Face it, we are not immortal
By Manfred Horst | The Conservative Woman | July 30, 2021
WHEN Boris Johnson said in October 2020 that the median age of Covid fatalities was above life expectancy, he was clearly on to something. It is a pity, and a terrible mistake of historical dimensions, that he – and so many others – did not drive their reasoning to the logical conclusions, let alone act on them.
The following is a translation and adaptation of an article which appeared on the German blog Achse des Guten (Axis of the Good) a few days before Johnson’s remarks were made public through his former adviser Dominic Cummings. The numbers are from official German statistics; the percentage distributions derived from those numbers are remarkably similar across the whole Western world.
***
In the course of the last 150 years, mankind has landed many notable successes in its fight against disease and death, against infant and maternal mortality. It has thus raised the average age of death in the Western world from 35 years to around 80 years. (1)
Some people still die at a younger age, but fortunately far fewer than in earlier times. A total of 939,520 people died in Germany in 2019, with the following distribution in age groups: (2)
Mortality Table Germany 2019
With the ageing of our population, the total number of deaths has been increasing steadily in recent years. (3) However, the mean age of death and the percentage distribution among age groups have remained relatively constant ; (4,5) they are also fundamentally similar across all countries of the Western world. (6)
For almost one and a half years now, we have been kept in anxiety and fear with the daily cumulative figures of ‘corona deaths’. (7) The age distribution of these deaths ‘with coronavirus’ (the official denomination, i.e. death of a person with a positive test, not necessarily from a viral pneumonia) in Germany up to June 29, 2021, looks as follows: (8)
Mortality table ‘with coronavirus’, Germany 2020/21 :
One may compare the percentage age distribution of these ‘corona deaths’ with the one of the general population and ask the following questions :
– How do the ‘corona deaths’ differ from the natural mortality table ?
– For which subgroups, if any, would it make sense to explore life-prolonging measures?
– Which age groups should be considered in such a discussion about possible life-prolonging measures?
Don’t the deaths ‘with coronavirus’ (i.e. with a positive PCR test) look as though they are part of the normal and unpreventable death pattern in Germany? Is this not the basic hypothesis that every statistician or epidemiologist worth his or her salt would have enounced if it weren’t for the fact that we have entered an era of extraordinary public hysteria? Also, these figures are remarkably similar everywhere in the world – no matter which measures had been taken against the Coronavirus, see for example in Sweden. (9)
Since the virus does nothing to neonates, children and adolescents – or perhaps because they have so far been submitted to fewer tests – people ‘with corona’ actually reach an average age which is a little higher than that of the rest of the population.
In statistical terms, the coronavirus (or rather the positive PCR test) is a ‘random variable’ with regards to the result ‘death’ – like athlete’s foot or wearing red socks. Of course, severe forms of respiratory infections caused by / with SARS-CoV-2 do exist. Of course, medicine is obliged to help and support each and every one of the people affected. Of course, individual cases can be heartbreaking. Of course, NHS capacities may be stretched during the winter (they generally are). On average, however, the ‘corona deaths’ would have left this world at the same time, with corona or from (or with) another virus or another disease.
All those calculations of allegedly lost lifetime (10) claim that the cohort (group) of people who had died ‘with corona’ would have reached an average age of well beyond 90 years, had it not been for the virus. This is statistical nonsense. One cannot and must not transfer the remaining life expectancy of a person alive at age 80 to a cohort of dead people. Following this methodology, it would be possible to declare any random variable (red socks for example) to be a mortal danger. (11)
Some authors (12) have put forward the hypothesis that the mortality risk due to (or with) corona is equal in its age distribution to, but (largely) additional to the normal mortality risk: so the virus acts like a terrorist who kills 100,000 people with the same age distribution as the mortality table in the general population. If this were true, if this were even possible, we would have had to see a corresponding increase in general mortality across all countries – which we have not. (13) As we are talking of people killed by (or with) a respiratory disease which is mild in the majority of cases, not of people killed by a terrorist, we would furthermore again have to ask the essential question: Why should they have lived significantly longer than the rest of the population, what would have pre-destined this particular cohort (of corona test-positives) to a longer than average lifespan? No, this assertion is not tenable either.
People in the 50-70 age groups also die of (or “with”) Corona? Is it normal to die at age 60 the reader may ask. No, it’s not, of course not, every single case is tragic (and deserves medicine’s full and best attention). But our politicians should know that it inevitably happens sometimes, and that you need to compare and analyse numbers on a population level, instead of being swayed by emotion about individual cases. Specifically in answer to that question, in every population, there are always some 50-70 year olds who unfortunately die – this is inevitable in the human condition. Some of these 50-70 year-olds have always died of (or with) a viral respiratory infection (like the one caused by the Coronavirus). The essential question is whether more people of these age groups die because of the Coronavirus than previously. The answer is no because:
1) We have not observed and are not observing a significant excess mortality in these age groups.
2) The percentage of Corona mortality in these age groups is not only not higher, but effectively lower (!) than the one in the general population.
The conclusion is – the Coronavirus has no influence on the mortality of the 50-70 age groups. And that very conclusion is the same for all groups below 80 years of age. As 80 is the average age of death in the population, the general conclusion therefore is that the Coronavirus has no influence on population mortality.
Science and virology have certainly progressed over the last 16 months, and perhaps humanity will benefit from this in the future. Nevertheless, in 2020 and in 2021, the ‘corona deaths’ would have died, on average (not in every individual case), at roughly the same time. We are not immortal. On average, we die at our average age of death.
Since March 2020, our societies have been treating this normality as if it were a catastrophe. However, no short-term political or social intervention can prevent general population mortality at an average age of currently about 80 years. Nor can it prevent our continuous (especially during the cold season) and immunising confrontation with freshly mutated respiratory viruses. We could have known this, many experts and politicians (perhaps Boris Johnson among them) certainly knew it at the latest on March 12, 2020, when the Italians publicly announced the data on their first 2,003 ‘corona deaths’ (largely from Bergamo and its surroundings): Average age 80.3 years, all (‘with two possible exceptions’) suffering from severe pre-existing conditions. (12)
Incidentally, no vaccination can prevent normal population mortality either, and I suppose many of my former colleagues in the pharmaceutical industry know this. As a pre-requisite for any marketing authorisation – even more so for such hasty and therefore risky ones – the regulatory authorities should have demanded mortality studies (i.e. proof of a lower total number of deaths in the vaccinated group compared with the placebo group).
Such a study would have been very unlikely to produce a positive result though, as normal human mortality at the general average age of death cannot be prevented.
Instead, the evidence of a reduction in common cold symptoms with a positive test was declared a relevant clinical endpoint and published with great fanfare, (13) and the seasonal decrease in test-positive cases and deaths – which was already observed last summer – is being celebrated as a success of vaccination. German (and other) professional associations claim, against their better judgement, that the vaccines’ pivotal studies have proven that they prevent severe forms and deaths by almost 100 per cent. (14)
However, even if entire populations become vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, people will continue to catch common colds and flu, severe forms will continue to occur in the elderly and immunologically weakened, and a yearly fluctuating number of average 80-year-olds will leave us as always, with the coronavirus or with other mutated respiratory viruses and with their constantly mutating variants.
If the human consequences of the political and societal response to this one respiratory virus were not so horrific, we could almost watch and enjoy the whole thing as a grotesque farce. Perhaps in the not too distant future, a (hopefully still – or again!) free humanity may learn useful lessons from this dystopian episode. In particular, we need to develop a healthily sceptical distrust of a certain type of scientists who spread fear and anxiety with their model-based predictions, and of their political followers.
References:
(3) https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/156902/umfrage/sterbefaelle-in-deutschland/
(4) Sonderauswertung – Sterbefälle 2016 bis 2021 (Stand: 05.07.2021) (destatis.de)
(5) 2_5251422028526783027_online.pdf (2020news.de)
(6) https://www.statista.com/statistics/241572/death-rate-by-age-and-sex-in-the-us/
(7) https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
(9) https://www.statista.com/statistics/1107913/number-of-coronavirus-deaths-in-sweden-by-age-groups/
(10) https://fullfact.org/news/boris-johnson-whatsapp-covid-life-expectancy-cummings/
(11) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7646031/#eci13423-sec-0005title
(12) https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3259)
(13) https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Cross-Section/Corona/Society/population_death.html
(14) https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577
(15) Coronavirus, Brusaferro (Iss): età media dei deceduti è 80,3 (today.it)
(16) https://www.dgi-net.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/20210323_COVID_Impfung_Stellungnahme.pdf
On the COVID Delta and masks for the vaccinated: “Governor Newsom, Dr. Wen, and Dr. Walensky, please spare us!”
