Connect with us

International

Despite Low Monkeypox Risk, Vaccine Developers Prepare

Monkeypox is unlikely to become a global pandemic like COVID-19, but vaccine manufacturers are expanding their programs, just in case. Currently, there…

Published

1 year ago

on

Cases of monkeypox (likely soon to be dubbed MPXV by the World Health Organization) are proliferating worldwide, but many experts say it seems unlikely to develop into a pandemic like COVID-19, AIDS, or SARS.

The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) says the risk to the U.S. population is low. Nonetheless, the World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General tweeted on June 14 that he is convening a meeting June 23 to determine whether the expanding outbreak constitutes a global health emergency.

“Does monkeypox have the potential to become a pandemic of significant proportion?” Cesar Arias, MD, PhD, co-director of the Center for Infectious Disease at Houston Methodist, asks. “The answer, as with any transmissible virus, is yes, but whether that will happen is the million-dollar question. Transmission is occurring (outside the regions in which it is endemic) and the magnitude of the transmission is unknown. After what we experienced these past three years, we should be cautious.”

David Dodd, chairman, president, and CEO of GeoVax, is optimistic. “It’s an issue, but it likely won’t become a pandemic like COVID-19. There probably is an element of hysteria to it right now.” His confidence is based on a body of research into monkeypox going back at least two decades, its method of transmission, and the availability of vaccines and therapeutics to counter this virus.

Two vaccines available in United States

The CDC says the vaccines developed against smallpox also offer 85% protection against monkeypox. Currently, there are two vaccines approved for smallpox in the U.S., Jynneos and ACAM2000. Of them, only Jynneos is approved for monkeypox.

Bavarian Nordic’s Jynneos is a nonreplicating modified vaccinia Ankara (MVA) vaccine that is FDA-approved for both smallpox and monkeypox. The company received an order from BARDA for 500,000 liquid-frozen doses for delivery this year. Receipt of that order will increase the U.S. stockpile to 1.9 million doses. Most of Bavarian Nordisk’s remaining bulk Jynneos vaccine will be freeze-dried into approximately 13 million doses by 2025. The vaccine, known as Imvanex® in the U.K., was delivered to England in 2018 in response to a monkeypox outbreak there.

ACAM2000 is a second-generation smallpox vaccine developed by Sanofi Pasteur Biologics. This live vaccinia-based vaccine is licensed to immunize people at high risk of contracting smallpox. It is part of the U.S. Strategic National Stockpile for smallpox.

GeoVax considered monkeypox even before the outbreak. “We already have published in peer-reviewed journals that our MVA vaccines, in addition protecting animal models against HIV and other infections, also prevents monkeypox,” Dodd says. “We are validating our COVID-19 vaccine (CM04S1) now, which, is in Phase II trials, [and we] also will address the monkeypox virus.”

Likewise, “Moderna is investigating potential monkeypox vaccines at a preclinical level, using its mRNA platform,” Luke Mircea-Willats, corporate spokesperson, says.

Others are watching the situation carefully. “Inovio Pharmaceuticals produced preclinical data on a monkeypox vaccine, published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases in 2010,” corporate spokesman Jeff Richardson says. “There has been no further work on this particular vaccine since that publication.” Inovio is monitoring the outbreak of this and any other infectious disease threats, with the potential of applying its DNA medicines platform as applicable.

Mass vaccination not needed

As yet, Arias says, “I don’t see real evidence of airborne transmission. It is not associated with sexual behaviors either, but with proximity to active, infective, skin lesions.” The CDC says monkeypox is transmitted through direct contact with infectious sores, scabs, or bodily fluids from those infected. So, unless the virus becomes airborne—which the WHO says is possible but uncommon—wearing masks won’t affect transmission.

Monkeypox rash. [MarioGuti/Getty Images]
That also means wide-spread vaccination is unnecessary. The CDC recommends vaccination only for people likely to contact monkeypox, such as lab workers exposed to certain orthopoxviruses and certain military personnel.

