Increase in Miscarriages, Stillbirths Directly Linked to COVID Shots, Data Show — Health Officials ‘Should Have Known’
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 28, 2023
A major increase in spontaneous abortion among pregnant women was directly linked to the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine in Switzerland, according to a new analysis by statistician and Luzern University professor Dr. Konstantin Beck.
Beck, a former adviser to the German Minister of Health and the Swiss Parliament, analyzed publicly available Swiss and German data from scientific publications, health insurance companies and the Swiss Federal Office of Statistics (FOS).
He found that miscarriages and stillbirth rates in 2022 corresponded directly to COVID-19 vaccination among pregnant women in Switzerland nine months earlier.
And, he said, vaccine makers and public health officials either knew or could have known this information at the time, if they cared to look. Instead, they presented the information to the public in a way that obscured the risks.
Beck presented his groundbreaking research findings on Wednesday to Doctors for Covid Ethics.
Also, contrary to public statements by Swiss authorities that, “There is no relevant excess mortality among young people ” in Switzerland, Beck’s re-examination of the government’s own data reveals significant patterns of excess mortality among young people emerged in late 2021 and early 2022.
He said these findings show that during the COVID-19 pandemic, “We exposed the most vulnerable unnecessarily to new risks that outweigh by far the original pandemic risk.” And that “today, more and more heavy consequences of our Corona measures pop up in our official statistics, but only a few are interested to know [about them].”
“By analyzing the rollout of these vaccines, especially for pregnant women and their unborn, I found plain evidence from the very beginning that rethinking and postponing the vaccination strategy would have been imperative,” he said.
COVID shots led to ‘the baby gap’
Switzerland saw a historic drop in the rate of live births in 2022.
Every month that year, there were fewer births than there had been on average over the previous six years, for an overall reduction of 8.5% in the national birth rate, according to Beck’s analysis.
In some places, the drop was even more significant — Zurich had a 16.5 % drop in its birth rate.
The last comparable drop in births, 13%, Beck said, was during the 1914 mobilization of the Swiss Army at the start of World War I.
The 2022 plummet in birth rates came on the heels of a small “Corona baby boom” — a 3% spike in birth rates in 2021, that had followed the pandemic lockdown.
According to data compiled by analyst Raimund Hagemann, COVID-19 vaccination rates among Swiss women in 2021 and early 2022 corresponded very closely to the drop in birth rates nine months following vaccination.
Figure 1 (below), which adjusts the birth rate timeline by nine months to account for the time of pregnancy, shows this strong correlation between rates of vaccination and decline in the birth rate — the two numbers mirror one another.
Figure 1
Researchers have offered a few different hypotheses for this “baby gap,” which Beck evaluated.
Some proposed a behavioral explanation, hypothesizing that people changed their behavior out of fear associated with the pandemic itself or the associated economic uncertainty.
But Beck said this hypothesis did not match historical behavior patterns — the baby boom itself happened in the middle of World War II. And, it can’t account for the baby boom that followed the beginning of the pandemic, when public fear and unemployment were both at their height.
He also dismissed the hypothesis that COVID-19 infection reduced fertility. If that were the case, he said, there would not have been a 2021 spike in the birth rate following the first wave of infection in 2020, and there was no evidence of reduced fertility following the Omicron virus wave.
In fact, Beck said, there is no evidence of reduced fertility at all. On the contrary, the data show women were becoming pregnant at the same rates as before the pandemic.
Using German health insurance data — because Swiss data are not yet available — he showed the number of women seeking pregnancy tests and visiting doctors to be treated for pregnancy remained constant throughout 2021 and 2022.
There was even slight ongoing growth, and a spike related to the mini-baby boom of 2021.
That makes COVID-19 vaccine-induced spontaneous abortion the most plausible hypothesis for the drop in birth rates — because the same number of women were becoming pregnant, but fewer of them were carrying their pregnancies to term.
Supporting that claim, data from German health and Swiss insurers show that beginning in the fourth quarter of 2021, there are clear and significant increases in the number of pregnancy complications treated and in the length of hospital stays following birth — both of which had been trending downward for years.
German data also indicate that the number of stillbirths was up 20% in the fourth quarter of 2021.
Although data on stillbirths were not available for Switzerland, he said, there is no reason to believe that it would be substantively different.
‘Anyone who had read the leaflet, would have been informed’ of dangers
The vaccines’ impact on pregnancy was not simply a tragic and unanticipated outcome, because it was already evident in the vaccine manufacturers’ own data or lack thereof, Beck said.
Anyone who had “read a leaflet from the manufacturer,” he added, “would have been informed” that there were no pregnancy data, but that there were serious concerns about the possible effects of vaccines on infants.
The German version of the Moderna Spikevax warning said, essentially, “We have no clue what the risk is for pregnant women. There are no good controlled studies done. There is not enough data available,” Beck said.
The leaflet also recommended against vaccination for breastfeeding mothers, but strongly recommended it for pregnant women, Beck said.
“But isn’t pregnancy usually preceding breastfeeding?” he asked, “And what should you then do after giving birth to get rid of vaccination?”
On April 20, 2021, Pfizer sent its report regarding the mRNA vaccine and pregnancy to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), according to the Pfizer documents.
The following day, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published preliminary findings on COVID-19 vaccine safety in pregnant women based on an analysis of V-safe and the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
On April 23, in a White House press conference, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky recommended pregnant women get vaccinated based on the findings of that paper.
The paper explicitly stated that researchers found no safety signals with respect to pregnancy or neonatal outcomes in the third trimester, but that it could make no conclusions about the first or second trimesters.
Given that the first and second trimesters are the highest risk periods for pregnancy, Beck said, the NEJM paper concedes the researchers didn’t know what additional risks the vaccines might pose to pregnant women at their most vulnerable time.
The paper also included an irrelevant comparison of the most frequent symptoms post-vaccine between pregnant and non-pregnant women, and used live birth as the only measure of the potential health effects on the newborn.
And perhaps most importantly, it explicitly stated that “The most frequently reported pregnancy related adverse events were spontaneous abortion.”
The paper reported 46 spontaneous abortions related to vaccination out of 104 total reported. That, Beck said, is a 73.1% increase in spontaneous abortion.
Making calculations based on that NEJM data, Beck found that the reported vaccination rate of 75% of pregnant women in Switzerland, 1 in 10 pregnancies ends in a miscarriage or stillbirth.
He concluded that alternative existing hypotheses can’t account for this phenomenon, and the vaccine-induced miscarriage hypothesis corresponds to both the manufacturer’s data and the relevant findings reported as the basis of the CDC’s campaign to vaccinate pregnant women.
125% spike in pulmonary embolism, cardiac arrest and stroke, and cerebral infarction among children ages 0-14
The presentation also raised a series of concerns about the impacts of COVID-19 vaccination on young people and how statistical manipulation can obscure those potential effects.
