I knew for sure that Anthony Fauci is a fraud after listening to him for about 10 seconds—as anyone who listens carefully would have known as well. President Trump had been charging the Chinese government with obscurancy and deception in its handling of the novel coronavirus outbreak. Fauci had dealt intimately with the Chinese on that matter. His National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Centers for Disease Control had partially financed the notorious Wuhan laboratory where Chinese scientists were researching the virus. Fauci knew a lot.

A reporter asked Fauci if he agreed with Trump that the Chinese have not been fully forthcoming about the scope of the pandemic. Fauci answered that although the Chinese had lacked candor in previous years, this time they had turned over “the sequence of the virus.” Spoken like a wily swamp reptile!

His words were factually correct. The Chinese had turned over all they knew about the virus’s “sequence”—namely, its genetic structure. But the reporter and the audience neither knew nor cared about that. They were interested in the Chinese government’s misrepresentations of the virus’s contagion, fatality rate, and so forth. That is what they had dissembled and lied about. 

Fauci’s answer artfully deceived the audience into believing the opposite of the truth. Thus did Fauci help plant a dagger between Trump’s shoulder blades and help his party—the Democrats and the deep state—extort the American people’s compliance to their agendas.

Deep State Doctor

Donald Trump’s decision to accredit Dr. Anthony Fauci as the COVID-19 pandemic’s guru is largely responsible for the extent of the panic that gripped America in the spring and now summer. Fauci is a bona fide graduate of medical school. Many attest to his earlier epidemiological brilliance. But none of the words by which he has helped inflict chaos on America have reflected either medical or epidemiological facts. Fauci has acted as, and has been, a politicized, partisan bureaucrat while pretending to be the disinterested authority of physicians and scientists. 

The pretense that COVID-19 is something like, and hence is to be treated like, the plague is the essence of the scam that the deep state and the Democratic Party are perpetrating on America. Anthony Fauci’s pseudo-medical, pseudo-scientific pretense is the foremost pillar of that lie.

Sowing and maintaining confusion about the severity of cases of  COVID-19 infections—indeed, about the very meaning of the word “case”—has been the heart of that lie. 

Understanding the truth begins with comparing the infection/fatality rate (IFR) of ordinary seasonal flu, 0.01 percent, with that of the bubonic plague or smallpox—around 30 percent—and then realizing that COVID-19’s IFR is roughly that of the flu.

Although Fauci was not the sole author of the confusion, he surely was most influential in spreading it. And it was a lie, because by January Fauci knew that, despite the Chinese government’s indications and media management to the contrary, COVID-19 was what we in the West have since learned from experience: deadly to the very old and otherwise compromised, but milder than most flu strains for just about everyone else. 

That knowledge notwithstanding, Fauci concurred with the mathematical modelers’ dire forecasts of frightful across-the-board mortality rates. He substantiated their (baseless) assumptions of an IFR around 5 percent for everyone by citing as a “case” any sick person who tested positive for the virus or who had a fever, cough, and other respiratory symptoms like those caused by the virus. He then agreed that all such persons who died should have their deaths attributed to the virus. 

In late March, Fauci convinced President Trump that a wave of such deadly “cases” would overwhelm America’s healthcare system unless Americans huddled at home. Trump agreed. (Remember, “15 Days to Slow the Spread”?) Thereafter, the lockdowns took on a momentum of their own.

Mindless Momentum 

So mindless of reality was this momentum that it shoved aside the only medical fact that made any difference, namely, the vulnerability of old, fragile people. Hence, Fauci’s CDC, all keen to free up hospital space, advised state and local health systems to transfer all manner of patients into nursing homes and long-term care facilities.

Thus did Fauci’s CDC become the efficient cause of the holocaust that killed perhaps 60,000 practically captive old folks.

By mid-April however, as the great wave simply was not happening, any number of independent studies were establishing COVID-19’s true, low IFR. Fauci retreated, no longer linking “cases” to deaths, he used the panic he had helped foment and the credit that Trump had naively given him, to finagle Trump into agreeing to a staged plan to end the lockdowns which, upon closer look, was really a plan for perpetuating them regardless of what happened.

The essence of this fraud is the pretense that all COVID-19 infections are “cases” requiring sequestration and quarantine, even if they involve persons to whom the virus poses no danger—i.e., nearly all Americans. To keep down the number of “cases” Fauci now preaches, Americans must be willing to accept any number of arbitrary restrictions, not least of which is superintendence by “contact tracers” empowered to allow or disallow anyone from ordinary employment and human contact.