Vaccination also is recommended after exposure. To prevent the onset of monkeypox, the vaccine must be administered within four days of exposure. When given up to 14 days after exposure, however, vaccination may ease the symptoms but not prevent disease onset.

Baby Boomers and GenXers shouldn’t assume they’re protected from monkeypox or smallpox. “It is unlikely that the first-generation vaccine for smallpox, which was administered until 1972 in the United States, will withstand a new challenge,” Arias says. “The newer vaccines seem to work [better]. The question is whether we have enough, if this gets out of hand.”

Antiviral meds ready, too

If it does spread, antiviral therapies are available. Siga Technologies’ antiviral drug, TPOXX® (tecoviromat), is approved to treat monkeypox in Europe. “TPOXX blocks the spread of virus while allowing the induction of a protective immune response,” Dennis Hruby, CSO, tells GEN. “The approved course of therapy is two oral doses per day for 14 days.” It recently received FDA approval for an intravenous version for those who cannot easily swallow pills.

Although TPOXX is not FDA-approved for use in the United States against monkeypox, it may be used under an expanded access protocol to treat monkeypox during an outbreak. It already has been used on at least one patient during the current outbreak, Hruby adds.

Vistide® (cidofovir) by Gilead Sciences, is approved for the treatment of cytomegalovirus retinitis in AIDS patients and also holds expanded access protocol authorization for monkeypox, as does vaccinia immune globulin intravenous (VIGIV).

Additionally, an expanded access—investigational new drug application (EA-IND) is being prepared for a fourth therapy, Tembexa® (brincidofovir) by Chimerix, for monkeypox. (The intention to sell Tembexa to Emergent BioSolutions was announced in early May.)

Scientists watch closely

During the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists frequently pointed out that the science was changing, while trust in public health officials waned. Going forward, Dodd says, earning the public’s trust “is less about getting the information right or wrong and more about being transparent,” and pivoting as needed. “People are much more accepting of that.” So, as long as the experts admit when they are wrong and adjust their strategies to adapt to new information, they can regain—and maintain—the public’s trust, he suggests.

While no can accurately predict what will happen regarding the monkeypox outbreak, it merits close scientific observation.

“Monkeypox is a serious infection and can be fatal,” Anne Rimoin, PhD, professor of epidemiology and director of the UCLA Center for Global and Immigrant Health, said in a Q&A blog post. She has studied monkeypox for some 20 years and says transmission patterns are changing. Specifically, it is expanding beyond the areas of Africa in which it is endemic. In fact, the current outbreak is “the largest-ever outside of Africa.”

Transmissibility and fatality depend on the clade, with the Central Africa/Congo Basin clade associated with 6% to 10% mortality and the West African clade with 1% to 3.5% mortality. Access to vaccines and therapeutics improves those risks, however. “There haven’t been any fatalities in high-income settings,” she points out. “There are vaccines and treatments, and the world is more aware of what it takes to contain outbreaks.

“The risk of monkeypox to the general public is low. It is still a rare infection…and it is unlikely that most people in the U.S. will ever come in contact with it,” Rimoin says.

The post Despite Low Monkeypox Risk, Vaccine Developers Prepare appeared first on GEN - Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.

Read More

Related Topics:
Continue Reading

International

Germany: AfD Reaches New Record High, Gains Unprecedented 8-Point Lead Over Ruling SPD

Germany: AfD Reaches New Record High, Gains Unprecedented 8-Point Lead Over Ruling SPD

Authored by John Cody via Remix News,

At the same…

Published

1 hour ago

on

October 17, 2023

By

Germany: AfD Reaches New Record High, Gains Unprecedented 8-Point Lead Over Ruling SPD

Authored by John Cody via Remix News,

At the same time the governing left-liberal coalition crashes in the polls, the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) is surging ahead, reaching a new record high in a major state-run poll.

AfD leaders Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla.

According to the most recent ARD Deutschlandtrend poll, all parties of the ruling traffic light coalition only have 33 percent of the vote, while the AfD is now stronger than the SPD and the Free Democrats (FDP) combined, reaching 23 percent of the vote.