Based on several examples of how the health and mortality of young people worsened over the course of the vaccination period, Beck posed the question, “Why did we vaccinate children? I mean, they were not the target group of this virus.”
An examination of data from major health insurers, for example, showed that during 2020-2021, people ages 19-39 had the highest growth in healthcare costs, while they typically have the lowest costs, indicating a change in the health of that demographic.
Data on the frequency of pulmonary embolism, cardiac arrest and stroke, and cerebral infarction among children ages 0-14 showed a 125% spike in events. While the numbers were still small, they went from an average of 20 events per year over the several preceding years to a total of 45 events in 2021.
A second look at data analysis by the FOS, which had reported that there was no excess mortality for young people in 2022, raised red flags, Beck said.
Excess mortality measures the difference in reported deaths versus expected deaths in a given period. Baseline projections of excess mortality are typically based on previous averages.
Re-analyzing the FOS mortality data, but keeping the expected number of deaths in line with previous averages — which the FOS had not done — Beck found a 12% increase in overall excess mortality.
When he analyzed the excess mortality by age groups, Beck found that for young adults ages 20-39, there was a spike in excess mortality beyond normal expectations in late 2021 and in 2022. And for children ages 0-19, he identified a similar trend.
Excess mortality data, he said, can be easily hidden by widening confidence intervals for predictions, combining demographic groups with different health profiles or changing the baseline expected number of deaths to hide variation, which made it possible for Swiss officials to announce there was no excess mortality for young people.
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
The Money Trails of the Pandemic Planning Racket
By Jeffrey A. Tucker | Brownstone Institute | July 30, 2023
The Justice Department has dismissed all charges related to campaign finance leveled against Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the founder and CEO of the Bahamas-based crypto exchange FTX. The grounds were a bit unusual. Officials in the Bahamas said that such charges were not the basis of the extradition. “The Bahamas did not intend to extradite the defendant on the campaign contributions count,” said the Justice Department. “Accordingly, in keeping with its treaty obligations to the Bahamas, the Government does not intend to proceed to trial on the campaign contributions count.”
And just like that, charges are gone. What’s strange is that this claim jumps out in the financial trail of FTX. Indeed, it seems obvious. It was an impressive caper. FTX said it practiced “effective altruism” and so intended to give away $1 billion to charity. It raised venture funding from many sources that wanted to pay off politicians but were restricted from doing so by law. FTX classified this as investment and then altruistically gave money to many charities involved in “pandemic planning” but many were not real charities. They were 501c4s that fund political campaigns. With just a few hops in the money trail, this mechanism allowed vast funding of mostly Democratic political interests in advance of the 2020 election.
Once you have a look at the details and players (and we have done so in two articles here and here), it becomes clear that “effective altruism” was simply a cover for a politically driven money scheme. FTX was founded and then went into bankruptcy exactly in keeping with this purpose. It remains possible that SBF will face trouble over claims of wire fraud but that could be plea-bargained away. We shall see. What’s striking is that the most obvious issues have been swept away on a legal technicality.
Central to the charity of FTX was the issue of pandemic planning, or so they said. SBF’s brother ran a pandemic organization. Linda Fried, Sam’s aunt on his mother’s side, was Dean of the School of Public Health at Columbia University and on the board of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Aging. SBF’s girlfriend Caroline Ellison’s mother is a professor of economics at MIT with a research specialization in the pharmaceutical industry while her father has written at least four papers on epidemiological modeling.
The “Together Trial” was a trial of therapeutics that ended up inveighing against Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine and was generously funded by FTX together with the Koch Foundation. The head of Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, Moncef Slaoui, received $150,000 from FTX to write SBF’s autobiography. HelixNano, a vaccine company that claims to be developing mutation-resistant vaccines, received $10M in funding from FTX Future Fund. And Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security: This institution ran the Event 201 lockdown tabletop exercise in 2019, and received at least $175,000 for a single employee, from FTX coffers.
This barely scratches the surface and we would like to know more. It would be glorious if the New York Times or some other big media organ would assign 50 reporters to dig deeper, as they did with the supposed Trump-Russia connection that turned up nothing after years of high dudgeon. But nope: all we get is silence. In contrast, the national media mostly treats SBF as a confused genius who got in over his head because his wonderful company achieved too much too fast.
How the national media treats money trails entirely depends on the political drive behind the effort. In the second term of the Reagan administration, the executive branch became involved in an effort to fund the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and the Contras in Nicaragua in the name of fighting the spread of Soviet influence and winning the Cold War. Congress had specifically stopped these funding efforts so the Reaganites turned to the usual suite of shell companies, friendly governments, intelligence agencies, and secure money-movers to get the cash to those who wanted it.
The result was many years of intense investigation. Every center-left and left-wing outfit was all over the Iran-Contra money scandal, seeking receipts and subjecting the major players like Oliver North to sworn Congressional testimony. There was nothing wrong with this and everything right: in the American system, the executive branch cannot fund global projects without the approval of Congress. The search to ferret out the scandals seemed like part of the effort to clean up government.
Here we are nearly 40 years later and the Biden administration is embroiled in an astonishing version of something similar, with familial connections, shell companies, cash moving here and there, foreign governments like Ukraine, and intelligence agencies serving as essential tools of covering it all up. It was the Hunter Biden laptop that provided the clues and that led to more receipts of an amazing nature. This week I received a call from a man who was instrumental in discovering the laptop who explained many of the funding connections but after about 15 minutes of detail I could not keep up even though he went on for another 30 minutes. It was all mind-boggling. This one makes the Iran-Contra scandal seem like the age of innocence.
How deep does this rabbit hole go? Consider the attacks on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the attempt to close the primary such that only Biden can win it? The effort is primarily funded by Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook which itself cooperated very closely with the federal government in suppressing contrary opinions on lockdowns and vaccines. Liam Sturgess explains:
The group behind the campaign is the Progressive Turnout Project, a political action committee (PAC) that has been described as “the largest voter contact organization in the country.” It has a series of sub-organizations operating under different names, two of which are also engaged in the BAN RFK petition: Stop Republicans and Progressive Takeover. … Using the most recent publicly-available data from OpenSecrets, we discovered that the single largest donation to the PTP came from Dustin Moskovitz.
Moskovitz also co-founded a project management application called Asana in 2008. Between these two massively profitable companies, Moskovitz generated so much wealth that he was identified by Forbes in 2011 as the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, even beating out Zuckerberg.
After earning his fortune in Big Tech, Moskovitz and his future wife, Cari Tuna, signed on to “The Giving Pledge,” committing to give away the vast majority of their money before the end of their lives. The Giving Pledge was the creation of mega-millionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, with co-signatories including Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, George Lucas, David Rockefeller, and Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the recently-collapsed FTX cryptocurrency trading platform.
