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Oxford Prof: “Jabbing Children Without Parental Consent Is Battery!”

By Richie Allen | September 6, 2021

Clinicians will be reluctant to administer covid-19 jabs to children without parental consent according to Oxford Family Law Professor Lucinda Ferguson. She told The Telegraph this morning that injecting a child without parental permission is “technically battery.”

Yesterday, vaccine minister Nadhim Zahawi said that if a 12- to 15-year-old said yes to the jab and was deemed to be “competent” then their decision would overrule the parents’ refusal.

However, according to The Telegraph :

Lucinda Ferguson, associate professor of family law at the University of Oxford, said: “In my view the clinician may well be reluctant to accept that because alongside that, you’ve now got the JCVI saying that they don’t consider it to be essentially in the medical best interests of children more generally.

She added: “At least at this early stage would be reluctant to accept that that consent [from a child] is good enough because of course if you treat a child without informed consent, either from them, or from a parent with parental responsibility, it’s technically battery and that would be what would be concerning the clinician.”

That seems perfectly reasonable to me. If I was a parent and my child was underage, I would consider it an assault if anyone laid their hands on the child without my express permission.

Further to that, aren’t those administering the jabs putting themselves at risk of litigation, if they ignore the parents wishes that the child not be jabbed and the child is subsequently injured?

Good luck relying on a defence that the now injured child gave you permission to inject her and that in your mind her wishes superseded those of her parents. No credible judge or jury would buy that.

September 6, 2021 Posted by | War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Jabs for kids and the impossibility of informed consent

By Neil McCarthy | TCW Defending Freedom | September 6, 2021

‘THEY’RE coming after the children next’: these were the words of a Northern Ireland GP, Anne McCloskey, on a video she posted on social media a couple of weeks ago, much shared until predictably deleted from YouTube and Twitter; words which, amongst others, have led to her being ‘suspended’ by the Northern Ireland Health and Social Care Board pending a ‘full investigation’, due to there being ‘no evidence to support Dr McCloskey’s comments’.

It hasn’t taken long for the truth of Anne’s words to be revealed.

Although the Government’s own independent vaccination advice body, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, advised as recently as July 15 that  ‘the JCVI’s view is that the minimal (my emphasis) health benefits of offering universal COVID-19 vaccination to children do not outweigh the potential risks’, that selfsame body performed a spectacular volte-face a mere couple of weeks later to advise that all 16- and 17-year-olds should receive a first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

In tendering this advice they were unusually frank about the precise risks, as they saw them, for young people, especially young men. They characterised these risks as potential ‘serious side effects’ which include myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) and pericarditis (inflammation of the membrane around the heart), with data from the US reporting ‘67 cases of myocarditis per million after the second dose.’ Although stating again that ‘Covid-19 is usually mild in younger people’ and that it is therefore ‘important to weigh up the benefits of any vaccine against the possible, although extremely rare, side effects’, the JCVI signally failed to do so in this statement. The simple arithmetic of Covid-19 fatally affecting approximately one in every 1.7million children compared with myocarditis affecting 9.8 in every million males aged 12 to 17 after receiving their first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech jab seems to have eluded them.

Such an egregious reversal of a clearly set out and principled opposition to mass vaccination of young people within such a short time suggests that the heavily covered (in the legacy MSM) tussle between Government and the JCVI over whether to extend the mass vaccination programme to all children over the age of 12 and last Friday’s apparent refusal by the JCVI to recommend mass vaccination of 12- to 15-year-olds are merely stage-managed ploys to make us believe that some deep ethical and societal debate is taking place. Judiciously leaked comments before Friday from Government about its ‘frustration‘ and the description of the JCVI as a ‘black box‘ in which ‘no one knows what’s going on‘ were so many will-o’-the-wisps. It is surely no coincidence that one of the most outspoken opponents of the mass vaccination of young people amongst the membership of the JCVI, Robert Dingwall, was recently ‘axed’ from the body. Indeed, according to a Guardian report dated August 7, ‘the JCVI has moved to ‘refresh’ the membership of its Covid subcommittee in recent weeks‘.

