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The NY Times reports US forces ‘killed dozens in Syria.’ The reality is far worse.

By Eva Bartlett | RT | December 15, 2021

Two recent reports by the New York Times highlight some of the US’ manifold crimes in Syria, murdering untold numbers of Syrian civilians over the years, under the pretext of fighting the Islamic State.

They exposed a 2019 US bombing in Baghuz, eastern Syria, which killed 70 civilians, and that this was but one of numerous instances, with the Delta Force routinely launching “reckless airstrikes” while purportedly fighting ISIS.

Stating the obvious: had the wanton and repeated mass murder of civilians been committed by Syria or Russia, it would have been in headlines, ad nauseum… because the legacy media genuinely cares about the Syrian people. But, since the crimes were committed by the US, we’ll neither see outrage nor crocodile tears. In fact, it’s pretty shocking that the New York Times, a noted apologist for American Imperialism which has promoted outright fabrications about Syria over the years, has deigned to report honestly on actual war crimes in the country.

In April 2019, Airwars (and Amnesty International) reported that, “at least 1,600 civilians died in Coalition strikes on the city of Raqqa in 2017 during the battle to evict so-called Islamic State – ten times the number of fatalities so far conceded by the US-led alliance, which had admitted 159 deaths to April 24th.”

It noted that, “most of the destruction during the battle for Raqqa was caused by incoming Coalition air and artillery strikes – with at least 21,000 munitions fired into the city over a four-month period. The United Nations would later declare it the most destroyed city in Syria, with an estimated 70% laid waste.”

Along with reporting from Syria since 2014, I’ve keenly followed news on the subject and, unless my memory betrays me, I don’t recall overwhelming media outrage following this report.

In November, former United Nations Weapons Inspector and former Marine Corps Intelligence Officer, Scott Ritter, wrote: “The Battle of Raqqa became a template for all future anti-ISIS operations involving the SDF and the US going forward. By the time the mopping up operations around Baghuz were conducted, in March 2019, there was in place a seamless killing machine which allowed the US to justify any action so long as it was conducted in support of an SDF unit claiming to be in contact with ISIS.”

The US strikes were apparently meant to be portrayed as “self-defense” protecting US proxies on the ground, a feeble excuse for the slaughter that occurred. Yet, what Syria, with the aid of allies, has been doing the past ten years has literally been self-defense: defending the country against the death squads supported and funded by the West, the Gulf, Turkey and Israel in their war on Syria.

Were such death squads to descend on Western cities, they would almost immediately be eviscerated. This scenario is highly unlikely given that the terrorists are tools of the West, but this illustrates the hypocrisy of the situation: Syria has been doing its utmost to restore security to the nation, via strategic warfare against terrorist factions, as well as reconciliation deals enabling Syrian armed men among the foreign terror groups to lay down their weapons and return to civilian life. Simultaneously, the US, their allies, and the terrorists they support, have wantonly murdered Syrian civilians and wreaked destruction on the country.

Referring to the New York Times reports, RT reported recently that former Pentagon and State Department adviser Larry Lewis, who co-authored a 2018 DoD report on civilian harm based on classified casualty data, said the rate was “10 times that of similar operations he tracked in Afghanistan.’ … and that, when interviewed by the New York Times, Gen. Townsend blamed any civilian casualties on “the misfortunes of war.”

Funny how that works. When Syria is actually fighting terrorism, they are condemned. When the US is fake fighting terrorism and slaughtering civilians, it’s just a “misfortune of war.” 

It should be no surprise to any thinking person that the US has committed untold war crimes in Syria (and many other countries) during its illegal presence in the country. Still, even with ample documentation of these crimes, the US is not held accountable. Completing this unjust scenario, the US and allies have repeatedly hurled unfounded accusations of chemical weapons attacks and Russian war crimes, providing no evidence and generally relying on unnamed sources or the al-Qaeda-affiliated White Helmets.

I wrote about this last year, noting, “A UN-mandated report, which accuses Russia of war crimes in Syria, heavily relies on anonymous sources and lacks evidence, but also smacks of deliberate disinformation that is halting the eradication of terrorism in Idlib.”

Emphasizing that this report was based on testimonies taken in Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon or by phone, I noted, “I scoured the 24 pages of the report, but even in the annexes I could find no transparent and credible sources, only the following vague terms repeatedly referred-to: Witnesses, civilians, NGO rescuers, medical teams, first responders, flight spotters, and early warning observers.”

In the relentless propaganda against Syria, and Russia, that report got a lot of traction in regime-change media. The recent reports on US crimes in Syria? Not so much.

Some days ago, the Twitter account @USEmbassySyria tweeted about the US standing firm in its commitment to human rights and the rights of women. A ludicrous tweet given the US’ support for terrorists who quash human rights and imprison and rape women.

It is also worth mentioning that Twitter account represents a non-existent entity: in their push for human rights for Syrians (as they bomb and murder Syrians or starve them with sanctions), the US Embassy in Syria long ceased to exist, as did most embassies involved in the plan to put extremist terrorists in power.

In a world where Israel can daily imprison and slaughter children and other Palestinians, and Saudi Arabia can wage war on Yemen while beheading its own civilians, the crimes of the US (and allies) in Syria are sadly not surprising. Nor are they new. The US has a decades-long history of attempting regime-change in Syria.

But seriously? Syria and Russia are to blame in this upside-down world…?

Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist and activist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years).

December 15, 2021 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

PSA: Be Careful on Telegram

eugyppius | December 15, 2021

Assume that most large chat groups are infiltrated by security services and that everything you say there is being surveilled by the police.

For a few weeks, regime-friendly press outlets in Germany, like the Süddeutsche Zeitung, have been ringing the alarm about Telegram as a “lawless space” that poses a “danger to society.” Apparently it is a den of hate speech and incitement. This coordinated hyperventilation comes with demands that the new German government regulate Telegram as a social media application, which would require its administrators to report illegal content to authorities. Right now German law regards Telegram as a messenger app and thus exempts it from some of these rules.

In perfect tandem with this false press hysteria, police have raided the apartments of a Telegram chat group in Dresden. Allegedly, members of the chat, in the context of discussions about vaccine mandates, contemplated assassinating Michael Kretschmer, the CDU minister president of Saxony. Whenever police actions and press messaging campaigns align this perfectly, you should presume it is the work of agents provocateurs. In all likelihood, German security services are infiltrating Telegram chat groups, and putting about violent rhetoric in the interests of creating arrests and headlines to reinforce the press narrative.

I understand most of my readers aren’t in Germany, but as a back-up to Twitter I have my own Telegram channel, so I just want to advise everyone that caution is extremely important here. If you’re in a chat and anyone proposes violence, the chances that this is a bad actor are high, and you should distance yourself from these statements immediately. “I disavow all political violence and you should too” is the line I always use. Protect yourself.

December 15, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, False Flag Terrorism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment

Mainstream media moves against “misinformation” in email

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | December 14, 2021

The boundary corporate media want to establish for what they think should be policed and censored as political “misinformation” keeps expanding.

The new “frontier” that seems to be shaping up, if narratives pushed by the likes of the New York Times are to be taken into account, are people’s email communications.

Unlike the politicians’ speech on public platforms like social media and TV broadcasters, that is tightly controlled and often censored by various fact-checkers hired by Big Tech, the medium of email remains elusive, the newspaper laments, even though it is a powerful way to reach constituents.

Mentioning several examples of fund-raising emails that the NYT said contained false information regarding benefits enjoyed by illegal migrants, and Medicare, abortion, etc., the article’s author goes on to qualify email as a tool “teeming” with misinformation.

The newspaper is trying to highlight email communication as a problem ahead of the 2022 mid-term election, and the “methodology” used was to sign up for mailing lists from 390 members of Congress seeking reelection, and then decide which ones were sending out “unfounded claims.”

After reviewing the emails sent from 390 campaign lists since August, the NYT said it discovered that 15% percent of messages coming from Republicans and only 2% of those authored by Democrats contained misinformation.

And more sinister undertones have also allegedly been detected, since “multiple” Republicans are accused of doing this in an organized manner, by repeating the same claims, while Democrats “rarely” do that.

Democrats are also painted as far more cooperative, with a spokesperson for one campaign saying they had made “honest mistakes” and would be more careful in the future – while several Republican candidates cited in the article ignored NYT’s requests for comment.

Unavoidably, President Trump is blamed for the “ubiquity” of misinformation among Republicans. The fact that political messages can freely and in a cost-effective way reach an audience despite the massive censorship efforts and deplatforming on big social media platforms is seen as particularly concerning.

However, no suggestion is made on what to do about this “problem” and how to make sure fact-checkers can gain access to emails as well.

December 14, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment

Why the Russiagate Scandal Outranks the Rest

By J. Peder Zane | Real Clear Politics | December 8, 2021

Russiagate is the biggest scandal in American history.

Nothing comes close in size, scope or harm to the republic than the years-long effort to cripple Donald Trump’s presidency by claiming he conspired with an enemy state to steal the 2016 election and then do its bidding as commander-in-chief.

Its notorious predecessors – L’Affaire Lewinsky, Iran-Contra, Watergate, Teapot Dome, Crédit Mobilier, the XYZ Affair – involved relatively small numbers of malefactors engaged in specific acts of illegality and corruption (we still don’t know who, if anyone, planned the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol)

Russiagate, by contrast, is a vast conspiracy involving innumerable powerful forces, including the Democratic Party, NeverTrump Republicans, the Obama administration, the FBI, Department of Justice and the nation’s most prestigious news outlets.

Where previous scandals often ended with public accountability for the perpetrators – Watergate saw the imprisonment of top White House aides and President Nixon’s resignation – and public reforms, Russiagate has produced no such reckoning.

Russiagate began with a kernel of truth: Someone – probably Russians, though we still don’t know for sure – hacked the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s private server. Fearful of what might be released, the Clinton campaign tried to discredit any damaging material by raising dark questions about its source. (Joe Biden executed this same strategy to great effect when he falsely described the evidence of corruption found on his son Hunter’s laptop as “Russian disinformation.”)

In response, the Clinton campaign financed an absurd collection of conspiracy theories involving peeing prostitutes and billion-dollar bribes, the so-called Steele dossier. Its importance cannot be overstated – it was the dossier that linked the Trump campaign to the hacking. No dossier, no collusion theory.

