The crisis in Ukraine demonstrates the sheer brilliance of Pentagon strategists. Yes, granted, it’s an evil and malevolent strategy, but nonetheless one cannot help but admire it for its sheer ingenuity.
The strategy has involved maneuvering Russia into having to make a choice between two scenarios, both of which have bad consequences. The choices are these: (1) Russia does not invade Ukraine, in which case the U.S.-controlled NATO absorbs Ukraine, which means U.S. bases, missiles, tanks, and troops permanently situated on Russia’s borders; or (2) Russia invades Ukraine and takes over the reins of government, in which case U.S. officials portray Russia as a horrific aggressor that now threatens the rest of Europe, the United States, and all mankind.
Like I say, it’s an evil and malevolent strategy but everyone has to concede that it is absolutely ingenious.
The box into which the Pentagon has placed Russia reminds me of the equally ingenious strategy that President Franklin Roosevelt employed to get the United States into World War II. Prior to U.S. entry into the war, the American people were overwhelmingly opposed to entering the conflict, especially after the fiasco of U.S. intervention into World War I.
This was at a time when U.S. presidents were still complying with the constitutional provision that requires them to secure a declaration of war from Congress before being able to wage war legally and constitutionally against another nation-state. Owing to the overwhelming opposition to entering the war, FDR knew that he could not get Congress to declare war on Germany.
Thus, FDR decided that he needed to figure out a strategy that would induce Germany to attack the United States, which would then enable him to go to Congress and exclaim, “We’ve been attacked! I am shocked! This is a day that will live in infamy! Now give me my declaration of war so that I can begin waging war against Germany.”
Thus, Roosevelt did everything he could to induce the Germans into attacking U.S. vessels in the Atlantic. But the strategy didn’t work. The Germans knew what FDR was up to and refused to take his bait.
So, Roosevelt looked instead toward the Pacific and embarked on a course of action designed to induce Japan into attacking the United States. FDR hoped that such an attack would give him a “back door” to the European war.
Knowing that Japan’s military needed oil to operate its war machine in China, Roosevelt imposed a highly effective oil embargo on Japan. That left Japan with two choices: (1) Withdraw its military forces from China, or (2) Attack the Dutch East Indies to secure a permanent supply of oil.
Not surprisingly, Japan chose Option 2. But Japan knew that the U.S. Navy was almost certain to interfere with its oil supply after it invaded the Dutch East Indies. Thus, the only way to ensure that continuous supply of oil was by knocking out the U.S. naval fleet. That’s what the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor was all about. The attack was never about conquering the United States. It was always about simply trying to knock out the U.S. fleet to ensure a continuous supply of oil for Japan’s war machine in China.
The canny FDR left American warships (but not American carriers) in Pearl Harbor as bait for the Japanese. His strategy worked brilliantly. Sure, he had to sacrifice some warships and some troops at Pearl Harbor (as well as in the Philippines), but his ingenious strategy enabled him to achieve his goal. Soon after the Japanese attack, Germany declared war on the United States. FDR dutifully went to Congress, played the innocent, exclaimed a day of infamy, and got his declaration of war and U.S. entry into World War II.
Yes, Roosevelt’s strategy was evil and malevolent, but you can’t help but admire it for its sheer brilliance. Like the Pentagon has done with Ukraine, FDR manipulated the situation so that Japanese officials were put into a box that entailed choosing from two available alternatives, both of which came with bad consequences from the standpoint of Japan.
Today, all that the Pentagon — along with its loyal supporters in the executive branch, including President Biden and the bureaucrats in the State Department, and along with its loyal acolytes in the mainstream press — has to do is sit back and watch Russia squirm. If it invades Ukraine, it will be portrayed as the supreme aggressor nation, which will then be used to justify the continued existence of the U.S. national-security establishment and NATO, along with ever-increasing budgets, power, and influence for the U.S. “defense” establishment. If Russia declines to invade, NATO absorbs Ukraine and the Pentagon installs its military bases, troops, missiles, and tanks on Russia’s border, thereby ensuring a state of constant tension and crisis, which, once again, ensures ever-increasing taxpayer-funded largess for the national-security establishment, its Cold War dinosaur NATO, and the entire U.S. “defense” industry that feeds at the public trough.
The only way out of this evil statist morass lies with the American people. What is needed is a great awakening within Americans, one that comes with both a heightened sense of consciousness of the evil of a national-security state form of governmental structure and a heightened sense of conscience that enables people to recognize the evil and malevolence within their own government, not to mention the danger of playing games with a nation-state that has the potential of unleashing a massive number of mushroom clouds over American cities and towns. If that great awakening were to transpire, America could restore its founding governmental system of a limited-government republic and put our nation back on the road toward liberty, peace, prosperity, morality, and harmony with the people of the world.
February 18, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | NATO, Ukraine, United States |
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U.S. officials are declaring unequivocally that Russian officials were lying when Russia stated that it was withdrawing troops from the Russia-Ukraine border. U.S officials say that it’s the exact opposite — that Russia is actually bringing more troops to the border.
Russian officials might well be lying about Russian troop movements. It certainly shouldn’t surprise anyone, especially if Russia is in fact going to actually invade the country.
Unfortunately, however, the Russians wouldn’t be the only ones lying about what is going on with Ukraine. So are U.S. officials. But of course that shouldn’t surprise anyone either, given that lying has always been a foundation stone of the U.S. national-security establishment, at least when “national security” is at stake.
As Russia has made clear, its objective is to prevent Ukraine from becoming a member of NATO. If Ukraine becomes a member of NATO, that would enable the Pentagon and the CIA to install U.S. missiles, tanks, and troops along Russia’s border. That’s precisely what Russia opposes, in much the same way that U.S. officials would (and did) oppose Russian missiles, troops, and weaponry in Cuba.
In other words, if the U.S. provided assurances to Russia that Ukraine would not become a NATO member, the crisis would be over and Russian troops would be withdrawn. But the problem is that the Pentagon and the CIA do not want to give Russia that assurance. They are insistent on making Ukraine a member of NATO, an old Cold War dinosaur bureaucratic entity, so that they can station their missiles, troops, and tanks on Russia’s border.
U.S. officials claim that Russia has nothing to worry about because, they say, the U.S. government is a peace-loving, non-aggressive regime. That’s a lie. In fact, the U.S. government is the most aggressive regime on the planet. Just ask the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, two countries against which the U.S. government waged wars of aggression and killed and injured hundreds of thousands of people in the process.
During the Cold War, Poland was aligned with the Soviet Union as a member of the Warsaw Pact. After the ostensible end of the Cold War, the U.S. absorbed Poland into NATO, thereby enabling the Pentagon and the CIA to station missiles, troops, and tanks closer to Russia’s border, which is precisely what they want to do in Ukraine.
In fact, as the New York Times reported yesterday, the Pentagon has installed missiles near the Polish village of Redzikowo, which is only about 100 miles from Russian territory. U.S. officials say that those missiles are situated there to protect Eastern Europe from Iran. That’s just another lie and a ridiculous one at that. Iran is no more a threat to Eastern Europe than Paraguay is. The fact that U.S. officials feel the need to lie about why their missiles are in Poland would obviously concern anyone in Russia.
Today, the Pentagon is sending thousands of U.S. troops into Romania and Poland, which gives everyone a very good picture of what would happen if Ukraine were absorbed into NATO. As soon as U.S. officials stoked any new crisis with Russia, there is no doubt that the Pentagon would do what they are doing today in Romania and Poland — they would be rushing thousands of troops into Ukraine along with missiles, tanks, other weaponry being positioned on Russia’s border.
In fact, it is a virtual certainty that if NATO absorbs Ukraine, the Pentagon will expand its worldwide system of permanent military bases to Ukraine. It’s not difficult to imagine a string of sprawling military bases in Ukraine, along with the bars, brothels, corruption, pollution, and violent crimes that inevitably come with them.
