By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | February 25, 2022
Twitter announced that it was monitoring “emerging narratives” about the Ukraine war that will be censored if they represent a violation of the company’s policies.
The announcement was made in response to Twitter deleting tweets and suspending accounts that had posted videos of Russian tank divisions and helicopters heading to Ukraine.
After users complained, Twitter acknowledged that it had targeted the accounts in “error” and they were later restored.
However, a statement by a Twitter spokesperson is likely to cause alarm amongst free speech advocates.
“We took enforcement action on a number of accounts in error,” the statement said, adding, “We’ve been proactively monitoring for emerging narratives that are violative of our policies.”
The use of the term “emerging narratives” suggests that Twitter will begin censoring certain perspectives on the conflict in the context of their policy on “misinformation.”
These problematic “narratives” are almost certainly likely to be ones that question narratives being put out by the Biden White House and NATO sources.
Similar rules were applied to skepticism expressed towards COVID vaccines as well as the lab leak theory, which was once deemed to be ‘harmful misinformation’ but is now widely accepted as the most likely explanation for the pandemic.
The potential for the Russian attack on Ukraine to be exploited to push for further censorship and blacklisting of free speech in the west is a clear danger.
For weeks, leftists have been trying to smear Tucker Carlson as being guilty of “treason” over him accusing the Biden administration of exploiting tensions between Russia and Ukraine to distract from the president’s dreadful handling of domestic issues.
The word “traitor” also trended on Twitter yesterday in response to Nigel Farage suggesting that NATO should share some blame for Putin’s actions.
In a related story, the official Twitter Ukrainian government also lobbied Twitter to ban the official Russian government Twitter account.
By Dr. Malcolm Kendrick | February 23, 2022
The first thing I want to say here is that there should be nothing in science that is beyond analysis and potential criticism. Because, once this happens, we can find ourselves in a very dangerous situation indeed. A place of unquestioned acceptance of the accepted narrative, with criticism enforced by the authorities.
Unfortunately, I believe this is the place we have reached with COVID19 vaccination. Here is just one example from the UK.
‘GPs have been warned that criticising the Covid vaccine or other pandemic measures via social media could leave them ‘vulnerable’ to GMC* investigation.’1
*GMC = General Medical Council. This is the body that can strike doctors from the medical register so they cannot work as a doctor.
‘Vulnerable to GMC investigation’. What a deliciously creepy phrase that is, dripping with unspoken menace, whilst pretending to be helpful. It sounds like something the Mafia would come up with.
‘I would keep quiet about this, if I were you.’ Baseball bat tapping gently on the floor. ‘No, this is not a threat, think of it as advice from a friend. We don’t like to see anybody making themselves, or their family, vulnerable, and getting seriously injured now, would we?’
It seems that, unless you prostrate yourself before the mighty vaccine, and intone ‘Our vaccine, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…’ and suchlike, you will be attacked from all sides … simultaneously. Indeed, to suggest that vaccines are not perfect in every way is the twenty first century’s equivalent of blasphemy.
‘he said Jehovah. Stone him.’
This does make any discussion on vaccines somewhat tricky. To criticize any individual vaccine, indeed any aspect of any individual vaccine, is also to be instantly defined as an anti-vaxxer. Then you will be furiously fact-checked by someone with a fine arts degree, or suchlike, who will decree that you are ‘wrong’.
At which point you will be unceremoniously booted off various internet platforms – amongst other sanctions open to the ‘vulnerable’. This includes, for example, finding yourself struck off the medical register, and unable to earn any money:
‘Hell, we ain’t like that around here. We don’t just string people up, son. First, we have a trial to find ‘em guilty, only then do we string ‘em up. Yeeee Ha!’
Spit … ding!
Yes, it seems you must support the position that all vaccines are equally wonderful, no exceptions. Try this with any other pharmaceutical product. ‘He doesn’t think statins are that great, so he obviously believes that antibiotics are useless.’ Would this sound utterly ridiculous?
But with vaccines… All are the same, all are great, not a problem in sight? I said, NOT! a problem in sight. However, I genuinely believe there are some questions which still have not been answered and simply because of the different types of vaccines that are available, no, not all vaccines are the same.
Just for starters, vaccines come in many different forms. Live, dead, those only containing specific bits of the virus, and suchlike. Now we have the brand new, never used on humans before, messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines. So no, all vaccines are not alike. Not even remotely.
In addition to the major difference between vaccines, the diseases we vaccinate against vary hugely. Some are viruses, others bacteria, others somewhere in between, TB for example.
Some, like influenza, mutate madly in all directions. Others, such as measles, do not. Some viruses are DNA viruses – which tend to remain unchanged over the years. Others, e.g. influenza, are single strand RNA viruses, and they mutate each year.
Adding to this variety, some of those viruses which mutate very little, also have no other host species to hide in. Smallpox, for example. Which means that the virus was unable to run away and hide in, say, a chicken, or a bat. Others are fully capable of flitting from animal species to animal species. Bird flu and Ebola spring to mind.
Some vaccines just haven’t worked at all. For over thirty years, people have tried to develop an HIV vaccine, and have thus far failed. Early trials on animal coronavirus vaccines also showed some concerning results. Here from the paper ‘Early death after feline infectious peritonitis virus challenge due to recombinant vaccinia virus immunization.’
‘The gene encoding the fusogenic spike protein of the coronavirus causing feline infectious peritonitis was recombined into the genome of vaccinia virus. The recombinant induced spike-protein-specific, in vitro neutralizing antibodies in mice. When kittens were immunized with the recombinant, low titers of neutralizing antibodies were obtained. After challenge with feline infectious peritonitis virus, these animals succumbed earlier than did the control group immunized with wild-type vaccinia virus (early death syndrome).’2
Yet, despite all this massive variety flying in all directions, with some spike protein vaccines found to increase the risk of death (in a few animal studies), attach the word vaccine to any substance, and it suddenly has miraculous properties that transcend all critical thought. Vaccines move in mysterious ways, their wonders to perform.
Yes, of course, some have worked extremely well. The polio vaccine, for example, although I have seen some valid criticisms. Smallpox… I am less certain about. Even though it is held up as the greatest vaccine success story of all. Maybe it was. Smallpox has certainly gone, for which we should be truly thankful. It was a truly terrible disease.
My doubts about the unmatched efficacy of smallpox vaccine simply arise from the fact that diseases come, and diseases go. The plague, for example. This was the scourge of mankind at one time. It tore round and round the world and leaving millions of dead in its wake, over a period of hundreds of years.
