Walmart has introduced a two-class vaccine passport system in the Canadian province of Quebec which restricts those without proof of vaccination to grocery and pharmacy products only and requires them to wait in a box before being escorted by staff as they shop.
Under the new rules, those who show proof of vaccination will be free to shop. Those who don’t show proof of vaccination will be told to wait in a blue box until a member of staff is available to escort them as they shop. This member of staff will then follow them around the store and make sure they don’t buy any prohibited goods.
The new restrictions were introduced in response to an expansion of Quebec’s vaccine passport rules which now require all stores with surface areas of 1,500 [sq. meters?] or more to demand that customers show a vaccine passport unless they’re shopping for groceries or pharmacy products.
This two-tier vaccine passport system has been blasted by store owners with many expressing concern about potential backlash from customers and their struggles to find staff to enforce this vaccine passport system amid ongoing labor shortages.
“Mainly, we’re disappointed, especially after being considered an essential business for two years,” Patrick Delisle, marketing director for the Canac hardware and construction chain, told the Montreal Gazette.
“We’ll need to tell clients we can’t serve them and, because of the delays it causes, there will be moments when it’s minus 30 outside and there could very well be 50, 60, or 75 people waiting in line,” Delisle added.
Delisle said Canac has hired GardaWorld security guards for each of its 31 stores and will be assigning one or two employees to the task of vaccine passport enforcement at each store. He estimates the cost of complying with the new rules will be a staggering $100,000 per week.
On Twitter, Walmart’s vaccine passport rules also faced mass pushback with “#BoycottWalmart” trending for several hours and Twitter users describing the measures as “cruel and humiliating” and the blue box as “a box of shame for the unvaccinated.”
The introduction of vaccine passports at Walmart and other big-box stores follows the Quebec government mandating vaccine passports in alcohol and cannabis stores last week.
This vaccine passport expansion is the latest example of how this technology, which was initially positioned as a way to slow the spread of the coronavirus, is being used to surveil the population and crush civil liberties.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has already admitted that Omicron breakthrough infections in people who are fully vaccinated are “likely to occur” and Canada’s Council of Chief Medical Officers of Health (CCMOH) says that it’s still “gathering information on how well vaccines work against transmission.”
Despite these admissions from leading health authorities and groups, vaccine passport systems continue to expand and impose additional burdens on the unvaccinated.
Queensland recently announced similar rules that will allow essential businesses like grocery stores and pharmacies to introduce vaccine passports. In Italy, vaccine passports have been mandated in banks and post offices – a policy that could make it difficult to claim their pensions. And in Washington, vaccine passports have been combined with photo ID.
French President Emmanuel Macron went one step further in a recent interview where he acknowledged that he wants to “piss off” those without a vaccine passport.
In an interview with the Montreal Gazette, Dr. Benoît Barbeau, a virologist at the Université du Québec à Montréal, said he believes the latest vaccine passport restrictions in Quebec are largely punitive in nature and noted that while it’s possible for transmission in larger stores, he believes they’re less risky than smaller, more contained spaces.
Dr Rochelle Walensky, director of the US Center for Disease Control, told the media on Friday that the CDC is intending to “pivot the language” regarding the Covid19 vaccines.
Speaking to the press briefing, Dr Walenksy had a very obvious message she really wanted to hammer home :
And what we really are working to do is pivot the language to make sure that everybody is as up to date with their COVID-19 vaccines as they personally could be, should be, based on when they got their last vaccine. So, importantly, right now, we’re pivoting our language. We really want to make sure people are up to date. That means if you recently got your second dose, you’re not eligible for a booster, you’re up to date. If you are eligible for a booster and you haven’t gotten it, you’re not up to date and you need to get your booster in order to be up to date.
It’s pretty clear that “say “up to date”, not “fully vaccinated”, was underlined in the memo. As was “pivot the language”, but what does it actually mean?
Well, that should be clear, it means people who were “fully vaccinated” will soon be “not fully vaccinated”.
(Side note here, but can we take a moment to appreciate the term “pivot the language”? That is some nice newspeak, beautiful. Up there alongside “enhanced interrogation”.)
The use of the term “up to date” in place of “fully vaccinated” is likewise deliberately crafted political language, turning a hard-and-fast reality into an ever-extending continuum. Normalising the open-ended nature of the new “vaccinations”.
The good news is that this could be the breaking point for a lot of people who have gone along peacefully up until now, and if you doubt that just look how nervous Walenksy is in saying it, and listen to how much trouble she’s going to avoiding the phrase “not fully vaccinated”.
She knows this is going to alienate a lot of people. Could be our side is about to get some considerable reinforcements.
Now that Covid restrictions are being rolled back, various commentators are declaring victory over the miserable virus. Lockdowns, we are told, worked. Only a fool could argue otherwise.
Devi Sridhar, the Chair of Global Public Health at Edinburgh University, who was formerly an exponent of the Zero Covid strategy of completely eradicating the virus, has recently announced in the Guardianthat “delaying and preventing infection as much as possible through this pandemic was a worthwhile strategy. In early 2020, there were few treatments, limited testing and no vaccines. The costs of those lockdowns were big, but the effort to buy time paid off”.
At the other end of the political spectrum, Tom Harwood of GB News says much the same. Lockdown sceptics, he writes in CapX, are “bizarrely claiming victory now that restrictions are coming to an end”. The sceptics, Harwood asserts, ignore the success of vaccines. “There is a blindingly obvious distinction between the need for non-pharmaceutical interventions amongst a non-immune population, verses [sic] one with incredibly high levels of immunity.” He points to a lower death toll from the Omicron variant which appeared after the “stupendously successful vaccine rollout”. In conclusion, Harwood writes that to “deny lockdowns worked to reduce spread is to deny logic”.
Let’s examine the logic. If lockdowns bought time for the rollout of vaccines, then we would expect fewer Covid deaths in places that locked down early and fast. That is the case in Australia and New Zealand, which early in the pandemic sealed their borders against the virus. But the trouble with this policy, as our Antipodean friends are discovering, is the difficulty of exiting. Their policy of national self-isolation has lasted nearly two years, and continues in large measure even after most of their population has been vaccinated.
By contrast, in Europe there is no evidence that lockdowns significantly reduced Covid deaths. Sweden, which never locked down, has the same number of deaths per million as Austria, which did (see chart below). It’s true that Swedish deaths ran higher somewhat earlier than Austria, but this ‘bought-time’ doesn’t appear to have changed the final tally.
