Tidal Wave of Documents on Gain-of-Function and the Leak of the Virus
Stuff is starting to get interesting (and undeniable)
By Robert W Malone MD, MS | January 11, 2022
There is so much news hitting the streets that is being censored by main stream media and social media today, that it is overwhelming easy comprehension.
Let’s start with the letter to sent to Secretary of the HHS, Xavier Becerra from Representatives Jim Jordan (Ranking Member, Committee on the Judiciary) and James Comer (Ranking Member, Committee on Oversight and Reform). Here is the opening excerpt:
The letter goes on:
Rather than be transparent with the Committee, HHS and NIH continue to hide, obfuscate, and shield the truth. By continuing to refuse to cooperate with our request, your agencies are choosing to hide information that will help inform the origins of the ongoing pandemic, prevent future pandemics, respond to future pandemics, inform the United States’ current national security posture, and restore confidence in our public health experts. HHS and NIH’s continued obstruction is likely to cause irreparable harm to the credibility of these agencies. The emails released today raise significant questions, including but not limited to:
1. Did Drs. Fauci or Collins warn anyone at the White House about the potential COVID-19 originated in a lab and could be intentionally genetically manipulated?
2. If these concerns were not shared, why was the decision to keep them quiet made?
3. What new evidence, if any, came to light about COVID-19 between February 1, 2020 and February 4, 2020 to alter the belief it originated in a lab?
4. Did Drs. Fauci or Collins edit the Nature Medicine paper entitled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2”?
5. Would having this knowledge earlier have benefitted either vaccine or treatment development?
6. By February 1, 2020, were Drs. Fauci or Collins aware of the State Department’s warnings about WIV safety?
7. Would this warning have changed the early response to the COVID-19 pandemic?
These questions are vital to understanding this and future pandemic responses. Unfortunately, thus far, HHS and its subordinate agency have hidden behind redactions to shield these emails from public scrutiny. We call on you to immediately lift these redactions and produce the email communications to Congress. Further, considering the import of the above questions, we request Dr. Anthony Fauci be made immediately available to sit for a transcribed interview. Please respond by January 18, 2022 to confirm.
Thank you for your attention to this important matter.
If you want a detailed analysis of above letter and the appended emails, I recommend ZeroHedge Tyler Durden’s article entitled “House Republicans Release Damning Fauci Emails Suggesting Concealed Knowledge Of Lab Leak”.
More on the Project Veritas data dump.
Minor main stream media outlets are already trying to cast aspersions on the Veritas documents, although as of yet, they have yet to strike a direct hit. Their tactic out of the box are to attack Veritas, and smear the legitimacy of the documents (without evidence, near as I can tell). All the while, ignoring the contents of the documents themselves. Did “we” really expect anything more from them?
I will be the first to say that we don’t have full verification, but the report issued to the Inspector General of the Department of Defense by US Marine Corp Major Joseph Murphy on August 13th, 2021 appears to be the real deal so far. When Project Veritas contacted Major Murphy, he declined to talk about the documents, but Project Veritas reported that he said the following:
To me, the above statement doesn’t exactly sound like a denial. Something tells me that Major Murphy will be pushed one way or another to reveal more of what he knows. To either verify the legitimacy of his report or not.
First, I encourage everyone to read the actual report.
This report is damming on so many fronts. Read it. Read it. Read it.
If validated, it is as big as the Pentagon papers. This would mean that research funded and conducted by the US Government has caused the death of millions of people world wide. Just ponder that. I can’t hardly wrap my head around the idea. Shocking doesn’t describe how important this is. History will remember.
I am briefly going to focus on just one of tiny aspect of this report. The “how and why” this all happened:
Translated: The purpose of the gain of function research was to inoculate (vaccinate) bats found in caves in Yunnan, China where confirmed SARS viruses had been identified. This research project was to reduce the prevalence of bat SARS viruses found in bat populations there. Basically, the researchers were trying to build a bat attenuated virus spike protein vaccine to “enhance their immune memory.” Of course, remember the adage that one should not vaccinate into a pandemic or against a rapidly mutating RNA virus, as one does not want create vaccine escape mutants. But these researchers seemed unaware of this risk (they seemed unaware on a whole lot of issues, but that is beside the point here). Why vaccinate bats with viruses adapted to humans, you might ask? Major Murphy then details that the virus got accidentally released before it fully attenuated (attenuated means to be mutated to be non-pathogenic, presumably to bats and humans).
Now, I have all sorts of questions about this. My first and foremost question is why would the researchers chose a chimera that attaches to human ACE2 receptors as the target?
Warning- tortuous logic curves ahead…
Once again seeking to provide benefit of the doubt, I suspect that the logic must have been that by vaccinating the bats with such a construct, this would reduce the risk of developing a human adapted, ACE2-binding SARS-related virus in same bats. But if this is the case, then the logic is really convoluted. One would first develop a human adapted SARS-like virus which binds human ACE2, then attenuate this virus, then find a way to aerosolize it, then infect the bats. And apparently, somehow, before the attenuation step to adapt the human adapted virus to infect the bats, there was a lab leak.
I think that might have been the underlying logic and history, at least as far as I can figure out at this point.
I think that at this point we can all agree that more rigorous constraints on gain of function research are needed. And in my opinion, we need to renegotiate the biowarfare treaty.
However, how we can stop arrogant scientists with a sense of entitlement from doing reckless stuff with viruses is beyond me.
I also still question the legitimacy of this report. Provenance and chain of custody need to be established. A statement from Major Murphy to someone or a group other than the primary source of the documents would be a good start.
Please note that I have only touched on one tiny aspect of this report. Please go read it for yourself. It is jaw dropping in its detail and allegations.
I also know that it is time for Congress to step in and investigate. Are all of these documents real? Does Major Murphy’s report accurately detail all of the events in the report? Finally, I have complete faith that the Congressional Representatives Jim Jorden and James Comer intend to conduct this investigation. I just hope that the rest of Congress gets out of the way and lets them do their job.
Twitter bans Project Veritas Chief of Staff Eric Spracklen
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | January 11, 2022
Twitter has permanently banned Eric Spracklen, the Chief of Staff for investigative reporting outlet Project Veritas, from its platform for violating its rules on “ban evasion,” less than 24 hours after Project Veritas released a bombshell report on Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Before his ban, Spracklen had been promoting the Project Veritas report which focuses on documents that appear to contradict testimony that Fauci gave under oath on gain of function research.
The report quickly gained traction on Twitter and an associated “#exposefauci” hashtag became the number one trend for several hours.
Spracklen’s final tweets before being banned revealed that the video of this Project Veritas report had racked up 2.8 million views.
