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5 Recommendations to encourage us in the time of COVID from Dr. Abdu Sharkawy

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4 minute read

Infection Disease Expert

Ok, let’s all take a deep breath now …preferably a fair distance from anyone who’s coughing πŸ˜‰
Some basic recommendations to keep yourself safe AND sane:

1. Distancing. The idea that staying home means never breathing oxygen outside 4 walls and a ceiling is neither sensible nor tenable. Walks are both acceptable and necessary to maintain our health and well being! BUT… this means only with whomever lives in your household and NOBODY ELSE, NO EXCEPTIONS! (Cousins and neighbors count).
Keep a distance from others at all times. And no parks, playgrounds or anywhere others will inevitably join you.

2. Masks. You don’t need one in your home unless you are sick personally and want to protect others or you are providing care for an elderly or immune compromised person.

You also don’t NEED one to go out to the store for groceries or at work IF you can maintain strict distancing and hand hygiene. However, this is challenging if you can’t completely avoid separation from others eg. At the cash register. For this reason I would recommend wearing a mask for these situations. A surgical mask is not needed for this. Save these for health care workers please.
You can make your own from cotton, antimicrobial pillow cases, vacuum bags, and pretty much anything that can cover your face and withstand humidity. I personally recommend cotton or pillowcase material since this is easy to wash and reuse.

3. Food. Coronavirus doesn’t thrive in food or packaging. You won’t die from your takeout pizza or drive thru coffee, I promise you!
It does not aerosolize from these surfaces or materials. When you retrieve your food or groceries, do so with clean HANDS and avoid touching your face. Doing this is more than adequate for protection.
Want to put the takeout box and grocery bags in a dedicated garbage? Fine, but not necessary by any means. And save your wipes for places hands go all the time: table tops, counters, light switches, PHONES, tablets, remotes, game controllers, door knobs, faucets and taps. This is the viral hood!

4. Mental Health. Everyone is anxious, uneasy, worried. Some are depressed, overwhelmed, even panicked. It’s ok to admit this. It’s important. Try not to judge but instead to help and support whomever you can. Talk to each other! Listen to someone. Donate something to a homeless shelter or a community mental health organization. Giving will give you back so much more than you could imagine.

5. Breathe. As daunting as this is, it will end at some point when our containment strategies pay dividends, the virus runs out of susceptible people to infect and enough exposed and recovered people become immune. Take this time to reframe life habits and a perspective towards minimizing waste, maximizing time for those you love and need you, and learning that humility and patience are our greatest teachers and guides.

I wish you all health, safety, and sanity. These are dark times, but there is light in our eyes and hope in our hearts. Never forget.

#cleanhands #openhearts #openminds #caremongering #breatheHOPE

#RedDeerStrong – Uncertainty and Stress can lead to deadlock. Brown Resolutions may be just what you need right now.

After 15 years as a TV reporter with Global and CBC and as news director of RDTV in Red Deer, Duane set out on his own 2008 as a visual storyteller. During this period, he became fascinated with a burgeoning online world and how it could better serve local communities. This fascination led to Todayville, launched in 2016.

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Pentagon agency to simulate lockdowns, mass vaccinations, public compliance messaging

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From LifeSiteNews

By Tim Hinchliffe

With lockdowns, mass vaccination campaigns, and social distancing still on the table from the last around, it appears that AI and Machine Learning will play a much bigger role in the next.

DARPA is getting into the business of simulating disease outbreaks, including modeling interventions such as mass vaccination campaigns, lockdowns, and communication strategies.

At the end of May, the U.S.Β Defense Advanced Research Projects AgencyΒ (DARPA) put out aΒ Request for Information (RFI) seeking information regarding β€œstate-of-the-art capabilities in the simulation of disease outbreaks.”

The Pentagon’s research and development funding arm wants to hear from academic, industry, commercial, and startup communities on how to develop β€œadvanced capabilities that drive technical innovation and identify critical gaps in bio-surveillance, diagnostics, and medical countermeasures” in order to β€œimprove preparedness for future public health emergencies.”