We do not vaccinate against the plague, yet it is virtually unknown today. Cholera killed millions and millions, thousands each year in the UK alone. Now … gone. In the UK at least. This had nothing to do with vaccination either. Measles. There seems little doubt that the measles vaccine is effective. But vaccination cannot explain the fact that measles deaths fell off a cliff and were bumping along the bottom for years and long before we started vaccination programmes.
In the US vaccination did not begin until 1963. So, what happened here? The virus did not mutate, so far as we know. It did not mutate because apparently it cannot. Or, if it did, it would no longer be able to be infective. At least not to humans:
‘While the influenza virus mutates constantly and requires a yearly shot that offers a certain percentage of protection, old reliable measles needs only a two-dose vaccine during childhood for lifelong immunity. A new study publishing May 21 in Cell Reports has an explanation: The surface proteins that the measles virus uses to enter cells are ineffective if they suffer any mutation, meaning that any changes to the virus come at a major cost.’3
So, measles didn’t change, but it did become far less damaging. From around ten deaths per one hundred thousand in the first two decades of the twentieth century, down to much less than one.
Why? What I believe happened with measles is primarily that the ‘terrain’ changed. Nutrition greatly improved. Vitamins, perhaps most importantly vitamin D, were discovered and added to the food supply. Rickets and other manifestation of vitamin D deficiency were rife in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Virtually gone by 1940.
Of course treatments improved as well, although antibiotics (to treat secondary bacteria pneumonia following measles), did not come into play until the late 1940s, at the earliest.
What we see with measles is simply the fact that infectious diseases have far less impact when they hit a healthy, well nourished person (healthy terrain), than when they hit an impoverished and undernourished child caught in the war in the Yemen, for example.
So, yes, vaccines have played a role in improving human health and wellbeing, but we shouldn’t inflate their impact to the point where they have become the unmatched saviours of humankind. They have certainly not been the only thing that reduced the impact of infectious diseases. They were probably not even the most important thing. ‘Yes … how dare you say this… string up the unbeliever, I know, I know.’
Moving on, and I think this is even more pertinant to the disucssion that follows. If we cannot accept the possiblility that, at least some vaccines, may have significant adverse effects, if we will not permit anyone to look into this, in any meaningful way. Then we can never improve them. Criticism is good, not bad.
Speaking personally, I do not criticize things that I do not care about. Primarily, because I don’t care if they improve, or not. I only criticize things when I want them to be as good as they possibly can be. It is a character trait of mine to hunt for flaws, and potential problems. Both real and imagined.
Some criticism is, of course, close to bonkers. Suggesting that COVID19 vaccines contain transhuman nanotechnology and microchips of some kind that will become activated by 5G phones … to what end? ‘World domination Mr Bond. Mwahahahahaha etc.’ Quantum dots? Yes, these do exist. But they would be pretty useless at collecting informaiton, and suchlike. Give it fifty years and … maybe.
The problem here is that wild conspiracy theories are simply gathered together with reasonable science-based criticism, to be dismissed as a package of equally mad, unscientific woo-woo tin-foil hat wearing, conspiracy theorist, gibberish.
Which means that, when people (such as me) suggested that COVID19 mRNA vaccination could, potentially, lead to an increased risk of blood clots – this was treated with utter scathing dismissal. I did not understand ‘the science’ apparently. Fact check number one. ‘Oh, look… clots.’
When people questioned the ‘fact’ that the safety phases of the normal clincial trial pathway had been seriously truncated, and that some parts were just non-existent, they were told that they knew nothing of ‘the science’ either.
I looked on the BBC website to find out the ‘official’ party line on vaccine safety information, sanctioned and approved by HM Govt, and SAGE I presume. It was an article entitled ‘How do I know if the vaccine is safe?’ The information rapidly contradicts reality. They say:
The article then looks at fast track approval for vaccines against new variants
What is wrong here? Well, ‘if the principle is to start small and only move to the next stage of testing if there are no outstanding safety concerns,’ then this principle was not followed. After pre-clinical and animal testing, we move onto trials in humans. Phase I, then II and then III.
Phase I may include as few as twenty people to check that humans don’t simply drop dead on contact with the new agent (it has happened).
Phase II may include a couple of hundred individuals, and usually lasts a few months… a bit more safety, and an attempt to establish the potential size of any health benefit.
Phase III may have up to thirty or forty thousand participants. This phase often lasts for several years.
Well, with the Pfizer Biontech vaccine, the concept of waiting to move to the next stage of testing did not truly occur. Because phase II and III were combined… and the phase III trials have now been, effectively abandoned. They were not supposed to finish until May 2022 at the earliest, and now apparently, they are not going to finish at all. At least not as a double-blind placebo controlled trial.
Yet, we are still informed by the BBC, in all seriousness, that no corners were cut, or will be cut. The fact is that corners were absolutely one hundred per cent cut. Slashed to the bone would perhaps be more accurate. To pretend otherwise is simply to deny reality.
It normally takes around ten years for any drug, or vaccine, to move through the clinical trials process, with each step done in series. COVID19 vaccines took around six months from start to finish, with critical steps done in parallel, and the animal testing was rushed – to say the least. To claim that no corners were cut is nonsense. Nonsense that we are virtually forced to believe?
It is possible/quite likely/probable that vaccine development can be shortened, but please do not tell us that all the normal processes were followed. No-one is that easily fooled.
‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four[NK1] . If that is granted, all else follows.’ That freedom disappeared pretty early on in the COVID19 pandemic. I enjoyed the slant that ‘Important quotes explained’ had on the quote from Orwell’s 1984.
By weakening the independence and strength of individuals’ minds and forcing them to live in a constant state of propaganda-induced fear, the Party is able to force its subjects to accept anything it decrees, even if it is entirely illogical.
Of course, it could be that despite the speed with which these vaccines were pushed through nothing important was missed. It is almost certainly true that the standard ten years from start to finish in vaccine and drug development can be compressed, if everyone really wished. Bureaucracy expands to fill the space available.
But in general we are talking about a ten-year process, cut down to six months, or thereabouts. An additional concern is that this happened using mRNA vaccines, which represent a completely new form of technology. One that has never been used on humans before at all, ever.
We are not talking about the sixth drug in a long line of very similar drugs e.g. the statins.
Statins all do pretty much the exact same thing, in exactly the same way. Yet, each one of them still had to go through the entire laborious clincial trial process. Years and years.
‘Can we not just skip this phase…. please?’
‘No.’