By Paul Alexander | Trial Site News | July 29, 2021
Between Dr. Wen, Governor Newsom, and CDC Director Walensky, I cannot say which one is more nonsensical and inept. I continue to struggle to pin down who wears that crown as these three lockdown lunatics seem to outdo each other daily with their efforts toward stupidity and verbal tripe. What a trio of misinformation and unscientific, highly unsound falsehoods they repeat daily to the public. Always uninformed. All this crap they are talking about Delta. Delta, Delta, Delta. But we have looked at the evidence, and it is infectious, but it is not deadly. It is not lethal. This is the current evidence, so we do not know where they get their junk science from to underpin the masking of the vaccinated who are indoors. Or even a push for broad mask use at this time.
Moreover, the narrative that new infections (Delta) are raging only in the unvaccinated is pure nonsense and a lie. It appears to actually be the opposite. Even Townhall’s Vespa wants them to shut the hell up with their nonsensical, unscientific tripe. Indications are that Delta is running at higher numbers in the unvaccinated (though Israel and U.K. data suggest 50:50, but we have to give room for immature data), but it does not make one sicker. It’s not ever about infections, it’s about hospitalizations, ICU admissions, and deaths. Does the Delta drive this up? No! Not based on the evidence we have. It does not.
At times, I do not know if I should feel sorry for the CDC Director and her catastrophic, foolish statements or start crying that this is who leads the CDC. What a mess we are in. Newsom goes on television and slams Tucker when he talks such specious nonsense himself. He destroyed his state for 17 months with irrational and hysterical lockdowns that never worked. Children suffered in his state due to the unnecessary school closures and prolonged closures. Does the CDC Director ever read the science before she speaks? This new CDC guidance on masks indoors in the vaccinated takes the cake. Children, too? So why the heck did people take the vaccines? Are you tacitly saying the vaccines do not work? We could have told you that six months ago. It is the height of stupidity. What boloney.
We thought Dr. Fauci was the king of misinformation and scientific drivel, but Dr. Walensky has now begun challenging him for his chair. Remember when Fauci told the nation that asymptomatic spread is rare and never a driver of pandemics such as COVID? Yet he went on to lock down the country due to asymptomatic spread. If CNN’s Berman is lost, you know the CDC and Dr. Walensky are in some trouble. If you cannot keep him under wraps, then something has gone wrong, and your credibility is shot even to him who you own. Fully vaccinated people now must wear masks again in high-case areas. What constitutes a highly infectious area? Well, that’s not clear yet, but I’m sure the CDC and Dr. Anthony Fauci will make up some science fiction to justify this new mask mandate. The mandates are coming too. Not nationwide, Biden can’t do that yet due to the midterms, but federal agencies are one-by-one mandating it for workers who risk the loss of pay or their jobs if they refuse.
Remember when Makary of Johns Hopkins wrote the elegant piece in the WSJ on the potency of natural immunity and slammed Fauci et al. for their nonsense relegating natural immunity? He even wrote this: “The news about the U.S. Covid pandemic is even better than you’ve heard. Some 80% to 85% of American adults are immune to the virus: More than 64% have received at least one vaccine dose and, of those who haven’t, roughly half have natural immunity from prior infection. There’s ample scientific evidence that natural immunity is effective and durable, and public-health leaders should pay it heed”. We knew that while only 10-12% of Americans (35 to 40 million) have lab-confirmed infection, we project that it is actually 200 million based on a February 2020 modelling estimate that there are 7 times as many infections as there are lab-confirmed infections. Makary even writes, “Some health officials warn of possible variants resistant to natural immunity. But none of the hundreds of variants observed so far have evaded either natural or vaccinated immunity with the three vaccines authorized in the U.S.”
A word to this nonsensical, seemingly uninformed trio of Wen, Fauci, and Walensky: “the Delta is infectious but very, very mild.” It is not the problem as you are trying to make it out to be with this ridiculous mask guidance for vaccinated persons indoors. Again, then why did people take the vaccine? You said it would stop transmission and infections. Did the CDC, NIH, and vaccine developers lie? There is even a cogent debate that we are driving the emergence of variants with the vaccine program. What utter garbage, we do not need masks now, and definitely not for children in schools. What absurdity and how reckless. The sum of masking and mandates evidence shows that it is highly ineffective and potentially harmful. The U.K. and Israel data clearly verify that Delta is contagious but non-lethal. The pandemic is over, finished. We are closing it out, and we do not need a vaccine to do this; we need early multi-drug sequenced treatment (McCullough, Risch, Zelenko, Kory, etc.), combined with proper securing of the elderly high-risk persons in nursing homes (for once), improved personal behaviors around you, diet to keep body weight under control (as obesity is a key super-loaded risk factor), vitamin D supplements especially for minority persons with darker skin color (and those confined for prolonged periods indoors), improved hand hygiene, and above all, allow low risk, younger, well and healthy persons in the society to live free lives to be exposed naturally and harmlessly. In this way, they, the infected and then immune low risk persons, will help us protect the high-risk elderly. But the high-risk must be secured first.
The new CDC guidance on masks (out today in terms of indoor masks for the vaccinated etc.) is ludicrous and based on no science, false science, and flawed science. They should be ashamed that they continue to put garbage pseudoscience out, and they are working to scare the nation and parents into vaccinating their children. It is plain to see.
Leave our children alone; they are at very low, near statistical zero risk of acquiring the infection, including Delta, or of transmitting it, or getting severely ill or dying from it. This is established from stable global data. Not new science. There is no justification, none, zero, why our children are to be vaccinated for this illness. It is all a pack of lies, and the CDC, NIH, FDA, and vaccine developers better be careful that they do not cause the harm and deaths of our children with these vaccines, for they do not want to feel the subsequent wrath of parents. Maybe U.S. mothers will be the ones to straighten this mess out before the first child, God forbid, dies due to the vaccines. We have been warning that these vaccines are potentially unsafe. Do not use it on our children. It is reckless and dangerous to vaccinate our children with these vaccines that have not been safely tested and not followed for the proper duration to ‘exclude’ harms. The CDC’s VAERS database and Europe’s database for adverse vaccine effects show tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands and even millions of adverse effects, and severe due to the vaccine. They are all temporally linked to the vaccine with strong biological plausibility and consistency. Our worst nightmare is coming through with the vaccines.
Governor Newsom, you lockdown lunatic, please keep your mouth shut and spare us the verbal diarrhea as you clearly have no idea what you are talking about.
WaPo’s big CDC scoop on Delta variant in the vaccinated is unintelligible. Was it meant to be?
By Meryl Nass, MD | July 30, 2021
Here is the WaPo article, which the paper exclaims is “free” for all, not kept behind a paywall like the rest of the Post. So they want everybody to read it. Perhaps a federal agency or vaccine company paid for the privilege?
In a nutshell: WaPo reports that CDC admits that vaccination does not protect you against the Delta variant. Unsaid is whether it protects you against the other variants.
Has protection worn off, or was it missing for Delta to begin with? That simple question is never addressed. Might the vaccine make you more susceptible? This is a rare possibility, if it induced blocking antibodies.
Or is antibody dependent enhancement occurring? I don’t think we know yet.
Ingrained in this message is the hint that we will immediately need boosters–but they may not actually be boosters, if there is no immunity to boost. We might instead need a newly designed vaccine. Two more doses? But not to worry, that was the whole idea of the mRNA vaccines: new versions can be put together in a hurry. And Pfizer has been working on it.
Don’t forget, our government in its infinite wisdom contracted for a couple of billion doses. What did they know that we didn’t?
No doubt this story will stoke the market for monoclonal antibodies, a several thousand dollar treatment that only works in the early stage of illness, before you actually know whether you need it.
