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US vaccine-related deaths increasing rapidly

The latest weekly US VAERS update added a shocking 2,083 post-vaccination deaths

USA: Reported post-vaccination deaths, 1990 to 2021 (OpenVAERS)
Swiss Policy Research | July 11, 2021

The latest weekly US VAERS update added a shocking 2,083 post-vaccination deaths – by far the largest weekly increase to date – raising the total of reported post-vaccination deaths to 9,048. Not all of these 2,083 deaths occurred within a week, as there is a very significant reporting backlog.

In total, close to 1,000 post-vaccination miscarriages, more than 3,000 heart attacks, about 7,500 disabilities, close to 20,000 severe allergic reactions, and close to 1,000 cases of heart muscle inflammation in people under 25 have already been reported to VAERS.

A recent analysis by researchers at Queen Mary University in London found that even in senior citizens, about 85% of deaths reported to VAERS were definitively, likely or possibly caused by the vaccine. Moreover, due to significant under-reporting, the true number of vaccine-related deaths may already be significantly higher, possibly in the range of 10,000 to 50,000 deaths in the US alone.

Indeed, despite very few covid deaths, there continues to be unexplained excess all-cause mortality in all US age groups below the age of 75, with all-cause mortality having reached record levels in age groups below 45 since the beginning of the vaccination campaign. In people over 75, potential vaccine-related mortality may be masked by post-winter wave negative excess mortality.

There has been much discussion recently about an ultimately retracted paper that claimed covid vaccines kill 2 people for every 3 people they save. The two major points of criticism were that the paper underestimated vaccine protection by considering only a three-week period, and that the paper overestimated vaccine-related deaths by counting all reported post-vaccination deaths.

The first point is valid: vaccine protection should be estimated based on a near-100% population infection rate, not just a three-week window. But the second point is misguided: due to under-reporting, reported deaths are a lower bound, not an upper bound, of vaccine-related deaths.

Yet there is an even more important point to be considered: age-based risk-stratification. Below a certain age, covid-related mortality is so low that covid vaccines are bound to kill or severely injure more healthy people than they save. In some western European countries, this age threshold may in fact be as high as 60 years (for healthy people).

It has been argued that vaccination against covid may at least prevent “long covid” or multi-system inflammatory syndrome (MIS) in children and young adults; however, new reports from Israel and the US indicate that, to the contrary, covid vaccines may themselves cause MIS as well as “long covid”-like conditions, often lasting for months or possibly even longer.

Going forward, three covid vaccine-related potential risks should be kept in mind:

  1. In addition to immediate adverse events (such as strokes and heart attacks), are covid vaccines causing cardiovascular damage that will become apparent only later?
  2. In the face of new immune-escape coronavirus variants, such as the Indian and Peruvian variants (delta and lambda), how long will vaccine protection last, especially in senior citizens?
  3. Once new coronavirus variants achieve full immune escape, will the very high levels of vaccine-induced, non-neutralizing antibodies cause antibody-dependent disease enhancement (ADE)?

As a potential alternative to current covid vaccines, three options could be considered:

  1. Natural infection, combined with early treatment to avoid disease progression
  2. Medically supervised, low-dose oral live virus challenge (using least virulent strain)
  3. Fast-tracking possibly safer nasal/oral covid vaccines currently being developed

July 11, 2021 Posted by | Aletho News | | 5 Comments

Is the govt coming to your door to pressure you to take COVID shots? Here’s what you need to know

By Brian Shilhavy | Health Impact News | July 11, 2021

… This is what is called a “trial balloon.” The government is throwing this out there as a “trial” to see just how much the American public will tolerate in terms of government intervention.

Let them know that you will not tolerate it at all!

The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution protects you from unlawful searches and seizures in your home.

So here is my advice for what you should be prepared to do NOW, this week, if people come to your door to talk to you about the COVID-19 shots.

This advice is based on my years of experience in my working with attorneys all across the U.S. regarding the over-reach of local government agencies such as Child Protective Services who routinely come to people’s homes with the express purpose of looking for a reason to medically kidnap their children.

Most of those legal issues apply to this situation as well, regarding government agents coming to your home to discuss COVID-19 “vaccines.”

First, whether you are a renter or homeowner, the government has no right to enter your property without a warrant signed by a local judge. Absent that warrant, if you don’t want them there, they are trespassing.

And this includes any law enforcement agents. If they cannot produce a warrant signed by a judge, not only are they trespassing, if they are openly carrying a firearm (as most do), they are presenting a threat to you and your family.

