Net Zero Watch pours scorn on Tony Blair Institute claims about ‘cheap’ onshore wind
Net Zero Watch – January 21, 2022
London — Net Zero Watch has ridiculed claims by the “Tony Blair Institute for Global Change” that the recent sharp rise in energy prices could have been avoided if the UK had only erected more onshore wind turbines over the last decade.
Given that Tony Blair introduced lavish subsidies for land owners and wind investors 20 years ago, it is unsurprising that his institute is trying to downplay their contribution to rising energy bills. However, its claim that more onshore wind turbines would have avoided rising energy bills is simply untrue.
The “Tony Blair Institute for Global Change” has claimed that the falling cost of onshore wind means that the UK has lost out by not building more of this technology, first introduced in bulk by the Blair government after 2002. Similar statements have been made by Carbon Brief.
Neither claim stands up to scrutiny.
Onshore wind farms cost consumers in the UK just under £1.5 billion in subsidy in 2020, or about £50 per household in total, one third hitting consumers through electricity bills and the rest finding its way to them through the cost of goods and services as shops and businesses pass on their own share of the subsidy. Because of this subsidy, onshore wind electricity was supplied at an average cost of about £90/MWh, roughly double the cost of conventional energy.
Analysis of the audited accounts of onshore wind farms between 2008 and 2019 conducted by Professor Hughes of the University of Edinburgh, showed no significant reduction in capital or operational costs over this time. Windfarms built in 2008 broke even at about £92/MWh, and those built in 2018/19 at about £91/MWh.
Both the “Tony Blair Institute” and Carbon Brief rely on an estimated break-even cost for new wind farms over the last decade of about £50/MWh. This is wishful thinking for which there is no empirical evidence in the audited accounts.
Furthermore, as is well-known, but not apparently to the “Tony Blair Institute” or Carbon Brief, onshore wind was restricted in England by the willingness of communities to accept it and not at all in Scotland, which has 60% of all the onshore wind in the UK. Mr Cameron’s “ban” was half-hearted and had no real effect. Insofar as onshore wind development was limited, it was discouraged by reductions in subsidy driven through by the Treasury.
The only realistic option for developing more renewable capacity at the time would have been to increase the amount of offshore wind. This would have involved a commitment to pay between £140 and £180 per MWh – the current prices for offshore projects developed in the 2010s. Those prices are 3.5 to 4.5 times the average market price in real terms for 2015-19 and would have imposed a huge burden on electricity customers, not just temporarily but for another 12-15 years.
It should also be remembered that the wind does not blow on demand. The current gas crisis has been exacerbated by low wind conditions that would have becalmed any additional onshore capacity that Mr Cameron might have built.
Advocates of more reliance on wind generation should tell us how we are to ensure that the electricity system continues to function in such conditions without relying on gas – and what the cost will be. Gas generation is the cheapest form of backup to intermittent wind generation.
By opposing the extraction of Britain’s massive shale gas reserves, Tony Blair’s Institute together with other green NGOs, MPs and ministers have directly contributed to the UK’s gas supply and energy cost crisis.
What is more, they also sabotaged any prospect of building new – and much more efficient – gas plants which would have met the current needs at lower cost and with lower carbon emissions.
The authors of those policies should reflect on their part in making the current situation worse than it might have been.
Professor Hughes said:
The ‘Tony Blair Institute’ and Carbon Brief authors appear to live in an alternative universe of speculative numbers. We have plenty of actual evidence about the cost of onshore wind in exactly the period under discussion. It was (and still is) extremely expensive. To have built more of it would have made the current situation even more painful for consumers.”
Unruly numbers
By Thorsteinn Siglaugson | January 20, 2022
Shortly before Christmas, the 14 day Covid-19 infection incidence in Iceland by vaccination status started to change dramatically as the new omicron variant of the coronavirus began to gain the upper hand. By the end of the year, the 14-day incidence of infection among double-vaccinated people had increased sevenfold and was now double that of the unvaccinated, while increasing elevenfold for those with three jabs.