As with anything that pertains to the Pentagon and the CIA, the mainstream press is playing its standard deferential and supportive role in the Ukraine crisis, blinding themselves from seeing the critical role that the U.S. national-security establishment has played in producing this crisis. It’s that blindness that then causes the mainstream press to continue endorsing ever-increasing budgets, power, and influence for the national-security establishment and its army of well-heeled “defense” contractors.
The only way out of this statist and highly dangerous morass is for the American people to come to the realization of what a horrific mistake it was to convert the U.S. government to a national-security state after World War II, which thereby enabled the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA to wage their Cold War racket and, later, their global war-on-terrorism racket. If Americans were to come to that realization, we could then have our founding constitutional system of a limited-government republic back and no more perpetual foreign-policy crises.
February 17, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Militarism | NATO, Ukraine, United States |
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In this short video posted on BitChute in December 2021, Brittany Galvin gives an overview of what she had to do in the previous six months to report her vaccine adverse events to VAERS. She begins by sharing that she has once again received an email asking for information on her VAERS report1 that was initially entered in May 2021.
VAERS is the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System2 that was first established in 1990. It is coadministered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The system is supposed to be an early warning signal for vaccine manufacturers and health experts to identify vaccines that may be triggering a higher than expected number of adverse events. One of the primary objectives of the program is to:3
“Provide a national safety monitoring system that extends to the entire general population for response to public health emergencies, such as a large-scale pandemic influenza vaccination program.”
Anyone can make a report to VAERS — both patients and health professionals can use this system to report health concerns they suspect may be connected to a vaccine. Health professionals are required to use it for all adverse events that occur after the COVID-19 emergency use shots, but since the system is passive, whether the reports actually get filed depends entirely on each individual living up to that responsibility.
The reports must contain all hospital records and any other relevant medical information. Unfortunately, as Galvin succinctly notes in her video, the system is not efficient, and the data may be woefully out of date. This has a significant impact on monitoring the effects of the COVID inoculation program since it’s possible the currently published death and adverse event rates may be reprehensibly different from reality.
Magnetized Mom Tries to Report Injury to VAERS
Galvin has created many social media videos to document her journey. This four-minute synopsis begins with her vaccinations in May and ends in November 2021. In June 2021, in an interview with Stew Peters4 during her third hospitalization in two weeks, Galvin recalls that after her first injection, she immediately experienced chills, fever and many of the symptoms that others are reporting.
In addition to this, within four to five hours after the first shot, her legs felt heavy, which she described as feeling like she was walking through mud or cement. The experience left her nervous before the second dose. She put off getting the second shot for as long as she could. While she experienced no immediate symptoms after the second injection, on Day 13 her life changed.
Initially, she thought she had a seizure but later learned that her muscles had suddenly “seized up.” She passed out and reported severe pain in her head when she regained consciousness. Originally, the doctors believe she had had either a stroke or a seizure.
She was sent home from the first hospitalization with a diagnosis of pericarditis but when her symptoms didn’t get better, she was admitted two more times. On the third admission in two weeks, a neurologist told her that she had Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS) because of the Moderna injection. In addition, she was also diagnosed with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS).
Stew Peters comments that this was the first time he and others on his team had heard a doctor admit the adverse events were from a genetic therapy COVID-19 shot, yet Galvin reports that the physicians and nurses who treated her told her they had seen many patients with adverse events after the shots.5
Galvin reports the first question she was asked at each of the three ER visits was had she gotten a vaccine, when and which one? This suggests that health care officials and hospitals are aware of adverse events that are not reported in mainstream media.
She told Peters that she has never been against vaccines but didn’t want this one. She took it so she could go back to work. Instead of listening to her intuition, she listened to the shaming and the commercials that said if you didn’t have a vaccine you’d have to live differently. Now she wonders why all the people who have been concerned about people who died from the infection aren’t as concerned about dying from the vaccine.
Galvin’s social media page was originally filled with videos she had taken of herself, placing metal objects on her body that stuck because she was inexplicably “magnetized.” She reports that the doctors in the hospital have also placed metal objects on her skin and have seen with their own eyes that she is magnetized.
In addition, the MRI tech discovered that his body was also magnetized after seeing Galvin demonstrate how a spoon could attach to her body. As of January 2022, she is eight months into the reporting process to VAERS and has been advised by VAERS staff that it may be another six to 12 months before her case is posted.6
VAERS Has Only 50 People Processing Reports
Galvin has created several videos talking about the journey she’s been on trying to report her adverse events to VAERS. In a video posted in January 2022 on Odysee,7 Galvin recorded her phone conversation with an investigator from VAERS to discuss why her report filed in late May 2021 had not yet been counted in the system.
In one conversation she learned that the process takes many steps through different departments. The first stop for the VAERS reports is in a department with only 50 employees.8 Once the package of information is completed by this department, it is sent to a team of nurses who read and review every page.
If the staff have any concerns or if they feel they need more information, the package will be sent back to the first department for further information gathering.9 According to the recorded conversation, one investigator suggested that since anyone can make a report to the system, it’s possible there could be multiple reports for an individual and that this may be a reason why Galvin received multiple requests for information to complete her VAERS report.
And, that’s what did happen: There were two VAERS reports in the system for Galvin, one submitted by Galvin, and another submitted by Moderna. The VAERS report was still missing hospital information, which had been requested several times through the medical records department of the hospital. The VAERS investigator acknowledged that the reporting is a long process and explained:10
“The hospitals, a lot of them are not sending the records. My last two reports where they said, “We didn’t receive the requests.” Well, I’m like, OK, is this your fax number. “Yes, this is our fax number” … so, a lot of them are not sending the records when we ask for it.”
Galvin expressed her concern that there were hundreds of thousands of people like her and just 50 VAERS employees trying to process these reports. It could be months before the CDC receives the report of her vaccine injuries that can be published.11
“Meanwhile the whole government is trying to force everyone to get this thing. Lying to the people telling them that “no one has gotten GBS from it” but here I sit barely able to walk and my case isn’t going to be ‘technically’ reported because the CDC hasn’t investigated yet because the hospitals are dragging their feet … it’s like a revolving crazy door and all of us humans on this planet and in this country are being lied to, and it’s unfair.”
More Reasons Why Adverse Events Are Underreported
At the end of the conversation with the investigator, Galvin learned that while her report was filed in May 2021, it wasn’t assigned to someone at VAERS until September or November 2021.12 In addition to short-staffing at VAERS and hospitals dragging their feet to produce the documentation needed to support claims, there are other reasons why there is a significant underreporting factor in the system.
In the latter months of 2021, Deborah Conrad, certified physician assistant who worked as a hospitalist at a local hospital, stepped forward to speak to Del Bigtree at “The Highwire” about the lack of reporting to VAERS within her hospital. She also provided a voice recording of a conversation with the chief medical officer who chastised her for spending her time off to make the reports to VAERS for other physicians.13
The chief medical officer said: “There is a risk to the organization from a perspective of both underreporting and overreporting.”14 In other words, the lives of the patients were not the issue. And, despite the diligence done by VAERS investigators to ensure the reports are complete and accurate, the hospital must not overreport any injury.
It’s shocking that many physicians are still not aware of VAERS. Before 2020, the system was used primarily by pediatricians to report adverse events from childhood vaccines. Doctors were not educated on how to identify potential injuries, how to report them, or that they have a legal requirement to report all emergency use vaccine injuries.
In fact, this was one of the reasons used by Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the CDC, for pausing administration of the Johnson & Johnson jab when it was first revealed that individuals who took it had a higher risk of blood clots. She told ABC News:15
“One of the reasons for the pause was to make sure clinicians knew how to diagnose and treat this, but also to report it. Because we don’t know if we’ve missed some cases, whether the risk really is 1 in 1 million, or perhaps more than that.”
