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The Drug that Cracked Covid In this Buffalo Hospital Room, a Grandmother Led the Global Fight for the Drug That Would Save Her Life and End the Pandemic By Michael Capuzzo

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Volume 16 Issue 5

The Drug That Cracked Covid

5 The Story of the Cover

Story

By Michael Capuzzo

By Michael Capuzzo From a Buffalo hospital room, a grandmother led the Global fight for the drug that would save her life and end the pandemic.

20 Gobblers from the

Blind Side

By Roger Kingsley

Talking turkey to wary birds.

26 GlassFest Fusion By Karey Solomon

Creativity and innovation flourish in unbreakable Corning.

32 Mother Earth: Pain in

6 In the Market for Pound Cake?

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By Gayle Morrow

Pondering the science of windshields.

By Karey Solomon Love and memories inspire Wellsboro baker.

34 Mr. Burke Says...

By Diane C. Seymour

The best teachers give us more than math.

36 It Helps To Be Handy By Maggie Barnes

Averting check-out line disaster.

38 Spear Me, Oh Spear Me

14 Spanning 100 Years

By Cornelius O’Donnell

By Mike Cutillo Fusion celebration for Corning’s historic Centerway Bridge.

Some thoughts (and recipes) on asparagus.

46 Back of the Mountain

By Bernadette Chiaramonte Misty moments.

Cover by Gwen Button, cover photo by Michael Kulbacki, Judy Smentkiewicz’s family outside her hospital room. This page top photo, by Ralph Lorigo, Judy Smentkiewicz and daughter Michelle outside hospital; center, courtesy Kathy Siegrist; bottom, Centerway Bridge, courtesy Corning’s Gaffer District.

28 3

w w w. m o u n ta i n h o m e m ag . co m EDITORS & PUBLISHERS Teresa Banik Capuzzo Michael Capuzzo ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER George Bochetto, Esq. DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS Gwen Button MANAGING EDITOR Gayle Morrow SALES REPRESENTATIVES Shelly Moore, Richard Trotta CIRCULATION DIRECTOR Michael Banik ACCOUNTING Amy Packard COVER DESIGN Gwen Button CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Maggie Barnes, Mike Cutillo, Ann E. Duckett, Carrie Hagen, Roger Kingsley, Don Knaus, Dave Milano, Cornelius O’Donnell, Brendan O’Meara, Diane C. Seymour, Karey Solomon

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The Story of the Cover Story By Michael Capuzzo

hen my daughter Grace, a vice president at a New York advertising agency, came down with COVID-19 recently, she was quarantined in a “COVID hotel” in Times Square with homeless people and quarantining travelers. The locks on her room door were removed. Nurses prowled the halls to keep her in her room and wake her up every night to check her vitals—not to treat her, because there is no approved treatment for COVID-19; only, if her oxygen plummeted, to move her to the hospital, where there is only a single effective approved treatment for COVID-19, steroids that may keep the lungs from failing. The absence of treatments for COVID-19 is a global crisis, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said recently on 60 Minutes, for vaccines “are not enough.” Dangerous variants sweep the globe after mutating in the world’s poor and unvaccinated, lockdowns persist, and millions more are likely to die. The wonderous m-RNA vaccines need a cop buddy. Fortunately, I knew of an early treatment for Grace. It’s a cheap generic drug, safer than Tylenol, FDA-approved to treat scabies and lice in children and the elderly, with many other uses that make Ivermectin a “wonder drug.” In fifty-five clinical trials with 445 scientists and 17,730 patients around the world, Ivermectin has been shown to be the most powerful drug to eradicate COVID-19 in all stages of the disease, including prevention and early treatment. It’s what the world desperately needs now, according to Dr. Pierre Kory, a former professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison medical school, whose research group, the nonprofit Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, has developed the most effective non-vaccine treatments in the world from safe, FDA-approved generics. They have saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, including eightyyear-old Judy Smentkiewicz of Buffalo, the star of this month’s cover story. Judy’s remarkable story is a “miracle,” her family says, thanks to Pierre Kory, science, and

God. Grace researched Ivermectin and was surprised that it is not FDA-approved as an anti-viral to treat COVID-19, although it is FDA-approved as an antiparasitic agent. This would be an “off-label use,” a routine thing in medicine comprising some 20 percent of all prescriptions— aspirin to prevent heart attack or stroke, for instance, is “off label.” This is called doctoring. And it was routine until COVID-19, when a big pharma-dominated health system tried to eliminate all generic competition to protect its biggest payday of all time. Judy had the choice to fight back or die. A worldwide revolution that will determine the future of medicine and who lives and dies from COVID-19—the battle of Ivermectin—is fighting back, fighting for life. Grace, I’m happy to say, was prescribed Ivermectin and got better fast. If you are interested in Ivermectin, check out www.flccc.net, and talk to your doctor. Here’s a help page on how to talk to your doctor: www.COVID19criticalcare. com/guide-for-this-website. I got onto this story on Mother’s Day, 2020, when my wife Teresa, who many know as the publisher and editor of Mountain Home, and I watched Dr. Kory testify to the U.S. Senate about his group’s first breakthrough, a steroid treatment that was saving 95 percent of COVID-19 patients when 80 percent were dying in New York City and the world was in panic. To our surprise, as longtime journalists—we met at The Philadelphia Inquirer—Dr. Kory was cancelled by a global news blackout. Was not a treatment that could save the world news? While Teresa puts out the magazine, I’ve written two New York Times-bestselling books, Close to Shore and The Murder Room, featuring some of the world’s most brilliant scientists. Now I’ve spent months interviewing Kory and his colleagues, and I’ve seen unthinkable things. When professor Joe Varon, a top critical care doctor and Mexican-American hero recently honored with “Joseph Varon Day” in Houston for his

COVID-19 treatments that are saving the city’s sickest poor, black, Mexican, and immigrants, invited journalists from CNN, The Associated Press, and Reuters to his COVID-19 ICU to get out the news of his life-saving treatment, all the journalists fictionalized the story to make it seem like most everyone was dying when in fact most everyone was living. The happy story, the truth, didn’t fit the official government science. We live in a remarkable media age where a positive story on CNN, perhaps more so than a peer review in The New England Journal of Medicine, will instantly encourage doctors in two hundred countries to use a perfectly safe and legal drug and save humanity. I call on my fellow colleagues, including former colleagues and friends at The Washington Post and The New York Times, to open their hearts and minds to legitimate, unreported doctors and therapies and write about all sides of the Ivermectin story, like journalists always have. It is a historic opportunity. For the first time in the long journey from Gutenberg to Google, journalists may be the ones to save the world.

The Drug That Cracked COVID From a Buffalo Hospital Room, a Grandmother Led the Global Fight for the Drug That Would Save Her Life and End the Pandemic By Michael Capuzzo

n the morning of December 18, 2020, as the newscaster announced a grim New York record for COVID-19 deaths and the weatherman predicted a white Christmas for Buffalo, Judy Smentkiewicz drove home from a house cleaning job, excited about the holiday. But her back hurt bad, and she was unusually exhausted. “I thought it was my age, being eighty years old, working every day,” she said. “I never thought about COVID.” Judy’s small house in Cheektowaga, just east of Buffalo, was all set for Christmas. Daughter Michelle, who lives a few miles away and talks to her mother five times a day, put up the tree and the decorations and the snowman on the front lawn of grandma’s house with her daughter until it looked like a scene from It’s a Wonderful Life. Son Michael came up from Florida with his wife Haley to help his sister cook the family Christmas Eve dinner, usually

for twenty-five, but now just immediate family with “COVID shaping everything,” Michael said. Michael, fifty-seven, hasn’t lived in Buffalo for close to thirty years, and relishes the trip home. But now he was worried. Mom was sleeping twelve hours a day. She couldn’t eat. She couldn’t lift the phone. “I’m fine, I’m just tired,” she kept saying. But Judy was always up with the sun. After raising two children as a single mother, working thirty-five years as an office manager for Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, she was still cleaning houses five mornings a week with her girlfriends to “keep busy.” On December 22, three days before Christmas, Judy tested positive for COVID-19. “We were devastated,” Michael said. The family Christmas Eve dinner was cancelled, Judy spent Christmas in quarantine in her house, four days after Christmas she was taken by ambulance to

Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital, and on New Year’s Eve Michael and Michelle got a call from the hospital that their mother was being admitted to the ICU. It all happened so fast. “We can’t be with her,” Michael said. “We can’t hold her hand, we can’t sleep in the room with her.” He started keeping notes to make sense of it all. “Hearing her voice crack on the phone as she agreed to go on the ventilator was HEART-BREAKING,” he wrote. His mother was sedated and unresponsive, as if she were in a coma, as a ventilator mechanically breathed for her. The doctors said there was little more they could do, and her chances of survival were bleak. Judy was getting the global standard of COVID-19 care recommended by the World Health Organization, the National Institutes of Health, and all major public health agencies. It was called “supportive care.” Judy was told to stay at home since See Pill on page 8

Michael Kulbacki

After the battle of her life: Judy Smentkiewicz back home with family dog Callie.

Pill continued from page 6

there was nothing the doctor could do for her anyway, it was best to keep patients away from doctors and everyone else, until she had trouble breathing in week two. That was the sign the disease had entered its potentially fatal stage and it was time to go to the hospital where doctors couldn’t do much but more supportive care. In other words, Judy would have to save herself. “There is no antiviral drug proven to be effective against the virus,” The New York Times said on March 17, 2020, under the headline “Hundreds of Scientists Scramble to Find a Coronavirus Treatment.” It was day seven of the pandemic, when the global death toll was 7,138. “When people get infected,” the Times said, “the best that doctors can offer is supportive care—the patient is getting enough oxygen, managing fever and using a ventilator to push air into the lungs, if needed—to give the immune system time to fight the infection.” The global death toll was more than 3.3 million as this story went to press, and scientists are still scrambling. The NIH and WHO are still recommending Tylenol and water in 2021. There is still no approved treatment

for all stages of COVID-19. Even with the rollout of vaccines, they are “not the whole answer,” Dr. Francis Collins, director of the NIH, said recently on 60 Minutes, with variants that threaten to defeat vaccines in rich countries constantly sweeping the Earth after mutating in that majority of poor 7.9 billion humans who won’t get a big pharma jab any time soon. According to The Wall Street Journal, global deaths in 2021 will soon exceed 2020, and millions more are expected to die. “People are going to continue to get sick,” Collins said. “We need treatments for those people.” Michael was calling the doctors and nurses constantly, but “we heard nothing but bad, bad news. Mom wasn’t getting any better. It’s going to be a long haul, she’s in bad shape, prepare yourself.” The doctors and nurses said they had exhausted all treatment options, and like so many others Judy was highly likely to die. When an eighty-year-old COVID-19 patient goes on a ventilator, they said, it’s a highly likely death sentence—eighty percent of them don’t survive. The prolonged critical illness was typically about a month with little or no change until, surrounded by helpless

doctors and nurses and goodbyes and cries of loved ones echoing from a Zoom call, they turned blue and suffocated to death. But as Judy lay dying in the small hospital eight miles northeast of Buffalo, almost six hundred miles south in Norfolk, Virginia, Dr. Paul Marik, sixty-three, the endowed professor at the Eastern Virginia Medical School and a world-renowned clinician-researcher, was unknowingly preparing to save her life with a “wonder drug” that obliterates COVID-19. Discovering the drug was one thing, but getting it to Judy’s doctors in time to save her, getting it to the many thousands of people who needed it, would be a harrowing journey to rival the Iditarod mushers’ 1925 serum run of 675 miles through ice and snow to Nome, Alaska so Dr. Curtis Welch could stop the diphtheria epidemic. But this “Great Race of Mercy” had far less chance of success, for the obstacles were not in nature but in the minds and hearts of other men. Marik was accustomed to beating the odds. The legendary professor, a 6-foot, 230-pound, balding, barrel-chested, bear of a man with a crisp native South African accent touched with the South after thirty

years, is the second most published critical care doctor in the history of medicine, with more than 500 peerreviewed papers and books, 43,000 scholarly citations of his work, and a research “H” rating higher than many Nobel Prize winners. Marik is world famous as creator of the “Marik Cocktail,” a revolutionary cocktail of cheap, safe, generic, FDA-approved drugs that dramatically reduces death rates from sepsis by 20 to 50 percent anywhere in the world—whether you’re in a hospital in Zurich or Zimbabwe, Chicago or Chengdu—down to near zero, when given soon after presentation to hospitals. Since he published what he calls the “HAT Therapy” (Hydrocortisone, Ascorbic Acid [intravenous Vitamin C] and Thiamine) in 2016 in the most prestigious peerreviewed journal in the field, Marik has received worldwide publicity, is celebrated in James Bond Internet memes with the “Marik Cocktail” shaken, not stirred, and is seen in ICUs around the globe as a historic figure in medicine for improving care of sepsis, which last year passed cancer and heart disease as the world’s number one killer, according to Lancet. Marik, known as a quirky genius and an exceptionally kind-hearted doctor (his most published peer in the annals of medicine doesn’t see patients), has been searching for an effective treatment for COVID-19 since it began. Now, while Judy’s doctors were stumped, he was spending long days and nights at the Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, a large, 563-bed teaching hospital on the EVMS campus, where Marik, head of pulmonology and critical care, was treating hundreds of critically ill COVID-19 patients, many referred to him from all over the 1.8-million population Hampton Roads region. The pandemic had pushed him to nights doing Zoom grand rounds and making YouTube videos instructing doctors and hospitals all over the world on treating COVID-19, sending out a daily EVMS COVID-19 Management Protocol online for doctors worldwide, and hunting the literature for the “wonder drug” that would save Judy See Pill on page 10