This information, published on the official Covid-19 information site run by the Directorate of Health, began tocirculate at the start of this year and attracted quite some attention. On January 7th, data updates on the website were temporarily halted, explained by planned restructuring of the site. The next day I published an article in Iceland‘s main newspaper, Morgunblaðið, drawing attention to this sudden change in the infection rates. Chief Epidemologist Þórólfur Guðnason responded the same day, quoting a systematic error in the numbers; many who were registered as living in Iceland did not actually live in the country, had been vaccinated abroad but were registered unvaccinated locally. Therefore, he claimed it was not possible to draw the conclusions the data clearly supported, that the double-vaccinated were more likely to become infected than the unvaccinated.
As I pointed out in another article in Morgunblaðið on January 11th, in order for his explanation to be correct, the Chief Epidemologist would have had to previously overestimate the number of unvaccinated people by 90% to get an infection rate equal to the rate for the double-vaccinated. As I explained, such a huge overestimation would hardly go undetected for over half a year.
Change in 14-day incidence of infections for unvaccinated, original vs. updated values
It was finally on the morning of January 13th that the data appeared again. However, there was a snag: While the 14-day incidence of double- and triple-vaccinated adults and children was virtually unchanged, for the unvaccinated, the previously published numbers had taken an unexplained jump, starting on December 27 with a 4% increase, 11% the next day, then 12%, 14%, 15% and ending in a 20% increase on January 4th!
What might justify such a huge and sudden change in previously published data? Either a large group of unvaccinated people would have had to disappear without a trace during the second half of December, or a large number of infections, all among the unvaccinated, would have had to be lost and then found again. But no such explanations have been made.
This sudden and significant change in official data took place immediately after the data started to show a development that was in direct contradiction to the Chief Epidemologist‘s repeated claims that the vaccines were highly effective for preventing infections. Is this a mistake, or is there a different explanation? This is something the Directorate of Health will have to answer.
YouTube puts bogus age restriction on Andrew Napolitano and James Bovard discussion challenging ‘insurrection’ narrative
By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | January 20, 2022
YouTube or its owner Google sure seems keen on preventing people from learning about holes in the “insurrection” narrative being pushed by big money media and many politicians from President Joe Biden on down regarding protest and riot activity at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Legal commentator Andrew Napolitano, who is an Advisory Board member for the Ron Paul Institute, posted Tuesday at YouTube an episode of his show Judging Freedom titled “The FBI’s possible role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.” In the episode, Napolitano and journalist James Bovard discuss many apparent problems with the heavily pushed January 6 insurrection narrative. But, when you try on Thursday to watch the video at YouTube, you cannot just push play and watch as you can with most videos at YouTube. Instead, you are presented with a warning.
Where normally an image from the video with a play video button in the center would appear, the video screen is all black with over it at its center a circled exclamation point followed by this message:
Sign in to confirm your age
This video may be inappropriate for some users.
Click on the “SIGN IN” button below that message and you are taken to a page to sign in to your Google account, or to create a Google account if you do not have one, in order to watch the discussion.
Once you have done all this and YouTube seemingly has been satisfied that you are old enough, you are still not presented with the video ready to play. Instead, you encounter another all black video screen with a warning on it — again the circled exclamation point followed by “This video may be inappropriate for some users.” Below the warning is a button labeled “I UNDERSTAND AND WISH TO PROCEED.” Only after clicking on this button can you finally watch the video of Napolitano and Bovard’s discussion.
Of course, all the warnings, button clicks, age verification, and account sign in or creation requirements create a major impediment to people watching the video. Google and YouTube can say that they did not censor the video (at least for adults), but their imposing of special hurdles people must jump over to watch can be expected to much reduce viewership. Many adults will not trudge through all this. Children are barred from watching the video.
Should you go through all this and finally watch the video, you will see that the warnings and the action requirements that precede the video are without any justification, especially considering YouTube’s rather lenient approach generally to placing age restrictions on videos. So why all the effort to discourage people from watching? It sure looks like YouTube, or its owner Google, instead of trying to protect children from harm, is trying to protect the January 6 insurrection narrative from criticism.
Copyright © 2022 by RonPaul Institute.