In addition to the lack of education, another reason why so few physicians report suspected injuries is because there are no penalties for failing to fulfill this legal responsibility. In other words, this passive reporting system is not enforced. As Conrad described in her interview with Bigtree, the forms are also long and tedious to fill out.16
Additionally, not all of Conrad’s colleagues agreed that the injuries should be reported because they didn’t want to believe that the vaccines could cause injury. Historically, vaccine injuries have been routinely underreported, even among pediatricians. A report published in late 2010, which has become known as the Lazarus Report after the principal investigator Ross Lazarus, found:17
“Although 25% of ambulatory patients experience an adverse drug event, less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).”
More recently, a group of scientists used an engineering algorithm to determine the underreporting factor and found it had improved to 41, not less than 1% as had been reported 11 years earlier.18,19 This may be due in part to the media attention on VAERS. Nonetheless, there continues to be a significant underreporting factor indicating the numbers in VAERS20 are likely 41 times higher than published.
CDC and NIAID Imply Car Crashes Are Reported in VAERS
In addition to the underreporting factor and overworked VAERS employees that have created a large gap between the number of reports being submitted and the number being published, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Rochelle Walensky appear bent on completely discrediting VAERS.21
Fauci is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Walensky is the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Since the CDC co-manages VAERS you would expect that she would have at least a working knowledge of how the reports are accepted and verified before being published.
During testimony January 11, 2022, before the Senate, both Fauci and Walensky very clearly stated that any death after a vaccine could be reported to VAERS. Both used the example of an individual who gets vaccinated, hit by a car and dies.
They implied without outright stating that this death would also be recorded in VAERS and logged as a death related to the vaccine. In other words, they both skirted the issue without outright lying to the Senate. Walensky said:22
“The vaccine adverse event reporting system is a mandatory system of any event that happens after being vaccinated. So, if you get hit by a car tragically after being vaccinated, that gets reported in the vaccine adverse event reporting system, the VAERS system.
So, the vaccines are incredibly safe. They protect us against omicron. They protect us against delta. They protect us against COVID. They don’t protect us against every other form of mortality out there.”
However, it’s evident not all medical professionals are reporting adverse events. Yes, you can report a car accident death after a vaccine, but the verification process will weed out that death.
Overall, the shots have not protected people from getting Omicron, Delta or any other form of COVID, which Walensky made clear in a CNN interview the day before testifying before the Senate.23 And, it goes without saying, that there is no shot that protects anyone from all forms of mortality.
Immediately after her response, Walensky was asked if the CDC kept data on the number of people who have died as a result of the vaccine. And she answered: “Absolutely yes. I couldn’t give you the number off the top of my head, but our staff could absolutely get back in touch with you.”
So, while publicly denying that any deaths have occurred from the jabs, Walensky is basically admitting that the CDC is aware that there have been people who died from this “incredibly safe” vaccine. Fauci was then asked if he knew the number or “had any clue on that, and he said:”24
“I don’t know the number, but I think part of the confusion is that when you do a reporting, when you get vaccinated, and you walk out and get hit by a car that is considered a death.
That’s the thing that gets confusing, that everything that happens after the vaccination, even if you die of something completely obviously unrelated, it’s considered a death. So, if I had metastatic cancer, got vaccinated and died two weeks later, that’s a death that gets counted.”
Fauci’s statement only implies that the death is counted as a vaccine death. That is, until his example of having metastatic cancer, when he says, “that gets counted.” Until that point, neither Fauci nor Walensky said it was anything more than a death. Meaning that they didn’t specifically say it would be recorded as caused by the vaccine.
When Fauci said “that gets counted,” Walensky immediately jumped in to save the explanation with, “And every one of those is adjudicated.”25 In other words, each of the reports of death not in any way associated with the shot are removed from the record. But unless you are listening carefully, you will mistakenly be led to believe that VAERS is riddled with reports of injuries and deaths not caused by the shot.
Sources and References
February 17, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, Video | CDC, COVID-19 Vaccine, United States, VAERS |
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Even toddlers will eventually be required to get annual Covid-19 jabs, an FDA official said in the undercover clip
© Project Veritas
Investigative outlet Project Veritas has released footage of a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) executive claiming that annual Covid-19 vaccine jabs are on the way, even for children under five.
In part one of a two-part undercover video series, Christopher Cole, an executive officer with the FDA and head of the agency’s Countermeasures Initiatives, told a Project Veritas reporter he is involved in the “approval process for the various” Covid vaccines. In the video released on Tuesday, Cole claimed more jabs are in the pipeline for everyone and acknowledged the “money incentive” for companies like Pfizer to promote more vaccination.
“It’ll be a recurring fountain of revenue. It might not be that much initially, but it’ll be recurring… if they can get every person required at an annual vaccine, that is a recurring return of money going into their company,” Cole said of vaccine manufacturers. At another point in the footage, the FDA official also admitted that the very companies the FDA regulates dump “almost a billion dollars a year” into its budget.
Cole said even toddlers would be included in this annual shot requirement, though he conceded that there hasn’t been enough testing on the long-term effects of the vaccines on various groups, including young children and pregnant women. Asked how he knew such a mandate could be coming, he said: “Just from everything I’ve heard, [the FDA] are not going to not approve it.”
The annual jab would be “just like the flu shot,” Cole said, and required as the effectiveness of vaccines “wanes.”
The FDA released a statement responding to Veritas’ video on Wednesday, saying Cole “does not work on vaccine matters” and “does not represent the views of the FDA.”
US President Joe Biden has not endorsed an annual vaccine jab, but Cole said the president “wants to inoculate as many people as possible.” Biden’s health officials have also floated the idea of regular jabs. White House health adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci has been open in recent talks to the idea of booster shots being needed regularly, though he has not endorsed annual shots for everyone.
“It will depend on who you are,” he told the Financial Times last week. “But if you are a normal, healthy, 30-year-old person with no underlying conditions, you might need a booster only every four or five years.”
February 16, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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A White House email, obtained on behalf of ICAN, shows Facebook, Merck, and the CDC Foundation, whose corporate partners includes Pfizer, have formed an alliance “to use social media and digital platforms to build confidence in and drive uptake of vaccines.” No conflict there.
On August 12, 2021, ICAN, through its attorneys, submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for communications between White House staff and Facebook, Google, and YouTube. In response to this request, ICAN received a June 15, 2021 email sent by Facebook’s then-Public Policy Manager, Nkechi “Payton” Iheme, to several White House employees.
In it, Iheme announces a new initiative, the “Alliance for Advancing Health Care,” between Facebook and several major companies and organizations, including Merck, the Vaccine Confidence Project, the Sabin Vaccine Institute, and the CDC Foundation. Significantly, one of the CDC Foundation’s corporate partners is Pfizer. In the email, Iheme explains that the Alliance is “focused on advancing public understanding of how social media and behavioral sciences can be leveraged to improve the health of communities around the world” and states that its first project is to “provide grants to researchers and organizations for projects that explore how to use social media and digital platforms to build confidence in and drive uptake of vaccines.” Facebook announced this new initiative on June 9, 2021 here.
The conflict of interest is astonishing. This email shows without a doubt that, through the CDC Foundation created “to support the [CDC’s] work,” the federal government, which is in charge of ensuring the safety of vaccines, has teamed up with Big Pharma and Big Tech to push a liability-free product on the world, while attempting to stomp out anyone who questions this arrangement.
Just as the pharmaceutical companies will never rest when it comes to promoting and selling their vaccine products, and the federal government will not rest in its efforts to assist them, we will never rest in exposing the truth regarding these products or in demanding full transparency and full informed consent for any and all vaccines.
