A highly viral tweet by “Corona Realism” is making the following claim: “Something really odd is going on: In Europe we are seeing surges at many places where most of the population has already been vaccinated. At the same time, the 15 least vaccinated countries don‘t seem to face any problem. At some point, denying this problem will get painful.”
In reality, the “least vaccinated countries” shown above are simply the Eastern European countries, whose infection cycle has always been delayed compared to Western Europe. They already missed the first spring wave in 2020, which led to the notorious misinterpretation that they were protected by (useless) face masks. Back then, the chief pathologist of Bulgaria famously claimed that covid was a hoax; today, Bulgaria has one of the highest covid death rates in Europe. Vaccination rates in Eastern Europe are lower than in Western Europe primarily for economic reasons.
To make the deception work, “Corona Realism” had to leave out some highly vaccinated countries in Eastern Europe (notably Hungary, Poland and Czechia), whose infection rates are as low as in the rest of Eastern Europe; and he had to leave out the many countries with a low vaccination rate severely affected by Delta, notably Russia as well as many Asian and even African countries. In fact, in many countries with a low vaccination rate, Delta covid deaths have reached an all-time record level.
In conclusion, while many “public health experts” got almost everything wrong during the covid pandemic, skeptics should remain careful not to fall for some of the same fallacies.
The vulnerable are out in force this morning. Today is July 19th. It’s Freedom Day apparently. The government has removed the legal requirement to wear a mask and to maintain social distancing. The vulnerable are worried.
BBC Breakfast and SKY News have been speaking to vulnerable people this morning. These are people with various illnesses that have left them immunosuppressed. They’re not happy about opening up, at least the ones on tv and radio this morning.
One young woman who has aplastic anemia, told SKY’s Kay Burley that the removal of restrictions puts her in danger. She said that people who ditch their masks today, are selfish.
Last week, a man called in to LBC radio to say that his wife was recovering from cancer and that she was vulnerable. He said that as she needed to use the underground to commute, people should continue to wear face coverings on her behalf and on behalf of other vulnerable people.
I had a heated argument with a wheelchair-bound woman in May of last year. Don’t laugh. It wasn’t my finest hour. The woman has cerebral palsy. She works for a local company. I like her, but we got into it over lockdown.
As she saw it, I had a moral responsibility to stay indoors as much as I could tolerate, to lessen her chances of catching covid-19. She said that I was selfish and irresponsible for doing as I liked and not wearing a mask.
I asked her if she was prepared to engage in a bit of quid pro quo and help me pay my mortgage. She looked at me as if I’d gone mad. Game over. By the way, when I say heated, I don’t mean shouting and swearing. It was a robust exchange.
I bet you that most so-called vulnerable folk couldn’t name their next door neighbours if you asked them. I bet you their eyes would glaze over if you asked them when was the last time they had a neighbour over for dinner.
Funny that isn’t it? Those who are demanding that strangers turn their lives upside-down so that they can feel protected, most probably couldn’t give a shit about the people who live around them.
It’s crazy when you really think about it. How dare you ask people to commit financial suicide and incidentally, make themselves physically and mentally unwell, so that you can feel safe? How bloody dare you insist that people have a potentially deadly injection just because you can’t?
If you want to live in perpetual fear and choose to view your fellow citizens as biological weapons, then have at it. That’s your personal choice. But I won’t indulge your fantasy.
Neither will I commit self harm to assuage your irrational fears. I owe you nothing. I have no obligation to you whatsoever.
I’m a very good neighbour. My philosophy is do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I turn my music off at 8pm. I turn down the telly. Our dog is trained, meaning that she is quiet. I’m out and about at dawn, when most people are in bed. I don’t make a sound.
I do not engage in any activity that has a negative impact on others. I am selfless by nature.
But I will not wear a facemask in public, just in case there is an immunosuppressed person nearby. Nor will I confine myself to my home. That is preposterous. I accept no responsibility for your wellbeing whatsoever, the exception being when I am behind the wheel of my car.
If you’re unfortunate enough to be so ill that you are vulnerable to infection, you have my genuine sympathy. But tough shit Paddy. Those are the breaks. That’s life. You and you alone are responsible for your health. If you think it’s a bit too risky to go outside or jump on a train, you act accordingly. But don’t expect me to walk on eggshells for the rest of my life. It ain’t a rehearsal you know.
Pure gold is all I can say for Episode 110 – that’s what this conversation is!
The New York Times, WSJ and all of the media have mused about the origins of this virus – well here we explain the actual science and data, and what IT actually tells us 🙂
NOTE: My extensive research and interviewing/video/sound editing and much more does require support – please consider helping if you can with monthly donation or one-off payment – simply use the following link: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=69ZSTYXBMCN3W
It was 40 years ago that Israel conducted the first skyjacking of a civilian airliner. On Dec. 12, 1954, Israeli warplanes forced a Syrian Airways Dakota passenger craft carrying four passengers and five crewmen to land at Lydda airport inside Israel.1 The passengers were interrogated for two days before international protests, including strong complaints from Washington, finally convinced Israel to release the plane and its passengers.2
Moshe Sharett, who as Israel’s foreign minister had to explain the incident to the international community, was privately appalled by it. He recorded in his diary: “I have no reason to doubt the truth of the factual affirmation of the U.S. State Department that our action was without precedent in the history of international practice. What shocks and worries me is the narrow-mindedness and the short-sightedness of our military leaders. They seem to presume that the state of Israel may—or even must—behave in the realm of international relations according to the laws of the jungle.”3
The purpose of the unprecedented skyjacking, according to Sharett, was Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan’s ambition “to get hostages in order to obtain the release of our prisoners in Damascus.”4 The reference was to an incident that had occurred four days earlier. Five Israeli soldiers were captured retrieving tapping devices on Syrian telephone lines on the Golan Heights inside Syria. Israel expressed outrage at the imprisonment of the soldiers but Syria refused to release them. 5
Israeli passions were riled even further the next month when one of the Israeli soldiers, Uri Ilan, son of a former Mapam member of parliament, committed suicide in jail on Jan. 13, 1955. Although the Israeli press loudly charged Syria with torture, an examination by the United Nations showed “no signs of physical ill-treatment.”6
But still Syria refused to release the prisoners, pointing out that Israel was holding Syrian civilians prisoner. The impasse contributed to an even graver incident toward the end of the year. On Dec. 11, 1955, Israel sent two paratroop battalions backed by artillery and mortar batteries under the command of Ariel Sharon, later Israel’s defense minister, against Syrian military posts at Buteiha Farm and Koursi near the northeast shore of Lake Tiberias.