SPOOKS, RUSSIA, AND DISINFORMATION
By Paul Robinson | IRRUSIANALITY | January 20, 2022
Jeremy Morris has an interesting post on his Postsocialism blog about the malicious role played by Western intelligence services in shaping narratives of Russia. I’m somewhat sceptical about his thesis – or at least the extent of the phenomenon he describes – but as if by chance, today I also came across a story that kind of backs him up.
Morris complains of two “elephants in the room,” who together distort our understanding of Russia. The first is the “clear leveraging of latent public sympathy abroad for the Russian regime by our friends at the English-language offices of RT.” I guess that would be me.
The second is “academic and think-tank contacts with the security services in the West.” Given my former involvement in the intelligence world, and the fact that I’ve taught courses at the University of Ottawa with members of the Canadian security and intelligence services, I guess that would be me too.
Double elephant!
I imagine that Morris thinks that elephant number one distorts things in favour of Russia, and elephant number two distorts them against. That must make me some sort of push-me-pull-you doing both at once. Perhaps that explains why I always end up occupying the middle ground!
Anyway, I digress, because this isn’t meant to be about me. Back to the point.
“If you underestimate the hidden motives of those that comment on Russia – from both elephants, then you are guilty of the ‘fallacy of insufficient cynicism’,” writes Morris. I must confess myself guilty as charged. I can be pretty cynical, but I don’t think that everybody has “hidden motives.” People who write what one might call “pro-Russian” articles for RT aren’t doing it for the money or because the FSB has got some dirt on them any more than people writing Russophobic stuff for think tanks are doing it because they’re taking orders from the FBI, MI5, or CSIS. People tend to believe what they’re doing.
In any case, I worry less about spooks and more about the military industrial complex and its funding of think tanks and the like, all of which work together to inflate threats, keep us in a state of fear, and justify increased defence spending and aggressive foreign policies. But even there, the think tankers etc believe in what they’re doing. The problem is that believers get funded whereas non-believers don’t. I don’t think “hidden motives” are the issue.
That said, Morris has a point, in that security and intelligence services do maintain contacts with chosen favourites and feed them information that they hope will further their chosen narrative. The story I came across today illustrates how this works quite well.
A while back, I mentioned a law case in the UK involving Guardian journalist Carol Cadwalladr and British businessman Arron Banks. Banks is suing Cadwalladr for libel for having claimed that the Russian government offered him money for use in the Brexit referendum campaign, and that he lied about his relationship with the Russians. The case is now before the court, and Cadwalladr’s defence is becoming clear.
The Guardian journalist isn’t claiming that what she said about Banks was true, merely that given the evidence she had at the time she had good reason to believe that it was in the public interest for her to report it. So what was this evidence, and where did she get it from? This is where it becomes interesting. For as the Guardian reports,
In her written evidence statement, she [Cadwalladr] said she had obtained two intelligence files from an organisation contracted to undertake work countering Russian disinformation in Europe on behalf of a government agency, one file of which raised concerns about Banks’s Russian wife.
In other words, British intelligence fed the information to her via another source.
The accusation that Banks took Russian money to fund Brexit received widespread coverage. It was even repeated in a parliamentary report. Yet no evidence to support the claim has ever been produced, and as we have seen, Cadwalladr isn’t trying to say that it was true. In short, it was disinformation. And yet, what prompted it was in part documents leaked by British intelligence to a third party “contracted to undertake work countering Russian disinformation” and then in turn given by that organization to Ms Cadwalladr.
Doesn’t that strike you as a bit iffy?
In the first place, the story reinforces what I have said several times before, namely that the “disinformation industry” set up to “counter Russian disinformation” is itself a major source of disinformation. And second, it reveals an excessively cosy relationship between the media – supposedly an independent guardian of the truth that holds the state to account – and state organizations, including secret intelligence.
Personally, I find it more than a little disturbing.
Maybe Mr Morris is right after all!
Was Peter Daszak Working For The Central Intelligence Agency?