The evidence from the United States points to a similar conclusion: the Covid death rate (as a share of the population) in Florida, which largely avoided lockdowns, is slightly below the U.S. national average and far below that of New York, which had (and continues to impose) relatively tough restrictions.
It’s true that mass vaccination has reduced the risk of hospitalisation and death from Covid. But lockdown exponents imply that vaccines alone are responsible for the decline in the infection fatality rate. The evidence from South Africa, whose vaccination rate is around a quarter of the European average (49 doses per 100 people versus 180, or 27%), suggests otherwise.
It appears that either Covid has evolved to become less virulent, as the South African doctors suggested back in December, or South Africa’s population has built up strong natural immunity from prior infection – a possibility overlooked by most commentators. It seems likely that both factors have played a role in reducing the virulence of the disease. Even if lockdowns had succeeded in reducing Covid deaths until the vaccine rollout that wouldn’t necessarily justify their imposition. From the start, lockdown sceptics were concerned about the collateral damage caused by closing down the economy, shuttering schools, neglecting conventional health care and forcing people to isolate in their homes for months on end. They railed in vain against the cruelty of lockdowns: mothers giving birth alone, old people dying alone or left for months without visitors in nursing homes, the damage to children’s education, funerals unattended, small businesses crushed and so forth. Finally, the public appears to be waking up to these cruelties. Hence, the fury at the hypocrisy of Downing Street officials who imposed harsh rules for the nation which they didn’t scrupulously follow themselves.
Then there are lockdown’s immense financial costs. At the time, these could be ignored since governments financed them with interest-free loans from central banks. But all that money-printing is now fuelling inflation that will lead to further immiseration in the coming years. The sceptics argued that lockdowns were never subject to a proper cost-benefit analysis which took social and economic costs into account. That remains the case. Thus, not only has there been no ‘victory’ in the war on Covid – on the contrary, the highly contagious Omicron variant appears to be overcoming all attempts to constrain it – but the argument over lockdowns has yet to be decisively won by either side, so that lockdowns are either accepted as a tool of sound public health policy or roundly condemned as a colossal mistake. The sceptics’ work continues.
It’s the last week of the 2022 European Men’s Handball Championship, held this year in Slovakia and Hungary, and the players just can’t stop testing positive for Corona. Iceland, where handball attracts enormous interest, had eleven players sidelined after positive tests last week. Their star goalie, Björgvin Páll Gústavsson, emerged from isolation to play against Croatia yesterday, only to test positive again this morning. It’s back to quarantine for him, as he waits for a PCR confirmation. Nobody is actually too sick to play, but the alternative – spreading Omicron to a bunch of other athletes who will get it one way or another anyway – is unthinkable.
Mass containment is a set of policies that require people to act crazy all the time. Omicron is everywhere; locking up a few athletes isn’t going to slow it down. To that comes the fact that these handball players are all totally healthy; their risk of severe outcome is so low, it’s essentially unquantifiable. And on top of it all, all these precautions plainly do nothing. Everyone is testing positive anyway.
Somehow, it’s always the people at least risk who have to put up with the most Corona nonsense. Kids have spent almost two years alternating between prolonged social isolation and antiseptic prisons once known as schools. Professional athletes are probably the most heavily tested demographic in the world. The lower-risk working-age population bears the brunt of the vaccine mandates, capacity limits, and hygiene rules. Meanwhile, if you’re a sedentary retiree and you don’t care about going to the pub, your life has hardly changed since all this started.
Containment has been denuded of every conceivable goal; not even the people directing the circus can explain why we are doing this anymore. If you ask leading vaccinators like Karl Lauterbach, they’ll tell you it’s because we need to ward off hypothetical future variants – a laughable justification, which will always spring eternal. It’s time to put an end to this. It’s time to stop the testing and the masks and the vaccinating, it’s time for the hystericists to shut up and go home.
The drama currently unfolding in which the Biden Administration is doing everything it can to provoke a war with Russia over Ukraine is possibly the most frightening foreign policy misadventure since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1967 Lyndon Johnson attempt to sink the USS Liberty and blame it on Egypt, either of which could have gone nuclear. I can well recall the Robert Heinlein sci-fi book The Puppet Masters, later made into a movie, which described how alien-slugs, arriving by way of a flying saucer landing in Iowa, invaded the earth and parasitically attached themselves to the central nervous systems of humans and became able to completely control their minds. What the humans know, they know. What the slugs want, no matter what, the human will do. And the tale gets really scary in geopolitical terms when some Secret Service Agents are “occupied” by the invaders and they are thereby poised to capture the President of the United States. I would point out that the movie came out when Bill Clinton was president, which should have provoked some concerns about whether it was fact or fiction.
Well, does anyone currently wonder why I think of The Puppet Masters when an incoherent Joe Biden in particular makes a speech? And also consider the befuddled look of Secretary of State Tony Blinken or the bewildered expressions of Vice President Kamala Harris or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, all of which might also suggest that the slugs now completely control the Administration. The Biden and Blinken possibly slug-controlled automatons are now stating their conviction, based on no evidence whatsoever, that Russia is about to invade Ukraine and they are threatening sanctions like Putin “has never seen before.” There will no doubt be more slug-derived pronouncements to reinforce that warning in the next few days after the latest round of talks breaks down. Evacuation of US Embassy staff families in Kiev is already underway, deliberately escalating rather than attempting to defuse the crisis which could lead to nuclear war, destroying the human race and replacing it with the alien slugs.
Consider for a moment the inconsistencies and sheer contradictions in US foreign policy, which might support the credibility of the alien slug theory. The State Department’s management of foreign relations is supposed to serve the interests of the American people, but has not actually done so for decades. Can anyone explain why Washington’s foreign policy during the decade 2010 to 2020 constantly hammered at Russia, which, if anything, should have been the one country with which the US would seek to have a respectful relationship. Where is the logic in condemnation of Russia’s non-violent annexation of the Crimea, which was carried out based on a long-term historic relationship and a popular referendum, while also enabling “allies” like Israel’s illegal occupation and annexation of both Palestinian and Syrian land which has relied on force majeure to drive hundreds of thousands of local inhabitants from their homes. And then there are the Saudis using American made weapons to terrorize and kill the people of Yemen. Slug Biden is now considering aiding the murderous Saudi onslaught by declaring Yemen’s Houthis to be terrorists, legitimizing their slaughter.