It was Israel’s largest military raid inside Syria up to that time and resulted in 56 Syrian deaths, including three women, and nine wounded. Significantly Israel also took 30 prisoners, whom it later used as hostages to exchange for the four Israelis held by Syria.7 The United States expressed its “shock” at the raid and supported a resolution by the United Nations Security Council that unanimously condemned Israel for its “flagrant violation” of the armistice agreement.8
French Ambassador to the U.N. Herv Alphand observed that the condemnation resolution of Israel was “the strongest ever passed by the council.”9 It was the fifth time the council had condemned, censured, called on and otherwise passed resolutions critical of Israel.
Israel insisted the raid was simply in retaliation for Syrian troops firing at an Israeli patrol boat on Lake Tiberias the previous day, in which there had been no casualties. But the explanation was widely disbelieved. Canadian General E.L.M. Burns, the chief of staff of the United Nations Truce Supervisory Organization, bluntly wrote:
“No one with any knowledge of military affairs would believe that such an elaborate, coordinated attack had not been planned well before, and probably rehearsed. Certainly it was not improvised in a few hours…. The reasons given by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ statement were only an excuse, and not a very good one.”10
In fact, like most major actions in the Middle East, there was far more than just retaliation behind the raid. At the time, it was widely suspected that Israel’s main motive in launching the heavy attack was primarily to punish Syria for keeping the four Israeli soldiers prisoners. But it turned out that was just one of the reasons. Israeli historian Benny Morris reports that primarily the attack was meant as a provocation to goad Egypt into attacking Israel and thus start a war. “This,” wrote Morris, “was the thinking behind the strike.”11
The timing was dictated by two events during the previous three months: Egypt and Syria had signed a mutual defense pact on Oct. 20, 1955, and on Sept. 27 Egypt had announced its historic “Czech” arms deal, shocking Israel by the fact that Egypt was about to start receiving massive quantities of Soviet weapons. In the event, Egypt did not respond to the attack on the Golan and Israel had to wait nearly another year before taking on itself the burden of attacking Egypt to start a war.
ANOTHER MOTIVE
There was also another motive behind the attack. It had to do with Israel’s long- term policy to establish exclusive control over Lake Tiberias, the biblical Sea of Galilee, which lay within Israeli territory, and the three demilitarized zones (DMZs) that lay along the Israeli-Syrian frontier in the Jordan Valley.
Palestinians and Syrians insisted on fishing in the lake and were a constant source of friction, especially during mid-November to mid-April, which marked the official fishing season. Israel denied Arabs had any rights to fish there, citing the fact that the Mandate governments over Palestine and Syria had agreed in the 1920s that the frontier followed the east shore of the lake at a distance set back 10 meters parallel to the water.
However, the Arabs countered that under Anglo-French agreements of Feb. 3, 1922, June 23, 1923 and Feb. 2, 1926, Syrians were given “the same fishing and navigation rights on Lakes Huleh and Tiberias… as the inhabitants of Palestine” and also the right to “enjoy grazing, watering and cultivations rights” and to “cross the frontier freely.”12
Nonetheless, Israel insisted on keeping Arab fishermen away from the lake, by force if necessary. It further lacerated relations with Syria by chasing Palestinian farmers out of the DMZs near the lake in violation of the truce of 1949, which held the farmers should be allowed to remain. Israel’s forceful takeover of the DMZs left the Palestinian farmers and fishermen denied access to their fields or fishing grounds embittered and angry. A later UNTSO chief of staff, Norwegian General Odd Bull, who served during the 1960s, wrote:
“I imagine that a number of those evicted settled somewhere in the Golan Heights and that their children have watched the land that had been in their families for hundreds of years being cultivated by Israeli farmers. From time to time they opened fire on these farmers. That, of course, was a violation of the armistice agreement, though I could not help thinking that in similar circumstances Norwegian peasants would almost certainly have acted in the same way. In the course of time all the Arab villages [in the DMZs] disappeared.”13
So too did the Arab fishermen. In 1967 Israel conquered the whole area, including the Golan Heights, and chased out all of the Arabs. It is Israel’s continuing occupation of this land that today remains the major impediment to peace between Israel and Syria.
Recommended Reading:
Bull, Odd, War and Peace in the Middle East: The Experiences and Views of a U.N. Observer, London, Leo Cooper, 1976.
Burns, Lt. Gen. E. L. M., Between Arab and Israeli, New York, Ivan Obolensky, 1962.
Chomsky, Noam, The Fateful Triangle, Boston, South End Press, 1983.
*Chomsky, Noam, Pirates & Emperors: International Terrorism in the Real World, Brattleboro, VT, Amana Books, 1986.
Khouri, Fred J., The Arab-Israeli Dilemma, Syracuse, NY, Syracuse University Press, 1985.
Morris, Benny, The Birth of the Palestine Refugee Problem, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1987.
*Neff, Donald, Warriors at Suez: Eisenhower Takes America Into the Middle East, Brattleboro, VT, Amana Books, 1988.