According to Infratest dimap, the three-party ruling coalition has reached a new low among Germans. Only 15 percent back the SPD, while 13 percent would vote for the Greens and 5 percent for the FDP. Given that 5 percent is needed to enter parliament, the FDP is under threat of being removed entirely, which is putting the coalition on increasingly shaky ground.

AfD party co-leader Alice Weidel celebrated the new record high, writing: “New record also in the ARD Germany trend: The AfD is now at 23% here too! In addition, 50% of citizens would like the AfD to be in government where it has performed strongly. A great confirmation of our work!”

The poll showed all three governing parties dropping one point compared to polling from a week ago. For the Social Democrats, this is the worst result during this legislative period; in the federal election approximately two years ago, SPD had 25.7 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, FDP has seen its vote cut in half since 2021, when it received 11.5 percent of the electoral vote.

The AfD is enjoying a record lead over the SPD, coming in at an unprecedented eight points. Meanwhile, the Christian Democrats and Christian Socialists (CDU/CSU) continue their run on top of the polls, coming in at 29 percent, a bump of one point compared to last week. The Free Voters and the Left Party would each have 4 percent.

Voters’ top concern is immigration, while climate change becomes a non-issue

Voters also say their top concern is mass immigration, with 44 percent of voters naming this as the most important political problem that politicians should address. This issue towers over the other problems facing the country, with armed conflicts/peace/foreign policy only coming in at 18 percent, while the economy comes in at 11 percent and inflation and taxes at 10 percent.

Regarding the environment and climate change, only 1 percent of Germans list this as the most pressing issue.

Tyler Durden Tue, 10/17/2023 - 02:00

Read More

Continue Reading

International

New recipe for efficient, environmentally friendly battery recycling

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, are now presenting a new and efficient way to recycle metals from spent electric car batteries….

Published

2 hours ago

on

October 17, 2023

By

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, are now presenting a new and efficient way to recycle metals from spent electric car batteries. The method allows recovery of 100 per cent of the aluminium and 98 per cent of the lithium in electric car batteries. At the same time, the loss of valuable raw materials such as nickel, cobalt and manganese is minimised. No expensive or harmful chemicals are required in the process because the researchers use oxalic acid – an organic acid that can be found in the plant kingdom.

Credit: Chalmers University of Technology | Anna-Lena Lundqvist

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, are now presenting a new and efficient way to recycle metals from spent electric car batteries. The method allows recovery of 100 per cent of the aluminium and 98 per cent of the lithium in electric car batteries. At the same time, the loss of valuable raw materials such as nickel, cobalt and manganese is minimised. No expensive or harmful chemicals are required in the process because the researchers use oxalic acid – an organic acid that can be found in the plant kingdom.

“So far, no one has managed to find exactly the right conditions for separating this much lithium using oxalic acid, whilst also removing all the aluminium. Since all batteries contain aluminium, we need to be able to remove it without losing the other metals,” says Léa Rouquette, PhD student at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Chalmers. 

In Chalmers’ battery recycling lab, Rouquette and research leader Martina Petranikova show how the new method works. The lab has spent car battery cells and, in the fume cupboard, their pulverised contents. This takes the form of a finely ground black powder dissolved in a transparent liquid – oxalic acid. Rouquette produces both the powder and the liquid in something reminiscent of a kitchen mixer. Although it looks as easy as brewing coffee, the exact procedure is a unique and recently published scientific breakthrough. By fine-tuning temperature, concentration and time, the researchers have come up with a remarkable new recipe for using oxalic acid – an environmentally friendly ingredient that can be found in plants such as rhubarb and spinach.  

“We need alternatives to inorganic chemicals. One of the biggest bottlenecks in today’s processes is removing residual materials like aluminium. This is an innovative method that can offer the recycling industry new alternatives and help solve problems that hinder development,” says Martina Petranikova, Associate Professor at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Chalmers.

