Platforms censored posts saying Biden could introduce federal vaccine mandate as CDC’s own fact check denied it
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | September 12, 2021
During the last 18 months, social media platforms have often used the recommendations of the CDC as a basis of censorship online. The CDC’s own “Myths and Facts” section explained clearly, and still does at the time of publication, that the federal government does not mandate vaccines and that it’s a matter for states and local governments.
Social media users who suggested that Biden was going to introduce a federal mandate were censored online and told they were providing misinformation, likely falling back on the fact that the CDC’s own statement on the issue (a go-to source for mainstream social media platforms) said it was false and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi had also made it clear that the federal government doesn’t have the power to exert such authority.
Back in July, Dave Rubin, an author and political commentator, was locked out of Twitter for saying the Biden administration wanted a federal vaccine mandate.
“They want a federal vaccine mandate for vaccines which are clearly not working as promised just weeks ago. People are getting and transmitting Covid despite vax. Plus now they’re prepping us for booster shots. A sane society would take a pause. We do not live in a sane society,” read his original tweet.
On Friday, he took to Twitter to remind people of his suspension for predicting something that was going to happen.
Alongside a screenshot of the original tweet, he wrote: “Reminder: Twitter banned me for saying they want a federal vaccine mandate back in July.”
He had to remove the tweet for his account to be restored.
Similarly, the popular YouTube commentary channel MrObvious, had a video removed by YouTube for making a similar statement; that Biden would federally mandate vaccines.
“About a week ago I made a video on YouTube about vaccine federal mandates and YouTube took down that video. I don’t know why – maybe they thought that I was simply – I don’t know – jumping the gun saying that Biden was going to do these federal mandates,” Mr Obvious said in a recent video. “Well guess what? Mr Obvious was in fact right.”
Sydney doctor who criticized medical censorship online is suspended from practicing medicine
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | September 11, 2021
On social media, a Sydney doctor questioned whether vaccines and lockdowns would be effective in ending the pandemic while also scrutinizing how medical authorities were handling treatment. As a result of his postings, New South Wales medical authorities have taken action against Dr. Paul Oosterhuis by suspending him.
Oosterhuis’ social media activities have garnered at least two anonymous complaints to the medical council, the group confirmed on September 2nd.
“Over the last 18 months, I have been increasingly concerned about the misinformation and censorship creeping into science and medicine,” the doctor had stated.
Oosterhuis recommended that medical authorities advise COVID-19 patients to take vitamin D and zinc and to treat them with ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
He called the lockdowns “totalitarian” and causing “massive damage to society-wide.”
In a post, he wrote. “The risk of antibody-dependent enhancement of disease… driven by immune escape from the selective evolutionary pressure of vaccinating with a non-sterilizing agent is a real and present danger and needs to be discussed. The danger to millions is distressing me, and discussing that danger is, I believe, unarguably in the public interest.”
According to the Medical Council of New South Wales, Oosterhuis’s social media activity was flagged. He was asked to attend an “immediate action panel” on September 3rd and the anesthetist was questioned by the MCNSW.
“The Council deals with individual doctors whose conduct, performance or health may represent a risk to the public and works with them, where possible, to reduce that risk by for example, placing conditions on their medical registration. Section 150 or immediate action panels are held by the Council when a complaint or notification prompts serious concerns about risk to public safety or the need to otherwise act in the public interest. Panel members include community representatives as well as medical practitioners,” the MCNSW statement read.
The MCNSW provided Reclaim The Net with this full statement here
Ultimately, the MCNSW chose to suspend Dr Oosterhuis’ later that day.
Medical practitioners can be suspended by the medical council under New South Wales’ Health Practitioner Regulation National Law (NSW). The New South Wales Medical Council collaborates with the state Ministry of Health to investigate and resolve complaints about specific doctors and other medical specialists.
According to the council, this law does not give it the power to de-register Oosterhuis or revoke his license and they have no authority to punish him. However, despite his almost 30 years of experience in medicine, his suspension has already barred him from practicing in the medical profession.
Oosterhuis has responded by stating that he will not adjust his behavior to be more compliant. He stated that he intends to challenge the suspension, saying:
“I am very disappointed by the Medical Council’s decision to suspend my registration.
“The material I submitted in support of my evidence-based concerns was not considered. I intend to appeal the decision.
“The council drew upon s150 powers to demand an urgent hearing into some posts I have shared on Facebook on the importance of early treatment, particularly the low hanging fruit of vit D, Zinc, Quercetin, vit C and the repurposed drugs Ivermectin.
“I’m pro choice, pro informed consent… it’s always been a key ethical principle… you need to be able to discuss all the risks, benefits, and alternatives of any medical intervention.”
He later added, “Censorship kills. My responsibility to the Hippocratic oath, and basic ethics compels me to share data that I believe is definitely in the public interest.”
Despite an initial public statement, the MCNSW failed to make any further statements on this issue.
Adam Schiff demands more data on Amazon’s policing of “misinformation” in books
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | September 10, 2021
Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democrat, has written to Amazon and Facebook, requesting more information on their efforts to combat the spread of “misinformation” on their platforms. The Democratic party has intensified its criticism of online platforms for their failure to address what they say is misinformation, which they blame for the stalling of the vaccination program.
“Despite some concrete and positive steps previously taken, these companies owe both the public and the Congress additional answers about the exponential and dangerous proliferation of misinformation,” said Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, in a statement.
In recent weeks more Democrats, including White House officials, have spoken out against online platforms for their failure to address health misinformation, blamed for the increased vaccine hesitancy in the country. Biden singled out Facebook, saying the company was killing people for allowing the spread of vaccine-skeptic content.
In a statement to Reuters, Facebook said that, since the beginning of the pandemic, it had “removed over 20 million pieces of COVID misinformation, labeled more than 190 million pieces of COVID content rated by our fact-checking partners, and connected over 2 billion people with reliable information through tools like our COVID information center.”
It added it had “removed over 3,000 accounts, pages, and groups for repeatedly violating our COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation policies and will continue to enforce our policies and offer tools and reminders for people who use our platform to get vaccinated.”
A spokesperson for Amazon said that it has been “constantly evaluating the books we list to ensure they comply with our content guidelines, and as an additional service to customers, at the top of relevant search results pages we link to the CDC advice on COVID and protection measures.”
Texas governor branded hypocrite after signing free speech bill, having cracked down on Israel critics
RT | September 10, 2021
Republican Governor Greg Abbott has been slammed as a hypocrite after he signed an anti-Big Tech censorship bill on Thursday, with critics pointing out that he’s cracked down on Texans who’ve protested against Israel’s actions.
In a video on Thursday, Abbott claimed “freedom of speech is under attack in Texas,” before revealing he would be signing a law that “prevents social media companies from banning users based upon the user’s political viewpoints.” He said it would allow Texans to file lawsuits against “dangerous” Big Tech platforms that wrongfully suspend their right to post.
“In Texas, we will always fight for your freedom of speech,” Abbott concluded, as he signed the bill.
Though many US conservatives praised Abbott online for signing the bill, journalist Glenn Greenwald pointed out that the same governor had previously used his power to crack down on pro-Palestine activists who protested against Israel.