Even if one rejects the alien slug theory, at a minimum, there has been a great deal of hypocrisy in terms of how Washington deals with the rest of the world and that has been increasingly the case under both Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Targeting and killing civilian populations and permanently driving them from their homes are, by the way, unambiguously war crimes and the United States is signatory to the Geneva Conventions that define the Israeli and Saudi actions as such. Israel, which claims a form of perpetual victimhood thanks to the so-called holocaust narrative, is the only nuclear power in the Middle East, though its arsenal is regarded as so secret that US government officials are not allowed to mention it, possibly another indication of alien slug control. It uses that advantage to carry out undeclared open and covert warfare against its neighbors, most notably targeting Syria and Lebanon as presumed proxies for its number one designated enemy Iran. Saudi Arabia for its part does not seem to care at all regarding the devastation it is delivering on the largely defenseless Yemenis.
Israel goes far beyond the actions of any other belligerent nation in the world, and the US is the only nation that even comes close, as recent reports regarding a particularly reckless bombing in Syria suggest. Israel, often with American complicity, engages in covert sabotage and assassination operations inside Iran, which have been sometimes reported, though hardly condemned, in the mainstream Western media. Less well covered are the more-or-less routine bombing attacks conducted against Syria, frequently also violating Lebanese airspace when the Israeli jets stand off in the Mediterranean Sea to fire their missiles at the Syrian targets. It should be noted that attacking a nation with which one is not at war and which poses no direct threat is also a war crime, in this case a war crime that the Israeli and Saudi governments repeat on a regular basis without any objection coming from Washington, which itself has attacked Syria on at least four occasions while also illegally stationing troops inside the country to “protect” its oilfields.
A recent devastating attack by Israel on Syrian targets consisted of a missile strike launched by Israeli air force planes against the Mediterranean port of Latakia on December 28th. Israel’s attack on Latakia has to a certain extent shifted the focus of the war on Syria being conducted by Israel and the United States and their Gulf allies including the UAE and Saudi Arabia. In the past, the port was protected by its proximity to the major Russian base at Tartus in Syria and the actual presence of some Russian personnel assisting in Latakia ship cargo unloading operations, which threatens to bring Moscow more directly into the conflict. And as Washington is Israel’s enabler that will no doubt lead to US involvement in the UN and other fora if any attempts are made to limit or even condemn the Israeli actions. The situation is nasty and threatens to explode if Israel stages a false flag attack intended to lead to demands for direct military action by the US, a concern that some outside the Biden Administration have expressed.
What is particularly disturbing is the fact that while Israel and the Saudis continue to do their best to engage the United States in their own quarrels in the Middle East, President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Tony Blinken do nothing but look the other way so as not to annoy the Israeli leaders and their powerful domestic lobby in the US. At the same time, they unnecessarily provoke a nuclear armed and capable Russia and an emerging superpower China, both of which are regularly demonized both in the media and by leading politicians from both parties. The actions taken together are so irrational as to suggest that Robert Heinlein knew what he was writing about.
And then there is what might be described as the “hidden hand.” It should be observed that many of those US politicians and government officials most keen on baiting Russia are strong and vocal supporters of Israel. Many are neocons, who have penetrated the foreign and national security teams of both political parties and are dominant in the media while also having close ties to the Israeli government. Most of them are Jewish, to include all four of the top officials in the Department of State, while prominent politicians in both political parties, to include the president, have self-described as Zionists. For various reasons, many in the Jewish diaspora have a visceral hatred of Russia, so Israel in an odd way is part of the war party machinations to provoke an armed conflict over Ukraine.
That America is Israel’s poodle and both Russia and China are considered fair game to score political points is really the crux of the matter and it makes Americans complicit in Israeli crimes as Washington provides both arms and money as well as political cover to Jerusalem. It also reduces major US national interests involving Moscow and Beijing to sideshows and in so doing turns American national security on its head, supporting the unspeakable to make political points and ignoring what is important. One might even suggest that never before in history has a great nation so enthusiastically pursued policies that could easily lead to its own destruction. It is not in our interest, or even our survival, to continue along this path and it is past time that the politicians and bureaucrats begin to recognize that fact. Or maybe I should instead be addressing my advice to that alien-slug mothership hidden somewhere in a corn field in Iowa.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
Croatia will withdraw its military from NATO forces deployed in the region in the event of a conflict between Russia and Ukraine, President Zoran Milanovic said on Tuesday.
“I follow reports, according to which NATO, not a separate state, not the United States, is strengthening its presence, sending reconnaissance vessels. We have nothing to do with this, and we will not have, I guarantee you this,” Milanovic told a national broadcaster, adding that Croatia will not send its military to the region.
“If there is an escalation, we will withdraw everyone to the last Croatian military. It has nothing to do with Ukraine or Russia, it has to do with the dynamics of the US’ domestic policy, [President] Joe Biden and his administration, whom I supported, the only one in Europe … but I see dangerous behavior in matters of international security,” he added.
The French Government is introducing a tougher vaccine passport regime today. Now, only vaccination (and not natural immunity or covid tests) will count to allow access to cafes, libraries, sports facilities, and long-distance trains.
The near-hysterical arguments made by the French political class justifying this new pass are strikingly unguarded and reveal the inner dynamics behind the vaccine passport drive. These debates show that vaccines are no longer a simple medical product. Instead, the vaccine has become a way in which states are establishing their authority, and creating a new QR-code citizenship based on regular compliance with medical procedures.
Vaccination has become a test for entry into the civic body. The ‘test’ of the vaccine is not your degree of medical immunity, or the degree to which you stand to suffer personally from COVID-19 infection. (The vaccine pass goes down to the age of 12 in France, while in New York it applies to those aged five and above).
Instead, the new meaning of vaccination is an act of compliance; it is a matter of doing what is asked and expected of you. The French Prime Minister Jean Castex said that the vaccinated have “played the game”, they have done what is asked of them. President Emmanuel Macron said that the vaccinated, “near-totality of people”, have “adhered” or “subscribed” to what they were asked to do. These people are “responsible”. By contrast, it is a “very small” that is “refractory” or “resistant”. They are “irresponsible”, says Macron, and “a irresponsible person is longer a citizen”.
Here, the state claims the right to set conditions for entry to civic life. The question of being part of social life is not a right, but something provisional; it is a permission that is granted by the state. The new gatekeepers of civil society are the waiter at a cafe, the head of a sports club, the door staff at the theatre, who from Monday will not only scan QR codes but check people’s ID cards too.
“To be a free citizen means to be a responsible citizen,” says Macron. “Duties come before rights.” You can only have rights (enter society) once you have done your duty (been vaccinated). The idea that duties come before rights means, at base, that the state comes before the citizen: the citizen only takes his place in society at the behest of the state.