Treat them as your enemy, not as your friend. Ask them to leave immediately.

Secondly, you are under no legal obligation to answer any questions – period! You have a 5th Amendment right to remain silent, and if that applies to criminals who are arrested based on an arrest warrant, how much more does that apply to you as a private citizen on your own property where you have not even been accused of a crime?

Do NOT answer any questions! Ask them to leave immediately. Put up as many “No Trespassing” signs as possible on your property, like the one I put as the featured image in this article.

No matter what they say to you, or ask you, the only words that should come out of your mouth should be: “You need to leave now. You are trespassing on private property.”

Third, RECORD EVERYTHING! The best way to record is to have a hidden camera pointed at your door, and then to also hold up a cell phone camera right in front of their face to let them know you are recording.

If they rip the cell phone out of your hand, hopefully you have a second camera somewhere also recording that. If you do, take that recording to your local District Attorney and ask them to press charges. Then send it to us also, and we will publish it to our international audience.

Expect FALSE FLAG events! To merely question the safety or efficacy of these injections is to be labeled a “domestic terrorist.” You can be sure that if these volunteers that are sent out door-to-door are not successful, that they will soon move on to the next stage of their plan, and at some point they are going to stage an event where some “domestic terrorists” allegedly decide to start killing people who are just “trying to do their jobs” and “provide a safe community” by “getting everyone vaccinated.”

Do your best to record everything that happens when unwelcome visitors decide to violate your 4th Amendment rights by coming on your property to discuss COVID-19 “vaccines” that you have no intention of discussing. … Full article

July 11, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | 4 Comments

FBI goes ‘American Stasi’ encouraging family members to rat each other out for ‘extremism’

RT | July 11, 2021

The FBI has asked Americans to examine their own family members for signs of “homegrown violent extremism,” and report them. The call for snitches comes as the FBI turns its surveillance powers on regular Americans.

“Family members and peers are often best positioned to witness signs of mobilization to violence,” read a tweet from the FBI on Sunday. To help prevent “homegrown violent extremism,” the agency advises Americans to visit its website, “to learn how to spot suspicious behaviors and report them to the FBI.”

The link provided by the FBI brings visitors to a 2019 document listing “mobilization indicators” that may suggest an individual is preparing to engage in terrorism – for example, “preparing and disseminating a martyrdom video,” “communicating directly with violent extremists online,” and “preparing to travel to fight with or support terrorist groups.”

The indicators and imagery used in the document suggest that its focus was on radical Islamic terrorism, but the FBI, along with the rest of the US security apparatus, has in recent months has turned its surveillance powers on white, conservative America.

Since the pro-Trump riot on Capitol Hill in January, FBI Director Christopher Wray has testified before Congress that the anti-government sentiment responsible for the affray has been “metastasizing” in the US for years, and that “the problem of domestic terrorism … is not going away anytime soon.” Former Assistant Director Frank Figliuzzi was more explicit last month when he called for the arrest of high-level Republicans to “really tackle terrorism, this time domestically.”

President Joe Biden has linked the Capitol mob to “white supremacism,” which he called “the most lethal terrorist threat to our homeland today” during his first speech to Congress in April. Against this supposed “threat,” the Justice Department has asked for new powers of prosecution, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has claimed that right-wingers and conservatives, “inspired by foreign terrorist groups” and “emboldened by the breach of the US Capitol Building,” are “plotting attacks against government facilities” and “threatening violence against critical infrastructure.”

In addition to their own powers, the DHS, FBI, and National Security Council also want to hire third-party ‘researchers’ to spy on Americans, recent reports have claimed.

Though the riot on Capitol Hill was broken up in a matter of hours and Congress returned to work the same evening, the FBI has left no stone unturned in finding and prosecuting hundreds of Trump supporters who took part. Out of more than 500 arrested already, some were turned in by their own family members and co-workers, with those who merely entered the building charged alongside militia members in what prosecutors are terming a “shock and awe” campaign of arrests and charges.

The agency’s latest call for snitches didn’t sit well with some pundits and commenters online, who drew uncomfortable parallels with the totalitarian dystopia of George Orwell’s ‘1984’, and with the real-life surveillance and repression of East Germany’s dreaded Stasi.

Amid the ongoing domestic terror crackdown, questions remain unanswered as to the FBI’s suspected foreknowledge of, and potential involvement in organizing, the Capitol Hill riot.