“I’m happy seeing anyone take a stand against Big Tech censorship, but I also feel compelled to note that [Abbott] himself is one of the country’s most repressive censors,” Greenwald tweeted on Friday, noting that the governor had championed a law that “punishes American citizens who refuse to take an oath about Israel.”
“I can’t overstate how repressive is the censorship supported by Abbott and other mostly but not all red-state governors that punish citizens who advocate a boycott of Israel. Thankfully, the courts are declaring them unconstitutional, but Abbott is a fraud.”
In 2017, Abbott’s office announced that the governor had “proudly” signed a new law that “prohibits all state agencies from contracting with, and certain public funds from investing in, companies that boycott Israel.”
At the signing of the bill, Abbott declared that “any anti-Israel policy is an anti-Texas policy” and “any boycott of Israel is considered to be un-Texan,” ultimately disregarding citizens whose views on the matter didn’t align with his own.
“We will not tolerate such actions against an important ally,” he warned.
A Muslim speech pathologist at an elementary school in Austin, Texas was subsequently ousted from her job after she refused to take an oath swearing she would not engage in a boycott of Israeli products or other such anti-Israel actions.
In 2019, a federal court in Texas ruled Abbott’s bill to be an unconstitutional violation of citizens’ First Amendment rights.
In March, Abbott also took aim at the social network Gab, calling it an “anti-Semitic platform” and declaring, in a video in which he sat in front of an Israeli flag, that it had “no place in Texas.”
Abbott received heavy criticism from Republicans for his anti-Gab stance, including from several Jewish conservatives who served in President Donald Trump’s administration.
The governor’s statement was branded “despicable and false” by Gab CEO Andrew Torba, who pointed out that nearly 800,000 Texans had visited the network in the previous 24 hours and that even the Texas Republican Party had a verified account on the site.
LAPD officers are collecting social media information from citizens they stop
By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | September 10, 2021
LAPD officers have been told to collect the social media information of all civilians they stop, whether or not they have been arrested or even accused of a crime. Critics have noted the social media information collected could be used for illegal surveillance.
A report on The Guardian revealed that the “field interview cards” LAPD officers use when interviewing civilians include a line for the collection of information on social media accounts, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
A leaked internal memo revealed that Police Chief Michael Moore told officers that collecting the social media information was important for “investigations, arrests, and prosecutions.”
The police boss also warned that the cards would be reviewed to ensure that the social media information was collected. The collection of social media information started in 2015.
The Brennan Center for Justice, the civil rights non-profit that obtained the documents, warned that the collection of social media information by law enforcement agencies could be used for unjustified mass surveillance of civilians in the future.
“There are real dangers about police having all of this social media identifying information at their fingertips,” said Rachel Levinson-Waldman, a deputy director at the Brennan Center.
The organization reviewed another 40 police departments in the country but did not find evidence of the gathering of social media information.
The LAPD’s field interview cards have been the center of controversy in the past. Three officers were criminally charged for falsely accusing civilians of being gang members by checking a “gang member” box on the interview cards.
“The fact that a department under scrutiny for racial profiling was also engaged in broad scale social media account collection is troubling,” said Levinson-Waldman, speaking to The Guardian.
Hamid Khan, of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, noted that the data collected by the LAPD is shared with federal agencies, which have previously been accused of using “predictive policing” based on data provided by police.
Khan described the social media information collection as “stop and frisk,” warning that the department was doing it “with the clear goal of surveillance.”
The Bots That Are Not
By Mike Hearn | The Daily Sceptic | September 10, 2021
Since 2016 automated Twitter accounts have been blamed for Donald Trump and Brexit (many times), Brazilian politics, Venezuelan politics, skepticism of climatology, cannabis misinformation, anti-immigration sentiment, vaping, and, inevitably, distrust of COVID vaccines. News articles about bots are backed by a surprisingly large amount of academic research. Google Scholar alone indexes nearly 10,000 papers on the topic. Some of these papers received widespread coverage:
Unfortunately there’s a problem with this narrative: it is itself misinformation. Bizarrely and ironically, universities are propagating an untrue conspiracy theory while simultaneously claiming to be defending the world from the very same.
The visualization above comes from “The Rise and Fall of Social Bot Research” (also available in talk form). It was quietly uploaded to a preprint server in March by Gallwitz & Kreil, two German investigators, and has received little attention since. Yet their work completely destroys the academic field of bot research to such an extreme extent that it’s possible there are no true scientific papers on the topic at all.
The authors identify a simple problem that crops up in every study they looked at. Unable to directly detect bots because they don’t work for Twitter, academics come up with proxy signals that are asserted to imply automation but which actually don’t. For example, Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Project – responsible for the first paper in the diagram above – defined a bot as any account that tweets more than 50 times per day. That’s a lot of tweeting but easily achieved by heavy users, like the famous journalist Glenn Greenwald, the slightly less famous member of German Parliament Johannes Kahrs – who has in the past managed to rack up an astounding 300 tweets per day – or indeed Donald Trump, who exceeded this threshold on six different days during 2020. Bot papers typically don’t provide examples of the bot accounts they claimed to identify, but in this case four were presented. Of those, three were trivially identifiable as (legitimate) bots because they actually said they were bots in their account metadata, and one was an apparently human account claimed to be a bot with no evidence. On this basis the authors generated 27 news stories and 323 citations, although the paper was never peer reviewed.
In 2017 I investigated the Berkley/Swansea paper and found that it was doing something very similar, but using an even laxer definition. Any account that regularly tweeted more than five times after midnight from a smartphone was classed as a bot. Obviously, this is not a valid way to detect automation. Despite being built on nonsensical premises, invalid modelling, mis-characterisations of its own data and once again not being peer reviewed, the authors were able to successfully influence the British Parliament. Damian Collins, the Tory MP who chaired the DCMS Select Committee at the time, said: “This is the most significant evidence yet of interference by Russian-backed social media accounts around the Brexit referendum. The content published and promoted by these accounts is clearly designed to increase tensions throughout the country and undermine our democratic process. I fear that this may well be just the tip of the iceberg.”
But since 2019 the vast majority of papers about social bots rely on a machine learning model called ‘Botometer’. The Botometer is available online and claims to measure the probability of any Twitter account being a bot. Created by a pair of academics in the USA, it has been cited nearly 700 times and generates a continual stream of news stories. The model is frequently described as a “state of the art bot detection method” with “95% accuracy”.
That claim is false. The Botometer’s false positive rate is so high it is practically a random number generator. A simple demonstration of the problem was the distribution of scores given to verified members of U.S. Congress:
In experiments run by Gallwitz & Kreil, nearly half of Congress were classified as more likely to be bots than human, along with 12% of Nobel Prize laureates, 17% of Reuters journalists, 21.9% of the staff members of UN Women and – inevitably – U.S. President Joe Biden.
But detecting the false positive problem did not require compiling lists of verified humans. One study that claimed to identify around 190,000 bots included the following accounts in its set:
Taken from a dataset shared by Dunn et al.