February 16, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception | CDC, COVID-19 Vaccine, Facebook, United States |
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In late January, the CDC published a report that made what might have been regarded as a shocking claim. If you have had Covid, the CDC demonstrated in a chart, you gain robust immunity that is better than that of vaccination, especially concerning duration.
That should be nothing surprising. Brownstone has chronicled 150 studies making that point. What made this new chart different was that it came from the CDC, which has buried the point so deeply for so long as to amount to a near denial.
So there: the CDC says it. So nonchalant! So uneventful!
If people had understood this two years ago, plus been made more completely aware of the dramatic risk gradient by age and health, lockdowns would have been completely untenable.
The society-wide mandates and lockdowns depended on keeping the public ignorant on settled points of cell biology and immunology, plus pressuring social media companies to censor anyone who didn’t fall in line. Here we are all this time later and the truth is coming out.
Had the knowledge of risk gradients and immunities been in the forefront of policy makers’ minds – instead of wild fear and obsequious deference to Fauci – we would have focused on protecting the vulnerable and otherwise allowed society to function normally so that the virus would become endemic. We would not only have saved thousands of lives; we could have avoided the vast economic, educational, cultural, and public-health wreckage all around us.
Somehow at the time, that point was made unsayable for reasons on which we can only speculate. And yet today, the New York Times had said exactly this. In a piece by David Leonhardt called Protecting the Vulnerable, he writes:
With the Omicron wave receding, many places are starting to remove at least some of their remaining pandemic restrictions. This shift could have large benefits. It could reduce the isolation and disruption that have contributed to a long list of societal ills, like rising mental-health problems, drug overdoses, violent crime and, as Substack’s Matthew Yglesias has written, “all kinds of bad behavior.”
At the same time, there remain those who are vulnerable and they deserve protection: “They include the elderly and people with immunodeficiencies that put them at greater Covid risk. According to the C.D.C., more than 75 percent of vaccinated people who have died from Covid had at least four medical risk factors.”
You can read that again: unhealthy but vaccinated people still die. What these people need is to enjoy the protection of herd immunity, the point at which the virus exhausts itself in the face of widespread immunity.
If you have followed this debate, you know exactly the origin of that precise idea now being pushed in part by Leonhardt: The Great Barrington Declaration. This is the document on which Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci ordered a media hit back in October 2020. It advocated nothing more than traditional public health measures as a moderate solution between lockdowns and complete negligence of the virus threat.
As decent as this article is, it overlooks a huge issue, namely why would non-vulnerable populations be forced to get a non-durable vaccine with risks when natural immunity is a known option? Leonhardt doesn’t go there but he should have.
Today, even Anthony Fauci is singing a different tune. He told the Financial Times:
“There is no way we are going to eradicate this virus,” he said. “But I hope we are looking at a time when we have enough people vaccinated and enough people with protection from previous infection that the Covid restrictions will soon be a thing of the past.”
Further:
As we get out of the full-blown pandemic phase of Covid-19, which we are certainly heading out of, these decisions will increasingly be made on a local level rather than centrally decided or mandated. There will also be more people making their own decisions on how they want to deal with the virus.”
Again, this is straight out of the Great Barrington Declaration, almost to a word, but without acknowledgement.
There can be no question that early on in lockdowns, Fauci, the CDC, and the WHO all decided to bury the point that we would get to endemicity the same way we always have.
How did that happen? Paul Allan Offit is an epidemiologist who advises (or did advise) the Biden administration in the early days. He is not my favorite guy but, as things go, he is no Anthony Fauci. He seems sincere and intelligent.
Offit variously appears on podcasts. Last week, he let slip an astonishing thing. He said that early on in the pandemic, he met at the White House with Walensky, Fauci, Collins, and one other person. The topic was whether the Biden administration should recognize natural immunity to Covid — the most well-established fact about cell biology. He and one other person said absolutely. The rest said no.
Here is the remarkable clip.
Offit is fascinating in this interview because it was pretty clear to him that he was revealing something very important but he did not know whether this was going to be some kind of problem. He then proceeded to tell the story. He did not speculate about the reasons. He was smiling and laughing throughout the interview.
The immunity passports in place in three of the biggest American cities (though DC just repealed its own), the entire public sector, plus the attempt to impose them on the whole of the private sector, probably constitute the most invasive, aggressive, and controversial public policy since the Vietnam War draft. It all could have been fixed by a recognition of the immunological reality: the exposed and recovered are protected. That point of science was rejected by Fauci, Collins, and Walensky. The whole Biden administration went along.
We didn’t know until last week that this Offit meeting had even occurred. And surely this is just the tip of the iceberg. The more that time goes on, the more questions are piling up about this gang that wrecked liberty in the US after Inauguration Day 2021, a time when they could have reversed all the restrictions but instead went the other way.
Central to the concern here is what precisely happened in February 2020 to cause Fauci to forge plans to lock down the entire American economy for a virus that he previously said repeatedly could not be stopped. Why did he change his mind? We have plenty of evidence that his change of mind was related to his fear — real or imagined — that the pathogen was made in a lab and was leaked either deliberately or accidentally and that he would likely bear responsibility. Fauci and his friends were on burner phones for weeks and holding secret meetings. The HHS document ordering lockdowns were all forged in these weeks.
If the Republicans take back Congress, they are going to have a real time discovering the inner workings of the deep state here, if they find the courage to look deeply enough. That such an obvious and settled point of science became taboo for a time is truly a scandal for the ages. Now we know that it was a deliberate decision. Why? And why are we only now hearing about it, long after knowing this truth might have saved so much destruction?
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown.
February 16, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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US Republican lawmakers have sent a letter pressing chief White House medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci for answers about his alleged silencing of concerns that the Covid-19 virus originally came from a Chinese lab.
The letter, sent on Monday by three US House members, cited emails suggesting that Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), tried in early 2020 to quash speculation among scientists that the virus may have originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Instead of alerting national security officials to the pandemic’s potentially unnatural origin, Fauci and Collins sought to shut down the debate, the GOP lawmakers said.
The emails, which were obtained by media outlets under Freedom of Information Act requests, reportedly showed that some virology experts saw reason to believe that the virus was lab-created. Some of the messages made reference to a February 2020 conference call in which many scientists leaned toward the lab-leak theory. For instance, Tulane Medical School professor Robert Garry said he could see no “plausible natural scenario” for some aspects of Covid-19 otherwise.
“However, those same email communications, particularly when viewed in light of other publicly available information, demonstrate an apparent effort by you and Dr. Collins not only to cover up the concerns those virologists raised, but to suppress scientific debate about the origins of Covid-19,” the letter said.
Representatives Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Washington), Brett Guthrie (R-Kentucky) and Morgan Griffith (R-Virginia) signed the letter.
They demanded that Fauci provide details on how those conversations with scientists were initiated and who consulted him and Collins on Covid-19’s likely origins. The lawmakers also requested information on any communications by Fauci and Collins with Chinese scientists, as well as documents related to US funding of the research in Wuhan.
Even as scientists were speculating about Covid-19’s potentially manmade origins, Fauci told reporters in April 2020 that the sequencing of the virus was “totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.” Earlier that same day, Collins sent him a message of concern about the lab leak theory, asking how NIH might “put down this very destructive conspiracy.”
Republican lawmakers have accused Fauci of directing taxpayer funding to gain-of-function research that could potentially make organisms more transmissible or lethal. In Monday’s letter, the House members claimed the efforts to quell the lab-leak theory may have stemmed at least partly from fears of those grants being exposed. “It appears you and Dr. Collins may have done so to protect China and avoid criticism about incredibly risky research that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was funding at the Wuhan lab,” the legislators said.