July 11, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | 2 Comments

Con Man Bernie Sanders’ Support for Health Destroying Flu/Covid Jabs

By Stephen Lendman | July 11, 2021

Once a con man, always one — how Sanders operated throughout his public life as Burlington, VT mayor, congressman and senator.

Time and again saying one thing, then going another way, he nearly always supports destructive policies pursued by undemocratic Dems.

Notably he backs public health destroying flu/covid policies while pretending to want Americans protected.

“Does anyone deny that we have a major healthcare crisis,” he asked?

True enough because of increasing unaffordability, leaving most US households uninsured or way-underinsured.

His remark also relates to all things flu/covid he supports — notably the Biden regime’s diabolical scheme to mass-jab maximum numbers of Americans with unapproved, experimental drugs designed to destroy health, not the other way around.

Falsely calling them “safe and effective (sic),” he urged Americans to “continue wearing masks (that don’t protect and risk respiratory harm) and engage in social distancing” that’s all about destruction of normal interactions and social control.

Claiming the above “is how we will beat this virus and end this terrible pandemic” ignores that protecting and preserving health requires ignoring what’s mandated and recommended at a time when a so-called “pandemic” was invented, not real.

Complicit with state-sponsored fear-mongering, Sanders defied reality by falsely claiming that a non-crisis “crisis we face from (flu/covid) is on the scale of a major war (sic).”

He urged continued use of respiratory system-destroying ventilators and need for “increase(d) healthcare capacity to handle a (nonexistent) surge in (flu/covid) cases” during months when they normally increase with no fear-mongering created mass hysteria until last year.

He also falsely claimed that the US “healthcare system does not have the doctors and nurses we need (sic). We are understaffed (sic),” adding:

“We need to mobilize medical residents (sic), retired medical professionals (sic), and other medical personnel to help us deal with this crisis (sic).”

No shortage of providers exists. No crisis.

Because over one-fourth of working-age Americans are unemployed, most others way underemployed as healthcare costs rise, an affordability crisis exists, not availability of care in the world’s richest country.

The Economic Collapse Blog explained the following:

“(T)he vast majority of the available (US) ‘jobs’ pay so little that most Americans don’t want them.”

It’s at a time of “skyrocketing” costs of housing, health insurance premiums, food and other essentials.

“The cost of living is rising far faster than (incomes so) an increasing number of Americans are not even able to afford the basics.”

“(B)uy(ing) enough food to eat is becoming a challenge for a lot of people.”

The above are real issues facing most US households, not a flu/covid crisis that does not exist.

Yet Sanders called for increased PCR testing that nearly always produces false results when positive.

He urged increased “production of critical supplies (sic) such as masks, ventilators, and protective equipment for health care workers (sic)” when none of the above is needed.

He wants Pentagon forces used to “build mobile hospitals and testing facilities, assist providers, reopen hospitals that have been shut down and expand our health care capacity in at-risk areas (sic).”

He called for “emergency funding to dramatically expand access to community health centers.”

His prescription for dealing with garden variety flu now called covid ignores reality like the vast majority of other US/Western politicians, bureaucrats, and their press agent media.

Separately, Biden regime propaganda falsely called flu/covid “a global challenge” — that doesn’t exist so US/Western dark forces invented it to pursue their diabolical mass-extermination campaign.

According to Biden’s double, the “US is exercising diplomatic leadership to mobilize an international response to (a nonexistent) crisis and (invented) health-related threats” ahead.

Interventionist Blinken added that the Biden regime is “leading the global response to (a nonexistent) pandemic (with) an arsenal of (toxic health-destroying drugs) for the world.”

Con man Sanders supports the Biden regime’s diabolical agenda.

It includes transforming nations worldwide into ruler-serf societies, along with mass-extermination of unwanted people everywhere.

Resisting tyranny is a universal right.

Now is the time to challenge a diabolical US/Western agenda no one should tolerate before a rubicon of no return is crossed.

July 11, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | 1 Comment

‘Nobody has died’: scandalous vaccine propaganda for NHS staff

By Niall McCrae | Unity News Network | July 8, 2021

Covid-19 vaccine propaganda is everywhere, and particularly shrill in the sanctified NHS. Reluctant care workers are given a chance to see the error of their thinking, through a teaching session attended with compliant colleagues. Take for example the webinar Vaccination Myth Busting Session for Care Staff, used for NHS and other health and social care staff in Hertfordshire.