During the summer and fall of 2016, Hillary’s henchmen fed this preposterous concoction to Obama administration officials in the DOJ, FBI, CIA and State Department. Everyone knew it was a political operation: Declassified notes showed that then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Obama in July 2016 that Clinton planned to tie Trump to Russia as “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”

Clinton staffers – including Jake Sullivan, who now serves as Biden’s national security adviser – tried to interest the mainstream press in its scurrilous accusations, but got little traction because they could not be verified. Instead of laughing it all off as transparent campaign mud-slinging, however, the FBI joined the conspiracy. The bureau took the extreme step of opening a counter-intelligence probe into an ongoing presidential campaign – and its agents perjured themselves to obtain wire-tapping warrants.

Days after the November election, Hillary’s campaign focused on “Russian interference” as a chief reason for her defeat. On Jan. 5, 2017, President Obama, Vice President Biden and other key leaders met with FBI Director James Comey in the Oval Office to discuss Russia-related matters. We do not know what was discussed in that meeting, but the next day, Comey briefed President-elect Trump on some allegations in the Steele dossier. Four days later, on Jan. 10, CNN used that briefing as a news hook to report the collusion conspiracy theories as high-drama news.

Over the next few months and years, current and former officials illegally fed misleading classified material and partisan anonymous quotes to the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC News and other sympathetic press outlets to advance the narrative. Brennan and former National Director of Intelligence James Clapper became a constant presence on cable news, using the top-secret authority of their previous positions to assure the public that collusion was real – although in sworn testimony, Clapper admitted he had not seen such evidence.

Congressional Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Adam Schiff – who falsely claimed to have seen “more than circumstantial evidence” of Trump/Russia collusion – amplified the smears.

The appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate the fantasy in May 2017 fueled the fire. His effort became part of the scheme: He only looked for evidence that might implicate Trump, ignoring questions about who cooked up the conspiracy theory, how they disseminated it throughout the government and media, and the laws they might have broken in the process.

Despite his best effort, Mueller said he’d found no evidence of collusion when he released his report in April 2019. That should have killed the conspiracy theory and – following the script of previous major scandals – sparked a period of reflection by the government, the media and the American people that asked: How did we get this so wrong?

Such a broad reckoning has not yet happened. DoJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s 2020 report detailing grave abuses in the FBI’s handling of the matter prompted little outcry and no sweeping reform. The recent indictments of Clinton-connected actors filed by Special Counsel John Durham – who is finally doing the work Mueller should have, exposing the malfeasance that actually transpired during the 2016 campaign – have, bizarrely, led partisans to minimize his findings and actually double-down on the debunked collusion narrative. Recent pieces in The Atlantic and New York Times, for example, suggest, without evidence, that “Mueller never definitively got to the bottom of what happened.”

As Aaron Maté recently reported for RealClearInvestigations, many news organizations have refused to correct documented errors in Trump/Russia coverage, including deeply flawed articles thatwere awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

Leading peddlers of the hoax – including Brennan, Clapper, Pelosi, Schiff and Sullivan – have paid no price for their actions. To date, no one has conducted probing interviews with Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama about their roles in the scandal.

Engineered by broad swaths of the government and media, the effort to paint a sitting president as a foreign agent alone makes Russiagate the worst scandal in American history. But it is this second, still ongoing  phase – this willful effort to deny  what happened, this refusal to hold the  perpetrators accountable – that presents the most serious danger to our nation.

If truth and justice don’t matter, what does?

December 14, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Whilst you were distracted by a Christmas Party the UK Gov. released a report confirming the Fully Vaccinated account for 4 in every 5 Covid-19 Deaths in England since August

THE EXPOSÉ | DECEMBER 11, 2021

Serious questions need to be answered as to why Boris Johnson’s Government have decided to restrict the freedoms of the unvaccinated population through the introduction of Vaccine Passports, when the latest official data shows that the vaccinated population have accounted for 3 in every 5 Covid-19 cases, 3 in every 5 Covid-19 hospitalisations, and 4 in every 5 Covid-19 deaths, in England since August 16th 2021.

Source Data

During a national Covid-19 briefing that took place on Tuesday December 8th, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom announced that ‘Plan B’ would be implemented in England from Wednesday December 15th, which would entail ‘working from home’ (if you can) orders, and the introduction of Vaccine Passports.

The reason given for the commencement of ‘Plan B’ is that it has to be done to protect the public from the alleged new Omicron variant of the Covid-19 virus. A variant which as of December 11th, has failed to cause a single fatality in the UK, with just several hundred cases allegedly being confirmed.

A new law will come into effect from Wednesday December 15th, which will state that Vaccine Passports will become mandatory for entry to nightclubs and other large venues, including Premier League football matches and concerts. We’re told they will be required for indoor settings of 500 people or more, outdoor settings of 4,000 people or more, and any setting with 10,000 attendees or more.

There will be many in England who believe Vaccine Passports are the answer to their prayers. Two years of misinformation, and disinformation mixed with propaganda published by the mainstream media can do that to people. But unfortunately the official data published by the UK Government proves that they are far from it, and suggests Vaccine Passports have absolutely nothing to do with protecting public health, and instead everything to do with controlling the nation.

The UK Health Security Agency (PHE) is an executive agency of the Department of Health and Social Care and recently replaced Public Health England. The Chief Executive of the agency is Dr Jenny Harries OBE, who you may recognise from the television as she has served as Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England throughout the pandemic.

The UKHSA publish a weekly ‘Vaccine Surveillance’ report which contains data on Covid-19 cases, hospitalisations, and deaths by vaccination status over a period of four weeks, and unfortunately for the vaccinated population, the official data shows that they have accounted for the majority of Covid-19 cases, hospitalisations, and deaths for at least the past four months.