The developers of the Botometer know it doesn’t work. After the embarrassing U.S. Congress data was published, an appropriate response would have been retraction of their paper. But that would have implied that all the papers that relied upon it should also be retracted. Instead they hard-coded the model to know that Congress are human and then went on the attack, describing their critics as “academic trolls”:
Root cause analysis
This story is a specific instance of a general problem that crops up frequently in bad science. Academics decide a question is important and needs to be investigated, but they don’t have sufficiently good data to draw accurate conclusions. Because there are no incentives to recognize that and abandon the line of inquiry, they proceed regardless and make claims that end up being drastically wrong. Anyone from outside the field who points out what’s happening is simply ignored, or attacked as “not an expert” and thus inherently illegitimate.
Although no actual expertise is required to spot the problems in this case, I can nonetheless criticize their work with confidence because I actually am an expert in fighting bots. As a senior software engineer at Google I initiated and designed one of their most successful bot detection platforms. Today it checks over a million actions per second for malicious automation across the Google network. A version of it was eventually made available to all websites for free as part of the ReCAPTCHA system, providing an alternative to the distorted word puzzles you may remember from the earlier days of the internet. Those often frustrating puzzles were slowly replaced in recent years by simply clicking a box that says “I’m not a bot”. The latest versions go even further and can detect bots whilst remaining entirely invisible.
Exactly how this platform works is a Google trade secret, but when spammers discuss ideas for beating it they are well aware that it doesn’t use the sort of techniques academics do. Despite the frequent claim that Botometer is “state of the art”, in reality it is primitive. Genuinely state-of-the-art bot detectors use a correct definition of bot based on how actions are being performed. Spammers are forced to execute polymorphic encrypted programs that detect signs of automation at the protocol and API level. It’s a battle between programmers, and how it works wouldn’t be easily explainable to social scientists.
Spam fighters at Twitter have an equally low opinion of this research. They noted in 2020 that tools like Botometer use “an extremely limited approach” and “do not account for common Twitter use cases”. “Binary judgments of who’s a “bot or not” have real potential to poison our public discourse – particularly when they are pushed out through the media …. the narrative on what’s actually going on is increasingly behind the curve.”
Many fields cannot benefit from academic research because academics cannot obain sufficiently good data with which to draw conclusions. Unfortunately, they sometimes have difficulty accepting that. When I ended my 2017 investigation of the Berkeley/Swansea paper by observing that social scientists can’t usefully contribute to fighting bots, an academic posted a comment calling it “a Trumpian statement” and argued that tech firms should release everyone’s private account data to academics, due to their capacity for “more altruistic” insights. Yet their self-proclaimed insights are usually far from altruistic. The ugly truth is that social bot research is primarily a work of ideological propaganda. Many bot papers use the supposed prevalence of non-existent bots to argue for censorship and control of the internet. Too many people disagree with common academic beliefs. If only social media were edited by the most altruistic and insightful members of society, they reason, nobody would ever disagree with them again.
Support our campaign to repeal the unjustifiable and dangerous Coronavirus Act
By Kathy Gyngell | TCW Defending Freedom | September 6, 2021
THE Coronavirus Act 2020 received Royal Assent on March 25 last year after passing through the House of Commons without a vote, such was the panic engendered by media images of overwhelmed medical services in Italy and Imperial College’s massively exaggerated Covid death predictions. The Act granted the government emergency powers to handle the Covid-19 pandemic. These allow the government to limit or suspend public gatherings, to detain individuals suspected to be infected by Covid-19, and to intervene or relax regulations in a range of sectors to limit transmission of the disease, ease the burden on public health services, and assist healthcare workers and the economically affected. Areas covered by the act include the National Health Service, social care, schools, police, Border Force, local councils, funerals and courts.
The Act was originally designed to expire at the end of March 2022 without interruption, but thanks to former Brexit Secretary David Davis it became subject to a six-monthly renewal vote in Parliament. Davis’s amendment tabled on March 21 last year to restrict the Act to a ‘brick-wall stop’ of one year failed, but this and the threat of a backbench rebellion led to the government’s own amendment to the Bill requiring parliamentary renewal of its powers every six months. The first of these came at the end of September 2020, the second in March 2021. Each time, shamefully, its extension has been voted through by a large majority of MPs. Only 24 MPs voted against the first time, and a very disappointing 76 the second time.
The one party to date to make a formal stand against its extension are the Liberal Democrats. Their leader, Ed Davey, has accused the Government of making ‘false claims’ over the need for an ongoing Coronavirus Act to enforce emergency lockdown restrictions. Notable critics to take a stand against it in the Conservative Party include Sir Charles Walker, Sir Graham Brady and Sir Desmond Swayne.
The argument that the Coronavirus Act is not important because most of the restrictions that have been irrationally imposed on society have been under section of the 1984 Public Health Act is mistaken. Nothing has been more symbolic of the slide into tyranny than this rubber-stamped Act. Numerous prosecutions have been attempted and indeed made under its provisions. If MPs fail to repeal it for the third time they will be allowing the government – and indeed the media which they appear to lead by the nose – to continue with the charade that there is a Covid crisis national emergency. There is not.
Powers in the Act remain dangerous. Schedule 22 gives the government extraordinary powers to prohibit gatherings, meaning that protests, vigils and political assemblies could be banned. It has never been activated in England and so is plainly unnecessary, but neither is it proportionate in a democracy. All the time it sits on the statute books it poses a threat to the right to free expression, freedom of assembly and democracy.
The fact is that none of the measures were ever necessary. They were granted in the middle of a panic to prevent a worst-case scenario that never came to pass. Since then the government has used these powers irresponsibly, if not abused them. The Coronavirus Act has made the problem worse, not better. There was and is no justification for extending these powers. All the data accumulated in the last eighteen months says this Act is not needed, as has been documented endlessly on these pages, on Lockdown Sceptics (now the Daily Sceptic), by HART and by numerous other independent scientists and doctors. As James Delingpole put it brutally and accurately at the beginning of the year, most of the government Covid statistical analysis is bollocks and designed to engender false fear.
Now, in less than three weeks, the vote for renewing this unjustifiable Act is coming up for a third time.
In March we advised readers to write to their MPs and set out a specimen letter. We fear repeating this letter is a waste of time. We suggest instead that readers concentrate their MPs’ minds by telling them that if he or she fails to vote against this next Coronavirus Act extension you will be giving your vote to the LibDems next time round, as the only party taking a decisive stand on the Act’s immediate repeal, or any other emergent party taking an equally decisive stand.
We’d also encourage you to sign this Repeal the Coronavirus Act petition here and forward it to like-minded friends.
Finally we invite readers to suggest or design their own TCW Defending Freedom car and window stickers to promote our ‘Repeal the Coronavirus Act’ campaign. And we invite your suggestions, below the line and via email to info@conservativewoman.co.uk on how to further our campaign and which other groups we could or should join forces with.
It’s time to end the charade. It’s time to end this legislative symbol of fear and to take away these tyrannical powers from an immoral government that looks quite capable of using them. Please make your voice heard.
On child vaccines, the experts are suddenly reluctant to follow ‘the science’
By Jonathan Cook | September 4, 2021
In some of these blogs I have been trying to gently highlight what should be a very obvious fact: that “the science” we are being constantly told to follow is not quite as scientific as is being claimed.