Rokach, Livia, Israel’s Sacred Terrorism: A Study Based on Moshe Sharett’s Personal Diary and Other Documents, Belmont, MA, Association of Arab-American University Graduates, Inc., 1980.
Von Horn, Carl, Soldiering for Peace, New York, David McKay Company, Inc., 1967.
Notes:
1 New York Times, 12/13/54.
2 Associated Press, New York Times, 12/15/54.
3 Rokach, Israel’s Sacred Terrorism, pp. 20-21. For an analysis of Sharett’s lengthy diaries, see “Secrets of State: An Analysis of the Diaries of Moshe Sharett,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Autumn 1980, pp. 35-57.
4 Chomsky, Pirates and Emperors, p. 84.
5 Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, p. 366.
6 Burns, Between Arab and Israeli, p. 109.
7 Ibid., p. 108; Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, p. 366n.
8 Resolution 111. The text is in Tomeh, George J., United Nations Resolutions on Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: 1947-1974, Washington, DC, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1975, p. 137; the text of the U.S. statement is in Boudreault, Jody and Eric Fortin, U.S. Official Statements: The Golan Heights, Washington, DC, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1993, pp. 27-28.
9 Neff, Warriors for Jerusalem, 118.
10 Burns, Between Arab and Israeli , p. 108.
11 Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, p. 364.
12 Khouri, The Arab-Israeli Dilemma, p. 194.
13 Bull, War and Peace in the Middle East, pp. 50-51.
Donald Neff is author of the Warriors trilogy on U.S.-Middle East relations and of the unpublished Middle East Handbook, a chronological data bank of significant events affecting U.S. policy and the Middle East on which this article is based. His books are available through the AET Book Club.
FACT checkers at the BBC, Reuters and Snopes have been busy debunking the Covid vaccine ‘magnet challenge’. Social media including TikTok, Facebook and Instagram have been awash with videos showing people with magnets sticking to the exact spot on their arms where they had received a Covid jab. See some independently verified examples here.
All three companies went to great lengths to explain why a magnet cannot possibly cling to your skin, without experimenting on a single vaccinated person to see what would happen.
BBC fact checker Jack Goodman spoke to many who said the magnet challenge worked for them and ‘were genuinely curious as to why’. He didn’t provide them with answers; instead he focused on one TikTok prankster called Emily who admitted she’d licked a magnet as a joke and stuck it to her arm.
It has been left to independent associations, doctors and journalists to test the phenomenon. Not On The Beeb founder and award-winning director Mark Playne tracked down a woman called Lorraine whose Instagram post of a magnet sticking to the Pfizer vaccine site on her left arm went viral. The fact checkers said the video was a fake but none of them bothered to visit her and test for themselves.
Playne told me: ‘Lorraine’s son Carl demonstrated the spot of magnetism on his mother. Even though I was inches away, I asked Carl to take the camera so I could try for myself. Feeling a magnet being tugged out of your hand, by a subtle yet defined magnetic force from under the skin of a living human being, is quite a shock.
‘Sensing the magnet being repelled and trying to flip so that the correct polarity was in contact with the skin was mind-blowing.’
A group called the European Forum for Vaccine Vigilance (EFVV) representing 25 European countries, took the magnet challenge to the Belle-Étoile shopping centre in Strassen, Luxembourg. The organisation represents over 100,000 medical professionals and scientists, from pro-vaccine choice groups, who are fighting for the 258 million people in Europe who have no freedom of choice when it comes to vaccination.
EFVV randomly interviewed 30 vaccinated and 30 unvaccinated people between June 1 and June 5. There were 15 men and 15 women in each group.
Their published report says: ‘In the non-vaccinated group, the number of people showing attraction to the magnet was zero. In the vaccinated group, 29 of the 30 individuals showed attraction to the magnet. The magnet adhered to their skin without difficulty.
‘Two individuals, a nurse who was one of the first to be vaccinated, and a financial analyst, showed abnormal electric field emission. It seems that people who were vaccinated earlier are more electromagnetic than people who were vaccinated more recently. The magnet adheres faster and holds better than in freshly vaccinated people.’
Some participants were shocked and upset at the results. EFVV said: ‘It was an extremely disorienting experiment for some. One lady cried and said that she had not wanted to be vaccinated but was forced to by her employer because she was in contact with customers.’
The obvious questions are: what is in the vaccine to cause magnetic pull and what are the consequences for the magnetised?
A former GP who prefers to remain anonymous hypothesises, and she stresses that it is a hypothesis, that graphene oxide, a synthetic form of carbon which is being studied as a vaccine delivery method, is the culprit. Graphene oxide is magnetic.
Dr T said: ‘They want to say it is crazy for us to consider that such a thing could be in the vaccinations and yet the literature points to research being exactly in this area for years. And we have magnetic people after vaccination.’
None of the Covid vaccines used in the UK (Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna) lists graphene oxide as an ingredient and all three companies deny its inclusion. So far, independent researchers have not managed to obtain empty vaccine vials for analysis, although international lawyer Reiner Fuellmich, whose Coronavirus Investigative Committee Corona Committee Foundation (corona-ausschuss.de) is gathering evidence surrounding the pandemic response, says some vials they have tested contain graphene oxide while others do not.
Chemical engineering researchers from Monash University, Melbourne, have studied whether superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs) could improve the efficiency of vaccine gene delivery, and Chinese scientists have studied graphene oxide for the same purpose.