To grasp Fauci’s dishonesty—being anything but ignorant, he knows exactly what he is doing—we need not recall his self-contradictions regarding the wearing of masks or regarding the risks associated with Holy Communion versus sex with strangers. Let us only recall what this board-certified physician has said and done about the drug hydroxychloroquine.

This standard antimalarial drug’s usefulness against COVID-19 was discovered accidentally as physicians around the world found it useful for treating patients, especially in the disease’s early and mid-stages. President Trump praised it. 

The deep state howled. Fauci tried to backstab Trump by pointing out that the drug had not been specifically approved to treat COVID-19. Reporters refused to accept a backhanded put-down. When one asked whether he would take the drug were he infected with COVID-19, Fauci said yes, but qualified that he would do so only as part of an FDA study. Later, as the deep state’s campaign against “Trump’s drug” produced studies obviously biased against it, Fauci happily retreated to saying that the drug was now off the table. 

But by June, as major peer-reviewed studies confirmed hydroxychloroquine’s usefulness, Fauci remained silent. He was doing the best he could for his class. Not for us.

This is not how scientists behave. Much less is it how doctors behave who take seriously the Hippocratic Oath. Fauci, unfortunately, behaves as an ordinary creature of the Washington swamp.

Appeared in part July 10, 2020.
Credits: American Greatness
By Angelo Codevilla • July 10, 2020

On a sunny day in Bellevue, Wash., in June 2011, I had just completed a workout class when I experienced a bizarre sensation of intense, full-body muscle fatigue. I broke into a bone-chilling sweat. My upper left arm throbbed, a deep ache next to the bone. I was heaving for air at a rapid clip. I grew nauseated. A fist was pressing through my chest to my spine. I was 56 years old, an exercise enthusiast, a nonsmoker and a retired cardiac-care nurse. And yet I had no idea that I was having a heart attack.

It felt nothing like I’d imagined. It turns out that it’s hard to recognize a heart attack as it happens. What I didn’t understand until much later was that a deposit of plaque had ruptured in my right coronary artery and caused a clot to form, depriving my heart-and brain-of oxygen. I knew something was wrong., but-not what, and it was difficult to think clearly. Was it serious? It just seemed weird. I should have asked for help, but in-stead I headed to the parking garage.

There my symptoms eased as swiftly as they’d arrived. I had recently stopped taking a prescription medication for heartburn, and I concluded that I had suffered re-bound indigestion. I called my husband, a physician, and asked him to run to the store to get groceries for dinner. I told him that I’d felt bad for a few minutes. Stopping that drug was rough, I said. If that’s what a heart attack feels like, I added, it sure does hurt. I made light of it, raised no alarm, gave no indication of my suffering.

On the way home, my symptoms returned in force. Now I had to merge onto a major highway, then a second, and navigate through rush-hour traffic. I draped myself over the steering wheel, fighting for air. My eyesight narrowed. Instead of pulling to the side, I drove on, gripped by a primal urge to reach home. Clarity of judgment had evaporated, a dangerous symptom of lack of oxygen.

Why had my symptoms eased and then recurred? Most likely, blood had temporarily found its way around the clot, restoring the flow through the damaged tissue, flooding my heart muscle with oxygen. But then the clot formed again. This frequently happens in heart attacks, adding to the confusion that many patients feel as symptoms subside and then reappear.

At home, my neighbor, also a physician, was checking his mailbox. Can you help me, I asked? I’m in terrible trouble. I drove 50 more feet to my driveway and handed him my keys and cellphone through my open car window. I was sinking fast, desperate for air, drenched in cold sweat. My arm ached. The nausea was overwhelming. My neighbor tells me that my skin turned gray. I heard sirens. ”They’re coming,” he assured me.

The firefighters who arrived first assessed me through my car window. “Slow your breathing down,” they shouted at me. “Stop hyperventilating. You have to answer our questions.” But I couldn’t recover. I was trying to surface from depths too deep to talk. They ignored my neighbor, who was urging them to treat me as if I were having a heart at-tack. “Answer our questions,” they shouted again. I felt my-self slipping away. A medic van appeared “Stop breathing so hard,” they yelled. These unhelpful directives went on for some time. The firefighters and medics failed to recognize that one of the major symptoms of a woman suffering a heart attack is extreme shortness of breath.