That is inevitable in the context of a new virus about which much is still not known. And it is all the more so given that our main response to the pandemic – vaccination – while being a relatively effective tool against the worst disease outcomes is nonetheless an exceedingly blunt one. Vaccines are the epitome of the one-size-fits-all approach of modern medicine.
Into the void between our scientific knowledge and our fear of mortality has rushed politics. It is a refusal to admit that “the science” is necessarily compromised by political and commercial considerations that has led to an increasingly polarised – and unreasonable – confrontation between what have become two sides of the Covid divide. Doubt and curiosity have been squeezed out by the bogus certainties of each faction.
All of this has been underscored by the latest decision of the Joint Committee on Vaccinations and Immunisation, the British government’s official advisory body on vaccinations. Unexpectedly, it has defied political pressure and demurred, for the time being at least, on extending the vaccination programme to children aged between 12 and 15.
The British government appears to be furious. Ministers who have been constantly demanding that we “follow the science” are reportedly ready to ignore the advice – or more likely, bully the JCVI into hastily changing its mind over the coming days.
And liberal media outlets like the Guardian, which have been so careful until now to avoid giving a platform to “dissident” scientists, are suddenly subjecting the great and the good of the vaccination establishment to harsh criticism from doctors who want children vaccinated as quickly as possible.
Watching this confected “row” unfold, one thing is clear: “the science” is getting another political pummelling.
Peek behind the curtain
There are a few revealing snippets buried in the media reports of the JCVI’s reasons for delaying child vaccinations – information that challenges other parts of the vaccination narrative that have been unassailable till now.
One concerns long Covid, fear of which has probably been the main factor driving parents to push for their children to be vaccinated – given that Covid poses little immediate threat of serious illness to the vast majority of children. Of long Covid in children, the JCVI argues, according to the Guardian, that “the impact of the symptoms may be no worse than those seen in children who have not actually had Covid”.
What to make of that? We know that over the past few decades a small but growing proportion of children have been suffering from long-term chronic fatigue syndromes – often following a viral infection. This may relate to more general immunity problems in children that, like other chronic disease, doctors have been largely baffled by – and may even be contributing to.
Is long Covid another fatigue syndrome, and one that many of these children would have suffered from if they had been infected with a different virus, like flu? Don’t hold your breath waiting for a debate on that question, let alone an answer, any time soon.
Then there is this. The Guardian reports that the JCVI was concerned about “the unknown longer-term consequences of a rare side-effect [myocarditis – heart inflammation] seen with mRNA vaccines such as the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna shots. … What makes the JCVI uneasy is that there is little long-term follow-up on vaccinated children.”
“Unknown longer-term consequences”? A lack of “follow-up” on vaccinated children? These sound more like the criticisms of the tin-foil hat-wearers than the cautious advice of vaccination experts.
Or is it just that we have been given a fleeting peek behind the curtain of official medical debate to see an uncertainty that has been actively concealed from us. “The science” is not quite as solid as the scientists or politicians would have us believe, it seems.
Piling on the pressure
What sensible view should we, the public, take when that “scientific” consensus suddenly solidifies – possibly as soon as next week – behind exactly what the politicians are demanding.
The government and parts of the media are clearly going to keep piling the pressure on the JCVI. The committee’s efforts to avoid being drawn into a highly charged and politicised debate about vaccinating children is written all over the caveats and get-out clauses in its decision on Friday.
The government’s stated aim in wanting to vaccinate children is to avoid “disruption” to children’s education, as though this is about the well-being of pupils. But we need to be honest: the disruptions were imposed on schools by politicians and educators not for the sake of children but for the sake of adults, frightened by our own vulnerability to Covid.
The JCVI has embarrassed the government by reminding us of this fact in relation to child vaccinations. Not only have we deprived children of a proper education over a year or more and opportunities to develop physically, mentally and emotionally through their school life, clubs, trips and sport, but now, suggests the JCVI, we want to inject them with a new drug whose long-term consequences are not fully understood or, it seems, being properly investigated.
All of this will be unmentionable again as soon as the JCVI can be arm-twisted into agreeing to the government’s demands. We will be told once again to blindly “follow the science”, to obey these political dictates as we were once required to obey the spiritual dictates of our clerics.
Censoring testimony
“Follow the science” is a mantra designed to shut down all critical thinking about how we respond to the pandemic – and to justify censorship of even well-qualified dissenting scientists by corporate media and their social media equivalents.
For example, YouTube has excised the testimony of medical experts to the US Congress who have been trying to bring attention to the potential benefits of ivermectin, a safe, long-out-of-patent medicine. Instead the corporate media is derisively describing it as a “horse drug” to forestall any discussion of its use as a cheap therapeutic alternative to endless, expensive vaccine booster shots.
(And by the way, before the “follow the science” crowd work themselves into a lather, I have no particular view on the usefulness of ivermectin, I simply want experts to be allowed to discuss it in public. Watch, for example, this farcical segment below from the Hill in which the presenters are forced, while discussing the media furore about podcast star Joe Rogan’s use of ivermectin to treat his Covid, to avoid actually naming the drug at the centre of the furore for fear of YouTube censorship.)
To want more open debate, not less, about where we head next, especially as western states have vaccinated significant majorities of their populations, is often being treated as the equivalent of “Covid denial”.
Where this new authoritarian climate leads is apparent in the shaming of anyone who tries to highlight that our responses to Covid are following a familiar big-business-friendly pattern: focus all attention on expensive, short-term, resource-hungry quick fixes (in this case, vaccines) and ignore important, long-term, sustainable solutions such as improving the population’s health and immunity to this pandemic and the ones likely to follow.
An obesity epidemic – obesity is a key factor in susceptibility to severe Covid, though you would hardly know it from the media coverage – is still not being tackled, even though the obesity epidemic, unlike Covid, has been growing as a public health threat for many decades. Why? Because the corporate food industry, and more especially the fast-food and sugar industries, and the corporate health industries are financially invested in it never being tackled.
There is no serious media debate about the role of health in tackling Covid because the corporate media are invested in exactly the same consumption model as the food and health corporations – not least, they heavily depend on corporate advertising.
Which is why the media hurried to amplify attacks on Jonathan Neman, head of the salad fast-food restaurant chain Sweetgreen, for supposedly “downplaying the importance of vaccines”, as soon as he pointed out the statistical fact that 78 per cent of people admitted to hospital for Covid are obese and overweight. He asked quite reasonably:
What if we made the food that is making us sick illegal? What if we taxed processed food and refined sugar to pay for the impact of the pandemic? What if we incentivized health?
Politicians, of course, have no interest in taking action against the corporate food industry both because they depend on campaign donations from those same corporations and because they want good press from the corporate media.
Studies on immunity
Another topic that has been made all but taboo is the issue of natural immunity. A series of recent studies suggest that those who have caught and recovered from Covid have a better response to the delta variant than those who have been vaccinated only.
Those who have recovered appear to be many times less likely to get reinfected, suggesting natural immunity confers stronger and longer-lasting protection against Covid than vaccines, including preventing hospitalisation and transmission to others.
That may have significant implications for our reliance on vaccines. For instance, vaccines may be playing a part in creating new, more aggressive variants, given that the vaccinated have been wrongly encouraged to see themselves as at less risk of catching Covid but are in fact more likely than those who have recovered to transmit the disease.