To accomplish their goal, Moskovitz and Tuna embraced a philosophy of “effective altruism.” According to its proponents, effective altruists seek to direct funding towards the people and organizations most likely to accomplish a given intended outcome for the betterment of humanity and the planet —often focusing on topics such as artificial intelligence, natural disasters, and combating “misinformation/disinformation.”
With effective altruism as their anchor, Moskovitz and Tuna started the Good Ventures Foundation in 2011. The focus of their philanthropy was to include biomedical research, pandemics and bioterrorism, education, food security, foreign aid, geoengineering, global health and development, immigration, nanotechnology and treatment of animals. Good Ventures also partnered with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to co-fund research related to infectious diseases in Africa.
In August 2014, Good Ventures partnered with a similar organization called GiveWell to launch the Open Philanthropy Project, which would recommend grants for Good Ventures to fulfill (paid for by Moskovitz).
In the years leading up to COVID-19, Moskovitz used Open Philanthropy and Good Ventures to provide significant funding toward pandemic preparedness and biosecurity. Open Philanthropy is also listed as the primary sponsor of a series of tabletop pandemic “war games,” during which world leaders practice how they might respond to various scenarios involving outbreaks of novel viruses, whether man-made or of natural origin. Some examples include Clade X (May 2018); A Spreading Plague (February 2019); and of course, the infamous Event 201 (October 2019).
If you have followed this article carefully, you see that we have come full circle, from the effort to silence and stop Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., back to Sam Bankman-Fried, the phony crypto exchange FTX, and the money trails through pandemic planning straight to political control of people by a single political party that tolerates no competition. One might suppose these connections would launch a thousand investigations and calls for reform. They should.
Instead, the charges were dismissed, by the very regime that stands to lose all credibility in light of all these strange money trails. And now we see major banks canceling accounts by major medical dissidents, as a warning to others.
Let there be no mystery as to why the public has lost trust in government, public health, media, and virtually every other official institution. Even as Americans have been pillaged and had their foundational rights violated by governments, the people on the inside have done very well for themselves within this tangled web of graft and corruption. They have every intention to forever block curious journalists from knowing more.
RFK Jr. Says Biden DHS Won’t Provide Secret Service Protection
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | July 29, 2023
RFK Jr., whose father was assassinated on the presidential campaign trail in 1968, says the Biden Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has denied his request for Secret Service protection.
“Since the assassination of my father in 1968, candidates for president are provided Secret Service protection. But not me,” Kennedy tweeted.
“Our campaign’s request included a 67-page report from the world’s leading protection firm, detailing unique and well established security and safety risks aside from commonplace death threats.”
A misleading community note was added to the tweet, which suggests that candidates will only be protected within 120 days of the general election…
The Secret Service’s website suggests the same:
The actual text of the law, however, makes clear that the 120-day guidance is for spouses.
“Major Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates and, within 120 days of the general Presidential election, the spouses of such candidates.“
Punctuation matters.
Meanwhile, an argument for why Kennedy should receive SS protection:
(continued, emphasis ours)
The law authorizes Secret Service protection for major presidential and vice presidential candidates and their spouses within 120 days of the general presidential election. However, the evolution of the protective detail is based upon actual threats and acts of aggression against both the highest public office in the land and those who seek the position.
History shows there is precedent for candidates receiving protection >120 days ahead of the general election.
Donald Trump & Ben Carson were provided Secret Service protection 365 days before Election Day in 2015
Barack Obama was provided Secret Service protection 551 days before Election Day in 2007
RFK Jr is within the time range of the precedent set by the candidates above (465 days from Election Day) and is arguably under even greater threat given the Kennedy family’s tragic history of assassinations.
The Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas) has the discretion and the ability to approve or deny Secret Service coverage to presidential candidates at any point in the campaign.
Given that the Biden Administration began to censor RFK Jr within days of getting into the White House and is continuing that censorship even through last week’s censorship hearing, it is not surprising that a Biden appointee has denied a political opponent’s request for Secret Service protection.
Bill to Allow Whole Milk in Schools Supported by Science, Experts Say
By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 25, 2023
For years, children at public schools have been offered only nonfat and 1% milk — but that may soon change, thanks to a bill that aims to put whole milk back on kids’ lunch trays.
The “Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act of 2023” would override the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) current guidelines on milk by amending the Richard B. Russell National School Lunch Act to allow school cafeterias to offer unflavored and flavored whole milk.
The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce on June 30 advanced the bill, which has been scheduled for a floor vote. The date of the vote is not yet publicly available.
According to the bill’s lead sponsor, Rep. Glenn “GT” Thompson (R-Pa.), “Bad federal policy has kept whole milk out of our school cafeterias for too long. … Milk is the number one source of 13 essential nutrients.”
The bill would bypass the USDA and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services advisory committee, which determine U.S. dietary guidelines — which in turn determines what foods schools can serve.
Whole milk banned in public schools since 2012
In what they said was an effort to curb childhood obesity, lawmakers passed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which revamped the National School Lunch Program to conform to the standing dietary guidelines recommending reduced saturated fat in children’s diets.
The National School Lunch Program provides low-cost or free lunches to roughly 30 million children in nearly 100,000 public and nonprofit private schools, as well as residential childcare institutions.
This led two years later to a ban of 2% and whole milk at participating schools.
Since then, schools have served non-fat and low-fat milk, including sweetened flavored varieties.
This experiment was “clearly a failure,” said Dr. Michelle Perro, “as rates of obesity continued to rise, now affecting 1 in 4 to 1 in 5 children.”
Perro, an integrative pediatrician with more than 38 years of experience, applauded Thompson’s “recognition that food policies can be revisited and changed,” telling The Defender:
“Fat is good for children. It is one of the three macronutrients the body needs for growth, nervous system health, hormone production, prostaglandins, etc. Additionally, fat in the diet helps with the absorbable and key vitamins A, D, E, and K, and are a concentrated energy source.”
The Nutrition Coalition, a nonprofit and nonpartisan group that “aims to improve health in America by ensuring that the public receives evidence-based nutritional advice,” last month sent a letter to Thompson in support of the legislation.
The group noted that whole milk was removed from schools in 2010 “due to longtime fears that saturated fats cause heart disease” — but “those fears are now outdated, as they are not supported by the current science.”
Health writer James Capon tweeted his support for the amendment:
Drinking less milk – particularly less whole milk, has not helped slow increasing rates of obesity and diabesity in the US.