The Graphene Flagship Project, a collaboration of 150 academic and research groups in 20 countries, is studying the safety of graphene oxide for many uses, including vaccines. The tests began in 2013 in the lab, and in animals, and are ongoing. The researchers warn that ‘there needs to be sound, science-based assessment of the potential impact on human health’ after they found it settled in the lungs, causing asbestosis-like illness. It also settled in the liver, caused cell death, mitochondrial dysfunction, changed the diversity in the gut and caused blood clots in mice after 15 minutes. We know that one of the few adverse reactions that has been accepted by the establishment are blood clots that can form in the brain and body, known as vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT). Last week AstraZeneca and Johnson and Johnson both announced they are studying their vaccines to see whether they can be modified to reduce blood clots.
Dr T, who has tested the magnet challenge on vaccine recipients herself, believes that graphene oxide is in the vaccine, and that it crosses the blood/brain barrier (BBB). The BBB is there to protect the brain from toxins, but scientists have been trying to breach it to treat diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. They discovered that polyethylene glycol (PEG), which is in the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA covid vaccines, can cross it and so can polysorbate 80, which is in the AstraZeneca vaccine. Both substances could allow graphene oxide through too.
Dr T thinks graphene oxide could be the ingredient affecting the 12 cranial nerves emerging from the mid-line structure in the brain and the brain stem. These nerves govern our mood, heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, digestion, sight, taste, pain, touch, hearing, balance, muscles inside the major organs, neck muscles and speech.
She said that damaged cranial nerves could account for the many serious neurological and physical adverse reactions reported to the Medicines Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the government body responsible for regulating all medicines in the UK.
The Yellow Card Scheme to July 9 shows 100,564 reports of headache and 9,649 of migraine. Eye disorders are 16,980 with blindness at 327. Psychiatric disorders stand at 20,856 and hallucinations at 1,183. Facial paralysis, including Bell’s Palsy, are 1,310, nervous system disorders 212,708, strokes and haemorrhages 2,207, Guillain-Barré syndrome 377, tremors 10,565 and dizziness 30,715. Pulmonary embolism, deep vein thrombosis, seizures, paralysis, nosebleeds, all types of haemorrhage, vertigo, and tinnitus account for another 23,907 reactions. That’s on top of the 1,440 reported deaths.
Maddie de Garay, 12, from Cincinnati, Ohio, who took part in Pfizer’s vaccine trial for 12-15-year-olds, suffered a serious adverse reaction with neurological and physical symptoms that include seizures, loss of bladder control, loss of memory and heavy menstrual cycles. She is now in a wheelchair and she is fed through a tube.
Dr T said: ‘Maddie’s mum Stephanie said her symptoms worsened after she received an MRI scan. MRI stands for magnetic resonance imaging. If there are magnetic nanoparticles in the vaccine, and someone has an MRI those microscopic particles will be attracted to the scanner – it’s the biggest magnet you can get. They will act like shrapnel, ripping through the brain, damaging everything in their path.’
If patients who believe they are vaccine-damaged experience worsening symptoms post MRI, that should surely be a red flag for doctors?
Brighter Future – Oil on Linen – 40×72 inches.
A child assists her father in blocking the New Normal. If left unobstructed the New Normal would shut out their pathway to a brighter future.
The worldwide push towards authoritarianism under the pretext of a faux pandemic is coercing nearly every aspect of society into its respective pen, which means that nearly everyone is in a position to become a wrench in the gears.
This is what inspired me to create this painting; it celebrates the revolutionary spirit being demonstrated by all manner of people, from grandmothers refusing to shop at mask enforcing stores, to parents exploring alternative ways to educate their children rather than letting them be muzzled and injected by the state.
To represent the New Normal crowd on the right and left of the painting, I elaborated on an idea that I established in an earlier painting Safe and Sanitized with skulls gagged by facemasks and held by their handcuffed hands (lockdowns), plus vaccine syringes stuck half haphazardly into them.
The building towering over the crowd on the left is Building 21, one of the CDC’s most iconic structures in their headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia.
On the right is the United States Capitol Building, with the bronze Statue of Freedom that crowns the Capitol dome having been replaced in my painting by a statue of the Caduceus (serpents twined around a winged rod ). The Caduceus is an ancient symbol with various interpretations including commerce, though used in the USA as a symbol of medicine. Here it represents freedom displaced for “medicine” with the added irony that “medicine” is really just business and is actually being represented by a commerce symbol.
Also on the right is the ancient symbol of medicine still widely used, The Rod of Asclepius (a single serpent twined around a staff ). Here the serpent rises above its “patients” which it terrorizes, and the knob on the top of the rod is a human skull impaled on a large vaccine syringe. This rendition of The Rod of Asclepius more accurately captures the spirit of modern medicine.
The landscape that can be seen through the center is set both in autumn and in the evening to emphasize that it is the past, which is why our protagonists cannot go back that way.
They must push back against the New Normal, thereby maintaining open a doorway to a brighter future.
Jordan Henderson lives in the Northwest of the United States. He works in oil paints, and charcoals. A portfolio of his works can be viewed at either of his websites: Original Paintings – Fine Art Prints.
There has been a longstanding concern about blatant bias at the BBC, not least in matters of climate change. This certainly dates back at least to January 2006, when they held a seminar of “top scientific experts” to advise them on climate change. The BBC fought tooth and nail to conceal the identity of these experts, but it was subsequently discovered that they were not experts at all, but the usual collection of green lobbyists.
Ever since, the BBC’s coverage of global warming has been woefully one sided and at times inaccurate,
This year they have been publishing a monthly feature, Then and Now, purportedly showing how climate has been changing in a warming world.
One article looked at the recent drought in California, while another claimed that the Victoria Falls had dried up. Both implied that climate change was to blame, with the usual weasel words that while one weather event cannot be linked to climate change, “scientists” say that such events are likely to get worse with global warming.
However both stories omitted crucial information, which would have shown such claims to be nonsensical and untruthful.
California, for instance, has had droughts in the 20thC every bit as bad as the current one. Moreover the official data clearly shows megadroughts there were much worse for much of the last thousand years or so. In short, California is a land of drought. The modest amount of warming there since the Little Ice Age has altered nothing.