The slides begin with results of an Ipsos MORI poll, which asked ‘how convincing are arguments for taking a coronavirus vaccine?’ Of the several items, ‘to protect other people from catching the coronavirus’ and ‘because it will reduce my risk of catching the coronavirus’ got 77% and 76% support respectively. This use of a public opinion poll is manipulative, enabling the educators to make a point without recourse to scientific evidence. In fact, the vaccines do not prevent infection or transmission. As Peter Doshi explained in the British Medical Journal, trials could only measure mild symptoms, because hospitalisations and deaths were too few for statistical significance.

Also scoring 77% was ‘because vaccines have been very successful against other diseases’. This may be true, but would you agree to take an experimental pill because drugs work for other diseases? Trust in medicine is being exploited. While 66% agreed with the statement ‘because I trust scientists and other medical experts if they say I should take it’, there was also 45% support for following the advice of pharmaceutical companies, and 39% on government recommendation. This is troublingly naïve.

The next slide is on the World Health Organisation’s steps in vaccine development. No mention is made of the need for long-term safety assessment in the trial stages, as would normally be required. Instead, this is left to post-marketing surveillance. Yet the danger of insufficient time for testing was shown by the thalidomide scandal.

The purpose of vaccines is herd immunity, a state that is only reached ‘when most people in a community are vaccinated against a disease’. Naturalistic herd immunity has been conveniently forgotten. According to the slides, ‘vaccines train your immune system using a harmless form of the virus’. Fact check: false. The mRNA type, described in the slides as ‘genetic vaccines’, instructs cells to produce spike proteins. The adenovirus vector type does not use SARS-CoV-2 either, as the virus has never been properly isolated.

‘Single dose is not single dose’ is the illogical title of the next slide. Although there is ‘high efficacy after first dose’, the second dose gives more lasting protection. However, there is clearly not much confidence in immunisation because the webinar instructs staff to ‘behave as if everyone you meet outside your home is infected and you are too’. The status of sick until proven healthy, apparently, persists for the double-jabbed.

Thus everyone should wear face coverings I guess that ‘2 layers min, preferably three’ means the thickness of cloth rather than the number of masks, although Tony Fauci was telling people earlier this year to wear two masks. As with the vaccines, masking is presented as part of a package. Amusingly, a block of Swiss cheese analogises the various interventions: all slices are riddled with holes, but no hole goes through the entire block. None of these are optional: ‘if you want to get out of lockdown, your only real option is compliance’.

The threatening tone continues with the assertion that unvaccinated people will cause new variants to arise, and ‘vaccine escape’. Reference is made to the ‘Green Book’, which makes almost no exceptions to the vaccine regime. Based on advice from the British School for Allergy and Clinical Immunology, anyone who had an anaphylactic shock after a previous jab should be given the Astra Zeneca vaccine rather than Pfizer, and should have half an hour of monitoring afterwards.

The slides were produced before the authorities gave the green light for jabbing pregnant women, but there is little caution: expectant mothers ‘should be reassured that the vaccine does not contain live SARS-CoV-2 virus, and therefore cannot cause COVID-19 infection in her or in her baby’. So that’s all right then. The impact on fertility cannot be known, but the webinar glibly states: ‘current guidance is that the vaccination is safe for women of childbearing age’.

Lastly, the session considers side effects. It is accepted that all drugs can cause adverse reactions in some people. However, the covid-19 vaccine is not a treatment but an experimental intervention on the healthy. Thus the risk-benefit ratio is different from a medicine used to treat illness. The teaching session describes the common side effects of ‘a painful arm, feeling tired, headache, general aches and mild flu-like symptoms’, which disappear over a few days.

Then comes a leap of faith: ‘these symptoms are a sign that your body is building immunity’. Such information may explain why people experiencing adverse reactions say ‘at least I know it’s working’. But the reality is that many vaccine recipients feel very poorly after the jab, as known to healthcare providers due to the high level of staff sickness.

It is unethical and against the principles of the Hippocratic Oath to tell people that adverse reactions are normal. But this seems to be the message of the vaccine regime. A Guardian article this week advised people who are suffering nasty side effects: ‘don’t think of this as a bad sign – it’s exactly what’s expected from an effective but imperfect jab’. In this Orwellian newspeak, harm is safe.

The most egregious economy of truth in this teaching session is on the most serious adverse reaction of all – death. By the time that the slides were produced (27th January), millions of Britons had been jabbed. But this bold claim is made:

‘Nobody has died following having the vaccine in the UK or anywhere else in the world’.