As if masks, social distancing, lockdowns, and vaccination mandates under the unscientific guise of slowing the spread and preventing the transmission of COVID weren’t harmful enough, the U.S. military wants to model the effects of these exact same countermeasures for future outbreaks.

The RFI also asks participants β€œFatality Rate & Immune Status: How are fatality rates and varying levels of population immunity (natural or vaccine-induced) incorporated into your simulations?β€œ

Does β€œnatural or vaccine-induced” relate to β€œpopulation immunity” or β€œfatality rates” or both?

Moving on, the RFI gets into modeling lockdowns, social distancing, and mass vaccination campaigns, along with communication strategies:

Intervention Strategies: Detail the range of intervention strategies that can be modeled, including (but not limited to) vaccination campaigns, social distancing measures, quarantine protocols, treatments, and public health communication strategies. Specifically, describe the ability to model early intervention and its impact on outbreak trajectory.

The fact that DARPA wants to model these so-called intervention strategies just after the entire world experienced them suggests that these exact same measures will most likely be used again in the future:

β€œWe are committed to developing advanced modeling capabilities to optimize response strategies and inform the next generation of (bio)technology innovations to protect the population from biological threats. We are particularly focused on understanding the complex interplay of factors that drive outbreak spread and evaluating the effectiveness of potential interventions.” β€” DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

β€œIdentification of optimal timelines and capabilities to detect, identify, attribute, and respond to disease outbreaks, including but not limited to biosensor density deployment achieving optimal detection timelines, are of interest.” Β­β€” DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

With lockdowns, mass vaccination campaigns, and social distancing still on the table from the last around, it appears that AI and Machine Learning will play a much bigger role in the next.

For future innovation, the DARPA RFI asks applicants to: β€œPlease describe any novel technical approaches – or applications of diverse technical fields (e.g., machine learning, artificial intelligence, complex systems theory, behavioral science) – that you believe would significantly enhance the state-of-the-art capabilities in this field or simulation of biological systems wholistically.”

Instead of putting a Dr. Fauci, a Dr. Birx, a replaceable CDC director, a TV doctor, a big pharma CEO, or a Cuomo brother out there to lie to your face about how they were all just following The ScienceTM, why not use AI and ML and combine them with behavioral sciences in order to concoct your β€œpublic health communications strategies?”

When you look at recently announced DARPA programs likeΒ KallistiΒ andΒ MAGICS, which are aimed at creating an algorithmic Theory of Mind to model, predict, and influence collective human behavior, you start to get a sense of how all these programs can interweave:

β€œThe MAGICS ARC calls for paradigm-shifting approaches for modeling complex, dynamic systems for predicting collective human behaviour.” β€” DARPA, MAGICS ARC, April 2025

On April 8, DARPA issued an Advanced Research Concepts (ARC) opportunity for aΒ new program called β€œMethodological Advancements for Generalizable Insights into Complex SystemsΒ (MAGICS)” that seeks β€œnew methods and paradigms for modeling collective human behavior.”

Nowhere in theΒ MAGICSΒ description does it mention modeling or predicting the behavior of β€œadversaries,” as is DARPA’s custom.

Instead, it talks at length about β€œmodelingΒ humanΒ systems,” along with anticipating, predicting, understanding, and forecasting β€œcollectiveΒ humanΒ behavior” and β€œcomplex social phenomena” derived from β€œsociotechnical data sets.”

Could DARPA’sΒ MAGICSΒ program be applied to simulating collective human behavior when it comes to the next public health emergency, be it real or perceived?

β€œThe goal of an upcoming program will be to develop an algorithmic theory of mind to model adversaries’ situational awareness and predict future behaviour.” β€” DARPA,Β Theory of Mind Special Notice, December 2024.

In December 2024, DARPA launched a similar program calledΒ Theory of Mind, which was renamedΒ KallistiΒ a month later.

The goal ofΒ Theory of MindΒ is to develop β€œnew capabilities to enable national security decisionmakers to optimize strategies for deterring or incentivizing actions by adversaries,” according to a very briefΒ special announcement.

