What happened to the Zika virus health emergency?

This week’s show is dedicated to the short-lived Zika virus outbreak and fear-driven public health campaign analyzed by doctor Randall Bock, MD, and fully exposed in his book Overturning Zika: The Pandemic That Never Was:

“Overturning Zika investigates (now-overshadowed) pandemic Zika-microcephaly: from improbable but terrifying arrival — to immediate disappearance. Overturning Zika illuminates facts ignored at the time: for instance, in 2015 Brazil clinical Zika-testing didn’t exist; none were performed on “mild dengue” patients reclassified as novel “Zika”; nor during or after the microcephaly-birth pregnancies. These unfortunate moms were diagnosed through later telephone questionnaires.

Zika-microcephaly, the world’s largest medical news story in 2016, brought shock, fear, and panic throughout the tropics – coincident with Brazilian assertions’ casting the eternally harmless Zika virus as the ultimate danger to pregnancy, potentially rendering hundreds of millions of women in pregnancy but one mosquito-bite away from irrevocable damage to the cherished life within. The WHO acknowledged and aggrandized this worldwide threat, uniquely amongst all the many mosquito-borne illnesses, as a “public health emergency of international concern.”

Public health officials immediately took center stage, issuing travel advisories and recommending indefinite abstinence from pregnancy for certain populations. The relief of a vaccine was promised but never delivered. The WHO predicted four million cases of Zika in the Americas and numbers worldwide that would add one million cases of microcephaly per year.

It’s a complete blessing that none of this occurred — not in 2016, nor in any subsequent year. As soon as stricter measurements for both Zika and microcephaly came into existence, neither was found to show medical significance or mutual association. Zika and microcephaly have long existed independently of each other—the one harmless, the other tragic but rare — and they will continue to do so.

Why has the “good news” of both Zika’s and microcephaly’s disappearance been buried? Overturning Zika is no conspiracy tale but elucidates secondary interests and forces that keep narratives (however flimsily constructed) active when serving political or institutional goals.

While there were sparse cases of fetal death with autopsies showing systemic viral illness and viral genomes consistent with Zika, the lack of reliable testing and the excess concern over small head size drove the cases of concern as an epidemic. Once standard definitions of microcephaly were used and more rationale analyses performed, even with Zika PCR testing, the outbreak resolved overnight with no therapeutics and no vaccines. Sadly, the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex geared up with millions of dollars wasted on >24 vaccines in development only to find no more putative outbreaks.

So let’s get real, let’s get loud on America Out Loud News; this is the McCullough Report!

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/zika-virus

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1600651

Overturning Zika: The Pandemic That Never Was

“Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth.” C.S. Lewis To Caesar’s “I came, I saw, I conquered,” Zika might add, “I disappeared, – but nobody noticed,“… until now. Overturning…Read more →

The McCullough Report: Sat | Sun 2 PM ET – Internationally recognized Dr. Peter A. McCullough, known for his iconic views on the state of medical truth in America and around the globe, pierces through the thin veil of mainstream media stories that skirt the significant issues and provide no tractable basis for durable insight. Listen on iHeart Radio, our world-class media player, or our free apps on Apple, Android, or Alexa. Each episode goes to major podcast networks early in the week and can be heard on-demand anywhere in the world.