If that is the case, the current orthodoxy preferring vaccines has turned reality on its head.
Perhaps, not surprisingly, these studies have received almost no coverage. They conflict with every single message the politicians, media and “follow the science” crowd have been promulgating for months.
How much that narrative has been engineered can be seen in the role the World Health Organisation played early on, as the vaccines were being rolled out, in secretly trying to rewrite medical history. Uniquely in the case of Covid, they pretended that herd immunity could only be achieved through vaccination, as though natural immunity did not count.
Highlighting this new study does not mean that letting Covid rip through the population is the best strategy, or that vaccinations do not help prevent illness and the spread of Covid.
But it does undermine the simple-minded, and novel, insistence that vaccination is the only safe way to protect against a virus, or even the best.
It does undermine the case increasingly being promoted by politicians and the media that the unvaccinated should be treated as a threat to society and accorded second-class status (watch the video below).
It does undermine the demand for vaccine passports as a prerequisite for “normal life” being restored.
And it hints at an additional reason the JCVI may have been reluctant to rush into testing a new generation of vaccines on children for a disease that is rarely serious for them and to which they will have stronger immunity if they catch it rather than being vaccinated against it.
Glaring vacuum
What these studies and others suggest is that we need a more open, honest debate about the best way forward, a more inclusive debate rather than what we have at the moment: accusations, arrogance and contempt – from both sides.
The left should not be siding with media corporations to shut down debate, even Covid denial; they should be pushing for more persuasive arguments. And the left should not be cheering on the bullying or stigmatising of people who are hesitant about taking the vaccines, either for themselves or their children.
Enforce a glaring vacuum in the public discourse, as has happened with Covid, and two things are guaranteed: that politicians and corporations will exploit that vacuum to increase their power and profits; and a significant section of the public will attribute the worst, most cynical motives to those enforcing the vacuum.
The very act of gagging anyone – but most especially experts – from conducting certain kind of conversations is bound to increase political alienation, cynicism and social polarisation. It creates no kind of consensus or solidarity. It creates only division and bitterness. Which, putting my cynic’s hat on for a moment, may be the very reason why it seems to be our leaders’ preferred course of action.
No Animal Studies for the Vaccines
By Martin Armstrong | ArmstrongEconomics | September 2, 2021
I find it extremely unbelievable that nobody will investigate this entire scam for what it is. The people behind the vaccines should be dragged in to testify what is going on. Moderna has admitted it took them only 2 days to create the vaccine. In Texas, they are trying to launch a criminal investigation. The FDA is no longer trustworthy, for the normal time to get anything approved is 12 years. What has been released in less than one year with no animal studies? There has been NO TESTING to determine side effects on pregnancy, fertility, or lactation.
It is just stunning that we have politicians REFUSING to look at anything, probably because they are too busy counting their bribes. The White House said under NO condition would they ever fire Fauci, meaning under NO condition will they investigate anyone.
Meanwhile, even the notorious corrupt Snopes had to admit this is TRUE. Despite demanding everyone gets vaccinated, the White House said its own staff DOES NOT need to be vaccinated provided they are routinely checked. So why is the White House the entire exception? Even the military is demanding 100% compliance. Meanwhile, the White House has demanded everyone else receive vaccinations or lose their job.
The fact that they have skipped animal trials is very disturbing. When the government is part of the conspiracy against the public, we will NEVER know the truth about anything. Jack Dorsey has been especially protective of the narrative. Nobody is allowed to question the government no matter what.
Then there are studies revealing that natural immunity to COVID is 13 times better than the vaccines. They try to bury such studies, and they also try to ensure that they are not peer-reviewed in order to discredit them. The Science journalist Alex Berenson was permanently suspended from Twitter one day after his tweets that reported an Israeli study that making this finding that natural immunity from a prior Covid-19 infection is 13 times more effective than vaccines against the delta variant. Twitter is now acting against the very basis of free speech, which is threatening people’s lives. I would love to see Twitter taken down, for they are clearly now responsible for the deaths of many people from vaccine injuries.
To show that this is one giant cover-up, OSHA has instructed employers NOT TO REPORT vaccine injuries suffered by employees if they only “recommend” the shots. Many employers with more than 10 employees are required to keep a record of serious work-related injuries and illnesses. Nobody should volunteer to be vaccinated to satisfy an employer, for you will not be covered for any injury or loss of pay, and you could be fired for not showing up to work for a period of time. However, if employers mandate vaccines to work, then the vaccine injuries should become subject to reporting, lawsuits, and workman’s comp claims.
Top Misinformation Article Attributed to Chicago Tribune
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | September 2, 2021
According to Facebook’s content transparency report for the first quarter of 2021, released in mid-August 2021, the most popular article shared on the platform between January 2021 and March 2021 was about a 56-year-old Miami, Florida, obstetrician who died two weeks after his first Pfizer injection.1
The story initially ran in the South Florida Sun Sentinel 2 April 8, 2021, and was republished by the Chicago Tribune that same day.3 The doctor, Dr. Gregory Michael, received his first dose December 18, 2020.
Three days later, he developed small spots on his hands and feet, which prompted him to go to the emergency room, where they found he had an abnormally low blood count. Platelets stop bleeding by clotting, and when platelets drop too low, internal bleeding can occur, resulting in what looks like blood blisters on the skin.
Michael remained in intensive care for two weeks, but no matter what they did, his platelet count refused to budge. During the night of January 3, 2021, he died of a massive stroke. According to the coroner, the COVID injection could not be ruled out as a contributing or causative factor.
In a Facebook post, Michael’s widow stated he’d been “very healthy” and that he’d been a COVID-19 vaccine advocate. His death caused her to question the safety of the shot, however.
“I believe that people should be aware that side effects can happen, that the vaccine is not good for everyone and in this case destroyed a beautiful life, a perfect family and has affected so many people in this community.” she wrote. “Please do not let his death be in vain please save more lives my making this information news.”4
Even Viral Content Has Minor Reach
According to The New York Times,5 Facebook held off on publishing the first-quarter report for fear the findings might “look bad for the company.” Executives decided they wanted to make some “key fixes to the system” before releasing it. That’s why it wasn’t published until August.
Interestingly, the report reveals that even when something goes viral, the total number of views is still a tiny fraction of the overall content. Even the biggest accounts make up but a small portion of overall content views. Combined, the top 20 accounts with the most views during the first quarter — which included UNICEF, The Dodo and LADbible — accounted for only 1.18% of all U.S. content views.
As noted in the report, this “shows that, even though it may seem like a page or post has extensive reach on the platform, that isn’t the case when measured against the total amount of content available on the platform.”
Facebook Calls Out CCDH for Manufacturing ‘Faulty Narrative’
As you may know, an obscure one-man organization funded by dark money called the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) has published several reports, including “The Anti-Vaxx Playbook,”6 “The Disinformation Dozen”7 and “Disinformation Dozen: The Sequel,”8 in which the founder, Imran Ahmed — an unregistered foreign agent — claims to have identified the top most influential “anti-vaxxers” in the U.S.