Why still ban its consumption in US schools? Are things about to change? (graph from @bigfatsurprise). pic.twitter.com/Mjfky7LiwP— Fat is our Friend (@fatisourfriend) July 12, 2023
‘We got it wrong on saturated fats’
According to the Nutrition Coalition, an “authoritative 2020 ‘State of the Art Review’” in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology found that there is “no robust evidence that current population-wide arbitrary upper limits on saturated fat consumption in the United States will prevent CVD [cardiovascular disease] or reduce Mortality.’”
“More than 20 other review papers by independent teams of scientists around the world have concluded the same,” the Nutrition Coalition added.
USDA’s 2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) found that the evidence linking saturated fat to heart disease was “strong.” However, a 2021 peer-reviewed investigation by outside scientists showed 88% of the studies reviewed by the DGA committee did not support that conclusion.
The scientists noted that of the 39 studies the DGA committee reviewed, 25 had null or negative findings — meaning saturated fats were found either to have no effect on cardiovascular disease or coronary heart disease, or were associated with lower risk.
Additionally, the DGA committee looked at 11 studies on saturated fatty acids and stroke. Of those 11 studies, 8 had null findings and 3 reported higher intake of saturated fatty acids was associated with a lower risk of stroke, the scientists pointed out.
Despite those findings, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), an independent consumer advocacy organization, on June 6 issued a statement against bringing whole milk back into schools, calling it “troublesome” that most U.S. children exceed the recommended limits on saturated fat and claiming that “too much saturated fat is linked to raises in LDL (‘bad’) cholesterol, a known cause of heart disease.”
Science journalist, author and founder of the Nutrition Coalition Nina Teicholz on June 12 pushed back against CSPI’s statement, noting that the committee for the current U.S. Dietary Guidelines found that there was “‘insufficient evidence’ to show that restricting saturated fats in childhood could prevent heart-disease or mortality in adulthood.”
Teicholz — who in her 2014 book, “The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet,” reviewed thousands of scientific studies and argued that the saturated fats in animal foods have been unfairly maligned based on weak, inconclusive evidence — said in a recent Substack post:
“Over the past 13 years, nearly 25 systematic reviews and meta-analyses, of both clinical trial and observational data, by independent teams of scientists have been published, and nearly all concluded that we got it wrong on saturated fats.
“The most rigorous clinical trial data show that these fats do not cause cardiovascular mortality or total mortality. Mortality (death) data is definitive. That should be the last word.”
Nonetheless, the USDA and the American Heart Association managed “simply to ignore these findings on mortality,” Teicholz said, “even when presented personally with these data by top scientists in the field … as reported in the BMJ.”
Meanwhile, the CSPI — which says it values “independence, scientific rigor, and transparency” — depicts the fight to get whole milk into schools as being led by “Big Dairy.”
But according to Teicholz, this claim lacks evidence:
“Interestingly, I’ve discovered that dairy behemoths like Danone make more money by skimming the fat off the milk and charging for it in other products, like ice cream, rather than selling the whole milk itself. These multinationals have shown themselves to be dis-interested in promoting whole milk.
“From what I can see, whole-milk advocacy seems mainly to be driven by people concerned about child health and farmers from the rapidly diminishing number of dairy farms in the U.S., 95% of which are family-owned.”
Teicholz questioned why CSPI would go to such lengths to keep whole milk out of schools. Part of the answer, she said, likely is that the group for decades has adamantly opposed saturated fats, so they are slow to acknowledge that current science no longer supports their stance:
“CSPI was so much against saturated fats that in the late 1980s, the group ran a major campaign in favor of replacing these harmful fats with trans fats, billed by the group’s newsletter as ‘healthy’ and ‘not a bad bargain’ for combatting heart disease (whoops! trans fats turned out to be even more of a heart-disease threat than saturated fats and were ultimately banned from the food supply).”
Studies ‘build the case for possible benefits’ of dairy fat
The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in November 2019 featured three peer-reviewed studies that called into question the narrative that the saturated fat in whole milk is harmful to people’s health.
The first study examined dairy fat consumption and the onset of diabetes in three cohorts of U.S. health professionals and found that higher dairy fat intake — when compared with calories from carbohydrates intake — was associated with lower diabetes risk in one cohort and not significantly associated with diabetes in the other two cohorts.
In an editorial about the study, Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, dean emeritus and distinguished professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University in Boston, wrote that the findings added to a “growing body of literature which call into question the soundness of conventional dietary recommendations to avoid dairy fat.”
The second study reported reductions in Type 2 diabetes were correlated with yogurt consumption and increases in cheese consumption, but could not form a conclusion on whole milk because few people in their study reported drinking it.
The third study looked at dairy consumption and death from cancer, cardiovascular disease and all causes in Italy.
The researchers found that compared with no milk consumption, moderate milk intake (≤200g or ∼6.5 ounces per day) was associated with around 25% lower mortality overall and 50% lower cardiovascular mortality. However, higher levels of milk consumption — either low-fat or whole milk — were not associated with lower mortality risk.
The three studies together, Mozaffarian said, provide “little support” for the notion that consuming dairy, or dairy fat, is “harmful,” but rather, “They continue to build the case for possible benefits.”
Americans more obese, unhealthy after push for low-fat diets
According to pediatrician Dr. Lawrence Palevsky, “Low-fat diets have been pushed by the health, medical and food industries for many decades.”
He said:
“Fat was demonized as a health hazard, and, as low-fat or non-fat items were pushed into American society, Americans became more overweight, obese and unhealthy. Why?
“Polyunsaturated fats (more inflammatory omega-6 seed, vegetable, corn and soybean oils than healthy anti-inflammatory omega-3 oils) were substituted for saturated fats, and processed bleached white sugars and high fructose corn syrup sugars were added to low-fat and non-fat foods to make them more palatable.
“These changes, all in what we were told were in the best interests of our health, only made Americans sicker and more overweight.”
Perro, too, believes the attack on fat and promotion of carbs stems from industry advocacy. The USDA food pyramid — originally designed by former USDA Director of Dietary Guidance and Nutrition Education Research Luise Light — was “hijacked and thwarted by the wheat and corn industries,” according to Perro.
Palevsky said he is not afraid of saturated fats in the diet. “What I do fear is the consumption of saturated fats from animal sources that are poorly fed with inappropriate and toxic diets, and those animals that are abused and poorly cared for in concentrated animal feed operations.”
These inappropriate diets and toxic exposures and living conditions, he said, make consuming the fat of the animals unhealthy:
“Most people are unaware that toxins are stored in animal fat tissue and that is what makes the saturated fats unhealthy for us when we consume milks and products from these animals.
“When animals are grass-fed and pasture-raised, and allowed to live in the wild, and we choose to cook them in a way that doesn’t destroy the quality of the fat, these saturated fats will generally not harm us. In fact, we may gain many benefits from consuming them.”