The timing is also notable because Fauci was testifying at a Senate hearing on COVID variants as this Project Veritas report was going viral on Twitter.
Spracklen had over 200,000 followers at the time he was banned and was Project Veritas’ last remaining large account on the platform. Its main account (which had more than 735,000 followers) and the account of its founder James O’Keefe (which had over 926,000 followers) were booted earlier this year.
As with the banning of Spracklen, O’Keefe was banned on the same day that one of Project Veritas’ explosive reports was trending on Twitter.
“Twitter has PERMANENTLY SUSPENDED my account for journalism,” Spracklen said. “Twitter knows Veritas is over the target.”
Spracklen is the latest of several high-profile accounts to be banned by Twitter recently. In the last two weeks alone, the tech giant has booted Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, American immunologist and virologist Dr. Robert Malone, and @Unity4J, a popular support account for journalist Julian Assange.
In addition to the bans, Twitter has locked several users out of their accounts and introduced new censorship rules during the last 30 days.
The growing levels of censorship on Twitter and other Big Tech platforms have inspired an exodus to alternative platforms that vow to not censor their users. Free speech social network Gab, Twitter alternative GETTR, and video sharing platform Rumble have all attracted big names this year.
House Republicans Release Damning Fauci Emails Suggesting Concealed Knowledge Of Lab Leak
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | January 11, 2022
Republicans on the House Oversight Committee have released several emails which suggest Dr. Anthony Fauci may have known that Covid-19 originated from a lab leak, and that it may have been “intentionally genetically manipulated.”
“We write to request a transcribed interview of Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director, U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Excerpts of emails we are making public today (see enclosed Appendix I) reveal that Dr. Fauci was warned of two things: (1) the potential that COVID-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute Virology (WIV) and (2) the possibility that the virus was intentionally genetically manipulated. It is imperative we investigate if this information was conveyed to the rest of the government and whether this information would have changed the U.S. response to the pandemic,” reads the letter from Reps. James Comer and Jim Jordan to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra.
The letter goes on to state that Fauci – despite claiming otherwise on multiple occasions – was in fact aware of the monetary relationship between NIAID, the NIH, EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan lab – by January 27, 2020. Fauci also knew that EcoHealth and NIAID worked together to craft a grant policy which would ‘sidestep the gain-of-function moratorium at the time.’
“This allowed EcoHealth to complete dangerous experiments on novel bat coronaviruses – and with little oversight – that would have otherwise been blocked by the moratorium,” the letter continues, adding that in January 2020, Fauci was also aware that EcoHealth was delinquent in submitting an annual progress report to NIAID, “presumably to hide a gain-of-function experiment conducted on infectious and potentially lethal bat coronaviruses.”
The conference call
The letter references a February 1, 2020 conference call between Fauci, NIH head Collins, and ‘at least eleven other scientists’ who convened to discuss Covid-19.
“It was on this conference call that Drs. Fauci and Collins were first warned that COVID-19 may have leaked from the WIV and, further, may have been intentionally genetically manipulated. Again, it is unclear if either Dr. Fauci or Dr. Collins ever passed these warnings along to other government officials or if they simply ignored them.”
Three days after the call, four participants authored a paper entitled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” of which Fauci and Collins were sent drafts. The authors, who had previously expressed concern over a lab-leak and genetic manipulation, suddenly abandoned that theory to insist the new virus had a natural origin.
Meanwhile, on April 16, 2020, Collins emailed Fauci to express dismay that the Nature Medicine article which they saw prior to publication (and were given the opportunity to edit), did not quash the lab leak hypothesis. Collins asked Fauci if the NIH could do more to “put down” the lab leak hypothesis. The next day, Fauci cited the paper from the White House podium “likely in an effort to further stifle the hypothesis that COVID-19 leaked from the WIV.”
Questions
The House GOP letter then asks a series of questions.
Rather than be transparent with the Committee, HHS and NIH continue to hide, obfuscate, and shield the truth. By continuing to refuse to cooperate with our request, your agencies are choosing to hide information that will help inform the origins of the ongoing pandemic, prevent future pandemics, respond to future pandemics, inform the United States’ current national security posture, and restore confidence in our public health experts. HHS and NIH’s continued obstruction is likely to cause irreparable harm to the credibility of these agencies. The emails released today raise significant questions, including but not limited to:
1. Did Drs. Fauci or Collins warn anyone at the White House about the potential COVID-19
originated in a lab and could be intentionally genetically manipulated?
2. If these concerns were not shared, why was the decision to keep them quiet made?
3. What new evidence, if any, came to light about COVID-19 between February 1, 2020 and February 4, 2020 to alter the belief it originated in a lab?
4. Did Drs. Fauci or Collins edit the Nature Medicine paper entitled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2”?
5. Would having this knowledge earlier have benefitted either vaccine or treatment development?
6. By February 1, 2020, were Drs. Fauci or Collins aware of the State Department’s warnings about WIV safety?
7. Would this warning have changed the early response to the COVID-19 pandemic?
Read the entire letter and released emails below:
Five Theories on the Origin of Omicron, the Variant That Might End the Pandemic
By Josh Mitteldorf, Ph.D. | The Defender | January 10, 2022
The genome of Omicron has taken the community of public health scientists by surprise.
Not only are there a large number of mutations, but some of these mutations have not been observed in the many previous genome analyses, thousands of which are being conducted in labs around the world.
Among scientists, there are five competing explanations for this situation.
- Maybe the virus has been mutating toward Omicron for a long while, but it has happened “under the radar” in a region of the world where there are few scientific labs that might have reported its genome in intermediate states. In other words, it appeared someplace where genomic testing was unavailable and intermediate strains remained undetected.
- A single immune-compromised patient might have harbored the virus for an extended period of “long COVID,” during which the virus mutated while replicating within that individual.
- The virus might have jumped to a mouse host and spread from mouse to mouse, in an environment where different mutations would be favored. The heavily mutated virus must then have jumped back to humans.
- The virus leaked from, or was released from, a laboratory in Durban, South Africa, where experimenters were genetically manipulating the virus.
- Vaccinated populations have put intense selection pressure on the virus to evade the vaccine by mutating its spike protein, which is the only part of the virus to which vaccinated individuals have immunity.
As with everything COVID, we’ve seen significant censorship around the origins of Omicron, both in the mainstream press and the medical journals.
Three of the above theories were discussed out in the open. But No. 4 was relegated to the fringes because scientists are still gunshy about discussing engineered bioweapons, and No. 5 has similarly been sidelined because it is politically incorrect to say anything bad about vaccines.
The irony here is that evolution in vaccinated populations may have led to the emergence of a version of COVID that everyone can live with.
Let’s take a closer look at each theory.