This is not a matter of two shots and you are done. There is an ongoing demand for compliance, whereby your citizenship – and claim to ‘responsibility’ – is continually renewed. France has followed Israel in requiring a booster shot for vaccine passes to remain valid. Currently, you have seven months to get a booster, but this will shorten to four months in February. A French Government guide sets out the exact timetable expected of you: this is a jurisprudence of medically based citizenship. Every injection gives a ‘valid QR card’ that you can use to access social life; if you don’t get the booster in the required window then this QR code will expire. France has also followed Israel with a special offer (available until February 15th) allowing first-time jabbers to “benefit from a valid vaccine pass” after their first dose, so long as they get their second jab within 28 days.
The discounting of natural immunity is very telling. Natural immunity yields a wider spectrum of anti-bodies than vaccination and is likely to confer longer protection against infection and against new variants. And yet natural immunity has no political meaning. It is a strength that your body has gained through its own efforts, without involving the state or wider society. The ‘pass sanitaire’ that had been in operation in France since last summer recognised natural immunity and negative covid tests, alongside vaccination; the new ‘pass vaccinal’ recognises vaccination alone. The French Prime Minister now claims that natural immunity provides “only very little immunity”, while the source of genuine immunity is a “full course of vaccines”. This claim reflects more about the different political value placed upon these two routes to antibodies. One route is deemed “protective”, robust, and the other very weak, as something that “wanes”, only because one has a robust relationship with the state and the other relates to the state “only very little”.
(Indeed, as we saw with the Novak Djokovic saga, natural immunity – and the claim to exemption based on natural immunity – in fact now poses a threat, so dangerous that a person must be imprisoned and deported. Natural immunity poses a threat not to actual public health, but to the new social order based on vaccination that is being built by the Australian government.)
The fetishism of Covid vaccination is at base a fetishism of bureaucracy. The vaccinated person has a pass, they have a QR code; they are on these grounds judged safe. You can feel ‘reassured’ when you are in a public space and everybody has passes on their phones. The unvaccinated person has no card or QR code and therefore they are seen as risky and posing a danger to others. In declining to be vaccinated, they are not merely refusing a medical procedure – with its attendant benefits and risks – but they are refusing to relate to bureaucracy. The absolute power attributed to a vaccine card – to show that someone is safe, to show that they care for others, and are willing to protect themselves and others – owes less to the medical effects of vaccination than to vaccination as an insignia for bureaucracy.
This is why it is repeatedly asserted that only the unvaccinated are infectious. The French prime minister says that the unvaccinated cannot be allowed to go around “infecting others with impunity”. He even claims that the unvaccinated intend to infect others, that they think to themselves, “I’m going to infect others.” This belief persists in the face of sky-high vaccinated case rates; in the face, even, of the Prime Minister’s own recent Covid infection.
There is a long history of blaming dissident elements for infectious disease – as with the expulsion of beggars, Jews and prostitutes from medieval plague towns, or in the nineteenth century the association between cholera and revolutionary urban uprisings. Infectious disease has often been associated with elements outside the system or that cut against social or religious hierarchy. Michel Foucault said that the absolutist state saw the plague as “a form… of disorder”, a disease of “rebellions, crimes, vagabondage, desertions, people who appear and disappear, live and die in disorder”.
Now too, the unvaccinated are seen as the source of all ills of society. The Italian Prime Minister said that “most of the problems we are experiencing today are due to the fact that there are unvaccinated people”, as he introduced a new tougher vaccine pass for Italian citizens on January 10th. The unvaccinated are even, perversely, presented as the cause of repressive instruments designed by politicians. Emmanuel Macron said that the unvaccinated didn’t merely put other people’s lives at risk, but they also “restricted the liberty of others”, which was “unacceptable”. The French Prime Minister said the unvaccinated “put in danger the life of the whole country and restrict the daily life of the immense majority of French people”.
The eight per cent or so of people who have not been vaccinated in France appear to be the single focus of state authority. Macron recently said that his primary aim was to “piss off the unvaccinated”, and that he will continue to do this “until the end”. In his New Year’s message, he urged the unvaccinated to join the fold, telling them that “all of France is counting on you”, as if the course of the pandemic – indeed the very fate of France – depends upon them agreeing to the jab.
The project of improving national health has been replaced by a project of integrating the population into a bureaucracy by means of health status. The health of the nation has become confused with the proportion of the population that has a valid health pass.
The pursuit of the ideology of vaccination at the expense of health outcomes is shown most vividly in the imposition of vaccination mandates upon healthcare professionals. Here, we see the sheer blindness of sacking of experienced medical staff in the midst of a pandemic on the basis of a vaccine that has no bearing on the risk they pose to patients. It also shows how far the notion of the ‘irresponsible’ unvaccinated person is from the reality, given that healthcare workers have given and contributed more than anyone. In French Guadeloupe, vaccine mandates led to a 30% reduction in staff at the main hospital and the reduction of services to a skeleton operation. The scene there now is colonial: black healthcare staff picketing the hospital were removed by white mobile gendarme units, and now there is an armed police checkpoint at the hospital entrance. Vaccination mandates are a test of allegiance for healthcare professionals. Authorities show that they are prepared to run hospitals into the ground, to risk lives, to protect the ideology.
The vaccine passport is a citizenship test for a morally and politically vacuous age. It is entirely passive – it is the simple act of consenting to a medical procedure, after which you are crowned with a civic virtue. This is a citizenship test that occurs on the level of what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life”; that is, it is a question of merely biological existence, rather than a question of how a life is lived. Receiving a vaccine pass is mute; there are no words, there is no oath of allegiance to party, country or leader. You offer your body and receive a QR code in return: this is the nature of the new social contract between citizen and state. “Vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate” is the mantra for reconstituting authority and society in an age where this authority cannot be grounded on a substantial social basis.
The vaccine is being treated as a mystical state or collective substance that incorporates people into the collective body. Vaccination now is like a sacrament, a transubstantiation ritual; through the vaccine we are receiving the body of the state into our body and therefore joining the community.
One casualty in this is vaccination itself. Considered scientifically, a vaccine – as with any drug – is not a protective talisman or means for membership of a community. It is a medical product with particular qualities and uses, and particular side effects and risks. It may be useful for some groups but not others, and in some contexts but not in others. The rational use of a drug is as important as the drug itself, to ensure that it is directed towards the appropriate ends.
The ideological weaponisation of vaccines distorts these cost-benefit judgements. The vaccine is forced upon people who have little or no need of it, such as children and those with natural immunity, while ignoring those who have need of it. (The older and more vulnerable someone is, the less they are affected by vaccine passports.)