‘Please?’
‘No.’
Hold on one moment, just step back, what was that at number six on this list, I hear you say… cerivastatin. You mean you’ve never heard of it. Well, it got through all the pre-clinical trials, then the animal trials. It then sailed through the human Phase II and III trials without a murmur. It was then was launched to wild acclaim. In truth that may be over-egging its real impact, which was a bit more ‘who cares, do we really need another one?’
Here from a 1998 paper: ‘Clinical efficacy and safety of cerivastatin: summary of pivotal phase IIb/III studies.’
‘In conclusion, these studies indicate that cerivastatin is a safe and effective long-term treatment for patients with primary hypercholesterolemia and also suggest that higher doses should be investigated.’ 5
Here from 2001, and an article entitled: ‘Withdrawal of cerivastatin from the world market.’
‘Rhabdomyolysis was 10 times more common with cerivastatin than the other five approved statins. We address three important questions raised by this withdrawal. Should we continue to approve drugs on surrogate efficacy? Are all statins interchangeable? Do the benefits outweigh the risks of statins? We conclude that decisions regarding the use of drugs should be based on direct evidence from long-term clinical outcome trials.’ 6
Yes, as it turns out, cerivastatin caused far more cases of severe muscle breakdown, and death, in a significant number of people. Which meant that it was hoiked from the market.
The moral of this particular story is that, even if you DO do all the clinical studies, fully and completely, one step at a time, over many years, in a widely used class of drug, your particular drug may still be found in the long term, not to be safe. Not even if it is the sixth of its class to launch.
The cerivastatin withdrawal is not an isolated event. You can, if you wish, read this paper ‘Post-marketing withdrawal of 462 medicinal products because of adverse drug reactions: a systematic review of the world literature.’7. So, what happens if you try to compress the entire ten year clinical trial process into around six months, on a completely new type of agent?
… Well then, it may be time to cross your fingers and hope for the best. But please do not insult my intelligence, or the intelligence of anyone else, by trying to tell me that vaccines have undergone: Rigorous testing and safety checks. Compared to what, exactly? Certainly not any other drug or vaccine launched in the last fifty years. ‘We rushed them through, and launched two years before the phase III clinical trials were due to finish.’ would be considerably more accurate.
Two plus two does not equal five, it never has, and it never will. However much you try to browbeat me, and everyone else, into accepting that it does. Indeed, as I write this, the simple fact is that not a single phase III clinical trial has yet ever been completed, on any mRNA COVID19 vaccine, and possibly not ever will be, in truth.
To repeat, this does not mean that mRNA vaccines may not be entirely safe. However, it has become impossible to claim that we have not seen significant adverse effects from the mRNA vaccines. Effects that were not picked up in any phase of the clincial trials. Here, from the Journal of the American Medical Association in February. One of the most highly cited medical journals in the world:
‘Based on passive surveillance reporting in the US, the risk of myocarditis after receiving mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines was increased across multiple age and sex strata and was highest after the second vaccination dose in adolescent males and young men.’ 8
I highlighted the first bit here. Namely, the words ‘based on passive surveillance reporting in the US.’ Whilst this adverse effect was not seen, or reported in the clinical trials it was picked up by the passive surveillance reporting system a.k.a. spontaneous reporting systems.
Drug adverse event reporting systems
Frankly, it is surprising that anything at all is ever seen using passive surviellance. In the UK we have the passive/spontaneous reporting system, known as the ‘Yellow Card system.’ In this US (specifically for vaccines) there is ‘VAERS’ (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System).
When I use the term ‘spontaneous reporting’, I mean a system whereby someone may (or more likely may not) report an adverse effect to a healthcare professional. They may (or more likely may not) fill in a form, whereupon it goes through to VAERS, who then look at it and can decide whether or not the adverse effect may (or more likely may not) be due to the vaccine. Same basic principle in the UK.
How good are these types of spontaneous reporting system in picking up adverse effects?
Well, as far as I am aware, only one serious attempt has been made to look at how many drug and vaccine-related events were actually reported in the US. Here, from a study by The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality:
‘Adverse events from drugs and vaccines are common, but under-reported. 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). Likewise, fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported.’ 9
Fewer than one per cent of vaccine adverse events are reported. Their words, not mine. Even though, in the US, unlike the UK, there is a legal responsibility to report adverse events – I believe.
When the authors of this report tried to follow up with the CDC and perform further assessment of the system, with testing and evaluation, the doors quietly, but firmly, shut:
‘Unfortunately, there was never an opportunity to perform system performance assessments because the necessary CDC contacts were no longer available and the CDC consultants responsible for receiving data were no longer responsive to our multiple requests to proceed with testing and evaluation.’
This study was done over ten years ago, but nothing about the VAERS system has changed since, as far as I know, or can find out.
In the UK the Yellow Card system may be better, or it may not be. No-one has carried out the sort of detailed analysis that was attempted in the US. However it has been accepted that:
… all spontaneous reporting schemes have a problem with numbers: the MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) itself says that only 10% of serious reactions and 2 – 4% of all reactions are reported using the Yellow Card Scheme. This means that most iatrogenic* morbidity goes unreported.’ 10
*Iatrogenic means – damage/disease caused by the treatment itself.
Frankly, I see no reason why the Yellow Card system would be any better than VAERS. The barriers to reporting are exactly the same. As the US report states:
‘Barriers to reporting include a lack of clinician awareness, uncertainty about when and what to report, as well as the burdens of reporting: reporting is not part of clinicians’ usual workflow, takes time, and is duplicative.’9
In other words, reporting an adverse event takes an enormous amount of time and effort. You don’t get paid for doing it, you certainly don’t get thanked for it, and you have no idea if anyone paid any attention to it. All made worse if you are not sure if the adverse event was due to the vaccine, or not.
I have filled in yellow cards three times, and several hours of work followed each one. As directed, I searched though patient notes for all previous drugs prescribed, the patient’s medical conditions, a review of the consultations and on, and on. Back and forth from the pharmaceutical company the questions went. Until the will to live was very nearly lost.
If you wanted to devise a system to ensure that adverse effects were under-reported, you could not devise anything better. Yes, doctor, please do report adverse effects to us. The result will be endless hours of work, with no attempt to report back that what you did had the slightest effect, on anything. Thank you for your continued and future co-operation. And yet this, ladies and gentlemen, is the system we have in place to monitor and review all drug and vaccine-related adverse effects.