The JCVI is clearly thoroughly compromised. Friday’s statement that the ‘margin of benefit’ of jabbing 12- to 15-year-olds is ‘considered too small’ was in reality a Pontius Pilate-style washing of hands with its express invitation to the Home Secretary to seek further advice. The JCVI is salving what remains of its conscience and is inviting the Government to do its dirty work for it. Therefore Dr Anne McCloskey is right: they are ‘coming after the children next’. Indeed, the Times reported on Saturday, one day after the JCVI’s apparent refusal, that ‘ministers are reported to be confident the medical officers will give swift backing to the mass immunisation programme . . . it could begin as early as next week’.

As if to clarify their malice aforethought, our Government had until Friday gone out of their way to make it known that they had decided in advance that children of 12 and up are ‘Gillick competent’. What this means, quite simply, is that the sole force which stands between our children and a state which is determined to inject them with what Dr McCloskey has rightly called an ‘unlicensed’ vaccine – i.e. parents – was to be pushed out of the way. Briefings to the Times last Friday to the effect that written consent from parents will be sought after all are just words. The Government simply cannot be trusted.

The 1985 case of Gillick v West Norfolk and Wisbech Area Health Authority was without doubt a great victory for the modern liberal state against the traditional notion that children belong to their families rather than the state. Victoria Gillick lost on the substantive issue of whether her teenage daughter could be lawfully prescribed contraception by the family GP without the consent of her parents being sought. A consolation of the ruling, however, was that such bypassing of parental consent to medical procedures for children under 16 could be lawful only in specific circumstances when, as Lord Scarman put it, ‘the child achieves sufficient understanding and intelligence to understand fully what is proposed’. A gratifying and very recent upholding of this ruling occurred in the Bell v Tavistock case, when the High Court decided that it must essentially be true in nearly all cases, a priori, that a child under the age of 16 could not understand fully the implications of receiving puberty blockers.

How children could fully understand the implications of receiving an unlicensed vaccine which, according to the JCVI itself, has the potential for ‘serious side effects’ and the safety trials of which are not due to conclude until 2023, is a question which the courts could surely only but answer in the same way as they did in Bell v Tavistock.

We need to take this government to court. Even if they stick to their new word and children under 16 are no longer classed as ‘Gillick competent’ in relation to receiving the Covid vaccines, the fight needs to move on to the general question of ‘informed consent‘, based upon the Montgomery case, which is detailed here. In the absence of full clinical trials and the suppression and non-investigation of adverse symptoms, ‘informed consent’ is simply an impossibility. This was one of Dr Anne McCloskey’s central points in that suppressed video, and doubtless her real crime.

Update

We read today that Nadhim Zahawi is ALREADY rowing back on last Friday’s briefings to the Times about the need for written consent and that children deemed ‘Gillick competent’ will be able override their parents. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/sep/05/vaccine-passports-to-be-required-for-nightclubs-and-mass-events-in-england

September 6, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

A Twelve Year-Old Cannot Give Informed Consent For Vaccination

By Richie Allen | September 6, 2021

Professor Adam Finn from the Joint Committee on Vaccination (JCVI) has just been speaking to the BBC. He was on Radio 5 Live’s Breakfast Show. Finn reiterated the JCVI stance, that is that healthy children should not be offered a covid jab.

Finn did say that the JCVI stood by its earlier advice, that children with underlying health conditions should be offered the jab. He was speaking to the BBC’s Rachel Burden. Strangely, Burden didn’t ask Finn for his thoughts on comments made by vaccine minister Nadhim Zahawi (pictured) yesterday.

Zahawi told The Marr Show yesterday, that if the parents of a given child refused to give their consent but the child wanted the jab, once the child was ruled to be competent, he/she could overrule mum and dad. Zahawi gave no details as to how it would be determined whether or not the child was competent.

Adam Finn made a point of telling Rachel Burden this morning that parental consent is needed for every vaccine that is offered to children. Burden, either through incompetence or because she’d been warned off, didn’t press him. She should of course have said, “Well Professor, it sounds like you disagree with the vaccine minister. Is that right?”