A plethora of recent research shows that women dis-play different cardiac symptoms from men. According to a 2016 statement from the American Heart Association, published in the journal Circulation, women are less likely than men to feel crushing chest pain. More of them exhibit symptoms like mine-shortness of breath; muscle weakness and fatigue; profuse, cold sweating; atypical chest pain (or arm, jaw and back pain) and indigestion. When medical providers and patients fail to recognize· these symptoms, the consequences can be fatal.

The most recent comprehensive research on foe subject, a 2017 study by the American College of Cardiology, shows that women are twice as likely as men to die within 30 days of a heart attack. After a year, they are still 50% more likely. Why? One factor is that women are older, on aver-age, when they have attacks and are more likely to have associated diseases such as diabetes.

But a key issue, according to a study published in 2017 in the Journal of the American Heart Association, is that women suffering heart attacks take an average of 30 minutes longer than men to reach a hospital. Like me, they are more likely to misinterpret or write off their symptoms’. A 2018 Swiss study in the European Heart Journal showed that women suffering heart attacks wait an average of 37 minutes longer to contact medical officials.

When my symptoms suddenly eased in front of the medics-the clot, breaking again, had allowed more oxygen through-they walked me to their van to get what they called a “perfunctory” EKG. But walking is a dangerous thing for someone having a heart attack. In another moment, my symptoms erupted again. The medic gaped as he read the EKG. He started oxygen, placed two IV tubes and in-fused morphine. My neighbor appeared with a baby aspirin. As the van raced back down the same highway I had just negotiated, my heart broke into an irregular rhythm. “Atrial fibrillation,” the medic muttered. The right coronary artery, I told myself. A heart attack, definitely.

The emergency room was a blur-a team of seven or eight people, a chest X-ray, another EKG, more morphine, oxygen. My husband arrived in his own car. ”I love you,” I told him as they wheeled me away. “Tell the children I love them.” I thought it might be the last time I ever saw him.

Luckily, the cardiologist was able to clean out the clot and place a stent in my artery. I recovered in the cardiac-care unit without complications, and three subsequent stress echocardiograms showed no damage. I had reached the hospital within the requisite two hours to save heart muscle, one of the key factors in survival and recovery. I lived.

My parents hadn’t. My great risk factor, which I had spent a lifetime trying to mitigate, was that I was the descendant of generations of people who had died young of cardiovascular disease: my mother at 53, my father at 62, my maternal grandmother in her 40s. High cholesterol ran in our family, for which I took Lipitor. But it’s difficult to counteract genetics, much as I had tried.

Cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death in women as well as mett,afld -women suffer just-over half of all fatal heart attacks. Rates of morbidity and mortality from attacks are decreasing for both sexes, but women die at a higher ratio than men. And as reported in

a 2016 circular by the National Institutes of Health in women younger than 55-and I was close, at age 56 female mortality hasn’t declined.

For three months after the experience, I had a series of conversations with the county’s Medic One emergency services to spur them to commit to retraining the firefighters and medics who had mishandled my treatment. The long-standing gender gap in cardiac care, from the time of first contact with physicians or first res-ponders to arrival at the hospital, has improved in recent years, but it persists. De-spite strides in awareness, women still arrive at the hospital more slowly than men. Time is everything in a heart at-tack. Women must recognize the danger signs, even amid doubt, and get the immediate help we need.

Appeared in the February 16, 17, 2019, print edition.
Credits: Wall Street Journal

Women make up nearly two-thirds of patients with Alzheimer’s dis-ease in the U.S., in part because they live longer than men. Now, researchers are exploring whether hormonal changes related to menopause affect the development of the disease.

“The truth is that Alzheimer’s is not a disease of old age, it’s a disease of middle age,” says Lisa Mosconi, director of the Weill Cornell Women’s Brain Initiative in New York City, a research program aimed at reducing Alzheimer’s risk. “In reality, the brain changes start in mid-life.”

Most people think of how menopause affects fertility. But Dr. Mosconi says its effect on the brain is what results in night sweats, hot flashes and even memory changes. Those symptoms are caused by declining levels of estrogen and other hormones. Estrogen protects the female brain from aging and stimulates neural activity. It may help prevent the buildup of clusters of proteins, or plaques, that are linked to Alzheimer’s disease.

Studies show that when estrogen production declines during menopause, the brain’s metabolism appears to slow down and it be-comes less efficient.