In January covid-19 mortality surged, a pattern seen in most other countries after vaccine rollout. The likely reason is weakened immunity for two or three weeks after the jab. In the frail elderly, recovery of the immune system takes longer, exposing them to infection in the winter peak. This correlation is not proven, but numerous care homes had a spate of covid deaths after all residents were jabbed.

The blood clotting problem was also well known, with several reports of people dying shortly after vaccination. Again, causation has not been fully determined (although belatedly the authorities have added cardiovascular risks to the vaccine marketing information). But why have a Yellow Card system if reported adverse reactions are simply ignored?

The producers and presenters of this misinformation should be held to account. As the ‘no jab, no job’ mandate looms, it is time for professional practitioners to speak out. Indeed, their code of conduct demands they do so.

July 11, 2021 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | 1 Comment

Scandal of the rushed rollout: Censored vaccine expert speaks out

By Sonia Elijah | The Conservative Woman | July 8, 2021

I HAD the pleasure of interviewing Dr Robert Malone, an industrial scientist and the authoritative voice on mRNA (messenger ribonucleic acid) technology since he invented it when he was a graduate student at the Salk Institute in 1988.

US-based Dr Malone is not a conspiracy theorist and he’s not an anti-vaxxer. He’s spent the past three decades building vaccines and vaccine technology.

He has more than 20 years of management and leadership experience in academia, pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, as well as in governmental and non-governmental organisations.

The fact that he is now being ‘ghosted’ for speaking about the adverse effects of the mRNA vaccines reflects the dark era of censorship that we’ve been experiencing for far too long.

Even my interview with him was pulled off YouTube in the space of just three hours. Fortunately, I posted it on alternative video-sharing platforms, such as Rumble and BitChute.

Here are some of the highlights he revealed in the interview. Firstly, Dr Malone stated: ‘In the Security and Exchange Commission filings for both Pfizer and Moderna, there’s explicit statements that acknowledge that these are gene therapy-based (vaccines) and the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) perceives them as such.’

He brilliantly explained the science behind the vaccines by using the metaphor of an industrial robot used to build cars. The RNA in this metaphor is the code that a hacker is inserting into the bit stream to make these robots (your cells) make something they would not have otherwise made. In this case, it’s the spike protein that’s recognised by the immune system triggering a response.

‘In a conventional vaccine you can precisely calculate how much protein goes into your shoulder because it’s fixed and predictable, but in the case of these genetic vaccines you can’t,’ he warned.

‘You can’t calculate how long it produces this protein and how much protein it makes and exactly what cells in your body the protein goes into. Conventional vaccines go around your cell, but for these gene therapy-based vaccines the target is your cell.’

When I asked whether he thought the UK (which was the first country in the world to approve the Pfizer vaccine on December 2, 2020) rushed through their approval of it, Dr Malone quickly responded: ‘I wouldn’t say maybe, I would say they did. You can’t take a process that normally takes a decade and push it down into nine months and not cut corners.’

He explained that regulatory agencies such as America’s FDA and Britain’s MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) have different safety check lists for vaccines and gene therapies. Typically, genotoxicity and reproductive toxicity studies are not done with vaccines, but are done with gene therapy products.

Dr Malone revealed that in the face of the crisis, apparently there was a global consensus with these regulatory agencies that they were going to suspend their gene therapy checklist, or if they were done, they were not done in a ‘vigorous’ way. He said this was the biggest mistake of the regulatory agencies.

Children are at very low risk of hospitalisation and death from Covid-19, Dr Malone confirmed. In their age group, the risks overwhelmingly outweigh the benefits from the vaccine.

The risks are the cardiotoxicity events (pericarditis and myocarditis) being recorded in the adverse event databases coming out of Israel, Norway and the Netherlands, to name but a few.

Given that the MHRA and FDA have approved the Pfizer vaccine for 12 to 15-year-olds and have been actively encouraging the use of it across multiple age groups, Dr Malone likened this application to the situation where ‘if you give a three-year-old a hammer, everything becomes a nail’.

He talked intently on bioethics and whether it’s ethical to encourage the young (including children) who are currently healthy to take on the responsibility of being exposed to the risks associated with the vaccines in order to protect the vulnerable (the elderly and those with a compromised immune status).

For him, the answer was a categorical, no – it’s not ethical. When I asked him why there’s such a push to get children vaccinated, he answered: ‘A cynic might mention the financial compensation at stake.’