Theory #1: Omicron was hiding out in darkest Africa
Christian Drosten, a virologist at Charité University Hospital in Berlin, proposed Omicron evolved its prodigious ability to spread rapidly while hiding out in regions of Botswana and Southwest Africa.
“I assume this evolved not in South Africa, where a lot of sequencing is going on, but somewhere else in southern Africa during the winter wave,” Drosten said.
This region of the world has few virology laboratories that would have reported intermediate versions of the virus.
In both Botswana and South Africa, just under half the population has been vaccinated, according to Reuters. This might explain the many mutations in the spike protein and Omicron’s ability to infect the vaccinated.
Theory #2: Omicron gestated in the slow cooker of a single patient with long COVID
According to a Dec. 1, 2021 article in Science, Omicron clearly did not develop out of one of the earlier variants of concern, such as Alpha or Delta.
Instead, it appears to have evolved “in parallel — and in the dark.”
Emma Hodcroft, a virologist at the University of Bern, told Science :
“Omicron is so different from the millions of SARS-CoV-2 genomes that have been shared publicly that pinpointing its closest relative is difficult. It likely diverged early from other strains. I would say it goes back to mid-2020.”
That raises the question of where Omicron’s predecessors lurked for more than a year.
Andrew Rambaut of the University of Edinburgh told Science he can’t see how the virus could have stayed hidden in a group of people for so long.
“I’m not sure there’s really anywhere in the world that is isolated enough for this sort of virus to transmit for that length of time without it emerging in various places,” Rambaut said.
Rambaut and others propose the virus most likely developed in a chronically infected COVID-19 patient, likely someone whose immune response was impaired by another illness or a drug.
According to Science, when Alpha was first discovered in late 2020, that variant also appeared to have acquired numerous mutations all at once, leading researchers to postulate a chronic infection.
That theory is bolstered by sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 samples from some chronically infected patients.
Theory #3: Omicron jumped to a mouse, then back to humans
This study from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, cites genetic evidence from the Omicron genome to support the thesis that the virus jumped to mice, then back to humans.
The frequency of different kinds of mutations (different amino acid substitutions) is different within the mouse physiology compared to the human physiology.
These authors determined the types of mutations found in Omicron are more characteristic of mouse than human physiology.
A creative idea! But perhaps that is its main weakness, because:
- There are a huge number of mutations of every kind when the virus replicates, either in a mouse or a human. The ones that stick are the ones that are adaptive, i.e., the ones that help the virus replicate or spread more effectively to another host. The Chinese study does not address this.
- A great many adaptations would be needed for a virus to effectively infect a mouse population. These would have to be established to accomplish the jump into the mouse population, then undone for the virus to jump back to humans. Still, there is some precedent in the known ability of SARS-CoV-2 to infect a herd of white-tailed deer.
- Both these objections could be obviated if the virus were deliberately passaged through humanized mice in a laboratory.
Theory #4: Omicron escaped from a gain-of-function laboratory
In April 2021, a laboratory in Durban, South Africa, published this paper, describing the genetic modification of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
In November 2021, the Omicron variant was first discovered in the area of Johannesburg / Pretoria, about 600 km away from Durban.
Were the two events related?
The 501Y mutation which is the subject of the Durban study is present in the Omicron variant, but many of the other mutations listed in the Durban manuscript are missing from the Omicron genome.
Many scientists are convinced, based on its genetic signature, that the original Alpha strain of COVID was engineered in a bioweapons laboratory.
Normally, the spike protein of a virus is just evolved to latch firmly onto a host cell. But in the case of the COVID virus, the spike protein does a lot of nasty things as well, including blood clots and damage to nerves and arteries.
The spike protein seems on its face to be designed for toxicity.
The early Nature Medicine article that tried to put the lab-origin theory to rest claimed only that the spike protein was not fully optimized to bind to human cells. That was the sole basis of the authors’ certainty that “SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”
However, when Dr. Anthony Fauci’s emails were FOIAed, we learned Fauci himself commissioned this article, whose authors included suspects for channeling bioweapons research to China through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, of which Fauci is the director.
So now it appears the spike protein was designed as a compromise between optimal infectivity and optimal toxicity.
If Omicron was engineered for unsavory purposes, it seems to be serving more as an antidote rather than a weapon.
Omicron appears to spread so fast that it has rapidly displaced Delta in the population where it originated, yet it is causing remarkably mild illness and few if any deaths.
Theory #5: Omicron evolved to evade the vaccine
All four of the above theories have adherents and all four can be supported with logic. Any one of them may turn out to be correct.
But there is a simpler hypothesis, theory No. 5, which involves no extra assumptions, relying instead only on the principles of natural selection.
The main weakness of this hypothesis is that the number of mutations in Omicron, and the rate of evolution of those mutations, seem to be anomalously high — but perhaps that fact is being ignored because of publishing taboos.
Viruses eventually evolve toward higher transmission rates and lower fatality rates. The higher transmission rate is what allows the virus to out-compete other variants and spread through the population.
The lower fatality rate is less obvious — viruses can spread better if the host is feeling well and circulating in the population. If the host dies, the virus dies with it.
The Omicron variant seems to take an unusually large step in both directions. This is why most epidemiologists are looking for a specialized explanation for its origin.
A more mundane explanation points to the possibility that vaccinated populations put pressure on the virus to adapt. Communities with high vaccination rates have created an ideal environment for the coronavirus to mutate.
All parts of the virus are mutating all the time, but not all help the virus to be successful.
If the spike protein mutates, this can throw the vaccinated immune system off the scent because vaccination produces a highly focused immune response to the (Wuhan original) spike protein.
Dr. Geert vanden Bossche prominently predicted this would happen early in the distribution of the COVID vaccines.
The Omicron variant demonstrates that vanden Bossche got this exactly right. It includes 37 new mutations in the area of the spike protein, and Omicron has largely evaded the vaccines.
Vaccinated people are as likely or more likely to get Omicron compared to unvaccinated.
Vanden Bossche anticipated tragic consequences for all of humanity, but this does not seem to be what is happening. Rather, this cloud appears to have a silver lining.
As stated above, the spike protein is the toxic payload of the COVID virus, responsible for most of the damage the virus does to blood vessels and neurons. (It appears that the spike protein was engineered for this purpose in a gain-of-function experiment.)
As the spike protein has mutated, it has become less toxic. As a result, the Omicron variant is far milder than the original Wuhan COVID.
The Omicron mortality rate, according to UK figures, is only 1/10 as high as the Wuhan rate. (The UK has had 10,866 Omicron cases and 14 deaths for a mortality rate of 0.0013. For comparison, the two-year total of COVID deaths and cases in the UK was 148,000/11,800,000 = 0.013, almost exactly 10 times higher.)