This article is allegedly based on a leaked slide show from CDC. And CDC is said to have its knickers in a twist over its vaccine “messaging.” How will CDC deal with the fact that government officials told a Big Lie last week about 99.5% of hospitalized cases being unvaccinated, when the truth might stoke vaccine hesitancy? What message can they now use, having painted themselves into a corner?
But why did they paint themselves into a corner? Why did Fauci et al. make such an outrageous claim (the 99.5% one), when data from Israel, the UK, Singapore and elsewhere belied the lie?
Much of the rest of the article is a collection of quotes from people to whom the WaPo showed the slides. Since these experts are vaccine boosters, what would you expect them to say? Their remarks are vapid and unenlightening.
Of course this is more fear-mongering (CDC claiming that delta is the most virulent strain of all) designed to make us happily grab our retired masks and stop hanging with our vaccinated friends.
And now the government is going to force a vaccine that doesn’t work on millions of employees.
The one thing that is clear in this whole story is they want the ability to inject us with something, and to do it over and over. We don’t know why. And they’re not telling.
The NYT says half a million Americans are getting the shot every day. Join the crowd! The Europeans are besting us in the number vaccinated. Do I believe the NYT ?
The NYT is confused tonight. It has one article on the Delta variant– CDC slides story, while it has another article claiming:
Although those steps fall short of a mandate, Mr. Biden also ordered the Defense Department to move rapidly toward one for all members of the military, a step that would affect almost 1.5 million troops, many of whom have resisted taking a shot that is highly effective against a disease that has claimed the lives of more than 600,000 Americans.
And Biden was late to get the message about the CDC slides, saying today:
“This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” Mr. Biden said, calling it an “American tragedy” and talking directly to the 90 million Americans who are eligible for a vaccine but have not gotten one. “People are dying and will die who don’t have to die. If you’re out there unvaccinated, you don’t have to die. Read the news.”
I guess those CDC slides really were leaked unexpectedly. I had been wondering if the federal employee vaccine mandate might bring a few federal whistleblowers out of the woodwork. Let’s hope they keep the information coming.
Israel and Covid: Is the drug deadlier than the disease?
By Neville Hodgkinson – The Conservative Woman – July 30, 2021
ISRAEL’S nine million people, and Gibraltar’s 34,000, are among the most Covid-19 vaccinated in the world, almost entirely using the Pfizer mRNA injection. But after a fall in cases, both communities are now once again seeing a rapid rise in infections.
Sacrifices made in life and liberty are beginning to look less worthwhile – a fact that French legislators seem to have overlooked this week in requiring Covid vaccine passports for a wide range of normal life activities.
Governments and media commentators internationally praised Israelis and Gibraltarians as they did their best to support scientists and politicians trying to minimise damage wrought by SARS-COV-2, the genetically engineered virus (see here and here and here) first identified in Wuhan, China.
Less attention was given to the fact that Gibraltar suffered the highest Covid mortality rate in the world, proportional to its small population, during the first three weeks of a vaccine rollout that began on January 10 this year.
Despite the opportunity for a focused inquiry that could have shed light on the vaccine’s safety, regulators failed to look into claims that the jab itself, in the frail and elderly people who received it first, contributed to this tragic loss of life, the worst in Gibraltarians in over 100 years.
More than 78,000 doses were administered, reaching close to 100 per cent of the population, as well as some visiting tourists and workers.
Residents went along with promises that the jab would prevent a renewal of the lockdowns they suffered last year, which were hugely socially and economically damaging.
But today Gibraltar is experiencing a surge in breakthrough infections. More than 700 people are in self-isolation, and there are over 260 active Covid cases, although only seven of those are receiving treatment in hospital.
Globally, regulators have downplayed deaths and injuries associated with the Covid vaccines, insisting that the protection they offer against the disease offers the best way out of the crisis.
In Israel this week, however, the health ministry reported that 2,260 new infections were diagnosed on Tuesday alone, a high not seen since mid-March.
Across Israel there are now 14,365 confirmed cases, described as ‘skyrocketing’ by the Israeli newspaper Arutz Sheva. Of those, 258 are in hospital, 153 in a serious condition, and 35 are critically ill.
It has not been revealed how many of these cases had received the vaccine. More than five million Israelis have had both doses, but ‘vaccine hesitancy’ has grown, as news of the apparent dangers has spread, and the rate of full vaccination has slowed to a crawl.
A study by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, reported this week by The Times of Israel, indicated however a fall in the Pfizer vaccine’s effectiveness over time, with those vaccinated in January having just 16 per cent protection against infection now. Since elderly people, who respond less to the vaccine, were among the first to receive the jab, that failure is unlikely to be as great across the population as a whole.
Nevertheless, the phenomenon of so-called breakthrough infections is causing mounting concern in the scientific community.
The Israeli government has recognised the harm caused by lockdowns and to try to curb the resurgence in infections is focusing instead on mask-wearing, social quarantining, and reinstatement of a vaccine passport for events of more than 100 people in closed venues.
It has also announced a continuing programme of vaccinations, and health ministry officials met on Wednesday to decide whether a third, booster dose should be provided to all elderly people. Israel set a world precedent by administering a third shot two weeks ago to those with severely compromised immune systems.
If the world goes down the route of regular Covid jabs, as with the (largely ineffective) flu vaccine, it will be great news for Pfizer shareholders, but not for those who suffer the resulting injuries and deaths from the vaccine.
Nearly 6,500 deaths have been attributed to Covid in Israel, but one study claimed there were ‘orders of magnitude’ increases in death rates during a massive vaccination campaign beginning in mid-December.
In the two months to mid-February, 2,337 deaths occurred, leading the study authors to conclude that ‘vaccinations have caused more deaths than the coronavirus would have caused during the same period.’
The Israeli People’s Committee, a team of doctors, lawyers, and scientists of various disciplines concerned at the impact of both the vaccine drive and civil rights restrictions on ‘our people’s welfare and the destiny of our country’, has announced an inquiry into what it called ‘suspected governmental and institutional criminality’ during the crisis.
It says the state has ‘systematically shut down all monitoring and tracking systems’ designed to identify vaccine adverse events, despite the experimental nature of the product.
The result has been ‘an unprecedented flood of thousands of serious adverse event reports after the vaccine on social media, which seems to be the only forum that still allows people to share their experiences’.
The gap between this reality and information published by the Israeli ministry of health and the media, is ‘inconceivably large’, the committee says, raising concerns of ‘a dangerous deception not only of Israeli citizens, but of citizens of the entire world, who view Israel as the research laboratory of Pfizer’s corona vaccine.
‘Such a deception, whether negligent or premeditated, could create additional cycles of harm to humans around the globe.
‘We wish to say to the Israeli government and governments throughout the world: A lack of transparency kills people. Deception and concealment lead to disability and loss of life. Remove all confidentiality, create transparent and controlled reporting mechanisms; only then can lives be saved and further damage avoided from the very tool that is supposed to preserve health.
‘Is this a case where the drug is more deadly than the disease? Or is it equally, or less, deadly? We can only come to a true conclusion if comprehensive data is revealed in real time and if the press, which is supposed to be free and a watchdog of democracy, will remain on guard and raise the alarm when necessary. And it is indeed very necessary.’
Meanwhile, Pfizer has applied to US regulators for full approval of its jab, arguing that the company’s data ‘confirm the favourable efficacy and safety profile of our vaccine’.
J’accuse! Banned GP’s damning letter to the NHS chief
By Sally Beck | The Conservative Woman | July 29, 2021
WHEN the NHS suspended GP Dr Sam White without pay for daring to question the Covid narrative, they thought he would meekly disappear. Thankfully he didn’t, because the lack of debate from doctors over draconian measures the country has endured unnecessarily has been deafening. Instead, he took legal advice and his solicitor fired off a 23-page letter to the chief executive of the NHS, Sir Simon Stevens.
The colour must have drained from Stevens’s face when he opened it, even more so now as it has been made public and read over a million times. It began: ‘Please treat this letter as a public interest disclosure or whistle blow in that it raises allegations of alleged criminal conduct and breach of legal obligations by those leading the Covid response.’