Which becomes even more worrying because, as mentioned before a couple of times so far, nothing else of much use is going to come out of the clinical trials. With the Pfizer BioNTech trial, crossover occurred in Oct 2020. By crossover I mean the point at which they started giving the vaccine to those in the placebo group as well. End of randomisation, end of useful data. End of … well of anything of any use.
mRNA vaccines and myocarditis
Anyway, getting back to the JAMA study. Even with all the formidable barriers in place to reporting adverse events, JAMA reported an increase in the rate of myocarditis of around thirty-two-fold, as reported via the VAERS system.
I should make it clear that this was the increase seen in the most highly affected population. Males aged eighteen to twenty-four. [Myocarditis = inflammation and damage to heart muscle]. The risk was lower in females, and also in other age groups, although still high. But, to keep things simple, I am going to focus on this, the highest risk group, as far as possible.
The first thing to say is that a thirty-two-fold increase probably does sound enormous. Another way to report this would be, a three thousand one hundred per cent increase, which may sound even more dramatic?
However, myocarditis is not exactly common. In this age group, over a seven-day period, you would expect to see around one and three-quarter cases per million of the population. Multiplying this by thirty-two still only gets you to fifty-six cases per million.
Which is not exactly the end of the world. In addition, most cases may fully recover. Although, having just said this, I have no long-term data to support that statement. The closest condition we have to go on as a comparator, is post-viral infectious myocarditis. And this has a mortality rate of 20% after one year and 50% after five years.11
Which means that myocarditis is certainly not a benign condition of little concern.
Anyway, at this point, you could argue that if around only one in twenty thousand men, in the highest risk population, suffer from myocarditis post-vaccination, then this does not represent a major problem.
It could indeed be worse to allow them to catch COVID19, where the risk of myocarditis is even higher than with vaccination. In reality, we may be protecting them from myocarditis through vaccination. This certainly seems to be the current party line. I might even agree with it… maybe. So, as is my wont, I looked deeper.
I looked for the highest rate of (reported) post-viral infection myocarditis, in younger people. I believe it can be found here. ‘Risk of Myocarditis from COVID-19 Infection in People Under Age 20: A Population-Based Analysis’ 12
Here, the reported rate was around four-hundred-and-fifty cases per million. On the face of it, this is much higher than the fifty-six cases per million post-vaccination. Approximately ten times as high. But … there are, as always, several very important buts here. There were two key factors that alter the equation.
First, in the JAMA post-vaccine study, the time period for reporting myocarditis was limited to seven days after vaccination. Any case appearing after that was not considered to be anything to do with the vaccine and was thus ‘censored’. In the study above, the time period was far longer. Anything up to ninety days post-infection was counted. A period thirteen times as long.
In addition, although it is difficult to work out exactly what was done from the details provided, the four-hundred-and fifty study only looked at young people who attended outpatients at hospital. These would have been the most severely affected by COVID19, or who had other underlying medical conditions. So, they represent a small proportion, of a small proportion …. of everyone who was actually infected. The vast majority of whom would only have suffered very mild symptoms, or none at all.
In short, we are not remotely comparing like with like here. I find that we very rarely are. We are not only going to vaccinate a small proportion, of a small proportion, of the population who are at high risk of myocarditis. We are going to vaccinate virtually everybody. So, the two populations are completely different.
Leaving that to one side, where else can we look for a comparison between the risk of post-vaccine myocarditis vs post-infection myocarditis. The CDC published this statement.
‘During March 2020–January 2021, patients with COVID-19 had nearly 16 times the risk for myocarditis compared with patients who did not have COVID-19, and risk varied by sex and age.’ 13
Their figure appears to have been entirely derived from a paper published in the British Medical Journal : ‘Risk of clinical sequelae after the acute phase of SARS-CoV-2 infection: retrospective cohort study’ 14. Different age groups were studied here which, again, makes any direct comparison tricky.
This study found a sixteen-fold increased risk, rather than a four hundred and fifty-times risk. A sixteen times risk is around half of the post-vaccination myocarditis risk reported in JAMA, in the eighteen-to twenty-four-year-old group.
Again, though, there were major differences. In the BMJ paper the observation period for inclusion of myocarditis considered to be ‘caused by’ COVID19, was one hundred- and forty-days post infection, not seven days. Twenty times as long for cases to build up.
Equally, after looking at nine million patients records over a year, slightly over two hundred thousand were diagnosed as having had COVID19. Of these, only fourteen thousand had post-infection problems, known as clinical sequelae. In this sub-group, which represents, one point two per-cent of one per-cent of the total, population there were so few cases of myocarditis that they didn’t even appear in the chart published in the main paper. You had to go to supplemental tables and figures 15
To be frank, there are far too many unknowns and uncontrolled variables kicking around here to make any accurate comparisons. However, I do not think it would be unreasonable to suggest that the risk of myocarditis post-vaccination, from these studies, is roughly the same as if you are infected with COVID19.
Once again though, we need to take a further step back. All of our figures here only make sense if all – or the majority of cases of myocarditis – are actually being picked up. What if they are not?
Worst case scenario
SAGE – the UK Governments scientific advisory group for emergencies – have been accused of scaremongering, and only presenting worst case scenarios for COVID19 hospital admissions and deaths. They are not the only ones. This is a worldwide phenomenon.
However, as Sir Patrick Vallance – one of the key members of (SAGE) – has stated, in response to such criticism.
‘It’s not my job to be an optimist’: Sir Patrick Vallance takes swipe at critics accusing scientists of scaremongering over Covid saying ministers need to ‘hear the information whether uncomfortable or encouraging.’ 16
SAGE believe it is their role to highlight the worst possible scenarios, the highest possible death tolls, and such like. So, let us now do the same, and focus on the worst-case scenario regarding mRNA vaccines and myocarditis. Whether ‘uncomfortable or encouraging’.
The worst-case scenario starts like this. If the VAERS system only picks up one per cent of vaccine related adverse effects, this means that we can start by multiplying the JAMA figures by one hundred.
Thus, instead of fifty-six cases per million, the reality is that we could be looking at five thousand six hundred cases per million, post-vaccination. Or very nearly one in two hundred.
If, in this model, we then include the possibility that post-vaccination myocarditis is as damaging as post-viral infection myocarditis, it means that one in four hundred eighteen to twenty-four-year-olds could be dead five years after vaccination.
Do I think that this is likely? I have to say that no, I don’t, really. Although this is where the figures, such as they can be relied upon, inevitably take you. Just to run you through the process a bit more slowly.
There are approximately sixteen million men aged between eighteen and twenty-four in the US.