We have used the following official reports for our analysis –

Covid-19 Cases

Table 8 of the latest report shows the number of Covid-19 cases by vaccination status in England. The table may have been attributed a different number in previous reports published by the UKHSA, but the following chart shows cases by vaccination status over a period of 16 weeks from 16 Aug 21 to 05 Dec 21.

The chart shows that between August and early September, the vaccinated population accounted for the majority of Covid-19 cases. However, between the middle of September and early October this switched to the not-vaccinated population accounting for the majority of cases. This is most likely due to children returning to school in September and being “encouraged” to test on a regular basis.

But between October 11th and December 5th the roles reversed again, and it is the fully vaccinated population that have accounted for the majority of Covid-19 cases in England.

This data alone puts an end to the myth that it is selfish to not be vaccinated, because it’s quite clear the jabs do not prevent infection or transmission. Which begs the question as to why Boris Johnson has decided to implement Vaccine Passports in England?

The above chart shows the cumulative number of cases by vaccination status between 16 Aug 21 and 05 Dec 21, and illustrates quite clearly that the fully vaccinated have accounted for the majority of cases since August.

What we can see from the above is that the unvaccinated had accounted for the majority of cases up to October 10th, however since this date there has been a switch with the fully vaccinated taking the lead, hitting a cumulative total of 1.5 million confirmed cases by Dec 5th.

When including the 258,387 confirmed cases among the partly vaccinated during this period, the total cases among the vaccinated population rises to 1,757,444. Whilst the number of cases among the unvaccinated population during this period of 16 weeks has amounted to 1,403,100.

Covid-19 Hospitalisations

Table 9 of the latest report shows the number of Covid-19 hospitalisations by vaccination status in England. The table may have been attributed a different number in previous reports published by the UKHSA, but the following chart shows cases by vaccination status over a period of 16 weeks from 16 Aug 21 to 05 Dec 21.

You may have heard several times this week on national television from people such as Dr Hilary, Lorraine Kelly, and Martin Kemp that “90% of the people currently in hospital with Covid-19 have not been vaccinated”.

Well it looks like they have been lying to you because the official UK Government data the fully vaccinated population have accounted for the majority of Covid-19 hospitalisation every month since at least August.

The above chart shows the cumulative number of hospitalisations by vaccination status between 16 Aug 21 and 05Dec 21, and shows just how bad things have actually been for the vaccinated population compared to the unvaccinated.

Between Aug 16 and Dec 05, the unvaccinated population accounted for 11,767 Covid-19 hospitalisations. But the vaccinated population have accounted for nearly double the amount, recording 19,730 hospitalisations, with 18,406 of those being among the 2/3 dose vaccinated population. This means the vaccinated population have accounted for 63% of Covid-19 hospitalisations since August 2021.

Covid-19 Deaths

Table 10 (b) of the latest report shows the number of Covid-19 hospitalisations by vaccination status in England. The table may have been attributed a different number in previous reports published by the UKHSA, but the following chart shows cases by vaccination status over a period of 16 weeks from 16 Aug 21 to 05 Dec 21.

The above chart proves that the fully vaccinated population have accounted for the majority of Covid-19 deaths every single month since August 2021, with things really taking a turn for the worse in October.

The highest number of Covid-19 deaths in single four week period among the fully vaccinated population has been 3,284, whereas the highest number of Covid-19 deaths among the unvaccinated population in a four week period has been just 850. That’s a 286% difference.

The above chart shows the cumulative number of deaths by vaccination status between 16 Aug 21 and 05 Dec 21, and illustrates quite clearly that this is very much a pandemic of the fully vaccinated.

Between 16 Aug 21 and 05 Dec 21 there were 3,070 Covid-19 deaths among the unvaccinated population in England, compared to 12,058 deaths among the vaccinated population during the same time frame. That is a 293% difference.

Covid-19 Fatality Rates by Vaccination Status

The official data shows the the vaccinated population have accounted for 56% of Covid-19 cases, 63% of hospitalisations, and 80% of deaths over the past 16 weeks in England.

It’s quite clear that the jabs do not prevent infection or transmission, but they are alleged to reduce the risk of hospitalisation and death. However, if this were the case then should we not be seeing a graph that looks more like this?

So why aren’t we?

It could have something to do witht he fact that the data suggests the Covid-19 injections are actually increasing the risk of death due to Covid-19 rather than reducing it by the claimed 95%.

The following graph shows the case-fatality rate among the not-vaccinated population, and the case-fatality rate among the 2/3 dose vaccinated population over the past 16 weeks.

The case-fatality rate is calculated by dividing the number of known deaths by the number of known cases among the population. As we can see from the above the case-fatality rate among the not-vaccinated population is just 0.2%, which is what is in line with the average case-fatality rate in 2020 before a Covid-19 injection was introduced to the masses.

However, the case-fatality rate among the fully vaccinated population is much higher, equating to 0.8%. Therefore the fully vaccinated are 4 times / 300% more likely to die if exposed to the Covid-19 virus based on official UK Government figures.

The following graph shows the hospitalisation-fatality rate among the not-vaccinated population, and the hospitalisation-fatality rate among the 2/3 dose vaccinated population over the past 16 weeks.

