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The Latest Paper From Neil Ferguson et al. Defending the Lockdown Policy is Out of Date, Inaccurate and Misleading

By Mike Hearn • The Daily Sceptic • August 24, 2021

Neil Ferguson’s team at Imperial College London (ICL) has released a new paper, published in Nature, claiming that if Sweden had adopted U.K. or Danish lockdown policies its Covid mortality would have halved. Although we have reviewed many epidemiological papers on this site, and especially from this particular team, let us go unto the breach once more and see what we find. The primary author on this new paper is Swapnil Mishra.

The paper’s first sentence is this:

The U.K. and Sweden have among the worst per-capita Covid mortality in Europe.

No citation is provided for this claim. The paper was submitted to Nature on March 31st, 2021. If we review a map of cumulative deaths per million on the received date then this opening statement looks very odd indeed:

Sweden (with a cumulative total of 1,333 deaths/million) is by no means “among the worst in Europe” and indeed many European countries have higher totals. This is easier to see using a graph of cumulative results:

But that was in March, when the paper was submitted. We’re reviewing it in August because that’s when it was published. Over the duration of the journal’s review period this statement – already wrong at the start – became progressively more and more incorrect:

As always, we must note that these ‘death’ graphs can be heavily affected by testing levels, because Covid deaths are defined as any death within 28 days of a positive test. The U.K. tests much more than Sweden does. But putting that to one side, Sweden by now has significantly better results than the rest of the E.U. What’s going on here? A likely explanation is that although the paper was submitted in March it was actually written some time last year, probably starting around the end of the summer and finishing up in August. There then followed a strange many month gap before they submitted it, and then many more months were added by the glacial peer review process journals use. We can see evidence of this timeline in the abstract, where they say:

We use two approaches to evaluate counterfactuals which transpose the transmission profile from one country onto another, in each country’s first wave from March 13th (when stringent interventions began) until July 1st, 2020.

More evidence comes from the upload dates on the released code, which is from 10 months ago. In other words, Nature is publishing a paper about the fast-moving coronavirus situation that builds its entire case on obsolete data more than a year old, without explicitly noting that anywhere. In July 2020, Sweden and the U.K. did indeed have worse results than the rest of the E.U. However as we now know, this meant nothing and a year on the data looked very different.

Why did ICL wait so long before submitting this paper to Nature? No obvious explanation occurs. And why didn’t anyone notice that the claims were no longer true? Not for the first time, it appears nobody can actually be reading these papers adversarially before publication. Time and again we see that at major scientific journals the lights are on, but nobody’s home.

Seeing this made me wonder if they were once more engaging in a favourite trick of this team, by using Verity et al.‘s obsolete infection:fatality ratio estimates from January 2020. And indeed they are:

The idea that 1% of all SARS-CoV-2 infections would lead to death was later disputed as being ~4x too high by a meta-study of seroprevalence data published by the WHO. This newer estimate was based on far larger sample sizes, and serosurveys give an ability to detect people who recently had mild disease without getting tested or reporting it at the time. It’s thus a much more scientifically robust method of IFR estimation than Verity’s paper, which being written very early on had to rely on media reports and questionably reliable information coming out of China. As the authors discuss in the supplementary material, using a lower IFR (they try 0.5) means that the U.K.’s predicted mortality from adopting the Swedish strategy drops significantly due to the changed impact of herd immunity.

Who is responsible for this situation? Nature appears to be knowingly publishing a paper on Covid that makes claims in the present tense, but which is in reality so out of date that the very first sentence is factually false. This is not merely useless but actively damaging because non-academic readers (i.e., politicians and public health officials) will reasonably assume that claims published by scientists about Covid in August 2021 were actually written in August and have some relevance to the current situation. Nowhere is it explicitly stated at what time the analysis was believed to be accurate: it must instead be inferred from the choice of datasets and audit trails left on the source code hosting site they use.

Overall approach

Moving on. What does the model actually do?

The core concept is to try and calculate the changing infectiousness of SARS-CoV-2 for each of the U.K., Sweden and Denmark over time, then ‘graft’ the generated timeseries for R(t) onto the other countries. As is typical for this team, the authors assume that changes in Rt are driven only by government interventions or voluntary behavioural changes, and thus by transposing Rt onto other countries they claim to be calculating what would have happened if different countries had adopted each other’s policies. They try two different approaches to this, an ‘absolute’ and a ‘relative’ approach.

There are many problems with this methodology.

The study of only the U.K., Sweden and Denmark has no scientific basis. Why Denmark and not, say, France? This selection is very obviously politically motivated. In fact, the entire paper is basically a policy paper designed to influence politicians, not answer any question about viruses that a real scientist might ask.

With the benefit of 2021 hindsight we can argue persuasively that lockdowns had no real impact on Covid. The most recent and effective demonstration of that was the U.K.’s ‘Freedom Day’ in which cases dropped off a cliff just days after restrictions were relaxed, in defiance of the warnings of “international health leaders” that this would be “foolish” and “unethical”, a “threat to the world”, etc. There have been many other such events and analyses of global datasets show no correlation between lockdowns and health outcomes. Thus their underlying assumption that social policy is responsible for different outcomes is wrong. In fact, although they are well aware that there must be many factors influencing mortality outcomes, they explicitly disregard all of them: “While we cannot fully encompass the myriad of differences between each country, our analysis is nonetheless informative on best practice for control of future waves of the Covid pandemic.”

Despite asserting that their analysis can tell lawmakers what to do in future epidemics, they later admit that “our counterfactual scenarios should be interpreted as a exchange of both population behaviour and government policy between donor and recipient countries“. This is important for them to admit because they tried to explain why Covid has varying infectiousness in different countries by reference to “cultural differences“, which they boil down to a single statistic about the proportion of single person households in each country. But this is illogical nonsense. Even if we (wrongly) assume that all differences in observed outcomes are to do with policy and culture, governments cannot magically make the U.K. population become Danish or vice-versa. Any analysis that assumes this and claims to be “informative on best practice” is wrong and should have been dropped during peer review.