Total number of deaths within five years (men aged eighteen to twenty-four in the US)
16,000,000 ÷ 400 = 40,000
(Divide by five for the UK) = 8,000.
Now, if I were in charge of anything, which I am not, which is probably a good thing, I would hope to have been made aware of these worst-case scenario figures. I would then immediately have begun to do everything I possibly could to verify them.
For starters I would want to know two critical things:
1: Is the VAERS system truly only picking up one per cent of vaccine related adverse effects?
2: Does vaccine related myocarditis lead to the same mortality and morbidity as caused by a viral infection?
If the answer to both of these questions were, yes, then I would have to decide what to do. And that could not possibly, be nothing. At least I would hope not. Yet, nothing appears to be exactly what is currently happening.
As you can tell, I still cling to the concept of ‘first do no harm.’ Today, with COVID19, it seems this this idea has become hopelessly naïve. The current attitude seems to be. ‘We are at war; you must expect casualties’ ‘Also, careless talk costs lives.’ So, my friend, I advise you to keep your ‘vulnerable’ mouth shut, if you know what is good for you.’
Well then, I just hope for everyone’s sake, that these figures are completely wrong. They are, after all, only a model. A worst-case scenario created using the most accurate information available at this time. However, as per the SAGE underlying philosophy, I believe it is important to present the information whether uncomfortable or encouraging.
The thing that concerns me the most is that we have a worrying signal emerging about the mRNA vaccines. A signal surrounded by a lot of noise, admittedly. Yet, the ‘official’ response continues to be to sweep the entire thing under the carpet. ‘Nothing to see here, move along.’
Postscript
As with regard to the GMC, and the threat of sanctions, as you can see, I am only following their guidance
‘Healthcare professionals must also be open and honest with their colleagues, employers and relevant organisations, and take part in reviews and investigations when requested. They must also be open and honest with their regulators, raising concerns where appropriate. They must support and encourage each other to be open and honest, and not stop someone from raising concerns.’ 17
What do you do if it is the GMC itself that may be stopping someone from raising concerns. Should I report the GMC to the GMC? I imagine they will find themselves innocent of any wrongdoing. Quis custodiet Ipsos custodes?
2: https://europepmc.org/article/MED/2154621
3: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150521133628.htm
4: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55056016
6: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC59524/
7: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4740994/
8: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2788346
10: https://wchh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/psb.1789
12: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34341797/
13: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7035e5.htm
14: https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1098
15: https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/suppl/2021/05/19/bmj.n1098.DC1/daus063716.wt.pdf
By Kathy Gyngell | TCW Defending Freedom | February 23, 2022
THE BBC gets very righteous and uppity when it’s dishing out the criticism – but doesn’t like it when it’s on the receiving end.
A classic example came my way on Monday with a message from TV Licensing about a TCW Defending Freedom blog. Basically, it was asking me to ‘censor’ a sentence they didn’t like.
I wrote back to BBC Director-General Tim Davie and here I’m publishing my reply to him as an open letter. The contents are self-explanatory …
Dear Mr Davie,
I am the editor and proprietor of the website TCW Defending Freedom, which registers between one and 1.4million page impressions a month.
On Monday of this week, we published a blog about Justin Trudeau’s use of emergency powers to end the protest in Ottawa by Canadian truckers.
It contained the following paragraph: ‘For example, violent Black Lives Matter protesters have been free to run riot in the US, while peaceful pro-Trump supporters have been arrested. In the UK, minimal, even helpful, action was taken against disruptive Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain protesters, while single mothers are jailed for not having paid their TV licence fee. Unvaccinated citizens are penalised and scapegoated everywhere, while illegal unvaccinated boat immigrants are rescued by coastguards and the RNLI and welcomed generously into society.’
To my surprise, I received an email later that day from Alex Skirvin alexander.skirvin@bbc.co.uk in which he stated: ‘I am getting in touch from TV Licensing regarding your recent piece, ‘Iron fist for the truckers, velvet glove for eco-terrorists.’
‘The piece states: “In the UK, minimal, even helpful, action was taken against disruptive Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain protesters, while single mothers are jailed for not having paid their TV licence fee.”
‘This is inaccurate. Nobody is imprisoned for non-payment of the licence fee – the maximum sentence is a fine which may be imposed by a court.
‘If a court fine isn’t paid this is a separate matter, a custodial sentence may be imposed, but that is entirely a matter for the courts. In 2020, there were no admissions into prison associated with failing to pay a fine in respect of the non-payment of a TV licence in England and Wales. To ensure readers are correctly informed, please could you update the piece?’
I would like to ask you the two following questions:
Was this an authorised communication from BBC licensing?
Is it now the BBC’s official view that no one is jailed in consequence of non-payment of the licence fee?
Technically, of course, a custodial sentence is the consequence of non-payment of a fine imposed because of evasion of the licence fee. But the fact remains that the root cause of such a sentence – the sine qua non – is because offenders have not paid their licence fee.
In all the circumstances, I do not regard what our columnist wrote to be inaccurate, and I would also like an apology for being approached in this unprofessional and rather disrespectful way.
We are publishing this as an open letter on the TCW Defending Freedom website tomorrow.
Yours sincerely,
Kathy Gyngell
Editor, TCW Defending Freedom
MEMO | February 23, 2022
Leading law firm Bindmans LLP has sent a formal letter of complaint to Facebook over its “anti-Palestinian bias.” Instructed by the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP), the London based firm demanded explanation for the “systematic” and “far-reaching” censorship of content and accounts related to Palestine.
The complaint was also sent to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of freedom of opinion and expression. It requests an urgent review of, and explanation for, the decisions made by Facebook, which was rebranded last October as Meta Inc, to suspend accounts and posts which are affiliated to Palestinian news agencies, commentators and journalists.
Monday’s letter of complaint to Facebook is the second in nine months sent by Bindmans LLP to the social media giant. A previous communication submitted in May 2021 was made on behalf of five journalists and news agencies in Palestine. Facebook is said to have interfered with their accounts and/or posts and was accused of breaching their fundamental right to freedom of expression as well as its own Corporate Human Rights Policy.
In the May 2021 complaint, the main questions posed by Bindmans LLP included whether the censorship decisions were carried out by an algorithm or by a person exercising their discretion, and details regarding Facebook’s policy in justifying their censorship decisions, in addition to steps taken by the company to resolve unfair censorship.