In a completely unexpected turn of events, Facebook is now calling out the CCDH for having manufactured a faulty narrative without evidence against the 12 individuals targeted in its reports (myself included).9
This is important, seeing how the CCDH reports have been the primary “reference” source of authority used by media and government officials to smear, threaten and infringe on American citizens’ right to free speech.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security even lists promulgating “false narratives” around COVID-19 as a top national security threat, which basically puts a “domestic terrorist” target on the backs of those of us who have been identified by the CCDH as the most prolific “superspreaders” of COVID misinformation.
As reported by GreenMed Info :10
“Google now shows an astounding 84,700 search results for CCDH’s defamatory phrase ‘disinformation dozen. ’Amazingly, this includes 16,000 news stories within the international press, approximately 100% of which are word-for-word amplifications of CCDH’s claims/defamatory statements and reported uncritically as fact.
In addition, the Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, the White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, and president Biden all used CCDH’s report as the sole source for their own defamatory accusations, reaching a dangerous rhetorical climax on July 20th when Biden stated that these 12 individuals are literally “killing people” [by spreading misinformation].”
No Evidence to Support ‘Misinfo Superspreader’ Claim
In an August 18, 2021, Facebook report, Monika Bickert, vice president of Facebook content policy, sets the record straight, and in the process, demolishes the CCDH’s claims:11
“In recent weeks, there has been a debate about whether the global problem of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation can be solved simply by removing 12 people from social media platforms. People who have advanced this narrative contend that these 12 people are responsible for 73% of online vaccine misinformation on Facebook. There isn’t any evidence to support this claim …
That said, any amount of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation that violates our policies is too much by our standards — and we have removed over three dozen Pages, groups and Facebook or Instagram accounts linked to these 12 people, including at least one linked to each of the 12 people, for violating our policies.
We have also imposed penalties on nearly two dozen additional Pages, groups or accounts linked to these 12 people, like moving their posts lower in News Feed so fewer people see them or not recommending them to others. We’ve applied penalties to some of their website domains as well so any posts including their website content are moved lower in News Feed.
The remaining accounts associated with these individuals are not posting content that breaks our rules, have only posted a small amount of violating content, which we’ve removed, or are simply inactive.
In fact, these 12 people are responsible for about just 0.05% of all views of vaccine-related content on Facebook. This includes all vaccine-related posts they’ve shared, whether true or false, as well as URLs associated with these people.”
It’s worth restating the key point in this quote: Combined, the top 12 individuals and organizations identified by the CCDH as being responsible for a whopping 73% of vaccine misinformation on Facebook, are in fact only responsible for 0.05% of vaccine-related content — 1,460 times lower than the CCDH’s outrageous claim. That’s no small discrepancy.
CCDH Claims Blasted as Unjustified and Biased
Bickert goes on to refer directly to the CCDH report “The Disinformation Dozen,”12 stating:
“The report13 upon which the faulty narrative is based analyzed only a narrow set of 483 pieces of content over six weeks from only 30 groups, some of which are as small as 2,500 users.
They are in no way representative of the hundreds of millions of posts that people have shared about COVID-19 vaccines in the past months on Facebook.
Further, there is no explanation for how the organization behind the report identified the content they describe as ‘anti-vax’ or how they chose the 30 groups they included in their analysis. There is no justification for their claim that their data constitute a ‘representative sample’ of the content shared across our apps.”
CCDH Meets Definition of ‘Hateful Extremists’
Ironically, while the CCDH claims to “counter hate” online, and Ahmed sits on the Steering Committee of the U.K. Commission on Countering Extremism, CCDH itself actually meets the Commission’s definition of hateful extremists.14 In the 2019 Commission document, “Challenging Hateful Extremism,” the term is defined as:15
“Behaviours that can incite and amplify hate, or engage in persistent hatred, or equivocate about and make the moral case for violence; And that draw on hateful, hostile or supremacist beliefs directed at an out-group who are perceived as a threat to the wellbeing, survival or success of an in-group; And that cause, or are likely to cause, harm to individuals, communities or wider society.”
In addition, in the forward of the report, lead commissioner Sara Khan notes that “Hateful extremists seek to restrict individual liberties and curtail the fundamental freedoms that define our country.”
All of these definitions and clarifications of what hateful extremism is fit the CCDH to a T. Ahmed manufactured data to create a false narrative that 12 individuals pose a threat to the well-being and survival of the whole world, and then used that narrative to incite hate against us and curtail our freedom of speech.
Who Fact Checks the Fact Checkers?
In related news, the self-appointed arbiter of factual truths, NewsGuard, has had to backpedal in recent months and issue dozens of corrections to “fact checks” in which they’ve labeled the Wuhan lab leak theory as a debunked conspiracy theory with no basis in fact.
Since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, NewsGuard has wrongly down-rated 225 websites for articles mentioning the lab leak theory.16 In reality, there’s far more evidence to support the lab leak theory than any other theory, but it took over a year before the weight of this evidence became too obvious for the media to ignore.
NewsGuard’s erroneous fact checks were recently highlighted in an August 11, 2021, report by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER).17
AIER decided to take a closer look at NewsGuard after receiving a request for comments on a NewsGuard fact check article regarding AIER and the Great Barrington Declaration — a statement written by public health experts from Harvard, Stanford and Oxford that calls on government to implement focused protection rather than lockdowns and self-isolation. AIERS investigation found that:18
“… NewsGuard falls far short of the very same criteria for accuracy and transparency that it claims to apply to other websites. Most of the company’s fact checkers lack basic qualifications in the scientific and social-scientific fields that they purport to arbitrate.
NewsGuard’s own track record of commentary — particularly on the Covid-19 pandemic — reveals a pattern of unreliable and misleading claims that required subsequent corrections, and analysis that regularly conflates fact with opinion journalism in rendering a judgement on a website’s content.
Furthermore, the company’s own practices fall far short of the transparency and disclosure standards it regularly applies to other websites … NewsGuard’s staff primarily evaluates scientific claims by appealing to the authority of public figures who they designate as ‘experts’ on the subject in question.
Their approach generally avoids direct examination of the evidence surrounding contested claims, and instead cherry-picks a figure to treat as an authoritative final word … many of their preferred authorities are political officeholders rather than persons trained in scientific or social-scientific methods.
By selectively curating cherry-picked political authorities rather than evaluating evidence directly, NewsGuard’s approach to fact-checking effectively sidesteps the scientific method. This strategy is rendered even more problematic by the general lack of scientific expertise within NewsGuard’s team of writers.
We examined the educational credentials, including the highest degree listed, for 28 publicly identified staff members on NewsGuard’s website. The company’s staff page reveals shockingly little expertise in either the hard sciences such as medicine or social sciences such as public policy, economics, and related fields …
Most NewsGuard articles on Covid-19 topics and policies are written by [NewsGuard Deputy Editor for Health, John] Gregory, whose only identified qualification is a bachelor’s degree in Media Arts … Gregory would not qualify as an expert in most of the fields he is responsible for fact-checking …
Of course, non-experts have every right to offer opinions on scientific and social-scientific matters. Whether or not they should be taken seriously as fact checkers or act as arbiters of scientific disputes is another question entirely.”