An EcoHealth Alliance whistleblower steps forward
Dr. Shi Zhengli, Dr. Peter Daszak, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology
Kanekoa TheGreat | January 18, 2022
“We found other coronaviruses in bats, a whole host of them, some of them looked very similar to SARS. So we sequenced the spike protein: the protein that attaches to cells. Then we… Well, I didn’t do this work, but my colleagues in China did the work. You create pseudo particles, you insert the spike proteins from those viruses, see if they bind to human cells. At each step of this, you move closer and closer to this virus could really become pathogenic in people. You end up with a small number of viruses that really do look like killers.”
This statement was said by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak at a 2016 forum discussing “emerging infectious diseases and the next pandemic”. Daszak, who received more than $118 million in grants and contracts from federal agencies, including $53 million from USAID, $42 million from DOD, and $15 million from HHS, appeared to boast about the manipulation of “killer” SARS-like coronaviruses carried out by his “colleagues in China” at the now infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology.
According to investigative research done by independent-journalist Sam Husseini and The Intercept, much of the money awarded to EcoHealth Alliance did not focus on health or ecology, but rather on biowarfare, bioterrorism, and other dangerous uses of deadly pathogens.
EcoHealth Alliance received the majority of its funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), a State Department subsidiary that serves as a frequent cover for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Their second largest source of funding was from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), which is a branch of the Department of Defense (DOD) which states it is tasked to “counter and deter weapons of mass destruction and improvised threat networks.”
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has a long history of acting as a contract vehicle for various CIA covert activities. With an annual budget of over $27 billion and operations in over 100 countries, one former USAID director, John Gilligan, once admitted it was “infiltrated from top to bottom with CIA people.” Gilligan explained that “the idea was to plant operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas; government, volunteer, religious, every kind.”
In 2013, a US cable published by WikiLeaks outlined the U.S. strategy to undermine Venezuela’s government through USAID by “penetrating Chavez’s political base”, “dividing Chavismo”, and “isolating Chavez internationally.” In 2014, the Associated Press disclosed that USAID contracted out a project to develop a rival to Twitter in order to foment a rebellion in Cuba.
From 2009 to 2019, USAID partnered with EcoHealth Alliance on their PREDICT program which identified over 1,200 new viruses, including over 160 coronavirus strains; trained roughly 5,000 people around the world to identify new diseases; and improved or developed 60 research laboratories.
What better way for the CIA to collect intelligence on the world’s biological warfare capabilities?
Source: The Intercept
Dr. Andrew Huff received his Ph.D. in Environmental Health specializing in emerging diseases before becoming an Associate Vice President at EcoHealth Alliance, where he developed novel methods of bio-surveillance, data analytics, and visualization for disease detection.
On January 12, 2022, Dr. Andrew Huff issued a public statement (on Twitter) in which he claimed, Peter Daszak, the President of EcoHealth Alliance, told him that he was working for the CIA.
Dr. Andrew Huff’s full statement below:
Source: Dr. Andrew Huff
Dr. Huff continued, “… I wouldn’t be surprised if the CIA / IC community orchestrated the COVID coverup acting as an intermediary between Fauci, Collins, Daszak, Baric, and many others. At best, it was the biggest criminal conspiracy in US history by bureaucrats or political appointees.”
What exactly did they cover-up?
Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance—financed by USAID, DOD, and other U.S. Government agencies—partnered with Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina and Dr. Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology to conduct gain-of-function research on bat-borne coronaviruses.
Baric successfully created a “chimeric” coronavirus in 2015. There is a well-documented scientific paper trail that details how Dr. Baric and Dr. Zhengli continued to collaborate on gain-of-function research together to create what went on to be a potential precursor to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Francis Collins, and Dr. Peter Daszak, who were proponents of this type of international collaboration on gain-of-function research were heavily incentivized to cover up the possibility of a lab origin because they previously had funneled U.S. taxpayer money to the Chinese lab.
At the start of 2020, there was a lot of chatter about where the virus SARS-CoV-2 actually originated from. Two papers published in March 2020—one in Nature Medicine and one in The Lancet—controlled the direction of the dialogue on the origin of the virus.