The BBC claims about the Victoria Falls were even more absurd. For a start, the Falls did not run dry; every dry season lake levels drop. As the Zambian side is at a higher elevation, the Falls there dry up, while continuing at the other end. This happens every year, but the BBC deceitfully misled readers by showing a split image comparing Jan 2019 with Dec 2019. In January every year water levels rise sharply, and Jan 2020 was no exception.
It is certainly true that there was a drought in the region in 2019, and water levels were lower than average. But the Zambesi River Authority say that there have been six occasions since 1914 when water levels were lower, the worst being in 1995.
Just as with California, the BBC have picked on a drought, but ignored all of the data showing that they are both natural events, with no evidence that droughts are getting more severe or common.
This sort of misreporting of the Victoria Falls is of extreme concern to Zambia’s tourist industry and local businesses, who are naturally worried that tourists may stop visiting if they think the Falls are no longer there.
Which brings us to the point of the story. I complained to the BBC that both stories were grossly misleading and omitted crucial information.
Complaints to the BBC go through three stages. The first response appears to be written by the office junior, who tries to fob you off with a few bland statements.
If you are unhappy, you can resubmit the complaint, which usually gets the same response, though dressed up in sciency sounding language.
Finally you can appeal to the Executive Complaints Unit.
As is usually the case, I effectively received the same reply at all three stages, viz:
There was a drought
“Scientists say” climate change is making droughts worse
None of the replies actually addressed my complaint, that the actual data shows droughts are not unusual or getting worse at either location.
The real issue here of course is that the BBC Complaints Dept is all in house, even the ECU. In effect the BBC is marking its own homework.
In theory it is possible to appeal to OFCOM. In practice however they have no obligation to investigate, and would only consider doing so for substantive cases.
Clearly BBC bias will never be addressed until they are subject to a fully independent process, just as the press is.
In the meantime, if Tim Davie is serious about cleaning the stables, he should start by taking his axe to the bloated, fourteen strong Environmental Dept, which is now clearly out of control.
Instances of bias and misinformation, such as these two, are now commonplace in their output, and they seem to believe that they don’t even have to pay lip service to editorial guidelines anymore.
Health Secretary Sajid Javid has tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, despite being vaccinated – and he is far from alone. The latest ZOE data shows that, as of July 12th, infections in the vaccinated (with at least one dose) in the U.K. now outnumber those in the unvaccinated for the first time, as the former continue to surge while the latter plummet (see above). (Note that 68% of the population has had at least one vaccine dose, so there are still at this stage disproportionately more new infections in the unvaccinated, though on current trends that may soon change.)
At what point will the Government accept that these vaccines have limited efficacy in preventing infection and transmission, and thus the whole rationale of being vaccinated to protect others – vaccine passports, compulsory vaccination, and so on – is suspect?
The above graph was in yesterday’s report, so I downloaded today’s report (you can get it by signing up to the app and reporting your symptoms) to get the new update. I was dismayed to find the graph was gone. At the bottom, a note explains:
Removed incidence graph by vaccination status from the report as there are very few unvaccinated users in the infection survey, the Confidence Intervals are very wide and the trend for unvaccinated people is no longer representative.
Which I would say is very convenient, just as infections in the vaccinated became the majority. Perhaps ZOE should try to recruit some more unvaccinated people for its survey, so it can continue to report on this as well as have a control group for its vaccine data? That would seem the scientific thing to do, rather than just stop reporting it because it is suddenly “no longer representative”.
It’s doubly odd because Tim Spector, lead scientist on the ZOE app, made the decline among the unvaccinated a feature of his video this week. So the realisation that the trend is “no longer representative” appears to have been rather sudden, even invalidating the contents of a ZOE ‘data release‘ two days earlier.
It seems we will never know how the story ends, which is a shame and a missed opportunity for ZOE.
ZOE data continues to suggest the current Covid surge is peaking and possibly even beginning to decline in the U.K., at least outside England (see above). Yet this is at odds with the daily Covid reports from the Government, which show continued growth.
Why the discrepancy? Is it because the Government figures include all the lateral flow tests that schoolchildren are taking as they isolate? 839,100 children – 11.2% of the total pupil population, more than one in 10 – were absent from state schools for Covid-related reasons on July 8th. All of them will have been tested and this will be picking up asymptomatic or mild infections that would usually not be noticed. ZOE data is symptom based, with a confirmatory PCR test, so would not be affected by surges in lateral flow testing among schoolchildren picking up asymptomatic infections.
In a story that shows just how much detail Facebook has on the lives of its users, a new report says that Facebook fired 52 employees who were involved in obtaining location data of women they were romantically interested in.
Male programmers were able to view women’s whereabouts, personal messages, deleted photographs, and more because of their access to user data through Facebook’s internal systems.
This story follows an engineer who was on vacation with a woman in Europe. After a fight, the woman left the room they were sharing. The Facebook developer then used the location information he had access to locate her down at a hotel nearby.
In another case, following their date, a woman stopped replying to a Facebook engineer’s messages. He then surreptitiously spied on her using the position. He had exposure to years of private Facebook messages with contacts, events attended, photos shared, and postings she had remarked about or clicked on. He could also track her real-time location because she has Facebook installed.
In September 2015, Facebook’s top security officer, Alex Stamos, apparently informed Mark Zuckerberg about the situation.
According to Stamos, Facebook staff spied on individuals “almost every month.” At the time, over 16,000 workers had access to confidential user data. Stamos made many suggestions, including limiting access and forcing workers to submit formal requests for data access.
According to the article, male Facebook engineers were able to exploit their access to the information to access private conversations, whereabouts, and even deleted photographs of women they were intrigued with, based on an excerpt from a newly released book by New York Times writers Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang.