It was Dr White’s viral resignation video that had angered health service chiefs. He described how he had quit as a partner from his Hampshire general practice because of the harm Covid measures were causing. He was also being prevented from using readily available effective treatments for Covid patients and he could see the toll that isolation was taking on the elderly and vulnerable. He was distraught at the thought that children would be vaccinated for a disease from which they are not at risk, whereas the experimental vaccines could cause them catastrophic damage.
All licensed doctors have a revalidation process conducted every five years either by their employer, their contracted health authority or by their governing body the General Medical Council (GMC). This is to ensure they are fit to practise and to prevent rogue doctors, such as serial killer Harold Shipman, slipping under the radar. Dr White had already passed his revalidation by the GMC without comment in December 2020, where he raised his concerns about masks, not being able to prescribe safe and effective drugs and the inaccurate PCR test. He was reassessed in April after his video made the same points, and passed again. After it went viral, however, clocking up over a million views, he was suspended in June. The NHS had had enough and the same doctor who revalidated him effectively sacked him.
Dr White’s legal letter issued by the pjhlaw legal firm accuses HM Government, the executive board of the NHS, Sage, senior members of the civil service and the executive board of the Medicines Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) of breaching common law (derived from hundreds of years of precedent rather than recent statute) obligations, and the seven Nolan principles governing public life. The most important of these is Selflessness, meaning that decisions should be taken solely in the public interest and not for financial gain. As we have seen nine billionaires created thanks to the pandemic, alongside millions of reports worldwide of death and injury post-vaccination for a disease with a 99.7 per cent recovery rate, I think it’s safe to say they’ve trampled all over Nolan.
One of Dr White’s main complaints is that the public were not given proper informed consent before vaccination. In the pop-up vaccination hubs set up in car parks, churches and cinemas, they were not asked about their medical history. This meant if there were contra-indications to receiving the vaccine, the vaccinator did not know the jab should not be given and the vaccinated had no clue they could suffer a serious, life-changing adverse event.
The letter adds: ‘It should be noted that those presenting the information have not publicly declared at the press conferences their financial links to the vaccine industry . . . It should be noted that Moderna’s share price has risen from $10 (£7) to over $200 (£145) in the space of 18 months.
‘Bill Gates and his charitable foundation are significant investors in Moderna. Many of those presenting the information to the public are associated with or employed directly or indirectly by organisations who have been financially funded by the Gates Foundation. The MHRA, the UK regulatory body approving the vaccines, has itself been funded [£1million donation] by the Gates Foundation.’
The letter goes on to cover the unreliability of the PCR tests which are being abandoned by the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in December; the fact that in most fatalities patients died ‘with’ Covid rather than ‘of’ Covid; the coercive introduction of vaccine passports for travel and work, and the unnecessary use of face masks.
The NHS has offloaded Dr White’s case to the GMC, who say they have had 18 complaints from unnamed doctors offended by his resignation video, but as usual in all cases of doctors subjected to a witch hunt because they questioned the narrative, none is from a patient.
Dr White said: ‘I have received 155 pages of complaints, which is quite distressing and upsetting, and they are just downright untrue. There is one complainant alleging I used the C-word when talking about a patient, which is something I never would have done.’
The professional standards department of NHS England and NHS Improvement are struggling to find concrete evidence for his alleged misdemeanours. About the only one they can prove is that he did not wear a face mask when walking around his GP surgery (although he wore one to consult with patients) and did not advise his elderly patients to wear them because they found them distressing. Departing from NHS directives is considered unacceptable and to them, raises serious concerns regarding Dr White’s fitness to practise. Forget the fact that it’s been reported widely that face masks can do more harm than good and are nothing more than theatre.
Incidentally, coming back to Dr Harold Shipman, who murdered more than 250 patients, he was not suspended without pay. Shipman, who was arrested in 1998, kept his c£70,000 salary from West Pennine health authority even after he was convicted and jailed for killing 15 patients. He didn’t lose it until two years after his arrest, when the GMC finally struck him off. By then, his family had received more than £100,000. In contrast, the NHS has now decided, on appeal, that Dr White can receive 90 per cent of one month’s earnings from his locum work until after the GMC decide his fate.
Dr White, who is now practising functional medicine, said: ‘Complete uncertainty about my financial future is really worrying.’ He has effectively been reduced to begging for money to live on and to fight his court case against Stevens et al. Two crowd-funders are out there which he hopes will help him do both until he gets back on his feet.
Another Israeli Spy Story: When Will It End?
By Philip Giraldi | Strategic Culture Foundation | July 29, 2021
It is perhaps not necessary to point out how the mainstream media in the United States as well as in Europe and Oceania persist in ignoring or otherwise covering up stories that make the Israelis look bad. Recent accounts of the slaughter of children and mostly civilians in Gaza by Israeli planes, missiles and artillery consistently try to depict the conflict as warfare between two comparable opponents, ignoring the enormous disparity in the military force available to the two sides. Israel has a modern army, air force and navy while Hamas has nothing but some small arms as well as improvised rockets and incendiary balloons.
The reluctance to criticize Israeli behavior is largely attributable to the power of the Zionist lobbies in the respective countries but it is also at least in part due to the complicity of Western governments in conniving at the Jewish state’s actions in its own region. The persistence in Israeli demands for war against Iran, preferable fought by the United States, was clear again this past week when the new government in Jerusalem declared that it would be increasing its military budget in anticipation of war with the Islamic Republic. Perhaps not surprisingly, the U.S. Congress also has several bills pending that would increase military assistance to Israel by a factor of three.
Aside from their overwhelming affection for the Jewish state, politicians and talking heads in Washington have always sought to have an enemy to explain why the foreign and national security policies have been such failures. Russia was so designated during the long years of the Cold War and more recently both the White House and Congress have begun to warn that it is China that is seeking to confront democratic norms and “export its authoritarian model.”
Given all of that, there must have been shock in a number of newsrooms when it turned out that the guilty party behind an explosive spy story that was revealed recently appears to be none other than America’s “closest ally and best friend.” It seems that a private Israeli surveillance plus security firm consisting of former cyberwarfare military and intelligence officers and having close ties to the Benjamin Netanyahu government has been selling advanced spyware to at least 45 governments. The sales are in theory restricted for use only in terrorism and criminal cases, but somehow the resource has instead been routinely used against journalists, political activists, business executives, and politicians. Saudi Arabia, for example, used the spyware to track dissident journal Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered by Saudi agents in Istanbul in 2018.
And even though the software has been regularly used against U.S. government officials and journalists, it appears that the Biden Administration has been aware of its capabilities and has done nothing to stop it. In its own defense, the Israeli company NSO that developed the spyware has claimed, implausibly, that it can no longer be used to hack U.S. phones. That assertion was debunked by former NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who tweeted “NSO’s claim that it is ‘technologically impossible’ to spy on American phone numbers is a bald-faced lie: a exploit that works against Macron’s iPhone will work the same on Biden’s iPhone. Any code written to prohibit targeting a country can also be unwritten. It’s a fig leaf.”
The surprise revelation of the Israeli activity came not from a government counter-intelligence agency, but rather from a group of 17 international media organizations that formed a consortium to investigate a data leak relating to hacked telephones. The group included major news outlets that had apparently been targeted using the Pegasus hacking spyware developed by the NSO Group, which was primarily designed to penetrate the security features of smartphones. One former cybersecurity engineer from the U.S. intelligence community described Pegasus as an “eloquently nasty” tool that could be used to “spy on almost the entire world population.” The spyware “can be installed remotely on a targeted person’s smartphone without requiring them to take any action such as clicking on a link or answering a call. Once installed, it allows clients to take complete control of the device, including accessing messages from encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal, and turning on the microphone and camera.” It can also reveal the phone’s location.
The software was designed with a backdoor which allowed NSO to monitor the surveillances and it is presumed that the information was also shared with Israeli intelligence. By one estimate 50,000 smartphones were accessed worldwide, including 10 prime ministers, three presidents including Emmanuel Macron of France, a king, foreign ministers and assorted journalists and government officials both in the U.S. and elsewhere.