Reversing order and avoiding the loss

The aqueous-based recycling method is called hydrometallurgy. In traditional hydrometallurgy, all the metals in an EV battery cell are dissolved in an inorganic acid. Then, you remove the “impurities” such as aluminium and copper. Lastly, you can separately recover valuable metals such as cobalt, nickel, manganese and lithium. Even though the amount of residual aluminium and copper is small, it requires several purification steps and each step in this process can cause lithium loss. With the new method, the researchers reverse the order and recover the lithium and aluminium first. Thus, they can reduce the waste of valuable metals needed to make new batteries. 

The latter part of the process, in which the black mixture is filtered, is also reminiscent of brewing coffee. While aluminium and lithium end up in the liquid, the other metals are left in the “solids”. The next step in the process is to separate aluminium and lithium.

“Since the metals have very different properties, we don’t think it’ll be hard to separate them. Our method is a promising new route for battery recycling – a route that definitely warrants further exploration,” says Rouquette. 
“As the method can be scaled up, we hope it can be used in industry in future years,” says Petranikova.

Petranikova’s research group has spent many years conducting cutting-edge research in the recycling of metals found in lithium-ion batteries. The group is involved in various collaborations with companies to develop electric car battery recycling and is a partner in major research and development projects, such as Volvo Cars’ and Northvolt’s Nybat project. 

Video: Demonstration of the new and efficient method for recycling metals from electric car batteries. Léa Rouquette explains the process in the lab at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden.

More about the research

The scientific article Complete and selective recovery of lithium from EV lithium-ion batteries: Modeling and optimization using oxalic acid as a leaching agent was published in the journal Separation and Purification Technology. The study was conducted by Léa Rouquette, Martina Petranikova and Nathália Vieceli at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. 
The research was funded by the Swedish Energy Agency (52009-1), BASE Batteries Sweden, Vinnova (2019-00064) and the experiments were conducted with spent electric car batteries from Volvo Cars, processed by Stena Recycling and Akkuser Oy.
 

Journal

Separation and Purification Technology

DOI

10.1016/j.seppur.2023.124143

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Complete and selective recovery of lithium from EV lithium-ion batteries: Modeling and optimization using oxalic acid as a leaching agent

Article Publication Date

1-Sep-2023

COI Statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Read More

Continue Reading

International

The Greatest Hoax Of All Time

The Greatest Hoax Of All Time

Authored by ‘Mr. E’ via bombthrower.com,

Follow Mr. E on Substack and Twitter!

It should come as no surprise…

Published

3 hours ago

on

October 17, 2023

By

The Greatest Hoax Of All Time

Authored by 'Mr. E' via bombthrower.com,

Follow Mr. E on Substack and Twitter!

It should come as no surprise to anyone following my work when I say that both mainstream and alternative media are, to a very large extent, part of the controlled dialectic put forth by the ruling class. It helps to maintain a division of society, promulgated by useful idiots and true believers of either side’s dogma.

Malcolm X’s famous quote applies:

The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make the criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. This is the press, an irresponsible press. It will make the criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.

It behooves everyone to have a healthy skepticism of whatever they hear no matter the outlet. But even more concerning to you is when they all begin to push the same narrative. In this report you’re going to see just how much effort some are willing to exert in the maintenance of a popular scapegoat – the Freemasons.

In the days following the breakout of violence in Israel and Gaza Greg Reese, producer of the popular Reese Report, published a video outlining the contents of a letter allegedly written by Freemason Albert Pike on August 15, 1871. The very same letter was reported on in rapid succession by mainstream outlets The Daily Star, Daily Mail, News.com.au, and Express.co.uk in 2016. A South African newspaper also reported on it in 2013.

All these reports make mention that this letter “allegedly” exists, but none went so far as to even attempt to confirm this. They didn’t investigate the sources, and merely uncritically repeated something that appeared too good to be true.

The Devil in the Nineteenth Century

We must go back over 130 years to get to the bottom of this story, and it all begins in France with a man named Marie Joseph Gabriel Antoine Jogand-Pagès, better known as Léo Taxil. Born in 1854 he was placed in Jesuit seminary school, where he came to be disillusioned with the Catholic faith and religion in general.