The paper has another difficulty with being “informative“. Although the authors propose two different approaches to try and answer the same underlying question, the two approaches give totally different answers. For example: “If Denmark followed U.K. policies, our relative approach estimates that mortality would not have been markedly different, although our absolute approach implies that mortality would have been more than twice that observed.” Their calculations aren’t even consistent with each other, yet the paper provides no specific recommendation on which approach is supposed to yield the best answer.

Other problems include an inability to actually calculate Rt from death data (“the high variance of this distribution leads to high uncertainty in Rt estimates“), even though their entire analysis is based on the presumed integrity of that calculation, and an implausibly high sensitivity to the exact starting date of policy changes (“a three-day difference in the introduction of measures can lead to twofold differences in mortality“). The strength of this connection in their model is absurd and would appear to be strongly motivated by ICL’s attempted rewriting of history to one of: “If only the Government had listened to us sooner everything would have been far better.”

Conclusion

Given the history of this department, it’s no surprise that ICL is still churning out delusional and misleading epidemiology papers. They will continue doing so for as long as they’re funded. Analysing each and every one is a futile effort due to the sheer scale at which academia operates (e.g. this paper alone has 19 authors). But we can nonetheless learn some more about bad science by reading them. This paper shows all the usual hallmarks of an academic sector that’s gone off the rails:

  • A grotesque level of data cherry picking.
  • A publishing process so slow that the claims are entirely wrong on the date of publication, and wrong from literally the first sentence.
  • A delusional belief that their work is “informative” to policy makers, despite implicitly arguing that entire societies can be transplanted from one country to another.

Who is ultimately responsible for stopping this? It must be the funders, who for this paper include:

  • The National Institute for Health Research
  • The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
  • The U.K. Medical Research Council
  • Community Jameel (a Saudi family foundation)
  • Microsoft, who donated free compute time on Azure
  • And finally, universities and other institutions who subscribe to Nature despite its history of publishing misleading papers

The theme here is that none of these organisations is paying close attention to what’s actually being written, apparently including the journals and peer reviewers. For funders, giving away money is not the means but the end. Until research is funded by people who actually care about the utility of the results our society will continue to be flooded with highly evolved scientism, of which the output of the ICL Epidemiology Department is a textbook example.

Mike Hearn is a former Google software engineer. You can read his blog here.

August 27, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Dorothy versus Hassan

By Taxi | Plato’s Guns | August 27, 2021

The US ambassador to Lebanon, Dorothy Shea, thinks she’s smarter than Hassan Nasrallah.

Yet, evidence shows that since Trump appointed her as ambassador to Lebanon back in February 2020, every dastardly trap she has placed before Mr. Nasrallah and his Hezbollah resistance group has failed. 

Proof of this failure is that Hezbollah keeps growing stronger and stronger, untouched by all external or internal forces hellbent on destroying the Lebanese resistance group.  Failed simply because Dorothy is not as smart as she thinks she is.  Most certainly, she is not as intelligent as the nifty leader of Hezbollah.

Having spent some three years working as Deputy Principal Officer at the US Consulate General in Jerusalem immediately prior to her post in Beirut, Dorothy no doubt continues to have a direct hotline to the Israeli Prime Minister’s office, if not to his direct cell phone; and no doubt, every morning, her first official word from Beirut is ‘shalom’.

Dorothy does not behave like a diplomat.  Instead, she behaves like an eye-patched leader of a sketchy militia: laying aside all diplomatic decorum and behaviorism and charging forth into every single aspect of Lebanese social, economic and political life, with the blatant intent of widening existing societal fissures in Lebanon, as well as adding new ones: aiming for a sectarian war that would cause the wholesale mass murder of innocents.  One could say that she behaves as the Jews do in DC.  A Puss in Boots, but utterly charmless and physically unattractive.  Puss in Boots with mouth bigger than boots.  So much so that last year, a Lebanese judge banned Lebanese media from interviewing Dorothy for her atrocious and blatant attempts at creating sectarian warfare in Lebanon.  Needless to say, Dorothy the ‘ambassador’ gave the proverbial middle finger to this native judge while hiding behind the skirts of her diplomatic immunity.  She continues to pollute Lebanese media and its political landscape with daily feces propelled out of all her orifices.  Yes, she literally defecates on Lebanon every day, while feigning love and affection for the Lebanese people.  Because the Lebanese resistance group, Hezbollah, defeated Israel twice already on the battlefield, Dorothy’s instruction since taking the ambassadorship has been to starve the Lebanese population as punishment for these victories.  Tel Aviv must love her for her Zionist activism and zeal.  The Mossad must be sending her monthly boxes of Cuban cigars.

And I’ll remind American taxpayers here that their hard-earned taxes are being spent on starving populations in the middle east, when bombing them to smithereens is not feasible.  Starving millions of people who have done absolutely no harm to the American people.  I’ll remind taxpayers that they are paying Dorothy’s wages while she is spreading anti-Americanism with her bolshie, toxic behaviorism overseas.  I’ll remind them that since 2005, no less than $30 billion have been spent on destroying the Lebanon as a means of demoting Hezbollah – all for the benefit of Israel and Israel alone.  And although Lebanon’s society is currently teetering on total collapse due to Dorothy’s malicious and malignant schemes, yet Hezbollah itself appears untouched by this exuberant, negative expenditure.  And I will add here that Lebanon has suffered from corrupt governments for some thirty years, yet all this while, the Lebanese collective enjoyed a decent lifestyle and were never in need.  They became needy when Dorothy came to town.

Perhaps when she lived in Israel, Dorothy got everything she wanted.  But in Lebanon, what Dorothy wants, Dorothy doesn’t get.  Hassan has insured this.  Time and time again, he has outsmarted all her plans to create civil war in Lebanon.  All straight and curve-balls that Dorothy has daily thrown at Hassan have missed and landed either way off mark, or, unfortunately, on innocent, civilian bystanders.