The government will ignore the JCVI advice. It will roll out the jabs in schools to perfectly healthy children. England’s Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty and his deputy Jonathan Van Tam will give the go ahead.

Parents, you need to seek legal advice at the speed of light. It is preposterous to claim that a child under 16 years-old can give informed consent to be jabbed. You need to move quickly.

The government’s plan is to administer the jabs in schools. Children will come under tremendous pressure to take the needle. It’s fiendishly clever. The government knows that by doing it in schools and not at vaccine centres where parents would need to be present, they’ll be in a better position to overcome the problem of parental consent.

They’re coming for your children. Seek legal advice now.

September 6, 2021 Posted by | War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Support our campaign to repeal the unjustifiable and dangerous Coronavirus Act

By Kathy Gyngell | TCW  Defending Freedom | September 6, 2021

THE Coronavirus Act 2020 received Royal Assent on March 25 last year after passing through the House of Commons without a vote, such was the panic engendered by media images of overwhelmed medical services in Italy and Imperial College’s massively exaggerated Covid death predictions. The Act granted the government emergency powers to handle the Covid-19 pandemic. These allow the government to limit or suspend public gatherings, to detain individuals suspected to be infected by Covid-19, and to intervene or relax regulations in a range of sectors to limit transmission of the disease, ease the burden on public health services, and assist healthcare workers and the economically affected. Areas covered by the act include the National Health Service, social care, schools, police, Border Force, local councils, funerals and courts.

The Act was originally designed to expire at the end of March 2022 without interruption, but thanks to former Brexit Secretary David Davis it became subject to a six-monthly renewal vote in Parliament. Davis’s amendment tabled on March 21 last year to restrict the Act to a ‘brick-wall stop’ of one year failed, but this and the threat of a backbench rebellion led to the government’s own amendment to the Bill requiring parliamentary renewal of its powers every six months. The first of these came at the end of September 2020, the second in March 2021. Each time, shamefully, its extension has been voted through by a large majority of MPs. Only 24 MPs voted against the first time, and a very disappointing 76 the second time.

The one party to date to make a formal stand against its extension are the Liberal Democrats. Their leader, Ed Davey, has accused the Government of making ‘false claims’ over the need for an ongoing Coronavirus Act to enforce emergency lockdown restrictions. Notable critics to take a stand against it in the Conservative Party include Sir Charles Walker, Sir Graham Brady and Sir Desmond Swayne.

The argument that the Coronavirus Act is not important because most of the restrictions that have been irrationally imposed on society have been under section of the 1984 Public Health Act is mistaken. Nothing has been more symbolic of the slide into tyranny than this rubber-stamped Act. Numerous prosecutions have been attempted and indeed made under its provisions. If MPs fail to repeal it for the third time they will be allowing the government – and indeed the media which they appear to lead by the nose – to continue with the charade that there is a Covid crisis national emergency. There is not.

Powers in the Act remain dangerous. Schedule 22 gives the government extraordinary powers to prohibit gatherings, meaning that protests, vigils and political assemblies could be banned. It has never been activated in England and so is plainly unnecessary, but neither is it proportionate in a democracy. All the time it sits on the statute books it poses a threat to the right to free expression, freedom of assembly and democracy.

The fact is that none of the measures were ever necessary. They were granted in the middle of a panic to prevent a worst-case scenario that never came to pass. Since then the government has used these powers irresponsibly, if not abused them. The Coronavirus Act has made the problem worse, not better. There was and is no justification for extending these powers. All the data accumulated in the last eighteen months says this Act is not needed, as has been documented endlessly on these pages, on Lockdown Sceptics (now the Daily Sceptic), by HART and by numerous other independent scientists and doctors. As James Delingpole put it brutally and accurately at the beginning of the year, most of the government Covid statistical analysis is bollocks and designed to engender false fear.

Now, in less than three weeks, the vote for renewing this unjustifiable Act is coming up for a third time.