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Boiling Ocean Update: Florida Sea Temperature ‘Record’ Drops 15°F in just 48 Hours
BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JULY 30, 2023
Last week, the BBC reported that seawater along the tip of Florida had exceeded “hot tub” temperatures of 37.8°C (100°F) in recent days, “making it potentially the hottest ever measured”. The Guardian was in fine alarmist form noting that the Florida recording posed a threat to human food supplies and the livelihoods of those working in the water. Similar hysteria was to be found across most of the mainstream media. Alas, curiously missing from all this excitable coverage was a note that just 48 hours later the temperature plummeted to around 85°F.
The reading was taken from a buoy in Manatee Bay which is managed by the Everglades National Park, and located north of Key Largo. The upper left graph below shows that the temperature moved between 90-101°F on consecutive days, then fell away rapidly to around 85°F.
Examining the ‘record’ on the climate site Watts Up With That?, the former ecology lecturer Jim Steele observed that water temperatures were being driven by dynamics other than rising CO2. Steele noted that the Manatee Bay buoy measuring the water temperature was in a small embayment surrounded by landform, and this forms a natural hot tub. Low winds and a high pressure system further helped heat the bay, while muddy waters darkened the water enhancing solar heating.
Steele noted that the science of solar ponds has shown that when fresh water overlayed saltier water, heat gets trapped, and temperatures can be as much as 60°F hotter than the surface at depths between five and 10 feet.
To maintain the “crisis hoax”, Steele suggests it’s also important to ignore conflicting data. Southern Florida has several buoys, some measuring water temperature, some air, and some both. Just 56 miles to the south-west of Manatee Bay, the VAKF1 buoy measured water temperatures that were 10°F lower than Manatee Bay on those same days, as shown in the lower left graph (above), which then cooled to 86°F. Manatee Bay lacked air temperature data but VAKF1 reported a high air temperature of 91°F (lower right graph) which then cooled to the low 80°Fs, even dipping to 76°F. “These air temperatures don’t even approach being unprecedented,” said Steele.
Jim Steele has a lifetime’s experience in working for environmental educations projects. For 25 years he ran the Sierra Nevada Field Campus for San Francisco State University. As part of one monitoring project, he studied the effect of regional climate change on bird populations in the Sierra Nevada.
Mainstream media is now clearly in the grip of a climate catastrophisation mania where activists scour the world for any unusual weather event or recording. Normal reporting standards seem to have been abandoned in the rush to scare populations to comply with the collectivist Net Zero agenda. Top level politicians encourage widespread panic with Al Gore ranting about “boiling oceans”, while a deranged Antonio Guterres claimed earlier this week that we live in an age of “global boiling”. At a stroke, the UN Secretary General seems to have retired the Guardian’s ‘Global Heating’ invention. Last year’s Nobel Physics Laureate Dr. John Clauser says the climate narrative has corrupted his beloved science. Meanwhile, global boiling is promoted as global surface temperatures are retrospectively adjusted upwards by state-funded bodies, while the accurate satellite record shows a near nine-year pause. In the U.K., the Met Office happily uses corrupted station temperature data that the World Meteorology Organisation states has a error estimate of up to 2°C. The British weather service still seems inordinately proud of its 60-second U.K. heat record last year, despite evidence that three Typhoon jets were landing around the time on the runway next to the measuring devise at RAF Coningsby.
On Wednesday, the BBC’s Georgina Rannard wrote a story asking if the Gulf Stream could collapse by 2025? This is pure Day After Tomorrow sci-fi territory, promoting fears of catastrophic cooling in the northern hemisphere, with widespread impacts across the planet. Again the story was all over the mainstream media with USA Today reporting the Atlantic Ocean currents could soon collapse, adding, “how you may endure dramatic weather changes”.
The story originated from a recently published scientific paper and was pure clickbait for impressionable activists. The claims are based on limited observation evidence producing computer model projections. The authors state “with high confidence” that the change will occur between 2025-2095. However, the paper does contain this massive caveat, which went unreported in any of the media coverage: this prediction is only valid “under the assumption that the model is approximately correct, and we of course, cannot rule out that other mechanisms are at play, and thus, the uncertainty is larger”.
Needless to say, the story went around the world and was reported in blazing headlines. However, it seems eyebrows are starting to be raised about this sort of guff, even in alarmist circles. The climate alarmist’s climate alarmist is Professor Michael ‘Hockey Stick’ Mann of Penn University, but rerunning the Day After Tomorrow script was not wholly to his taste. According to USA Today, he said: “I’m not sure the authors bring much to the table other than a fancy statistical method. History is littered with flawed predictions based on fancy statistical methods; sometimes they’re too fancy for their own good.”
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
The fantasy explanations for excess deaths as panic sets in
By Guy Hatchard | TCW Defending Freedom | July 25, 2023
The writer is in New Zealand
On Saturday the Daily Express headlined a story ‘Experts call for urgent investigation as excess deaths spark “dangerous” theories’. UK excess deaths in 2023 have risen to levels commensurate with 2020 alpha variant deaths during the height of the pandemic, but the article admits that the 2023 excess is not due to Covid. Most concerning is the death toll in the 15-44 age group which exceeds 2020 and prior years, an age group which was mostly mildly affected by Covid.
As here in New Zealand, where our rates of excess death are measurably higher than the UK, the Westminster government is keeping quiet and looking the other way. Dr Charles Levinson, Medical Director of private GP service Doctorcall, said the ‘silence’ from the government was allowing conspiracy theories to flourish, including from anti-vaxxers, and added: ‘A refusal to openly discuss these statistics is an abdication of responsibility from parts of the scientific community [and the government], leading to an irreversible erosion of trust by parts of society.’ We agree.
So we are not conspiracy theorists when we warn that excess deaths are up, mainstream scientists agree with us, but they don’t want the jabs they pushed on people to be revealed as the cause, or even openly discussed – that could be very embarrassing.
Why aren’t governments investigating? It might be a fair guess that governments are well aware of excess deaths and afraid to investigate, because what limited data they have released suggests clearly that those asking questions about vaccine safety are right about the cause.
Excess deaths appear to be clustered around a range of cardiac events scientifically proven and acknowledged to be related to mRNA vaccines, and cancers suspected to be. The Boston Globe for example headlines ‘Rise in cancer among younger people worries and puzzles doctors’. Indian doctor Feruzi Mehta from Mumbai tweets that heart attack deaths among younger people now make up 15-20 per cent of the total, when it was just 1-2 per cent ten years ago.
Doctors like Mehta speaking up are risking de-registration. Therefore most others, faced by rising incidence of illness and death especially among the young, are remaining silent. However, some diehards are doubling down or even succumbing to the irrational.