A more cautious estimate from the Washington Post, which participated in the investigation, states only that “1,000 people spread across 50 different countries were identified as having numbers on the list, among them are ‘several Arab royal family members, at least 65 business executives, 85 human rights activists, 189 journalists, and more than 600 politicians and government officials.’ This includes Robert Malley, the Biden administration’s lead Iran negotiator, and journalists for CNN, the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times.” Other news agencies that were hacked by Pegasus include Agence France-Presse, Al Jazeera, France 24, Radio Free Europe, Mediapart, El País, the Associated Press, Le Monde, Bloomberg, the Economist, Reuters and Voice of America.
Some are inevitably wondering why the Biden White House has been silent about NSO. It has not identified the Israeli firm as a threat to national security and made demands to the Israeli government that it intercede with NSO and shut down the use of Pegasus until some international regulation of the use of hacking software can be developed. Part of the explanation for the reluctance might be that Biden’s senior adviser Anita Dunn’s consulting firm SKDKickerbocker was hired by NSO in 2019 to provide “public relations” advice to improve the company’s image.
The reluctance, of course, also derives from the fact that Israel is involved, but those with longer memories of the Jewish state’s record in stealing American secrets should not be surprised by this latest venture. Israeli-recruited U.S. Navy analyst Jonathan Pollard was, for example, the most damaging spy in U.S. history. And Israel has, in fact, a long history of stealing U.S. technology and military secrets to include sharing them with countries that Washington has regarded as enemies, including China and Russia.
Israel always features prominently in the annual FBI report called Foreign Economic Collection and Industrial Espionage. The 2005 report states: “Israel has an active program to gather proprietary information within the United States, these collection activities are primarily directed at obtaining information on military systems and advanced computing applications that can be used in Israel’s sizeable armaments industry.” It adds that: “Israel recruits spies, uses electronic methods, and carries out computer intrusion to gain the information.” A 1996 Defense Investigative Service report noted that: “Israel has great success stealing technology by exploiting the numerous co-production projects that it has with the Pentagon.” It says: “Placing Israeli nationals in key industries is a technique utilized with great success.” A General Accounting Office (GAO) examination of espionage directed against American defense and security industries described how: “Israeli citizens residing in the U.S. had stolen sensitive technology to manufacture artillery gun tubes, obtain classified plans for reconnaissance systems, and pass sensitive aerospace designs to unauthorized users.” The GAO concluded that: “Israel conducts,” and this is a quote, “conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the United States of any U.S. ally.” More recently, FBI counterintelligence officer John Cole has reported how many cases of Israeli espionage are dropped under orders from the Justice Department. He has provided a conservative estimate of 125 viable investigations into Israeli espionage — involving both American citizens and Israelis — that were stopped due to political pressure.
So Israel gets yet another pass on its spying against the United States. Indeed, the Biden Administration has yet to definitively comment on the latest impropriety. One wonders when the penny will drop and the American people will rise up and say “enough is enough.”
New FBI Initiative Will Put “Hate Crime” Quotas On Local Law Enforcement
By Eric Striker | National Justice | July 29, 2021
The Department of Justice and the FBI have a message for local police departments: start charging more white people with hate crimes or invite an investigation.
Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta told an assembly of FBI agents yesterday that they are now tasked with hounding police departments in their district if they do not register any “hate crimes.”
Gupta and FBI Deputy Assistant Director of the Criminal Investigative Division Jay Greenberg have declared “hate crimes” by “racially motivated violent extremists” (a euphemism generally reserved for right-wing white men) to be a national threat priority — a rare designation.
According to Greenberg, the FBI will be increasingly specialized in pursuing “hate crimes” through increased training in the matter, an aggressive media campaign designed to recruit victims in “underrepresented and targeted populations,” and putting federal pressure on local law enforcement to charge and report hate crimes when they otherwise wouldn’t.
Hate crimes laws are political and racially motivated. Blacks and Jews are heavily overrepresented as supposed victims in the FBI’s “hate crime” database, while whites are charged at higher rates than general crime rates. For example, last month a black man who shot five white men in a multi-state shooting spree told police his sole motive was that he hated white people, yet neither local prosecutors or the FBI have charged him with a hate crime.
According to the FBI’s 2019 hate crime report, blacks are 49% of victims of racial bias while Jews are 60% of crimes motivated by religious animosity. Most of the blacks in the data were victims of “intimidation,” an often Constitutionally dubious charge. A large number of reported hate crimes targeting both blacks and Jews are hoaxes, as seen in famous cases like the Jussie Smollett incident and the thousands of bomb threats targeting Jewish community centers that were the work of a Jew in Israeli.
Just yesterday, a white man was charged with “ethnic intimidation” for putting up stickers that say “I Love Being White.” The FBI wants more police departments to exploit the legal gray area and lack of First Amendment advocacy groups for white dissidents to juke crime statistics and distort the reality of crime. Blacks commit roughly 90% of violent interracial felonies, a statistic the Critical Race Theorists at the FBI find inconvenient.
The mad rush for white racists at the FBI is bound to cause more embarrassments for the increasingly discredited agency. Last year, the theater put on by the FBI over NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace’s “noose,” which turned out to be a hoax, served to reveal the hyper-politicization and lack of seriousness at the Bureau.
Covid “vaccines” & pregnancy: Twitter blocks OffG for telling the truth
Social media is allowing promotion of vaccines with unknown effects on pregnant women, and “restricting” any dissent… no matter how well sourced.
By Kit Knightly – OffGuardian – July 28, 2021
Yesterday, the Scottish government put out a tweet containing potentially dangerous medical misinformation.
We at OffGuardian did our civic duty and corrected them, citing non-controversial proven facts available from official sources…. and within eighteen hours our account was “limited”.
We are now locked out of Twitter unless we remove the “misleading” tweet.
In short, Twitter is punishing us for telling the absolute, provable truth. Whilst allowing governments to promote experimental medical treatments which may harm pregnant women and/or their unborn children.
Here’s the original tweet, sent last night by the Scottish Government (@ScotsGov):
[Note the ultra-PC wording “pregnant people”, not “pregnant women”, because when you’re enforcing quasi-fascist medical practices, inclusive language is important.]
And here is our response, and Twitter’s demand it be removed:
We refute the labelling of our tweet as “misleading or potentially harmful”. Our fact-check of the Scottish government was three-fold, and each of the three claims can be supported with evidence:
Claim 1: “Women young enough to get pregnant have a greater than 99.99% chance of surviving Covid”
This is true. Many studies and experts have noted Covid’s low IFR, especially for people below 70 years of age. For example, a paper published in Nature last year found that “For every 1,000 people infected with the coronavirus who are under the age of 50, almost none will die.” And that’s not even accounting for the absurd ways so many countries count “Covid deaths.
Claims 2: “The NHS says there is no evidence Covid19 can cause miscarriage or impact the development of your baby”
Also true. You can read it on the NHS’s own “Covid19 and Pregnancy Website”, along with other choice quotes such as “If you’re pregnant your chance of getting COVID-19 is not higher than anyone else and it’s very unlikely you’ll get seriously ill with it.”
Claim 3: “The vaccines are experimental and have unknown long-term side effects”
Completely true. The phase 3 trials for the vaccines are not set to conclude until 2023, at least. And clearly we have no long-term data on injections which have literally existed for less than a year.
As you can see, far from being “misleading and potentially harmful”, these claims are both logically sound and supported by sources.
In fact, the tweet to which we are replying could far more accurately be branded “misleading and potentially harmful”, in so far as it is literally medical misinformation that presents a serious potential danger to public health.
Firstly, it claims Covid “vaccines” are:
The best way to protect you and your baby from the risks of the virus during pregnancy.”
… but they don’t quantify those risks. As we’ve already shown, the “risks” run from minimal to non-existent. (Plus, the “vaccines” may not even protect from infection or transmission of the alleged virus anyway, so even if there were a “risk”, the vaccines may do nothing to avert it).
Their graphic then claims that “Covid vaccines are recommended during pregnancy”, but that is an essentially meaningless statement. Anything can be “recommended”, but that doesn’t mean they are proven safe.
The simple truth is, obviously, there has been no time for any long-term studies on the physical or cognitive development of children born to vaccinated mothers, either post-birth or in utero.
That is our position: it is simple, logical, backed up with facts… and we are censored for saying it.
Not only are we “limited” for doing nothing but telling the truth, but the ScotsGov tweet remains, despite being potentially dangerous to pregnant women, and their unborn babies, all across the country.