He raised more alarm bells by suggesting there’s bias in the data stating there’s no effect of the vaccine on pregnant women, causing spontaneous abortion. In fact, many of the women in those studies were in the third trimester, where the risk of miscarriage is much lower.

Dr Malone said if you took out the third trimester data and reanalysed it, just looking at those women in the first and second trimester, then the risk of spontaneous abortion jumps to above 50 per cent.

The topic of censorship was raised, as at the time of the interview the doctor had been ‘erased’ from LinkedIn and his full interview with Brett Weinstein and Steve Kirsch had been removed from YouTube.

One of the reasons LinkedIn gave him was because he mentioned that a chairman on the board at Reuters had links to Pfizer.

Dr Malone stressed that Reuters is a member of the Trusted News Initiative, led by the BBC, which was first formed to combat the spread of misinformation during the US presidential election, but now its attention is on combating vaccine misinformation.

Its other members include AFP, CBC/Radio-Canada, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Facebook, the Financial Times, First Draft, Google/YouTube, The Hindu, Microsoft , Twitter, and the Wall Street Journal.  

Dr Malone warned that ‘the only version of scientific truth that’s allowed to be discussed are those truths endorsed by large bureaucratic public health agencies’. He was very concerned about ‘this integration between Big Tech, government and biopharma’.

On a final note, he raised the insidious question of whether ‘there is a group of people that could be exploiting this window for their own purposes, whether it’s financial, political or power.’ That, he said, would be ‘a huge travesty’.

Here is a link to my full interview with Dr Malone.

July 11, 2021 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | | 1 Comment

Pro-lockdown polling is not as clear as you might think

Does one-fifth of the country really support nighttime curfews?

Covid lockdowns may be coming to an end, but what about climate lockdowns?
By Amy Jones | Unherd | July 9, 2021

A new poll on the public’s views of Covid restrictions has been doing the rounds this week, and the results may come as a shock to many. They find that, of the people surveyed, 40% wished to continue with masks permanently, 26% were in favour of shutting casinos and clubs forever, and an astonishing 19% were in favour of a permanent 10pm curfew. Has Britain become a nation of authoritarians?

We’ve seen results like this before. Over the last 16 months, poll after poll has shown high levels of public approval for lockdowns and restrictions, which feels hard to square with the scenes of people emphatically celebrating the England victory on the streets this week.

That may be because, as a new study shows, the polling data is not all that it seems. Examining public attitudes towards restrictions, researchers at the Royal Society asked a sample of the public about their opinions on lockdown, twice over a 6 month period, first in June 2020, then again in December. Beyond standard questions about approval for lockdown and restrictions, they dug a little deeper, and asked participants what their views were on topics such as the side effects and trade-offs of restrictions, how they judged the threat of covid, and whether they felt this threat was mostly an individual threat, or a societal threat.

As anticipated, participants were in favour of lockdowns and almost all restrictions suggested. But when they were asked about their feelings about side effects (e.g. depressionobesity and abuse) of these policies, the picture changed. In fact, a majority of people appreciated that there were significant side effects and were generally unsure if the trade-offs were worthwhile. Essentially, a picture of ambivalence emerged.

There were some other interesting findings: public assessment of the risk of Covid was generally not related to individual threat, but to the threat to society as a whole. The fact that lockdown was considered necessary by the Government itself increased perception of the threat Covid posed to society. This in turn fed into public approval of lockdowns, essentially making it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The researchers also found that this applied to support for restrictions. Due to the “apparent moralisation” (just this week, a WHO member accused the Government of “moral emptiness” for loosening restrictions) of the issue, there was more support for tighter measures. This then fed into participants’ responses, who in wishing to give socially acceptable answers, voiced support for restrictions. 

It would therefore seem that public attitudes towards restrictions are far more complex than the headlines and polls suggest. Public feelings on restrictions are nuanced, and multifaceted — as one would expect, given the benefits, risks and huge trade-offs. Distilling complex issues into soundbites and simple figures only muddies the water further. So next time you see a poll claiming that nearly one-fifth of the population supports a permanent curfew, treat it with a heavy dose of scepticism. Journalists and politicians, that applies to you too.

Amy Jones is an anonymous doctor working in the NHS, who has a background in Philosophy & Bioethics.

July 11, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

VARIANT FACTORIES: THE NEXT PHASE IS NOW UNFOLDING

July 11, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | 1 Comment