Silence is one thing, but the NZ Prime Minister’s office is actively funding a disinformation project dedicated to discrediting anyone who asks questions about vaccine safety, labelling them violent extremists, paedophiles, satanists, anti-Semites, animal torturers, white supremacists, neo-Nazis and anti-transgender. All these wild and incredible accusations are explicitly made during the first 12 minutes of the first episode of a seven-part podcast series produced by RNZ called Undercurrent in which they interview government-funded disinformation experts. (Twelve minutes of this half-baked smear campaign was enough exposure for me to press the pause button.)
The problem with the RNZ podcast so far (aside from its lengthy episodes and unrelenting madness) is that it doesn’t actually discuss vaccine injuries or unprecedented rates of excess deaths (or even mention that there are such things). RNZ began putting the podcast series together more than ten months ago. Since that time it has become apparent that worrying excess death rates have persisted, but RNZ has apparently decided to avoid mentioning the problem. There is a possible reason for this: once you get into inventing causes of excess deaths you really do begin to sound mad.
For example, the NY Times suggests that extreme heat is causing hundreds of extra deaths. Alex Berenson, award-winning former NYT journalist, responds to this kind of reporting with ‘The New York Times has lost its mind. And by mind, I mean principles and understanding of the First Amendment (the right to free speech).’ In which he says the NYT has walked into the government censorship trap, cancelling those voicing concerns including himself.
A quick survey of other suggested causes of record excess deaths suggested by mainstream media ranges from the just possible marginal effect of lockdowns to the implausible alcohol consumption, loneliness, too much exercise, gardening, vacations, climate change and the really far out: ‘there is too much air’. One News in NZ tweeted that people in Mount Maunganui are dying of air pollution in large numbers, along with a picture of its pristine coastline. You can feel the panic setting in, can’t you? Something terrible is happening, but people are very afraid to face up to it.
Pro-vaccine advocate Professor Peter Hotez is recommending staying at home. He is warning against going to see the blockbuster Barbie or Oppenheimer movies at the cinema because you might bring Covid home with you. Incredibly he joins with RNZ in thinking that concern about vaccine safety is a form of anti-Semitism.
It doesn’t take much thought to realise that the underlying concern here is the increasingly noticeable high rate of excess deaths and the lack of any plausible explanation. All this is happening after mass vaccinations with a novel biotechnology drug. How long are we going to go on without acknowledging the elephant in the room or more especially tabulating how many among those dying are vaccinated or unvaccinated?
Just remember the paragraph with which we started this article. Scientists are now warning us that excess deaths are real and very concerning, not imaginary as our politicians and some uninformed medicos and media hacks are still pressing us to accept, against the evidence.
We are facing a real-life emergency. Our EDs and hospitals are overwhelmed. Young people are dying of conditions that used to mainly affect the elderly, but the media, the government, and the medical establishment want the subject to remain taboo. They are funding efforts to marginalise those asking questions, shooting the messenger rather than acknowledging the problem and searching for solutions. Time to wake up from the fantasy.
1,700+ demand retraction of influential COVID-19 origins paper after emails reveal authors doubted their own conclusions
By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 26, 2023
More than 1,700 people have signed a petition calling for the retraction of the seminal scientific correspondence paper, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” that claimed COVID-19 was “not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”
The paper — sometimes referred to as the “Proximal Origins” paper or the “Nature Medicine paper” — was published March 17, 2020, in Nature Medicine journal.
It was used by former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, and other federal public health officials in 2020 and beyond to dismiss the possibility of a lab leak.
Biosafety Now — a nongovernmental organization that “advocates for reducing numbers of high-level biocontainment laboratories and for strengthening biosafety, biosecurity, and biorisk management for research on pathogens” — on July 19 launched the petition, stating, “It is imperative that this clearly fraudulent and clearly damaging paper be removed from the scientific literature.”
Biosafety’s leadership team includes 27 experts in biomedicine, mathematics, public health, public policy, public advocacy, law and social science.
Fraudulent paper ‘played an influential role’ in driving official narrative
Bryce Nickels, Ph.D., co-founder of Biosafety Now and professor of genetics at Rutgers University, said the petition seeks “to expose a clear case of scientific fraud and misconduct that has had a major impact on public opinion and policy.”
Nickels told The Defender :
“The removal of ‘Proximal Origins’ from the scientific literature is the first step in a long process needed to repair the damage this paper has caused to public trust in science.”
According to the petition, “This paper played an influential role — indeed, the central role — in communicating the false narrative that science established that SARS-CoV-2 entered humans through natural spillover, and not through research-related spillover.”
The petition continues:
“Email messages and direct messages via the messaging program Slack among authors of the paper obtained under FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] or by the U.S. Congress and publicly released in full in July 2023 … show, incontrovertibly, that the authors did not believe the conclusions of the paper at the time the paper was written, at the time the paper was submitted for publication, and at the time the paper was published.”
The recently-released internal communications show the paper “was, and is, the product of scientific fraud and scientific misconduct,” the petition said.
Commenting on the petition, investigative journalist Paul Thacker said:
“The thing that’s really the most troubling, which is why it should be retracted … [is] the ghostwriting and the undue influence [of federal public health officials on the drafting of the paper], which we know from the emails by Francis Collins, by Anthony Fauci, and from Jeremy Farrar.”
Thacker — who noted that within only a few days the petition had already garnered more than 1,300 signatures and set the hashtag #RetractProximalOrigins trending on Twitter — told The Defender :
“These guys basically ordered up a piece of science — or some sort of publication — that they could then point to, which they all did afterwards, as definitive proof that this thing could not have come from the lab.
“The whole thing was orchestrated for political purposes. It has nothing to do with science.”
Little more than a ‘political piece of propaganda’
Thacker is a former fellow at the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University whose investigative writing has appeared in The New York Times, The BMJ, the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Washington Post.
He explained that weeks prior to the paper’s publication, Kristian Andersen, Ph.D. — one of the co-authors of the “Proximal Origins” paper — emailed Fauci and Collins a draft of the manuscript, thanking them for their “advice and leadership” on the paper.
Andersen also invited Fauci and Collins to comment and offer suggestions about the paper — but neither are mentioned in the acknowledgments section of the final version published by Nature Medicine. According to Thacker:
“Both Collins and Fauci then promoted the Nature Medicine paper as evidence of ‘independent science’ pointing against a possible lab accident — Collins in a post for the NIH Director’s blog that alleged the study left ‘little room’ for argument in favor of a lab accident, and Anthony Fauci in a White House press briefing.
“In both cases, neither Collins nor Fauci disclosed their involvement in orchestrating Andersen’s study. This last March, Congress released further emails showing that Fauci helped to orchestrate the Nature Medicine paper.”
Thacker pointed out that the paper — which “has been called everything from ‘research paper’ to ‘analysis’ to ‘study’” — was “really just correspondence” that was later turned into a “political piece of propaganda that people could then reference, which they did.”