Let us be clear here that the traditional role of an ambassador is to work the trade and Intel files, as well as to assist expats in a variety of bureaucratic and legal matters.  It is never the job of a diplomat to act politically or to make inciteful, political statements concerning the host nation.  Never!  It is abnormal behavior for a diplomat to be an in-your-face politico whose name and incendiary words are headlines in local media on a daily basis.  Yet, Dorothy Shea swans about the Lebanon like a privileged colonialist: doing exactly that and doing it with shameless gusto.

She is proud that she has turbo-charged the destruction of Lebanon.  But she is very angry that the Hezbollah remains untouched.  Livid that Hassan remains leagues ahead of her diabolical plans.  How dare Hassan challenge her, the mighty Queen Sheba herself?!  She Who Must Be Obeyed, must be obeyed or else!

Yet, she is not obeyed by Hassan.  Currently, the genocidal-minded Dorothy is reeling from the latest punch in the teeth that Hassan metaphorically gave her last week, when he defied US sanctions on Lebanon and announced that Iranian fuel ships are now headed to fuel-starved Lebanon: a miserable and existential shortage that Dorothy herself had engineered for the Lebanese people through her incessant, corrupt interference in absolutely all internal Lebanese affairs bar none.  (She has even interfered in local, district elections, personally rejecting and approving candidates!).  Her destructive meddling is compounded by the Caesar Act sanctions that her chowderhead boss, Trump, had imposed on the Lebanon at the behest of Tel Aviv.  Because Israelis dare not kill Lebanese people with their missiles for fear of an equal Hezbollah retaliation, starving the Lebanese people en mass was to be their path to mass murder of said Lebanese; and thus Dorothy has been assigned the task of insuring that all trade and energy doors were closed to the Lebanese, and all paths to a much-needed new government blocked and blocked some more, ad infinitum.  Dorothy has forbidden the Lebanon from trading with any country in the world, and simultaneously forbidden friendly nations from delivering any aid to Lebanon’s starving population.  She has appeared more than happy this past year and a half to just watch the very fabric of Lebanon disintegrate under her  ‘ambassadorship’ – doing absolutely nothing to help the long-suffering, collective Lebanese people whatsoever.  Au contraire, the more Lebanon’s system broke down, the more the people suffered, and the more Dorothy jumped with joy and stirred the sectarian embers further.

It appears that not only are Hezbollah and the Lebanese population as a whole a target for destruction by Dorothy, but so is the Lebanese government itself.  She does not even want a government for the Lebanon to exist.  She wants for Lebanon what Israel wants: wiping Lebanon and its flag right off the map and turning it into many-flagged, sectarian enclaves and warring Bantustans instead.  Simply, everyone and everything Lebanese is her target for destruction.

Of course, Dorothy gets much help from powerful Lebanese persons and political entities who are opposed to Hezbollah.  Fortunately for the Lebanon, these people do not represent the majority of the Lebanese.  Known Lebanese members of Dorothy’s team are handsomely paid in mega dollars to destroy their own country, just so that they can boost their Swiss bank accounts and augment their seats of power by getting rid of the most popular party in the Lebanon: the Hezbollah.  These unsavory, treasonous Lebanese are ideologically aligned with fascism and predatory globalism, and they are also known for being supporters of the Israeli enemy and its religio-colonialist project in the Levant.  Their names and professional titles are known all over the Lebanon, and they are as follows:

  • Riyad Salame is a Maronite Christian who heads the Lebanese Central Bank (Banque Du Liban).  He is the very man who colluded with Dorothy to collapse the local Lebanese currency in order to initiate the ‘starvation plan’ of his own people.  He is also behind the financial pyramid scheme that suddenly, and by his design, collapsed a year ago.  He is also behind the ‘Capital Control’ system that has been imposed on all bank account holders since the collapse of the Lebanese Lira.  This system limits monthly withdrawals of all account holders, be they rich or poor, to a pitiful $400 per month: thus consigning both rich and poor to the same poverty pot.  This system is currently holding hostage all of the people’s earnings and life-savings.  Salame continues to shamelessly collude with the haters of Lebanon, while hiding some twenty billion dollars that suddenly went missing out of the country a year and a half ago.  He claims no knowledge of where this vast amount went.  He has not been held accountable by Lebanese law, nor has he lost his highest banking office in the nation, all because he has Dorothy’s full political protection.
  • Samir Gaegae, is a Maronite Christian who is a convicted war criminal who colluded with Israel during its 18 years of occupation of Lebanon back in the ’80’s and 90’s, causing thus the torture, the disappearance, and the mass murder of tens of thousands of Lebanese civilians. And Ironically, it was Hezbollah’s hands, after the eviction of Israeli forces from Lebanon, who worked for his clemency, thus sparing him an execution.  The ingrate Gaegae is now also best friends with both Saudi Arabia and Israel: tasked by them too to destroy Hezbollah, even at the cost of destroying Lebanon itself.
  • Patriarch Bechara Boutros al-Rah, who holds the highest seat in the Lebanese Maronite church, is also known for regularly inciting sectarianism during his speeches and sermons.  He became infamous for breaking a Lebanese law that forbids the cooperation or promotion of the Israeli enemy when he illegally visited Israel several years ago with the excuse of “I want to pray in Jerusalem.”  No doubt he dined at Jewish Masonic Lodges there too.  He adamantly refuses to separate ‘church from state’.  He is a regular visitor to the US embassy in Beirut and all his political statements read like memos issued by Tel Aviv.  He supports normalization with Israel that continues to occupy the Lebanese Shebaa Farms.  For a religious Christian leader, he appears to devote his time to spreading the message of the Synagogue of Satan instead of the message of Jesus.
  • NGO’s. The Lebanese population is some 4.6 million natives currently residing in Lebanon, yet Lebanon has over an astounding 10.000 NGO groups, with 92% of them being funded by foreign governments and other dubious Western and oil-Arab institutions.  These shady NGOs are tasked with ‘inflaming’ the masses and creating a Color Revolution in the Lebanon.  They have proved that they can successfully gather the protesting masses with matching banners and baseball hats, but they have failed to achieve their anarchic objective after several attempts.  They are well-paid agents of chaos who swarm the Lebanon like biblical locust: receiving all their instruction from Dorothy’s office at the American embassy in Beirut; and eating all that great, green leaf we call ‘dollars’ right off Dorothy’s hand.

