“Commonsense from our esteemed Advisory Board member, Mitchell J. Rabin, regarding expanding President Biden’s Covid-19 Advisory group’s approach beyond the current single-minded approach on vaccines. I can only add my own earlier retrospective view in my, “Let’s Restart America: Free Daily Test Now!” , reporting the research and development, at last acknowledged and receiving approval and some funding of the free daily use of saliva-based antigen tests, using simple at-home paper strip tests with results in a few minutes. The epidemiologists, Dr. Mina at MIT and many others advocated this universal testing to catch asymptomatic COVID-19 spreaders and empower personal decision-making, and as in some countries, paying people to stay home for a quarantine period without fear of job loss.
This approach was denied approval during the Trump administration, while approximately $87 billion was thrown at Big Pharma to produce COVID-19 vaccines under the Warp Speed program. Now this story as well as the many alternatives Mitchell Rabin documents, is breaking on mainstream media, which is still influenced by the massive advertising of drugs, a source of media profits not permitted in any other country on Earth! See my “ Steering our Powers of Persuasion Toward Human Future“.
~Hazel Henderson, Editor“
Dear President Biden
Covid and the economy: a holistic approach
11 FEBRUARY 2021,
The answer, Mr. President, is for us to build our immune systems,
not with drugs or vaccines, but by commonsense approaches to strengthening ourselves
Dear President Biden,
So many of us worldwide are very pleased by your victory. Many across the planet are still heaving a sigh of relief weeks after the Inauguration. This letter to you is to help support and hopefully guide you in the direction of serving Americans as you have pledged to do.
As we know, the overriding issue facing the nation and the world is how to effectively deal with the Coronavirus, halt its spread, its deaths and get the economy back into full gear. Unlike your predecessor, I don’t think that you’ll have a lot of time for golf—clearly, you take the job much more seriously and to heart which is why so many people think well of you—they can feel you and your commitment to our well-being.
Many of us, therefore, stand behind you in respect to putting forth a positive vision of the future far beyond Covid through dealing immediately and effectively with it. No matter how bleak things look now in so many respects, there are also shining opportunities to break through this. Americans, and people everywhere, are resourceful, robust, and given a challenge, we rise to it.
However, I don’t think your current Covid Task Force is guiding you as you need to be. Theirs appears to be an extremely narrow, singular perspective that there is one solution before us. This preoccupation seems to have blinded them to other options rendering them limited in what they have to offer you and the American people.
I suggest that it is most helpful to understand the phenomenon of Covid in the general context that historically we have always periodically had nasty, disruptive viruses in society. To deal with any massively threatening virus or problem, a multi-pronged, holistic approach proves to be the most rational, effective -and most rapid-way of creating health in our people and going beyond the infection.
I would suggest that the current, ‘vaccine only’ approach is extremely limited, not a little risky and puts all eggs in one basket. These vaccines have no track record, no longitudinal studies to back them, are utilizing an untested, new methodology of which we have no idea what the long-term effects may be, need to be refrigerated making storage, transportation and administration extremely challenging and highly expensive, costing taxpayers billions.
Any scientist or member of the public knows that the usual time period for the research and development of a new vaccine and proper testing takes between 5-15 years. Yet the government is backing this highly experimental, truly risky treatment as its only tool for overcoming Covid. Isn’t this very irresponsible while there are several other inexpensive, easy-to-use-and-access therapies in the toolkit that have been tested and used effectively over the course of over 50 years?
The good news Mr. President is that these other treatments that could be implemented immediately without medical assistance at home for pennies on the dollar, the science behind which is long-term, could be made available and applied in a matter of days.
I get the impression, and please correct me if I’m wrong, is that your Covid Task Force hasn’t breathed a word of these to you. So my first proposal is that you change or expand this Board. You are being fed partial information at best and it is not serving the American people or the world-at-large but costing us, between the expense of vaccines and an enormously slowed economy, trillions and widespread unhappiness. Due to the lack of testing and some of the ingredients in most vaccines, it is possibly doing harm. A rigorous analysis is surely in order.