Léo Taxil circa 1880, from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Eventually becoming a writer, he targeted Christianity with scathing critiques such as The Holy Pornographers: Confession and Confessors and The Pope’s Mistresses. He even ventured into satirical pieces like The Life of Jesus, making a mockery of the immaculate conception, and The Amusing Bible. In 1884 he wrote The Secret Loves of Pope Pius IX, which is exactly what the salacious title suggests and eventually led to accusations of libel.

Also in 1884, Pope Leo XIII published an encyclical on Freemasonry where he declared:

The race of man, after its miserable fall from God … separated into two diverse and opposite parts, of which the one steadfastly contends for truth and virtue, the other of those things which are contrary to virtue and to truth. The one is the kingdom of God on earth … The other is the kingdom of Satan … At every period of time each has been in conflict with the other, with a variety and multiplicity of weapons and of warfare, although not always with equal ardour and assault. At this period, however, the partisans of evil seems to be combining together, and to be struggling with united vehemence, led on or assisted by that strongly organized and widespread association called the Freemasons. No longer making any secret of their purposes, they are now boldly rising up against God Himself. They are planning the destruction of holy Church publicly and openly, and this with the set purpose of utterly despoiling the nations of Christendom, if it were possible, of the blessings obtained for us through Jesus Christ our Saviour.

Perhaps swayed by this polemic, Taxil announced he had converted back to Catholicism in 1885 and set to work on an entirely different literary endeavor with a new target, the Freemasons. Over the next several years he published Les Mystères de la Franc-Maçonnerie, a four-volume history of Freemasonry containing curious-but-unsourced accounts of eyewitness’s participation in strange rites. The books were sensational and Taxil even had an audience with Pope Leo XIII himself to congratulate him on all his good works exposing the dastardly plans of the Freemasons.

The best was yet to come, however, when he teamed up with Dr. Karl Hacks to write the two-volume Le Diable au XIXe Siècle, published in 1892 and 1894, telling the insider tale of one Diana Vaughan in the words of Doctor Bataille. The lurid details of her account boggle the mind. She was a member of the Palladium Rite, under the command of Albert Pike, where she was involved in ritual orgies and blood sacrifices. They would summon demons in physical form, and she was even betrothed to one of them.

Chapter 25 of the second volume is entitled “Plan of the Secret Chiefs,” and it purportedly contains the text of a plan written on August 15, 1871, by Albert Pike and the leadership of the Palladium Rite, detailing their plan for the destruction of Roman Catholicism. The description of the final coup-de-grace contains a paragraph that has gone on to be legend:

Therefore, when the autocratic Empire of Russia will become the citadel of papist adonaism, we shall unleash the revolutionary nihilists and atheists, and provoke a formidable social cataclysm, which will demonstrate clearly to the nations, in all its horror, the effect of absolute unbelief, mother of savagery and of the bloodiest disorder. Then everywhere, the citizens, obliged to defend themselves against the mad minority of revolutionaries, will exterminate these destroyers of civilization; and the countless disillusioned adonaites, whose deist soul have up until that time remained without a compass, thirsting for an ideal, but not knowing which God is worthy of tribute, will receive the True Light, by the universal manifestation of the pure Luciferian doctrine, at last made public, an event that will arise from a reactionary movement following the destruction of atheism and adonaism, together at the same time vanquished and exterminated.

Catholics fell in love with Taxil’s work, and a Catholic journalist by the name of Abel Clarin de la Rive became friends with Taxil, believing unreservedly in his revelations about the Masonic threat the Church faced. Taxil authorized de la Rive to publish a quote by Albert Pike alleged by Diana Vaughan, Taxil’s whistleblower, in his 1894 book La Femme et l’Enfant Dans la Franc-Maçonnerie Universelle:

That which we must say to the world is that we worship a god, but it is the god that one adores without superstition. To you, Sovereign Grand Inspectors General, we say this, that you may repeat it to the brethren of the 32nd, 31st and 30th degrees: The masonic Religion should be, by all of us initiates of the higher degrees, maintained in the Purity of the Luciferian doctrine. If Lucifer were not God, would Adonay and his priests calumniate him?