One can clearly discern that the American embassy in Beirut is more of a war theater against the Lebanese themselves, than it is a peaceful salon of diplomacy and trade activity.

Dorothy also enjoys the occasional support from other powerful Lebanese who may not share her ideology, but assist her when called upon because they are beholden to the US via their investment projects in the US, and also via their children and grandchildren who reside and study in the US.  Yes, just like mafias threaten people with harm done to their businesses and families, so does Dorothy threaten her second tier of helpers, thus they always oblige.  Saad Hariri (a Sunni leader), Walid Jumblatt (a Druze leader), and Nabih Berri (a Shia leader) are examples of second-tier helpers of the US embassy in Beirut.

Here I would add that although Dorothy’s Lebanese inner circle leaders are all Christian Maronites, between them, they actually represent the minority of Maronites in Lebanon.  The majority of Maronites belong to the Maronite President Aoun’s party, who are allies and supporters of Hezbollah.  And it appears that the Maronites who are anti Hezbollah are fundamentally Islamophobic, all due to an aftertaste that the brutal, Sunni Ottoman Empire left in their mouths back in 1922, when the Ottoman Empire collapsed and its soldiers finally exited Lebanon after some 500 years of miserable colonization.

Aside from creating the total collapse of the Lebanon, financially, socially and politically, it is germane here to give a summary of what the enemies of Hezbollah and Lebanon itself hoped to achieve with their treachery and sedition:

1-  IMF enslavement of Lebanon’s financial life.

2-  Disarming Hezbollah and the dismantlement of the Lebanese army, to be replaced with UN or NATO troops that answer to Tel Aviv and DC.

3-  Destroying the current governmental system and the insertion of a new, federalized political theater where only enemies of the Hezbollah are in positions of power.

4-  Naturalization into Lebanese citizenship of captive Sunni-Syrian refugees who are forbidden by the West to return to Syria, thus changing the voting demographic of Lebanon to favor Saudi-sponsored blocks (means Israeli-centric).   This plan even has the temerity to favor Syrian naturalization over Palestinian one, even though Palestinian refugees have been stuck in Lebanon since 1948.

5-  Allow Israel to annex gas field ‘Block 9’ that sits in the southern Lebanese maritime waters and is considered to be the richest field in the Lebanon waters.

6-  Allow Israel to annex the Lebanese Litani River that’s some 23.6 miles from the Israeli border.

7-  Through educational and cultural projects, unleashing insidious social-engineering programs such as ‘woke’, opioid and porn addiction, religious irreverence, cultural Marxism, and what I like to call the ‘gender bandito’ culture.  In other words, social-engineering programs that shred the very fabric of traditional Lebanese life and culture.  And sanity.

8-  The looting and destruction of Lebanon’s museums and ancient artifacts so as to wipe out the ancient identity of the Lebanon.

9-  Bantustaning and turning rural landscapes into militarized zones, and turning cities and towns into police states overseen by Israel-friendly UN or NATO forces.

10-  Normalization with Israel through forced trade with Tel Aviv – the only entity Lebanon would be allowed to trade with.

And last but not least:

11-  Empty Lebanon of its Christian population who are mainly concentrated in the Mount Lebanon area, but also scattered wide in villages and towns all over the Lebanon.

This is a project that analysts say has been handed to the current Lebanese Maronite Patriarch, Bechara Boutros al-Rahi.  His consistent sectarian incitement is intended to promote a religious civil war that will find the majority of Lebanese Christians fleeing the Lebanon as political refugees to mainly Canada and France, where they already have immigration programs that are specifically preferential and lucrative to Lebanese Christian applicants.  Yes, France and Canada are partners with the US in the destruction of Lebanon.  In fact, all other Western nations and some Arab ones too are also conspirators and abettors  in this diabolical, mass-murderous plan.

The Patriarch’s other vital mission is to turn Maronite Aounist voters against President Aoun’s party – driving them to the arms of Saudi-sponsored Samir Gaegae, who is a Maronite himself too and an infamous friend of Israel – not forgetting here his close friendship with Dorothy the Destroyer.

Because Lebanon is the only Christian-Arab country, and Christian Lebanese are fundamental to Lebanese history, heritage and identity, removing them from the Lebanon facilitates the Jewish plan of turning Lebanon into a zombie without a national, rooted identity, all in preparation for future Judeofication of the Lebanon, as per the Yinon Plan.

Of course, Dorothy here is a mere soldier for Tel Aviv.  But still, all responsibility of Lebanon’s current destruction lays at her feet for her absolute devotion and willingness to participate and manage this grand and evil project for the Lebanon.  She is responsible for the current starvation and the misery of millions of Lebanese, Christian and Muslim alike,  because she is the most powerful mover and shaker in the Lebanon: moving and shaking it towards its mass grave.

Even though this ‘starvation plan’ has been well conceived and executed with the help of internal traitors, yet Hezbollah and its Lebanese allies continue to stand like firm walls in its path.  Hassan and his patriotism continue to outsmart Dorothy.  In fact, so much so that now Hezbollah has unexpectedly taken up the new mantle of ‘economic resistance’, as opposed to only a military one.  Only two weeks go, Dorothy’s breathless destruction literally forced the Hezbollah to actively enter the economic war against the Lebanon, after a year and a half of passivity.  They are economically-resisting now by defying the Caesar’s Act and all other members of Dorothy’s inner circle.  This defiance comes in the shape of organizing Iranian fuel ships to arrive to Lebanon as aid for the utterly desperate people of the Lebanon.

The first Iranian fuel ship is due to imminently arrive to Lebanese shores.  Many more Iranian ships are slated thereafter, carrying much needed life-saving medicine and food to the needy Lebanese.