NewsGuard Staff by Field and Highest Degree Attained
NewsGuard Apologizes for Erroneous Fact Checks
After being confronted about its erroneous fact checks on the lab leak theory, NewsGuard offered the following apology in a statement sent to AIER:19
“NewsGuard either mischaracterized the sites’ claims about the lab leak theory, referred to the lab leak as a ‘conspiracy theory,’ or wrongly grouped together unproven claims about the lab leak with the separate, false claim that the COVID-19 virus was man-made without explaining that one claim was unsubstantiated, and the other was false.
NewsGuard apologizes for these errors. We have made the appropriate correction on each of the 21 labels.”
AIER commented on the apology:20
“Gregory and his colleagues appear to have simply decided that their own premature dismissal of the lab leak hypothesis equated to ‘fact’ and proceeded to penalize other sites not for factual errors, but rather for diverging from NewsGuard’s own editorial position on the same subject.
When this position turned out to be mistaken, NewsGuard pivoted to remove the errors — albeit in non-transparent ways that downplay the significance or pervasiveness of their mistake.”
NewsGuard Fails to Fulfill Its Own Credibility Criteria
In their report, AIER goes on to apply the criteria NewsGuard uses to evaluate a website’s credibility to NewsGuard itself. It’s ranking? A paltry 36.25 out of 100. According to AIER:21
“This website fails to adhere to several basic journalistic standards, and should be used with extreme caution as a source for verifying the reliability of the websites it purports to rate …
When we see fact checkers like NewsGuard, who not only fail to uphold their high-sounding principles but even publicly encourage working with the government to suppress speech, we should raise red flags.”
The NewsGuard ratings are meant to influence the reader, instructing them to disregard content with cautionary colors and cautions. That it would serve as the thought police of the technocratic establishment that seeks to silence dissent and bury information that doesn’t help move the Great Reset agenda forward is no surprise.
Especially considering its primary startup capital came from Publicis Groupe,22 a PR group that represents most of Big Pharma, including vaccine makers, and Big Tech. NewsGuard is also backed by Microsoft23 and Google.
The Publicis Groupe has been manipulating what people think about commercial products for nearly a century. Over that century, this advertising and communications firm bought or partnered with targeted advertising avenues, beginning with newspapers, followed by radio, TV, cinema and the internet.
With revenue avenues secured, Publicis’ clients and partners built a global presence that dominated the advertising world. Be it tobacco or sugar, Publicis Groupe found a way to promote and strengthen big industries. Publicis was recently sued24 for its deadly and illegal marketing of Purdue Pharma’s opioid products.
When you consider that Publicis describes its business model approach as putting clients and their needs and objectives at the center of all they do so their clients can “win and grow,” it’s easy to see what’s driving NewsGuard.
Overall, NewsGuard is just another big business aimed at keeping the chemical, drug and food industries, as well as mainstream media, intact by discrediting and eliminating unwanted competitors and analysts who empower you with information that runs counter to any given industry’s agenda.
If you’re as disturbed by censorship as I am, be sure to contact your local library today to find out if they’re one of the more than 700 libraries using NewsGuard. If they are, then ask them if they’re aware of NewsGuard’s censorship of truthful news that is now encroaching on scientific freedom and threatening the very roots of our democracy.
If your local library is using NewsGuard, it would be helpful to start a campaign to get it removed. Contact your neighbors and let them know what is happening so they can kick out this public health threat. Likewise, whenever you see someone referencing reports by the CCDH, call them out on it.
Sources and References
- 1 USA Today August 23, 2021
- 2 Sun Sentinel April 8, 2021
- 3 Facebook Heidi Neckelmann
- 4 Chicago Tribune April 8, 2021
- 5 New York Times August 20, 2021 (Archived)
- 6 The Anti-Vaxx Playbook (PDF)
- 7, 12, 13 CCDH, The Disinformation Dozen
- 8 Misinformation Dozen: The Sequel
- 9, 11 Facebook August 18, 2021
- 10 GreenMed Info August 19, 2021
- 14 Greenmed Info March 25, 2021
- 15 Challenging Hateful Extremism 2019
- 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 AIER August 11, 2021
- 22 Washington Post March 3, 2018
- 23 axios.com August 23, 2018, NewsGuard Launches First Product With Help From Microsoft
- 24 Reuters May 6, 2021
Supporting Doctors’ Rights To Speak, Free From Censorship
doctors4covidethics.org
Dr. Paul Oosterhuis is an Australian anaesthetist with over thirty years experience, including in critical care and resuscitation, who urgently needs your support.
He is facing a hearing by the Medical Board of NSW for posting information on social media regarding COVID-19. His posts related to early treatment and prophylaxis, PCR tests, and risk-benefit calculations regarding COVID-19 vaccination and lockdowns (scroll down for details). His hearing is on September 3rd. Please help him by signing and sharing this petition.
We are practicing doctors and allied health professionals and/or scientists and academics and/or members of the public and/or represent professional organisations. We support the right of Dr Oosterhuis, and that of all doctors, to offer informed medical opinions on COVID-19 and to discuss the available evidence on COVID-19 interventions.
As doctors we too have advised and continue to advise patients and the general public about the medical management of COVID-19 disease and vaccination on the basis of good science. As members of the public we reserve the right to receive honest information, opinion and advice from our doctors, free from government interference.
From Dr Oosterhuis:
Dear colleagues and concerned citizens,
Thank you for taking the time to read this petition.
My name is Dr Paul Oosterhuis. I am an anaesthetist from Australia. I have been called before the NSW Medical Board for a hearing on September 3rd 2021 following anonymous complaints about my social media posts on Facebook regarding COVID-19. I have been advised by the Medical Council that:
“The Medical Council of NSW received two anonymous notifications regarding your activity on social media.
Due to the concerns outlined in the notifications the Council has resolved to convene proceedings under section 150 of the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law (NSW) to consider whether any action is required for the protection of the health and safety of the public or in the public interest.”
Ahead of the hearing I am seeking signatures from my medical and scientific colleagues and members of the public to help me defend my own and all doctors’ rights to offer our informed medical opinions, share our expertise, and engage in open discussion regarding COVID-19.
I am a Sydney University trained medical graduate. I undertook my internship and residency at Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney, followed by postgraduate training in Anaesthesia at The Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. I have more than 30 years of practice, the first 20 years involving hands-on critical care and resuscitation, and the last 10-plus years as a senior Visiting Medical Officer working in the Sydney Local Health District.
In the social media posts for which I face a Medical Board hearing, I discussed issues such as early treatment and prophylaxis against COVID-19, evidence for government measures such as lockdowns and PCR tests, and evidence regarding risk-benefit analyses of COVID-19 vaccines.
For example:
“I wish you could just add EARLY TREATMENT and drug PROPHYLAXIS …..Tell everyone to take Vit D, Zinc, and EARLY TREATMENT with IVM/ HCQ as evidence based medicine alternatives.”
I provided a link to a presentation by Dr Paul Marik on prophylaxis in support of the post, highlighting a chart of vitamin D versus risk of COVID from Dr Marik’s presentation, to illuminate the low hanging fruit of prophylaxis.
In other posts I questioned the evidence base for the government’s policies of lockdowns and mask mandates, and pointed out that there is evidence of vaccines having low effectiveness and real risks and harms (which are being suppressed), along with harms from the totalitarian lockdowns causing massive damage society-wide.