In March we advised readers to write to their MPs and set out a specimen letter. We fear repeating this letter is a waste of time. We suggest instead that readers concentrate their MPs’ minds by telling them that if he or she fails to vote against this next Coronavirus Act extension you will be giving your vote to the LibDems next time round, as the only party taking a decisive stand on the Act’s immediate repeal, or any other emergent party taking an equally decisive stand.

We’d also encourage you to sign this Repeal the Coronavirus Act petition here and forward it to like-minded friends.

Finally we invite readers to suggest or design their own TCW Defending Freedom car and window stickers to promote our ‘Repeal the Coronavirus Act’ campaign. And we invite your suggestions, below the line and via email to info@conservativewoman.co.uk on how to further our campaign and which other groups we could or should join forces with.

It’s time to end the charade. It’s time to end this legislative symbol of fear and to take away these tyrannical powers from an immoral government that looks quite capable of using them. Please make your voice heard.

September 6, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Solidarity and Activism | , , | Leave a comment

David Davis: “Vaccine Passports Are Dangerously Misleading!”

By Richie Allen | September 6, 2021

The former Brexit Secretary David Davis has described vaccine passports as dangerously misleading. The Conservative Party MP also said this morning, that he will be opposing the extension of “unnecessary emergency powers” in a vote in Parliament this month.

Speaking to Talk Radio’s Julia Hartley-Brewer, Davis said:

“On the so-called coronavirus passport, it is an idea looking for a problem. It’s not actually gonna do any good. If you have been vaccinated, it protects you! It doesn’t particularly well protect other people.

It stops you getting a very serious illness. but it doesn’t stop you becoming infected and it doesn’t stop you infecting other people. So we’re now going to have a certificate saying we’ve got a vaccine protecting ourselves, and we’re pretending that it’s protecting everybody else.

It’s misleading. Apart from all the civil liberty issues, it’s also dangerously misleading. And again, I hope the opposition parties grow some courage over this, because I think there’s a growing opposition to it on the Tory benches including me.”

Davis was responding to Vaccine Minister Nadhim Zahawi’s confirmation yesterday, that vaccine passports will be required to enter a nightclub and other indoor venues from the end of the month.

On the government’s wish to extend the covid emergency powers for another six months, something which will require parliamentary approval later this month, Davis said:

“We ought to have a freedom bill to revoke every law passed under the emergency powers act.”

September 6, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

“Big increase in weather disasters over the past five decades” – Claim BBC

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | September 6, 2021

This is another fairy tale to scare the kids which comes around once a year without fail:

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The number of weather-related disasters to hit the world has increased five-fold over the past 50 years, says the World Meteorological Organization. … Full article

In fact, according to the BBC’s own chart, the number of disasters has declined in the last decade, hardly supporting their story.

But why do disasters seem much more common now than in the 1970s, when even the IPCC says there is no evidence that weather is getting more extreme? Simple- better reporting systems mean that we record weather events now that would have been missed in the past.

We have, of course, been down this road before! The WMO data comes from Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) database EM-DAT. CRED, who only began publishing data in 1998, themselves warned in 2004 that earlier data was incomplete:

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https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2018/09/07/the-international-disaster-database/

Despite this warning, false claims that weather disasters are on the increase keep being made. Last year, it was the UN, and the before it was the left wing IPPR. And as surely as night follows day, their claims are faithfully trumpeted by the BBC and the rest of the gullible [alarmist] media.

September 6, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

They can’t hide the costs of Net Zero forever

By Patrick Benham-Crosswell | TCW Defending Freedom | September 6, 2021

THE run-up to the COP26 climate change jamboree in Glasgow later this year is probably not going as well as the government would like.  Despite being committed to Net Zero by Mrs May’s undebated and uncosted statutory instrument, the size of the likely costs can’t be hidden for ever and the guardian of the magic money tree, Chancellor Rishi Sunak, is fretting.