This episode is violating the very basis of health and medical ethics. Through vaccination passports and mandates, it has become acceptable to force someone to take a medical treatment, even a treatment that is not really in their medical interest. When Jean Castex boasted that the vaccine passport led to a rise in people getting their first vaccination, the interviewer pointed out “but they were forced”. Castex shrugged. In normal times, medical force is unacceptable; medical force means the Nazis. When France began vaccinating a year ago, it insisted upon consent forms and pre-vaccine interviews to ensure that people were really consenting. Now, the use of force has become entirely acceptable, it has become ethical in fact. It is the duty of the state to get people to do their duty.
And in this, the state is claiming rights over our bodies, the right to say what we put in them and what we don’t. A citizen under the vaccine passport regime is not in fact a citizen at all, but rather a chattel: you sign your body over to the state, and agree to take the latest required treatments in order have your QR code renewed. You sell your rights over your body for the price of drinking a cup of coffee in a cafe.
As reported last week by The Defender, federal monies from the 2020 and 2021 COVID stimulus bills dramatically reshaped K-12 educational priorities, turning American school officials into lackeys for federal agencies more intent on masking and vaccinating every last child than on supporting meaningful education.
So, too, with the stimulus-induced reshaping of hospital priorities.
In the second half of a January interview on Del Bigtree’s “The Highwire” — “COVID-19: Following the Money” — policy analyst A.J. DePriest reported on the untoward consequences set into motion as a result of COVID funds provided to hospitals.
Managed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the federal government allocated a total of $186.5 billion to the Provider Relief Fund (PRF), with two-thirds ($121.3 billion) disbursed as of January 2022.
The first tranche of $50 billion for hospitals and other Medicare providers — “for healthcare-related expenses or lost revenues … attributable to COVID-19” — began flying out the door in April 2020.
Almost immediately, alert doctors and astute journalists warned the Medicare add-on payments built into the relief package created perverse incentives unfriendly to patients’ interests.
As summarized by Dr. Scott Jensen — former Minnesota state senator and current gubernatorial candidate — “anytime healthcare intersects with dollars it gets awkward.”
Nearly two years down the road, the “awkwardness” is increasingly difficult to hide.
In the view of DePriest and many others, HHS’s stimulus slush fund has been every bit as dangerous for hospital patients as the U.S. Department of Education’s handouts have been for the nation’s schoolchildren.
Making out like bandits
Dr. Elizabeth Lee Vliet and Ali Shultz, J.D., who wrote a widely distributed op-ed in late 2021 for the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), summed up the disturbing situation prevailing in hospitals. The AAPS’s professional calling card is its “dedication to the highest ethical standards of the Oath of Hippocrates.”
Not mincing their words, the two argued that Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) payment directives turned hospitals and medical staff into “bounty hunters,” and COVID patients into “virtual prisoners.”
Highlighting the slew of CMS add-ons and other incentives established with the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act — and also the Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act (PPPHCEA) — they emphasized the payments hinge on hospitals’ willingness to slavishly follow the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) guidelines “for all things related to COVID-19.”
As itemized by Vliet and Shultz, compliant hospitals garner CMS payments for:
Each completed diagnostic test (required in the emergency room or upon admission).
Each COVID-19 diagnosis.
Each COVID admission.
Use of the intravenously administered Gilead drug remdesivir (brand name Veklury), which yields a 20% bonus payment on the entire hospital bill.
Mechanical ventilation.
COVID-19 listed as cause of death.
Citing a Becker’s Hospital Review breakdown, published in April 2020, of CARES Act payments to different states, DePriest told Bigtree payments ranged from $166,000 per COVID patient in Tennessee hospitals, for example, to far higher payments in states such as North Dakota ($339,000), Nebraska ($379,000) and West Virginia ($471,000).
In addition, for hospitals ascertained to be in COVID “hotspots,” HHS distributed special “high-impact” funds — $77,000 per admission initially, later downsized to $50,000 per admission.
HHS explained it used COVID admissions “as a proxy for the extent to which each facility experienced lost revenue and increased expenses associated with directly treating a substantial number of COVID-19 inpatient admission [sic].
The remdesivir ruse
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) spent $79 million developing remdesivir for Gilead, which itself dished out $2.45 million during the first quarter of 2020, to lobby for the drug’s use with COVID patients.
On May 1, 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized remdesivir for emergency use in individuals hospitalized with severe COVID illness, and members of an NIH expert panel (many with financial ties to Gilead) added the drug to the agency’s treatment guidelines.
A scant five months later, FDA granted full approval to remdesivir for hospitalized COVID patients over age 12.
The World Health Organization (WHO), in contrast, advised against remdesivir, stating the drug has “no meaningful effect on mortality or on other important outcomes for patients.”
Remdesivir sailed through regulatory hoops in the U.S. despite an abysmal track record of “adverse effects serious enough to kill” any individual hapless enough to take it.
Children’s Health Defense Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. discusses remdesivir’s toxicity in his best-selling book, The Real Anthony Fauci, outlining the lethal problems — multiple organ failure, acute kidney failure, septic shock, hypotension and death — experienced by participants in NIAID’s clinical trial of remdesivir as an Ebola therapy.
When the trial, which compared remdesivir against three other drugs, killed more than half (54%) of the remdesivir recipients within 28 days — the highest mortality rate among the four groups — an oversight board forced the NIAID to end the prong of the study focused on remdesivir.
As if remdesivir alone weren’t bad enough, Vliet and Shultz estimate mechanical ventilation kills anywhere from 45% to 85% of COVID patients. Moreover, NIH’s skimpy treatment guidelines prescribe dexamethasone concurrently with ventilators.
Dexamethasone, often described as a “double-edged sword,” is a highly potent corticosteroid that suppresses the innate immune system.
Like remdesivir, dexamethasone’s potentially significant adverse impacts include kidney damage. Additional side effects include interference with the normal function of other organ systems such as the cardiovascular, digestive, endocrine, musculoskeletal and nervous systems.
Ironically, dexamethasone can also increase the need for mechanical ventilation as well as for blood pressure intervention.
Therapies like these are a large part of why, as Vliet and Shultz note, the U.S. COVID mortality rate is so “shockingly high” compared to the rest of the world.
Remdesivir’s trail of destruction could get worse — on Jan. 21, FDA expanded use of remdesivir to “high-risk” adult and pediatric outpatients (age 12 and older) “for the treatment of mid-to-moderate COVID-19 disease,” permitting administration of the intravenous drug in various outpatient facilities.