Both papers were repeatedly cited by Fauci, Collins, Daszak, the corporate media, and big tech as evidence to shut down and even censor any discussion of the possibility that the virus originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Only later through redacted emails released by FOIA did we learn that Fauci, Collins, and Daszak were intimately involved in crafting the two papers which dismissed the lab origin hypotheses as “conspiracy theory.”
In February 2020, Daszak told University of North Carolina coronavirus researcher Dr. Ralph Baric that they should not sign the statement condemning the lab-leak theory so that it seems more independent and credible. “You, me and him should not sign this statement, so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a counterproductive way,” Daszak wrote.
More unredacted emails have revealed that while these scientists held the private belief that the lab release was the most likely scenario, they still worked to seed the natural origin narrative for the public through the papers published in Nature Medicine and The Lancet.
In April 2020, Daszak opposed the public release of Covid-19-related virus sequence data that has been gathered from China, as part of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) PREDICT program because he said it would bring “very unwelcome attention” to the aforementioned “PREDICT and USAID” programs.
Source: U.S. Right To Know FOIA
In September 2020, scientists were outraged when Daszak was chosen to lead the World Health Organization task force examining the possibility that Covid-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Despite many clear attempts to cut off a legitimate scientific inquiry into the Wuhan lab origin hypothesis, the theory continued to persist predominantly due to the fact that the Chinese government was unable to provide a single shred of evidence in support of the natural origin theory.
In May 2021, the narrative turned when, Nicholas Wade, a former science reporter at the New York Times published his seminal column outlining the case for the Covid lab-leak theory.
For SARS1, an intermediary host species was identified within four months of the epidemic’s outbreak and the host of MERS was identified within nine months. Yet some 15 months after the SARS2 outbreak began, and a presumably intensive search, Chinese researchers had failed to find either the original bat population, or the intermediate species to which SARS2 might have jumped, or any serological evidence of a natural origin.
Every step of the way, Fauci, Collins, and Daszak have done everything in their power to obfuscate, mislead, and misinform the world about the possibility of SARS-CoV-2 originating at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
If Dr. Andrew Huff is telling the truth, Fauci, Collins, and Daszak are not covering up the lab origin only for themselves, but also for the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, and the U.S. Government.
True or false? Reuters “fact check” of the Denmark study showing negative VE
By Steve Kirsch | January 20, 2022
Reuters did a “fact check” of the negative Vaccine Efficacy (VE) in the Denmark study and the study author used a hand waving argument to conclude the negative VE is due to a bias. What do you think?
I wrote earlier about the Denmark study showing that vaccine efficacy against Omicron goes negative after 90 days:
There is a Reuters “fact check” that says that the author claimed that the vaccines are fine and that the negative vaccine efficacy reported in the paper was simply due to a “bias.”
Oh really???
Here’s why I think the Reuters “fact check” is garbage
First of all, a hand waving argument supported by no data whatsoever claiming bias is not convincing to me.
Furthermore, I think the Denmark paper was accurate for these 3 reasons:
- we see negative VE consistently in MANY other studies.
- VE continues to go negative in that study consistent over time… how can they explain that?
- if it was behavior differences between vaxed and unvaxed that accounts for the bias, then how come people who got Moderna behave DIFFERENTLY than people who got Pfizer?!?
I am not alone in suggesting the authors claim “there must be a bias” as needed to fit the narrative
One of the commenters on the original paper wrote something very similar to what I wrote:
So assume the results you like (high VE for recent vaccination) are causal, but hand wave confounders at results you don’t like (negative VE for distant vaccination)? Science?
I couldn’t have said it any better myself. This was my reaction too when I read the paper.
What do you think?
So who got it right? Me or Reuters?
Fallen Icon: Sir David Attenborough and the Walrus Deception
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | January 19, 2022
In 2019 Netflix in conjunction with WWF broadcast Frozen Worlds, an episode in the Our Planet series and narrated by David Attenborough. The scenes it showed shocked and horrified viewers around the world.
After a brief introduction about the recent loss of Arctic summer sea ice and the ‘inevitable’ devastation this will cause for Arctic animals, it shifts to a series of amazing shots of tens of thousands of walrus, crowded cheek-by-jowl on a beach in Siberia.