Unknowns and what lies ahead?
We know historically that the natural immunity of a recovered patient provides the best immunity we know. People (mostly Chinese) who recovered from SARS 18 years ago seem to have full immunity to COVID, though the two viruses are substantially different.
This should mean that Omicron will sweep through the population, and many, many people will recover after a mild and abbreviated illness, with permanent immunity to all forms of COVID.
This would be the dawn of herd immunity and the end of COVID. The question is whether recovering from Omicron will provide full immunity to future variants.
We see that recovery from past variants does not provide sufficient immunity to protect against Omicron.
Is this because Omicron is an exception to the general rule about robust immunity in recovered patients?
Or is it an artifact of faulty testing, people who have been told they recovered from COVID when they really had the flu?
Or is it an artifact of vaccination after recovery, which seems to be counter-productive, narrowing some of nature’s robust, acquired immunity?
Meanwhile, press releases from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and mainstream reports are using Omicron as a booster for the fear-porn industry, citing exploding “case” statistics while ignoring the simultaneous drop in “death” statistics.
Pfizer is developing a new mRNA vaccine for Omicron, which it plans to release in March. Will the vaccine maker double down on its tragic mistake in basing the vaccine on the toxic spike protein?
Or will the new vaccine be derived from a less dangerous part of the virus?
We have reason to hope Omicron will spell the end of COVID, but only time will tell.
Josh Mitteldorf, Ph.D., has a background in theoretical physics. Since the 1990s, he is best known for his contributions to the biology of aging, including many articles and two books.
© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
BUY TODAY: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s New Book — ‘The Real Anthony Fauci’
A BBC Complaint
By Toby Young | The Daily Sceptic | January 9, 2022
A reader has shared with us the complaint he submitted yesterday to the BBC about the way in which Radio 4 presented the news that Britain’s Covid death toll has reached 150,000 – a figure which is also on the front of most of today’s papers:
The 1800 News on Radio 4, Saturday January 8th 2022 began with this headline:
“More than 150,000 people now have died of Covid in the UK since the start of the pandemic two years ago.”
This clearly stated that the deaths of 150,000 people had been as a result of contracting Covid. This is at best misleading, at worst a falsehood. The truth is stated on the BBC website, which said, correctly, “More than 150,000 people in the UK have now died within 28 days of a positive Covid test since the pandemic began.”
This isn’t a question of semantics. It’s a really important point and a crucial distinction between accurate news reporting and ‘number theatre’ (as Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter calls it). I can include two of my neighbours who died ‘with Covid’ and went down in the Covid total, even though one in fact died from the leukaemia that had kept him in hospital (where he caught Covid) for two years as he deteriorated, and another from liver cancer, also catching asymptomatic Covid in hospital.
On the 1800 News the Health Correspondent Katherine da Costa made no attempt to contextualise the figure of 150,000 in terms of annual normal deaths in the UK (this might in fact have strengthened her piece), interviewed a family member of a victim without clarifying the actual cause of death, and ignored the much larger number of people who have died of other causes.
Although Ms Da Costa did not repeat the inaccurate headline, she did not qualify her reference to the number of deaths by making it clear, as the news website did, that these were of people who had died within 28 days of testing positive. It was also quite evident that the interviewee had no framework of reference for the 150,000.
There is a stark contrast here with the coverage by Nick Triggle which always contextualises the figures and makes it clear what they actually are, without seeking to sensationalise as the inaccurate headline in the 1800 did.
The Global Disinformation Campaign Against Ivermectin in COVID-19 (Part I)
By Pierre Kory | January 6, 2022
Ivermectin, a decades-old, off-patent drug costing pennies to make, with an unparalleled safety profile and numerous manufacturers across the world, actually sits atop one of the largest and strongest clinical trials evidence base in history. The existing, massive amount of clinical trials data shows immense efficacy against COVID-19 in all its phases; prevention, early and late treatment, and long-haul syndrome (no actual trials in long-haul but rather extensive positive clinical experiences). Despite this inarguable (yes, inarguable) supportive evidence, no major Western or international health agency has recommended its use in COVID-19. Conversely, ivermectin has been officially adopted for early treatment in all or part of 23 “less developed” countries (39 if you include non-government medical organizations), and which include about 25% of the world’s population.
Now, before we delve deeper into the workings of the most heinous disinformation campaign ever waged by the pharmaceutical industry in history (and also it’s most successful so far as 75% of the earth’s inhabitants still have not been recommended to use it to treat COVID), I will ask you not to just “take my word for it” but instead take you on a brief, guided tour of the insanely positive evidence base supporting the use of ivermectin in COVID-19.
Let’s go. First, the below “Forest Plot” was compiled by the anonymous expert research group at c19early.com (not enough can be said of the impact their meticulous work has had on COVID clinicians and scientists across the globe). Please visit their site, it is mind-blowingly impressive. The compounds listed in the rows represent the medicines with the most clinical trials evidence as of today, either by size or by number and are listed in order of potency against COVID.
Here is how to read and understand a Forest Plot: there is a thin grey line in the center, on either side of which are plotted squares which represent an estimate of the true size of the “treatment effect,” derived from an average of the treatment effects measured from all the trials performed of that medicine. If the box is squarely on the vertical line it means it is a treatment whose benefits have been found equal to its harms. In the above list, (with the exception of one) medicines with “positive” treatment effects are listed, meaning the benefits of treatment with these agents outweigh any potential or actual harms. No medicine on the list above, besides convalescent plasma (CP), indicates it is inferior to placebo (note that CP was the initial favored therapy of every single academic medical center in the U.S despite the fact CP has only ever been shown to be effective in hematogenous infections). In cases, such as with CP, due to the fact it’s harms outweigh it’s benefits, the box is plotted on the right side of the line and shaded in red. Conversely, the farther to the left of the vertical line that a box is plotted, the larger the measured impact on the clinical outcome tested. Green boxes indicate the effect estimate is based on at least 4 trials. Grey boxes and greyed out medicine names mean the estimate for that medicine is based on fewer than 4 trials. The thin horizontal line through each little box indicates the degree of precision, i.e. how confident we can be in the estimate of the treatment effect – narrow horizontal lines through the boxes mean the data in support is large and consistently positive and is “statistically significant” in favor of the medicine. The wider the line, the less consistent, or less amount of data can be relied upon to make the estimate. When the horizontal line through a box extends across the vertical gray line, this indicates that it is statistically possible that the true estimate may actually be in favor of placebo!