For decades many women entering menopause tempered its effects with hormone replacement therapy. But in 2003 a large randomized controlled study called the Women’s Health Initiative was halted after the women taking HRT had an increased risk of heart attacks and breast cancer. Some women also showed a small in-creased likelihood of developing dementia. Since then HRT has fallen out of favor though many women continue it. When re-searchers re-examined the data, they noticed that the trials focused on older women-on aver-age age 63 and more than a decade past menopause. When they looked solely at the women in their 50s, they found estrogen therapy reduced the risk of mortality related to heart disease and breast cancer.

“The jury is still out and we’re still trying to sort out all of the current data, whether hormone re-placement therapy will help prevent the development of Alzheimer’s disease or even put women at risk,” says Howard Hodis, a professor of preventive medicine at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. “This issue is complicated by a lot of factors-not just timing as to when women start HRT, but also the hormone regimen, what kind of hormone or estrogen that is used and the route of delivery.”

In a study published in December in the journal PLOS One, Dr. Mosconi and co-researchers documented how healthy women’s brains change before and after menopause.

The 59 women in the study had higher rates of brain-energy de-cline and shrinkage in the memory centers, as well as higher rates of Alzheimer’s plaques compared with 18 men of similar age.

”Women’s brains seemed to age faster than men’s brains during the transition to menopause,” Dr. Mosconi says. “This accelerated aging process is likely related to the loss of estrogen in the brain and all the hormonal changes going on inside the brain.”

“It’s not that menopause causes Alzheimer’s disease,” she adds. “It’s more like for the average woman, if you have an Alzheimer’s predispositiorr, menopause may accelerate the process.” Such changes don’t affect all women. About 20% of women don’t suffer from the hormonal changes associated with menopause, Dr. Mosconi says, and the other 80% have varying effects, from mild to severe.

In a 2017 study published in the journal Neurology, Dr. Mosconi and co-researchers used PET scans to analyze the brain activity of 42 healthy 40-to 60-year-old women and 18 men of a similar age.

Perimenopausal women had a 15% to 20% reduction in brain metabolism compared with the men, while postmenopausal women had over 30% reduction. Perimenopause, which lasts an average of one to five years, is the transition period that leads to menopause.

Postmenopausal women also showed the emergence of Alzheimer’s plaques in the brain. Alzheimer’s plaques don’t necessarily mean that a person will get the disease but indicate a higher risk for developing it.

Dr. Mosconi said there is some evidence that estrogen therapy initiated within five years of menopause, particularly during perimenopause, may also protect against dementia though more re-search is needed.

But other experts say it isn’t clear whether hormone therapy can help-or harm-cognitive health and affect the development of Alzheimer’s disease in women.

Dr. Rodis was the lead re-searcher in a trial that randomly placed more than 600 healthy women into groups who either started taking an oral form of estrogen therapy within six years of menopause or more than 10 years after menopause.

Their findings, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2016, found that the women who started taking estrogen earlier had a reduction in the progression of atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries, which can lead to strokes and heart at-tacks. Another 2016 study in the journal Neurology showed that there was no difference between the two groups of women in cognitive decline, a potential precursor to Alzheimer’s disease. An earlier randomized controlled study had similar findings.

Roberta Diaz Brinton, director of the Center for Innovation in Brain Science at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and senior author of the PLOS One study has been studying why the female brain is at risk for Alzheimer’s dis-ease for three decades. She says estrogen therapy may be a useful intervention for women in perimenopause who experience a lot of symptoms such as hot flashes, insomnia and depression. Dr. Brin-ton is studying whether estrogen therapy can lower a woman’s risk of Alzheimer’s.

She is developing an estrogen-only formulation which targets the estrogen receptors in the brain, but not in the breast or uterus. One small clinical trial to be published this year demonstrated the safety of the formulation. Its efficiency against Alzheimer’s is now being tested.

“Estrogen therapy alone is not going to be the panacea,” she says. “Exercise, diet, sleep. These are all important.”

Timing is key. Estrogen therapy is unlikely to be effective in women 60 or older who are no longer experiencing menopausal symptoms. “The time to intervene is when women are having symptoms very early on in this process potentially at the inception of perimenopause,” Dr. Brinton says.

She noted that the women in Dr. Hodis’s study were all post-menopausal so their brains were no longer responsive to estrogen. Her re-search is focused on determining the process that leads to a loss of estrogen response in the brain.

Dr. Mosconi currently has funding to look at hormonal and brain changes in both men and women at risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

For men, she says testosterone levels lower very gradually over time, typically in one’s 70s.

Appeared in the February 16, 17, 2019, print edition.
Credits: Wall Street Journal