The camera pans out to a rocky cliff, which several walrus are attempting to climb. Then suddenly, one after another, the walrus are shown falling off the cliff to their deaths on the rocky shore below.The scenes are shown in slow motion and repeated in order to maximise the shock effect.
As the scenes unfold, Attenborough coolly informs viewers that the walrus would not normally be there, but out on the sea ice instead. But because of man-made global warming, the poor walrus have been forced onto land in crowded conditions, where they will inevitably suffer and die.
But was it all as simple as Attenborough portrayed?
A number of suspicions were immediately evident. Far from these beach haulouts being unusual, walrus in fact regularly use these beaches every year, in order to rest and feed while waiting for the sea ice to move south in autumn.
Walrus also invariably crowd together in these situations, both for warmth and protection from polar bears. Indeed, far from walrus being threatened by climate change, their populations have been growing in recent years, explaining why so many were hauled out that day.
And what made those walrus try to climb the cliff?
Dr Susan Crockford is a professional zoologist, who has specialised in Arctic mammals for many years, particularly polar bears and walrus. She immediately smelled a rat.
Her newly released book, Fallen Icon, tells the story of how she uncovered exactly what went on that day on the Siberian beach. Her detective work reveals how it was polar bears stalking them that forced the walrus up that cliff; how this is a common hunting tactic and how the bears then fed off the carcasses down below.
She uncovers evidence that WWF already knew about this hunting tactic at that particular location, and that was precisely why this beach was chosen for the film.
She goes on to describe how retreating sea ice actually increases the food supply for walrus and how their populations are both healthy and increasing.
And how Attenborough used this horrifying imagery to jump-start a three year campaign against human-caused global warming that included ten documentaries laden with groundless climate emergency messaging, much of it aimed at the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world. Attenborough’s relentless climate activism included a utopian vision of global changes for society eerily similar to the one proposed by the World Economic Forum.
It is hard to disagree with Crockford’s conclusions:
The public’s trust in science and medicine now appears to be at an all-time low. People who had been blind to the abuse of science rampant in the climate change narrative have had their eyes opened by the pandemic response. These things cannot be unseen.
In a worrying trend, traditional scientists struggle to be heard or have their concerns and criticisms published, both for climate change and Covid-19 related issues. Research that features testable hypotheses and reproducible studies seem to be rare birds while predictive modelling projects gobble up grant funds as well as the media attention.
Is science as we used to know it already dead? If so, how much of a role has Attenborough played in this progression? Over the last three years, he has used weaponized science presented to a trusting public in a most egregious manner.
My ultimate goal in writing this book is not to denigrate Sir David but to correct the misinformation he has deliberately or unwittingly promoted in his documentaries and public statements.
I am a traditional scientist standing up for science as it is meant to be – without activism and without politicization – because its loss to society will be incalculable.
Over the years but especially since 2018, Attenborough has shown that he lets others do his serious thinking for him and has often placed his trust where it was ill-advised, as he has done with the WWF. By that I mean he has relied on others to present information to him in an easily digestible manner rather than delving into the literature himself.
And having spent a lifetime taking this easy way out, when he decided he wanted his legacy to be something more substantial than ‘a good storyteller’, he seemed to take on the role of spokesman for others with ideological political agendas.
It appears to me that when he agreed to present the gruesome falling walrus film footage in Our Planet as evidence of climate change, Attenborough compromised his principles to achieve a specific end result. Such noble cause corruption is common in the conservation world but it was new for Attenborough.
I am convinced that what Attenborough has done with the falling walrus episode will be remembered long after he’s dead but not for the reasons he intended. It will go down as another ‘own goal’ for the climate change movement and judged as the moment Attenborough fell from grace as a trusted British icon.
Susan Crockford’s book is now available on Amazon here:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0991796691
Susan Crockford adds:
As I point out in my new book, Fallen Icon, David Attenborough devised a three year campaign on the falsehood that hundreds of Russian walrus died falling off a cliff due to climate change because he also desired what the World Economic Forum (WEF), meeting online this week, say they want: immediate and drastic changes, supposedly to mitigate an invisible ‘climate emergency’ and other societal ills.