February 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Anthony Fauci, Covid-19, Francis Collins, NIH, United States |
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A legal motion makes bombshell allegations about IT firm’s clandestine spying activities on Trump White House
Lawyers working for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign paid an IT firm to “infiltrate” servers at Trump Tower and the White House in order to establish a “narrative” that would link Donald Trump to Russia, an explosive new legal filing alleges.
The legal motion, filed in a District of Columbia court on Friday by a Justice Department (DOJ) prosecutor investigating the origins of the FBI’s ‘Russiagate’ probe, relates to potential conflicts of interest by former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann. Sussmann has previously pleaded not guilty to a one-count charge of lying to federal agents.
Two months before the 2016 election, Sussmann, a partner at Perkins Coie, the law firm that represented the Democrats and Clinton’s campaign, allegedly told the FBI he was not working on behalf of Clinton when he presented the agency with supposedly incriminating documents.
In the filing, Special Counsel John Durham alleges that Sussmann was working on behalf of the Clinton campaign and an unnamed “technology executive” at a US tech firm when he submitted “purported data” and “white papers” to then-FBI General Counsel James Baker in September 2016. They apparently pointed to a “covert communications channel” between the Trump Organization and Russia-based Alfa Bank (identified as “Russian Bank-1”).
Highlighting Sussmann’s “billing records,” Durham alleges that he had “repeatedly billed the Clinton Campaign for his work on the Russian Bank-1 allegations.” This involved an unnamed lawyer working with the campaign, the tech executive (identified as “Tech Executive-1”), an investigative firm, several cyber-researchers, and employees at “multiple internet companies,” the motion states.
It alleges that the executive “exploited his access to non-public and/or proprietary Internet data” and tasked researchers at an unnamed US university to “mine Internet data” so as to create “an inference” and “narrative” linking Trump to Russia. The executive claimed to be working “to please certain VIPs.”
While many US media outlets pointed to the Alfa Bank claims as proof of Trump’s “collusion” with the Kremlin, the FBI found that the email server in question was run by an advertising agency that sent out promotional emails for Trump’s hotels, among other things.
Among the internet data exploited was “domain name system (DNS) Internet traffic” from Trump Tower, Trump’s apartment building in New York City, and the White House, the filing states. It alleged that Tech Executive-1’s employer (identified as “Internet Company-1”) provided DNS resolution services to the White House – and accused the executive and his associates of exploiting this arrangement to mine data for “derogatory information” about Trump.
Then, in 2017, Sussmann apparently used this information to compile “an updated set of allegations” about Trump’s supposed Russian ties – noting “suspicious DNS lookups” and “Russian-made wireless phones” – to another US government agency, the motion states. Durham said he found “no support for these allegations” and added that some of the lookups occurred as early as 2014 during the Obama administration.
Demanding “reparations” be paid, Trump said in a statement on Saturday that the filing provided “indisputable evidence” that his campaign and presidency were “spied on by operatives paid by the Hillary Clinton Campaign” to “develop a completely fabricated connection to Russia.”
“This is a scandal far greater in scope and magnitude than Watergate and those who were involved in and knew about this spying operation should be subject to criminal prosecution,” he added, noting that there was a time when the alleged crime “would have been punishable by death.”
There has been no official response from Clinton as yet.
Last year, Sussmann’s attorneys said their client had “committed no crime,” calling charges against him “baseless [and] unprecedented.” Meanwhile, a lawyer for the person who fed Sussmann the Alfa Bank claims said that his client did not know his law firm had a relationship with the Clinton campaign “and was simply doing the right thing.”
Sussmann represented the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during proceedings related to the alleged 2016 hack of its computers. Both Clinton and the DNC had blamed Russia, but could not back up their accusations.
The original Russia probe ballooned into a two-year investigation led by then-Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who failed to produce evidence of collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia.
February 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Timeless or most popular | Hillary Clinton, United States |
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in the age of government sponsored science driven by grants, sinecure, and sponsorship, scientists face a difficult set of choices.
they must, if they wish to continue receiving the largess of the gold-givers toe the party line of state or commercially sponsored science. he who has paid the piper demands to call the tune and producing work that does not suit “the narrative” is career suicide. your funding will dry up. so may your position, your prospects for advancement, and even your tenure. you will not be asked to join committees, interviewed for articles, citied, or supported. you may be outright attacked. i discuss this in more depth HERE.
but scientists also face another constraint: they need to be accurate. they need to run good experiments, collect good data, and relay it faithfully. if they do not, they will get called out and revealed as incompetents or frauds. this too will end one’s career as it means that not only are you doing no useful work (apart from to propogandists) but will reveal that you have sold out integrity for lucre and that is the end of peers taking you seriously. you play for team lysenko now.
the need to thread this needle and appease and please both demands has led to an odd practice:
many times, the claims made in the abstract or in the conclusions are not supported by the actual data.
i know this sounds a little bizarre, but as someone who reads perhaps 1000 such papers a year, allow me to assure you, it is stunningly common in any politically loaded sphere. (and you would be amazed how many are politically loaded. it need not be government pushing it. watching geneticists tie their conclusions in knots to claim that you can breed horses for speed and endurance or dogs for intelligence but that of course there is no such thing as eugenics in humans because that would be unspeakable despite your having just proved that there is in fact, eugenics in humans is really quite something. they go to astounding lengths in the introductions of their books to disavow what they are about to prove.)
this odd compromise sort of works, but mostly, it doesn’t.
it gives those who fund studies and the journals who curate them for ideological purity their bone. the abstract says “X means Y.” this is what they want for the press releases and for waving around.
it also puts the actual data out into the world. this is what researchers, both those who did the work and those who will read it in detail, actually need. they can see the facts and will not be gulled in by the claims in the conclusion as they are adept at drawing their own conclusions.
this leads to the weird outcome of the public and the politicians frequently having one idea about what a study says and the experts in the field having more or less the opposite take.
the “experts” all know what the data means and why they are not allowed to say it. it works a bit like the foils used by renaissance dialogue writers to ape at being fools while presenting the actual case being made while the “authorities” presented the “narrative” and were made fools of by those able to read between the lines.
in the age of the internet, this sets up a bizarre and deeply frustrating conflict: those who can and do really read studies are constantly having to pick them apart and explain to the “google and spam” crowd who just selectively confirm their biases and skim the lead paragraph of a study why the study they just cited does not, in fact, say what they are claiming it does.
and, of course, trying to convince someone that the authors deliberately misstated the facts in the summary is like trying to teach a new trick to the very oldest of dogs. they are just not having it.
this has created a rancorous and dangerously stupid level of debate and an impossible burden for any one individual to carry. it takes 10 seconds to search, skim, and spam with a study you never read and start yelling “peer review!” over and over as if that means something.
it can take hours to pick the study apart and see if it really does support the conclusions stated in the summary and then hours more to convince someone who has not even read it (and probably does not know how). that’s unwinnable. it’s like sisyphus getting and additional rock to push back up the hill every time he reaches the top. pretty soon it’s 20 boulders and nothing is going anywhere.
fortunately, the internet age has produced a large group of folks interested in picking these studies apart and publishing their takes. and we form communities and help one another. so no one has to do ALL the work when the CDC publishes yet more self refuting “wave around” data.
this is, in fact, what real peer review is. it’s supposed to be hostile and to pick holes.
the upshot here is that you should be very careful taking studies you have not actually read at face value.
you need to read them. thoroughly. waving them around as if you did when you have not is a recipe for being wrong.
let’s take a simple and straightforward recent example:
this article is being used to push boosters. this is because the authors said this:
i have not spoken to them. perhaps they believe this, perhaps they do not but felt they had to say it or be pariahs. i have no special insight there. but i can read data.
so let’s see what the data says.
this was a big study, but also a retrospective study with post facto matching. the matching was by age, sex, and municipality. it is tainted by the ever present “we counted no one as vaccinated until 14 days post dose 2” issue which will inevitably deeply favor vaccine efficacy through a mathematical rig job (especially in the short run) and can even produce it from zero VE and looks to have had large effects in canadian data.
so we have some ingrained bayesian issues with our cohorts that may inject serious bias toward making vaccines look effective.
the data itself was rendered quite challenging to read. (heavy text, few graphics)
it was also truncated in a somewhat misleading fashion.
if you read it closely, you’ll see that even the longest follow ups on infection data were lumped after 210 days, several were 180 (before it really gets bad) others were 120.
this is just typical bayesian datacrime and presentation bias as we’ve seen so many times before. and it does not really speak to the interesting issue of “are the vaccines preventing severity?”
this is, in fact, omitted from the study. but they did collect the data, they just made it REALLY difficult to find. you need to go HERE to the supplemental materials page. you then need to download the actual PDF as the data is not on the webpage. then you need to go to the very last page of that supplement.
those who do so (and i’m guessing we’re down to a very few folks by then) will be rewarded with this graph:
and this one has profound and powerful implications.