FDA’s side effects warnings include possible liver injury and allergic reactions such as “changes in blood pressure and heart rate, low blood oxygen level, fever, shortness of breath, wheezing, swelling …, rash, nausea, sweating or shivering.”
Getting involved and bringing transparency
Referring to the 20% add-on payment that hospitals receive for administering remdesivir to COVID patients, DePriest commented that a “bonus” is a “weird thing to call something when you’re murdering people.”
Journalist Jon Rappoport agreed, preferring to characterize hospitals’ behavior toward COVID patients as “a federally incentivized protocol for murder” — or “cash for death.”
All of the above parties concur that the best-case scenario is to treat COVID early at home and avoid hospitals — “because we know from experience what happens there.”
In cases where hospitalization is unavoidable, DePriest encourages communities to get more involved:
“[W]hen you know these hospitals are doing that, the people of that community need to show up at that hospital en masse and start telling them that you, as a community, are going to be advocating for every single COVID patient that walks through those doors, and you are going to hold that hospital accountable — to their patient bill of rights, to their stated visitation policies — and if your state is not in a state of emergency anymore, there shouldn’t be any reason why patients are medically kidnapped and separated from their families and isolated.
“There’s absolutely no reason for it, but the communities have to get involved and they have to confront these hospitals and tell them, ‘We’re done, you’re not killing any more of us.’”
Boris Johnson recently declared an end to the COVID restrictions in the UK. He said, “We will trust the judgment of the English people.”
Why can’t we do that in the US? Isn’t it time to trust the judgment of the American people?
Whether you ask a red or blue pill person, it’s clear that both sides have compelling rationales to end the mandates and the State of Emergency.
Interestingly, the rationale for each side is completely different, but the conclusion is the same. Here’s how they stack up.
Blue pill rationale
We don’t need mandates for the vaccine or masks because we know they work. No need to sell us! Mandate or not, we will comply.
We no longer fear those who are not compliant: we are all boosted up the wazoo using safe and effective vaccines with virtually no side effects AND we are wearing N95 or P100 masks at all times. And we always stay 6 feet from any other person. So there is basically no way to infect us.
We have nothing to fear. Virtually none of us will be hospitalized, and none of us risk death. And the prevalence of Omicron makes our risk even lower.
We think people who are not compliant are evil and deserve to die. Why force them to take life-saving medical interventions? We are better off as a society if these people are gone. Permanently.
We trust our doctors to deliver quality medical advice. Our doctors always follow the CDC guidance which has been uniformly excellent. We all should be treated the same, no matter what our medical histories are. If the doctors follow the CDC guidelines, almost nobody dies. All the hospitals are filled with unvaccinated people.
Just to be safe, we test ourselves every day using antigen tests for COVID. If we have a positive test result, we now have two new safe and effective drugs from the most trusted drug companies in the world so that in the rare chance that we get COVID, we can treat it with nearly 100% success.
Red pill rationale
Mandates aren’t needed because we won’t comply with them anyway. They just create division and animosity in society. They divide us.
We don’t fear the vaccinated.
Cloth, surgical, and N95 masks don’t work so why should we wear them? P100 masks do work, but they are pretty cumbersome and not worth the trouble for a COVID variant that can’t hurt us.
Social distancing is useless and doesn’t work. The 6 foot rule is not based on any science. Why isn’t it 5.2 feet? Nobody has seen the science justifying 6 feet so we aren’t going to comply with silly non-scientific rules.
The current COVID vaccines are more likely to kill people than save them. In the Pfizer trial, 24% more people died in the group taking the vaccine! So it’s clear. If the vaccines don’t kill us, they will actually make the pandemic worse because they depress our immune system making us twice as likely to be infected with COVID as well as susceptible to other diseases (like reoccurrence of cancer). They also cause serious side effects. They are the most dangerous vaccines in human history. There is no way we will take them. Mandating them is just going to piss us off and hurt the economy. You will not get us to take them.
Why would we take a drug that could kill us to prevent a variant that cannot? You’d have to be nuts. We will not comply so the mandates won’t make us.
The primary variant is Omicron which if it happened today, we’d just ignore it since it is like getting a cold.
If we get sick, we have very effective early treatment protocols using existing safe repurposed drugs like ivermectin, HCQ, aspirin, vitamin D, NAC, and Prozac. These protocols are 100% successful in preventing death from COVID when given early. We would never use Molnupiravir or Paxlovid; those drugs are both super dangerous.
We use symptoms to determine if we have COVID. If we are unsure, we can use antigen tests. There is no need to test if we aren’t symptomatic because we know there is virtually zero asymptomatic spread and because the antigen tests almost never work reliably unless you are symptomatic so it’s a complete waste of money to test asymptomatic people. The testing companies don’t want anyone to know that, but we do.
If we do get sick with COVID symptoms, we stay home and rest.
Even if we had a truly safe vaccine, those of us who are recovered from COVID wouldn’t need it. A uniform mandate for everyone makes no sense.
We believe doctors should be allowed to be doctors and that medical care should always be delivered by our healthcare professional we trust to use his professional judgement on our individual case. The CDC guidance is just awful.
Here is a flashback of Dr. Anthony Fauci spreading false information about AIDS transmission. Fauci claimed that people could become infected by simply being near someone with AIDS. “[I]f the close contact of a child is a household contact, perhaps there will be a certain number of cases of individuals who are just living with and in close contact with someone with AIDS, or at risk of AIDS, who does not necessarily have to have intimate sexual contact or share a needle, but just the ordinary close contact that one sees in normal interpersonal relations,” Dr. Fauci advised. Obviously, we know this is a complete lie.
This false narrative led to gay men being ostracized from society. Democratic politician Pete Buttigieg’s husband Chasten is offended that people are comparing the disinformation on AIDS to COVID disinformation. A Newsmax reporter asked, “During the AIDS crisis, can you imagine if gay men and intravenous drug users . . . had they been pariahs the way the non-vaccinated are?” Chasten replied on Twitter, “AIDS patients died because people feared simply touching them would lead to infection. Families abandoned their own children to be buried in unmarked graves.” Sadly, AIDS patients were treated in a horrific way due to people like Anthony Fauci painting them as dangerous to society. Yet, the masses continue to trust this man who has spent his entire career altering “the science.”