Describing the recent about-face regarding the paper’s importance, Thacker said:
“Now the editor-in-chief of Nature Medicine is saying, ‘Oh, well, it was just a viewpoint … like he’s trying to dismiss what it was when they [federal public officials] used it for completely different purposes. They used it as some definitive piece of scientific research that put to rest any idea this thing could have come from a lab.
“Then we find out internally that none of them who wrote it believed that in the first place. … Quite frankly, from the very beginning, none of the scientific evidence in any direction means anything about how this pandemic started. It’s always been the internal documents and the money that have mattered more.”
Thacker added, “This entire drama and discussion has nothing to do with science. It has everything to do with corruption and a coverup.”
On July 25 Thacker tweeted:
Writers Curtis Schube and Gary Lawkowski in a July 24 op-ed for The Hill pointed out that when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention responded to the FOIA request to release Fauci’s “explosive” email showing his involvement with the Nature Medicine paper, the agency completely redacted the email.
Moreover, Thacker alleged that Andersen submitted false testimony at the July 11 hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, which is investigating the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Andersen’s allegation that Fauci and Collins were provided the paper only after it had been “accepted” and was in “proof” is false, Thacker said. “Emails impeach this portion of Andersen’s testimony,” he added.
Thacker also pointed out that The Intercept last week published newly revealed documents showing Andersen and his co-author — Tulane virologist Robert Garry, Ph.D. — both lied to Congress during the House hearing. The alleged lies covered the fact that both had pending federal grants controlled by Fauci — money that could have been used to influence their positions on the lab-leak theory.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s latest book, “The Wuhan Cover-up: How US Health Officials Conspired with the Chinese Military to Hide the Origins of COVID-19,” is due out in September. The book is available now for preorder. Kennedy is the founder and chairman on leave from Children’s Health Defense.
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
There’s No Need to Ban These Vaccines
By David Bell | Brownstone Institute | July 28, 2023
Individual sovereignty means that people can make their own choices, based on their own assessment of risk. It means that others can advise them, but not compel them. It is a basis for modern human rights and natural law.
Public health practitioners like to voice support for these principles, but also really feel good about telling people what to do, based on their expertise and superior knowledge. This is why fascism tends to have a strong healthcare component.
Covid Vaccines are Part of Life
Health bureaucrats have really found their feet during the Covid years, prohibiting children from going to school, families and friends from meeting, and people walking in more than one direction in supermarket aisles or sitting alone on park benches. They banned the use of safe repurposed medicines, claiming they were fit only for animals whilst continuing to use them for other human diseases. Then they mandated injections with novel pharmaceutical products, banning people from working or traveling without them. They have benefitted their sponsors but impoverish the majority with virtual impunity. They rightly feel important, the guardians of society.
But all is not well. While medical fascism has paid well for three years, the public are starting to show signs of lack of trust – perhaps they are sick of being told what is best for them. They may be starting to think they are best placed to assess their own risks and priorities, and act accordingly.
Growing mistrust may stem from a realization that few of the Covid response measures seem to have brought much benefit. They successfully promoted poverty whilst transferring wealth upwards, disproportionately benefiting those promoting the response. They had old people locked up in solitary confinement, so they died alone rather than with family. They declared that those calling for informed consent are a threat to society, and children a threat to adults. Perhaps mistrust is justified.
Now many are proposing a ban on Covid-19 vaccines. They are convinced, on reasonable evidence, that these novel pharmaceuticals probably do net harm overall. They note the unprecedented rate of adverse events associated with the vaccines, from rising mortality to falling birth rates. They worry about mRNA vaccines concentrating in ovaries and adrenal glands, and crossing the placenta to unborn babies, with no long-term data on safety. Many who were standing for freedom of choice regarding ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine are now backing this movement.
Understanding safety and effectiveness of the Covid-19 vaccines is complicated, as the initial randomized clinical trials were damaged by evidence of incompetence and lack of transparency. The manufacturers themselves were unable to show all-cause benefits. Trials for carcinogenicity and genotoxicity, normally mandatory for the genetic therapeutic class to which these substances belong, were also avoided simply by changing the name from genetic therapeutic to ‘vaccine.’ This renaming had required a broadening of the definition of vaccine, as mRNA must co-opt the person’s cellular machinery, like a medicine, in order to eventually stimulate an immune response.
Pharma in general, including these vaccine manufacturers, have appalling histories of fraud. This is shaky ground for trusting a new class of pharmaceuticals, and considerable propaganda and censorship have been required to project a positive image.
However, for better or worse, Covid-19 vaccines do now exist. Lots of people have had them and lots of people, for reasons best known to themselves, continue to request boosters. The vast majority are clearly not dying. People also skydive, go rock climbing and base jumping, risky activities but with generally non-mortal outcomes. While a marketed pharmaceutical is not quite equivalent to a cliff face, both carry inherent risk and theoretical benefits. Anyone partaking of them should be fully aware of the risks and provide informed consent.
The Right to Choose
Truly informed consent is one of the most unpopular ideas in medicine. The idea that the health professional is there merely to inform a patient’s sovereign, independent decision is difficult for a self-entitled profession to accept. Most believe they have a right to limit the public’s freedom when they deem it necessary. While many on both sides of the Covid vaccine debate act with good intent (and sometimes switch sides accordingly), their positions on mandates or bans require that governments use authoritarian approaches to implement public health policy.
As this article will upset well-meaning people, my argument needs further explanation. A belief common to those for and against the Covid response holds that people need to be protected from toxic substances and from malfeasance by doctors or pharmaceutical companies. It assumes that health professionals have a special place in society, shielding the public from areas where they lack knowledge and therefore cannot make sound judgment.
These arguments are reasonable, and in a world where all people live by high standards of integrity and ethics they might represent the safest approach. Unfortunately none of us seem able to infallibly uphold such standards. As 1930s Germany showed, and the Covid response reiterated, the public health establishment is particularly vulnerable to influence and abuse by political or corporate sponsors.
While a penchant for authoritarianism is well-established within medicine, the inclination to ban pharmaceuticals is relatively new. The doctor-patient relationship previously determined use based on context and history, informed (one hoped) by an honest regulatory system. Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine would have been managed similarly to occasionally deadly penicillin; available at the doctor’s discretion with the patient’s agreement.
Many in the West are getting fat on carbohydrates. However, we don’t ban sugar, but we do encourage the public to eat less, because it’s slowly killing them. We ban smoking where it directly affects others, but don’t ban people from taking risks when alone or among those who consent. Some would like to, but there are always people who wish to ban books, limit free speech, and impose their preferences on others. Decent societies should tolerate them but not indulge them.
Who Should be in Charge?