With ivermectin, what sets it apart from all the other compounds tested, is the sheer number of randomized and observational controlled trials that have been performed to date. It is #1 among the “green box” compounds given it has been tested in 73 controlled trials which include an unheard-of 56,804 patients. Why unheard of? Because never in history has a medicine been so thoroughly tested, with such consistent positive results, yet led to a situation where governmental agencies in highly developed countries call for even more placebo-controlled trials to be done… and then slow walk to doing them. The ethics of giving a covid patient a placebo given this amount of supportive data are too miserable to contemplate this early in the article (fun fact – I was personally asked to try to help recruit patients for the ongoing University of Minnesota placebo controlled RCT. I got off the phone as fast as I could). Another not-so-fun fact: penicillin was mass deployed to great effect to all our troops for their battlefield injuries in World War II… based on a case series of 157 patients where their bacterial infections overtly resolved without signs of toxicity during treatment. Not one RCT was done before this decision was made by military and medical leaders.
The only other medicine with a larger supportive evidence base is hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), especially when only the early treatment trials of HCQ are considered as that collection of trials results in an equally impressive position on the Forest plot (not shown). A tired topic I will explore later is the much parroted (and highly favored by Pharma) notion that “retrospective, observational controlled trials (OCT)” cannot be trusted as they are inferior to “proper, large, double-blind, randomized, placebo controlled trials (RCT).” This notion is not evidence based. Even the captured (I know, sorry) Cochrane Library knows this. They themselves have shown that, on average, over thousands of clinical trials, over decades of research, OCT’s and RCT’s reach the same conclusions. So stop with the false dichotomy. Pharma wants you to only trust in “large RCT’s”… because they are the only ones with the cash to do them. That way, they can control the only medicines that get “proven” and thus adopted into guidelines.
Two absurdities (crimes) must be highlighted in the above diagram – one is the sheer number of medicines with demonstrated efficacy, most costing under $5 a dose (and almost all with unparalleled safety profiles and/or “over the counter” status) that are still not recommended by any U.S or “western” health agency (with the exception of the state of Florida since the hire of Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo who has put together a terrific public health campaign supporting the use of a combination early treatment protocol which includes another FLCCC adopted drug, fluvoxamine).
Meanwhile our federal governmental health agencies, which I have argued repeatedly (and will for years until it stops) are so completely captured by the pharmaceutical industry that they have not advocated for any one of these “repurposed” compounds, even as a “precautionary principle” (meaning that even if the purported benefits may not be realized to the extent estimated, the risks are so small it is more likely best for all we employ them now in early treatment given the world is cratering). Their most unforgivable and absurd inaction is the deliberate ignoring of the critical role of Vitamin D in protecting against the worst outcomes of COVID, despite knowing full well significant portions of the U.S population is Vitamin D deficient. Even Anthony Fauci recommends to himself that he take Vitamin D… regularly. The data below was given to me by a Dr. Henele and is from work he published in 2016. Note the percent of the U.S population that is critically deficient in Vitamin D.
The second absurdity is found when looking at the plot with only the medicines recommended in the NIH’s COVID protocol circled. Note that the NIH protocol is adhered to by almost the entirety of the country’s hospitals (largely due to large add-on bonuses paid to hospitals when the protocol elements are used – I am not making this up). A “theme” should begin to emerge as you look at the circled, “recommended” medicines vs the non-circled, “non-recommended” medicines – every single one is massively expensive. Every single one. Note not one inexpensive drug is circled. How much more evidence do you need to prove that our agencies have been completely captured by the pharmaceutical industry?
Fun fact now that you are en expert in reading Forest Plot’s: Merck’s mutagenic new drug molnupiravir, after the highly positive results from their study’s “interim analysis,” published in a press release, instead found that, in the 2nd half of its one study, the data favored… placebo. Thus if the 2nd half was a stand-alone study (which it arguably could have been) it’s box would be firmly on the right side of the line. FDA still approved… while feigning concern. Unsurprising really.
Now, beyond the above 73 controlled trials supporting ivermectin, there are, in addition, numerous health ministries from around the world that deployed ivermectin in either the prevention or early treatment of COVID, among often very large populations. Each program’s report found that ivermectin use led to massive reductions in the need for hospitalization and/or death (Mexico City, Uttar Pradesh, Brazil, Misiones, La Pampas, Peru, Phillipines, and Japan – I will do a deeper dive on these in a later post). The program in the city of Itajai, Brazil is both the largest study of ivermectin in the world (data from nearly 200,000 patients was carefully collected over a 6 month period) and most impressive. They found that, despite the fact that the 120,000 patients who agreed to take ivermectin every 15 days were older, fatter, and sicker than the approximately 37,000 that did not… they went to hospital 67% less frequently, and died 70% less frequently… from all causes, not just COVID. The issue with ivermectin as a therapeutic in COVID… has NOTHING to do with the science.
The issue with ivermectin is simply it’s price – it costs less than a $1 and represents the biggest threat to the immense and future profits of the pharmaceutical industry’s novel oral anti-viral drugs… as well as their vaccines.
The previous title holder of the largest threat to Pharma profits in COVID was the highly effective (and also anti-viral) drug hydroxychloroquine (HCQ). However, it lost that title after the 2020 war on HCQ was essentially won by Pharma (for now?), using tactics so sinister as to be unimaginable, and which I will not review here as that macabre war has already been expertly reviewed in incredible and highly referenced detail in the book “The Real Anthony Fauci” by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. His book, in my opinion, is a must read for all the globe’s citizens, as without it, no coherent understanding of the innumerable non-scientific actions and policies across the entirety of the developed (and majority of the undeveloped) world can be gained.