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Smentkiewicz and bring the pandemic to an end. This was not something many people thought possible. But while the world was living the nightmare of the COVID-19 pandemic like a Michael Crichton sci-fi horror production where the planet is facing a plague apocalypse, millions die, and doctors can do nothing as brilliant pharmaceutical scientists race to develop vaccines to save the globe in the final scene, Paul Marik had a different movie in his head. He was startled and appalled that all the national and international public health agencies recommended that the most well-trained, well-equipped doctors in history stand down and wait on big pharma’s lab scientists while the worst pandemic in a century devastated the world. “It’s therapeutic nihilism to say that doctors can do nothing,” Marik said. “Supportive care is no care at all.” What Marik did was assemble four of his closest friends, who also happen to be four of the top academic critical care doctors in the world. He challenged them to join him in an expert panel to continually review the literature while treating their COVID-19 patients and developing treatment protocols—lowcost generic therapies that countless black and brown and poor people all over the world would need, he saw from the beginning, or face a coming catastrophe without treatments or vaccines. These five doctors set out to save the world, with a better chance at it than most. Pulmonary critical care specialists often lead medical teams at hospitals in a crisis. “Lungs are the most common organ that fails in the ICU and in the context of many diseases,” says Dr. Pierre Kory, Marik’s protégé. “Pulmonary critical care physicians (are)…the most widely skilled, and the most knowledgeable and experienced in all facets of disease and all levels of severity to the extent that no other doctor comes close.” ICUs were getting hammered by the new respiratory plague all around the world, but Marik had assembled a group of intensivists with nearly 2,000 peer-reviewed papers and books and over a century of bedside experience in treating multi-organ 10

welcome to failure and severe pneumonia-type diseases. If anyone could arrest the coronavirus in a living patient, they could. Marik turned to his dearest colleague in medicine in Houston, professor and doctor Joseph Varon, a Mexican American with academic appointments in both his countries that have included the University of Texas Health Science Center, and research innovations including a cooling cryo-helmet he used to save his own life when he had a stroke. He then recruited his comrade-inarms in sepsis therapies, the renowned Dr. Gianfranco Umberto Meduri, an Italian, professor at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis, the father of noninvasive intubation and world authority on steroid treatment of ARDS (Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome) and COVID-19. He called on his longtime boon colleague and former resident Dr. Jose Iglesias, from Cuba, a highly published associate professor of medicine at Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine in Seton Hall, New Jersey, and director of one of that state’s largest dialysis centers. At age fifty, the youngest of the group was Pierre Kory, a big, passionate doctor-scientist like Marik, and his protégé. Kory was a highly published former associate professor and critical care service chief at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the director of the Trauma and Life Support Center at University Hospital, one of the top academic medical centers in the world. If you go by the traditional measure of lives saved by research breakthroughs or bedside care, Marik, Meduri, Varon, Iglesias, and Kory—four brilliant immigrants from South Africa, Italy, Mexico, Cuba, and one brash New Yorker—are the finest COVID-19 clinicianresearchers of the pandemic. They made their first major breakthrough in March 2020, by the third week of the pandemic when only 3,800 Americans had died. It was based on the idea that COVID-19 has one great weakness: the coronavirus doesn’t kill anybody. In a mechanism so diabolical Marik believes “human beings aren’t smart enough to have figured it out,” the trillions upon trillions of coronaviruses that overwhelm and sicken the host don’t kill it. But in the second week of the disease, all the coronaviruses die, and like suicide bombers flooding out of a Trojan Horse swamp the body with a “vast viral graveyard” that triggers a friendly-fire hyper-immune response that in turn unleashes monstrous multiorgan inflammation and clotting like doctors have never seen. A body dying of COVID-19 is a complex, terrifying sight. But its weakness is simple: “As pulmonary critical care doctors we know how to treat inflammation and clotting, with corticosteroids and anticoagulants,” Marik says. “It’s first-grade science.” From the beginning of the pandemic, the hospitals that Marik and Varon led had COVID-19 beat. They achieved remarkably high survival rates at their hospitals at a time when 40 to 80 percent of patients in the U.S. and Europe were dying from the disease. Their success was achieved with the group’s now-famous MATH+ protocol for hospitalized COVID-19 patients. The cocktail of safe, cheap, FDA-approved generic drugs— the steroid Methylprednisolone, Ascorbic Acid (Vitamin C), Thiamine (Vitamin B1), and the blood thinner Heparin—was the first comprehensive treatment using aggressive corticosteroid and anti-coagulant treatments to stop COVID-19 deaths. Both were novel approaches strongly recommended against by all national and international health care agencies throughout the See Pill on page 12

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world, but later studies made both therapies the global standard of hospital care. In addition, Kory, Marik, et. al published the first comprehensive COVID-19 prevention and early treatment protocol (which they would eventually call I-MASK). It is centered around the drug Ivermectin, which President Trump used at Walter Reed hospital, unreported by the press, though it may well have saved the president’s life while he was instead touting new big pharma drugs. The doctors published their breakthroughs in real time on the website of their nonprofit research group, the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (www.flccc.net ), so doctors anywhere in the world could find them and use them immediately. Marik, Kory, Varon, Meduri, and Iglesias became heroes of the pandemic to intensivists around the globe who used their protocols to save thousands of lives, and to practitioners at many hospitals in the U.S., including the St. Francis Medical Center in Trenton, New Jersey, where Dr. Eric Osgood posted the MATH+ protocol on a private Facebook group for thousands of ICU doctors after it stopped the dying in his hospital, and talked it up with his colleagues around the nation. Marik and his

colleagues receive more than five hundred emails a day from doctors and patients begging for help to beat COVID-19, and they answer all of them, comforting patients and their families, coaching other doctors, and saving lives. Emails like this (unedited): Dear Dr Marik I am from a remote place(Muzaffarpur,Bihar) in India.people are not that rich and can’t effort costly treatment.i used your MATH PLUS protocol in TOTO to save hundreds of life at very low cost.since there is limited govt facility I have managed pts with SPO2 of even 72% at room air with home oxygen,proning and MATH PLUS. I don’t have words to thank you for this.you deserve to get Nobel Prize for your protocol. Words are not supporting me enough to thank you. Dr Vimohan Kumar Many prominent doctors and scientists around the world believe that Marik, Kory, Meduri, Varon, and Iglesias deserve the Nobel Prize in medicine. Dr. Keith Berkowitz, director of the Center for Balanced Health on Madison Avenue in New York City and Dr. Robert Atkins’ former medical director, and Dr. Howard Kornfeld, founder of the Recovery Without Walls Clinic in Marin County, California, found Marik while looking in the literature for COVID-19 treatments for their patients, and convinced him to form the nonprofit

Courtesy Pierre Kory

Courtesy Frank Junghanns

Is there a doctor in the house?: Dr. Pierre Kory’s December testimony on Ivermectin to a U.S. Senate committee saved many lives and changed the world; (right) a Japanese fan lauds Kory on social media.

FLCCC to get the word out to the world and save humanity. Emmy Award-winning publicist Joyce Kamen of Cincinnati and former CBS News correspondent Betsy Ashton of New York City set aside their lives and began working tirelessly to reach every famous TV newsperson, scientist, and public health expert you know and hundreds you don’t, the handful of science writers who have won Pulitzer Prizes, the five thousand science writers on a special news wire who haven’t, every science desk from CNN to NBC News to the Atlantic magazine, every governor and member of Congress, President Trump, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and, when the time came, President-Elect Biden. Nobody responded. Marik thought it might be a good idea if doctors who were actually saving lives with treatments that could save almost everybody could spend a few minutes on the podium sharing their knowledge with the world after Trump made his speeches and Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx talked about flattening the curve and obeying lockdowns so millions wouldn’t die. “People are dying needlessly,” Marik said. “We’ve cracked the code of the coronavirus.” Nobody seemed to care. See Pill on page 24

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(5) Courtesy Kathy Siegrist Pounding the pavement: Kathy Siegrist brings her pound cakes and personality to Wellsboro’s Farmer’s Market.

In the Market for Pound Cake? Love and Memories Inspire Wellsboro Baker By Karey Solomon

magine the dense, rich scent of pound cake, made in small batches as it used to be, and, fortunately, as it still is in some places. That deliciousness wafts through Kathy Siegrist’s Bakery 303 kitchen most days as she mixes and bakes seventeen different flavors of pound cake for the Wellsboro Farmer’s Market, festivals, special events, and private orders. It’s a skill she first learned at the age of seven when she became her mother’s baking buddy. “I loved having my mother’s undivided attention,” she explains. “I helped measure and pour, and I loved to crack eggs. My older sister was more interested in reading. I was all about baking and had a sweet tooth.” As an older, more accomplished baker, she’d often fire up the oven and bake a cake when her parents went out on errands. “I’d do it to surprise them. It made everyone so happy!” By sticking to her mother’s tried-and-true recipe, which mostly involves a strict adherence to only using quality ingredients, she’s created a niche among the Wellsboro Farmer’s Market

vendors only a pound cake could fill. In addition to being a stellar baker, Kathy is a self-confessed “people person.” A conversation with this pound cake enthusiast is almost guaranteed to work up an appetite. For example, she’ll freely share the unwritten eating law of her Classic Butter Pound Cake, made exactly as her mother taught her: “Slice it about an inch thick and toast it, or even better, butter it and griddle it, then slab on more butter— that’s awesome.” Or, she’ll advise you on how to enjoy strawberry shortcake the New Jersey way. Make pound cake the base, then top it with juicy, sliced sweetened berries and whipped cream. For those who want to explore other flavors, she offers at least sixteen more, including Lemon-Glazed Lemon Pound Cake, popular across a tri-state area because “the glaze is tart and so amazing;” Coconut Pound Cake she describes as “awesome— one customer makes coconut ice cream and serves that with the cake;” Chocolate Stout and Chocolate Cherry Stout Pound Cake—

made with beer and “soooo delicious, that’s one of my favorites!” To be exact, at one time or another, they’re all her favorites. There’s Serious Chocolate Pound Cake made with the same black chocolate used in Oreos. Crumb and Get It, named by her husband Bill, features a wonderfully buttery and cinnamon-y crumb topping. Of the Pecan Streusel Swirl, she says, “You should smell this house when it’s baking!” Seasonal fruits and berries are also featured in the roster, offering the mingled flavors of tart and sweet in each bite. Kathy began Bakery 303 in 2016, encouraged by a co-worker and regular at the Wellsboro Farmer’s Market who thought her pound cakes would do well there. As she planned, her thoughts kept returning to her mother, who died in 1983, and who was not only her mother but also her best friend. Bereft, she hoped for a sign from beyond. She got what felt like several unmistakable messages of encouragement. A lilac bush that for years had remained stubbornly green See Pound Cake on page 16

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Pound Cake continued from page 14

and leafy burst into bloom. Lilacs were her mother’s favorite flower. Puzzlingly, she also kept coming across the number 303—as change from a purchase, the numbers where the pump stopped at the gas station, as the exit number when she visited her father, and often the moment during the night when she awoke. On one such night, peering at her digital clock in the darkness, she realized “303” was also a sideways rendition of the letters “MOM.” Pound cake is a dessert with a long history. Kathy says it became “a thing” soon after it was invented in the early 1700s, given its name because its ingredients were an easy-for-the-bakerto-remember pound each of butter, flour, sugar, and eggs. With the addition of other ingredients, this leads to either a generous four-pound cake baked in a Bundt pan or two slightly-more-thantwo-pound loaf cakes. A survey of farmer’s market customers proved that most preferred the loaf shape, possibly because it’s the best fit in a refrigerator for those who, like Kathy, prefer their pound cake chilled. Not surprisingly, Kathy’s pound cakes evoke an appreciative nostalgia. “When people eat classic pound cake, it brings you back to the time your mom and grandma used to make cakes with simple, classic ingredients—always the best of the best ingredients,” she says. “Some say they haven’t had a cake that tasted like this since they were children.” She even brews her own vanilla. She says it tastes so much better than store-bought. The price of a loaf varies according to the cost of ingredients; in 2021 the classic cakes will cost about $14, while the ones with expensive additional ingredients will be more. How good are they? For one thing, there are rarely leftovers. Kathy’s husband has dibs on any unclaimed coconut ones, but more often if he wants a cake she has to intentionally bake him one. Extra cakes are often cut into eighths, the chunks covered in layers of Ghiradelli chocolate and decorated to become “pound cake pops.” They join her caramel/chocolate and sprinkle-covered pretzels as single-serving “because I deserve it” indulgences. Her confections are also available through the area’s Delivered Fresh service (deliveredfresh.localfoodmarketplace.com). The family baking tradition has continued in the Siegrist family, helped along by a conversation Kathy had with Santa one Christmas, leading to the gift of a KitchenAid mixer for each of her two now-adult daughters. Molly became a pastry chef and a consulting advisor to the 303 Bakery; Valerie, a social worker, is the family’s cheesecake specialist. Kathy continues to experiment with new recipes—in the summer of 2021 she expects to add a gluten-free pound cake, a few new flavors, and a larger version intended for the family reunions and gatherings that lockdown-weary people are looking forward to resuming when it’s possible. The Wellsboro Farmer’s market season begins May 20 and continues to October 14. Find it Thursday afternoons from 2:30 to 5:30 on the front lawn of the Presbyterian Church, Main Street. In case of a pound cake emergency, you can reach Kathy by phone at (570) 404-8047, through her Bakery 303 FB page, or at bakery303.com. Karey Solomon is a freelance writer and needlework designer who teaches internationally.

THE 29TH ANNUAL

COAL FESTIVAL

BLOSSBURG May 28—May 30

For more Information call 570-638-3313 or visit www.coalfestival.com

Celebrating the history and heritage of the mining industry in Blossburg and the surrounding communities. In 1792 coal was discovered in the Blossburg area during the building of the Williamson Road. The coal quickly became a valuable resource that brought people to the area to work in the coal mines, and many of the towns in our area were created because of the mining that took place. Blossburg was home to William B. Wilson, the first US Secretary of Labor. After Wilson’s death in 1934 the family farm was sold to the American Legion Post No. 572 of Blossburg. The Legion Post is still located there today. Although mining no longer takes place in the area, we honor our past with the annual Coal Festival. The first Coal Festival was held Memorial Day weekend in 1993, 201 years after coal was discovered in Blossburg. We invite you, your family, and friends to help us celebrate.

Proud to support the 29th annual Blossburg Coal Festival Proudly Made in America Since 1924 Ward products are all American-made, in compliance with Stimulus Act requirements, and in keeping with our commitment to U.S. manufacturing. We are rooted in a long tradition of American manufacturing, having been established in 1924 in Pennsylvania, where our corporate headquarters and manufacturing facilities remain to this day.

117 Gulick Street, Blossburg, PA. 16912 - 570-638-2131 17

Hope to see you at the 2021 Blossburg Coal Festival! Open Monday-Saturday 8am-6pm Sunday 9am-6pm

Watch for our Meat Sales! • Visit us on Facebook! 1 Riverside Plaza • Blossburg, PA • 570-638-2695

COAL FESTIVAL

BLOSSBURG FRIDAY, MAY 28 SENIOR DAY

BLOSS BEVERAGE

Featuring Pennsylvania Sourced Yarns Various Yarn Weights and Blends Knitting and Crochet Notions Glenfiddich Wool • Sewing Supplies Drop Spindle Supplies • Antiques!

Wednesday-Friday 11 AM to 6 PM Saturday 10 AM to 2 PM

224 Main Street • Blossburg, PA

The

V I CTO R I A Theatre 222 Main Street •

B LO S S B U R G, PA

FOR MORE INFORMATION • 570-638-3456

V ICTORIAB LOSSBURG.COM

HILLSIDE ROD & GUN CLUB

See you at the 2021 Blossburg Coal Festival!

Members enjoy making use of our Rifle and Pistol Range, Trap field, indoor Archery Range, large pavilion, BBQ pit, and club house. 625 Gulick Street • Blossburg, PA hillsiderodandgun.org 18

5:00 p.m. 5:00 p.m. 5:00 p.m. 6:00 p.m. 6:30 p.m. 7:00 p.m. 7:30 p.m. 8:00 p.m.

Vendors and all activities open The Hatchet House Mobile Unit opens Stop the Bleed Class Rookie Cooks Academy Steak and Shrimp Class Stop the Bleed Class Logan Route LIVE Ghost Stories on the Island Stop the Bleed Class

SATURDAY, MAY 29

8:30 a.m. Color Run 5K (Registration begins at 7:30 at the Blossburg UMC) 9:00 a.m. Car and Bike Show Registration begins on the Island 10:30 a.m. Chicken BBQ by Sleezy (sales on Island only)

SCHEDULE OF

EVENTS 11:00 a.m. 12:00 p.m. 12:00 p.m. 12:00 p.m. 12:30 p.m. 1:00 p.m. 4:00 p.m. 6:00 p.m. 9:00 p.m.

Parade Vendors and all activities open The Hatchet House Mobile Unit opens 673 Cornhole Tournament Ben Jones Memorial Little League Tournament Rookie Cooks Academy Kids Class Talent Show presented by Bigfoot Country Rookie Cooks Academy Pasta Making Class Fireworks

Proud to support our local communities 300 Main St. Blossburg, PA 16912 (570) 638-2115 myFCCB.com

Blossburg Beverage Co. Like us on Facebook

570-638-2474

SUNDAY, MAY 30

Sunday Activities to be determined (check Facebook for updates) **More activities will be added as details are confirmed.**

There will be NO admission fee for this year’s festival. If you would like to make a donation, you’re more than welcome but no buttons and no admission fee ...for anyone.

BLOSS

HARDWARE A Traditional Hardware Store And A Whole Lot More • Since 1981

Bird Feeders

Show Your Hometown Glass n e Pride & Support re c S and with a Blossburg Repair! Coal Festival Garden Flag!

Large Selection of

Unusual Hardware • Opinel Knives

570-638-2600 •218 Main Street, Blossburg, PA 19

Gobblers from the Blind Side Talking Turkey to Wary Birds By Roger Kingsley

idestepping down the steep bank of the ravine in the early morning light, we waded through the gentle flow of the creek water at the bottom, then proceeded up the opposite side. Our boots trod a familiar trail—the one that I commonly turn into a cow path during deer season to access three of my favorite ladder stands. But this was May 24 and spring gobbler season was winding down fast. Following close behind me was my friend Steve bearing a 12-gauge pump, and our destination was a ground blind that was now within sight. But before we could even

halve the distance to it, we were jolted to a stop by the gravelly voice of a gobbler a stone’s throw away, high in a tree right on the rim of the ravine. Exchanging some whispered comments, we continued on and got ourselves situated in the chairs inside the blind as the periodic gobbles from the very close bird persisted. I’d keyed in on this area days before after hearing the vocals of roosted gobblers from our farm buildings several hundred yards away. But since both of my spring tags were already used up on birds I’d tagged elsewhere, I texted an invite

to Steve—a veteran turkey hunter with dozens of longbeards to his credentials. When the moment felt right, Steve revealed one of the few turkey calls stashed in his vest and sent out some soft yelps which were instantly acknowledged by our quarry. “That’s all I’m doing for now,” Steve said. “He’ll decide on his own terms what to make of it.” Prior to entering the blind, I’d placed a pair of hen decoys in the secluded clover-covered food plot within shooting distance of our hideout. Assuming gobblers might visit the plot right after fly-down, the See Gobblers on page 22

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BRADFORD CO.

We invite everyone from everywhere to come “Experience Bradford County!”

Adventure Awaits

PostcardLike Streets

Fairs & Festivals

Resources for Development. Progress for People. Coordinating Business Opportunities

History & Heritage

Kayaking & Hiking

Bradford Count

1 Elizabeth Street, Suite 3 Towanda, PA 18848 570-265-0937; fax 570-265-0935 Email us at cbpa@epix.net or visit our website www.cbprogress.org

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Wyalusing Hotel

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www.wyalusinghotel.com 21

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BRADFORD CO. Gobblers continued from page 20

W WHITE MOUNTAIN

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fake hens, in conjunction with our calling, would set the stage for luring them to their demise once entering the open ground. As daylight began brightening the woodlot, the flapping of wings caught our attention as birds—yes, plural—began gliding to the ground. While hoping he was solo, we weren’t the least bit surprised to learn he was occupied with hens. Nevertheless, as the birds moved away heading southwest toward our big fields, Steve dished out some remarkable realistic hen talk in an effort to change their minds, but the gobbling continued to fade away until all was quiet. Steve’s attempts were futile, but this is an oft-repeated turkey hunting behavior that can promote a positive outcome. Most hunters without a blind would now be on their feet contemplating two options: going elsewhere, or risking pursuit of the unsociable flock. But Steve and me? We simply leaned back in our chairs, began to chat…and listened. I didn’t time it, but I do know this—we were nicely into shooting the breeze when, suddenly, a gobble came from the southwest. Very soon another, and then another, closer each time. It was him all right, the same bird headed our way, all because he remembered hens talking (Steve’s calling) in our direction earlier. Steve worked his call again, sending some “I’m still here” yelps out the mesh windows, and then began preparations for a probable shot. Sauntering into view, then stopping momentarily, the mature gobbler was now on the main trail leading to the clover plot. Perfect! Most likely he had just seen the hens (decoys) that he thought were responsible for the yelps. And then, bang! A flopping turkey was down for the count, shot from the blind side. I don’t care who you are: sitting on the ground with your back against a tree trunk is an exercise that goes from tolerable, to uncomfortable, to agonizing in a very short time. Success will rule your turkey hunts when you are comfortable. Key to bagging one is to sit undetected. If you can’t, the hunt is over. When the moment becomes extremely critical to stay still, ground blinds are a game changer. They not only conceal your restless movements, they hide the human form that can spook gobblers who suddenly acknowledge something out of place at the base of a tree. Does this mean I always hunt gobblers from the blind side? No, but I do make sure I have blinds set up near those locations that are known for frequent visitations of birds. Now, it’s a very rare occasion when I have to resort to a “run-n-gun” version—the no-blind strategy that drives the minds of most turkey hunters. One of the best lessons I learned about the usefulness of blinds for turkey hunting took place in 2012 on a very special hunt. Dad turned seventy-nine years old that year and had never bagged a spring gobbler. I’d located a mature bird with a unique beard in the hayfield strips next to our heifer barn. Every morning he’d strut across the fields behind a handful of hens, then fade into the woods for the day. Near sundown, they’d be in the strips again backtracking across to their preferred roosting site, which they entered in precisely the same spot each time. The daily sightings continued, a pattern developed, and I devised a plan. Late one morning as soon as the birds had cleared the fields, I took a blind to the edge of the roosting woods and placed it where I had observed their entry habit. Once erected, the blind—as you can surmise—stood out like a sore thumb, but that evening I witnessed that same strutter and his flock stroll right beside the darn thing and enter the woods without paying

PINE CREEK VALLEY any heed whatsoever to it. I phoned Dad that evening and asked him if he wanted to kill a turkey. He didn’t say no. The following morning—May 22—I was proudly sitting beside Dad inside that blind when he pulled the shotgun trigger and toppled that curly bearded gobbler. For a few mornings in a row one season, I watched—from inside a blind—an unsociable gobbler and his feathered females pick their way across a big field of corn stubble and winter wheat. No matter what I did, my decoys and calling could not steer them my way. Obviously he had what he wanted and refused to budge. I couldn’t take it anymore. Just before dawn one morning, I hiked across the thirty-acre field loaded down with my normal turkey attire, but this time it included a folding chair and something called a “Blink of an Eye” blind. Locating the approximate path in the wide open field that the turkeys were favoring, and approximately one hundred yards from the woods, I erected the blind in the proverbial blink, zipped the door shut, and waited. At daylight, right on cue, the seasoned gobbler entered the field after fly-down, proudly following the nine hens he shacked up with overnight who were marching toward me. Half an hour later, after the pictures were taken, I was heading back to the truck toting an extra twenty-plus pounds. With the exception of that hunt, I’ve never occupied other blinds without staking some decoys nearby. That way, once I initiate calling, curious gobblers who eventually spot them will have a more positive reason for advancing if, for some reason, the blind was offensive. Blinds used for turkey hunting in Pennsylvania cannot be made by constructing an enclosure out of natural materials like brush, branches, logs, etc. Legal blinds must be manmade from artificial or manufactured materials, from which there are plenty to choose. While I’ve had tremendous success utilizing a variety of popup blinds over the years, I’ve heard comments that some turkeys will avoid them. Don’t believe it! Was it because the birds had a bad experience near one? It’s a well-known fact that some hunters have shot at turkeys…and missed! With the advent of the mentored youth hunting program, many youngsters are now becoming hunters at an earlier age. Blinds provide the perfect solution for mentors to use with their protégés. Protection from the weather is a huge benefit, but the utmost convenience is the blanket it provides for an age group with a very limited attention span. During the 2017 spring season, my eight-year-old grandson—mentored by his dad—bagged a ripe old twenty-pound long-bearded gobbler from a blind that I’d placed near the corner of a field along the turkey’s preferred travel route. Hunters who have experienced the intensity of a close encounter with a turkey surely know the demands of being motionless. Given turkeys’ remarkable peripheral vision, telescopic eyesight, and visual acuity, concealment is essential. With blinds, necessary motions can still be performed within reason and without consequences. My years of hunting gobblers from the blind side have proven it. An award winning writer, Roger Kingsley’s articles and photographs have appeared in several nationally-known publications.

Tackle Sh te Run op a l S

Wolfe’s General Store A unique store nestled among the steep mountains and gorges of Pine Creek! Remarkable Gift Shop Fully Stocked Orvis Fly Shop Fabulous Deli Hundreds of great gifts for the whole family!

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Open 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Seven Days a Week (Deli closes at 4:00 p.m.)

E-mail: info@slaterun.com

Rt. 414 • Slate Run, PA • (570) 753-8551 • slaterun.com

Liberty book Shop 1 East Park St., Avis, PA 17721 • 570-753-5201 • www.TheLibertyBookShop.com Used, Rare and Out-of-Print Books. Your source for unusual books on any subject. Browse our in-stock selection of over 40,000 hardcover books and paperbacks. HOURS: Thurs & Fri 10-6; Sat 10-3 (or by appointment, feel free to just call)

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DON & SUE DODD 570-353-2740 23

Pill continued from page 12

Kory even testified to the Senate on May 6, 2020, his first appearance before the committee seeking COVID-19 treatments, that steroids were “critical” to saving lives and received silence and scorn. Six weeks later, the publication of the Oxford University Recovery Trial proved that the FLCCC doctors were right, and corticosteroids became the accepted worldwide standard of care, changing the trajectory of the pandemic. Now, millions of deaths later, steroids remain “the only therapy considered “proven” as a life-saving treatment in COVID-19,” he says, and only in “patients with moderate to severe illness.” No approved treatment to stop the sick from getting sicker and overloading hospitals, where they face possible death, yet exists. All the non-vaccine big pharma designer treatments for COVID-19 have largely failed to show an impact on mortality, Kory says, including Remdesivir and monoclonal antibody therapy. The Holy Grail COVID-19 treatment remains elusive. On November 11, 2020, Dr. Fauci co-authored a paper for JAMA:The Journal of the American Medical Association, “Therapy for Early COVID-19, A Critical Need,” explaining that early treatments “to prevent disease progression and longer-term complications are urgently needed.” A month earlier, Dr. Marik had found exactly what Dr. Fauci was seeking. The discovery astounded him. In the professor’s continual review of “the latest (and best) literature,” he picked up a surprising “data signal” in October from emerging studies in Latin America. Ivermectin, a safe, cheap, FDA-approved anti-parasitic drug, was showing remarkable anti-viral and anti-inflammatory activity as a repurposed drug—the most powerful COVID-19 killer known to science. Marik had been keeping tabs on Ivermectin but hadn’t included it in his protocols. He knew the drug as a core medicine on the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines, and it is wellestablished in the literature as a “wonder drug” that won the 2015 Nobel Prize for its discoverer, Japanese microbiologist Satoshi Ōmura, for nearly eradicating two of the “most disfiguring and devastating diseases” in history, river blindness and elephantiasis, that had plagued millions of people in Africa countries, one of the great achievements in the history of medicine. The drug was also 24

well known as a standard treatment for scabies and lice, from nurseries to nursing homes. A veterinary version keeps millions of family dogs and cats, farm animals, and cattle safe from worms and parasitic diseases. An over-the-counter medicine in France, Ivermectin is safer than Tylenol and “one of the safest drugs ever given to humanity,” Dr. Marik said, with “3.7 billion doses administered in forty years, that’s B for billion, and only extremely rare serious side effects.” An earlier Australian study, reported in the journal Antiviral Research, showed that Ivermectin, which blocked other RNA viruses like Dengue virus, yellow fever virus, Zika virus, West Nile virus, influenza, the Avian flu, and HIV1/AIDS in vitro, decimated the coronavirus in vitro, wiping out “essentially all viral material by 48 hours.” But more research was needed in human beings. But by October Marik’s concerns were answered. The studies were well-designed university trials that showed amazing anti-COVID-19 activity at the normal doses used to treat parasites. Though small and endlessly diverse by large, Western big pharma “one-size-fits all” random control trials, the Ivermectin studies were a mosaic of hundreds of scientists and many thousands of patients in trials all over the world, all showing the same remarkable efficacy against all phases of COVID-19 no matter what dose or age or severity of the patient. “Penicillin never was randomized,” Marik says. “It just obviously worked. Ivermectin obviously works.” Marik was astonished. “If you were to say, tell me the characteristics of a perfect drug to treat COVID-19, what would you ask for?” he said. “I think you would ask firstly for something that’s safe, that’s cheap, that’s readily available, and has anti-viral and anti-inflammatory properties. People would say, “That’s ridiculous. There could not possibly be a drug that has all of those characteristics. That’s just unreasonable. But we do have such a drug. The drug is called Ivermectin.” If it were universally distributed at a dose that costs ten American cents in India and about the cost of a Big Mac in the United States, he said, Ivermectin would save countless lives, crush variants, eliminate the need for endless big pharma booster shots, and end the pandemic all over the world.

There were no effective, lifesaving, approved COVID-19 treatments that doctors had used to slow down or stop the coronavirus in the history of the pandemic, in any phase of the disease, except the one, corticosteroids, that Marik and company had discovered. Now they had discovered another treatment, even more powerful, that could save the world. Surely, Marik thought, the world would listen this time. As Judy lay dying in Millard Fillmore hospital, her doctors did not have Ivermectin in their treatment bag. But they did have Remdesivir, and they gave a dose to Judy. Manufactured by Gilead Sciences, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, Remdesivir costs $3,000 a dose. It is the only anti-viral treatment for hospitalized COVID-19 patients approved by the NIH COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel, and as a result is a standard of COVID-19 care in many hospitals, even though many doctors say it doesn’t work, and the WHO recommends against it. It has been shown in studies to have no mortality benefit for COVID-19 patients. (Coincidentally, seven members of the NIH COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel acknowledge in financial disclosures that they have received research support or consultant payments from Gilead, or sit on the advisory board of the $60 billion company). As The Washington Post reported, “Remdesivir may not cure coronovirus, but it’s on track to make billions for Gilead.” Remdesivir had “absolutely no effect” on his mother, Michael Smentkiewicz says. But Michael refused to accept the reality that nothing could be done. “I’m stubborn, I’m pushy, I’m the loudest guy in the room,” he says. Anguished that they couldn’t enter the hospital to see his mother and comfort her, Michael, Michelle, their families, and friends—eight of them in all—spent New Year’s Eve standing outside the hospital with their hands on the brick wall under her window, praying for her recovery. They linked arms and sang and called out her name to the high square window lit against the dark. “We felt we needed to be on that ground, blessing the doctors, blessing my mother, staking our claim for healing,” Michael says. “My wife said people live on love,” he says, “and they feel you.” New Year’s Day came. The calendar See Pill on page 40

(2) Courtesy Corning’s Gaffer District

Courtesy Corning Museum of Glass Memorable mix: Corning blends entertainment, food, music, and shopping to form the first event of the summer season.

GlassFest Fusion 2021

Creativity and Innovation Flourish in Unbreakable Corning By Karey Solomon

he challenge of difficult times can bring out the creative best in those open to possibility. Blending safety and creativity means the city that glass made internationally famous will host a (sociallydistanced) festival. GlassFest Fusion, in non-pandemic years a weekend event at the end of May, will this year be spread out over a week, May 24 through May 30, to give visitors and residents a chance to safely explore downtown Corning in depth while enjoying a variety of local arts. Coleen Fabrizi, executive director of Corning’s Gaffer District, says, “Since the very first GlassFest in 2010, the focus of the event has been to celebrate the extraordinary history of glassmaking and resilience in the city of Corning. This year may be a little different from what we can do when we’re not in a pandemic, but we are beyond excited to welcome everyone!” Taking your time to explore means, among other things, the ability to take one of the Gaffer District’s self-guided tours— perhaps the Buildings Alive survey of historic buildings. This one begins at the base of

the famous clock tower, and gives walkers an opportunity to canvass many notable structures and their oh-so-cool anecdotal histories. One location on Market Street (we’re not saying where—you have to find it!) still boasts the drinking trough used where customers who arrived via horsepower could tie their animals and offer them water while their owners shopped. There’s also a self-guided chocolate tour and a self-guided antiques and collectible tour, and a guided Arts Crawl tour…or you could combine them and look at everything. Could be a good strategy—many businesses will be hosting art shows in their windows as well as special promotions for GlassFest Fusion customers. Sidewalk dining is still a thing in Corning, but, on a pretty day (there are some on order), Coleen suggests you might also get a meal to go from the plentiful variety of downtown restaurants or from Wegman’s, then eat it picnic-style on one of downtown Corning’s many green spaces. Among these are Riverfront Centennial Park (walk toward the Corning Museum of Glass from the clock

tower at Centerway Square and find part of the park actually on the bridge spanning the Chemung River) and Tom Buechner Park near the Rockwell Museum. The bridge at Riverfront Park is celebrating its centennial this year. And while you eat—or explore, shop, and admire—regional musicians and musical groups will be performing at Centerway Square and on other stages in open areas. But those who come to the GlassFest Fusion week don’t need to lose sight of the glass. As always, Vitrix Glass at 77 West Market Street will provide in-store glassmaking demonstrations, so it’s possible to watch glass being made and take home a similar previously-crafted ornament, snowman, pumpkin, or something else special. Plans are underway to provide a live video feed on a flatscreen facing the street for those who want to see the process from a little further away. Want to try it yourself or watch more glass being made? The Corning Museum of Glass offers hot glass demonstrations at the museum and make-your-own-glass activities

GAFFER by reservation in their adjacent studio. Look for a particular, justintroduced innovation to watch, and perhaps experience, there. “It’s an interesting story, something we developed during closure,” says CMOG’s Kimberly Thompson. “We were asking ourselves, how do we reopen and have demos? How can you wear a mask and blow glass?” The creative staff invented an “Alternate Inflation Device.” It’s a foot-powered air compressor delivering five to ten pounds of pressure through a blow-pipe. It’s definitely a change, setting 2,000 years of glass-making tradition on its head, and CMOG has been sharing this new invention with other glass-blowers around the world. Locally, it allows masked demonstrators and masked studio participants to continue to produce beautiful glass. See this new technique online at youtube.com/watch?v=BlDAZ9Qv-HQ. “The Corning Museum of Glass is a proud sponsor of GlassFest Fusion because it’s an important event for the promotion of our beautiful downtown and its businesses,” says Beth Duane of CMOG. “We are excited to welcome the community during GlassFest weekend to explore our new exhibition, In Sparking Company: Glass and the Costs of Social Life in Britain During the 1700s. We also have many new works on view.” At the Rockwell Museum, a new exhibition of photographs taken in 1975 by National Geographic photographer Nathan Benn, “Finger Lakes Kodachrome”, opens on May 28. There won’t be an opening party, but the exhibit promises to be “lovely and relatable,” says Willa Vogel of the Rockwell Museum. The Rockwell Kids Art Lab on Market Street will also be open by reservation. At the West End Gallery at 12 West Market Street, “we are going to have a special glass showcase featuring glass artists in the community,” says owner Jesse Gardner. She’s planning to title the exhibit “Unbreakable” in reference to the resilient spirits of local glass artists and her fellow merchants. “Owning your own business is certainly not for the faint of heart,” she notes. “We’ll get through this. These [artists and merchants] are the most resilient people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with.” As the Memorial Day Weekend kicks off the summer season in the Finger Lakes, it’s a good time to remember local Hometown Heroes. A tribute video will air on TV screens in various windows throughout downtown, and a memorial is planned for Centerway Square on May 30. The diversity of Market Street shops, many featuring unique and hard-to-find items, means shopping will be rewarding and relaxed. To make it even “more better,” many will be offering crosspromotions during the week. And even though you’ll be wearing a mask, smile at other mask-wearers who greet you. Now and then some of those smiling at you will be handing out gift cards! The event schedule has yet to be finalized, and Coleen points out that, as always, everything planned has to comply with New York State COVID-19 restrictions. That’s for everyone’s safety. So bring your mask, your curiosity, and your appetite, as Corning promises a wonderful time. Find up to date information at gafferdistrict.com or call (607) 937-6292. Karey Solomon is a freelance writer and needlework designer who teaches internationally.

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Spanning 100 Years

Fusion Celebration for Corning’s Historic Centerway Bridge By Mike Cutillo

merica is flush with famous bridges. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge, the Sunshine Skyway Bridge over Tampa Bay, Lake Pontchartrain Causeway leading into New Orleans, even a former London Bridge, which used to cross the Thames in England and has been deconstructed and rebuilt over Lake Havasu, Arizona. Other iconic spans are associated with certain cities: Think the Golden Gate Bridge (San Francisco), the Brooklyn Bridge (obvious), the Rainbow Bridge (Niagara Falls, both U.S. and Canadian sides). The Edmund Pettus Bridge? Selma, Alabama, of course. New York State’s Southern Tier is not without its own epochal overpass. The Centerway Bridge is one of five bridges and/ or roadways that traverse the Chemung River in Corning. And though to cross it these days one needs only two legs and not four wheels—or more—it is as historic a part of this quaint Steuben County city of 11,000 residents as its glassworks and its beloved downtown Gaffer District. 28

In fact, to many, it is much more than just a bridge. “It’s a jewel, there’s no doubt about that,” says Sandie Wilson, longtime newspaper reporter for the local Corning Leader and current director of administration and operations for the Gaffer District. “It’s a treasure.” That jewel, now a pedestrian familyfriendly walkway, is celebrating its 100th birthday this year. Built in 1921 to relieve the stress of increased automobile and streetcar traffic on the nearby Bridge Street Bridge, the Centerway Bridge has had more lives than your favorite feline, surviving, among other potential disasters, major deterioration because of ever-increasing traffic and flat-out calls for demolition. It even was the subject of a “Save Our Bridge” campaign. There have been severe bouts with wicked weather— including the once-in-a-lifetime, cataclysmic flood of 1972, AKA Hurricane Agnes. “When you think about the flood of ’72, it was catastrophic in so many ways,” says Coleen Fabrizi, the Gaffer District’s

executive director since 2008. “First of all with the loss of lives, but then what it did to downtown… and that bridge withstood the flood. As we continued with restoration and revitalization efforts throughout the city following the flood, the bridge was there. I think for me, because that bridge stood in the very river that attacked the city, so to speak, it was saying, ‘Not my city.’ It still is there as a beacon of hope, I think in that way.” Jewel. Treasure. Beacon. Add “unique” to the list of descriptors for the Centerway Bridge. The 752-foot concrete span consists of seven arches, each of which is about ninetytwo feet long. It is said to be one of the few examples of a filled spandrel bridge still in existence, spandrel being a feature popular in medieval architecture and referencing the area where arches adjoin; filled because its hollows were packed with earth. Designed by Abraham Burton Cohen, a pioneering concrete bridge engineer from New York City, the Centerway became See Spanning on page 31

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Spanning continued from page 28

obsolete for twentieth century traffic after six decades and was scheduled for demolition in 1980. The city’s residents, however, did not want to lose a beloved piece of their history. Led by native daughter Mary Lu Walker, a folk singer and Steuben County Hall of Famer, hundreds of Corningites staged a sit-in on the bridge. “The community rallied around saving the bridge,” says Sandie. “They went to the bridge and protested on it, and sang songs, had a little sit-in—it was that kind of time period.” The grassroots efforts worked, and, after major renovations, the Centerway reopened in 1986 for pedestrians, bicyclists, and the double-decker buses that had been brought in from England to carry tourists to and from the Corning Museum of Glass and the historic downtown district. A maze was also painted on the bridge that became popular with families but was just a precursor to what would be included when another round of renovations—$5.2 million worth—were completed in 2012-13. Now strictly for walkers, joggers, skateboarders, and cyclists, the bridge has green spaces and flower gardens, decorative glass pavers, historical placards, even concrete pads with the bronzed footprints of animals that are native to the region. The maze was preserved, and sprinkler and drainage systems were put in place to keep the foliage and lawns healthy. “It was basically turned into a park on a bridge,” Sandie says with a laugh. That renovation also led to another label for the veritable bridge: Award winner. In 2014 it was named the American Public Works Association Historic Restoration & Preservation Project of the Year. It also won the 2013 Bridge Award by the Western New York Chapter of the Association for Bridge Construction & Design, and the Award of Merit from the International Concrete Repair Institute in the Historic Preservation category. All those accolades—and a centennial anniversary—certainly call for some kind of celebration. COVID-19 has made it a bit difficult to plan anything, but the same community that has rallied in the past to save the bridge will gather for a celebration ceremony May 25, 6 p.m. at Riverfront Park Pavilion, at the bridge’s south entrance. In the meantime, the cherished landmark remains a must-see on a visit to the Crystal City, a bridge—if you will—between Corning’s past, present, and future. “When I became a part of the downtown business community, I noticed a couple of things right off, one of which was the Centerway Bridge,” Coleen recalls. “It was obvious that that particular structure was so much more than a bridge. It was a symbol of the connectivity of the entire downtown and all of the people who used that bridge as a touchpoint, whether it was sweethearts meeting there for a surprise proposal and then journeying back year after year to celebrate an anniversary or people taking their kids there because, you know, any bridge is an adventure to a child. “I’m just in awe of it, and I’m very proud of our city and our corporate partners and everyone who believed in saving this bridge. I applaud that in a society that sometimes gives up too soon on such things.” Mike Cutillo has crossed many bridges, literally and figuratively, in his 35 years as a journalist in New York’s Finger Lakes region, none as lovely—or as green—as Corning’s Centerway Bridge.

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Mother Earth

Pain in the Glass

Pondering the Science of Windshields By Gayle Morrow

“D

amn. A crack.” I never heard the stone that hit the windshield, never saw the tiny chip that started the thing, but there it was, clear as a curse, beginning low, about halfway along the length of the driver’s side wiper blade, then, almost before my eyes, meandering like a river across the bottom of the windshield, taking a bit of a jog up, then turning back down low again to a random, and, I hope, permanent, terminus near to where the glass meets the body of the car. All in all, about two feet of something that could cost me a lot of money. I was not impressed. Glass. To put it in really scientific terms, glass is pretty amazing stuff. Watching the seemingly arbitrary path of this crack got me wondering whether glass has a grain,

you know, like wood does. As near as I can figure, the answer is no. Wood, of course, is, or was, a living thing consisting of living cells. Wood’s grain comes from the alignment of its long cells with the trunk, limbs, and roots. There’s some order there. According to folks who know a thing or two about glass, including the ones who put the information on the Corning Museum of Glass website (cmog.org if you’re interested), glass is neither liquid nor solid. Its form, or condition, is known as “liquid rigid.” It’s also described as an amorphous solid, meaning its atoms don’t have long-range order, and really not much short-range order, either. I can relate. Glass is created when molten material cools rapidly. In fact, it cools so rapidly that

there is not time for a crystalline structure to form. The various atoms are just kind of floating around with one another, so the formation of a grain is not going to happen. For a fun experiment that helps visualize this concept, check out mrsec.psu.edu/ content/amorphous-solids. In nature, glass forms as the byproduct of volcanic activity, or strikes from lightning or meteors. It happens when sand and/ or rocks, often high in silica, are quickly heated and then cooled. There are even marine creatures whose silica skeletons are considered a form of natural glass. People started making glass as early as 3000 B.C. I’m not sure how those first glassmakers figured things out. Where’s Drunk History when you need it? Mother Nature does not provide us with a ready-

made pane of window glass or a usable goblet, but she’s right there with the basics, so maybe somebody picked up a chunk of shiny stuff from a newish lava flow, or from a sandy spot that was the scene of a recent lightning strike, and made the connection. But, back to windshields and windshield glass. The first cars did not have windshields—thus the need for drivers to wear those interesting goggles. It was 1904 before someone thought to include a windshield with the car; those early windshields were basically window glass, however, and had the same properties, one of which was shattering on impact. When there was a crash, drivers and passengers were often injured or killed by glass shards. But, there wasn’t much in the way of consumer protection in those days, nor was there much impetus on the part of car manufacturers to incur more production costs, as they were trying to make more cars as cheaply as possible in order to sell them to as many people as possible. The year before, a French chemist and artist named Éduoard Bénédictus had made a serendipitous discovery when he knocked over a glass beaker. The beaker broke, but for some reason held its shape. Hmmm. Turns out it had a coating of plastic cellulose nitrate, left over from another experiment. Like those glass makers from 3000 B.C., M. Bénédictus made the connection. In 1909 he filed patent for what was then known as safety glass or laminated glass—it had the product name of Triplex. Car makers were still not on board, and it took a world war for the world to start paying attention to the benefits of glass that didn’t shatter—it was used successfully in gas mask eyepieces. Other enterprising, entrepreneur types, in the interim, were coming up with their own versions of and uses for safety/laminate glass. Car makers were still dragging their heels, or maybe it was their hand brakes. According to futuretravel.today/through-thewindshield-together-efac522fbe1c (another fun read), the early car manufacturers thought their job, in terms of safety, was to help drivers avoid accidents via things like better brakes or improved handling. If a mishap should occur, the safety of the driver and passengers was not the responsibility of the manufacturers. Not until people started suing did anything change. One of the most famous, and most aptly named, suits was Pane vs. Ford in 1917. Mr. Pane (no kidding, but I couldn’t find his first name) was involved in an accident while driving his Ford, and attempted to blame the company and the glass in the car for his subsequent injuries. The court ultimately determined it was Mr. Pane’s reckless driving that was the cause, but public sentiment was changing—perhaps because so many people were continuing to be injured from broken glass in car crashes. In 1919, Henry Ford started putting safety glass in all of his cars. These days, windshield glass is silica sand, soda ash, dolomite, limestone, cullet (broken waste glass), and various oxides like aluminum oxide or potassium oxide. It’s all mixed and heated, terms like float chamber, anneal, autoclave, and lehr are added, a layer of polyvinyl butyral, or PVB, is sandwiched between two layers of glass, and, voila, a windshield! So should I get mine replaced? Of course, but the crack is not in my line of sight, so, for inspection purposes, it’s not required. Maybe leave it as a science project?

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Courtesy Larry Burke Mr. Gerald F. Burke brought “New Math,” rockets, and cherished memories to his classrooms, resulting in the Pennsylvania Teacher of the Year award in 1978; (inset) the rockets made by our writer in 1963.

Mr. Burke Says...

The Best Teachers Give Us More Than Math By Diane C. Seymour

owe thanks to the Soviet Union for my introduction to Mr. Burke. In October 1957, they launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite into outer space. Sputnik sent out radio signals for twenty-two days, until its batteries died, and then burned up ten weeks later as it fell from orbit and reentered the earth’s atmosphere. Shocked by this achievement, the U.S. government plowed money into new mathematics and scientific educational programs in a concerted effort to “catch up with” this Cold War adversary. Thus “New Math” came to life, and by 1962 it found its way to a small, rural elementary school in Wyalusing, Pennsylvania. Progressive for a rural school at the time, Wyalusing adopted a trial program of this new-fangled math and also chose a radical approach to teaching it. Twelve of my fifth-grade classmates and I moved

into a classroom with an equal number of sixth graders. Gone were hard-backed math textbooks with countless numbered problems at the end of each chapter. They were replaced with softbound workbooks with write-in-the-book-as-you-go problems. Those of us who already loved old-time arithmetic soon embraced set theory, non-base-10 systems, commutative property, and other parent-frustrating concepts—welcome to the New Math of the 1960s. Chosen to teach in this unconventional setting, Mr. Burke rose to the task. When school started in the fall of 1962, John Glenn had already claimed a page in history after his shot into space earlier in the year. As the first American to orbit the earth, he flew 17,500 miles per hour as he circled earth three times. Mr. Burke brought the excitement of this new space age into our

classroom. We built our own rockets in class, and, one sunny school day, walked down the hill to the town park and shot them off into space, future astronauts in the making! Not every day was as unconventional. We began each class day with the salute to the flag and a silent moment of prayer, not knowing or perhaps just not yet responding to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1962 ruling making mandatory prayer in school unconstitutional. Each morning we also practiced handwriting, forming our OOOOOOs and lllllllls, learning to write our letters the “correct way.” I often think of this as I scribble my name on a credit card payment, with my D and S as the only two legible letters. Mr. Burke would be sad. He’d probably also be sad about the problems facing our country and the world today. In our school days, he led us in

Diane C. Seymour writes stories of rural Pennsylvania from her home on the Potter Century Farm in Sugar Run, Pennsylvania, www. homebeckons.com

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discussions of current events, encouraging us to read (Weekly Readers included, of course!) and watch the news at night. The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 caused fear and uncertainty for a few scary days, and we practiced huddling in the hallways in case of a nuclear attack by the Soviets. The following year, Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, and while I don’t specifically remember learning about the speech at the time, we did discuss racial unrest happening across the country (foreign news to our all-white rural community) and talked about Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act the following year. Every Friday was art project time, and on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, we were using an electric drill to spin colored crepe paper into strings to wrap around bottles for Christmas presents for our parents. Sometime after two o’clock an announcement came over the loudspeaker that President Kennedy had been shot and killed. Mr. Burke helped us get through the next few minutes, and Walter Cronkite helped us get through the next few days. I still get chills. Other events in the country from ’62 to ’64 failed to make much of an impression on us until later years. The U.S. stuck its toes a little bit deeper into Vietnam, with the first U.S. casualties reported. The very first Walmart store opened in Arkansas and the first Ford Mustang roared to life. Zip codes arrived, along with a new TV show, Jeopardy, and the first federal pronouncement was made that smokers might want to reconsider lighting up. We did watch the Beatles make their noisy U.S. debut on The Ed Sullivan Show, but I’m pretty sure none of my friends swooned or fainted! Back in the classroom, Mr. Burke shared his passion for the local history of the Delaware and Iroquois tribes who lived on and roamed the lands along the Susquehanna so long ago. He also talked us through the triumphs and tragedies of our country’s fight for independence and later of the battle of Gettysburg. Between battles, we diagramed sentences, played games of logic, and listened to Mr. Burke’s impromptu stories and lessons about hard work, respect for others, and citizenship. For years, my mother kidded me about the two years when almost every sentence I spoke started with, “Mr. Burke says…” Recently, several of my classmates shared stories of those days, and they laughed and echoed the same memory of their “Mr. Burke says…” phase. All these years later, we may not recall many specific Mr. Burke quotes, but what we do recall is a man who encouraged our curiosity, inspired us to learn, challenged us to excel, and provided a role model of decency. He was a kind and compassionate man. While his specific words may have faded, his life’s lessons live on within us, a lasting tribute to a good man. Thank you, Mr. Burke. • Mr. Gerald F. Burke was born in rural Wilmot Township, Bradford County, Pennsylvania, in 1916. He taught for forty-one years in the local classrooms, including one-room schools, at Oak Hill, Farr, Golden Hill, and elementary schools in Camptown, Laceyville, and Wyalusing. His teaching career culminated in the well-deserved honor of Pennsylvania Teacher of the Year in 1978.