The primacy of decision-making within the doctor-patient relationship was based on recognition that illness is not just about a virus. It is the result of these within a body with particular genetic makeup, past exposure history, and underlying immune competence. Its severity further depends on the cultural context and value system of the sick person. Lastly but most importantly, it was based on the principle that the patient is a free, independent being, with primary rights over their own body. A doctor could refuse to perform a requested service, but could not force one. Insanity was the only exception. This is fundamental to medical ethics.
Medical practice also traditionally assumed that the doctor has a responsibility to help the patient, or a requirement to cause no harm. This requires expertise and may involve refusal to do all that a patient requests; the doctor is an advisor of the individual and not their subordinate. For this relationship to work, it must be free of conflict of interest and provided with reliable evidence and opinion. Various professional governing boards are supposed to support this process, so these boards and regulators must also be free of conflict of interest.
Public health should be no different – public health practitioners have a role in providing evidence-based guidance to help populations make decisions on health in their own interest. But in the end, the population’s values – cultural and religious – and its weighing of this advice against other priorities it faces, will determine the response. Within this community response, each sovereign individual has a right to decide their participation and actions.
The Nuremberg Code was written to address the harm caused when these principles are abrogated, even if ‘for the greater good.’ Opposing them requires a belief that one person should have rights over another. This may manifest as preventing those considered less desirable from giving birth, destroying an ethnic group considered inferior, studying untreated disease outcomes at Tuskegee, or coercing vaccination as a criteria to earn a living. Like any other group, the health professions simply have no right to impose their will on others. The historic results of ignoring this are obvious.
Market Forces are Preferable to Self-Entitlement
Here we are in 2023 with the Covid vaccines established on the market, amidst allegations of fraud and misrepresentation of data, poor safety and efficacy, and a lack of clear overall benefit. Their target illness is confined in severity to a small segment of the population, nearly all of whom now have good post-infection immunity. The vaccines do not stop or substantially reduce transmission, and may over time increase it.
Mass vaccination in this context is obviously a flawed policy. Mandating a non-transmission blocking vaccine for immune people at minimal intrinsic risk could only be driven by gross ignorance or corporate profit. The use of behavioral psychology to instill fear and the use of coercion are clearly unethical by any modern ethical standard. The many people who have lost their jobs and homes, and were publicly vilified for standing on principle and refusing to submit to such practice, have a clear right to redress. Those who committed fraud should have to answer for it. Those who abandoned the precautionary principle and informed consent should be required to justify their actions and their right to continue to practice.
None of this should remove the right of the public to make their own decisions on accessing these new genetic vaccines as a currently marketed commodity. Where expected harm clearly outweighs benefit, no medical practitioner should offer it, just as it would be inappropriate to offer Thalidomide to a pregnant woman with nausea. Where there are plausible grounds for overall benefit, if should be available as an option. These individuals can decide, based on the information available. While this group of potential beneficiaries appears diminishingly small, it remains conceivable that elderly obese diabetics with no prior Covid infection may benefit. Market forces can then decide whether the product is viable, rather than authoritarian dictates.
In the meantime, the Covid vaccines must pass full regulatory approval as a valid, reasonably safe product. This opens a can of worms, as most were only accepted under emergency use authorization (EUA) and the companies aborted their Phase 3 clinical trials, normally required for approval, by vaccinating the control arms. Valid approval would require submission of data at least confirming overall benefit in people who remain at high risk for Covid. Large trials involving non-immune people would now seem impossible.
A Way Out
To fix the health and societal disaster of the past three years, the public does not need more dictates from the self-appointed medical guardians who caused it. Too many have proven unworthy and incompetent. The problem is deeper than the availability or withdrawal of a vaccine. Public health professionals have forgotten the primacy of individual freedom – of the right of each person to set their own priorities and manage their own bodies. The public are sovereign, not the doctors who wish to lead or mislead them.
With reducing interest in vaccine boosters, it appears the public may solve the vaccine access issue themselves. A free flow of information and genuine informed consent will probably accelerate this. So would a responsible attitude from medical journals and regulatory agencies, if they can emerge from the yoke of their sponsors.
These are problems caused by the public health establishment. This establishment should reform itself, and never again presume it has the right, or the character, to dictate to others. The public will make mistakes, but these will pale beside the mess the health professions have already created.
David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. He is a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), Programme Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland, and Director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, WA, USA.
Featured Video
Iran is (probably) collecting tolls, and why Asia stopped buying oil from the US
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
The Great Recycling Scam
By Dr. Vernon Coleman – 21st Century Wire – September 2, 2022
Recycling was introduced, worldwide, as a tool to teach citizens to become compliant.
Forcing citizens to sort their rubbish into up to nine separate bags or boxes every week had absolutely nothing to do with ‘saving the planet’ and everything to do with teaching citizens (through a mixture of fines and shame) to behave ‘responsibly’ i.e. to do as they were told without looking too closely at the rationale of what they were being told to do.
The recycling never had anything to do with protecting the planet, of course. Most of the rubbish sorted, washed and collected in the UK was taken abroad, by lorry or ship or train, and burnt or dumped. It was, quite simply, impractical and not cost effective to recycle the material that had been collected. And, of course, collecting the sorted rubbish involved massive costs in terms of cash and pollution.
Today, the recycling business has reached an apogee of lunacy. Councils introduce ever more complex rules and fees. They refuse to take away much of the waste that is collected. And those wanting to take their rubbish to a ‘recycling’ centre will probably have to make an appointment and answer a host of questions.
It is no surprise that fly-tipping has become a major problem. The biggest causes of plastic in the sea are dumped fishing gear and plastic waste (much of it officially designated as recycled) which has been dumped by ships.
The good news, however, is that in Britain, recycling rates are falling. More and more people have become aware that the whole recycling movement was just another piece of manipulative trickery.
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Weaponized Journalism: 2021 Sayer Ji Interview with NPR
- Beyond Netanyahu: what Israel’s election means for Palestinians
- Lithuania plans universal conscription
- Lies, Damn Lies, and Ukraine News
- Financial Times rejects Nordic demands to correct Putin call story – media
- The Case for Less Unity in Europe
- Ukraine expands minority rights under EU pressure – but Russians remain excluded
- Albania takes anti-riot crackdown cue from France
- The interest of the House of Rothschild in Ukraine
- Pentagon fires top military planner
- If Americans Knew
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
- No Tricks Zone
- Germany’s Green Energy Transition Becoming Increasingly Expensive…Another 6 Trillion Euros!
- Sudden Stratospheric Warming, Powerful El Niño Combination May Lead To Extreme Europe Cold, Energy Crisis!
- Two New Studies Find Thwaites Glacier Melt Cannot Be Driven By Human Activity Or A Warming Ocean
- E-Cars Reduce CO2 Emissions By Only 41% Compared To Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles
- Predictions Made By Renowned Climate Professor Over Past Decades Have Been Proven To Be Poor
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