I have just produced a short book on Net Zero (brazen plug, you can buy it here) and, having spent several months trawling through the government’s own numbers, have reached the conclusions that the costs are huge (and possibly more than that). Replacing fossil fuels means we have to produce our energy from nuclear and renewables. At the moment they provide just about 10 per cent of our energy requirements. Making up the shortfall needs 30 to 50 Sizewell Cs, or 300 to 500 Small Modular Reactors, or 17,000 to 28,000 new offshore wind turbines. It will also need the electricity distribution grid to more or less quadruple in size. (The uncertainty primarily comes from whether Mr Gove can convert 25million homes to heat pumps, or whether we adopt hydrogen).

The cost of the generation alone comes out at something like £1trillion. Add to that car chargers, heat pumps, hydrogen electrolysers and suchlike and the costs could double. Or more.

The cost of energy will also rise. A report from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) in 2016 (when Mrs May imposed Net Zero) forecast that the price of electricity would increase by at least 50 per cent. Which means that the UK is likely to be operating on a higher cost base than those economies which have not yet followed our lead and declared a net zero target. That’s most of the world – only Bhutan, Suriname, Uruguay, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, Austria and Germany have followed Mrs May’s quixotic charge. I’m not sure Germany is serious – 25 per cent of its power comes from coal and it is phasing out nuclear power.

Hilariously (or tragically) the government is threatening to crack down on ‘greenwashing’, by which they mean the habit of suppliers claiming that buying their product saves the planet. Yet our political leaders maintain that it will all be fine, that Net Zero is achievable and all we need to do is plant some trees. If they looked at their own data they would know that this is not the case.

To cite one example, every now and then one of them will trumpet about carbon capture, use and storage. Capturing CO2 is tricky and expensive. The world CO2 demand is some 230million tons per year (mostly for the oil and food industries). That’s less than half of the UK’s current CO2 emissions. There is no chance of widescale use of COcaptured in the UK.

Of course there is already ample legislation on what may or may not be said in advertisements. New legislation is unnecessary.

As we have seen during the pandemic, this government has a habit of deploying misleading graphs and generally being economical with the truth. If they really wanted to improve the flow of information to the public they would apply the current law to their own presentations.

Hell will freeze over before that happens.

September 6, 2021 Posted by | Book Review, Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Nuclear Power | | Leave a comment

Australia Sen. Malcolm Roberts: Big Pharma, Big Tech, & Big Gov ‘have blood on their hands’ for suppressing Ivermectin

September 2, 2021

Straight talking Australian Senator who is also a doctor calls out Big Pharma for taking over government Officials. If Ivermectin is witheld from the people as a treatment “they have blood on their hands.”

September 6, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Greenland’s Ice Cap Above Average This Year

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | September 5, 2021

You will no doubt recall the Greenland meltdown scare a few weeks ago, when the media went mental after a few sunny days there:

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It probably won’t surprise you to learn that the ice sheet actually finished the summer with an above average volume of ice, according to the Danish Meteorological Institute:

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The Greenland Icesheet Surface Mass Balance excl Glacier Calving
http://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/

 

As I pointed out at the time, this year’s summer melt has been one of the shortest on record, beginning a month late. Indeed last year’s summer melt was also truncated, but you won’t see this reported anywhere in the media.

When glacial calving is added into the figures, Greenland is still losing ice, but at a much lower rate in recent years than a decade ago, mainly due to glaciers becoming more stable.

In the last ten years, 2403 Gt has been lost. This may sound a lot, but equates to only 6.7mm of sea level rise. A giga-tonne, by the way, is 1 Billion tonnes, and Greenland sits under 2.6 million of these. At the current rate, it would take 10,000 years for the ice sheet to melt, by which time we will probably in the middle of the next ice age!!

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https://podaac-tools.jpl.nasa.gov/drive/files/allData/tellus/L4/ice_mass/RL06/v02/mascon_CRI/greenland_mass_200204_202106.txt

September 5, 2021 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment

Arctic has enough reserves to supply Russia for centuries – Russian official

RT | September 5, 2021

Russia will step up development of oil and gas reserves in the Arctic, which are sufficient to last the country centuries, according to Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak.
“The potential of the Arctic zone is huge. Speaking about offshore resources only, those are 15 billion tons of oil and around 100 trillion cubic meters of gas. That will suffice for decades, hundreds of years if they are required and it is economically reasonable,” Novak said during the educational marathon ‘New Knowledge’ earlier this week, as cited by TASS.