I must emphasize that ivermectin is just the latest drug under attack during Pharma’s long-standing (and highly successful) war on off-patent, “no-longer-obscenely-profitable” medicines. Books have been written about the numerous, and often criminal actions that Big Pharma has employed to replace older off-patent medicines with newer, highly profitable, and often poorly tested drugs with either prospectively known dangers or quickly discovered dangers which they then criminally suppress or distort to preserve profits. When science supporting older, off-patent, often “repurposed” medicines (particularly in the lucrative environment of a global pandemic) becomes “inconvenient” to the financial promise of newer agents, the industry employs what are called “Disinformation” tactics, first invented and perfected by the Tobacco Industry, and now used to great effect by the Pharmaceutical (and many other) industries. These tactics are brilliantly and succinctly summarized in an article called The Disinformation Playbook written by The Union for Concerned Scientists. I encourage all to read. The 5 main “plays” from the playbook are listed below. If you are at all versed in the ivermectin in COVID saga (many FLCCC followers are), it should be easy to quickly come up with numerous examples of each nefarious tactic. I give some hints below…
1) The “Fake”: Conduct counterfeit science and try to pass it off as legitimate research (Dr. Andrew Hill)
2) The “Blitz”: Harass scientists who speak out with results or views inconvenient for industry (attacks on FLCCC founders)
3) The “Diversion”: Manufacture uncertainty about science where little or none exists (Dr. Andrew Hill/captured high-impact journals)
4) The “Screen”: Buy credibility through alliances with academia or professional societies (i.e. high impact medical journal influences)
5) The “Fix”: Manipulate government officials or processes to inappropriately influence policy (i.e. capture the health agencies by creating “revolving doors” between Pharma and government to ensure total synchrony in objectives amongst their leaders)
Given the Disinformation Playbook was last updated in 2018, it does not include newer, more nefarious tactics that industries have been able to deploy since the historic consolidation of financial power by just 3 multi-trillion dollar investment funds (Black Rock, State Street, and Vanguard). These three corporations have now acquired influential or outright controlling investment stakes in nearly every major corporation in nearly every industry. These investment managers power, particularly the power held synchronously over media companies, social media companies, and the near entirety of the pharmaceutical industry, has allowed even more fearsome tactics to be used in the near-global suppression of the efficacy of ivermectin (and HCQ) as they now:
1) CENSOR any mentions of supportive evidence in corporate, (a.k.a. “legacy”) media. Note that, besides the influence of these investment manager overlords, the global censoring ability of media was greatly helped by the “Trusted News Initiative (TNI),” an obscene (and either naively misguided or completely corrupt) effort by the most powerful journalism organizations in the world to band together to try to control the spread of “mis-information”. Yes, professional journalists decided they needed to control information in a pandemic. I am not making this up. Would an appropriate analogy be that a bunch of physician leaders decided they needed to spread disease in a pandemic?
2) CENSOR any mentions or discussions of efficacy on almost all social media – see explicit youtube “community” policy below as the most unsubtle example:
YOUTUBE COMMUNITY GUIDELINES
3) RETRACT positive papers from impactful medical journals (3 fully peer-reviewed and highly supportive scientific reviews of ivermectin have been retracted, either immediately prior to or post-publication (I was the lead author on the first one with my FLCCC colleagues)
4) BLOCK review and publication of positive trials of ivermectin in major medical journals (in my now global network of ivermectin-expert and/or ivermectin study investigator colleagues, all lament how their positive clinical trials or papers were rejected for review from all the high-impact (captured) journals, with Dr. Eli Schwartz’s highly sophisticated, expertly conducted, and immensely positive study from Israel being one of the most illustrative examples
5) PUBLISH numerous “hit pieces” within high profile print media outlets discrediting the science and/or the scientists who support the medicine. This is actually an example of the already described “Blitz” tactic, but in 2021, during COVID, using total media control, it was deployed by a division of Howitzers. A more recent and relatable example of “the Diversion” tactic was when the NFL used media hit pieces to go after the scientists (and their inconvenient science) after they began publishing and disseminating data about the high rates and disastrous impacts of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in retired NFL players.
What I have found fascinating, is that for every planted hit piece article discrediting the mountain of evidence supporting ivermectin as a therapeutic, the FLCCC is actually rarely mentioned. But why? I think it is because the FLCCC is a sizeable group of highly published physicians and researchers (Professor Paul Marik is actually the most published practicing ICU physician in the history of the specialty). Thus, it’s hard (but not impossible) to call us “fringe.” The last thing they want to do is call attention to our high degree of credibility. Instead they seem to be trying to destroy it using separate hit pieces (among other tactics) which has led to the recent loss of employment for three founding FLCCC members (Drs. Marik, Meduri, and yours truly have been forced to leave jobs or had their exemplary clinical and research careers ended (Drs. Marik and Meduri). An article on ivermectin that does not mention our organization does so purposefully so as not to give attention to credible support for its use given we are considered the foremost clinical experts on the clinical use of ivermectin in COVID in the world.
6) employ a coordinated media-government agency PROPAGANDA campaign;
August 26th, 2021: Pharma used their CDC to send out a “health advisory” to all 50 state Departments of Health, which they then sent to all the physicians licensed in their respective states (a terrifying example of the immense destructive power of a federal agency captured by pharmaceutical industry interests). The bulletin both;
1) depicted ivermectin as a dangerous drug by deliberately exaggerating reports of calls to poison control centers
2) cited the meaningless fact that it “is not FDA approved for COVID” as a reason it should not be used, hoping doctors may not realize that “off-label” prescribing is both legal and encouraged… by the FDA.
Next, a quickly debunked (not quickly enough) planted media article in Rolling Stone appeared with an impressively click-bait-able headline describing emergency rooms so overflowing with ivermectin overdoses that our nation’s gunshot victims couldn’t get (obviously) needed care (even I clicked on it). The article then went viral across the world (thousands of media mentions) before the hospital could put out a statement saying it was 100% false. Gee, do you think Pharma hired a professional PR firm to pull that one off or did they just benefit from a serendipitous and lamentably lazy journalist’s error?
Then, in another terrifying example of the control of major corporate media… for week after week every news broadcaster, pundit, and late-night talk show host prefaced the word ivermectin with the descriptor “horse de-wormer.” Over and over and over again (totally pissing off Joe Rogan who recovered from COVID with ivermectin as part of his combination protocol- hah!)
Then finally, in a coup de grace, in comes Pharma’s FDA proudly using twitter to associate ivermectin with, you guessed it, horses. Janet Woodcock, the acting Commissioner of the FDA, even sent out a congratulatory email to her team about the success of the tweet.
Was this a coordinated attack led by an expert team of brazen PR professionals who have a fondness for horses… or did it arise organically via a series of disconnected events?
If you are still not convinced of the former, I need to point out that this “series of disconnected events” had an uncanny sense of when to “roll-out.” The CDC’s Health Advisory was issued on August 26th. Look at the below chart and see if you can find any reason why it would start then? Recall that the advisory was ostensibly in reaction to false “reports of calls to poison control centers”. The below chart shows instead what was really going on at the time – hundreds, if not thousands of licensed medical professionals across the country were prescribing ivermectin like mad during the terrible, and deadly summer surge of the Delta variant. Was someone getting nervous that a “dirty little secret” was being rapidly discovered by American citizens and physicians? The answer is a definitive yes – thus triggering Pharma to nefariously try to “stuff the genie back in the bottle” by unleashing their terrifying disinformation propaganda campaign.
NUMBER OF IVERMECTIN PRESCRIPTIONS DISPENSED IN THE U.S OVER TIME
But check this out… the good ole’ FLCCC, my little band of brothers and sisters, is somehow making a opening in the wall of information suppression and distortion as shown in the chart below (compiled by our data analyst and ivermectin expert, Juan Chamie). I say this makes us “the Bad News Bears” in the repurposed drug war.