Hassan has botched all nefarious plans and checkmated Dorothy with this move.  He has promised that any harm done to these Iranian aid ships will result in instant, open warfare against Israel.  The man always means what he says.  And he always delivers on his word.  The Israelis know this only too well.  They will be red-faced and watching through their north-pointing binoculars, a long stream of Iranian ships docking a mere hop away from Haifa port.  This was never part of their plan.  Their plan was to starve the Lebanon en mass so as to bring it to its knees and take from it what they want; as well as to get rid of Iran-friendly Hezbollah.  Instead, they’re ending up with a stronger Hezbollah bringing in Iranian aid ships that will feed the Lebanese people and provide them with desperately needed medicine and fuel.  Iranian ships that will be seen by most Lebanese as ‘savior ships’, while Hezbollah will be crowned as ‘savior of Lebanon’ for resisting and breaking the illegal, US economic siege on the Lebanon.

Begs the question here, therefore: will the Mossad continue to send Dorothy her boxes of Cuban cigars?

August 27, 2021 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | 3 Comments

You cannot be forced to get the Covid vaccine. Here is the way out.

By Meryl Nass, MD | August 26, 2021

Let me show you how FDA, Pfizer and BioNTech colluded to fool everyone about the EUA status of the vaccine Americans will be offered. But close reading of their document gives you an escape route.

The “Fact Sheet for Recipients, “dated August 23, 2021, is approved by FDA and is on FDA’s website, and is signed by BioNTech and Pfizer.

Direct quotes from this easy to read 8 page document are below, and I suggest you print the document out, as it will help you avoid a vaccine mandate. Pay close attention. I added numbers to the most interesting excerpts.

After stating that you might receive the licensed vaccine or a vaccine under EUA in item 2, item 6 indicates that both the licensed vaccine AND the EUA vaccine are both under EUA. (This may be the way chosen to shield the licensed vaccine from liability.) Item 5 says that while under EUA, it is your choice whether or not to receive the vaccine.

Show this document to your college, your hospital, your boss. They cannot force you to receive either of these vaccines!

—————–

1.  The FDA-approved COMIRNATY (COVID-19 Vaccine, mRNA) and the FDA-authorized Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) have the same formulation and can be used interchangeably to provide the COVID-19 vaccination series.[1]

2. You are being offered either COMIRNATY (COVID-19 Vaccine, mRNA) or the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine to prevent Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by SARS-CoV-2.

3. The licensed vaccine has the same formulation as the EUA-authorized vaccine and the products can be used interchangeably to provide the vaccination series without presenting any safety or effectiveness concerns. The products are legally distinct with certain differences that do not impact safety or effectiveness.

4. WHAT IF I DECIDE NOT TO GET COMIRNATY (COVID-19 VACCINE, mRNA) OR THE PFIZER-BIONTECH COVID-19 VACCINE?

5. Under the EUA, it is your choice to receive or not receive the vaccine. Should you decide not to receive it, it will not change your standard medical care.

6. This EUA for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine and COMIRNATY will end when the Secretary of HHS determines that the circumstances justifying the EUA no longer exist or when there is a change in the approval status of the product such that an EUA is no longer needed.

Manufactured by Pfizer Inc., New York, NY 10017

Manufactured for BioNTech Manufacturing GmbH An der Goldgrube 12 55131 Mainz, Germany LAB-1451-7.2 Revised: 23 August 2021

August 27, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , , , , , | 2 Comments

Kabul shows Americans how leaders openly lie about current events

Tales of the American Empire | August 19, 2021

Kabul fell just days ago, but that event is now history and shows Americans how leaders openly lie about current events.

Some newsmen compared the chaos at the Kabul airport with scenes of the rapid fall of South Vietnam in 1975. Pictures appeared in the media showing American helicopters involved in the mass evacuation in 1975 Saigon that looked like those involved in the mass evacuation of Kabul.

American Secretary of State Antony Blinken assured Americans the two events were much different and that an orderly evacuation was underway.

________________________________________

Related Tale: “The American Retreat from Vietnam”; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvMqb…

Related Tale: “The Empire’s Fake War on Terror”; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aI1ks…

Best documentary about this war: “This Is What Winning Looks Like”; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja5Q7…

August 27, 2021 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | 1 Comment

With a “left press” like this, who needs fascist media?

“Progressive” stars and outlets manage not to say a word about the gravest crisis in the history

By Mark Crispin Miller | OffGuardian | August 27, 2021

It pains me to say it, but Caitlin Johnstone—whose work I used to champion ardently, defending her against the crypto-Stalinists at Counterpunch—is one of many “leftists” who keep partying like it’s 2019.

Same with the interminable Noam Chomsky, The Nation, Consortium News, MoveOn, Popular Resistance, Nation of Change, Covert Action Bulletin, Naomi Klein, Tom Engelhardt and others that I used to champion, and (in some cases) see as friends, as well as outlets that I used to write for.

So Caitlin loves her boomer Dad for his irrepressible outrage over the bombing of Afghanistan, and loves ALL boomers for their fiery dissidence—on issues that don’t matter much at this apocalyptic moment.

From her, and all those other “progressive” voices/outlets, you’d never know that World War III has been raging (openly) since January 2020—a global war against humanity itself.

Someone should tell Caitlin—an Australian!—that those feisty boomers, with some very few exceptions, have turned rigidly authoritarian, and often downright hateful toward the bravest and most necessary dissidents today, standing firm against the bio-fascist mandates of the New World Order, and the looming portents of the Great Reset: dangers that those “leftist” sages never even mention, much less question or confront.

While Caitlin, resident of Melbourne, riffs indignantly about the bombing of Afghanistan back in 19 B.C. (Before COVID), the staunchest dissidents Down Under are the truck drivers threatening to shut that country down, if its cops don’t take their boots off everybody’s necks.

In the midst of this vast slo-mo Holocaust, conducted in the name of “public health” (much as the last one was), we find no reference to it, nor any reference to the unprecedented global wave of censorship on which that Holocaust depends, or to the naked violence of the police throughout the “democratic” West, or to the financial purposes of this whole global nightmare, in any of the “leftist” outlets named above.

Instead, we get “Ban Killer Drones,” “Why US Policy in Nicaragua Isn’t Working,” “America’s Merchants of Death Then and Now” (with no mention of Big Pharma), “Hidden costs of militarism: Climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss,” and (my personal favorite) “Is a Cold War Still Possible in an Overheating World?”