These resources are too costly to extract so far, but Novak says the government is optimistic and has already taken steps to develop the means for it.

“Those are rather expensive projects, which require provision, certain subsidies, including on taxes, return on investment. The government has provided such incentives for projects like that. Certain taxes have been slashed to zero for offshore projects,” Novak stated, noting, however, that Russia will only dip into its Arctic resources in the case that other regions fail to provide them.

At the Eastern Economic Forum that took place in Russia’s Vladivostok this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the country bears a “huge responsibility” to have a “prudent” attitude toward natural resources of the Arctic.

“For Russia, this is of tremendous importance – the development of the region… The Arctic accounts for 18% of our territory and [its] reserves of raw materials are necessary not only to our country, but to the whole world,” the head of state said at the plenary session of the EEF.

“In this sense, we have a huge responsibility to treat this wealth prudently and thoughtfully,” Putin stressed.

September 5, 2021 Posted by | Economics, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

The Collapse of Climate-Related Deaths

Climate-related deaths have fallen over 99 percent since 1920

By Gale Pooley | HumanProgress | September 3, 2021

Hurricane Ida has devastated the Gulf Coast. CNBC reports that “Ida made landfall in Louisiana on Sunday as a Category 4 storm with winds of 150 miles per hour, one of the strongest storms to hit the region since Hurricane Katrina.” The property damage will be significant. Nineteen deaths have been confirmed, and more will likely follow. Those deaths are tragic, but thanks to enhanced preparation and flood defenses, they are a small fraction of the 1,833 deaths caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Compare Ida to the Great Galveston Hurricane that made landfall on September 9th, 1900. The storm killed between 8,000 and 12,000 people. In 1915, another storm similar in strength struck Galveston. The 1915 storm resulted in only 53 deaths. How did Galveston reduce hurricane fatalities by 99 percent in 15 years? In a word, adaptation. In 1902, the residents of Galveston funded a 10-mile-long seawall, dredged sand from the shipping channel, and raised many buildings, some by as much as 17 feet.

Thankfully, the rest of the world is following Galveston’s example. Even the most dangerous storms kill fewer people than in the past. The Great Hurricane of 1780 killed between 22,000 and 27,000 people, making it the deadliest Atlantic hurricane ever recorded. The second deadliest hurricane (Mitch) occurred in 1998 and killed just over 11,000.

Average deaths are declining as well. The Danish environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg has reported that climate-related deaths averaged 485,000 a year in the 1920s. Between 2010 and 2019, there was an average of 18,362 annual climate-related deaths. In 2020, the death rate dropped to 14,893. Based on what has been reported, there have been 5,569 climate-related deaths in 2021 so far.

So, adjusted for population, we went from 255.3 deaths per million in 1920 to 1.9 per million in 2020, a 99.25 percent decrease. In other words, for every climate-related death in 2020, we had 133.6 deaths in 1920.

The above numbers suggest that between 1920 and 2020, the world has become 13,260 percent safer from climate-related death (i.e., around 5 percent safer a year). Lomborg notes:

This is clearly the opposite of what you hear, but that is because we’re often just being told of one disaster after another – telling us how *many* events are happening. The number of reported events are increasing, but that is mainly due to better reporting, lower thresholds, and better accessibility (the CNN effect).

To avoid falling for the CNN effect, look at the number of dead per year as reported by the most respected global database, the International Disaster Database (https://public.emdat.be/). You can also read more from Lomborg’s peer-reviewed article here.

Will there continue to be dangerous weather and climate-related deaths? Yes, but we must put these catastrophes into context. Over the last 100 years, humanity has shown that we can adapt and thrive under varying climate conditions. Let facts, rather than advertising dollars, inform your thinking.