The risk of Antibody Dependent enhancement of disease, predicted by Dr Geert Vanden Bossche, driven by immune escape from the selective evolutionary pressure of vaccinating with a non sterilising agent is a real and present danger and needs to be discussed. The danger to millions is distressing to me, and discussing that danger is, I believe, unarguably in the public interest.
Early in 2020, I was active in criticising my medical administrators for failure to prepare for an outbreak such as COVID-19 when it was apparent that PPE was being rationed (P95’s were in short supply). I urged my colleagues to perform quantitative fit testing of our available P95 masks in early 2020 during which we found a surprising number of staff failed quantitative fit testing with the hospital issued PPE. This was something I had hypothesised after looking at the number of healthcare workers in Northern Italy catching the disease.
I withdrew from clinical practice last year out of concerns about the increasing incompetence of the health administrators and the rapidly reduced autonomy of doctors to just be able to be a doctor.
Over the last 18 months I have been increasingly concerned about the misinformation and censorship creeping into science and medicine. Fellow physicians were saving lives with early treatment and medication/supplement approaches to prevention but it was THIS that was attacked and censored! People like Dr Paul Marik, Dr Pierre Kory of the FLCCC Alliance, Dr Robert Malone, Dr Geert Vanden Bossche, Dr Michael Yeadon, Dr Vlad Zelenko, Dr Chris Martensen, Dr Eric Weinstein and others are making credible and serious warnings about the gene therapy being coerced upon our populations.
Censoring their work, and the research of experts like Dr Tess Lawrie, Dr Peter McCullough, Dr Sucharit Bhakdi and America’s Frontline Doctors is dangerous.
The Medical Board of NSW is now using intimidation, threatening doctors like myself, who share data which questions the official narrative. I don’t believe that censorship is compatible with good science and good medicine, and I believe that it needs to stop now, in the name of public health and public interest.
I would be very grateful if you could help to support me in my effort to inform as many as possible about their true health choices. My hearing is in a matter of days.
While I wish I did not have to defend my right to speak truthfully as a doctor, the song and video below captures my attitude to fighting for that right. I hope you enjoy it.
With my most sincere thanks,
Dr Paul Oosterhuis
Australia
See also:
NZ Doctors Speaking Out with Science (petition)
Featured Video
House Resolution Calls for Tech Companies to Censor Speech
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
Book Review
Alarmist climate science as a textbook example of groupthink
By Paul MacRae | May 1, 2012
… Groupthink was extensively studied by Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis and described in his 1982 book Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes.
Janis was curious about how teams of highly intelligent and motivated people—the “best and the brightest” as David Halberstam called them in his 1972 book of the same name—could have come up with political policy disasters like the Vietnam War, Watergate, Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs. Similarly, in 2008 and 2009, we saw the best and brightest in the world’s financial sphere crash thanks to some incredibly stupid decisions, such as allowing sub-prime mortgages to people on the verge of bankruptcy.
In other words, Janis studied why and how groups of highly intelligent professional bureaucrats and, yes, even scientists, screw up, sometimes disastrously and almost always unnecessarily. The reason, Janis believed, was “groupthink.” He quotes Nietzsche’s observation that “madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups,” and notes that groupthink occurs when “subtle constraints … prevent a [group] member from fully exercising his critical powers and from openly expressing doubts when most others in the group appear to have reached a consensus.”[2]
Janis found that even if the group leader expresses an openness to new ideas, group members value consensus more than critical thinking; groups are thus led astray by excessive “concurrence-seeking behavior.”[3] Therefore, Janis wrote, groupthink is “a model of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”[4]
The groupthink syndrome
The result is what Janis calls “the groupthink syndrome.” This consists of three main categories of symptoms:
1. Overestimate of the group’s power and morality, including “an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their actions.” [emphasis added]
2. Closed-mindedness, including a refusal to consider alternative explanations and stereotyped negative views of those who aren’t part of the group’s consensus. The group takes on a “win-lose fighting stance” toward alternative views.[5]
3. Pressure toward uniformity, including “a shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view”; “direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes”; and “the emergence of self-appointed mind-guards … who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.”[6]
It’s obvious that alarmist climate science—as explicitly and extensively revealed in the Climatic Research Unit’s “Climategate” emails—shares all of these defects of groupthink, including a huge emphasis on maintaining consensus, a sense that because they are saving the world, alarmist climate scientists are beyond the normal moral constraints of scientific honesty (“overestimation of the group’s power and morality”), and vilification of those (“deniers”) who don’t share the consensus. … Read full article
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Iran unveils new control measures over Strait of Hormuz transit
- House Resolution Calls for Tech Companies to Censor Speech
- Ceasefire no longer viable after 200 days of Israeli violations: Hamas
- Israeli strikes intensify across southern Lebanon, casualties reported
- Left in Disbelief: Israel in Panic over Hezbollah FPV Drone Nightmare
- Trump Taps Israel Lobbyist From Mossad Cutout FDD To Join Iran Negotiations
- Trump’s Blockade Snatches Defeat from the Jaws of Victory
- Geopolitics and Geoeconomics of the Strait of Hormuz
- Mali: a new front in the Western war on multipolarism
- CHD Scientist: CDC, FDA COVID Vaccine Safety Monitoring ‘Insulting, and Many People Are Injured’
- If Americans Knew
- Israel’s New Ambassador to the ‘Christian World’ Served as Envoy to Azerbaijan During the Ethnic Cleansing of Christians from Nagorno-Karabakh
- US set to sell $1B “Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System” to Israel – Daily Update
- Israeli Strikes Kill at Least 32 Across S Lebanon, Including Children – Amid “Ceasefire”
- Israel to pour $730m into propaganda arm amid reputational crisis
- Real Cost of Iran War Likely Double the $25 Billion Figure the Pentagon Gave to Congress
- Israel conducts farthest-ever strike in long history of attacks on Gaza humanitarian aid flotillas
- In Gaza, Israel commits 10+ ceasefire violations a day – Daily Update
- US ships 6,500 tons of munitions, equipment to Israel in 24 hours
- A New Library in Gaza Rises From the Ashes of Destruction
- Israel’s top Jewish religious body ‘refuses to condemn’ smashing of Jesus statue
- No Tricks Zone
- Oversupply Of Volatile Solar Energy Leads To Record NEGATIVE Prices!
- New Study: Extreme Heat Records, Heatwaves, Extreme Cold Records Declining Across US Since 1899
- It’s The Cold, Stupid! Cold 20 Times More Lethal Than Heat, Multiple Studies Show
- European Institute For Climate And Energy: “Climate Debate is Seldom About Science”
- New Study: The Climate May Be 5 Times More Sensitive To Solar Forcing Than Commonly Assumed
- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
- Reality Check: Maldives Have Actually Grown In Size Or Remained Stable Over Recent Decades
- Abrupt Climate Change Also Occurred NATURALLY In The Past …25 Times During Last Ice Age
- Cave Discovery Reveals Today’s Desert Climates Were Recently Far Warmer, Wetter, Teeming With Life
- German Expert: Heat Dome Led To Record Temps In Western USA…Warmer In 1934, 1936
Aletho News 