The hospitalisation-fatality rate is calculated by dividing the number of known deaths by the number of known hospitalisations among the population. As we can see from the above the hospitalsiation-fatality rate among the not-vaccinated population is 26%.

But the hospitalisation-fatality rate among the fully vaccinated population is frighteningly higher equating to a shocking 63%. This means the fully vaccinated population are 2.4 / 142% more likely to die once hospitalised with Covid-19.

So now that you know that the double / triple jabbed population have accounted for 3 in every 5 cases, 3 in every 5 hospitalisations, and 4 in every 5 Deaths over the past 4 months in England, and that the UK Government has been laughing at you since at least Christmas 2020 through their alleged Christmas parties, are you going to allow them to take away your freedom yet again in response to an alleged variant that has so far caused zero fatalities, or are you going to stand up, carry on living, and say “no” this time around?

Because this will not end until we all say it does.

December 12, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

Latest Modelling on Omicron Ignores All Evidence of Lower Severity, Among Numerous Other Problems

By Mike Hearn | The Daily Sceptic | December 11, 2021

Today the Telegraph reported that:

Experts from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) predict that a wave of infection caused by Omicron – if no additional restrictions are introduced – could lead to hospital admissions being around twice as high as the previous peak seen in January 2021.

Dr Rosanna Barnard, from LSHTM’s Centre for the Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases, who co-led the research, said the modellers’ most pessimistic scenario suggests that “we may have to endure more stringent restrictions to ensure the NHS is not overwhelmed”.

As we’ve come to expect from LSHTM and epidemiology in general, the model forming the basis for this ‘expert’ claim is unscientific and contains severe problems, making its predictions worthless. Equally expected, the press ignores these issues and indeed gives the impression that they haven’t actually read the underlying paper at all.

The ‘paper’ was uploaded an hour ago as of writing, but I put the word paper in quotes because not only is this document not peer reviewed in any way, it’s not even a single document. Instead, it’s a file that claims it will be continually updated, yet which has no version numbers. This might make it tricky to talk about, as by the time you read this it’s possible the document will have changed. Fortunately, they’re uploading files via GitHub, meaning we can follow any future revisions that are uploaded here.

Errors

The first shortcoming of the ‘paper’ becomes apparent on page 1:

Due to a lack of data, we assume Omicron has the same severity as Delta.

In reality, there is data and so far it indicates that Omicron is much milder than Delta:

Early data from the Steve Biko and Tshwane District Hospital Complex in South Africa’s capital Pretoria, which is at the centre of the outbreak, showed that on December 2nd only nine of the 42 patients on the Covid ward, all of whom were unvaccinated, were being treated for the virus and were in need of oxygen. The remainder of the patients had tested positive but were asymptomatic and being treated for other conditions.

The pattern of milder disease in Pretoria is corroborated by data for the whole of Gauteng province. Eight per cent of Covid-positive hospital patients are being treated in intensive care units, down from 23% throughout the Delta wave, and just 2% are on ventilators, down from 11%.

Financial Times, December 7th

The LSHTM document claims to be accurate as of today, but just ignores the data available so far and replaces it with an assumption; one that lets them argue for more restrictions.

What kind of restrictions? The LSHTM modellers are big fans of mask wearing:

All scenarios considered assume a 7.5% reduction in transmission following the introduction of limited mask-wearing measures by the U.K. Government on November 30th 2021, which we assume lasts until April 30th 2022. This is in keeping with our previous estimates for the impact of increased mask-wearing on transmission.

I was curious how they arrived at this number given the abundant evidence that mask mandates have no impact at all (example one, example two). But no such luck – a reference at the end of the above paragraph points to this document, which doesn’t contain the word “mask” anywhere and “7.5%” likewise cannot be found. I wondered if maybe this was a typo but the claim that the relevant reference supports mask wearing appears several times and the word “mask” isn’t mentioned in references before or after either.

There are many other assumptions of dubious validity in this paper. I don’t have time today to try and list all of them, although maybe someone else wants to have a go. A few that jumped out on a quick read through are:

  • An assumption that S gene drop-outs, i.e. cases where a PCR test doesn’t detect the spike protein gene at all, are always Omicron. That doesn’t follow logically given the very high number of mutations and given that theoretically PCR testing is very precise, meaning a missing S gene should be interpreted as “not Covid”. Of course, in reality – as is by now well known – PCR results are routinely presented in a have-cake-and-eat-it way, in which they’re claimed to be both highly precise but also capable of detecting viruses with near arbitrary levels of mutation, depending on what argument the user wishes to support.
  • “We use the relationship between mean neutralisation titre and protective efficacy from Khoury et al. (7) to arrive at assumptions for vaccine efficacy against infection with Omicron” – The cited paper was published in May and has nothing to say on the topic of vaccine effectiveness against Omicron, which is advertised as being heavily mutated. Despite not citing any actual measured data on real-world vaccine effectiveness, the modelling team proceeds to make arguments for widespread boosting with a vaccine targeted at the original 2019 Wuhan version of SARS-CoV-2.
  • They make scenarios that vary based on unmeasurable variables like “rate of introduction of Omicron”, making their predictions effectively unfalsifiable. Regardless of what happens, they can claim that they projected a scenario that anticipated it, and because such a rate is unknowable, nobody can prove otherwise. Predictions have to be falsifiable to be scientific, but these are not.
  • Their conclusion says “These results suggest that the introduction of the Omicron B.1.1.529 variant in England will lead to a substantial increase in SARS-CoV-2 transmission” even though earlier in the ‘paper’ they say they assume anywhere between a 5%-10% lower transmissibility than Delta to 30%-50% higher (page 7), or in other words, they have no idea what the underlying difference in transmissibility is – and that’s assuming this is actually something that can be summed up in a single number to begin with.