My point is not that such well-worn concerns don’t matter anymore (though some of them were overblown before the COVID crisis), but that they’re now being used by our “left” press to give the misimpression that they’re really on the left — working for peace, freedom, civil rights and economic fairness, always in the interests of the people over all — instead of blinding us to this unprecedented global drive to make those things impossible, and snuff the people out.

Mark Crispin Miller is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University and the author of several books, including Boxed In: The Culture of TV; Seeing Through Movies; Mad Scientists: The Secret History of Modern Propaganda; Spectacle: Operation Desert Storm and the Triumph of Illusion; and The Bush Dyslexicon. You can read more of his work through his newsletter, News from the Underground

August 27, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | 6 Comments

ALERT: All Parents In U.K. With Children Aged 12 – 15 years

By Dr. Mike Yeadon | August 26, 2021

I’ve just been informed via someone senior in the vaccination authorities that they will begin VACCINATING ALL SCHOOL CHILDREN AGED 12 – 15 years old STARTING SEPTEMBER 6th 2021.

WITH OR WITHOUT YOUR CONSENT.

Children are at no measurable risk from SARS-CoV-2 & no previously healthy child has died in U.K. after infection. Not one.

The vaccines are NOT SAFE. The USA reporting system VAERS is showing around 13,000 deaths in days to a few weeks after administration. A high % occur in the first 3 days. Around 70% of serious adverse events are thromboembolic in nature (blood clotting- or bleeding-related).

We know why this is: all of the gene-based vaccines cause our bodies to manufacture the virus spike protein & that spike protein triggers blood coagulation.

The next most common type of adverse events are neurological.

Death rates per million vaccinations are running everywhere at around 60X more than any previous vaccine.

Worse, thromboembolic events such as pulmonary embolisms, appear at over 400X the typical low rate after vaccination.

These events are serious, occur at a hideously elevated level & are at least as common in young people as in elderly people. The tendency is that younger people are having MORE SEVERE adverse events than older people.

There is literally no benefit whatsoever from this intervention. As stated, the children are unquestionably NOT AT RISK & vaccinating them WILL ONLY RESULT IN PAIN, SUFFERING, LASTING INJURIES AND DEATH.

Children rarely even become symptomatic & are very poor transmitters of the virus. This isn’t theory. It’s been studied & it pretty much doesn’t happen that children bring the virus into the home. In a large study, on not one occasion was a child the ‘index case’ – the first infected person in a household.

So if you’re told “it’s to protect vulnerable family members”, THAT IS A LIE.

The information emerging over time from U.K. & Israel is now showing clearly that the vaccines DO NOT EVEN WORK WELL. If there’s any benefit, it wanes.

Finally, the vaccines ARE NOT EVEN NECESSARY. There are good, safe & effective treatments.

IF YOU PERMIT THIS TO GO AHEAD I GUARANTEE THIS: THERE WILL BE AVOIDABLE DEATHS OF PERFECTLY HEALTHY CHILDREN, and severe illnesses in ten times as many.

And for no possible benefit.

KNOWING WHAT I KNOW FROM 40 years TRAINING & PRACTISE IN TOXICOLOGY, BIOCHEMISTRY & PHARMACOLOGY, to participate in this extraordinary abuse of innocent children in our care can be classified in no other way than MURDER.

It’s up to you. If I had a secondary school age child in U.K., I would not be returning them to school next month, no matter what.

The state is going to vaccinate everyone. The gloves are off. This has never been about a virus or public health. It’s wholly about control, totalitarian & irreversible control at that, and they’re nearly there.

PLEASE SHARE THIS INFORMATION WIDELY.

With somber best wishes,
Mike

Dr Mike Yeadon

 

August 27, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | 1 Comment

The Dubious Ethics of ‘Nudging’ the Public to Comply With Covid Restrictions

By Dr. Gary Sidley | The Daily Sceptic | August 22, 2021

A middle-aged woman, walking along a pavement in the afternoon sunshine, sees a young family approaching and instantly becomes stricken with terror at the prospect of contracting a deadly infection. A man in a queue in a garage kiosk leans into the face of another and screams, “You selfish idiot! Hundreds of people will die because you don’t wear a mask.” The aggressor is oblivious to the fact that his victim suffers a history of asthma and anxiety problems. A neighbour puts on a face covering and plastic gloves before wheeling her dustbin to the end of her drive. These are three recent examples of many similar events I’ve observed or read. What could be the main reason for such extraordinary behaviour? Has the emergence of the SARS-COV-2 virus magically re-wired our brains, transforming many of us into vindictive germaphobes?

No, of course not. These extreme human reactions are, I believe, primarily the result of the Government’s deployment of covert psychological ‘nudges’, introduced as a means of increasing people’s compliance with the Covid restrictions.

In an article in the Critic, I discussed the remit of the Government’s behavioural scientists in the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B), a subgroup of SAGE which offers advice to the Government about how to maximise the impact of its Covid communications strategy. The methods of influence recommended by the SPI-B are drawn from a range of ‘nudges’ described in the Institute of Government document, MINDSPACE: Influencing behaviour through public policy, several of which primarily act on the subconscious of their targets – the British people – achieving a covert influence on their behaviour. The three ‘nudges’ to have evoked the most controversy, among both psychological practitioners and the general public, are: the strategic use of fear (inflating perceived threat levels); shame (conflating compliance with virtue); and peer pressure (portraying non-compliers as a deviant minority) – or ‘affect’, ‘ego’ and ‘norms’, to use the language of behavioural science. (Specific examples of how each of these covert strategies have been used throughout the Covid crisis are described here).

The British Psychological Society (BPS) is the leading professional body for psychologists in the U.K. According to their website, a central role of the BPS is: “To promote excellence and ethical practice in the science, education and application of the discipline.” In light of this remit, I – together with 46 other psychologists and therapists – wrote a letter to the BPS on January 6th, 2021, expressing our ethical concerns about the use of covert psychological strategies as a means of securing compliance with Covid restrictions. In particular, our alarm centred on three areas: the recommendation of ‘nudges’ that exploit heightened emotional discomfort as a means of securing compliance; implementing potent covert psychological strategies without any effort to gain the informed consent of the British public; and harnessing these interventions for the purpose of achieving adherence to contentious and unevidenced restrictions that infringe basic human rights.