According to the report, one of Facebook’s developers obtained the location data of a woman he liked and discovered she visited Dolores Park in San Francisco, so he started visiting there in the hopes of stumbling into her.
Facebook responded to this saying that they’ve always maintained a zero-tolerance policy for data misuse and have dismissed any employee found to be doing so. They’ve been working to improve staff training, harassment detection, and preventative processes since 2015.
WHILE some well-intentioned (but ill-informed) MPs are doing their utmost to counter Covid ‘vaccine hesitancy’ in their constituencies, the remarkable Dr Tess Lawrie is continuing to try to persuade medical colleagues to pause the rollout.
She sets out her case simply and powerfully in this interview with Mark Dolan of talkRADIO, aired on Wednesday. Well worth watching, and it could be sent to friends and relatives who are wondering who to believe on the issue.
Dolan, who has had both doses of the vaccine himself, puts questions reflecting the perspective held by most people, that the vaccine is safe and effective, as repeatedly advertised by the NHS.
Lawrie, who founded the Evidence-Based Medicine Consultancy Ltd, a specialist firmcommitted to improving the quality of healthcare through rigorous research, shows a cool authority in her replies.
‘I’ve looked at the data and I think there is reason to pause,’ she says. By the end of June, 300,000 people had reported adverse events through the UK regulator’s Yellow Card system after taking the vaccine, and this is not normal.
‘If you take a vaccine like tetanus, around since 1968, there are 36 deaths attributed to it on the World Health Organisation (WHO) database, whereas six to seven thousand deaths have been reported from Covid vaccine in just a few months.
‘In the UK, there are 1,440 deaths. So this is unprecedented in the history of any medicine, to have so many deaths reported in such a short time, and indeed so many reports in such a short time.’
Pressed by Nolan on whether this meant the need for a pause, even though the reports do not prove cause and effect, she says: ‘I tend to adopt the precautionary principle. I think if there’s any cause for concern, especially in view of these alarming numbers of reports, we need to get more information, and follow up each and every report to find out a bit more about its association – indeed, is it a cause for concern.
‘I feel there is a lack of transparency from the regulatory bodies. In their report, they highlight a very rare brain clot, cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, and that there have been 30 deaths associated with this and a couple of hundred cases.
‘But when you look at the Yellow Card data, you find there have been 2,208 strokes reported – a brain bleed – and of those, 154 people died. These data are far more worrying to me than just the cerebral venous sinus thrombosis data.
‘And when you look at all sorts of bleed, and the causes of death overall, you see that many are associated with bleeding and clotting. We’re seeing brain clots and heart clots and lung clots. The commonest causes of death are brain clots – strokes – and then pulmonary embolism, which is a lung clot, and also heart clots – heart attacks.
‘I would like to know more. I personally think these should be investigated.’
Dolan: Wouldn’t pausing the vaccine rollout put us back into the mess of the pandemic?
‘Not really, because we now know there are many safe, effective treatments for Covid. It is not an untreatable condition. There’s a very safe medicine called ivermectin, very low-cost, and around for 40 years, registered on the WHO’s database since 1992. And they’ve only registered 20 deaths since 1992. It’s been given billions of times, used against tropical parasites and available over-the-counter in many countries.’
Dolan: Should the vaccine be given to children over 12?
‘It’s unnecessary and dangerous. A child has more chance of dying from a vaccination – looking at these figures – than they do from Covid.’
Dolan: Is the relatively small risk from the vaccine better than getting Covid? It’s certainly a nasty virus.
‘I think we all have a robust immune system, if you’re not vulnerable and not very elderly. Our immune systems are geared up to deal with viruses, bacteria and others. A lot of the side-effects we see from Covid – the long Covid and so on – can be prevented by early treatment.
‘The doctors using ivermectin say you don’t get long Covid if you treat with it in the early stages. If you’ve got a treatment for Covid, you don’t have to be afraid of Covid.’
Dolan: What’s your professional verdict on 16 months of rolling out lockdowns in the UK and across the world?
‘I haven’t seen any good evidence that lockdowns or masks work. More concerning, we’ve known that ivermectin works for some time, and doctors have been trying to communicate this message to the authorities, who have been very single-minded in their strategy and approach. If ivermectin had been employed last year, when the UK authorities were notified, there would have been no lockdown in my opinion.’
Dolan: Why do you think your message about applications such as ivermectin were ignored?
‘I think there are a lot of forces at play that we don’t fully understand, particularly with regard to the huge . . . Covid is probably a £100billion-a-year industry, and ivermectin and other generic medicines are very cheap.’
Lawrie adds: ‘I think it’s time everybody took more responsibility for their health. Get themselves in better shape, be careful of what they eat – not just the quantity and the calories, but the nutritional value; exercise, and sunlight, and including taking responsibility for getting the information. Anybody can go to the Yellow Card system and have a look at the data. It’s not that easy on the government system, but there is a group called UK Column with a website that’s really easy to navigate. They update the data every week. You can type in a problem, and see what other people are reporting too.
‘I would encourage everybody, if you have the vaccine today and tomorrow you have some kind of problem, to report it – it may be associated with the vaccine, and there might be many other people who are suffering a similar thing. It’s only by highlighting these things that we will be able to ask the government to investigate.’
During a Covid surge, what proportion of the population is exposed to an infective dose of the virus, which they either fight off with no or minimal symptoms or are infected by? This is one of the most important questions scientists need to answer.
It’s closely related to the question of whether lockdowns work. If lockdowns work then, as per SAGE and Imperial orthodoxy, the restrictions successfully prevent the virus from reaching most people, who remain unexposed and susceptible – and hence in need of vaccination to protect them when the protective restrictions are lifted. If lockdowns don’t work, however, then they don’t prevent the virus spreading, and thus the majority of people will be exposed to it as it spreads around unimpeded by ineffectual restrictions.