Statins are HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors; that is, they block the enzyme in your liver responsible for making cholesterol (HMG-CoA reductase). According to Drugs.com, more than 35 million Americans are on a statin drug, making it one of the most commonly prescribed medicines in the U.S.1
National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey data suggest 47.6% of seniors over the age of 75 are on a statin drug.2 Lipitor — which is just one of several brand name statin drugs — is one of the most profitable drugs in the history of medicine.3,4
Collectively, statins have earned over $1 trillion since they were introduced.5 This, despite their being off patent. There is simply no doubt that selling them is big business with major financial incentives to distort the truth to continue their sales.
Statin recommendations have become fairly complex, as they’re recommended for various age groups under different circumstances, and whether they’re used as primary prevention of cardiovascular disease (CVD), or secondary prevention. Guidelines also vary slightly depending on the organization providing the recommendation and the country you’re in.6
In the U.S., the two guidelines available are from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF),7 and the American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association.8,9 The USPSTF guidelines recommend using a statin for the primary prevention of CVD when a patient:10
Is between the age of 40 to 75
Has one or more CVD risk factors (dyslipidemia, diabetes, hypertension or smoking)
Has a calculated 10-year risk of a cardiovascular event of 10% or greater
In secondary prevention of CVD, statins are “a mainstay,” according to the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.11 Secondary prevention means the drug is used to prevent a recurrence of a heart attack or stroke in patients who have already had one.
Regulators’ Role Questioned
A February 2020 analysis12 in BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine (paywall) brings up the fact that while the use of statins in primary prevention of CVD “has been controversial” and there’s ongoing debate as to “whether the benefits outweigh the harms,” drug regulators around the world — which have approved statins for the prevention of CVD — have stayed out of the debate. Should they? The analysis goes on to note:
“Our aim was to navigate the decision-making processes of European drug regulators and ultimately request the data upon which statins were approved. Our findings revealed a system of fragmented regulation in which many countries licensed statins but did not analyze the data themselves.
There is no easily accessible archive containing information about the licensing approval of statins or a central location for holding the trial data. This is an unsustainable model and serves neither the general public, nor researchers.”
Have We Been Misled by the Evidence?
In her 2018 peer-reviewed narrative review,13 “Statin Wars: Have We Been Misled About the Evidence?” published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Maryanne Demasi, Ph.D., a former medical science major turned investigative health reporter, delves into some of these ongoing controversies.
“A bitter dispute has erupted among doctors over suggestions that statins should be prescribed to millions of healthy people at low risk of heart disease. There are concerns that the benefits have been exaggerated and the risks have been underplayed.
Also, the raw data on the efficacy and safety of statins are being kept secret and have not been subjected to scrutiny by other scientists. This lack of transparency has led to an erosion of public confidence.
Doctors and patients are being misled about the true benefits and harms of statins, and it is now a matter of urgency that the raw data from the clinical trials are released,” Demasi writes.14
While Demasi’s paper is behind a paywall, she reviews her arguments in the featured video above. Among them is the fact that the “statin empire” is built on prescribing these drugs to people who really don’t need them and are likely to suffer side effects without getting any benefits.
For example, some have recommended statins should be given to everyone over the age of 50, regardless of their cholesterol level. Others have suggested screening and dosing young children.
Even more outrageous suggestions over the past few years include statin “‘condiments’ in burger outlets to counter the negative effects of a fast food meal,'” and adding statins to the municipal water supply.
Simple Tricks, Big Payoffs
Medical professionals are now largely divided into two camps, one saying statins are lifesaving and safe enough for everyone, and the other saying they’re largely unnecessary and harmful to boot. How did such a divide arise, when all have access to the same research and data?
Demasi suggests that in order to understand how health professionals can be so divided on this issue, you have to follow the money. The cost of developing and getting market approval for a new drug exceeds $2.5 billion. “A more effective way to fast-track company profits is to broaden the use of an existing drug,” Demasi says, and this is precisely what happened with statins.
By simply revising the definition of “high cholesterol,” which was done in 2000 and again in 2004, millions of people became eligible for statin treatment, without any evidence whatsoever that it would actually benefit them.
As it turns out, eight of the nine members on the U.S. National Cholesterol Education Program panel responsible for these revisions had “direct ties to statin manufacturers,” Demasi says, and that public revelation sowed the first seed of suspicion in many people’s minds.
Skepticism ratcheted up even more when, in 2013, the American College of Cardiology and AHA revised their statin guideline to include a CVD risk calculation rather than a single cholesterol number. U.S. patients with a 7.5% risk of developing CVD in the next 10 years were now put on a statin. (In the U.K., the percentage used was a more reasonable 20%.)
This resulted in another 12.8 million Americans being put on statin treatment even though they didn’t have any real risk factors for CVD. Worse, a majority of these were older people without heart disease — the very population that stand to gain the least from these medications.
What’s worse, 4 of 5 calculators were eventually found to overestimate the risk of CVD, some by as much as 115%, which means the rate of overprescription was even greater than previously suspected.
Industry Bias
While simple revisions of the definitions of high cholesterol and CVD risk massively augmented the statin market, industry-funded studies have further fueled the overprescription trend. As noted by Demasi, when U.S. President Ronald Reagan cut funding to the National Institutes of Health, private industry moved in to sponsor their own clinical trials.
The vast majority of statin trials are funded by the manufacturers, and research has repeatedly found that funding plays a major role in research outcomes. It’s not surprising then that most statin studies overestimate drug benefits and underestimate risks.
Demasi quotes Dr. Peter Gøtzsche, a Danish physician-researcher who in 1993 co-founded the Cochrane Collaboration and later launched the Nordic Cochrane Centre:
“When drug industry sponsored trials cannot be examined and questioned by independent researchers, science ceases to exist and it becomes nothing more than marketing.”
“The very nature of science is its contestability,” Demasi notes. “We need to be able to challenge and rechallenge scientific results to ensure they’re reproducible and legitimate.” However, there’s been a “cloud of secrecy” around clinical statin trials, Demasi says, as the raw data on side effects have never been released to the public, nor other scientists.
The data are being held by the Cholesterol Treatment Trialists (CTT) Collaboration at CTSU Oxford, headed by Rory Collins, which periodically publishes meta-analyses of the otherwise inaccessible data. While the CTT claims to be an independent organization, it has received more than £260 million from statin makers.
Inevitably, its conclusions end up promoting wider use of statins, and no independent review is possible to contest or confirm the CTT Collaboration’s conclusions.
Tricks Used to Minimize Harms in Clinical Trials
As explained by Demasi, there are many ways in which researchers can influence the outcome of a drug trial. One is by designing the study in such a way that it minimizes the chances of finding harm. The example she gives in her lecture is the Heart Protection Study.