Despite the fact that walrus and polar bears are thriving in the Arctic, this fabricated ’emergency’ seems to be the reason that its new chairman plans to make the G7 into a ‘climate club’.
Pfizer-backed CDC Foundation partnered with Facebook to fund social media tactics to increase “vaccine uptake”
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | January 19, 2022
The Pfizer-sponsored CDC Foundation has teamed up with Big Tech and Big Pharma giants Facebook and Merck, among others, in order to promote Covid vaccines.
The pressure group calls itself the Alliance for Advancing Health Online and some details about its purpose and organization are revealed in an email sent to the White House and obtained and shared by the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN).
Other than the CDC Foundation, Facebook’s partners are the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, Sabin Vaccine Institute, the Bay Area Global Health Alliance, and the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
During the fiscal years 2014 through 2018, the CDC Foundation reportedly received $79.6 million from companies Pfizer, Biogen, Merck, and others. Pfizer continues to be listed as a current donor.
ICAN noted that it emerges from the email – sent by Facebook’s US Public Policy head Payton Iheme – that the purpose of the initiative is to use social media and platforms “to build confidence in and drive uptake of vaccines.”
ICAN is a network whose mission is to promote putting authority over health choices in the hands of people whom these decisions affect, and parse out true medical information from that tainted by financial interest and advertising, which, they say, leads to “medical coercion” rather than tangible understanding of issues.
Now the group is suggesting there is conflict in the CDC Foundation forming an alliance to drive home the message of the need to get vaccinated as a matter of public health concern – when those selling the vaccines are members of that alliance. This is particularly pertinent as Facebook has been censoring some criticism of Pfizer vaccines.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the US public health agency, but it is a handy technicality in this and similar instances that the CDC Foundation has been set up as a private nonprofit incorporated in Georgia, established by Congress through the Public Health Service Act.
Facebook and Merck are throwing in $40 million each to start off the operation, and the money will go towards research into “advancing public understanding of how social media and behavioral sciences can be leveraged to improve the health of communities around the world.”
The first grants will be given to researchers and organizations who are exploring ways of using social media and digital platforms to build confidence in and drive uptake of vaccines, the email said.
Facebook’s representative also wrote that the corporation and its partners in the alliance are looking to expand their work.
New data on vaccine efficacy from scotland and more evidence on bayesian datacrime…
… and more bad news for “the experts”
el gato malo – bad cattitude – january 19, 2022
it’s becoming a bit like beating a dead horse to keep highlighting more and more data that shows the failure of the vaccines to act as promised, but this one highlights something else i was discussing recently and provides a tangible example of the math and definitional manipulation that’s going on.
so let’s take a quick spin:
(all data from HERE)
first, cases:
as is becoming endlessly apparent and replicable, “unvaxxed” is outperforming every other category.
vaccines are not stopping spread, they are most likely (subject to the limitations of non randomized society scale data) accelerating it.
this becomes readily apparent when we calculate risk ratios. (incidence of group divided by incidence in unvaxxed control, so any number >1 = more risk)
risk in the double vaxxed is well over twice as high as in the unvaxxed. boosters seem to help, but still cannot get you back to baseline and i want to emphasize the word “seem” here because i think this data is misleading and is vastly overstating booster efficacy and likely making double vaxxed look worse than it is. (more in a minute)
we can also look at hospitalization:
what’s most interesting here is that it seems like there was some vaccine efficacy against hospitalization but that it inverted as 2022 began.
we can see the risk ratio on 2 doses rise sharply from 0.76 (24% VE) to 1.39 (-39% VE). this is an 82% jump in risk ratio and it was durable into the following week. i have emphasized this in red.
boosters seem effective (but there’s that word again) but even this seeming efficacy is rapidly dropping and risk ratio is up from 0.15 in week 3 dec to 0.38 in week 2 jan, a 150% change.