- it shows that efficacy against severe outcomes like hospitalization and death also wanes very rapidly
- it shows that this efficacy keeps waning over time
- it shows that it could easily be strongly negative based on the huge downside bias to the error range (gray shaded area)
- and it shows that this data is of very low quality in terms of error magnitude.
at 9 months, midline expectation is ~15% reduction. (i’m eyeballing) but look at the confidence interval: it runs from (ballpark) +63% to -90%. that is not a useful range upon which to base anything. it implies that there is a very strong chance that vaccination is associated with greatly increased risk of severe outcomes for a great many people.
this pattern implies that boosters are likely, at best, a treadmill that will need constant refreshing, likely 3X a year or so, if you want to sustain efficacy. vaccine fade after 4 months degrades rapidly. (and frankly, the first 4 could well be an illusory halo generated by the dose 2 +14 vaccinated definition as linked above)
given the adverse events profile and the lack of severity of omicron this seems a truly odious proposition that looks likely to fail for most people on any sort or risk/benefit analysis. it is telling that the researchers here did not even attempt to take risk reward into account before claiming:
“The results strengthen the evidence-based rationale for administration of a third vaccine dose as a booster.”
what is also telling is the other part of the data required to make this claim:
do boosters work? do they refresh clinical immunity and mitigate severity? could they ever have done so and is this data even relevant with the emergence of omicron that seems to be at least an escape variant and far more likely a full blown hoskins effect/OAS variant that is enhanced, not mitigated by the vaccines.
because the evidence there looks quite persuasive that they do not.
note that all this data is from before oct 4th 2021, so it has no omicron impact whatsoever in it. claiming it bolsters the case for boosters without presenting evidence of booster efficacy on this new variant makes their claim feel like a rote bolt on, placed there to mollify and placate patrons and authorities.
there is absolutely no data here to validate that point.
the study does not even speak to the data that would be needed to make such a claim.
“efficacy wanes, so boost” is not a valid argument unless we know that boosters work, yet any evidence that boosters actually do anything to help is absent and all past data shows such rapid fade on efficacy vs severity as to make boosters a poor appearing proposition.
there is no data whatsoever on the new variant.
and boosters are sure not seeming to help in the UK. omi is driving rates of infection in the boosted at roughly double the rate of the unvaxxed.
the swedish study uses possibly irrelevant data and not only fails to prove out the ostensible interpretation, but winds up far more consistent with the conclusion that boosters are a waste of time and will provide ephemeral, at best, protection.
having seen this, go back and read the “interpretation” again.
now do you see my point about “the abstract says one thing while the data says another?”
i mean, they literally buried the lede at the very end of a hard to find supplement. it’s like putting the actual object of a video game inside of an easter egg.
most vexing, this easter egg also shows that vaccines may be making immunity to severe covid outcomes significantly worse.
call me mister suspicious, but i have a hunch that’s WHY they put it there.
let’s explore that a bit further:
what would be REALLY interesting is to see how this population distribution looks.
if it barbells then we likely have a serious confound going on. we really have no idea what the prior incidence of covid was in those who got vaccinated. one could expect it to be quite meaningful.
if vaccines look like they are working well in some and are strongly negative in others with not much in the middle (this is suggested but not proven by the skew in the confidence interval) then i would posit that the most likely explanation is that what looks like VE is actually naturally acquired immunity.
if you had covid then got vaxxed, vaccines look like they work, especially as the high risk groups got vaxxed more and these same groups likely had higher risk of prior infection. this gets magnified by the 2 week worry window of TLR suppression post vaccination that results in well documented decreases in immune function and a doubling of the rate of covid contraction in that period vs unvaxxed.
but if you got vaxxed without having had covid, it could be acting as an immunosuppressant or driving hoskins effect/OAS antigenic fixation that makes you more vulnerable.
this, along with all cause deaths in vaxxed vs unvaxxed measured from the moment you got your first jab is some data i’d really like to see.
it’s continuing non-availability certainly frustrating and likely telling. this data absolutely exists.
why we are not getting to see it is fast becoming a question too big to ignore.
February 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine |
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On December 17, 2021, Pfizer announced that the clinical trial of its mRNA shot in kids under age 5 had failed. Rather than withdraw this product, Pfizer “amended” its clinical trial to add a third dose. So Pfizer kept the original trial going and subjected these little kids to yet another shot of genetically modified mRNA.
The drug dealers at the FDA said, ‘sounds great, let’s proceed with authorization even in the absence of data.’ That created a huge public backlash as parents rightly protested that the FDA should not approve a drug for kids that failed in a clinical trial.
Yesterday (Feb. 11, 2022), the FDA was forced to admit defeat and Pfizer pulled its Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) application to inject kids under age 5.
Pfizer and the FDA claimed that they were “waiting for more data” that would be available in early April. We now know that this was a lie.
Buried deep in an article on page A13 of the NY Times this morning we learned the real reason why Pfizer withdrew its EUA — the clinical trial had failed, again.
Remember, Pfizer kept the clinical trial going after December 17. So between then and yesterday’s announcement, there was now roughly 55 more days worth of data. And it was truly terrible.
From the NY Times :
Then, late on Thursday [Feb. 10], Pfizer alerted the F.D.A. that it had more recent data, from mid-January on, showing a more discouraging picture as the Omicron variant bore down. The new data revealed that two doses were not sufficiently effective in preventing symptomatic infection.
Read that again. They have the data. And the data show that this shot does not work.
But even here, I think there is reason to believe that they are still lying. We already knew that “two doses were not sufficiently effective” — Pfizer announced that in December. The “more recent data, from mid-January on” is not the two dose regimen anymore, that phase of the trial is finished.
I think there is every reason to believe that this is now the three dose trial that they are describing. If the three dose trial was on track and showing promising results, they would have proceeded with authorization. So now we likely have the first evidence that the three dose trial has failed as well.
(Here’s my math: Pfizer likely injected the third dose into these kids between Dec. 17 and mid-January. So “from mid-January on” (to Feb. 10) is looking at the data in the 25 days after the third injection. In the comments, please let me know if you interpret this differently.)
So it is definitely NOT the case that this is just an incomplete trial that they are waiting to finish up in early April. All of the existing data is bad. Pfizer is now scrambling to find ways to save this product even though the clinical trial has now failed twice. And what’s Pfizer’s plan going forward — to just hope that the data in the next 60 days (from now through early April) magically turns the corner!? Talk about wishful thinking!
Just when I think the cartel and its enablers in the mainstream media could not possibly get any more cynical they sink to new lows.
Janet Woodcock and Peter Marks at the FDA must be fired and prosecuted for reckless endangerment of children. Pfizer must stop this grotesque clinical trial immediately and permanently suspend any plans to inject genetically modified mRNA into children under 5. Anything less is savagery and barbarism.