Analysis

If you’re new to adversarial reviews of epidemiology papers some of the above points may seem nit-picky, or even made in bad faith. Take the problem of the citation error – does it really matter? Surely, it’s just some sort of obscure copy/paste error or typo? Unfortunately, we cannot simply overlook such failures. The phenomenon of apparently random or outright deceptive citations is one I’ve written about previously. This problem is astoundingly widespread in academia. Most people will assume that a numerical claim by researchers that has a citation must have at least some level of truth to it, but in fact, meta-scientific study has indicated the error rate in citations is as high as 25%. A full quarter of scientific claims pointing to ‘evidence’ turn out when checked to be citing something that doesn’t support their point! This error rate feels roughly in line with my own experiences and that’s why it’s always worth verifying citations for dubious claims.

The reality is that academic output, especially in anything that involves statistical modelling, frequently turns out to not merely be unreliable but leaves the reader with the impression that the authors must have started with a desired conclusion and then worked backwards to try and find sciencey-sounding points to support it. Inconvenient data is claimed not to exist, convenient data is cherry picked, and where no convenient data can be found it’s just conjured into existence. Claims are made and cited but the citations don’t contain supporting evidence, or turn out to be just more assumptions. Every possible outcome is modelled and all but the most alarming are discarded. The scientific method is inconsistently used, at best, and instead scientism rules the day; meanwhile, universities applaud and defend this behaviour to the bitter end. Academia is in serious trouble: huge numbers of researchers just have no standards whatsoever and there are no institutional incentives to care.

Some readers will undoubtably wonder why we’re still bothering to do this kind of analysis given that there’s nothing really new here. On the Daily Sceptic alone we’ve covered these sorts of errors here, here, here, here, here and here – and that’s not even a comprehensive list. So why bother? I think it’s worth continuing to do this kind of work for a couple of reasons:

  1. Many people who didn’t doubt the science last year have developed newfound doubts this year, but won’t search through the archives to read old articles.
  2. The continued publication of these sorts of ‘papers’ is itself useful information. It shows that academia doesn’t seem to be capable of self-improvement and despite a long run of prediction failures, nobody within the institutions cares about the collective reputation of professors. The appearance of being scientific is what matters. Actually being scientific, not so much.

December 11, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Majority of Covid ICU Patients in October and November Were Vaccinated

By Will Jones – The Daily Sceptic – December 11, 2021

Contrary to the claims made by Dr Rachel Clarke and Professor Stephen Powis last month and used to blame the unvaccinated for the mounting troubles of the NHS, new data out this week shows that the majority of Covid ICU admissions in October and November were among the vaccinated, not the unvaccinated.

The latest report from ICNARC shows that of Covid ICU patients in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, 50.5% in October and 50.7% in November were double vaccinated. Add to that the 2.8% in October and 1.8% in November who were single-vaccinated and you get overall vaccinated proportions of 53.3% in October and 52.5% in November. That compares to 46.7% unvaccinated in October and 47.5% in November. Note that the unvaccinated here includes people who received a vaccine less than 14 days prior to the positive Covid test, so includes some (an unknown number) who are actually single vaccinated.

This is not what the public has been led to believe by some prominent medics and newspapers.

Two weeks ago, Professor Stephen Powis, the National Medical Director of NHS England, was quoted in the Sunday Times saying: “Data shows that the overwhelming majority of people admitted to intensive care with Covid are not fully vaccinated.” A source was not provided for this claim but the article implied that it meant right now, with an opening paragraph stating: “Hundreds of intensive care beds that could be used for life-saving surgery are instead occupied by unvaccinated Covid patients, one of NHS England’s top officials has said.”

The same day the Sunday Times also printed an article by Dr. Rachel Clarke with the subheading: “Some 75% of those suffocating in intensive care with the coronavirus are unvaccinated.” In it she states: “Of the Covid patients treated in intensive care in recent months, the majority – nearly 75% according to the latest data – have chosen not to be vaccinated.”

The Guardian published a piece in November headlined “ICU is full of the unvaccinated – my patience with them is wearing thin”, written by an anonymous medic who claimed that the ICU patient population “consists of a few vulnerable people with severe underlying health problems and a majority of fit, healthy, younger people unvaccinated by choice”.

Now that the data has been released it’s clear that the claim that ICUs are “full of” the unvaccinated is highly misleading. While the unvaccinated do currently appear to be over-represented (depending how many of them are misclassified), no one now can claim that ICUs are “full of” the unvaccinated or that the unvaccinated constitute the “overwhelming majority” of Covid ICU admissions. If you spot any newspapers still peddling this misinformation, particularly it if is being used to stigmatise and pressure the unvaccinated, you can complain to IPSO here.

December 11, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Blame the unvaccinated!

Basic morality on life-support across the western world

Health Advisory & Recory Team | December 9, 2021

The past week has seen a deliberate stirring up of hatred towards the ‘unvaccinated’ across mainstream media outlets. The mission to divide society and to shame and coerce those who have chosen not to take these experimental injections, is reaching horrifying new lows.