Professor Gale L. Pooley teaches economics at Brigham Young University, Hawaii. He is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute and a board member of HumanProgress.org

September 5, 2021 Posted by | Economics, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Chronic Disease: Still no Cures in Sight

By Dr. Rachel Nicoll | The Daily Sceptic | September 4, 2021

The developed world doesn’t just have to cope with a Covid pandemic – we also have a pandemic of chronic disease (defined as a condition which is persistent or otherwise long-lasting in its effects and for which there is no cure). A rough rule of thumb is to treat a condition as chronic if it lasts longer than three months; in 2012 this amounted to around 15 million sufferers in the U.K. and will be higher now. Examples of chronic conditions include Type 2 diabetes (T2D), obesity, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune conditions, dementia, lung disease, cancer… the list is endless.

Not only have many of these patients been effectively abandoned during the Covid crisis, with appointments cancelled, scans postponed and patients dying at home because they are discouraged from going to hospital, but if they do contract Covid they are likely to fare worse. All the chronic conditions listed above are Covid risk factors, making patients more susceptible to severe Covid and death. Furthermore, many of them are risk factors for other chronic conditions: T2D for cardiovascular disease, obesity for T2D, cardiovascular disease, cancer, dementia, musculoskeletal disorders, mental health disorders and many more.

Why is there still no cure for chronic diseases? By ‘cure’, I am not referring to medical management through drugs that have to be taken for the remainder of life, I mean a complete reversal of the disease, so that the patient can say, for example, that they no longer have Alzheimer’s disease or diabetes. With the trillions poured into medical research over the last several decades, we can be forgiven for asking what scientists have been doing all this time, as there seems to be very little to show for it in terms of reducing chronic disease. Furthermore, part of the definition of chronic disease includes the damning fact that it has no cure. So according to the current medical model, we apparently cannot prevent chronic disease and nor can we cure it; instead we must take ever-increasing numbers of drugs for the rest of our lives. In 2021, after decades of highly funded research, this is truly shocking. Not only is conventional medicine failing to cure chronic disease but the incidence of all chronic diseases is increasing dramatically.

Let me provide some examples:

Obesity
In the U.K., 2019 figures show that 28% of adults are obese and a further 36.2% are overweight. Obesity incidence is now occurring at considerably younger ages, with 2019 data showing that 10% of children aged 4-10 are obese and 21% at age 10-11. The incidence of obesity is rising rapidly: there were four times as many hospital admissions with a diagnosis of obesity in 2016/17 compared with 2009/10.

Diabetes
Ten per cent of all people aged over 40 in the UK are now living with a diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes; this amounts to 4.7 million of us, expected to reach 5.5 million by 2030. This compares to 1.4 million in 1996. The problem is global; the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimated that the number of people with diabetes rose from 108 million in 1980 to 422 million in 2014. Between 2000 and 2016, there was a 5% increase in premature mortality from diabetes.

Autoimmune conditions
Many autoimmune conditions are becoming more common, with some increasing in incidence by as much as 9% each year. In the U.K., four million people are known to be living with at least one autoimmune condition, and many with several autoimmune conditions at the same time. Rheumatoid arthritis is increasing at 7% per year, Type 1 diabetes by 6.3%, coeliac disease by up to 9% per year.

Cancer
According to Cancer Research U.K., there are over 164,000 cancer deaths in the U.K. each year, which is about 450 each day. One in two people in the U.K. born after 1960 will be diagnosed with some form of cancer during their lifetime. In the U.S., cancer incidence increased by 12% between 1994 and 2016; in the 1940s, one in sixteen had a cancer diagnosis; this had increased to one in three by 2018.

Dementia
There are currently around 850,000 people with dementia in the U.K. but this is projected to reach 1.6 million people in the U.K. by 2040. The global number of people living with dementia more than doubled from 1990 to 2016, while in the U.S., deaths from AD have risen 145% between 2000 and 2017. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) report that the number of people living with the disease doubles every five years beyond the age of 65. Most worryingly, those with early onset dementia have increased by 200% since 2013.

Cardiovascular disease
For some years cardiovascular disease mortality has been declining, despite increasing incidence of disease. However, in recent years, the rate of decline in CVD mortality has slowed in most developed countries, particularly at ages 35-74 years, and is now rising in 12 out of the 23 nations studied in 2017, including the U.K., the U.S. and Germany.