In its response to the letter, a month later, Facebook said that it had investigated the accounts referenced in the letter and, after further review, has restored content and/or accounts where applicable. Notably, no substantial answers were provided to any of the main questions cited in the original communication.
Despite the commitments made by Facebook in their letter sent in June 2021, the censorship remained, said ICJP in its press release detailing the content of the complaint. The centre is an independent organisation of lawyers, academics and politicians that work to promote and support Palestinian rights.
Monitoring group, Sada Social, which has been documenting the suspension of Palestinian content and accounts on Facebook, recorded in 2021 alone, hundreds of instances of inappropriate censorship of social media content in support of the rights of Palestinians. This censorship was exacerbated significantly during the last Israeli offensive on Gaza in May 2021.
The complaint reinstates the request that Meta/Facebook discloses and reviews its decision-making process, and explains why the accounts were closed, suspended or posts taken down, and whether in doing so an algorithm or human discretion was used.
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | February 22, 2022
The World Economic Forum (WEF), an international organization that works to “shape global, regional and industry agendas,” recently published its latest dystopian proposal – a far-reaching digital ID system that will collect as much data as possible on individuals and then use this data to determine their level of access to various services.
This digital ID proposal is outlined in a report titled “Advancing Digital Agency: The Power of Data Intermediaries” and builds upon a digital ID framework that the WEF has published previously.
Under this framework, the WEF proposes collecting data from many aspects of people’s “everyday lives” through their devices, telecommunications networks, and third-party service providers.
The WEF suggests that this data collection dragnet would allow a digital ID to scoop up data on people’s online behavior, purchase history, network usage, credit history, biometrics, names, national identity numbers, medical history, travel history, social accounts, e-government accounts, bank accounts, energy usage, health stats, education, and more.
Once the digital ID has access to this huge, highly personal data set, the WEF proposes using it to decide whether users are allowed to “own and use devices,” “open bank accounts,” “carry out online financial transactions,” “conduct business transactions,” “access insurance, treatment,” “book trips,” “go through border control between countries or regions,” “access third-party services that rely on social media logins,” “file taxes, vote, collect benefits,” and more.
In this Advancing Digital Agency: The Power of Data Intermediaries report, the WEF positions this digital ID framework as the part of the solution to a “trust gap in data sharing” and notes that vaccine passports, which were mandated across the world during the COVID-19 pandemic, do “by nature serve as a form of digital identity.”
The WEF also praises the way vaccine passports have allowed governments to harvest data from their populations without “notice and consent”:
“At a collective level, vaccine data is an incredible public health asset. The United Kingdom Government in particular has acknowledged this and has suggested that anonymization, pseudonymization and data shielding techniques could be harnessed in a controlled environment to allow for the reuse of that highly sensitive data. In such cases, notice and consent is not required per se for the reuse of the data but the intermediary processes the data undergoes must be done in a controlled environment so that the findings of the data set are made available rather than the data itself.”
Additionally, the WEF provides a specific example of how digital IDs could be used to authenticate a user (by using fingerprints, a password, or identity verification technology) and decide whether they should be granted access to a bank loan by judging their profile (which may include their biometrics, name, and national identity number) and history (which may include their credit, medical, and online purchasing history).
The WEF goes on to suggest that digital IDs will “allow for the selection of preferences and the making of certain choices in advance” and ultimately pave the way for “automated decision-making” where a “trusted digital assistant” “automates permissions for people and effectively manages their data across different services” to “overcome the limitations of notice and consent.”
This push for an invasive digital ID system from the WEF follows it proposing other similar surveillance systems such as turning your heartbeat into a digital ID. Throughout the pandemic, the WEF has consistently advocated for vaccine passports and digital ID.
Beyond these specific proposals, the WEF is infamous for its globalist and transhumanist agendas such as the “Great Reset” (which proposes that people will “own nothing” and “be happy”) and the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” (which, according to WEF founder and chairman Klaus Schwab, will lead to “a fusion of our physical, our digital, and our biological identities”).
Governments and private corporations are increasingly embracing digital IDs. Some governments are also pushing a similar notion – social credit-style apps that monitor citizens’ behavior and reward them for engaging in state-approved actions.
By Chris Morrison | The Daily Sceptic | February 20, 2022
The Associated Press (AP) is assigning another two dozen journalists across the world to cover ‘climate issues’. AP Senior Vice President Julie Pace described the move as a “far reaching initiative that will transform the way we cover the climate story”. Over 20 of the journalists will be new hires and they will be funded by an $8m gift from five billionaire philanthropic organisations, including the Left-wing Rockefeller Foundation. The money is just the latest in a series of such gifts and AP reports that 50 writing jobs are funded from these sources.
AP is not the only large media company to collect such hand-outs. The BBC and the Guardian regularly receive multi-million dollar contributions from the trusts of wealthy philanthropists. It is estimated that Bill Gates has given over $300 million over the last decade to a wide variety of media outlets. Faced with plummeting paid readers and advertisers, mainstream legacy media seems eager to tap a new revenue stream.
The money is spread wide across such media. This month, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting received $1.5 million from Rockefeller to “expand coverage of under-reported and/or inaccurately reported critical public health information”. The Quadrivium Foundation, run by Democrat power couple James and Kathryn Murdoch, is also paying climate wages at AP. On its website, the Foundation notes that it also invests in Climate Central, using meteorologists as “trusted messengers” of the links between extreme weather and climate change. Since it is not possible to link individual weather events to long term climate change with any scientific certainty, this aim looks to be a waste of money, or perhaps not.
‘Trusted messengers’ seems to be a phrase much in vogue around philanthropic operations. Last October, Rockefeller gave $4.5 million to Purpose Global, a non-profit company that aims to help corporate clients with their “cultural intelligence”. The money was given in support of facilitating a “communication network of trusted messengers”. This would “amplify accurate information and combat mis- and dis- information on COVID-19 vaccines”. In September 2020, the Gates Foundation gave the Guardian $3.5 million to “support” its regular reporting on global health. Likewise, the Global Health Security Team at the Telegraph is Gates-funded.
Old school journalists might be a little happier to see less of the ‘trusted messenger’ stuff and more of the requirement to investigate. But critical inquiry of climate change science has been more or less banned from many mainstream outlets. This is despite the fact that the hypothesis that humans cause all or most global warming is unproven, and many scientists look more to natural causes for long term change. Predictions – often termed evidence – of future warming, are based on climate models that have never provided an accurate forecast in the last 40 years. Global warming started to run out of steam two decades ago, and it has been at a standstill for the last seven. When Google Adsense banned the main climate web page tracking accurate satellite data showing the standstill, the interest was confined to just a few outlets, including the Daily Sceptic.