*
Take a moment to examine the actual psychology of the process here, and see it for what it is – a microcosm of the way millions have been bullied and subjugated over the past eighteen months. Twitter could easily simply remove the tweet. They could delete the entire account. But they don’t.
Instead, they tell us we have to remove it ourselves. We are being manipulated into compliance, in the hopes we will be disempowered and learn to self-censor in the future. It is an exercise in purposed domination. But it only works if you let it.
We are forced by circumstance, namely the need to communicate with our readers and receive submissions, to comply with Twitter’s blackmail. For now. But we do so under protest. In the future, we will be making the inevitable move to alternative platforms. We suggest our readers join us there.
We will be removing the tweet, but we do not repudiate it. We stand by it completely.
The vaccines are untested and therefore potentially harmful to everyone (including pregnant women), whilst mitigating almost zero hypothetical risk. It is the truth, and it’s our responsibility to say it no matter what.
Two plus two equals four. We will never say it’s five.
Who Watches The Watchmen? – Fauci’s “Noble Lie” Exposed
By Charles Rixey, MA, MBA | Prometheus Shrugged | July 22, 2021
More than 100K pages of FOIA documents referenced here have been condensed into 173 pages of the most relevant selections in my appendix Prometheus Shrugged. It was here, last February, that the role of Dr. Fauci in ongoing academic censorship of COVID’s origin was first exposed.
A chronological narrative of the events described throughout my research will included in a forthcoming volume of DRASTIC’s set of published collections of evidence.
The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once wrote that truth goes through 3 stages:
1st, it is ridiculed; 2nd, it is violently opposed; and 3rd, it is accepted as being self-evident
Guess what’s next for us?
Six months ago, I began my first article on scientific censorship during COVID-19 by introducing Dr. Fauci as a surprise character that had emerged unexpectedly while digging through what was then 83,000 FOIA emails, published by US Right-to-Know over the course of the last year:
[see files related to Ralph Baric, Linda Saif, Rita Colwell, Colorado State/Rocky Mountain National Laboratory & the NCBI; other FOIA releases from Judicial Watch, Buzzfeed & the Washington Post include NIH funding of the WIV & Dr. Fauci’s emails]
I’ve been trying for quite some time to get people to understand the full scope of the Dr. Fauci ‘situation,’ but it’s clear that segments of our national leadership are preventing an honest and open inquiry into his actions because they fear the backlash/collateral damage that will result from the tarnishing of their sacred cow. It’s time Americans were told the truth – that the grant money sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology [WIV] is merely a footnote in this narrative.
After all, Dr. Fauci controls nearly $4 billion of annual grant funding for the NIAID, the institute within the NIH he has directed since 1984; over 37 years, more than 50,000 research projects have been supported with more than $50 billion [conservatively] of taxpayer funds have been doled out to them.
It’s reasonable to hold him accountable for the results of his organization’s efforts, but the direct funding received by the WIV for Gain-of-Function (GOF) research represents only a tiny fraction of Fauci’s involvement in enabling risky research – the 2017 repeal of the GOF ban was decided without the consultation of the Trump administration, even though news coverage during the pandemic blamed him for the decision.
Neither Fauci nor his boss Francis Collins [the NIH director] bothered to clarify the record, which looks especially disgusting in the wake of persistent rejections of Senator Rand Paul’s assertions [with accompanying evidence] that the NIH ever financially supported such research:
Contents:
- Dr. Fauci’s true legacy
- The evidence of his involvement
- The questions Congress [and everyone else] should be asking Dr. Fauci
- The impact of his efforts
First, do no harm … to Fauci’s Legacy
It’s important to plainly state that I’m aware of the intense politicization of virtually every aspect of the pandemic and the pandemic response. Since many readers may not be aware, I’ll point out that my specific motivation for building a COVID-19 website and speaking to a broader audience about the various facets of the pandemic was to offer unfiltered information to counter the disgusting polarization I observed:
I felt obligated to re-iterate my stance, but the nature and importance of the situation can’t be ignored any longer, because Congress is now actively engaged in investigating the pandemic’s origins, and we must confront the truth if we are to gain meaningful insight that can help us prepare for future crises. There is no level of partisanship that justifies ignoring a tragedy of this magnitude.
“Everything rises and falls on leadership” – John Maxwell
It’s hard to place a dollar value on the impact of Fauci’s leadership decisions upon almost all aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is why it’s not difficult to understand the willingness of some to avoid a legitimate inquiry into the issue altogether. After all, he sits at the nexus of –
A) the NIH’s role in supporting the research & development of mRNA technology and new antiviral drugs like Remdesivir, and the resulting conflicts of interest that the NIH continues to ignore
B) His role in pushing those NIH-sponsored inventions; specifically, advocating for Remdesivir on the basis of weak evidence while rejecting legitimate investigations into generic alternatives with no less statistical support, as well as…
C) … His role in obfuscating concerning data and censoring public debate over the risk/benefit evidence emerging about COVID-19 vaccines. Had Fauci been bluntly honest about the unknowns involving the new technology throughout the pandemic, Americans would still largely have assumed the risk – at least, assuming that antibody dependent enhancement [ADE] was not a likely outcome. Oops.
D) His evolving stances on masking, lockdowns, school closures and other non-pharmaceutical interventions [NPI], largely the result of growing public awareness that those decisions have consistently been based upon reducing the accountability of cowardly officials, not the best interest of their constituents [Note: this is a conclusion from my research focus last year, that I will return to once the origin issue allows me to do so].
E) His refusal to address the blatant censorship of vaccine side-effect data; it takes a disturbing level of cynicism to witness the large-scale skepticism and uncertainty that has resulted from such censorship and then vilify those willing to speak up – and blaming them for any future vaccine breakout when one of the most likely causes would be ADE. ADE with SARS-CoV-2 would most likely result from the specific targeting of the MRNA vaccines, not vaccine hesitancy [in the absence of a simultaneous global administration of the jabs – which was never feasible under the geopolitical and temporal constraints of the pandemic.
Each of those factors has contributed to the fading perception of Fauci as ‘America’s Doctor, but each has also become a divisive litmus test for which the evidence for and against is hotly debated. My purpose here is not to offer judgment on those issues; rather, I want to highlight the fact that Dr. Fauci’s legacy includes elements far beyond the scope of my research – and the context of those debates is directly relevant for the proper framing of the failures illuminated here. The same hubris and gaslighting in defense of ‘Science’ has plagued everything.
My disgust doesn’t stem from casual reflection & an exaggeration of weak assertions to fan partisan flames. It stems from my analysis of 100K pages of FOIA documents, 1,000+ research articles reviewed, and my own published analysis of the the impact of Fauci’s censorship, which was the 1st of its kind.
My approach was external to science – from the perspective of an historian seeking to understand the ‘why’ behind the further collapse of trust in our institutions during the pandemic. My conclusions were formed over six months of investigation, and focused on the realization that one of the worst developments of the pandemic is the evaporation of public trust in scientists [see Edifice Wrecks].
I’ve never sought to inflame conspiracies or ignore evidence in support of zoonosis, but I’ve personally entered into discussions with a half-dozen of the scientists highlighted below, and none of them ever addressed the emerging evidence that, under normal circumstances, would’ve been part of the open debate that Fauci pretends already took place.
Every additional moment spent in denial and suppression just adds fuel to the coming backlash, and thus far discussions have ignored what I believe is the largest and most consequential elephant in the room:
F) Fauci quietly but directly ensured that scientific censorship was implemented, in large measure, to prevent public awareness of the extent of his role in GOF research and the controversies surrounding it. The evidence proves that, at the start of the pandemic, Dr. Fauci and many leading scientists moved to protect themselves – not us, who weren’t yet aware of the potential calamity at our doorstep.
Fauci LED the efforts to obstruct research into COVID’s origins, colluding with the President’s Science Advisor Kelvin Dreogemeier and Wellcome Trust head Jeremy Farrar, to proactively undermine consideration of the evidence that directly tied their global research initiatives to the lab at the center of the COVID-19 pandemic.
To date, all of their efforts have been focused on preventing disclosure of embarrassing connections – not preventing another novel pathogen from sparking a global pandemic; to prevent future scrutiny, not future tragedy.