Autism
In the U.K., there was a sharp increase in the prevalence rates of autism in U.K. schools between 2010 and 2019. Autism currently affects 1–2% of the UK population – that is one per 100 children and two per 100 adults. According to the U.S. CDC, autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is the fastest growing developmental disability, affecting one in 59 children (1970s: one in 5000). Prevalence has increased 10-17% each year over the last several years. It has been described as an ‘autism tsunami’.

Prior to COVID-19, according to the Kings Fund, people with long-term conditions accounted for about 50% of all GP appointments, 64% of all outpatient appointments and over 70% of all inpatient bed days. Of course, we have far fewer GP appointments now as a result, so this figure for the last couple of years will be artificially lowered and will not represent the true needs of patients with chronic conditions.

The U.S. is so concerned about the ‘pandemic of chronic disease’ that the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has recently undertaken a new initiative focusing on the increasing number of patients with multiple chronic conditions, estimated to affect more than 25% of Americans and consume 66% of US healthcare costs. The objective is to use evidence-based research to improve the care offered to these patients. It is notable that there is no objective to prevent or cure these multiple chronic diseases.

So what is going on? Even allowing for improved diagnostic techniques possibly increasing incidence rates, it is perfectly clear that there is no decline in incidence of these chronic diseases through provision of improved prevention and treatment. Chronic disease used to be something one accepted in old age, but this summer saw the publication of the 1970 British Cohort Study, which periodically tracks the lives of about 17,000 people. This showed that around one in three people in their late 40s has multiple chronic health issues.

Yet during the Second World War, we were apparently extremely healthy, despite rigorous food rationing. So what has changed over the last 70 years? Certainly not our genes, because although genes do evolve, they do not evolve to this extent in such a short period of time. Instead, we have introduced many more highly toxic chemicals into our food, our water and our air. We eat more, we eat more unhealthy foods and we have become ‘couch potatoes’.

Surely it is time for our Government and National Health Service to address the elephant in the room and acknowledge the extent to which our health is being damaged? Introducing a sugar tax and similar measures is just fiddling on the margins, playing lip service to improving health without actually tackling the issue head on. It is also time for the U.K. population to demand better from their government and healthcare providers? Without a complete reset of the medical model, we do not have ‘health care’, we have ‘disease care’.

Maybe it is also time to accept that the vast majority of medical research has not provided, and is not going to provide, a cure for chronic diseases. All it has achieved is improved patient ‘management’, usually drug-induced symptom suppression. This is a far cry from Sir William Osler’s precept: “One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.”

While it is true that most of the medical research is carried out in the U.S., nevertheless, the U.K. does undertake some research of its own. Expenditure on research in 2018/19 amounted to just over £1.6 billion, while overall healthcare spending in 2019 was £225 billion. In 2011, 70% of the U.K. healthcare budget was spent on chronic disease; it is likely that by 2019 that percentage would have increased but even if it has not this means that around £160 billion is devoted to ‘managing’ chronic disease. So using the most recent figures available before distortion by Covid, we spend £1.6 billion on medical research, only a proportion of which relates to chronic disease, compared to the current chronic disease care costs of £160 billion, i.e., just 1%. Furthermore, evidence suggests that less than 1% of high quality medical research is translated into clinical practice, meaning that only 0.01% of the £1.6 billion spent on medical research could actually be impacting clinical practice (i.e., £160,000). Surely our research budget could be better spent?

As I was writing this article, a timely email arrived informing me about Public Health Collaboration, a group of doctors and other health professionals, headed by Dr. Aseem Malhotra, who have launched a rival to Public Health England (PHE) and its successor, the U.K. Health Security Agency, to help combat obesity, poor diet and medical misinformation. The founders claim that PHE has failed in its responsibilities to the public, while the NHS can no longer cope with the demands placed on it by chronic disease. They point out that the two major industries, food and pharmaceuticals, mislead for profit and are the major root of our healthcare crisis. Unhealthy food and toxic chemicals – I rest my case!

Rachel Nicoll PhD is a Medical Researcher.

September 5, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment