LOIMOS – PROPHETIC PESTILENCE
September 22, 2004
http://www.tribul ation
period.com/
An article from the Australian Sidney Morning Herald titled, “Merck halts testing of AIDS Vaccine,” follows one of our old Archive Updates.
This article which follows our year 2000 Archive Prophecy Update 19 is of some importance to me, I suppose because of vanity. When I began doing the lecture series “A Geological Exposition of the Second Coming of Christ” in 1978, I had no idea that it was going to be presented in all the places covered on our Home Web Page. For those of you who have attended the lecture series, I am sure you will remember that from 1981 onwards I made the following statement hundreds of times during the lecture series: “I do not believe they will ever find a vaccination or cure for HIV because it is a prophetic pestilence, and if I am wrong, when they finally do discover one or the other, or both, it will be already be too late!”
ARCHIVE PROPHECY UPDATE NUMBER 19
ISSUED INITIALLY IN LATE 2000
Matthew 24:7,8 – For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places. [8] All these are the beginning of sorrows.
The word “sorrows” is “odin,” which means the type of pain pattern associated with a woman’s birth pains. “Pestilence” is “loimos,” which means “any deadly infectious disorder.”
But what about Matthew’s “pestilence” – Is it following the pattern of a woman’s birth travail for the first time since Jesus prophesied it would? Absolutely! The basic root meaning of the word “loimos,” translated “pestilence,” is simply “any deadly infectious disorder.” Many plagues have passed through mankind since the fall, but none have generated a massive epidemic that was continuously accelerating over a long period of time. These “loimos” have never been able to follow the pattern of a woman’s birth pains for very long on a worldwide basis. Cholera, small pox, typhoid, bubonic plague, and so on, have appeared in short spurts like false labor, but none has ever maintained a persistent, ever increasing, epidemic characteristic with seemingly no end. But now, for the first time, we have a “loimos,” a deadly infectious disorder, that has portrayed these characteristics from its inception. The HIV virus is the first to perfectly match the pattern of a woman’s birth pangs, and it will continue to do so until the travail of the woman Israel ends, and the Son she rejected arrives.
HIV is a virus that has swept across the globe like wildfire. HIV cases worldwide increased from a trace in 1980 to more than 5 million in 1985, to more than 10 million in 1990, to more than 20 million in 1995, and to a whopping 35 million in 2000.
AIDS, the dreadful blossom of HIV, was first reported in a British sailor, who died in England in 1959.
HIV has hardest hit Africa up to this point, but it is poised to spread into Asia and the former Soviet Union as an ever-increasing storm. And, in truth, medical researchers seem no closer to fining a cure than they were twenty years ago.
Are there other “loimos” infections that have also started to demonstrate the patterns of a woman’s birth pangs? Yes! The World Health Organization (WHO) fears that tuberculosis may kill 30 million worldwide during the next decade. The emergence of drug-resistant strains, and the spread of HIV have both hampered efforts by health agencies to slow
the renewed spread of the consumptive illness.
Another sort of “loimos” is malaria, which is on the rise around the world, and once curative treatments are losing their effect.
It is a pestilence of global dimensions, and new strains are evolving that scientists fear will be untreatable.
But what about all the microbes generating all this pestilence, this “loimos,” these deadly infectious disorders, what are they doing, how are they behaving? Are they doing something that will make the pestilences continue to act like a woman’s birth pangs through the tribulation period? Yes! A leading national magazine cover, back in the last century, carried the bold print title: “REVENGE OF THE KILLER MICROBES – ARE WE LOSING THE WAR AGAINST INFECTIOUS DISEASES?” Tuft’s Levy answered the question in Newsweek Magazine by stating: “The rise of drug-resistant germs is unparalleled in recorded biologic history.” Because of this contributing factor, pestilence will become more and more widespread in its acceleration until the second advent of Christ.
Begin Australian Sidney Morning Herald
smh.com.au
Merck halts testing of AIDS vaccine
September 22, 2007 – 6:34AM
In a disappointing setback, a promising experimental AIDS vaccine failed to work in a large international test involving countries including Australia, causing the developer to halt the study.
Merck & Co said that it is ending enrolment and vaccination of volunteers in the study, which was partly funded by the National Institutes of Health.
It was a high-profile failure in the daunting quest to develop a vaccine to prevent AIDS.
Merck’s vaccine was the farthest along, considered the most promising and was closely watched by experts in the field.
Officials at the company, based in Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, said 24 of 741 volunteers who got the vaccine in one segment of the experiment later became infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. In a comparison group of volunteers who got dummy shots, 21 of 762 participants also became infected.
“It’s very disappointing news,” said Keith Gottesdiener, head of Merck’s clinical infectious disease and vaccine research group. “A major effort to develop a vaccine for HIV really did not deliver on the promise.”
Michael Zwick, an HIV researcher at Scripps Research Institute, said it is too soon to know if other vaccines using the same strategy would also fail.
“It’s par for the course in the HIV field,” he said of the Merck result.
The volunteers in the experiment were all free of HIV at the start. But they were at high risk for getting the virus: Most were homosexual men or female sex workers. They were all repeatedly counselled about how to reduce their risk of HIV infections, including use of condoms, according to Merck.
In a statement, the NIH said a data safety monitoring board, reviewing interim results, found the vaccine did not prevent HIV infection. Nor did it limit severity of the disease “in those who become infected with HIV as a result of their own behaviours that exposed them to the virus” – another goal of the study.
Merck’s was the first major test of a new strategy to prevent HIV infection. The first wave of attempts to develop a vaccine tried to stimulate antibodies against the virus, but that hasn’t worked so far.
The new effort – an approach that Gottesdiener said is being tried in most other current research – is aimed at making the body produce more of a crucial immune cell called killer T cells. The goal is to simultaneously “train” those cells, like an army, to quickly recognise and destroy the AIDS virus when it enters cells in the bloodstream.
Dr Anthony Fauci, head of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said other vaccines are in line for testing that use a similar strategy but with important differences. One developed by the NIH – containing the same three genes as the Merck vaccine, plus 3 versions of another gene – is set in January to enter the same large, “proof of concept” testing stage as the Merck vaccine, Fauci said.
Zwick said some researchers are still working on vaccines to neutralise the AIDS virus. He thinks ultimately what is needed is one that combines that approach with a way to stimulate and train killer T cells.
Merck and the HIV Vaccine Trials Network, an international collaboration of researchers and institutions funded by the NIH, co-sponsored the study. The experiment, called STEP, began in December 2004 and had enrolled 3,000 volunteers in Australia, Brazil, Canada, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, Peru, Puerto Rico and the United States.
The results involved volunteers who researchers thought would benefit most because they had never been exposed to
the particular cold virus used in the vacc
ine.
Wall Street, on a generally upbeat day, showed little reaction to the news, with Merck shares rising 44 US cents to $US51.82 ($A60.22).
Analyst Steve Brozak of WBB Securities said the failure will not hurt Merck’s bottom line in the short term. But he said a vaccine is the only financially feasible way to fight the AIDS epidemic in poor countries and that the company that comes up with the first successful shot would have “a licence to print money”.
The Merck vaccine, known only as V520, was also being tested in a similar study in South Africa and in two smaller studies, which also were halted.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner.
We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more detailed information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml.
You may use material originated by this site. However, if you wish to use any quoted copyrighted material from this site, which did not originate at this site, for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner from which we extracted it.