February 12, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine, FDA, Janet Woodcock, Peter Marks, Pfizer, United States |
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[Note: This essay is abstracted from my eBook Myths: Widely Held But False Beliefs In The Climate Change Crisis, available on Amazon]
In their Fifth Assessment Report the IPCC, the ‘internationally accepted scientific authority on climate change’, gave their opinion of how much of the recent global warming was caused by human activity: ‘It is extremely likely [95-100 percent confidence] more than half of the observed increase in global mean surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic [i.e. man-made] increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together’. Reflecting that opinion Wikipedia states that the ‘Scientific consensus on climate change’ is that ‘the Earth is warming and… this warming is mainly caused by human activities’. It claims that 97-100% of actively publishing climate scientists endorse this opinion. Similarly, NASA claim that, ‘A consensus on climate change and its human cause exists… human activities are the primary cause of the observed climate-warming trend over the past century.’ And in an October 2020 interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes climatologist Dr Michael Mann said, ‘There’s about as much scientific consensus about human-caused climate change as there is about gravity.’ So is it actually true that 97-100% of climate scientists explicitly or implicitly endorse this key IPCC opinion?
Although science is not remotely democratic (it only needs one scientist to prove that the ‘consensus view’ is wrong and it is wrong) the fact remains that if this 97-100% consensus assertion is true then it is indeed very powerful. If the ‘internationally accepted scientific authority on climate change’ says something is almost certainly true and almost all climate scientists in the world agree then it almost certainly must be true – mustn’t it? Whilst there is undoubtedly almost total scientific consensus amongst the scientific authorities (literally dozens of scientific academies from around the world explicitly or implicitly endorse the IPCC’s opinions) that does not necessarily reflect the consensus view amongst climate scientists themselves. So what exactly is it that climate scientists agree on?
The consensus argument is epitomized by Barack Obama’s 2013 tweet that, ‘Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: climate change is real, man-made and dangerous’. He tweeted this immediately after the publication of the most famous climate change consensus survey, Quantifying the consensus on man-made global warming in the scientific literature (John Cook et al, 2013) conducted by Skeptical Science, a small group of climate change activists, who, despite their name, are precisely the opposite of climate change skeptics (their strapline is ‘Getting skeptical about global warming skepticism’). This study examined the Abstracts from 11,944 climate science papers published over the twenty-year period from 1991 to 2011. It concluded that 97.1% of the Abstracts (that actually expressed an opinion on the causes of global warming) endorsed the view that man-made greenhouse gas emissions (or, at least, greenhouse gases) cause global warming. Although this was 97% of Abstracts, not 97% of climate scientists, it is not unreasonable to suppose that, based on this survey, about 97% of climate scientists endorse the view that man-made greenhouse gas emissions (or, at least, greenhouse gases) cause global warming. It said nothing whatsoever about how much warming those emissions were causing and whether or not such warming was ‘dangerous’. It is probably the case that at least 99.9% of people who might describe themselves as climate scientists (including those most skeptical about the climate change crisis idea) endorse the view that man-made greenhouse gas emissions (or, at least, greenhouse gases) cause global warming, i.e. some global warming. That is not in any serious dispute. The dispute is about how much global warming human activity is causing and whether or not it is ‘dangerous’. So the study revealed nothing that was not already well known and uncontroversial.
Skeptical Science summarized their findings with the statement, ‘97% of climate papers expressing a position on human-caused global warming agree: global warming is happening and we are the cause’ – where ‘we are the cause’ clearly implied ‘we are the sole cause’ instead of what it actually found, viz. that we are the cause of some of the global warming. If the study had been able to show convincingly that 97% of climate scientists endorsed the IPCC’s opinion that human activity was the predominant cause of global warming between 1951 and 2010 then that would certainly have strongly supported the view that there was almost total scientific consensus that the IPCC was right. But of all the Abstracts reviewed in this study only 0.3% explicitly endorsed that central IPCC opinion1. Even (ex-IPCC) Mike Hulme has noted that, ‘The Cook et al study is hopelessly confused… in one place the paper claims to be exploring “the level of scientific consensus that human activity is very likely causing most of the current GW [Global Warming]” and yet the headline conclusion is based on rating abstracts according to whether “humans are causing global warming”. These are two entirely different judgements.’ The recently published paper Greater than 99% consensus on human caused climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature (Lynas et al, 2021) claims that the consensus is actually 2% higher – but once again only actually finds a 99% consensus that human activity contributes to climate change to some extent2; in fact about 99% of the papers reviewed in this study failed to explicitly quantify the extent. A survey3 of more than 1,800 climate scientists conducted in 2015 concluded that just 43% of them would endorse the IPCC opinion about our recent predominant role in global warming (and how many of them were agreeing based primarily on their faith in the IPCC and/or their self-interest in staying ‘on message’ to the climate change crisis narrative?)
Mike Hulme has stated that, ‘Claims such as “2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate” are disingenuous. That particular consensus judgement, as are many others in the IPCC reports, is reached by only a few dozen experts.’ Supporting that view, an independent study4 found that the views expressed by the IPCC were the consensus of a leadership cadre of just 53 (about 2%) of them, 44 of whom were very closely linked professionally, having co-authored papers with one another and so very likely to share the same opinions. The author of the study, John McLean (climate data analyst at the Australian Climate Science Coalition and an Expert Reviewer for the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report), concluded that ‘Governments have naively and unwisely accepted the claims of a human influence on global temperatures made by a close-knit clique of a few dozen scientists, many of them climate modellers, as if they were representative of the opinion of the wider scientific community.’
One of the most comprehensive reviews5 ever performed of surveys of the scientific consensus on climate change concluded:
- The articles and surveys most commonly cited as showing support for a ‘scientific consensus’ in favor of the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis are without exception methodologically flawed and often deliberately misleading.
- There is no survey or study showing ‘consensus’ on the most important scientific issues in the climate change debate.
- Extensive survey data show deep disagreement among scientists on scientific issues that must be resolved before the man-made global warming hypothesis can be validated. Many prominent experts and probably most working scientists disagree with the claims made by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
So what is the real scientific consensus on climate change? There is almost total scientific consensus that carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are increasing, that that increase is predominantly due to human activity, that the climate system is warming, that climate change is happening and that human activity has contributed to some extent to the warming, changing climate. Note again that skeptical scientists, like Dr Roy Spencer and Dr Judith Curry and Dr Richard Lindzen, are part of this ‘scientific consensus on climate change’; the idea that they constitute the 3% of scientists who do not support the scientific consensus on climate change is a false idea, misrepresenting what the ‘scientific consensus on climate change’ actually is6. This misrepresentation is designed to bolster the ‘climate change crisis’ narrative and to marginalize and neutralize the skeptical scientists by making their views appear to fall far outside the overwhelming consensus view, even though they actually share that consensus view. Basically, the ‘consensus’ breaks down over the issue of whether or not human activity has been predominantly responsible for recent warming – and whether or not that warming is ‘dangerous’. The power of the false ‘97% scientific consensus that human activity has been predominantly responsible for climate change’ meme, perpetuated by Wikipedia, NASA, Facebook (and many others) is that it can be used very effectively to strangle at birth any debate about the science. As Dr Richard Lindzen has put it, ‘The claim is meant to satisfy the non-expert that he or she has no need to understand the science. Mere agreement with the 97 percent will indicate that one is a supporter of science and superior to anyone denying disaster. This actually satisfies a psychological need for many people.’
So if we return to Dr Michael Mann’s statement that, ‘There’s about as much scientific consensus about human-caused climate change as there is about gravity’ this is very disingenuous. Whilst there is almost total scientific consensus that climate change is ‘real’ and happening and that there has been some human-caused influence, there is no such scientific consensus over the extent of the human-caused influence and whether or not it could reasonably be described as ‘dangerous’, let alone a ‘crisis’.