The Sunday Times decided to go with the headline: ‘Doctors and nurses vent anger as unvaccinated Covid cases delay vital operations.’  These doctors and nurses always appear to be nameless, unable to personally stand by their words.

Meanwhile in the Guardian we have the cheerful headline : ‘I dread Christmas. My husband won’t get jabbed’: The families split over Covid vaccines as they plan holiday gatherings.’ It seems the divide and conquer directive is alive and well in the Guardian editorial office.

Then on Monday, TV ‘celebrity’ doctor Hillary Jones announced on Lorraine Kelly’s ITV show that “90 per cent of the people that are in hospital are unvaccinated”. This was quite simply untrue, yet the damage is instantly done and cannot be corrected easily in the minds of millions of anxious viewers, even if an admission of wrongdoing is eventually made. Hearteningly, ITV was inundated with thousands of complaints, backed up by government data.

More chilling still was the Prime Minister himself during yesterday’s press conference saying:

‘I want to be absolutely clear here, I don’t believe we can keep going indefinitely with non-pharmaceutical interventions – I mean restrictions on people’s way of life – just because a substantial proportion of the population sadly has not got vaccinated. I think we’re going to have a national conversation about the way forward.’

Qualified as we all are now in the government’s favoured psychological ‘nudge’ techniques, it seems fairly obvious what he is alluding to here: the vaccinated won’t get their freedoms back unless we ‘encourage’ (blackmail?) the unvaccinated to jump on board the injection train. A merry-go-round would perhaps be a more fitting descriptive, considering the frequency of re-uptake required. Even though Johnson himself has stated that the vaccines don’t stop you getting or passing on the disease – a position backed up by real-world data – we live in such a post-truth world that we are now in danger of losing any semblance of rationality altogether.

These lockstep campaigns across the mainstream news to malign the ‘unvaccinated’ (whatever that might mean now) are trying to create a division that most of the public don’t support. GMB ran a poll on Twitter asking the provocative question ‘with omicron cases doubling every two days, is it time to make vaccines mandatory?‘ They swiftly deleted the poll when the result, with over 40,000 votes, was not the one they presumably had hoped for (89% ‘no’ versus 11% ‘yes’).

It would seem they are desperate to blame the unvaccinated in order to hide the fact that it is the vaccinated who make up the overwhelming majority of hospitalised patients. For some unfathomable reason, people have shown that they trust the media. Quite where this trust comes from is difficult to understand, as most people would probably say they do not believe everything they hear on TV. When it comes to covid however, there seems to be the mythical belief that there is a factory of ‘truth guardians’ making sure everything that is aired or printed is 100% factually accurate, when with increasing regularity, nothing could be further from the truth. The financial interests who own the media, also own the prevailing narrative. This video is one of the most striking visual representations of this phenomenon.

We could argue all day long about the scientific inconsistencies in this bizarre desire to demonise the unvaccinated, but we do not need to even venture down that path. The ‘othering’ of a minority group of people who, for whatever reason, do not wish to take these experimental vaccines, is discriminatory and it is very simply morally wrong. In 2019 almost everyone would have agreed with this. Now, it seems that this idea needs to be debated, which of course, it does not. We must all start to undo the spell of a cult-like allegiance to a vaccine ideology, that has been created almost entirely by a bought media over the past 20 months. Its nothing but brain-washing and must stop before our society ends up in very murky waters. History repeatedly tells us that segregating minority groups is never justifiable and should be stopped now before it is normalised. A simple cure might be for everyone in the UK to unplug the television for a few weeks and read a few books instead – preferably ones written before 2020.

December 10, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Andrew Neil: “It’s Time To PUNISH Vaccine Refuseniks”

By Richie Allen | December 10, 2021

The establishment has never had a greater gatekeeper than Andrew Neil. He’s edited the Sunday Times, been the chairman of SKY TV, chaired Press Holdings Media Group and spent a quarter of a century fronting flagship news shows for the BBC.

Neil was head cheerleader for Britain’s involvement in Afghanistan. He described opponents of military intervention there as; “wimps, with no will to fight.”

He used his columns and tv programmes to champion the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Writing for Scotland on Sunday in September 2002 Neil said that Saddam Hussein had:

“embarked on a worldwide shopping spree to buy the technology and material needed to construct weapons of mass destruction and the missile systems needed to deliver them across great distances…. the suburbs of Baghdad are now dotted with secret installations, often posing as hospitals or schools, developing missile fuel, bodies and guidance systems, chemical and biological warheads and, most sinister of all, a renewed attempt to develop nuclear weapons.”

Neil KNEW that this was undiluted bullshit, but he printed it anyway.

During that time he referred to The Guardian as “The Daily Terrorist.” In short, Andrew Neil is a rancid, rotten scumbag. Writing in today’s Daily Mail, he called for the punishment of the unjabbed.

Last night I took a friend out to dinner near my home in the South of France. At the restaurant door we were politely asked for our vaccine passports, the QR codes on our smartphones were scanned and we were ushered to our table.

The check had taken seconds — a very minor inconvenience when a new wave of the coronavirus pandemic is sweeping across the Continent.

There was a sense of safety in knowing that all the other diners had proved themselves to be fully vaccinated, or had very recently tested negative, or had contracted the virus and recovered.

Cheerleading illegal wars that killed millions of people earned him a home in the South of France. How nice for him. He goes on:

There are still 5 million unvaccinated British adults, who through fear, ignorance, irresponsibility or sheer stupidity refuse to be jabbed. In doing so they endanger not just themselves but the rest of us.