i see 2 likely explanations here and they are not mutually exclusive:
- this is omicron, the OAS/vaccine (Original Antigenic Sin) evading variant showing up and taking over. as it does, vaccine efficacy drops like a rock because you are antigenically imprinted for the wrong spike proteins. what had been a help becomes actual harm because a bad response is worse for you than making one up on the fly and omicron is the optimized output of selection by leaky vaccine for vaccine evasion and superspread. we’re now into OAS territory, just as certain gatos told you we would be…
- this is bad math and bad definitions being used to hide properties of these vaccines and shift risk. defining as “3 doses” only those 2 weeks after their 3rd jab is bayesian datacrime, especially when the jab itself is known to cause ~2 weeks of immunosuppression and higher risk. the jab itself generates a high risk cohort but then attributes that risk to the cohort before it. it’s like blaming getting hit by a car crossing the street on having stayed on the sidewalk, and the effects can be gigantic. you can hide ANYTHING in that. it’s bad definitions leading to bad math and it’s been widespread practice since pfizer ginned it up to slant their trials.
you can get a full walk through on this issue and the various forms in which is can manifest here:
the examples linked about lay it out clearly: you can make a zero efficacy vaxx look like it works and this works even better if it causes a rise in risk in the 2 week period you lump into the prior group.
thus, boosters make “full vaxxed” look bad. fully vaxxed made unvaxxed look bad. so much of what has been claimed to be vaccine efficacy is just a mathematic rig job from poorly chosen definitions and there is simply no way that that was an accident.
pfizer does not make mistakes like that or like vaxxing the whole control group right when vaxx fade started to get bad. they make choices and those choices have been aided and abetted by regulators and public health agencies.
they all signed off on and adopted these misleading definitions and have been providing information and making policy based upon them.
i’m willing to believe that the CDC was too inept to spot this. it’s sad, but it’s plausible.
but the NIH should have seen it and the FDA not only should have spotted it instantly but should have disallowed a trial using such a shady tactic. it’s pure manipulation.
they both let it go because they were both involved. NIH licensed the IP for the vaccine payload to moderna. former FDA head gottlieb stepped down mid-term to join the pfizer board of directors.
this is what full blown regulatory capture looks like… Full article
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Book Review
Alarmist climate science as a textbook example of groupthink
By Paul MacRae | May 1, 2012
… Groupthink was extensively studied by Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis and described in his 1982 book Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes.
Janis was curious about how teams of highly intelligent and motivated people—the “best and the brightest” as David Halberstam called them in his 1972 book of the same name—could have come up with political policy disasters like the Vietnam War, Watergate, Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs. Similarly, in 2008 and 2009, we saw the best and brightest in the world’s financial sphere crash thanks to some incredibly stupid decisions, such as allowing sub-prime mortgages to people on the verge of bankruptcy.
In other words, Janis studied why and how groups of highly intelligent professional bureaucrats and, yes, even scientists, screw up, sometimes disastrously and almost always unnecessarily. The reason, Janis believed, was “groupthink.” He quotes Nietzsche’s observation that “madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups,” and notes that groupthink occurs when “subtle constraints … prevent a [group] member from fully exercising his critical powers and from openly expressing doubts when most others in the group appear to have reached a consensus.”[2]
Janis found that even if the group leader expresses an openness to new ideas, group members value consensus more than critical thinking; groups are thus led astray by excessive “concurrence-seeking behavior.”[3] Therefore, Janis wrote, groupthink is “a model of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”[4]
The groupthink syndrome
The result is what Janis calls “the groupthink syndrome.” This consists of three main categories of symptoms:
1. Overestimate of the group’s power and morality, including “an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their actions.” [emphasis added]
2. Closed-mindedness, including a refusal to consider alternative explanations and stereotyped negative views of those who aren’t part of the group’s consensus. The group takes on a “win-lose fighting stance” toward alternative views.[5]
3. Pressure toward uniformity, including “a shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view”; “direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes”; and “the emergence of self-appointed mind-guards … who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.”[6]
It’s obvious that alarmist climate science—as explicitly and extensively revealed in the Climatic Research Unit’s “Climategate” emails—shares all of these defects of groupthink, including a huge emphasis on maintaining consensus, a sense that because they are saving the world, alarmist climate scientists are beyond the normal moral constraints of scientific honesty (“overestimation of the group’s power and morality”), and vilification of those (“deniers”) who don’t share the consensus. … Read full article
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