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It Helps To Be Handy Averting Check-Out Line Disaster By Maggie Barnes

“Y

ou should put something on your hands.” I was standing at the kitchen counter, rubbing my sandpaper-like hands together as my husband passed through the room. “They are so dry, I can hear them. Don’t you have lotion or something?” Oh, I’ve got something. Jars and tubes and bottles and tubs of something. All promising to give me the hands of a nineteen year old, preferably one who has never worked a day in her life. Though the warm breezes of May caressed our hilltop home, my skin was stuck in January. Happens every year. It takes most of the summer for my body to hydrate again and,

if I get any sort of warm weather “glow,” it comes in October, when I look as out of place as a green leaf in fall, and people often inquire if I am feverish. I mostly ignore my hands, even when it gets to the point that the socks from the dryer snag my rough fingers. But one night, I was forced to admit that the situation had gotten…well…out of hand. The person in front of me at the market had unloaded their groceries onto the checkout conveyor belt, and I started shoving my stuff forward in the cart. I have this unreasonable fear of making the cashier wait, so I try to be very efficient in my grocery movements. This includes getting

my rewards card and debit card out of my wallet and at the ready. While I waited, I checked out the headlines on the tabloids. “Jackie O and Elvis’s Love Child Now Mayor of Hoboken”— they must be proud. “72-Year Old Gives Birth”— her husband must be proud. “Aliens Reject Earth’s Message of Friendship”—we should all be proud. Of the aliens. I glanced at my cards and realized I had the wrong form of payment. Panic time. Now I had to get the right one out of my wallet and the cashier was already reaching for the last item of the person in front. I scrambled to get my wallet open and find

the correct card. When I yanked it out, it slid right through my course fingers, glided down the conveyor belt and disappeared under the lip of the mechanism the belt emanates from. I froze. The cashier was waiting for me to unload my cart, and my primary method of paying for the necessities of life had vanished in this massive machine. Stammering, I told her what happened. She seemed as stunned as I. I asked if there was a way to open the conveyor belt. She had no clue. We stood there, looking at each other, until it occurred to her to that she needed to call someone. A manager responded with all the enthusiasm of a Bassett hound with a bad tooth. She shrugged when asked about access to the conveyor belt. “Steve is the only one who would know, and he’s gone.” “Oh yeah, Steve,” the cashier nodded. They both looked at me like I should know of Steve’s mechanical prowess. “Can we call Steve?” I was getting concerned I was never going to see that card again. “Oh, you don’t want to call Steve. He lives way out in Ridgebury,” the manager stated. Again, the three of us stood there like an oil painting. Apparently, it was up to me to move this conversation along. “Why does the fact Steve lives in Ridgebury nullify the logic of calling him?” I tried. I think I lost them at “nullify.” Finally, the manager said, “He’ll get mad.” Steve—the all-knowing-conveyor-belt-guru—must be a jealous guardian of his off hours. Or he’s just a nut. I suddenly felt the need to keep Steve away from my debit card. By now, the light was off on the cashier’s lane and people had detoured to other lines. The two women continued to look at me, and it was clear the next move was mine. “Do you have a screwdriver?” So that’s how I came to be laying on the slimy, crusty floor of a supermarket, underneath the conveyor belt, holding a small flashlight in my teeth and pleading with the rusted screws to turn. I could feel my hair getting matted and I tried not to think about with what. My toes got smashed by two shopping carts of people who, distracted by the aliens’ rejection of Earth, shoved their carts into the lane, despite the lower half of my body blocking it. After the germs of a thousand pieces of unwashed fruit and the crumbs of countless bakery boxes had fallen on my face, I got the panel opened and snaked my fingers into the curve of the belt to be rewarded with the sweet feel of plastic. My debit card was undamaged and fully functional, as proven minutes later when I paid for my groceries and reloaded my cart. The manager took the screwdriver back without comment. “At least we didn’t need to call Steve!” grinned the cashier and the manager nodded in hearty agreement. Me losing my debit card forever caused them no strife whatsoever, but annoying Steve? Whoa Nellie, that was crossing a line that sane-minded people wanted no part of. So, Steve in Ridgebury, you owe me. You can start with a manicure. Maggie Barnes has won several IRMAs and Keystone Press Awards. She lives in Waverly, New York.

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Spear Me, Oh Spear Me Some Thoughts (and Recipes) on Asparagus By Cornelius O’Donnell

thought it would be a good idea to celebrate a seasonal vegetable, and my thought was to feature some unusual takes on what is possibly (after fennel) my favorite vegetable, asparagus. And then I thought: seasonal? These days you can walk into a good supermarket and find asparagus the year around. As I am—to put it mildly— mature, I remember my mom’s joy when the arrival of this vegetable caused the market to proclaim the presence of FRESH ASPARAGUS on swaths of butcher paper in their windows. And I remember, too, Mom and Dad’s attempts to grow asparagus in our woefully

small garden, which was shaded by a huge “cotton” poplar. In this same space, Dad tried to grow what he called his three-dollarsper-tomato plants. We knew when they turned a ripe red that frost was imminent. The large lawn was kept for the croquet set. How to Cook This Vegetable How do we love asparagus? Let me count the ways—or at least give you a few ideas. As I ease my way through the produce section of the market this time of year, I impulsively grab a bunch of asparagus, although I have a feeling the fresh arrival

in local farmers markets will be a bit tastier. Most often I cook the spears in a treasure from my working days, and that is the base for the CorningWare coffee pot. It’s tall and holds a fair amount of the vegetable. The spears obviously need a longer cooking time than the tender buds. You need to carefully rinse the spears to remove any lingering soil. Snap and discard the bottom part of the stalk at its natural break, then fit the veg in the tall cooking container. Many cooks trim off the little nibs on the spears as well. I heat water in a kettle with a spout until simmering and pour it over the spears to come about three-quarters of the way

up the spears. I place this over medium heat, snap on the cover, and leave it to steam for about 3 to 5 minutes or until the spears are tender. Carefully pour off the water and place the spears in a serving dish. You can use the base of a double boiler as well. And if you don’t have a tallish container, one idea is to use a wide-ish skillet and wad up enough foil to make a “pillow” for the tips on one inner edge of the pan. Pour over the simmering water from the kettle so as to leave the tips out of the water. Cover and steam until tender. If this seems too fussy just cook the spear. If the spears are really thick, you can cut through the spears lengthwise leaving the tips intact, forming a tassel shape. I must confess I often use the firm-tender steamed or roasted stalks as a dipper into melted butter laced with salt and pepper. Or, eat them dredged into any commercial dip or creamy salad dressing, or dabbled in just a dish of salt and pepper mixed together. Simple and delicious. But maybe you are in the mood for something more complex. Here goes.

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Asparagus with Aigrelette Sauce I found this recipe in a book called Pedaling Through Burgundy by Sarah Leah Chase. I’ve never heard of the vinaigrette, but the French love their asparagus and Sarah got the recipe from famous chef George Blanc. I tried it. Of course, you can use your favorite sauce but it’s so “springy” to try something new. Note the chef ’s way of cooking the spears. Crisp tips be darned. 1 egg yolk 1 Tbsp. Dijon mustard ⅓ cup peanut oil ¼ cup vegetable oil ¼ cup fruity olive oil 2 Tbsp. white Burgundy wine (I used dry vermouth) 1 Tbsp. white wine vinegar 2 Tbsp. chicken broth ½ cup assorted minced fresh herbs (any combination of tarragon, thyme, chives, dill, cilantro, basil) Sea or coarse salt and freshly ground pepper to taste 2 pounds medium asparagus trimmed and bottom portion of stalks peeled

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In a medium-size bowl whisk together the egg yolk, mustard, and lemon juice. Slowly whisk in the peanut, vegetable, and olive oils to form a thickened emulsion. Whisk in the wine vinegar and broth. Season with the herbs, salt, and pepper. Refrigerate the sauce if not using within an hour but bring it to room temperature before using. Place asparagus spears in a wide saucepan and add water just to cover. Bring the water to a boil and cook the asparagus, uncovered, until crisp tender, 3 to 4 minutes. Drain well and immediately sauce with enough aigrelette to coat the spears lightly and evenly. (Save the remaining sauce for another time. It will keep covered and refrigerated 3 or 4 days.) Serve hot, warm, or at room temperature. Makes 4 to 6 servings. Happy Spring!

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turned, but Judy was the same. In the morning Michael went by himself to the hospital parking lot and shouted into the cold gray air up toward his mother’s window. “We’re here for you!” he cried. “We’re not ready for you to go! We’re here fighting! We’re not leaving town until you get out of the hospital.” But by now the Smentkiewiczs believed they needed a miracle. Michael put out a wider appeal to the universe, calling upon some fifty of his “prayer brothers” around the country to pray for his mother’s life. Thoughts and prayers from a wide network centered on the room in the small hospital in Williamsville, New York. At 11:35 a.m. on New Year’s Day, with the annus horribilis of 2020 finally gone and buried, the universe delivered its answer. That was the morning Jan, Michael’s mother-in-law in Atlanta, who had also been praying for Judy’s life, picked up her phone and thought, “This is how the Lord works in my life. There on my phone is this video and the words ‘Ivermectin’ and ‘COVID.”’ Jan clicked on the link. A large, intense physician, six-foot-one inches tall and lineman-wide with horn-rim glasses wrapping a bald head, was being interviewed on Fox 10 News Now, KSAZTV in Phoenix, Arizona. It was Pierre Kory, president and chief medical officer of the FLCCC, who had testified that morning to the U.S. Homeland Security Government Affairs Committee in Washington that he and his colleagues had discovered a drug that could swiftly end the global pandemic and return life on Earth to normal. Kory is a COVID fixer. He went to COVID-19-wracked hospitals during outbreaks, when patients were dying and doctors were overwhelmed, with the mission to stop the dying and restore order to the ICU. When the pandemic hit, Kory helped prepare the university hospital in Madison to handle a forecast surge. Then he went east to help save New York City when the death rate exceeded that of the medieval plague, taking over as the ICU attending chief at the main COVID ICU at Mount Sinai Beth Israel Medical Center. “I’m a lung specialist, I’m an ICU doctor. My city is being destroyed by the worst pandemic in a century, and it’s a lung disease, all my friends, the ICU chiefs who 40