Responses from the BPS to our initial letter were slow and circuitous. However, on July 1st we received an email from Dr. Roger Paxton, the Chair of the Ethics Committee, which clarified the BPS’s position: in the Committee’s view, there is nothing ethically questionable about deploying covert psychological strategies on the British people as a means of increasing compliance with public health restrictions.

An in-depth inspection of Dr. Paxton’s defence of the BPS reveals that it is evasive, disingenuous and wholly unconvincing.

First, he quibbles about the use of the word “covert”, arguing that the compliance techniques under scrutiny are more appropriately described as “indirect”. Behavioural-science documents routinely refer to the psychological strategies underpinning Government communication campaigns as evoking responses from people that are “unconscious”, “subconscious” or “automatic”. The crucial point is that the human targets of these ‘nudges’ are often unaware that the intention of the SPI-B psychologists is to scare, shame them and socially pressure them to conform. The MINDSPACE publication – co-authored by Professor David Halpern, an SPI-B and SAGE member – seems to concur: “Citizens may not fully realise that their behaviour is being changed… Clearly, this opens Government up to charges of manipulation… [as] it may offer little opportunity for citizens to opt-out.” (p. 66)

Second, Dr. Paxton rejects the idea that it would be ethical to offer citizens an opportunity to opt-out by asserting that the application of covert psychological strategies to shape people’s behaviour falls outside the realm of individual consent. The BPS appears to be claiming that an appeal to some nebulous, ideologically-driven concept of social decision-making exempts psychologists from the fundamental requirement to seek a person’s informed agreement before delivering an intervention. So according to the BPS – the formal guardians of ethical practice in the U.K. – the Covid communications strategy, aimed at achieving mass behavioural change, was intended to influence some anonymous collective rather than the actions of as many individuals as possible.

Again, the BPS stance is at odds with Professor Halpern’s position. In his 2019 book, Inside the Nudge Unit, he states: “If Governments… wish to use behavioural insights, they must seek and maintain the permission of the public. Ultimately, you – the public, the citizen – need to decide what the objectives, and limits, of nudging and empirical testing should be.” (p. 375)

Third, Dr. Paxton’s claim that the levels of fear throughout the Covid pandemic were proportionate to the viral threat is ill-informed and does not stand up to scrutiny. The minutes of the SPI-B meeting of March 22nd, 2020, demonstrate that its endorsement of a covert psychological strategy was a calculated decision to scare the British people, recommending that: “The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent… using hard-hitting emotional messaging.” In her book, A State of Fear, Laura Dodsworth interviewed members of SPI-B who confirmed that there had been a concerted effort to elevate the fear levels of the general public. One committee member, Educational Psychologist Dr. Gavin Morgan, admitted: “They went overboard with the scary message to get compliance.” Another SPI-B member – who wished to remain anonymous – was even more forthright: “The way we have used fear is dystopian… The use of fear has definitely been ethically questionable. It’s been like a weird experiment. Ultimately, it backfired because people became too scared.”

The mission to indiscriminately instil fear in the British public has been highly effective. An opinion poll prior to ‘Freedom Day’ suggested most people were worried about the prospect of lifting the remaining Covid restrictions. Even now, when all the vulnerable groups have been offered vaccination, many of our citizens remain tormented by ‘Covid Anxiety Syndrome’ – a disabling combination of fear and maladaptive coping strategies – with 20% of the population ‘markedly affected’. And this psychology-assisted fear inflation will be responsible for a substantial proportion of the extensive collateral damage associated with the restrictions, including excess non-Covid deaths and mental health problems.

Fourth, Dr. Paxton’s response makes no reference to the use of shame and scapegoating, and whether these are acceptable strategies for a civilised society to use. One can only assume that the BPS either views these tactics as acceptable, or that they seek to avoid acknowledging that psychologists have recommended practices that, in some respects, resemble the methods used by totalitarian regimes such as China, where the state inflicts pain on a subset of its population in an attempt to eliminate beliefs and behaviour they perceive to be deviant.

The dismissal of our ethical concerns by the BPS was predictable: a cursory glance at the scientists comprising the SPI-B shows that several of its members are also influential figures in the BPS; a major conflict of interest that renders the impartiality of their views highly questionable. What was surprising was the strident tone of Dr. Paxton’s rejoinder, as exemplified by his assertion that the psychologists’ role in the pandemic response demonstrated “social responsibility and the competent and responsible employment of psychological expertise”. I suspect the lady trembling on the pavement, the young man being verbally abused in the garage, and the neighbour donning mask and gloves to wheel out her dustbin – along with the many others in similar positions – might all beg to differ.

Dr. Gary Sidley is a retired NHS Consultant Clinical Psychologist.

August 27, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | 2 Comments

Fury over Covid rules is FINALLY helping Aussies lose their long-held, unhealthy respect for authority

By Damian Wilson | RT | August 26, 2021

Having been forced to endure months of harsh lockdowns, my often-malleable compatriots Down Under are starting to fight back as they realise their government is clueless and they’ve been nuts to swallow the ‘zero Covid’ strategy.

By any measure, Australia has not enjoyed the coronavirus pandemic – and that has nothing to do with the number of deaths, because at less than 1,000 for a population of 25 million, it has, in the main, escaped lightly.

Where it has really suffered is in identifying exactly what level of threat Covid-19 poses to the population and then acting accordingly. Instead of being bold, brave, and positive in its handling of the situation, Australia has shown all the spine of a bluebottle jellyfish.

The collywobbles set in at the slightest whiff of Covid. Not deaths. Not hospitalisations. But simple cases of the virus send public health officials into a spin, locking down millions, deploying the military onto the streets, and imposing needless and draconian curfews. Blind panic best sums up the Australian government’s approach.