Scientists, if you’re struggling to understand the distinction between degrees of commitment to truth, I offer the example of Thích Quảng Đức, pictured here protesting the corrupt S. Vietnam regime in a prologue of the Vietnam War:
You see, the message for scientists who believe that a threat is existential is that words gain true meaning when they are supported by the actions & sacrifices of the speaker. What message are we supposed to derive from the COVID-19 pandemic?
I’d recommend pausing for reflection – on the image above, specifically – because what the world is beginning to see is that the scientific establishment made a mockery of the trust it had been given. The world’s leading experts in virology and public health called attention to a threat by setting the world on fire, rather than themselves – and then blaming us for being too simple to believe their noble lie.
Priorities
The baseline assumption of the public at large has been that Dr. Fauci has earned the benefit of the doubt thanks to his five decades of public service and consistency in defending establishment science – the admiration of which has risen nearly to cult worship in recent decades. The cognitive dissonance between appearance and reality have created a situation where trust in ‘science’ has reached its sacred peak at the exact moment when such trust is least deserved.
At the center of this incestuous arrogance is Dr. Anthony Fauci, the recipient of unquestioned adulation by those in the political sphere who have spent more than a century arguing that a Platonic ‘philosopher-king’ ideal must be forced upon intellectually vacuous masses whom, left to their own devices, would inevitably self-immolate.
Scientists reached new heights in the ivory tower when they warned us that man’s evil nature had left previous generations protected only by the horrific death equation of Mutually Assured Destruction. Setting aside the obvious complicity of scientists in the creation of nuclear weapons, trusting science over many decades has simply led to a new formulation of that Faustian bargain – Mutually Assured Corruption.
A Study In Scarlet
Before heading down the long and winding road, it’s important to explain what zoonosis is and why Fauci’s denial of basic facts simply kicks the accountability can down the road. Should we really be surprised that Dr. Fauci is ‘confused’ by the definition of “Gain if Function?” After all, not that long ago, he also ridiculed the idea that the virus could’ve come from a lab before finally admitting that it was a statistical possibility.
Zoonosis in the context of viral emergence doesn’t mean a virus originally sprung from nature – all viruses do. It means that the jump from animals to humans happened in the wild, as the result of a fortuitous combination of mutations that allow a virus to survive the switch. If human intervention artificially encouraged the process of adaptation by experimentation, or simply by virtue of bringing a virus to a lab and increasing the odds of such exposure, then the origin of a viral pandemic is a lab.
What’s sickening about his tortured twisting of language is that Fauci knows this better than almost anyone; thus his lies aren’t borne of ignorance. What he’s done is use his scientific gravitas to pretend that observers’ understanding of literal definitions is flawed because we are too ignorant to appreciate the complexity of the issues. The truth, however, is that our generation’s most prominent infectious disease expert is gaslighting the citizens of the country he swore an oath to protect [one could also use the term epistemic injustice ].
How a Psychic Healer Blog Convinced the Government to Fund “Long Covid” Research
By Phillip W. Magness | AIER | July 27, 2021
The National Institutes for Health (NIH) is exceptionally keen on the study of “Long Covid.” The federal agency recently allocated over $1 billion in funding for this purpose, and NIH Director Francis Collins has made the claimed ailment a recurring subject of his press commentary over the last year. The Department of Health and Human Services similarly signaled that it intends to classify “Long Covid” as a recognized disability for government funding and classification purposes.
So what is Long Covid, and why is it drawing so much attention and funding out of the federal government? As with any respiratory illness, Covid-19 does appear to have long-term sufferers who do not follow the normal recovery pattern and continue to demonstrate symptoms for weeks or months after an infection. At the same time however, the push to make “Long Covid” a distinctive medical classification unto itself appears to be a political phenomenon, wrapped up in clear signs of pseudoscience and linked back to a fringe “alternative wellness” blog that originally coined the term in March 2020.
A recent study published in the Lancet-owned journal EClinicalMedicine purported to document over 200 symptoms of Long Covid, ranging from fairly common Covid-19 ailments such as fatigue, cough, or long-term loss of smell to an eclectic assortment of problems such as hallucination, brain fog, tearfulness, insomnia, and mood anxiety. Media reports breathlessly repeated these findings to press the urgency of funding for Long Covid research, while also hyping the syndrome as a further justification for alarmism in justifying lockdowns and similar measures. After all, if Long Covid afflicts a sizable subset of Covid patients – as some claim – and can strike young people who are at a much lower mortality risk from the virus itself, then perhaps more restrictive measures are warranted on the general population – or so the argument goes.
Many lockdown advocates have seized onto the Long Covid narrative, incorporating it into their defenses of the draconian non-pharmaceutical interventions they have advocated over the last year and a half. The CovidFAQ website – a UK-based project set up by “neoliberal” activist Sam Bowman and British MP Neil O’Brien – invokes the threat of Long Covid in its attacks the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), arguing that the hypothesized syndrome undermines evidence that the virus is substantially less-severe among younger demographics. Several pro-lockdown scientists and epidemiologists issued coordinated statements attacking the GBD in October 2020 for “ignor[ing] the emerging burdens of long COVID.” These statements are usually offered as declarative assessments, treating Long Covid as an established medical fact.
With billion-dollar budgets and the prospect of additional sweeping policy measures at stake, it only makes sense to ask if the science behind Long Covid is sound. There is no doubt that some Covid-19 victims have symptoms that linger for weeks or months beyond the typical recovery, although that is true of many diseases. Whether it has 200 plus symptoms is another story – and a closer look reveals an alarming amount of outright quackery is currently shaping the scientific and media discourse around Long Covid.
The problem arises from the amorphous definition of the phrase “Long Covid” itself. Far from a careful clinical diagnosis, Long Covid has become a catch-all term for any extended medical ailment, real or imagined, attributed to the effects of the Covid-19 virus. An alarming amount of alleged data about the phenomenon traces back to a single source called the “Body Politic Wellness Collective” – an alternative medicine blog with dubious scientific credentials. To quote one recent study of the term’s origins, “the emergence and recognition of Long COVID as a potentially major public health problem is largely due to advocacy groups such as the Body Politic COVID-19 Support Group, and Patient Led Research For COVID-19” – the latter an affiliated survey administrator that, according to its own website, was “born out of the Body Politic Slack support group.”
The same Body Politic group frequently appears in an already large and growing literature on “Long Covid” in other scientific journals. In September 2020, NIH Director Collins devoted his personal column on the agency’s website to touting the group. He later credited their work when launching the aforementioned $1 billion research initiative. In July 2021, Body Politic reappeared at the center of the aforementioned EClinicalMedicine study along with a spinoff organization called the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. The two groups administered the survey behind the claim that Long Covid carries over 200 symptoms.
Before we get into the survey itself, it’s useful to take a closer look at the Body Politic group. TheWall Street Journal recently ran a lengthy expose of the organization by Jeremy Devine, an Ontario-based psychiatrist. Devine found that the group’s initiatives sprang to life at the outset of the pandemic in March 2020. They first coined the Long Covid moniker around this time, promoting it in a flurry of media appearances. In early April, the New York Times ran an op-Ed by Body Politic’s co-founder calling attention to the syndrome and recounting her own experience as a “long hauler” (which, at the time, consisted of experiencing symptoms for about three weeks after testing positive).
As Devine documented in the WSJ, the Body Politic group’s approach to scientific survey design appeared highly unorthodox. It frequently relied on self-reported descriptions of Long Covid symptoms, instead of independent medical verification. It also had a habit of diagnosing people with Long Covid even after they tested negative for Covid-19 itself. A March 2021 report by Adam Gaffney for StatNews called attention to similar problems with Body Politic’s research design. “[A]t least some people who identify themselves as having long Covid appear never to have been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus,” Gaffney noted. They were nonetheless touted by the media as case studies in the alleged syndrome.
