03/26/2017 / By JD Heyes
As Natural News founder/editor Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, has extensively reported, the Zika virus scare in which the mosquito-borne sickness was blamed for a rash of microcephalis among newborns, particularly in Brazil, was a manufactured hoax. But that isn’t stopping U.S. officials from perpetuating the myth that a) it’s a real problem; and b) something needs to be done about it.
One of the methods chosen by American officials around the country is introducing genetically modified mosquitoes grown by British biotech firm Oxitec that are supposed to mate with Zika-carrying mosquitoes, causing their offspring to die early.
The Houston Chronicle reported that officials in Harris County, Texas, are considering introducing Oxitec genetically modified mosquitoes into the area and are currently negotiating with the British firm.
So far, there have been no actual trials involving GM mosquitoes in the United States. A planned trial in the Florida Keys last fall never materialized because residents there expressed concern about the genetic engineering, which led to local officials canceling a proposed trial there. (RELATED: Read The Zika Hoax Is About Population Control.)
What’s even more bizarre is that officials in Harris County, which is home to Houston, note there have been no documented cases of Zika virus being transmitted locally. In fact, the only Texas cases at all have been in Cameron County, which borders Mexico.
The Chronicle noted further:
Mustapha Debboun, director of the Harris County Mosquito Control Division, said working with Oxitec could provide another tool in the fight against Zika and other mosquito-borne illnesses. Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which carry the Zika virus, dengue fever and chikungunya, among other deadly illnesses, are common in the Houston region.
But despite their presence, again – no cases of Zika in Houston.
A chief scientist at Oxitec, Deric Nimmo, has called “the release of mosquitoes to control mosquitoes” a big change in how officials deal with the virus. The company says it has conducted field trials in Brazil, Panama, and the Cayman Islands, and it says that the Aedes populations have been decreased by as much as 90 percent in those places.
But as Adams has noted, in places where there were an unusually high number of babies being born with microcephaly, the claim that they were being caused by the Zika virus never materialized:
Now, the Zika fraud has started to unravel as the Zika doomsday predictions failed to materialize. (How could the predictions be correct in the first place? It was all based on infectious disease quackery and viral voodoo.) “Brazil’s Ministry of Health has launched an investigation into the cluster of babies born with brain defects linked to the Zika virus, after an expected ‘explosion’ of cases across the country did not occur,” reports The Globe and Mail (Canada).
It turns out that even though Zika-carrying mosquitoes spread across Brazil and infected untold millions of people, those infections never translated into neurodevelopmental birth defects (shrunken brains).
The Zika virus alone, in other words, isn’t causing a wave of microcephaly, which is exactly what I’ve been accurately telling everyone since day one.
“The bulk of the cases of congenital Zika syndrome – fetal brain defects that sometimes cause microcephaly, or abnormally small skulls – remain clustered in the northeast region of the country,” reported the Globe and Mail. (RELATED: Read The Top 10 Most Outrageous Science Hoaxes Of 2016.)
Nevertheless, American health officials are falling for the hype. Last August, the Food and Drug Administration was the federal agency that gave Oxitec permission to launch a field trial in Key Haven, a suburb of the Florida Keys, after stating that the introduction of tens of thousands of genetically modified Aedes mosquitoes would have no ‘significant’ impact on human health, animal health or the environment. At the time, residents of Monroe County, Florida, approved a non-binding resolution to work with Oxitec, but the residents of Key Haven voted against the trial nearly 2-1 in November.
Now, however, it looks as though Harris County officials are going to be the latest U.S. officials to fall for the hoax. Check for updates to this story as it develops on Environ.news.
J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for NaturalNews.com and NewsTarget.com, as well as editor of The National Sentinel.
Sources:
Tagged Under: CDC, genetically modified mosquitos, hoax, Houston, Zika virus