I am going to stop here… and call it PART I. Please subscribe below so you can be sure to get Part II where I will continue to detail the numerous and wide-ranging corrupt actions taken to suppress the knowledge of efficacy and restrict the use of ivermectin… across the world. There is way way more to this story.
Also, please be aware of the following events:
World-wide Rally for Freedom Day
Join us for a march in DC on defeating the mandate and to march in support of our international colleagues- who are also rallying on this day: Sunday January 23rd.
United we stand, in peace we watch. Bring friends and jackets.
Go to https://defeatthemandatesdc.com/ for details
Finally, I am honored to have been invited by Dr. Chris Martenson and Peak Prosperity to their Annual Seminar as part of a speaker panel including some powerhouse thought leaders. Don’t miss it folks. Register using this link: http://peak22.events/kory
Kazakhstan turns into graveyard for US diplomacy
A Pentagon-funded bio-lab near Almaty, Kazakhstan, has become focus of attention for its research on “dangerous pathogens”
BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | JANUARY 9, 2022
The Kazakh Ministry of Health issued an innocuous disclaimer today denying social media reports about the seizure of a “military biological lab near Almaty by unidentified people.”
According to Tass news agency, the social media had speculated that specialists in chemical protection suits were working near the lab as “a leak of dangerous pathogens” occurred.
The carefully worded press release by the Kazakh ministry clarifies: “This is not true. The facility is being protected.” Period.
The intriguing report highlights the tip of an iceberg which has implications for public health and holds serious geopolitical ramifications.
Since the late 1990s, when it came to be known that the US was steadily establishing and building up partnerships in biological research with several ex-Soviet republics, Moscow has repeatedly alleged that such cooperation posed a threat to Russia.
These biological research facilities were originally envisaged as part of the so-called Nunn-Lugar Biological Threat Reduction Program to prevent the proliferation of expertise, materials, equipment and technologies that could contribute to the development of biological weapons.
But Moscow suspected that the exact opposite was happening — in reality, the Pentagon has been sponsoring, lavishly financing and providing technical assistance to these laboratories where “under the guise of peaceful research, the US is building up its “military-biological potential.”
In a sensational statement in October 2018, Major General Igor Kirillov, the commander of Russia’s Radiological, Chemical and Biological Defense Troops went to the extent of disclosing a discernible pattern of the network of Pentagon labs being located near the borders of Russia and China.
The US-Kazakh partnership in this field dates back to 2003. Kazakhstan has been an interesting “hotspot” for infectious disease occurrence and surveillance due in part to its history, geography, and its diversity of host species. Kazakhstan has long maintained an infrastructure and tiered network for infectious disease surveillance since the time of the Tsars.
The US-funded research projects centred on studies involving select agents including zoonoses: anthrax, plague, tularemia, highly pathogenic avian influenza, brucellosis, etc. These projects funded researchers in Kazakhstan, while project collaborators in the US and UK mentored and guided these researchers to develop and test their hypotheses.
It has been a “win-win” arrangement. The Kazakh institute staff got trained in modern diagnostic and data management techniques, and did research work with lavish external funding, while the Pentagon obtained through such labs valuable inputs for US covert biological weapons programs with military application specifically directed against ethnic groups in Russia and China.
The unassumingly-named Central Reference Laboratory (CRL) in Almaty figuring in the Tass report was originally planned in 2013 with the US investing $102 million in a biosecurity lab to study some of the most deadly pathogens that could potentially be used in bioterrorism attacks.
Rather than locating the new facility in some obsecure tract of land in Nevada, the Pentagon deliberately chose a site near Almaty to securely store and study the highest-risk diseases such as plague, anthrax and cholera.
The rationale was that the lab would provide gainful employment to talented Kazakh researchers and get them off the streets, so to speak — that is, discourage them from selling their scientific expertise and services to terrorist groups who may have use for biological weapons!
But the CRL, now operational, is anchored on institutional cooperation between Kazakh government and the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency under the the Pentagon, which is tasked with protecting “US National Security interests in a rapidly evolving, globalised threat environment to enable a greater understanding of our adversaries and provide solutions to WMD threats in an era of Great Power Competition.”
By the way, Germany also has a similar arrangement under the rubric German-Kazakh Network for Biosafety and Biosecurity, which is co-managed by the Bundeswehr Institute of Microbiology (a military research facility of the German Armed Forces for Medical Biological Defence.)
Why is Kazakhstan a sought-after partner? Simply put, the country provides unique access to ethnic Russian and Chinese groups as “specimen” for conducting field research involving highly pathogenic, potential biological warfare agents. Kazakhstan has 13,364 km of borders with its neighbouring countries Russia, China, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan.
Is China indifferent to all this? Far from it. Beijing Review featured a report sourced from BBC Monitoring in 2020 conveying China’s concerns in the matter. As recently as in November last year, a Russian commentator wrote that these bio-labs are virtual Pentagon bases and demanded an international inquiry. He highlighted that the Kazakh ministry of education and science “now works mainly on Pentagon research programmes.”
How could Kazakhstan, a CSTO member country, have got away with such conduct? This needs some explaining.
Paradoxically, these biological labs are living examples of something sinister that has been going on which everyone knew and no one wanted to talk about — namely, the extensive penetration of the decadent Kazakh ruling elites by the US intelligence.
This penetration has been going on for years but significantly deepened as the 81-year old former president Nurusultan Nazarbayev’s “hands-on” leadership began to loosen and his family members and cronies increasingly began moonlighting (under the patriarch’s benevolent gaze, of course) — something akin to Yeltsin years in Russia.
Sadly, it is a familiar story. The Kazakh elites are notoriously corrupt even by Central Asian standards and the parasitic elites have preferred to keep their loot in safe havens in the western world . Unsurprisingly, they are hopelessly compromised to the US intelligence. It’s as simple as that.
Most certainly, Moscow sensed that popular disaffection was building up and the ground beneath the feet of Nazarbayev, a close friend of Putin, was shifting. But it did not — or more likely, would not — interfere since the US was operating through powerful comprador elements who happened to be the ageing patriarch’s family members and associates.
Given the clan affiliations in that part of the world, Moscow probably felt it prudent to keep its counsel to itself. An added factor would have been the fear that the US might manipulate the ultra-nationalist forces (as happened in Ukraine) to inflict harm on the vulnerable 3.5 million ethnic Russian minority (18% of the population.)
Above all, the fact of the matter is that Nazarbayev cronies held the levers of state power, especially over the security apparatus, which gave Washington a decisive edge.
But things have dramatically changed this past week. Nazarbayev may still have some residual influence but not good enough to rescue the elite who subserved US interests. President Tokayev, a low-profile career diplomat by profession, is finally coming on his own.