A closer look at the Body Politic group itself raises several red flags about their scientific qualifications. The group’s executive board boasts few, if any, actual medical practitioners or scientific experts. Instead we find an eclectic assortment of political activists, musicians, poets, and journalists, many of whom share common interests in “alternative medicine.” Body Politic’s Treasurer and principle support group organizer describes herself as a “practicing Spiritual Medium” who specializes in detecting “invisible illness.” The website’s Vice President is a “social & racial justice activist,” and its Secretary is an “aspiring sex coach.” Other affiliates include a self-described “socialist poet,” multiple “social justice activists,” and people who describe their careers as operating at the intersection between art and natural wellness. The group’s website and social media accounts frequently invoke political terminology from the critical theory literature. They describe themselves as “a queer feminist wellness collective and a space for inclusivity, accessibility, and crucial discussions about the very real connection between wellness, politics, and personal identity.” Their values statement espouses “patient-led” research to “democratize” medicine – descriptions that appear to forgo traditional scientific methods of testing and verification in favor of placing heavier reliance on patient testimonials and personal experience.
While the group’s activism alone does not disqualify their commentary, the unconventional qualifications of its leadership should raise suspicion about their claimed expertise on Long Covid. When NIH Director Collins personally promotes Body Politic’s work, he is creating a false sense of scientific credibility around their work. Few who read Collins’s statements are aware that the group he praises as “citizen scientists” might be better characterized as an odd assortment of psychic healers, magic crystal gurus, and alternative medicine activists. As a leading public health official, Collins’s many endorsements of this quackery border on irresponsible.
Turning to Body Politic’s survey projects, we quickly find that skepticism of their credibility is warranted. The group’s survey design specifically eschews requiring a positive Covid-19 test or antibody test to confirm that their respondents actually had the disease. “[W]e do not believe people’s experiences with COVID-19 symptoms should be discounted because they did not receive a positive test result,” states one justification for this unconventional data collection procedure. To qualify as a sufferer of Long Covid, it seems, a person needs only to claim that he or she suffers from Long Covid. Lived experience of the disease trumps any requirement of scientific verification.
The prevalence of unverified and untested Covid claimants being classified nonetheless as Long Covid sufferers is stunning. In the WSJ, Devine reports the numbers from the group’s first survey, administered through their website in 2020: “Nearly half (47.8%)” of Body Politic’s survey respondents “never had testing and 27.5% tested negative for Covid-19. Body Politic publicized the results of a larger, second survey in December 2020. Of the 3,762 respondents, a mere 600, or 15.9%, had tested positive for the virus at any time.” As Gaffney notes in StatNews, this practice raises the distinct possibility that survey respondents are misattributing other chronic symptoms to the virus.
Their new study in the Lancet’s journal EClinical Medicine does not offer much hope that Body Politic has improved its survey design. Its authors state that “We analyzed responses from 3762 participants with confirmed (diagnostic/antibody positive; 1020) or suspected (diagnostic/antibody negative or untested; 2742) COVID-19, from 56 countries.” Unconfirmed Covid patients with self-reported Long Covid symptoms outnumber confirmed Covid patients by almost 2.7 to 1. To their credit, the group discloses the lack of PCR or antibody testing confirmation among the majority of their respondents. The extremely high rates of unconfirmed cases, however, are more than sufficient to cast doubt upon their claims to have identified over 200 separate Long Covid symptoms.
The survey’s design also appears to self-select for people who are inclined to claim Long Covid symptoms, whether valid or not. According to the paper, the survey consisted of 257 questions, took almost 70 minutes on average to complete, allowed participants to revisit their answers for up to 30 days, and was primarily marketed to readers of the Body Politic group’s various blogs and Slack channels. This design practically ensures that the majority of the people who received and completed the survey were drawn from a readership that already gravitates towards the group’s political messaging and medical eccentricities.
Imagine if a survey on diet products collected its sample entirely from the mailing list of Gwyneth Paltrow’s “Goop” store. And imagine if the CDC decided to use that survey as a basis for a billion dollar program to revise its food nutrition guidelines, claiming that it is a representative study of the average American’s diet. Because that’s essentially what NIH Director Francis Collins has done with Body Politic’s surveys when justifying his current research initiative into Long Covid before the public.
With most Long Covid research at the moment, self-diagnosis by amateur groups appears to have supplanted scientific rigor in driving the NIH’s research priorities. Even minimal scrutiny should cast doubt upon the Body Politic group’s deficit of scientific credentials and surplus of outright “alternative medicine” quackery. Yet in January 2021 the New York Times heavily leaned on testimonials from Body Politic’s resident psychics and alternative wellness healers in a feature story on so-called Long Covid, aiming to demonstrate the scientific validity of the diagnosis.
So did an August 2020 piece in the Atlantic that is widely credited with popularizing the concept. Indeed, the New York Times has turned its opinion page over to Body Politic writers on multiple occasions over the last year, giving them free rein to promote unscientific claims about the concept. Simply scanning over mainstream media coverage of “Long Covid” in the last year reveals that Body Politic-affiliated activists with dubious scientific credentials have become go-to “experts” on the subject. Here they are being interviewed in Vox, in the Guardian, in the Washington Post, on NPR, in Buzzfeed, and on MSNBC.
In calling attention to Body Politic’s influence over shaping the Long Covid narrative, I do not question the possibility that some of the organization’s activists may exhibit genuine long-term Covid-related symptoms, even if they are not a distinct classification unto itself. But scientific assessment of their claims remains woefully inadequate relative to the authority that the media has bestowed upon them. In this sense, much of the Long Covid literature bears striking resemblance to other claimed chronic illnesses that have less-than-robust scientific grounding (for example, consider the difference between Celiac disease – a rare but severe dietary illness involving gluten – and the mid-2010s “gluten sensitivity” craze, which mixed together real and imagined but also self-diagnosed symptoms, fad dietary practices, and dubious scientific attestation)
Despite their scientific shortcomings, Body Politic’s own surveys have found a welcome audience among many academics who should know better. Even leading medical journals now regularly tout Body Politic’s dubious survey results as if they are scientific fact.
Last fall, the BMJ published an article on “Long Covid” from a team of scientists led by Oxford’s Trisha Greenhalgh, an outspoken pro-lockdown regular on the BBC and other UK media circuits. Greenhalgh’s team estimated that perhaps as many as 10% of people infected with Covid develop “Long Covid” symptoms – a number that has since become a standard estimate for Long Covid risks.
Their empirical “evidence” for Greenhalgh’s claim, in turn, derives primarily from Body Politic’s “patient-led survey” of alleged Long Covid sufferers – the same survey where half or more of respondents never even had a confirmed Covid diagnosis. This was no accidental reliance on a substandard source, deriving from insufficient scrutiny of the survey’s methods. Greenhalgh credited the Body Politic group by name on Twitter for inspiring their paper, endorsing the “lived experience” of their “patient-led research.” Echoing the Body Politic survey, Greenhalgh and her co-authors further embrace the proposition “that a positive test for covid-19 is not a prerequisite for diagnosis” for Long Covid. It’s apparently sufficient to simply believe that you had a prior bout with Covid, and attribute your claimed long-term symptoms to the same.
Not surprisingly, Long Covid has become a favored fallback argument among lockdowner epidemiologists to argue for prolonged restrictions. Duke University’s Gavin Yamey has made a name for himself by credulously circulating conspiracy theories about the Great Barrington Declaration by blogger Nafeez Ahmed. Sure enough, he’s also a Long Covid activist, promoting Greenhalgh’s study as well as an assortment of news articles that blur the lines between legitimate reporting of long-term symptoms and quackery.
Although Body Politic is far from the only group advocating for Long Covid research funding, their high-profile promotion by the NIH, by leading news outlets, and by medical journals suggests a similar phenomenon to the pattern seen among other lockdown advocates in allegedly-mainstream epidemiology. We’re witnessing a full-scale breakdown of the screening mechanisms that normally steer scientific discourse away from fringe and conspiracist viewpoints – provided that those viewpoints may be used to advance the alarmist ideologies that have emerged around Covid policy over the last year. The doors have, sadly, been thrown wide open to psychic healing and alternative wellness gibberish. Lockdowner scientists have, in turn, given these suspect claims and defective survey designs a welcome home in the most prestigious institutions of journalism, government, and the ivory tower.
Phillip W. Magness is a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. He holds a PhD and MPP from George Mason University’s School of Public Policy, and a BA from the University of St. Thomas (Houston).
Prior to joining AIER, Dr. Magness spent over a decade teaching public policy, economics, and international trade at institutions including American University, George Mason University, and Berry College.
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