemia. I’m not sure it doesn’t go the other way.

Stage 2 looks at metabolic issues and chronic kidney disease (CKD). This stage is defined as

The MetS is defined as having three or more of the following criteria:

• Waist circumference: >102 cm in men, >88 cm in women

• Serum triglycerides: ≥150 mg/dL

• HDL-cholesterol: <40 mg/dL in men, < 50 mg/dL in women

• Blood pressure: ≥130/85 mm Hg

• Serum glucose: >110 mg/dL

You notice that elevated levels of LDL are not included in the MetS. Nevertheless, the recommendation for Stage 2 is to “maximize statin therapy.”

About 15 years ago Richard Feinman and Jeff Volek wrote a paper on using carbohydrate restriction for the treatment of the MetS. All of the issues listed above can be reversed by cutting the carbs. Which may well mean that all of the disorders causing the MetS are caused by the consumption of too much carbohydrate in those who are carb sensitive. Maybe carb insensitivity is defined as the MetS.

Restricting carbohydrates increases insulin sensitivity and reduces hyperinsulinemia. In my view, a low-carbohydrate diet should be the first step in any treatment protocol involving any of the components of the MetS.

Stage 3 is “defined as subclinical CVD among individuals with excess/dysfunctional adiposity, metabolic risk factors, or CKD.”

As you can see from the graphic, determining Stage 3 requires additional testing, primarily looking at protein in the urine. Excess protein making its way into the urine (the kidneys’ filtering system typically filters protein out so it remains in the blood) is an early sign of kidney disease.

And as you can also see from the graphic, more and more drugs are recommended for treatment should any of these labs show an abnormality.

The rest of the stages are pictures of more extreme disease with correspondingly more drugs being required for treatment.

As I say, this paper just came out, and I haven’t had the time to go through it in any depth, so my comments above are after a quick read. I did find a paper in JAMA that is an explainer for this new disorder, which is called Cardiovascular-Kidney-Metabolic Syndrome.

Here is a quick summary.

Why this matters.

Bear in mind that the $1.7 trillion annual cost to treat these diseases that are driven mainly by decreased insulin sensitivity and hyperinsulinema is double the annual defense budget for the United States. And the annual defense budget of the US exceeds that of the next ten countries with the highest defense budgets. We’re talking a lot of money here to treat diseases that are primarily lifestyle induced.

Treatment?

So there we have it. Drugs, drugs, and more drugs to treat disorders Feinman and Volek showed to be treatable simply by cutting the carbs. If we could just reduce the expense by half with this simple lifestyle change, we could save the equivalent of the entire annual US defense budget.

Prepare yourself for your doctor doing a few more tests and pushing a lot more drugs once these recommendations make their way into the various guidelines.

Video of the Week

Okay, this one requires a bit of a preamble.

For those who don’t know, San Francisco, one of the most beautiful cities in the world, has been converted to a total shit hole. Tent cities occupy the streets, human feces is everywhere. And open drug dealing and drug use is ubiquitous.

As this situation has developed, no one has been able to do anything about it. Everyone it seems has simply wrung their hands while standing by and watching the situation deteriorate.

Then a situation developed. Xi Jinping (China’s head honcho) was coming to visit. He was to meet with President Biden. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, wants to run for president so bad he can taste it. He has committed not to run as long as President Biden stays in the race. But he is on the sidelines, salivating, just waiting for his chance.

The visit from Xi to San Francisco would show the world what had become of one of the great cities under Newsom’s governance. He, after all, had been the mayor of San Francisco before becoming governor of the state. Newsom sprang into action and got the city cleaned up almost overnight. You can see the drastic before and after difference in the photos in this article.

And, as you might imagine, a lot of San Fran residents are outraged that this cleanup was possible, but hadn’t been done earlier. In my view, they have the right to be pissed.

The video below is of people wondering about what happened to all the homeless people and druggies that were swarming the streets just a few days ago. It’s a good question.

SOURCE

Finally, a poll.

That’s about it for this week. Keep in good cheer, and I’ll be back next Thursday. And, once again, MD and I wish you a Happy, Happy Thanksgiving.

Thanks for reading all the way to the end. Really, thanks. If you got something out of it, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. I would really appreciate it.

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