Yes, Lucifer is God, and unfortunately Adonay is also god. For the eternal law is that there is no light without shade, no beauty without ugliness, no white without black, for the absolute can only exist as two gods; darkness being necessary for light to serve as its foil as the pedestal is necessary to the statue, and the brake to the locomotive.

Thus, the doctrine of Satanism is a heresy, and the true and pure philosophical religion is the belief in Lucifer, the equal of Adonay; but Lucifer, God of Light and God of Good, is struggling for humanity against Adonay, the God of Darkness and Evil.

The assault upon Freemasonry drew intense criticism from their ranks, as well as from other esoteric societies. In 1896 Arthur Edward Waite, a British poet and mystic who wrote extensively on the occult, published Devil Worship in France, a comprehensive refutation of Taxil’s allegations.

By 1897 everyone was becoming impatient with Taxil, whose stories had been growing ever more radical and grotesque. They wanted to meet Diana Vaughan, in person, and Taxil eventually obliged.

The Confession

On the evening of April 19, 1897, Taxil held a press conference at the Hall of the Geographic Society in Paris. Many reporters, Catholic priests, Freemasons, monks, and other illustrious figures from around the world were in attendance. After raffling off a typewriter used by Diana Vaughan (the winner being M. Ali Kental, Editor of Ikdam, at Constantinople), Léo Taxil finally addresses his audience.

He reveals there is no Dr. Karl Hacks, there is no Dr. Bataille, there is no Diana Vaughan, there is no Palladium Rite.

“There wasn’t the least masonic plot in this story,” he says, and denies that his conversion to Catholicism was in earnest – all part of the prank, to win the Church’s trust and approbation. Diana Vaughan was a real person, but she was only his typist and collaborator in this colossal fraud designed to deeply embarrass the Catholic Church and become the crown jewel of his anti-clerical work.

Slandering Freemasons was the best way to establish the foundations of the colossal prank of which I savored all the suave happiness in advance. – Léo Taxil

After explaining in immense detail how everything he published on Freemasonry over the last 12 years was a monumental hoax, Taxil concludes his press conference saying, “You were told that Palladism would be knocked down today, better still, it is annihilated, it is no more,” and that “Palladism is now dead for good. Its father just murdered it.” The audience erupts calumniously, with Catholics hissing and screaming, a priest mounts a chair to try and maintain order, and it becomes obvious why Taxil had the attendees check their walking sticks at the door – some would certainly have beaten him to death on the spot.

They ought to have known better, though, as Taxil’s extensive use of the Baphomet throughout the entirety of his hoax was a dead giveaway that not all was as it seemed. Created several decades prior by another Frenchman, Éliphas Lévi, it was clearly stated in the book in which it first appeared that it was not a representation of a demon or the devil, but something far more complex and esoteric. Ultimately, it was Lévi’s attempt at rehabilitating the image of the extinct Knights Templar, who were massacred by the Catholic Church in the year 1312 after a campaign of blood libel, and false confessions obtained by gruesome tortures. Nevertheless, it found great use being circulated by others like Taxil and de la Rive as a demonic idol.

The shock of Taxil’s confession, the entirety of which was published in Parisian newspaper Le Frondeur on April 25, 1897, rocked the world. The same day Le Père Peinard, a weekly Parisian journal for anarchists, published a detailed recounting of the event.

Here is but a sampling of other stories published about Taxil’s infamous confession:

Taxil further elaborated on the intentions behind his grand hoax in a 1906 interview in Volume XXIV of The National Magazine:

The public made me what I am; the arch-liar of the period, for when I first commenced to write against the Masons my object was amusement pure and simple. The crimes I laid at their door were so grotesque, so impossible, so widely exaggerated, I thought everybody would see the joke and give me credit for originating a new line of humor. But my readers wouldn’t have it so; they accepted my fables as gospel truth, and the more I lied for the purpose of showing that I lied, the more convinced became they that I was a paragon of veracity.