trained me and the ones I trained, they’re going out of their minds, people are dying. Are you kidding me? I went to New York to save lives.” Kory is the son of two New York intellectuals, one a Jewish radiologist who survived the Holocaust, the other a French PhD linguist. He is a New York liberal, renowned pulmonary critical care specialist, award-winning professor and researcher, and a big, brawling, blunt-spoken, and deeply idealistic physician whose lectures are famously a river of eloquence until he gets worked up. Then out comes a torrent of scientific data roiling with moral outrage against medical institutions that turn their backs on human suffering. “I’m a New Yorker,” he says. “I tell it like it is.” In an impassioned, nine-minute testimony, Kory implored the Senate and the NIH to read his scientific review, later published in the American Journal of Therapeutics, that presented a “mountain of data” showing that Ivermectin stopped all phases of COVID-19. The peer reviewers, including three senior career scientists, two at the Food and Drug Administration, supported Kory’s conclusion that Ivermectin “should be systemically and globally adopted…for both the prophylaxis and treatment of COVID-19.” It was Tuesday, December 8, and the news was bleak. On CNN Dr. Fauci asked the American people not to get together for Christmas or Hanukkah to prevent “a surge upon a surge” after Thanksgiving. There were 286,189 deaths already and new cases and deaths were reaching a “frightening peak” and accelerating faster than ever, ABC News reported. “The end of the pandemic is in sight,” Fauci said. “The vaccine…will end the pandemic and return us to as near normal or normal as possible, but we have to do our part right now.” Then came the bright, confident voice of the big physician from the Midwest saying that science had discovered a way for schoolchildren to go back to school and workers to work, and for families to put a star on the Christmas tree and candles on the menorah with new hope. “We have a solution to this crisis,” he said. “There is a drug that is proving to be of miraculous impact,” Kory said. “When I say miracle, I do not use that term lightly. And I don’t want to be sensationalized when I say that. It’s a scientific recommendation based on mountains of data that has emerged in

the last three months…from many centers and countries around the world showing the miraculous effectiveness of Ivermectin. It basically obliterates transmission of this virus. If you take it, you will not get sick.” The scientific evidence was overwhelming, he said. The data from twenty-seven studies, sixteen of them randomized controlled trials, demonstrated, with highly statistically significant, overwhelmingly positive, consistent, and reproducible rates, that people who got sick with COVID-19 were far more likely to quickly get better at home when they took Ivermectin. They didn’t go to the hospital. Housemates of people with COVID-19 who took Ivermectin didn’t get infected. People who got moderately ill in hospitals didn’t go to the ICU; they got better quicker and went home faster. Hospitals didn’t get overrun. The drug even saved elderly, critically ill COVID-19 patients from dying compared to those routinely dying elsewhere. Six prevention studies showed Ivermectin reduced the risk of getting COVID-19 by 92.5 percent, superior to many vaccines. Dr. Hector Carvallo, a professor of medicine at the University of Buenos Aires, gave 788 doctors and other health care workers in three medical centers weekly Ivermectin prophylaxis, with a control group of 407 doctors and others who didn’t get the drug. In the control group 236 people, or 58 percent, “had become ill with COVID.” Among the 788 who got Ivermectin, “no infections were recorded.” Kory had been working with a senior data scientist in Boston named Juan Chamie, who discovered that Ivermectin dropped case and death rates off the cliff in numerous regions around the world. The huge Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, which with 232 million people would be the fifth biggest country in the world, mass distributed Ivermectin to 200 million people last fall and by winter was reporting few if any deaths in the country. The state is still not suffering as badly as its neighbors in that crisis-stricken country. In Peru, tens of thousands of rural residents in eight states often took animal-grade Ivermectin— some in the form of de-worming horse paste—through a large, door-to-door humanitarian mission because doctors and health ministers in the capital city of Lima refused to give the “peasants” the human medicine. But cases and deaths plummeted

in the eight rural states to pre-pandemic levels, with no reported harm from the medicine’s impurities, while they soared in Lima, where Ivermectin was not dispensed amongst the ivory towers of medicine. Kory’s data was corroborated by Dr. Andrew Hill, a renowned University of Liverpool pharmacologist and independent medical researcher, and the senior World Health Organization/UNITAID investigator of potential treatments for COVID-19. Hill’s team of twenty-three researchers in twenty-three countries had reported that, after nine months of looking for a COVID-19 treatment and finding nothing but failures like Remdesivir— “we kissed a lot of frogs”—Ivermectin was the only thing that worked against COVID-19, and its safety and efficacy were astonishing—“blindingly positive,” Hill said, and “transformative.” Ivermectin, the WHO researcher concluded, reduced COVID-19 morality by 81 percent. Kory nearly broke down pleading with the NIH to review the “immense amounts of data that shows that Ivermectin must be implemented and implemented now,” and reverse its negative recommendation of August 27, when no data was available. “We have 100,000 patients in the hospital right now dying,” he cried out to the committee. “I’m a lung specialist, I’m an ICU specialist. I’ve cared for more dying COVID patients than anyone can imagine. They’re dying because they can’t breathe. They can’t breathe…and I watch them every day, they die….I can’t keep doing this. If you look at my manuscript, and if I have to go back to work next week, any further deaths are going to be needless deaths, I cannot be traumatized by that. I cannot keep caring for patients when I know they could have been saved by earlier treatment with a drug…that will prevent the hospitalization, and that is Ivermectin.” Kory’s testimony, titled “I can’t do this anymore” on YouTube, went viral and reached eight million views and counting before being censored by YouTube for “misinformation”; it was the Howard Beale speech that captured the gestalt of a new time. But unlike the fictional newsman in the movie Network who had thousands throwing open their windows with 1970s angst and shouting “I’m mad as hell and I can’t take it anymore!” this prophet was real, and many lives and the fates of nations were at stake.

The reaction was explosive and hopeful all over the world, from doctors, nurses, scientists, and civil rights activists; from people watching their loved ones die from COVID-19 and begging for help. Eighty-five-year-old Nobel Prize winner Ōmura in Japan, a legend in microbiology, promptly asked his research team to translate Kory’s paper into Japanese to be placed on his institute website. Thousands of social media fans were moved by Kory’s bravery and the big heart of a doctor who cared about his patients, hailing him as a knight fighting big pharma, big media, big politics, big everything. “Never give up, Pierre Kory!” implored a young woman in Japan. Overnight, the American doctor was a folk hero to great masses of people weary of death and lockdowns and hungry for things not forgotten—the hush of the theater, the clatter of seats in the classroom just before the teacher started, the wonder of human touch—and a prophet to doctors who saw the Hippocratic Oath subsumed by regulators, politicians, and journalists picking COVID-19 drugs if they worked for Wall Street or Washington, whether the doctor thought they worked for the patient or not. In South Africa, where use of Ivermectin was criminalized, civil rights activists hung posters with Kory’s data urging revolt, and a group of physicians won permission from the Ministry of Health in Zimbabwe on January 27, 2021, to treat COVID-19 with Ivermectin; case fatalities dropped in one month from seventy a day to two a day, “and our hospitals are virtually empty,” said Dr. Jackie Stone, who was subsequently taken in for questioning for her use of a controversial drug. In Phnom Penh, Cambodia, a doctor trained in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was using Kory’s data to persuade the Ministry of Health of Ivermectin’s efficacy and was making a personal appeal to the king. “Thank you for your amazing courage and love for humanity,” he wrote. “You’re a real doctor who is living up to the Hippocratic Oath. All doctors need to follow your example!!” In Bath, England, Dr. Tess Lawrie, a prominent independent medical researcher who evaluates the safety and efficacy of drugs for the WHO and the National Health Service to set international clinical practice guidelines, read all twenty-seven of the Ivermectin studies Kory cited. “The resulting evidence is consistent and

unequivocal,” she announced, and sent a rapid meta-analysis, an epidemiolocal statistical multi-study review considered the highest form of medical evidence, to the director of the NHS, members of parliament, and a video to Prime Minister Boris Johnson with “the good news… that we now have solid evidence of an effective treatment for COVID-19…” and Ivermectin should immediately “be adopted globally and systematically for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19.” Ignored by British leaders and media, Lawrie convened the day-long streaming BIRD conference—British Ivermectin Recommendation Development—with more than sixty researchers and doctors from the U.S., Canada, Mexico, England, Ireland, Belgium, Argentina, South Africa, Botswana, Nigeria, Australia, and Japan. They evaluated the drug using the full “evidence-to-decision framework” that is “the gold standard tool for developing clinical practice guidelines” used by the WHO, and reached the conclusion that Ivermectin should blanket the world. “Most of all you can trust me because I am also a medical doctor, first and foremost,” Lawrie told the prime minster, “with a moral duty to help people, to do no harm, and to save lives. Please may we start saving lives now.” She heard nothing back. In Charlottesville, Virginia, Dr. David Chesler, an internist/geriatrician for fortyfour years with hundreds of COVID-19 patients in six nursing homes, wrote to Dr. Fauci, telling him essentially that he had found the early treatment Fauci was urgently looking for. Dr. Chesler explained that facing the choice with his elderly COVID-19 patients to “either provide my patients with the standard of care, basically first aid, with Tylenol, oxygen and monitoring, until they became sick enough to be sent to the hospital, or to try something more proactive with the hope of the patients not becoming so ill and then losing their lives,” he had since successfully treated “over 200 high-risk COVID patients” with Ivermectin, many over 100 years old, with none dying or needing “heroic” oxygen support. Fauci never replied. Everywhere the problem was the same, Kory said. The WHO, NIH, and other public health agencies were suddenly recommending only COVID-19 therapies Pill continued from page 42

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proven by the “gold standard” of large randomized controlled trials of treatment and placebo groups, which were powerful but had several limiting flaws, including the fact that they took months to complete and cost ten to twenty million dollars that only big pharmaceutical companies could afford. They had thrown out all the other time-tested forms of clinical and scientific medical investigation still taught in all the medical schools, such as observational trials (which had eliminated widespread crib death), case histories, and anecdotes. They also restricted the use of essential off-label and generic drugs with blatant disinformation campaigns that reminded Kory of big tobacco’s efforts to hide the dangers of smoking. In effect, the public health authorities eliminated the full toolbox of essential scientific methods and drugs that doctors use every day, including the most effective early, prophylactic, and late-stage treatments for COVID-19, which were developed by frontline doctors, not pharmaceutical companies. Kory never tires of reminding critics that the modern Hippocratic Oath, the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki, makes it abundantly clear that all medical research is secondary to the doctor’s clinical judgement in the moment, whether the patient is dying of COVID-19 or giving birth. The doctor is morally compelled to use their best clinical judgement and the “best available evidence” in that instant, not tomorrow or next year when more data is published. As the WMA puts it: “The health of my patient will be my first consideration.” Clearly the medical establishment is now routinely violating that ancient oath, Kory says, and as a result he “feels estranged from most, but not all, of my colleagues.” In the new world of medicine, the COVID world, he says, “Only big randomized controlled trials by big pharma/ big academic medical centers are accepted by big journals, while others are rejected,” while only studies in big journals are accepted by big public health agencies for drug recommendations, and only drugs recommended by big public health agencies “escape media/social media censorship.” “This leaves you with a system where the only thing that’s considered to have sufficient evidence or proven efficacy 42

is essentially a big new pharmaceutical drug,” he adds. “If it doesn’t come from the mountaintop, it doesn’t exist,” Kory says. “The people on the ground, we cannot do any more science that’s considered credible. We’re discredited as controversial and as promoting unproven therapies and our Facebook groups are shut down, Twitter accounts are locked, YouTube videos are removed and demonetized. It’s really almost totalitarian what’s happening when we’re just well-meaning scientists trying to do the right thing by our patients.” As Kory left the Senate hearing room that morning in December after his Ivermectin testimony, his face was dark with disgust. The hearing was dead before it started. When Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin (with whom Kory decidedly shares no political sympathies) called the hearing on early COVID-19 treatments, The New York Times ran an advance story eviscerating it as a panel of anti-science kooks promoting “fringe theories,” a “forum for amplifying dubious theories and questionable treatments pushed by President Trump,” including hydroxychloroquine. The hearing was boycotted by all seven Democrats (who have received a total of $1.3 million in big pharma bucks from Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Gilead, and others), and four of the seven Republicans, including Utah’s Mitt Romney (more than $3 million received from big pharma), Ohio’s Rob Portman ($542,400), and Florida’s Rick Scott (more than $1 million in stock in Gilead Sciences, maker of Remdesivir). Michigan Senator Gary Peters, the Democratic chairman, walked out after reading an opening statement saying the hearing was “playing politics with public health.” Kory was outraged. “I want to register my offense at the ranking member’s opening statement,” he said. “I was discredited as a politician. I am a physician and a man of science. I’ve done nothing, nothing, but commit myself to scientific truth and the care of my patients.” But the next day the assault continued. “All the gods of science and medicine” as Marik calls them, descended to crush the little Nobel-Prize winning pill. The New York Times headlined, “A Senate hearing promoted unproven drugs and dubious claims about the coronavirus,” slamming Ivermectin as unproven, but

never mentioning Kory or his testimony. In subsequent days, the WHO guidelines committee, after promising a thorough review for months, quashed Ivermectin without a vote, as a lesser advising committee threw out all the strongest evidence first— including the WHO consultant’s own report—and “having thrown out most of the evidence,” Kory said, “they called the remaining few crumbs of very low certainty.” Ivermectin is the generic name for Merck’s Stromectol, which they developed in 1981. Though the drug went off patent in 1996, Merck still distributes millions of doses each year in Africa for free, with a statue honoring the drug and the great humanitarian eradication effort in its headquarters and one at the WHO in Geneva. But recently Merck issued a stern warning that seemed written by marketing, Kory says, “as it had no scientific data to support the conclusion,” that Ivermectin was suddenly dangerous. Another pharmaceutical company’s CEO privately noted that “People must think Merck knows what they’re talking about because it’s their drug,” but Merck has “tremendous disincentives” to say nice things about the generic pill, as it has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing an oral anti-viral COVID-19 treatment, rival to Ivermectin, that may be priced at $3,000 a dose. A news blackout by the world’s leading media came down on Ivermectin like an iron curtain. Reporters who trumpeted the COVID-19 terror in India and Brazil didn’t report that Ivermectin was crushing the P-1 variant in the Brazilian rain forest and killing COVID-19 and all variants in India. That Ivermectin was saving tens of thousands of lives in South America wasn’t news, but mocking the continent’s peasants for taking horse paste was. Journalists denied the world knowledge of the most effective life-saving therapies in the pandemic, Kory said, especially among the elderly, people of color, and the poor, while wringing their hands at the tragedy of their disparate rates of death. Three days after Kory’s testimony, an Associated Press “fact-check reporter” interviewed Kory “for twenty minutes in which I recounted all of the existing trials evidence (over fifteen randomized and multiple observational trials) all showing dramatic benefits of Ivermectin,” he said.