DARPA never mentions who those β€œadversaries” are. In the case of a public health emergency, an adversary could be anyone who questions authoritative messaging.

The Theory of Mind program will also:

… seek to combine algorithms with human expertise to explore, in a modeling and simulation environment, potential courses of action in national security scenarios with far greater breadth and efficiency than is currently possible.

This would provide decisionmakers with more options for incentive frameworks while preventing unwanted escalation.

We are interested in a comprehensive overview of current and emerging technologies for disease outbreak simulation, how simulation approaches could be extended beyond standard modeling methods, and to understand how diseases spread within and between individuals including population level dynamics.

They say that all the modeling and simulating across programs is for β€œnational security,” but that is a very broad term.

DARPA is in the business of research and development for national security purposes, so why is the Pentagon modeling disease outbreaks and intervention strategies while simultaneously looking to predict and manipulate collective human behavior?

If and when the next outbreak occurs, the same draconian and Orwellian measures that governments and corporations deployed in the name of combating COVID are still on the table.

And AI, Machine Learning, and the military will play an even bigger role than the last time around.

From analyzing wastewater to learning about disease spread; from developing pharmaceuticals to measuring the effects of lockdowns and vaccine passports, from modeling and predicting human behavior to coming up with messaging strategies to keep everyone in compliance β€“Β β€œimproving preparedness for future public health emergencies” is becoming more militaristically algorithmic by the day.

β€œWe are exploring innovative solutions to enhance our understanding of outbreak dynamics and to improve preparedness for future public health emergencies.” β€” DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

Reprinted with permission fromΒ The Sociable.

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Audit report reveals Canada’s controversial COVID travel app violated multiple rules

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Canada’s Auditor General found that government procurement rules were not followed in creating the ArriveCAN app.

Canada’s Auditor General revealed that the former Liberal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau failed multiple times by violating contract procurement rules to create ArriveCAN, its controversial COVID travel app.

In aΒ report released Tuesday, Auditor General Karen Hogan noted that between April 2015 to March 2024, the Trudeau government gave out 106 professional service contracts to GC Strategies Inc. This is the same company that made the ArriveCAN app.

The contracts were worth $92.7 million, with $64.5 million being paid out.

According to Hogan, Canada’s Border Services Agency gave four contracts to GC Strategies valued at $49.9 million. She noted that only 54 percent of the contracts delivered any goods.

β€œWe concluded that professional services contracts awarded and payments made by federal organizations to GC Strategies and other companies incorporated by its co-founders were not in accordance with applicable policy instruments and that value for money for these contracts was not obtained,” Hogan said.

She continued, β€œDespite this, federal government officials consistently authorized payments.”

The report concluded that β€œFederal organizations need to ensure that public funds are spent with due regard for value for money, including in decisions about the procurement of professional services contracts.”

Hogan announcedβ€―an investigationβ€―of ArriveCAN inβ€―November 2022 after the House of Commons voted 173-149 for a full audit of theβ€―controversial app.

Last year, Hogan published an audit of ArriveCAN and on Tuesday published a larger audit of the 106 contracts awarded to GC Strategies by 31 federal organizations under Trudeau’s watch.

β€˜Massive scandal,’ says Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre

Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre said Hogan’s report on the audit exposed multiple improprieties.

β€œThis is a massive scandal,” he toldΒ reporters Tuesday.

β€œThe facts are extraordinary. There was no evidence of added value. In a case where you see no added value, why are you paying the bill?”

ArriveCAN was introduced in April 2020 by the Trudeau government and made mandatory in November 2020. The app was used by the federal government to track the COVID jab status of those entering the country and enforce quarantines when deemed necessary.

ArriveCANΒ was supposed to have cost $80,000, but the number quickly ballooned to $54 million, with the latest figures showing it cost $59.5 million.

As for theβ€―app itself, it was riddled with technical glitches along with privacy concerns from users.

LifeSiteNews hasΒ publishedΒ a wide variety of reports related to the ArriveCAN travel app.

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