Then it dawned upon me that there was lots of money in being a Munchausen of the right kind, and for twelve years I gave it to them hot and strong, but never too hot. When inditing such slush as the story of the devil snake who wrote prophecies on Diana’s back with the end of his tail, I sometimes said to myself: “Hold on, you are going too far,” but I didn’t. My readers even took kindly to the yarn of the devil who, in order to marry a Mason, transformed himself into a crocodile, and, despite the masquerade, played the piano wonderfully well.

One day when lecturing at Lille, I told my audience that I had just had an apparition of Nautilus, the most daring affront on human credulity I had so far risked. But my hearers never turned a hair. “Hear ye, the doctor has seen Nautulius,” they said with admiring glances. Of course no one had a clear idea of who Nautilus was, I didn’t myself, but they assumed that he was a devil.

Ah, the jolly evenings I spent with my fellow authors hatching out new plots, new, unheard of perversions of truth and logic, each trying to outdo the other in organized mystification. I thought I would kill myself laughing at some of the things proposed, but everything went; there is no limit to human stupidity.

Taxil would die ten months later in March 1907. In November of the same year the Sydney-based Catholic Press published an anonymous letter eulogizing Taxil as “The World’s Worst Liar,” and that he had “died despised by those who had known him and by the great world he had cheated,” while calling him a “horrible buffoon,” whose “thrilling fairy tale under the guise of fact took the Catholic world by storm.” More accurately, however, they also called his hoax “the most successful fraud of the nineteenth century,” something Taxil certainly would have taken as a compliment.

It was Taxil’s intent to exploit people’s tendency towards confirmation bias in his hoax, which had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. However, what he didn’t foresee was that the egos of his victims were so big that they would carry on pushing his fabrications as if nothing had happened. Confession or not, it had to be true.

The World in Chaos

With World War I kicking off in 1914, followed by the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, people were scrambling for a coherent explanation of why so much chaos was being sown around the world. In 1920 a book called The Cause of World Unrest emerged attempting to explain it all. It was an anonymous compilation of essays originally published in the London Morning Post in July of the same year.

In one of the essays we find Taxil’s magisterial hoax cited as truth, describing the chapter already mentioned above from Le Diable au XIXe Siècle about the written plan drawn up on August 15, 1871 by the fictitious Palladian Rite for global destruction. A familiar paragraph from the so-called plan is reproduced in The Cause:

That is why, when the autocratic Empire of Russia will have become the citadel of Papal Christianity (adonaisme papiste), we shall unchain the revolutionary Nihilists and Atheists, and we shall provoke a formidable social cataclysm, which will demonstrate clearly to the nations, in all its horror, the effect of absolute unbelief, mother of savagery and of the most bloody disorder. Then, everywhere, the citizens, obliged to defend themselves against the mad minority of revolutionaries, will exterminate these destroyers of civilization, and the multitude, disillusioned of Christianity, whose deist soul will up to that moment be without compass, thirsting for an ideal, but not knowing where to bestow their worship, will receive the True Light, by the universal manifestation of the pure Luciferian doctrine, at last made public, a manifestation which will arise from the general movement of reaction following the destruction of Atheism and Christianity, both at the same time vanquished and exterminated.

There is no mention of Taxil’s sensational confession in the pages preceding or following the reproduction of this part of the hoax. It does say in The Cause that this quote and the document it allegedly comes from could be a hoax, but that it nevertheless is quite prophetic.

But was it really? The rising tide of revolutionary socialism in the late 19th century was surely no stranger to Taxil. Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto had been in circulation for decades prior to Taxil creating the hoax, and bloody revolution was already being openly discussed. It was only a matter of where it would first emerge, and popular locations for that had already been determined to be Russia or Germany.

The Cause would go on to be used in the 1925 book called The Mystery of Freemasonry Unveiled, published by Cardinal Caro y Rodriguez of Chile. In it, the Cardinal uncritically repeats what he found in The Cause, reproducing verbatim the same paragraph from Taxil’s hoax. How a Catholic Cardinal would not know this was a fabrication is surprising seeing that he would have been nearly thirty years old at the time of Taxil’s confession and by then already an ordained priest.

Read more here...

Tyler Durden Mon, 10/16/2023 - 23:55

Read More

Continue Reading

Trending