Then she wrote: “AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. There’s no evidence Ivermectin has been proven a safe or effective treatment against COVID-19.” Like many critics, she didn’t explore the Ivermectin data or evidence in any detail, but merely dismissed its “insufficient evidence,” quoting instead the lack of a recommendation by the NIH or WHO. To describe the real evidence in any detail would put the AP and public health agencies in the difficult position of explaining how the lives of thousands of poor people in developing countries don’t count in these matters. Not just in media but in social media, Ivermectin has inspired a strange new form of Western and pharmaceutical imperialism. On January 12, 2021, the Brazilian Ministry of Health tweeted to its 1.2 million followers not to wait with COVID-19 until it’s too late but “go to a Health Unit and request early treatment,” only to have Twitter take down the official public health pronouncement of the sovereign fifth largest nation in the world for “spreading misleading and potentially harmful information.” (Early treatment is code for Ivermectin.) On January 31, the Slovak Ministry of Health announced its decision on Facebook to allow use of Ivermectin, causing Facebook to take down that post and removed the entire page it was on, the Ivermectin for MDs Team, with 10,200 members from more than 100 countries. In Argentina, Professor and doctor Hector Carvallo, whose prophylactic studies are renowned by other researchers, says all his scientific documentation for Ivermectin is quickly scrubbed from the Internet. “I am afraid,” he wrote to Marik and his colleagues, “we have affected the most sensitive organ on humans: the wallet...” As Kory’s testimony was climbing toward nine million views, YouTube, owned by Google, erased his official Senate testimony, saying it endangered the community. Kory’s biggest voice was silenced. But Jan heard him. After a few minutes of watching the interview with Dr. Kory on New Year’s Day morning, she’d heard quite enough. Her fingers flew on a text to her daughter, Haley: “This is the drug Michael’s mother needs to be on…now!!!!...You need to take charge of Nonnis healing.” Haley showed the text to her husband. But Michael Smentkiewicz wasn’t interested. He was skeptical. A doctor selling a “miracle

drug” for COVID on the Internet sounded awfully fishy. “This channel is telling you, ‘You gotta take Ivermectin,’ but you got people like QAnon, conspiracists, telling you what to take,” he said. He and his sister returned to the hospital parking lot to pray, and floated a cluster of mylar balloons, including a pink heart, up to their mother’s window. But nothing was working. Finally, he watched the video, and thought Kory was “incredible,” with top credentials, “and his passion is crazy.” Within minutes, “I called the ICU and told the attending physician, ‘We want my mother to be on this medication.’” The doctor said no. Ivermectin wasn’t approved for COVID-19, and “we don’t experiment on our patients.” But Michael pushed harder. “I’m a bull,” he said. After several back and forths, a hospital administrator gave approval for one dose, 15 milligrams of Ivermectin. Less than twenty-four hours later, “Mom is off the ventilator.” The nurses were shocked. Michael was jubilant. The next day his mother was sitting in a chair talking to him on Zoom. But then Judy regressed. They moved her to a cardiac floor, her heart was racing, and “she was going downhill,” Michael says, and he asked the doctor for another dose of Ivermectin. This time the “no” from the doctor and administration was final. That day the family retained Buffalo lawyer Ralph Lorigo, who studied Kory’s video and the FLCCC website and sued the hospital to give their mother more Ivermectin. Judge Henry Nowak of the New York State Supreme Court agreed to hear the case on an emergency basis as “a matter of life and death.” He ruled that a woman was dying in the middle of a pandemic with no known treatment for COVID-19 and a safe, long-established drug had affected her “miraculous turnaround,” and ordered the Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital to immediately start Judith Smentkiewicz on four more doses of Ivermectin, per her family doctor’s prescription. The hospital refused to carry out the judge’s order. The hospital’s lawyer insisted on a hearing to make his case that no patient has the right to choose their own medicine. The debate ensued as Judy lay dying. “The world has gone mad,” Kory said. All over the world, people were fighting for their lives not only against the coronavirus but against their national public health societies, their

most respected hospitals and long-trusted doctors for the right to use the little generic pill that cracked COVID-19. Dr. Manny Espinoza was dying of COVID-19 in his Texas hospital when his wife, Dr. Erica Espinoza, asked the doctors to try Ivermectin as a last resort, and was refused. Erica hired a life-flight helicopter to take Manny to the Houston hospital of FLCCC co-founder Joseph Varon for the cheap little pill that in four days had her husband sitting up smiling and telling their children about the “miracle” that saved his life. “We see this every day,” Dr. Varon says. “They say it’s a miracle, I say it’s the science, but it’s the truth.” In Atlanta, Georgia, eighty-four-year-old Lou Gossett Jr., the Oscar-winning black star of An Officer and a Gentleman, gravely ill with COVID-19, checked out of a hospital and was three days from his lungs failing, doctors said, when his son connected him with an FLCCC doctor in Florida who gave him Ivermectin. Gossett quickly recovered and made a very short film for the FLCCC doctors that ends: “I’m very grateful to all of you for literally saving my life.” In Cushing, Oklahoma (pop. 7,826), Dr. Randy Grellner saw Kory’s testimony and started giving his patients Ivermectin, which he’d used safely for years for parasites, for COVID-19 because he was “tired of the heartache…tired of the misery…I’ve seen enough death and despair.” In a few weeks the overwhelmed clinic dropped from twenty-five new COVID-19 cases a day to two. “The first thing that surprised me was how fast was the recovery in seventyfive and eight-five-year-old people,” Dr. Grellner said. “I know there’s controversy. I have no political motivation. I don’t have any desire except to put husbands and wives back together. If you’re getting problems from an organization that you work for that says you can’t use it, I would question that organization. If we’re not doing what is best for the patient, then we need to find another occupation.” In Buffalo, after a forty-minute hearing on the fate of Judy Smentkiewicz, the lawyer for the Millard Fillmore hospital agreed that she could take Ivermectin if the family doctor delivered the prescription, and after a lot of hassles (including the hospital couriering Ivermectin from another hospital), “At eleven o’clock that night she was administered the second dose of Pill continued from page 44

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Ivermectin,” Lorigo says. She immediately started improving. With three more doses of Ivermectin, he said, “she’s off the cardiac floor, she’s back on the COVID floor, she’s cured of COVID, she’s released.” A week later, Natalie Kingdollar, whose sixty-five-year-old mother Glenna Dickinson was dying of COVID-19 on a ventilator in Rochester General Hospital— the doctors had exhausted all treatment options—read the Buffalo News story of Judy’s recovery, a life-saving flicker in the media blackout, and persuaded the ICU doctors to give her mother Ivermectin. Twelve hours later, after one 12 mg dose that her daughter picked up at Walgreens for eighty-three cents, Glenna’s vitals were much improved. She was “completely stable and doing much better,” Lorigo said. They reduced her ventilator 50 percent, no longer had to “flip” her from her back to her belly for better oxygen flow, and they moved her to a “step-down ICU.” Glenna’s doctor, who prescribed the Ivermectin, is Thomas Madejski, internist and chief of medicine at Medina Memorial Hospital, former president of the New York State medical society, a clinical instructor in medicine and pharmacy at the University of Buffalo, who sits on the Board of Trustees of the American Medical Association as an expert in geriatric medicine. As medical director of a nursing home he says he has successfully used Ivermectin to quell COVID-19 among elderly patients in three New York counties. Now Dr. Madejski, who has treated Glenna for fourteen years, prescribed a full course of Ivermectin to complete the treatment, and was denied. The ICU doctors and Rochester General refused to administer the medication because Ivermectin isn’t approved to treat COVID-19 by the FDA (the budget of which, as it happens, is 75 percent funded by big pharmaceutical companies). Another state supreme court judge, relying on the science provided by Pierre Kory and the FLCCC, ordered the hospital to dispense a handful more of the pills, per the doctor’s script, and Glenna got off the ventilator and is now home, cured of COVID-19. A few days before Judy was released from the hospital, the writer of this story was interviewing her son Michael about the happy news that she was headed home,

but he said the doctors were waiting a few more days because she was still a little “breathy.” Alarm bells went off in my mind after many interviews with Pierre Kory. I got word to Dr. Kory, who called Michael Smentkiewicz, who heard the doctor’s voice and became emotional. “It’s him, it’s the guy,” he said, holding his phone out for the family to hear. “Listen to his voice.” Kory walked the rehab center through the complicated step-down use of corticosteroids for elderly COVID-19 patients that is more attentive than the one-size-fits-all government protocols, which cause of lot of needless deaths when doctors treat on cruise control, Kory says. After a month in rehab, Judy went home, happy and healthy, to her children and her grandchildren. She was quite amazed to learn from her children that while she was lying unconscious and near death with COVID-19 she became a front-page story in The Buffalo News and a Joan of Arc figure in a new revolution, the grandmother who won the first legal fight in the battle of Ivermectin. It is an unprecedented civil rights uprising of doctors, nurses, scientists, Nobel-Prize winning biologists, billionaire health philanthropists, civil rights activists, and thousands of ordinary people across Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, Canada, and the United States fighting a global, big-data-driven medical establishment. They’re fighting for the lost little things, the little data—the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship, the survival of the Hippocratic Oath, and the most important of civil rights, the right to life. Kory sometimes despairs at the forces against him. “Our little Ivermectin has so many big enemies,” he says. “It’s David versus ten Goliaths.” But word is getting out. More than twenty countries representing some 20 percent of the Earth’s population use Ivermectin, many in their national protocol. Every day it seems Kory hears from someone like the Toronto doctor, a Bulgarian, who used Kory’s data to convince the health ministers in his home country to sign on. Kory talks every day to his growing base of 17,000 Twitter followers, and his peer-reviewed paper on Ivermectin recently exploded online as one of the most-discussed scholarly papers ever posted out of seventeen million tracked by Altmetric.

Every Wednesday night, Kory stars in an FLCCC webinar hosted by former CBS correspondent Betsy Ashton that is an Ivermectin 60 Minutes, with Kory talking to the public and answering their questions. Recently he reported that Mexico, the “light and model of the world,” solved an Indialike COVID-19 crisis last fall by testing and treating the population with Ivermectin, and now has some of the lowest case and death rates on the globe. He also posted an interview with a prominent surgeon and hospital owner in Visakhapatnam, India, who treats many COVID-19 patients in the tragic current “COVID tsunami,” and passed on the hopeful news that the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi has recently approved Ivermectin for early and home treatment, “a game changer for India and for the world,” the surgeon said. Ivermectin “saved India in 2020 after it got official permission in Uttar Pradesh in August followed by many other states,” he wrote, but starting in January with many political changes, it “has been getting BAD propaganda by big pharma and big scientists,” and many doctors stopped using it, collapsing prevention and home treatment and seeding the crisis of overloaded hospitals and many needless deaths. “ We BEG health agencies and mainstream media in other countries,” the Indian doctor wrote, “NOT to give BAD PROPAGANDA of Ivermectin. Ivermectin is saving India and Africa.” As he reported the news that night, Kory expressed disgust with “the physicianscientists in the ivory towers and public health agencies” who are “just not getting it.” It was up to doctors now to save lives as the scientists are “completely disconnected to how to treat this disease and what to do.” His mentor takes the longer view. “The saddest thing for us is we know this can make a difference and save lives,” Marik says, “and it seems like nobody really cares and wants to listen to us.” But “we feel we can’t be silenced, we just can’t be, because you know the truth will ultimately prevail.” “This is how science always progresses,” says Dr. Berkowitz, who takes hope from the recovery of Judy Smentkiewicz. “This is what being a doctor is,” he said. “It says in the Talmud, if you save one life, you save the entire world.”

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