References
1 Legates et al. (2015), Science & Education and ‘Consensus? What Consensus?’, GWPF Note 5, thegwpf.org, September 2013 and ‘Richard Tol’s Excellent Summary of the Flaws in Cook et al. (2013) and ‘The Infamous 97% Consensus Paper’, wattsupwiththat.com, 26 March 2015 and ‘The Cook ‘97% consensus’ paper, exposed by new book for the fraud that it really is’, wattsupwiththat.com, 12 March 2016
2 ‘Cooked Up Consensus: Lynas et al “Should Rather Be Classified As Propaganda, Bad Science”’, wattsupwiththat.com, 26 October 2021
3 Bart Strengers, Bart Verheggen and Kees Vringer (2015), Climate Science Survey, Questions and Responses, PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, pp 1 – 39
4 ‘Prejudiced authors, prejudiced findings’, John McLean, (Science and Public Policy Institute), July 2008
5 Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming (2015) – Craig D. Idso, Robert M. Carter, S. Fred Singer
6 ‘Study: 3% Contrarians Derailing the 97% Climate Consensus’, wattsupwiththat.com, 18 December 2021
February 11, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Facebook, IPCC, NASA, Obama, Wikipedia |
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Ever since I realised the devastating effects lockdowns would have all over the world, I have actively fought them. My first task, in October 2020, was hosting an interview with world-renowned epidemologist Martin Kulldorff, one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which argues for focused protection instead of blanket lockdowns.
Incidentally, Kulldorff was involved also in my first really memorable encounter with the so-called fact-checkers. Last summer the Icelandic Chief Epidemiologist said in an interview he believed herd immunity would never be reached by vaccination, only through infections. I posted a link to the interview on LinkedIn. Kulldorff shared my post, and the next thing he knew his reshare had been removed. Clearly a fact-checker hadn‘t liked what our Chief Epidemiologist said, and decided the public shouldn‘t know.
Part of my activities as an active lockdown sceptic has been managing a large and fast-growing local Facebook group, dedicated to providing a broad view of the Covid situation, including negative effects of lockdowns, and later on, growing concerns with the effectiveness and safety of mass-vaccination. This is a difficult task as we must always be very careful not to accept posts that for some reason contain material that doesn‘t comply with the worldview of the fact-checkers. We get a few strange conspiracy theories of course, but mostly the material we have to reject is simply inconvenient facts or well-argued opinions, even by respected scientists, that just happen to go against the official narrative.
Fact-checking is nothing new, and until recently it was just that, checking for facts. But since very early in the pandemic, fact-checkers have become less concerned with facts, but more, and in some cases exclusively, with censoring anything that goes against their own opinions. Every day, hundreds of such articles are published and then used to justify censorship. The following example is a typical one.
Recently, official Scottish data has shown COVID-19 infections, hospitalisations and deaths are becoming more frequent among the double-vaccinated than the unvaccinated. The latest report shows the infection rate among the double-jabbed is now double the rate for the unjabbed, and 50% higher for the triple-jabbed. Hospitalisations are higher among the double-jabbed than the unjabbed and the death rate is double. This is a concerning development and has garnered some attention from those who follow such statistics. I wrote a short Facebook post on this the other day, quoting an article discussing this development. A few days later the familiar warning of ‘false information’ had been slapped on my post.
I decided to follow up on the ‘fact check’ referred to in the warning, an article by Mr. Dean Miller, managing editor at Lead Stories, one of the agencies that frequently publish articles used to justify censorship. Mr. Miller holds an undergraduate degree in English and seems to have no science training whatsoever.
Mr. Miller begins by claiming there is a consensus among health statisticians “working independently” that vaccination reduces the probability of hospitalisation and death, and that as the vaccinated tend to be older than the unvaccinated, “amateur statisticians” often reach false conclusions based on official data. Mr. Miller then quotes an epidemiologist who suggests various factors that “may” affect the numbers. First, that the vaccinated are more likely to get tested, quoting test and trace data but providing no reference. Second, that the vaccinated tend to be older than the unvaccinated and therefore more vulnerable in general. Third, that the vaccinated may behave differently from the unvaccinated when it comes to social interactions. Fourth, that the unvaccinated are more likely to have been previously infected by the virus.
None of this is necessarily untrue. But the article provides no references showing that vaccinated people behave differently from unvaccinated people, which would make them more likely to come into contact with infected persons. We also have no way of determining if the opposite is true. In other words, this is pure speculation, for which no evidence is provided. Whether vaccinated people are more likely to get tested is speculative also and there is no data provided to back up this claim. The same goes for the claim that the unvaccinated are more likely to have been previously infected. In fact, as numerous studies have already demonstrated that infection provides strong and lasting protection, this suggestion seems highly unlikely.
So, three of Mr. Miller‘s arguments are pure speculation, unquantified and not supported by any evidence. But what about the last argument, that the vaccinated tend to be older and therefore more likely to be hospitalised or to die? This certainly looks like a valid point, since we know it is primarily the elderly who become seriously ill with COVID-19. But how valid, or relevant is this really?
To start with, being vulnerable to serious illness or death if infected has nothing to do with the probability of infection. Rather than increasing it, it might rather decrease it, as a vulnerable person might be more likely to avoid situations where they are likely to get infected. As for hospitalisation and death, the data presented in the Public Health Scotland reports is in fact age-standardised. This means the age-related probability of death is already accounted for in the statistics. Mr. Miller‘s key argument, and the only one that isn‘t purely speculative, is therefore simply invalid. It seems he either failed to familiarise himself with the methodology used, or did not understand what it entails.
The weakness of Mr. Miller‘s argumentation does not however stop him from categorically denying that comparison of infection rates is a valid indicator of vaccine effectiveness. And of course it does not prevent the media and social media using his claim, based on speculation and lack of basic understanding of the data, to censor the discussion of a disturbing development that most certainly calls for thorough investigation.
When I showed the data to a Scottish friend recently, he suggested it was of no relevance for other nations, as the Scots were genetically different from other people due to a long-standing diet of nothing but chips, Marlboros and Irn-Bru. I can only say his explanation makes just as much sense as Mr. Miller‘s do.
But Scotland is not the only country experiencing this disturbing trend. A couple of weeks ago I published an article in the Daily Sceptic discussing a similar trend in Iceland: early January data showed the double-vaccinated to be twice as likely to get infected as the unvaccinated. This undermines the aforementioned dietary explanation, as in Iceland we boil our potatoes, smoke Camels rather than Marlboros and Irn-Bru has never been available. No ‘fact check’ has yet been published trying to invalidate this data. However the already published infection rate for the unvaccinated suddenly rose by 20%, without explanation, soon after this development was pointed out.
Unfortunately Mr. Miller‘s article is not the only example of a ‘fact check’ that ignores or distorts the facts, or counters hard data with pure speculation. This sloppy kind of reporting seems to be the fact-checkers’ standard way of working when it comes to the pandemic. Some have even admitted their fact-check labels are nothing but opinion. And the general press is no exception. For example, the Scottish Herald recently published an article on this subject, also failing to acknowledge the fact that the data is age-standardised.
It is a noble endeavour to try to make sure facts rather than fiction influence public opinion. But unfortunately, it looks as if the champions of ‘fact-checking’ have little respect for facts. Most of the material they produce consists of low quality, highly opinionated articles, lacking not only references, but more importantly the clarity of thinking that must be required of anyone who takes upon themselves the important and difficult task of deciding what is true and what isn‘t.
Thorsteinn Siglaugsson is an economist who lives in Iceland. Find him on his blog.
February 11, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | COVID-19 Vaccine |
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