One of the largest suppliers of cash for climate change is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the BBC and the Guardian are two of its favourite giftees. The Guardian has received upwards of $20 million over recent years starting with £6m in 2011 to establish a “millennium Development Goals” feed that provides “compelling evidence-based content”. During the last decade, Gates has given at least $20 million to help fund the BBC World Service and $5.5 million for the Corporation’s Media Action charity.
In that time, the software tycoon, once treated with great suspicion for early monopolistic tendencies, has become a prized ‘talking head’ across the BBC for epidemics, vaccines and anti-meat diets. His recent scary tales of climate change, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster”, was recently given five airings on prime time Radio 4.
Elsewhere, there are prizes for the best behaved – sorry – most distinguished climate journalist. Every year, the foundation of BBVA, a Spanish bank heavily involved in financing Net Zero projects, hands out €100,000 to the lucky recipient. Last year it went to Marlow Hood of Agence France-Presse, who describes himself as the “Herald of the Anthropocene”, the latter being a political renaming of the current Holocene era. In 2019, Matt McGrath of the BBC pocketed the cash, while in 2020 the award went to – no great surprise – the Guardian.
Much of the BBC money appears to support advocacy in the developing world, although the terms of specific grants are sometimes hard to understand. A letter from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in August 2019 describing the purpose of a $2.03 million grant to the BBC reads as follows: “To help us learn deepen our underpinning of processes and user journeys for different sets of women’s empowerment collectives, develop use cases for where digital can help amplify effects bring efficiencies, and close gender gaps for women”.
No doubt when this non-sensical gibberish was translated into understandable English, the money was spent wisely.
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | February 19, 2022
Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland wants to make permanent the invasive financial surveillance system introduced as part of the “Emergencies Act” to crush the civil liberties protests.
Freeland had announced the initial powers earlier this week to freeze the bank accounts of those who support the protests.
“As of today, all crowdfunding platforms, and the payment service providers they use, must register with FINTRAC and must report large and suspicious transactions to FINTRAC (Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada),” Freeland said at the time. “This will help mitigate the risk that these platforms receive illicit funds; increase the quality and quantity of intelligence received by FINTRAC; and make more information available to support investigations by law enforcement into these illegal blockades.”
“This is about following the money. This is about stopping the financing of these illegal blockades. We are today serving notice, if your truck is being used in these illegal blockades your corporate accounts will be frozen.”
Under the Emergencies Act, banks are required to freeze accounts without the need for a court order.
Freeland explained: “The government is issuing an order with immediate effect under the Emergencies Act, authorizing Canadian financial institutions to temporarily cease providing financial services where the institution suspects that an account is being used to further the illegal blockades and occupations. This order covers both personal and corporate accounts.”
But now, Freeland has announced that she plans to make some of the emergency measures permanent.
The government also intends to introduce new legislation to make new authorities for FINTRAC.
“We used all the tools that we had prior to the invocation of the Emergencies Act and we determined we needed some additional tools,” Freeland announced in a panel interview on Zoom.
“Some of those tools we will be putting forward measures to put those tools permanently in place. The authorities of FINTRAC, I believe, do need to be expanded to cover crowdsourcing platforms and payment platforms.”
(Since he claimed the right to freeze everybody’s bank accounts)
February 17, 2022
Dear Justin Trudeau,
How do you do it? It’s like you’re a psychic gifted with an intuitive capacity far beyond the range of normal people. I would never have known the truckers were racist just by looking at them, but apparently you can spot it from a mile away! And how did you know that they have “unacceptable views” without ever talking to them? Genius! Is this the result of special training or were you born this way? I must confess I’m so old-fashioned I still need racists to actually do or say something racist before I know I’m dealing with one. I was singing your praises to Mrs Trevor in Trimley only this morning and she agreed you have special gifts. (Actually she said you have special needs, she gets mixed up sometimes.) My Great Aunt Mabel had the gift too, but sadly those were different times and she was institutionalised. Perhaps when you die you should leave your brain to ‘the science?’
But I know you’re a busy man so I shall get to my point. I should tell you that it is Mrs Trevor in Trimley who prompted me to pen you this letter. She rightly brought to my attention that she has recently sent money (£20 as a birthday gift) to a cousin who emigrated to Canada in 1983, and she is now understandably concerned that Laurence may have gone off the rails since then and joined the ranks of the many hundreds of thousands of Canadians who have become racists, misogynists and terrorists during your premiership. Between you and me, I always had misgivings about “long haired Larry” and would not be the least bit surprised to see him flying a banner inscribed with provocative white supremacist language on it like, ‘freedom!’ (Yeah, sure Larry, freedom for whites like you but what about freedom for people who like to black up on social occasions?)
Mrs Trevor in Trimley’s concern, of course, is that her largesse may be mistaken for funding terrorism and that her bank account could be frozen, or worse, that she might be kicked out of the Women’s Institute if her name emerges on a list of supporters of working class struggles against the powerful, and all as a result of her being thoughtlessly generous to a person without first checking the acceptability of his current views. I offer my sincere apologies for my wife’s generous nature and would like to make a suggestion that I hope makes up for it.
To help us, and other non-Canadians, avoid making similar missteps in future, may I ask that you put in place a clear system that clarifies the views held by Canadian people we may come into contact with. My suggestion is that you ask Canadians to answer a simple “acceptable views” questionnaire, perhaps on a weekly basis? If their answers are published online we’ll be able to see whether or not we’re funding terrorism when we send them money for charitable causes they support, or money at birthdays and Christmas, etc.
My suggested ten questions are:
_____
My grading system would be:
10 pro-Trudeau answers = Acceptable views.
Anything less = A gulag in Saskatchewan, or just Saskatchewan, whichever is harder to escape from.
Once again, please accept our apologies and know that I am fully in support of your stance AGAINST wanting people to die of COVID, and AGAINST racists, misogynists, transphobics, homophobics, terrorists, and everything else that’s impossible for anyone to publicly support, and that you’ve so cleverly founded your political ideology on. Who could ever argue successfully with any of that??!!
Please be assured that any unfortunate error made by Mrs Trimley was just carelessness with her innate human desire to give generously to people less well off than herself and should not be interpreted as a hostile act towards you personally or anyone else lacking those instincts. We’re on your side! To prove it, I have begun a fundraiser with GoFundMe.com to support your campaign to be Dictator of Canada! This is gonna be huge! I’ve kicked it off with a pound. You’re on your way!