Before the trial got started, all participants were given a statin drug for six weeks. By the end of that run-in period, 36% of the participants had dropped out due to side effects or lack of compliance. Once they had this “freshly culled” population, where those suffering side effects had already been eliminated, that’s when the trial actually started.
Now, patients were divided into statin and placebo groups. But since everyone had already taken a statin before the trial began, the side effects found in the statin and placebo groups by the end of the trial were relatively similar.
In short, this strategy grossly underestimates the percentage of the population that will experience side effects, and this “may explain why the rate of side effects in statin trials is wildly different from the rate of side effects seen in real-world observations,” Demasi says.
Deception Through Statistics
Public opinion can also be influenced by exaggerating statistics. A common statistic used to promote statins is that they lower your risk of heart attack by about 36%.15 This statistic is derived from a 2008 study16 in the European Heart Journal. One of the authors on this study is Rory Collins, who heads up the CTT Collaboration.
Table 4 in this study shows the rate of heart attack in the placebo group was 3.1% while the statin group’s rate was 2% — a 36% reduction in relative risk. However, the absolute risk reduction — the actual difference between the two groups, i.e., 3.1% minus 2% — is only 1.1%, which really isn’t very impressive.
In other words, in the real world, if you take a statin, your chance of a heart attack is only 1.1% lower than if you’re not taking it. At the end of the day, what really matters is what your risk of death is the absolute risk. The study, however, only stresses the relative risk (36%), not the absolute risk (1.1%).
As noted in the review,17 “How Statistical Deception Created the Appearance That Statins Are Safe and Effective in Primary and Secondary Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease,” it’s very easy to confuse and mislead people with relative risks. You can learn more about absolute and relative risk in my 2015 interview with David Diamond, Ph.D., who co-wrote that paper.
Silencing Dissenters and Fear-Based PR
Yet another strategy used to mislead people is to create the illusion of “consensus” by silencing dissenters, discrediting critics and/or censoring differing views.
In her lecture, Demasi quotes Collins of the CTT Collaboration saying that “those who questioned statin side effects were ‘far worse’ and had probably ‘killed more people’ than ‘the paper on the MMR vaccine'” … “Accusing you of murdering people is an effective way [to] discredit you,” she says.
Demasi also highlights the case of a French cardiologist who questioned the value of statins in his book. It received widespread attention in the French press, until critics started saying the book and resulting press coverage posed a danger to public health.
One report blamed the book for causing a 50% increase in statin discontinuation, which was predicted would lead to the death of 10,000 people. On this particular occasion, however, researchers analyzed the number of actual deaths based on national statistics, and found the actual death toll decreased in the year following the release of the book.
The authors, Demasi says, noted that it was “‘not evidence-based to claim that statin discontinuation increases mortality,’ and that in the future, scientists should assess ‘real effects of statin discontinuation rather than making dubious extrapolations and calculations.'”
Trillion-Dollar Business Based on Flimsy Evidence
Statins, originally introduced three decades ago as secondary prevention for those with established CVD and patients with congenital and familial hyperlipidemias, have now vastly expanded thanks to the strategies summarized above.
Tens if not hundreds of millions of people are now on these drugs, without any scientific evidence to show they will actually benefit from them. As noted in the EBM analysis, “Statins for Primary Prevention: What Is the Regulator’s Role?”:18
“The central clinical controversy has been a fierce debate over whether their benefits in primary prevention outweigh their harms … The largest known statin usage survey conducted in the USA found that 75% of new statin users discontinued their therapy by the end of the first year, with 62% of them saying it was because of the side effects.
Regardless of what level of prevention statin prescription is aimed at, the proposed widening of the population to over 75s de facto includes people with multiple pathologies, whether symptomatic or not, and bypasses the distinction between primary and secondary prevention …
The CTT Collaboration estimates the frequency of myopathy is quite rare, at five cases per 10,000 statin users over five years. But others have contended that the CTT Collaboration’s work ‘simply does not match clinical experience’ … [Muscle-related adverse events] reportedly occur with a frequency of … as many as 20% of patients in clinical practice.”
Regulators Have a Duty to Create Transparency
Considering the discrepancy in reported side effects between statin trials, clinical practice and statin usage surveys, what responsibility do regulators have?
According to “Statins for Primary Prevention: What Is the Regulator’s Role?”19 regulators have a responsibility to “engage and publicly articulate their position on the controversy and make the evidence base underlying those judgments available to third parties for independent scrutiny,” none of which has been done to date. The paper adds:
“Regulators holding clinical trial data, particularly for public health drugs, should make these data available in searchable format with curated and dedicated web-based resource. If national regulators are not resourced for this, pooling or centralizing resources may be necessary.
The isolation of regulators from the realities of prescribing medications based on incomplete or distorted information is not enshrined in law but is a product of a subculture in which commercial confidentiality is more important than people. This also needs to change.”
Do Your Homework Before Taking a Statin
There’s a lot of evidence to suggest drug company-sponsored statin research and its PR cannot be trusted, and that few of the millions of people currently taking these drugs actually benefit from them.
Some of the research questioning the veracity of oft-cited statin trials is reviewed in “Statins’ Flawed Studies and Flawed Advertising” and “Statins Shown to Extend Life by Mere Days.”
To learn more about the potential harms of statins, see “Statins Double Diabetes Rates,” “Statins Trigger Brain Changes With Devastating Effects,” and “5 Great Reasons You Should Not Take Statins.”
By a strange paradox, most Kennedy researchers who believe that Oswald was “just a patsy” spend an awful lot of time exploring his biography. This is about as useful as investigating Osama bin Laden for solving 9/11. Any serious quest for the real assassins of JFK should start by investigating the man who shot Oswald at pointblank in the stomach at 11:21 a.m. on September 24, 1963 in the Dallas Police station, thereby sealing the possibility that a judicial inquiry would draw attention to the inconsistencies of the charge against him, and perhaps expose the real perpetrators. One would normally expect the Dallas strip-club owner Jack Ruby to be the most investigated character by Kennedy truthers. But that is not the case.
Of course, it is perfectly normal that Chief Justice Earl Warren, when Ruby told him on June 7, 1964, “I have been used for a purpose,” failed to ask him who had used him and for what purpose.[1] But what about independent investigators? Are only readers of the Forward (“News That Matters To American Jews”) worthy of being informed that “Lee Harvey Oswald’s Killer ‘Jack Ruby’ Came From Strong Jewish Background,” and that he told his rabbi Hillel Silverman that he “did it for the Jewish people”? … continue
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