Then there are the stern warnings from state leaders that would be hilarious if they weren’t so serious – about enjoying sunset on the beach, removing a mask to drink beer, dodging errant footballs while watching a game, and most recently, a local council deciding to shoot 15 rescue dogs rather than allow volunteers from an animal shelter to travel for their collection in case they spread the virus.

That’s the level of insanity we’re looking at.

Meanwhile, it was humans on the receiving end at a so-called ‘freedom rally’ in Melbourne, where violence between protesters and police led to officers firing rounds of pepper balls – the most powerful non-lethal force at their disposal – into the anti-lockdown crowd.

It was one sign that patience with being treated like sheep might finally have snapped among parts of the Australian public. And it’s about time. I had begun to wonder what happened to the rebellious larrikins, the famed Aussie battlers, the brave Diggers, the pioneering ‘new Australians’ who just a generation or so ago left homes and family in Italy, Greece, Vietnam and beyond to pursue their dreams in the Lucky Country.

It seemed that a subservience to the ruling class, an unhealthy respect for authority, had overwhelmed my homeland.

The whole penal colony fable is a bit exaggerated, and of course there have been generations of intermingling since the 18th century, when Australia’s first white arrivals were drawn from the ranks of Great Britain’s sheep thieves and petty criminals. The violence and harsh conditions that welcomed those newcomers to the shores of Botany Bay, however, instilled a deep loathing and mistrust of their governing class, and it is often argued that Australia’s success was built on that resentment, driving its people to prove themselves to the authorities at home – and back in Mother England – that they could more than hold their own on the world stage. That inferiority complex was the driving force that has seen us excel in literature, in music, and particularly in sport.

But it also makes the Aussies a malleable bunch at times. Authority can make us go all weak at the knees. Public awareness campaigns that might struggle for lift-off elsewhere prove wildly successful in obedient Oz.

There’s no doubt this has been employed effectively in the past. There were the anti-litter ‘Keep Australia Beautiful’, keep-fit ‘Life. Be in it’, and skin cancer prevention ‘Slip! Slop! Slap!’ campaigns of my childhood. There was the mandatory wearing of bike helmets that came into force in the early 1990s, the plain packaging for cigarettes that appeared in 2012, and even the strict limits on gun ownership under the National Firearms Agreement that followed the Port Arthur massacre which left 35 people dead in 1996.

We have long been suckers for any message whose central premise is: follow this prescriptive guidance and you will be totally free to enjoy the great outdoors (without dying from cancer, obesity, bike accident or gunshot). That explains why the heavy-handed Covid rules have faced such little resistance.

The problem public health officials are facing now, however, is that the message is no longer working. Aussies were told the ‘zero Covid’ strategy that their government was pursuing was the envy of the world. That closing all international borders and keeping everyone at home was the pathway to freedom. Just do as we say and everything will be bonzer.

But they lied. With the Delta variant on the loose, lockdowns, curfews, restrictions on movement and the rest of the usual draconian measures are coming into play once more. But the government has overplayed its hand, and a sceptical public is starting to think, “These galahs haven’t got a bloody clue!” And they’re right.

So we see unrest on the streets of Brisbane, Sydney, Perth, and Melbourne because patience has finally snapped. I say let it rip! I look forward to continuing protests, rule-breaking, tough questions, and political accountability. I look forward to heads rolling, humiliating inquiries, and heartfelt apologies from the bungling clowns in charge.

I might have to wait a few months, but hey, that’s okay… because like my fellow compatriots, I’m not going anywhere.

Damian Wilson is a UK journalist, ex-Fleet Street editor, financial industry consultant and political communications special advisor in the UK and EU.

August 27, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | 6 Comments

Washington school introduced invasive ankle bracelets for COVID tracing

Parents push back

By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | August 25, 2021

A public high school in the state of Washington was making student athletes, both vaccinated and unvaccinated, wear ankle monitors for the purposes of social distancing and contact tracing.

The story was brought to the spotlight by the mother of a 15-year-old girl in Eatonville High School’s volleyball team.

Speaking to The Post Millennial, the mother said that her daughter sent her a text about being asked to wear the ankle monitor. After being unable to reach her daughter again, presumably because she was playing, the mother called the school, but no one answered her questions. So she decided to go to the school where she spoke with the coach who told her that a meeting about an ankle monitoring program for students was held last week.

The device was manufactured by a tech firm called Triax. The company’s website states that the device’s purpose is to help in “maintaining social distancing guidelines” as well as “real-time insight into whether these guidelines are being observed.” The site mentions construction and manufacturing businesses as potential customers, not schools.

The device achieves its social distancing goal through “a visual and audible alarm, so individuals know when to adjust their current distance to a proper social distance.”

The device also has a feature for “passive collection of worker interactions for contact tracing should an individual test positive.”

The coach, Gavin Kralik, told the mother that if an unvaccinated student tested positive, they would have to quarantine for 14 days. The quarantine policy would not apply for vaccinated students.

The ankle monitoring policy was not included in the school district’s back-to-school documents. Additionally, the mother was not informed about the meeting, where, apparently, she would have been provided with the option to opt-out of the program.

In an interview Tuesday on The Ari Hoffman Show, the mother expressed her concern that the program would result in the discrimination of unvaccinated students, because, unlike the vaccinated students, they would have to go into isolation for 14 days.

The Eatonville School District Superintendent Gary Neal insisted that the purpose of the device was not discrimination.

Neal told The Post Millennial : “We received grant funding (known as ESSER III) that specifically included provisions to support higher-risk athletic programs, and we used some of those funds to pay for athletic proximity monitors. We are using these monitors for high contact and moderate indoor contact sports. The monitors are for both staff (coaches) and students on the field, regardless if they are vaccinated or unvaccinated. If a student or coach tests positive, we will have immediate information regarding athletes’ and coaches’ contacts, so we can more tightly determine who might need to quarantine.”

But the School Board Director Matt Marshall had a different message, saying that the school district has “shelved the devices until proper procedures including community input and board approval process occur.”

“I will fight any requirements that segregate students based on vaccination status,” he added. “I am confident the rest of my colleagues will do the same.”

August 27, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | 1 Comment