Another related question is: What proportion of exposed people are infected? Using ONS data we can estimate that around 10-15% of the country tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 over the autumn and winter. How many were exposed to the virus to produce this number of infections? Was it, say, 10-20%, with half to all of them catching the virus? Or was it more like 80-90%, with around 10% being infected? It’s a question that makes all the difference in our understanding of the virus and how to respond to it.
If almost all are exposed during a surge, and relatively few of them are infected, then a number of things follow. First, most people have enough immunity to fight off the virus when exposed to it, and only a small minority become infected. Second, the surge ends when enough of that small minority who are particularly susceptible to this virus or variant acquire immunity through infection, i.e., when herd immunity is reached. Third, there won’t be another surge or wave until there is a new virus or variant which evades enough of the existing population immunity to require herd immunity to be topped up via a further spread of infections.
If, on the other hand, very few are exposed during a surge, and most of them are infected, none of these things is true. It means: Most people have little immunity and are highly susceptible. A surge which infects 10-20% of the population has exposed not much more than that. The surge does not end because of herd immunity but because of restrictions. And there will be another surge as soon as restrictions are eased or behaviour changes and the unexposed begin to be exposed again. SAGE orthodoxy, in other words.
The evidence, however, is strongly supportive of the first position – ubiquitous exposure – not the second, limited exposure.
Consider the secondary attack rate (SAR, the proportion of contacts an infected person infects). Data from Public Health England consistently shows this figure sits around 10-15%, meaning around 85-90% of the contacts of infected people do not become infected. It rises during a surge, which is typically due to the higher SAR of a novel variant, and then falls after the surge, as the new variant’s SAR also falls.
Such data is much more consistent with ubiquitous exposure than with limited exposure, as it shows that only a minority of those exposed to an infected person are themselves infected (10-15%), meaning ubiquitous exposure with a minority infected is the much more plausible scenario. This meshes with the data on high levels of prior immunity via T cells and other mechanisms.
Another key data point is the fact that surges consistently peak abruptly and begin to fall, independently of the imposition of restrictions. For instance, as Professor Simon Wood has shown, all three lockdowns in England were imposed after infections had peaked and begun to decline. Similarly, multiple peer-reviewed studies have shown no relationship between the imposition of restrictions and Covid infections or deaths across different countries and U.S. states.
The pattern of abrupt peaks and falls in incidence, independent of restrictions, is strongly indicative of hitting a herd immunity threshold (or overshooting it), as the virus or variant runs out of susceptible people to infect and exhausts itself.
Similarly, when restrictions are lifted there is typically no immediate surge, as there wasn’t in Europe last summer and in numerous U.S. states such as Texas and Mississippi in spring 2021. Surges only tend to occur when a new variant arrives, which again suggests it is not restrictions that are preventing spread to a still highly susceptible population but herd immunity that is preventing it, at least until a new virus or variant arrives to temporarily disturb it.
How, though, does the virus circumvent restrictions to achieve ubiquitous exposure of the population, and apparently without being noticeably even slowed down by the restrictions or voluntary distancing behaviour?
The answer, as I have suggested previously, likely lies in the airborne transmission of the virus. It is likely that the virus primarily spreads through building up to infective levels in the air, and that people are infected by breathing it in (a form of transmission which face masks do little or nothing to prevent). During a surge the virus becomes increasingly ubiquitous in the air at higher concentrations, accelerating exposure and infections until the herd immunity threshold is hit, at which point it abruptly enters decline. This explains why even though it is at its highest point of prevalence and was spreading at its fastest rate just a few days before, it suddenly stops and enters sustained decline. It is hard to see how any explanation other than herd immunity can explain this consistently abrupt change in the rate of virus transmission, particularly as there is no evidence of a similarly abrupt change in public behaviour in the mobility data.
Is there any concrete evidence that SARS-CoV-2 or other airborne viruses like influenza are ubiquitous in the air? Yes, there is. As HART notes in its bulletin this week:
For novel influenza viruses, between 7% and 8% are susceptible and develop antibodies in the first winter, much as we saw with SARS-CoV-2… If a certain proportion of the population are susceptible to infection in any one season, those individuals will end up infected sooner or later, regardless of which day they are exposed.
Studies have demonstrated that influenza is transmitted by aerosol particles and that such particles are prolific, indeed ubiquitous, in all indoor settings during the winter season. What stops people contracting the virus is their level of susceptibility, not their level of exposure.
HART refers to a study on influenza from 2014, which argues:
There are some amounts of the virus in the air constantly. These amounts are generally not enough to cause disease in people, due to infection prevention by healthy immune systems. However, at a higher concentration of the airborne virus, the risk of human infection increases dramatically. Early detection of the threshold virus concentration is essential for prevention of the spread of influenza infection.
The idea of a “threshold virus concentration” at which an outbreak is triggered (rather than just low level transmission) may be important for understanding how airborne viruses spread, and how they can become ubiquitous during a surge. Seasonal factors such as temperature, humidity, UV radiation, human behaviour (e.g. gathering indoors with little ventilation), and cycles in the human immune system may play a role in how easily this threshold concentration is reached.
A study in JAMAtested the air in hospitals for SARS-CoV-2 and found plenty, particularly in the public areas:
Overall, 14 of 42 samples (33.3%) in public areas were positive, with 9 of 16 (56.3%) in hallways, 2 of 18 (11.1%) in other indoor areas, and 3 of 8 (37.5%) in outdoor public areas (P = .01).
There isn’t yet much evidence from other settings, though a study, COVAIR by Imperial College, is underway and the results will be of great interest when they eventually appear.