Two of Tokayev’s decisive moves have been the replacement of Nazarbayev as the head of the National Security Council and the dismissal of the country’s powerful intelligence chief Karim Masimov (who has since been arrested along with other unidentified suspects as part of a probe into “high treason.”)
Indeed, Washington has much to worry about because, at the end of the day, Kazakhstan remains an unfinished business unless and until a colour revolution can bring about regime change and install a pro-West ruler in power, as in Ukraine. The current turbulence signified an abortive attempt at colour revolution, which boomeranged.
Unlike in Afghanistan, the CIA and Pentagon are not in a position to “evacuate” their collaborators. And the torrential flow of events has shocked the Washington establishment. Kazakhstan is a large country (two-thirds the size of India) and sparsely populated (18 million), and the CSTO forces who moved in are well-equipped and led by a tough seasoned general who crushed the US-backed insurgency in Chechnya.
The Russian forces have taken with them the advanced Leer-3 electronic warfare system, which includes specially configured Orlan-10 drones, jamming devices, etc. Borders have been sealed.
The mandate for Russian forces is to protect “strategic assets”. Presumably, such assets include the Pentagon-funded labs in Kazakhstan.
Is ensuring people’s compliance with future diktats the key reason for the re-imposition of masks in the classroom?
Masking is not normal and should not be normalised
Health Advisory & Recovery Team | January 8, 2022
In the week when the requirement (or is it only a ‘recommendation’?) to mask children in the classroom was reinstated, it is worthwhile to consider the likely reasons underpinning the decision to return to a restriction that is both ineffective and harmful. Undoubtedly, there has again been pressure from the education unions for pupils to cover their faces, motivated either by a baseless belief that such a measure will reduce the risk of teachers contracting the virus, or perhaps a desire to further damage Government credibility by causing more disruption in our schools. Whatever their reason, at this juncture it is timely to revisit the range of circumstantial evidence that supports what HART believes to be the most plausible reason for compelling the healthy to wear face coverings: to increase compliance with future COVID-19 restrictions and the vaccination rollout.
Prior to June 2020, public health experts did not endorse masking healthy people in the community as a means of reducing viral transmission. In March 2020, Dr Jenny Harris (England’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer) was unequivocal when she stated, ‘For the average member of the public, masks are really not a good idea’ and that ‘People can put themselves at more risk than less’. North of the border, Professor Jason Leitch (Scotland’s Clinical Director) was equally emphatic when – in April 2020 – he said, ‘The global evidence is masks in the general population don’t work’. Strikingly, in December 2020 – several months after mask mandates had been imposed in the UK – the World Health Organisation (WHO) published a document titled, Mask use in the context of COVID-19 that formed the conclusion that, ‘There is only limited and inconsistent scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of masking healthy people in the community’. Many contemporary public figures spread a similar message.
So what changed in 2020 that flipped the public health experts into a pro-mask narrative?
One thing is clear: it was not in response to the advent of robust scientific evidence showing that face coverings significantly reduce viral transmission. On the contrary, a review of 14 controlled studies, published in May 2020, concluded that masks did not significantly lessen the spread of influenza in the community, protecting neither the wearer nor others. Although it is not possible to draw an unequivocal conclusion about the reason for the volte-face, several factors are consistent with masks being deployed primarily to enhance compliance with the Government’s COVID-19 interventions.
Deborah Cohen, a medically-qualified correspondent working for the BBC Newsnight programme, stated (in July 2020) that various sources had informed her that the WHO had recommended masks in response to political lobbying, and when she put this possibility directly to the WHO they did not deny it. Also, in her book, A State of Fear, Laura Dodsworth interviewed Gavin Morgan – an educational psychologist and member of the SPI-B (the behavioural science subgroup of SAGE) – who told her that his antipathy to masks had been nullified by some colleagues in the group who believed they were useful in promoting a sense of ‘solidarity’, strengthening people’s feelings of cohesion in the collective fight against the virus.
Further support for the compliance explanation derives from an examination of the activities of the Government’s behavioural scientists who, throughout the pandemic, have recommended the use of covert psychological ‘nudges’ as a means of promoting people’s acceptance of COVID-19 restrictions and the subsequent vaccine rollout. Masking healthy people (adults and children) significantly enhances two fundamental ‘nudges’ used within this campaign. First, the exploitation of fear to promote compliance with Government diktats has been well documented. Masking people in community settings, as well as being one of the restrictions fuelled by fear, is also a powerful way of perpetuating fear. Acting as a crude reminder that danger is – purportedly – all around, face coverings will also prevent disconfirmation of anxious beliefs, preventing the wearer from concluding that our communities are now safe enough to re-engage with in a normal way. A self-reinforcing restriction; something that would strongly appeal to our ethically-compromised behavioural scientists.
Second, the awareness of ‘norms’ – the prevalent views and behaviour of our fellow citizens – can exert pressure on us all to conform, and this widely-deployed ‘nudge’ is also greatly strengthened by mask wearing. Normative pressure (otherwise known as peer pressure or scapegoating) is less effective in changing the behaviour of the deviant minority if there is no visible indicator of pro-social compliance rooted in communities. A face covering, or lack of one, enables instant recognition of the rule followers and rule breakers, thereby escalating the pressure to comply.
These observations as a whole are consistent with the premise that masking healthy people is primarily a compliance device. Clearly, widespread wearing of face coverings in community settings is an effective way of keeping the British public on board with any future restrictions the state decides to impose in pursuit of its agenda. Would the Government have so easily capitulated to union pressure to re-mask children in the classroom if this was not so?
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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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- US set to sell $1B “Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System” to Israel – Daily Update
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- In Gaza, Israel commits 10+ ceasefire violations a day – Daily Update
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- A New Library in Gaza Rises From the Ashes of Destruction
- Israel’s top Jewish religious body ‘refuses to condemn’ smashing of Jesus statue
- No Tricks Zone
- Oversupply Of Volatile Solar Energy Leads To Record NEGATIVE Prices!
- New Study: Extreme Heat Records, Heatwaves, Extreme Cold Records Declining Across US Since 1899
- It’s The Cold, Stupid! Cold 20 Times More Lethal Than Heat, Multiple Studies Show
- European Institute For Climate And Energy: “Climate Debate is Seldom About Science”
- New Study: The Climate May Be 5 Times More Sensitive To Solar Forcing Than Commonly Assumed
- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
- Reality Check: Maldives Have Actually Grown In Size Or Remained Stable Over Recent Decades
- Abrupt Climate Change Also Occurred NATURALLY In The Past …25 Times During Last Ice Age
- Cave Discovery Reveals Today’s Desert Climates Were Recently Far Warmer, Wetter, Teeming With Life
- German Expert: Heat Dome Led To Record Temps In Western USA…Warmer In 1934, 1936
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