If they contract Covid, it is they who will put the biggest strain on the NHS, denying the rest of us with serious non-Covid ailments the treatment that is our right. We are all paying a heavy price for this hard core of the unvaccinated.

As long as they can be numbered in the millions, the nation will remain unnecessarily vulnerable to the latest variant, meaning more lockdowns, more restrictions on our lives, more lost jobs, more failing business, less economic growth — all of which will follow the Government’s introduction of its so-called Plan B of enhanced restrictions this week.

Of course, there is a small number of people who, for medical reasons, cannot be vaccinated. Those in that category can be identified and helped with regular testing to make sure they’re Covid-free.

But for the rest it is simply selfish not to be vaccinated. We all have a responsibility to act in ways that don’t just protect our own health but also that of others.

Neil went on to say that he’s not in favour of mandatory vaccination, but:

As it stands, the unvaccinated are making more restrictions on our lives inevitable. It is time we imposed some on them.

In a free society the unvaccinated have a right not be jabbed. But they need to realise that right comes with consequences, which will inhibit their freedoms as they constrain ours.

One final thought. Singapore has decided that the unvaccinated who end up in hospital with Covid will have to foot their own medical bills.

I doubt we’d ever go that far. But you can see the logic — even the morality — of it.

By all means exercise your rights. But beware of the consequences.

Andrew Neil remains a worthless, warmongering whore.

December 10, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

NY Times Claims Brazil Is Turning Into Desert, As Foliage Growth Surges

By James Taylor | ClimateRealism | December 6, 2021

The New York Times published an article Friday titled, “A Slow-Motion Climate Disaster: The Spread of Barren Land.” The article claims global warming is causing drought in northeastern Brazil, turning the region into a desert. Objective satellite measurements of vegetation, however, show increasing vegetation in northeast Brazil and throughout Brazil as a whole, not the other way around. The Times article is merely another example of agenda-driven fake climate news.

In its subtitle, the article claims, “Brazil’s northeast, long a victim of droughts, is now effectively turning into desert. The cause? Climate change and the landowners who are most affected.” The article adds, “Climate change is intensifying droughts in Brazil’s northeast, leaving the land barren. The phenomenon, called desertification, is happening across the planet.”

NASA satellite instruments have precisely measured the amount of vegetation throughout the Earth since the early 1980s. NASA reported its findings in an article titled “Carbon Dioxide Fertilization Greening Earth, Study Finds.” According to NASA, “From a quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.” Most of the rest of the land shows little change one way or the other, while a very small amount of land shows a decline in vegetation.

As a whole, “The greening represents an increase in leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times the continental United States,” NASA reports.

In the chart below, provided by NASA, you can see that nearly all of Brazil, including nearly all of northeast Brazil, is enjoying a significant increase in vegetation. Only a few, very small areas of Brazil and northeast Brazil are seeing a decline in vegetation.

The Times is right that where farmers or ranchers are deliberately removing rainforest and replacing it with farms or rangeland, vegetation declines. But that is not due to climate change, and those are about the only places in Brazil where vegetation is not increasing as the Earth modestly warms.

The simple, undeniable truth is that vegetation is increasing virtually everywhere in Brazil. The New York Times, in order to promote a fictitious climate crisis, is telling provably wrong lies to sell newspapers and to sell alarm.

December 9, 2021 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

As Predicted, They’re Coming For The Unvaccinated

By Richie Allen | December 9, 2021

Yesterday, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that his government would move to Plan B covid measures as a precaution against the emergence of the omicron variant. He was lying. What else is new, I hear you say.

In my opinion there is no omicron variant. It is a fantasy. Johnson’s government moved to Plan B for one reason only, to turn the jabbed against the unjabbed.

In recent weeks, regular listeners to my radio show will have heard me play dozens of soundbites from UK TV and radio news shows, where the public is invited to call in and opine on what should be done about the anti-vaxxers.

I said that we were being primed or conditioned for a day of reckoning next year, when the government will announce “enough is enough, we can’t keep shutting down society, we must mandate the jabs.”

Nothing that has happened since, has changed my mind. UK Health Secretary Sajid Javid said this morning that mandatory jabs will not be pursued by his government. He said that such a thing would be “unethical.” He was lying too.

Today, the public are quite rightly enraged at the announcement of new covid measures and the prospect that they will be tightened further still on December 18th.

However, the great majority of people are not demanding an end to this charade at once. No, they’re raging at the Tories for holding Christmas party’s last year while they were locked down and obeying the rules.

And predictably, they’re turning their ire on the unjabbed.

Take a look at this outtake from this morning’s Jeremy Vine Show on Channel 5. The guests call for the unjabbed to be blamed for the tyrannical covid restrictions. They even suggest that we should be exiled.

Instead of challenging them, the impotent host egged them on.

We’re in the fight of our lives now.

 

December 9, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Video, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth”

el gato malo – bad cattitude – december 8, 2021

It’s becoming truly amazing how much of the medical science of the past we never seemed to notice before only to see it seemingly all come to light at once…

pro tip: nothing says “guilty conscience” quite like 30 different people simultaneously answering, over and over again, a question they were never asked…

“he who controls the past controls the future. he who controls the present controls the past.”

and thus history and whole bodies of science do become fiction.

December 8, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment

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