To my mind, this is the explanation that (at least for now) explains all the known facts better than others – the low secondary attack rate, the ineffectiveness of lockdowns, the outbreaks that explode then suddenly end, the absence of resurgence when restrictions are lifted, the repeated hitting of herd immunity, and so on. At the heart of it is the idea of ubiquitous exposure – that almost everyone, not just a small percentage, are exposed each time the virus passes through, and the vast majority are already immune.
The Russian vote at the UN Security Council in favor of extending a humanitarian air corridor into Syria has been touted by the US government as a victory of American diplomacy. Moscow might have other ideas.
In a rare display of diplomatic cooperation, the US and Russia agreed last week on a one-year extension of the UN Security Council authorization for humanitarian aid supplies to reach northern Syria through the Bab al-Hawa crossing on the border with Turkey.
The Biden administration had made the extension of this authorization its highest priority when it came to US-Syrian policy. For its part, Russia had long been hesitant to allow such an extension, insisting it should be replaced by cross-line humanitarian deliveries.
It’s been alleged that the Bab al-Hawa crossing point was being used to resupply Islamic militant groups opposed to the Syrian government of President Bashar Assad that are operating inside Idlib province, which borders Turkey.
Russia’s vote in favor of the extension for up to 12 months took many observers by surprise, given Moscow’s past objections.
The US media called it a victory for the Biden administration, underscoring the importance of the June summit meeting between the US president and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in Geneva, Switzerland. The US made Syria, and in particular the issue of continued access by humanitarian organizations to refugee camps located in Idlib, a high priority at that meeting. The fact that Moscow and Washington have reached a compromise on the operation of the Bab al-Hawa crossing, from the perspective of Russia, was a clear sign regarding the efficacy of the Geneva process.
“We hope that it might be a turning point that is indeed in line with what Putin and Biden discussed in Geneva,” Russia’s UN Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia told reporters after the vote.
The situation, however, is far more complicated than the zero-sum diplomatic game being promoted in the US mainstream media. Idlib isn’t just a repository of internal refugees from the decade-long civil conflict that has wracked Syria since 2011 – it is the final redoubt of foreign-backed Islamic militants who have been waging a bloody fight against the Russian-backed Syrian government. The Islamic militant groups, many of which are allied with Al-Qaeda, once controlled much of the Syrian countryside and were operating in the suburbs of the Syrian capital of Damascus.
The decision by the Russian government to intervene militarily on the side of Assad in September 2015 helped turn the tide against the Islamic militant forces. Over the course of the next three years, the Syrian army, backed on the ground by Hezbollah and pro-Iranian militias, and in the air by the Russian Air Force, was able to recapture all of the militant-held territory save for the last remaining bastion in Idlib.
The situation inside Idlib is complex, with the various factions among the Islamic militants fighting among themselves to establish primacy. Many of these groups, including Al-Qaeda affiliate Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), are reportedly reliant upon foreign support for their survival and have been linked to both Turkey and the US in terms of serving as an anti-Assad proxy force. Recent claims by the exiled Turkish mafia leader Sedat Peker regarding the alleged shipment of “billions of dollars” worth of military equipment disguised as humanitarian aid to HTS and other anti-Assad groups operating inside Idlib only reinforced the concerns of the opponents to keeping the Bab al-Hawa crossing open.
There is a real humanitarian crisis ongoing inside Idlib, where millions of Syrian citizens remain housed in refugee camps that are little more than tent cities erected in open fields. The refugees are totally dependent upon international aid groups for the essentials of life, including food, water, shelter and medicine. With the restoration of central government control over much of Syria, however, and the willingness on the part of the Syrian government to resettle these refugees back in their original homes without any threat of retribution or retaliation, there is a growing sentiment among the Russian and Syrian government that the refugees have become little more than political pawns used by Syria’s many enemies, including Turkey and the US, to create the perception of a despotic regime while fostering continued instability inside Idlib that serves as an engine to motivate and recruit new anti-Assad fighters.
This reality served as the core argument underpinning the Russian objection to keeping the Bab al-Hawa crossing open. There is another reality, however, which also guided the Russian decision, namely the lack of a viable military solution to the problem of Idlib. Russia and the Syrian government are committed to a course of action that has the Syrian government asserting control over the totality of Syrian sovereign territory – including Idlib.
While Russia and Syria continue to conduct airstrikes against Islamic militant positions inside Idlib, and the Syrian army and its allies likewise exert pressure on Islamic militant forces on the ground, the feeling in both Moscow and Damascus is that the problem of Idlib cannot be resolved through force of arms unless one is willing to unleash a bloodbath that would cause more problems than it would solve.
The key to a solution in Idlib is for both Turkey and the US to recognize the futility of continuing to use it as a base of anti-Assad activity, and to finally give up on their dreams of regime change in Damascus. Such a policy change, however, will not happen overnight and will require considerable diplomatic cooperation on the part of all parties involved – including Russia. The Russian agreement to keep the Bab al-Hawa crossing open for another year, when seen in this light, represents the opening round of a lengthy diplomatic battle over the future of Idlib, Syria and the Middle East as a whole.
Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘SCORPION KING: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector.
Recent disclosures by the Zionist regime show that some 2,069 British nationals were serving in the IDF as of March 2025, according to Freedom of Information (FoI) requests submitted to the occupation forces (1,686 dual British-Israeli, plus 383 multinational). We cannot tell from the figures how many of these were already settler colonists and intend to stay in the colony, and how many will return or have returned to the UK. Presumably, those returning to the UK will number far fewer than 2,000, since many are known to have become permanently residents of the colony.
Additionally, the IDF figures only provide a snapshot, and do not tell us how many have served in the Jewish supremacist military either before or after March 2025. One way into the question of how many genocidaires are living in Britain is to ask how many current British residents were born in the Zionist colony. There is data on that, as we shall see. … continue
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