Yours sincerely,
PS. I’ve just watched a couple of YouTube videos of the truckers and now you’ve pointed it out, it’s so clear they’re racist! The black racist truckers I saw were obviously the worst. Who are they even racist against??? Is it white people or themselves??? Please advise.
Trevor in Trimley writes open letters to people who should know better. You can read more of his work on his substack.
RT | February 18, 2022
Once the world’s sixth largest firm with a valuation of over $1 trillion, Facebook’s parent company Meta finished Thursday’s trading with a value of $565 billion. According to data compiled by Bloomberg, the social media giant has tumbled out of the world’s 10 largest companies by market value, hammered by its worst monthly stock decline ever.
The stock rout has placed Mark Zuckerberg’s company in 11th place behind Chinese Tencent Holdings. Chip giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) holds the ninth spot. The list of the world’s most-valuable companies, ranked by market capitalization, includes Apple, Microsoft, Aramco, Alphabet, Amazon, Tesla, Berkshire Hathaway, and Nvidia.
Data shows that the value wiped out by the selloff in Meta’s shares exceeds the market caps of all but eight companies in the S&P 500 Index. Meta’s share price is down about 40% year-to-date after the company reported two weeks ago that its social media platform Facebook lost about one million users from the third quarter to the fourth quarter of 2021. That’s the first such decline for the company in its 18-year history.
Meta’s stock plummeted 26.4% on February 3 after the company released its weaker-than-expected outlook. The $240 billion loss in market capitalization was the largest one-day loss in US corporate history. CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s personal net worth is down more than $46 billion from the beginning of the year, he’s currently worth $78.8 billion.
Since then, Meta’s share price has extended losses, losing another 13% to date. The company has warned that the rest of the year is shaping up to be a choppy one as it deals with “macroeconomic challenges” and continues its long-term strategic shift “towards building the metaverse.”
But “misinformation” is constitutionally protected speech
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | February 18, 2022
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is doubling down on a recently revealed policy of tying the issue of domestic terrorism with online “misinformation,” as well as keeping an extra eye on trucker protests.
The document derived from an event that spelled all this out first appeared on February 7 as a bulletin, detailing the allegedly heightened threats the US is facing – not least because of “an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories.”
What was until recently typical of media op-eds and Twitter exchanges has evidently seeped into official policy, so the DHS now explicitly fears that “misleading narratives” found on the internet have the power to undermine trust in US government, not to mention branding free expression and political differences as dangerous “discord.”
Meanwhile, what is sowing true discord – Covid mandates – are mentioned not as a problem in and of itself, but simply something that gives rise to said “misleading narratives.”
“For example, there is widespread online proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19. Grievances associated with these themes inspired violent extremist attacks during 2021,” reads the bulletin.
A week later, after this particular take on the situation raised some eyebrows in the Senate, DHS Counter-Terrorism Coordinator John Cohen is defending the document.
Reports, including in the Washington Times, say that Senator Marsha Blackburn described this particular DHS policy as speech policing, while the nonpartisan Center to Advance Security in America (CASA) wants to know more about the department’s “methodology” in coming up with all this.
But according to Cohen “hard analysis” has taken place (he failed to mention whether it produced any “hard evidence”) which he says shows links between “narratives about government’s response to COVID, the 2020 election, immigration, and race.”
And, he continued, the job of the DHS is not to police thought. One would hope the agency does its job, but a question mark lingers over it since Cohen added that the DHS doesn’t monitor individuals who are engaging in constitutionally protected speech.
“Our job’s not to police thought. Our job is to prevent acts of violence. We don’t monitor individuals engaging in constitutionally protected speech,” he said.
“We’ve put in place a series of protections to make sure that as we’re evaluating online content, it’s only relating to threats, and we’re only handling that information in a privacy, civil liberties-protective way.”
Unfortunately for Cohen’s own “narrative” here, in the US, even what passes as “misinformation” is actually constitutionally protected speech.
As for trucker protests, which are treated in Canada as a national security issue, he said the DHS was monitoring them in cooperation with counterparts across the border.
He diminished the number of participants whose goal was “simply” to express opposition to vaccine mandates by saying there were “some people” who were there for that reason.
But, Cohen went on, there are “significant levels of online and physical participation by ideologically motivated violent extremists.”
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | February 17, 2022
YouTube, the world’s dominant video sharing platform, has already removed over one million videos for violating its strict and controversial “misinformation” rules. But in a new announcement, the tech giant has revealed that it’s going to be getting even stricter and suppressing “new misinformation” preemptively before it has the chance to gain traction.
YouTube’s Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan described how the video-sharing platform will start “catching new misinformation before it goes viral” in a blog post. The process will involve continuously training YouTube’s machine learning systems with “an even more targeted mix of classifiers, keywords in additional languages, and information from regional analysts” to identify “narratives” that YouTube’s main classifier doesn’t catch.
Mohan added: “Over time, this will make us faster and more accurate at catching these viral misinfo narratives.”
When YouTube does catch what it calls “viral misinfo narratives,” it will reduce the reach of some videos and push viewers towards “authoritative” videos (videos from brands, mainstream media outlets, and health authorities that YouTube has deemed to be authoritative) in search and recommendations.
For topics where there’s no authoritative content, YouTube is considering using news panels being developed (which direct viewers to text articles for major news events), “fact check” boxes (which direct viewers to content from fact-checkers), and new types of labels that add “a disclaimer warning viewers there’s a lack of high quality information.”
However, YouTube has yet to finalize how these labels will work because “surfacing a label could unintentionally put a spotlight on a topic that might not otherwise gain traction.”
Mohan justified these new censorship measures by claiming that “the fresher the misinfo, the fewer examples we have to train our systems” and noted that new narratives often “quickly crop up and gain views.” He added: “Narratives can slide from one topic to another—for example, some general wellness content can lead to vaccine hesitancy.”
YouTube has been proactively targeting “emerging” misinformation since at least 2020 via its “Intelligence Desk.” The Intelligence Desk initiative launched in 2018 to proactively police “inappropriate or offensive content” and in a 2020 interview, Mohan revealed that it was also being used to look “over the horizon” and “stay ahead of” emerging “conspiracy” and misinformation content before it “becomes a challenge” on YouTube.
or go to
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By Lisa Pease | Consortium News | September 16, 2013
More than a half century ago, just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961, the plane carrying UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others went down in a plane crash over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). All 16 died, but the facts of the crash were provocatively mysterious. … continue
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